Vault Dweller, when is Age of Decadence's "skill plateau moment"?

[Infinitron]

Vault Dweller A bit of heresy in Shoutbox today brought up something I should have asked about a long time ago. For you see, what every RPG player yearns for is that moment in a skill-based RPG when he doesn't need to think about his skills anymore:

Darth Roxor: spoiler
Night Goat: good night men
Darth Roxor: aod will suck
Excommunicator: night ng
Smashing Axe: Na, it has what I want. CYOA RPG stuff, which doesn't necessarily make it a good game.
Smashing Axe: Making a combat character who can assault the Aurelian Outpost and win was fun.
Excommunicator: i wish i could enjoy it more, it's definitely an earnest effort
Darth Roxor: or
Darth Roxor: IS
Darth Roxor: IT
Excommunicator: well yeah, i dont think you can deny that, no matter how much you disagree with the standpoint towards rpgs behind it
Darth Roxor: i can and i will just to be contrarian
Black_Willow: aod will be a fine video novel
Black_Willow: not an RPG, sadly
Infinitron: I don't know if AoD will be a "good RPG" and I've piled on it before myself, but one thing I'd be wary of doing is judging it by the Teron demo, if you haven't played since 2012-2013
Infinitron: Because it seems like the kind of game that could change in the late game as your skills go up and your options open up
Excommunicator: i dont see that as a possibility
Infinitron: giving you some space to, well, role play
Smashing Axe: The prices for higher tier skills are faily restrictive, though, from what I remember, you still get checks for skills of a mediocre level.
Smashing Axe: In late game
Excommunicator: unless there's some kind of multiclass system later then its a foregone conclusion
Black_Willow: Well, I played early combat demo and liked it very much, then I played the "proper" demo and it was a slideshow with an occasional choice or combat encounter
Black_Willow: A video novel basicaly
Smashing Axe: Just play through the Imperial Guards and focus entirely on combat skills and attributes, Black_Willow.
Excommunicator: maybe he doesn't want to do that though
Excommunicator: and thats the problem
Infinitron: Think of those really early game periods in Fallout where you're actually still struggling to raise up your skills to open most chests you find, use most terminals, etc
Excommunicator: its A or B and nothing in between. it's depth with no breadth of choice
Smashing Axe: Gestalt characters are possible, but definitely very hard to get working.
Infinitron: That goes down smoother than what AoD does, but it's similar
Black_Willow: Well, in early fallout I wasn't limited by a teleporting machine implanted in my body which limited my movement
Smashing Axe: Maadoran also has a bunch of optional fights unrelated to what faction you're working for. So do some of the dungeon areas.
Excommunicator: it's not satisfying the way its done. the rigidity of how the game is made means that there's not even an illusion of choice its very upfront about not providing alternatives to the one you have in front of you
Smashing Axe: The teleporting has been toned down, most conversations options will give you the option to exit now.
Black_Willow: All I'm saying is that VD made a "here is a C&C, here is a combat, here's another C&C" game
Excommunicator: thats my experience at least
Excommunicator: and i put that largely down to him wanting the game to be punishing
Smashing Axe: What version did you last play Ex?
Black_Willow: Also the "you made a bad choice, LOL u die" choices without any "soft" fail states
Smashing Axe: yeah, I agree more of those would be better.
Excommunicator: soft fail states and soft skill checks would solve most of its issues
Infinitron: Nah, people are focusing on symptoms rather than the cause
Excommunicator: i dont know smashing axe but i believe it had the first city
Black_Willow: Should we focus on VD?
Infinitron: There's just not a great deal of content in that part of the game
Infinitron: Or maybe in all of the game, I'll tell you after I've played it
Infinitron: People are like "If I could run around and do stuff and not be teleported it'd be different" but really, there's not much for you to do. Not at that point
Smashing Axe: Pure social character can finish the first two cities in 30 minutes or so, depending how long it takes them to read.
Excommunicator: well obviously not, because the game was made without exploration in mind
Excommunicator: but if teleportation wasnt seen as a "solution" then he would have been open to scattered content
Black_Willow: I think the problem is VD's uncontrolled love for text adventures
