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Ask me anything unless it's really dumb.
Recent Responses
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For the most part, they've defended themselves by retreating and/or resorting to merciless guerrilla tactics. Ruthless orlan behavior is the source of much of the dislike of orlans as a group. In this part of the world, the only area where orlans are on equal social footing with other races is in Eir Glanfath. In Glanfathan legends, orlan and elven tribes both took the same vow to defend the Engwithan ruins within Eir Glanfah. Since then, the tribes have intermingled to such an extent that despite the physical differences between them, Glanfathan elves and orlans treat each other as equals.
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Yes. Being below 50% Stamina will trigger statuses, abilities, or behavioral changes in some creatures and some classes, though I don't think we've implemented many of those specific abilities yet.
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I think in close to all cases where I've written "spike damage", I've used it as a verb. A rogue can spike his or her damage output, i.e. dramatically increase it for a short duration. Rogues have a few Abilities for doing this, the most notable of which does increasingly more damage based on how low the target's current Stamina is.
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Right now it is a percentage bonus to damage.
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We have a basic implementation but it needs to be crisper/more immediate, essentially as soon as the attacker gets within range and stops to attack. Responsiveness in movement (including stopping) and all actions is really important to the feel of the game so we're going to continue tuning that a lot.
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We haven't made any adjustments to it, no. That's still the way it works. Sometimes the option is advantageous, sometimes it's just another option, and sometimes it will work against you. The physical attributes are represented as well as the mental attributes, with the physical attributes often allowing you to perform actions within the conversation.
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We wanted the individual bars to be heavy, closer to the Good Delivery standard of 400 troy oz. / 12.4kg / 27 lbs. Ours are 35 lbs. to make them more difficult to remove.
Either way, the size of the model is close to the Good Delivery standard, the classic big ol' bar o***old, so the text on the texture is inaccurate. -
I'm sure I've been to more than two, but the two I remember are Bat for Lashes at The Fonda (awesome) and Björk at the Hollywood Palladium (awesome). I'm going to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor in September.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjW7LaCK0mc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuTtyhhN35A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR9dMM2qv3M -
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I hope you will be able to enjoy it, but you may find it difficult. You're managing an entire party of characters and the combat will be tuned for a tactical mindset. However, I am doing my best to remove non-viable build options from the character system and I'm trying to keep the core mechanics consistent.
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He is correct that the point buy system will give you a higher sum of ability scores if you stay in the lower ranges. There's not much to debate there; that's just how the math works. D&D 3E/3.5 does not favor generalist characters, though certain classes will suffer more by keeping a number of their ability scores at lower values. Jack-of-all-trades characters can be very fun to play at lower levels, but the math entirely favors specialists as the levels rise.
Role-playing/special builds aside, as a non-finesse melee ***hter, if I can have 14 Str/14 Cha or 16 Str/10 Cha (using the standard weighted scale), I'm going to take the latter pretty much every time. I have an additional +5% chance to hit on every attack and an additional point of damage on every hit. The cost I pay is -10% on every Cha-based check I make, which will be extraordinarily rare.
So yes, D&D's weighted point buy will give you a higher ability score sum if you keep the scores sub-15, but for many classes/builds, a balanced array is not favored by the game system itself. -
Late in development, we realized that we didn't have songs for the Lonesome Drifter (or Bruce Isaac) to perform at the Aces theatre. Talent Pool was a side quest and it seemed unlikely that, even if the quest was completed, people would return to the Aces to see the performances. Still, we needed to have songs, so I worked out some possibilities with Scott Lawlor and did the recordings with Nathaniel and James playing guitar on the three Lonesome Drifter pieces. I'm not sure where Scott found the Cobwebs and Rainbows instrumental, but it was handy for Bruce Isaac's song. I think we recorded all of the Lonesome Drifter songs on a Sunday afternoon and Cobwebs and Rainbows later that week.
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I intended for several of the Unarmed weapons to use ammo, but we encountered some problems with implementing it. I would have liked to continue with it because I think ammo use/reloading could have helped distingui****hose weapons in more interesting ways.
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Ideally, both, but I prioritize balance between a player's options -- whatever they may be.
Intuition varies a lot from person to person, especially when it comes to RPG mechanics. If you've played enough RPGs, you find commonality between systems, but also a huge amount of divergence. Pendragon is not like D&D, GURPS is not like FUDGE, and Burning Wheel is not like Cyberpunk. Someone coming to one of these systems from another may find the rules unintuitive simply based off of their past RPG experiences rather than from any sense of verisimilitude.
If a mechanic sacrifices intuitiveness for balance, even if the player makes a choice from the basis of an incorrect assumption, their "wrong" choice may very well wind up being a viable one. If a mechanic sacrifices balance for intuitiveness, it may point the player toward the viable solutions, but it's implicit in the sacrifice that we're knowingly including sub-par (or worse, trash) options in the game's content.
I don't think the player gains much from the inclusion of options that are designed to be bad. It means the designer is including things that take resources to make and display in the game, but really aren't ever made to be taken.
In the long run (and most RPGs have a fairly long run), the internal logic of the game's rules become the lens through which the player looks at choices. You can fit your playstyle to rules as you learn them. And on subsequent playthroughs, if the player's options are well-balanced, you can genuinely play with a completely different character. If the options are intuitive but not balanced, your long-term potential for different playthroughs is diminished because only a subset of options are viable -- or rather, many options inherently come with a difficulty penalty that you may or may not want to experience. -
Yes. That's how a lot of the IWD/HoW/TotL/IWD2 encounters were balanced. Kihan (Pak) and I would compare difficulty notes and I would balance my encounters around that. They usually wound up too hard for the average tester, so we dialed them down a bit, but the higher-end/later ***hts (e.g. Burial Isle) tended to err on the side of increased difficulty.
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That's a lot of different stuff to respond to. The main thing I would say is that PE's Attribute system isn't based off of 4E. A lot of stuff in PE is not based off of 4E because I don't think it would work well for the game. As an example, PE ***hters are WAY lower-maintenance than 4E ***hters (though a little higher than they are in 3E and certainly more than they are in 2nd Ed.). PE wizards are much closer to 3.5 sorcerer/wizards than they are to 4E wizards (though their power curve doesn't match 3.5's).
I *generally* like the mechanics of 4E (e.g. the unified defense system), but I think the classes lost a lot of their unique feel between 3E/3.5 and 4E and it still has a lot of flaws that are shared by other RPGs and editions of A/D&D.
I played 4E for about 2.5 years and I'm still playing 3.5 (and DMing a Pathfinder game). None of the rules in any edition of A/D&D are perfect and I'm not using a specific edition as a "goal". I want to use A/D&D-like mechanics when I can because I believe that's the sort of experience that our backers are going to enjoy.
No blend of rules is going to make everyone happy, but I do try to keep this idea in mind: a player saying, "I want to make this type of character and play through the game with it." I know that's not important to all players, but I do think it's important to many of them -- and it is important to me. -
I said that it was relatively conservative. I was mostly referring to the setting itself and the inclusion of common FRPG elements like elves, dwarves, ***hters, wizards, swords, plate armor, etc. However, that also applies to the feeling of how the game plays, how you work through quests (e.g., there are no quest arrows/markers), and so on.
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Joshua E. Sawyer’s Bio
Santa Ana, CA
twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/
I was raised in Fort Atkinson, WI, went to college in Appleton, WI, and have worked as a video game designer in Southern California for the past twelve years.
I'll answer questions in English or Deutsch but try français español o italiano.