Black_Willow: Don't get me wrong, I also love them
Infinitron: VD definitely has an uncontrolled hate for "scattered content"
Jaedar: Text adventures are fine, what brings it down is that its completely impossible to tell ahead of time if you'll get pulled into an impossible fight or what dialogue skills you'll need
Black_Willow: But if you make too many of text adventures the game turns into a CYOA book
Excommunicator: which is bizarre imo. because that's one of the fundamentals of a good rpg
Jaedar: I have no idea how you're supposed to have enough points to do some text adventure and still be decent enough to do some combat
Excommunicator: you cant jaedar, like i said its A (you fight everything) or B (you do the text adventures)
Infinitron: Jeadar: You're probably not, again, perhaps until the mid or late game
Black_Willow: Darklands were great because of a good balance of text adventures - everything else
Infinitron: This is a game that's very risky to judge based on early game
Excommunicator: anything in between and youll just frustrate yourself
Infinitron: All skill-based RPGs are, it's just that this one is far less forgiving
Jaedar: Except sometimes even on a text adventure path, like commercium in first city, you get pulled into combat
Jaedar: And presumably on combat paths you get pulled into super hard combats if you have no dialogue skills
Excommunicator: the substance is in HOW those skill checks are made, not whether or not the game has them
Excommunicator: yeah but thats basically a failure to pick the right social skills
Excommunicator: because a social character absolutely cannot hope to win in a fight
Jaedar: Except the only way to know which are the right is to save and reload constantly
Excommunicator: yep
Excommunicator: its twisted
Jaedar: Ooops, you need sneak(3) to not die here! I assume you saw that coming given there was aboslutely no use for sneak in this path before, or any hint and to be fair, you were also allowed all of 0 seconds to prepare
Jaedar: seriously, the bandit ambush at the end of commercium path in the first city completely baffles me. It's so incredibly shitty design
Infinitron: OK, but let's say you've gotten through that. You're in the mid-game, late-game. You've reached that plateau where all your skills arre "where they should be"
Infinitron: Like in Fallout: New Vegas where you stop sweating all those Medium and Hard-locked chests, you've plateued, you can get pretty much everything you want now, solve quests the way you want
Infinitron: Seems to me that this is not a foreign experience, it's just that AoD is more brootal about it
Excommunicator: again, its how that lack of subtlety takes it into a realm that people cant tolerate
Excommunicator: other games do it but people can tolerate it at lower levels
Jaedar: Except I don't think this happens 'tron, because presumably the requirements just keep going up and up
Infinitron: well, Smashing Axe said they don't I think
Excommunicator: if he wasn't so caught up in the whole "this game is not for newbs, its hardcore" the game would probably accommodate more choice, albeit at the cost of difficulty
Infinitron: but we'll see
Jaedar: AoD made me see the value of "all players are decent at combat" design. Means you can always use combat as a default solution and dialogue can add others
Jaedar: It's more fun that random game overs that you cannot predict
Excommunicator: yeah it is
Black_Willow: Arcanum let you have a char that's shit in combat but has a lot o followers
Excommunicator: id enjoy it more if all the characters were hybridised a little
Hobo Elf: to me it seems like AoD plays out like this: you make your character and then you run into walls until you find the correct pathway that you are able to go through
Hobo Elf: I can't make choices during the game, all the choices were made for me during chargen
Infinitron: How much of it have you played Hobo Elf
Excommunicator: but id enjoy it even more if strict pathways were possible, just not as rigid
Hobo Elf: Not much.
Excommunicator: strict pathways=pure archetypes
Hobo Elf: Combat didn't feel good to me so I lost interest
Excommunicator: the solutions to fix the game are very straightforward, just time consuming to implement
Black_Willow: I liked the combat but VD doesn't know how crossbows work
Hobo Elf: I hope AoD finds its niche, though
Hobo Elf: I'm sure there's a group of people who will be interested in the kind of game AoD is
Hobo Elf: I have so many other games to play so it's okay when some game doesn't appeal to me
Excommunicator: yeah, its a very small group though

 

[likaq]

Only a retard can like combat demo and shit on teron demo.

 

[laclongquan]

TLDR ~ Why cant you
1. Simplified it to a few lines
or
2. Bold the revelant part
like a literate is beyond me~

 

[ZagorTeNej]

The problem I have with asking for combat difficulty to be toned down is that:

-It devalues combat specialized builds and we get a sniper diplomat scenario. If I can beat every fight (and mind you, AoD allows you the option to back off from many fights, it's just that the players are used to seeing that as the laughable option designed for noobs or a flavor choice at best) with a mediocre fighter (that spread out SPs) instead of a narrowly focused killing machine, choosing to play the latter to end fights a bit sooner (without all the extra skill points I could have invested in other stuff/extra options that the former provides) doesn't feel that attractive.

-It devalues the setting that is supposed to be a harsh, post apocalyptic, dog-eats-dog one. It's one of my biggest issues with Fallout, in such a world you'd expect combat to be a very dangerous affair and supplies (healing items, ammo etc.) to be scarce yet it ends up being the opposite. Immersion is a dirty word on Dex but I consider story/setting-gameplay integration to be important.


Skill checks threshold being at times an exercise in metagaming is a complaint I agree with to a degree but I have no idea how it can be really fixed (besides adding more checks/content), especially for a game like AoD where something like a stealth skill is not a systemic (don't know if it's the right word to use) part of the gameplay but functions in a way similar to other non-combat skills (via checks).

 

[Athelas]

what every RPG player yearns for is that moment in a skill-based RPG when he doesn't need to think about his skills anymore:

Is this really a good thing? Considering it's seems to be one of the causes of the usual mid-game difficulty drop in RPG's.

At any rate, what is usually the case in 'skill-based' RPG's is that there are alternative solutions that don't require high stats/skills, but require more gameplay 'effort' or come with a resource cost. Is this the case in Age of Decadence as well or is everything gated by stats/skills?

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Is this really a good thing? Considering it's one of the causes of the usual mid-game difficulty drop in RPG's.

At any rate, what is usually the case in skill-based RPG's is that there are alternative solutions that don't require high stats/skills, but require more gameplay 'effort' or come with a resource cost. Is this the case in Age of Decadence as well or is everything gated by stats/skills?

Haven't played it in a while but I remember it has dual (say you can use either persuasion or streetwise) and synergized (required sum of two skills) skill checks. Sometimes your background choice can lowers the required skill threshold (Praetor at the Aurelain Outpost for example).

 

[likaq]

-It devalues the setting that is supposed to be a harsh, post apocalyptic, dog-eats-dog one. It's one of my biggest issues with Fallout, in such a world you'd expect combat to be a very dangerous affair and supplies (healing items, ammo etc.) to be scarce yet it ends up being the opposite. Immersion is a dirty word on Dex but I consider story/setting-gameplay integration to be important.

Skill checks threshold being at times an exercise in metagaming is a complaint I agree with to a degree but I have no idea how it can be really fixed

Me too. Maybe increasing skill point rewards or increasing amount of starting sp ( by 50 or so ) is a good idea?

 

[Infinitron]

At any rate, what is usually the case in 'skill-based' RPG's is that there are alternative solutions that don't require high stats/skills, but require more gameplay 'effort' or come with a resource cost. Is this the case in Age of Decadence as well or is everything gated by stats/skills?

I doubt it has anything like New Vegas's "pass this skill check...OR go find ten pieces of X and five pieces of Y", if that's what you're thinking about. Or "you don't need to pass the skill check if you exhausted all the NPCs' dialogue trees and learned this piece of info". I'd wager VD thinks stuff like that is a lame copout.

 

[Athelas]

I doubt it has anything like New Vegas's "pass this skill check...OR go find ten pieces of X and five pieces of Y", if that's what you're thinking about. Or "you don't need to pass the skill check if you exhausted all the NPCs' dialogue trees and learned this piece of info". I'd wager VD thinks stuff like that is a lame copout.

I was thinking more along the lines of 'you can use this autopsy report to talk down the Master if you don't have the requisite skills'. Ideally, that sort of alternative solution shouldn't be easy of course, but it is pretty common design in these type of games.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Jaedar: AoD made me see the value of "all players are decent at combat" design. Means you can always use combat as a default solution and dialogue can add others

Yeah, no.

Jaedar: It's more fun that random game overs that you cannot predict...
Hobo Elf: to me it seems like AoD plays out like this: you make your character and then you run into walls until you find the correct pathway that you are able to go through

Only if you pick random skills.

 

[Lurker King]

I think that if not for anything else, AoD is good because it shows the hypocrisy of some players who like to think of themselves as a kind of cRPG elite who knows all about the classics of the golden era, but can’t stand a game who follows to the letter of some of them. I read those complaints that the players should not be worrying about skill and stat checks to survive and all I see is “this game should be a sandbox overkill with lots of exploration and some dialogues in between”. Closet popamoles, all of them. The irony is that the skill checks are not that hard for the most part and the game offers many different paths of surviving the failures. But they will ignore this because they want the checks to be fluffy. The stat checks are different, because you can’t change the numbers when you fail. But the locations where the stat checks are required are not mandatory.

VD posted one of the negative reviews on the ITS forum that, for me at least, perfectly illustrates the kind of assumptions going on:

I wish there was a neutral 'meh' option, I was fairly set to give this game a thumb's up due to it's neat Late Roman Empire post-apocalyptic feel and the obvious fact that a lot of work has been put in(credit where it is due), but realizing that a CRPG with a vestigial 'Trade' skill(sales aren't a magical independent ability, it's a combination of charisma and persuasion in real life) is being released in the year 2015 makes me cringe.

This is very much a sendup to the late 90s-early 00s CRPG era. If you like *everything* about old isometric CRPGs like Fallout, including the chunky isometrics, the terrible merchant pricing balance, and the comical combat difficulty(not difficulty as in brutal or high skill cap, difficulty as in artificial) level that physically requires you to minmax the hell out of your stats to be remotely viable against the very common scenario that is 3+enemies attacking your lone character at once, then this is a game for you.

The Devs had a chance to make a landmark CRPG and add another foundation block in the rebuilding of the genre into something modern. The lore and writing is on point, but they decided to snub casuals(read: people who don't like reloading ten times per battle) with really high dialogue skill checks and no middle ground in character creation. Your characters are either autistic savants that are good at three things and completely incapable or worse at everything else, or you're not going to be able to make it very far into the game. Throw in extremely nuanced, vestigial skills like Trading(should be either or a combination of Persuasion/Charisma modifiers), Etiquette/Streetwise(Not useful enough to represent individual skills, and Streetwise is just Street Etiquette), and Impersonate(I can think of two ways to represent disguise more naturally than it's own vestigial skill and I've only put a half minute of thought into it), middle of the road everyman characters with one or two interests or specialties are simply not a possibility.

TL;DR: This game is a faithful throwback to the 'golden age' of CRPGs with an alluring atmosphere and competent writing, but it's gameplay is not an improvement over titles around two decades old. Age of Decadence suffers from the same playability/skillbloat issues as the classic games that it emulates, which is exaclty what a few but not most people are looking for, and exactly why the genre died.

Now, I know a popamole player when I see one.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm sure he is, but the question I'm asking is, are his basic observations even correct when you get to the mid-game and the late-game?

Your characters are either autistic savants that are good at three things and completely incapable or worse at everything else,

Does this stop being true at some point? Is it true after Teron? Is it true after Madoraan? When does your character "arrive" and become the guy who knows more-or-less everything he needs to know?

 

[Lurker King]

It doesn't stop being true after Maadoran. You have to know the game by heart if you want to make a successful hybrid build. On the other hand, is not as bad as it sounds. If you play with a talker, you can do amazing things that affect the game world. If you choose a combat build, there is also a lot of lore and exploration stuff to do.

 

[Lurker King]

You can even obtain the power armor with a talker, go back to Maadoran and start killing human beings at the arena.

 

[Infinitron]

In most skill-based RPGs of this type, at some point, the rate at which you "level up" and gain new skill points exceeds the rate at which you encounter new and challenging skill checks that exceed your capabilities. Again, in Fallout, when you begin the game there may be lots of checks in the world that require 40s and 50s, and it takes a while for you to get to that, to reach that minimum level of competence. But once you do reach it you kind of plateau. There will still be some higher skill checks than that later on, like 60s, 70s, or 80s, but by that point, unless you've decided to radically change your chosen character archetype, you'll probably have leveled up enough to have those scores already.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Does this stop being true at some point? Is it true after Teron? Is it true after Madoraan? When does your character "arrive" and become the guy who knows more-or-less everything he needs to know?

Everything? Never. More than 3 skills? Absolutely. You can max 3 skills with low INT (meaning that you can have 4-5 decent but not maxed skills), 4 skills with high INT.

 

[Infinitron]

Everything? Never. More than 3 skills? Absolutely. You can max 3 skills with low INT (meaning that you can have 4-5 decent but not maxed skills), 4 skills with high INT.

Note that "everything he needs to know" doesn't mean all skills in the game. It means "everything my specific character archetype that I've chosen to roleplay needs to do to succeed at what he's planning to achieve in this world".

 

[Vault Dweller]

There are two main paths through the game: fighter and talker. Playing a talker is easy. If you die often as a talker, you're (not you in particular) a special butterfly. A talker can acquire a lot more skills than a fighter which makes sense since this archetype is hard to define (are you a pure talker? An explorer? etc).

Playing a fighter is much harder. A beginner should stick with 2-3 skills in Teron (either a pure figther or fighter/craftsman, fighter/alchemist, fighter with CS), then start adding other skills unless he/she wants to max 3 skills. Playing a hybrid is the hardest and requires both a very good grasp of the combat system (how to do more with less) and the knowledge of the game. I'm guessing that many people go for the hybrid right away, skipping the learning the system and the game part, then complain that combat is too hard and dying is random.

As I said earlier this is how I start playing new games:

- make a balanced build first, enter combat, see what happens.
- if almost beat your opponents (i.e. if you were very close), try again
- if not even close, change stats - see what you can do without. If a charismatic fighter can't win a fight, see if an ugly fighter can. If he can't, see if a dumb and ugly fighter can.
- simultaneously, start decreasing skills' spread. Start with a balanced distribution, see where it gets you. If nowhere, start decreasing. It's a trial-n-error style approach, but in 3 attempts you should have a very good idea of where you stand and what's required to beat the fight you're stuck on.
- so, eventually you should lock down the stats and skills and move to weapons and attack types.

If it sounds too complicated, it really isn't.

To win any fight you need to watch 3 factors:

- your THC (to hit chance); it determines what you can do in combat - different attack types and such;
- damage you deal, which can change from one fight to another (a lighter weapon might be sufficient against lightly armored opponents but would barely scratch heavy armored guys)

Usually, THC and damage are at the opposite ends of the scale, so it's hard to have both high THC and high damage. Sometimes, higher THC is better, sometimes even 40% THC will do the trick if you can kill the opponent in 2-3 hits.

- damage taken (includes both the frequency (how well you dodge) and amount (your armor and shield's DR))

So, step 1 - if your damage is low and your THC is low, your build doesn't work well and you won't get far.

How THC is determined?

- skill
- Perception bonus
- weapon type (lighter weapons often offer a THC bonus)
- attack type

For new players, I'd suggest to start with swords, axes, or hammers. Swords work great with Critical Strike, Axes do savage blows, and hammers work well against DR. Put 4 or 5 points there, don't be stingy.

If you want to fight a lot, pick 2 skills (weapon and dodge or block) and stick with them until you're comfortable. You'll know when the threshold is passed and when you can start adding more skills to your repertoire. First, you survive, then you grow.

Keep in mind that you are NOT expected to beat every fight you're offered. There is no shame in walking away if your character isn't a killing machine. Optional fights are usually the hardest, so don't jump at the first opportunity to be brutally murdered. The game isn't linear and it's not about killing people.

 

[Infinitron]

Yeah, yeah, you don't need to copy-paste that spiel from Steam. We're talking about more than just the battles here, anyway. I think people here actually have more of a problem with the skill checks outside combat.

 

[Lurker King]

In most skill-based RPGs of this type, at some point, the rate at which you "level up" and gain new skill points exceeds the rate at which you encounter new and challenging skill checks that exceed your capabilities. Again, in Fallout, when you begin the game there may be lots of checks in the world that require 40s and 50s, and it takes a while for you to get to that, to reach that minimum level of competence. But once you do reach it you kind of plateau. There will still be some higher skill checks than that later on, like 60s, 70s, or 80s, but by that point, unless you've decided to radically change your chosen character archetype, you'll probably have leveled up enough to have those scores already.

Ok, but let us not assume without argument that games such as Fallout should be the only standard of SPs distribution in cRPGs. AoD design drinks in very different pots: From FO, PS:T and Arcanum, to Prelude to Darkness and Gothic. Moreover, the design is also inspired by his own ideas about unrealistic and poorly thought common places of cRPGs, less ego stroking, etc. If history teach us anything, is that people who innovate always face resistance and retaliation. The butthurt and aggressive reactions is normal, since people have this mistaken belief that what is familiar is always better. Besides, even if the SP distribution was wrong and the game was too hard, the story itself and the wide spectrum of choices is more than enough to appreciate the game.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Yeah, yeah, you don't need to copy-paste that spiel from Steam. We're talking about more than just the battles here, anyway. I think people here actually have more of a problem with the skill checks outside combat.

Like I said, the non-combat path is easy (it's the game's easy mode), so the only way to run into a problem there is to try to be a hero when you're not or try things your character isn't built for (like infiltrating the compound ninja style).

It's only a problem for hybrids when people don't know what they are doing and are trying to play the game as fighter/talker, having insufficient skills to pass checks or win fights when checks fail.

 

[Infinitron]

Like I said, the non-combat path is easy (it's the game's easy mode), so the only way to run into a problem there is to try to be a hero when you're not or try things your character isn't built for (like infiltrating the compound ninja style).

It's only a problem for hybrids when people don't know what they are doing and are trying to play the game as fighter/talker, having insufficient skills to pass checks or win fights when checks fail.

It's not just a matter of difficulty, though. There's more to a game than that. It's also a matter of people feeling that their roleplaying options are constrained. So again, my question - do your options open up as you progress, or are you bound to a harsh and constant skill point treadmill even in the late game, as Jaedar believes:

Jaedar: Except I don't think this happens 'tron, because presumably the requirements just keep going up and up

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's not just a matter of difficulty, though. There's more to a game than that. It's also a matter of people feeling that their roleplaying options are constrained.

Is that what we're discussing now? People feeling something? It's not a serious conversation. If you want to talk design, give me specific examples and explain how it's constrained and why the checks are random and couldn't possibly fit into your character's type.

So again, my question - do your options open up as you progress, or are you bound to a harsh and constant skill point treadmill even in the late game, as Jaedar believes:

Naturally, the checks go up (why else have 1-10 scale?), but you get more points. Only a few weeks ago the overwhelming opinion was that the player get too many skill points and we had to scale it back a bit. Does it answer your question?

 

[Infinitron]

It would be better if there was a definite moment or stage in the game you could point at - "Yes, it opens up after Madoraan". That would make people feel more confident about the game. But eh, I guess.

I suppose our review will have to analyze this.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It would be better if there was a definite moment or stage in the game you could point at - "Yes, it opens up after Madoraan". That would make people feel more confident about the game. But eh, I guess.

I'd say it opens up after Teron.