It's about attributes and the design of them (Might affecting healing power is mentioned, for example), and avoiding dump stats.

http://media.obsidian.net/eternity/media/misc/pe-jsawyer-gods-and-dumps.pdf

Edit: The actual presentation can be found here:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023481/Gods-and-Dumps-Attribute-Tuning

Interesting point about allowing a broad range of viable builds. That would have been good to know when I first created my Druid slave. With Might and Intellect marked as Highly Recommended, I gave more to them at the expense of Resolve than I would have liked, which was only Recommended. I still gave a fair bit to Resolve but I really wanted it to be higher. Thought it suited a slave who managed to survive and escape. With a Caed Nua resolve boost, though, I get up to about where I'd like it.

Well.. that would have made sense in the system that was presented early in the beta. In the existing system, more to the liking of a select few loudmouths in the obsidian community with their own youtube channels, these nuances really make no difference. The only thing that matters in the existing system is might and endurance. And thanks to the way they "adjusted" the invisible stat-table, this really has no bearing on anything until you play on higher difficulty settings. And even then the stats you can change as a player only really matter in the very early game. Although they do matter in the intermission sequences - which you of course can't fail if you just look at the stats and click the right button with the corresponding +1 number on.

Btw, you really shouldn't be playing at higher difficulties anyway. Because the entire game has been "balanced" by scaling encounters to fit the level you would reach after the amount of xp you can gather after literally slaying every single rat, dog, wolf and spider, in order of size and rank, throughout the whole of Eothas as you move on. If you skip some rats, you're going to be constantly underleveled for the encounters you reach. Because not getting kill xp was TOO MUCH OHMYGAWD!! So replacing a very easily structured quest and exploration xp gain, with a constant raking of the forest down to the last rabbit and last berry and flower, over and over again. That just made too much sense.

In the same way, the turn-system has been changed so that a number of very viable light builds - and more importantly light classes in general - essentially are crippled completely against might and endurance based characters, because they simply sequence too late.

Because, or so the argument went: No one does role-playing considerations like you just did in your post right there when playing video-games. It's simply UNHEARD OF.

So the "community wanted it", and that was that. In the open beta, they literally had 1 person (other than Josh, I guess) out of about a 100 people participating on the forum that thought having a system, in a role-playing game... where you could role-play a character, and create that character and make it viable in the game mechanically if it was viable narratively... was a good idea.

Seriously. I'm not making any of this up. Matt (known for rpg-reviews on youtube and books on crpgs, which he used as justification for why he should be listened to) and Sensuki (from rpg-codex) had a large treatise they submitted on rolls and stats, among various other things. 50 pages of "mathematical" proof of why flipping a coin in any single encounter, is always fair and balanced in a game. Because if you see one instance in isolation and generalize over that, then everything makes complete logical sense. And tilting the critical range was a way to "trap" people into unviable builds, according to these and many others.

And a very large amount of changes to the early beta, that are in the game, were exactly as suggested in that document. This isn't about the size of a tree in the forest, it's about core concepts that essentially cut the knees off Josh's design. Josh later argued that the final system at least was more dynamic than D&D, which it is. But the "viable builds" route only exists because none of the character changeable stats in the game really make any difference. That's mechanically why all builds are viable.

Matt since deleted the document and the link he made public, and disowned the idea that any of his suggestions were at all taken on board at Obsidian.

Which was of course just as much bullshit as the entire campaign from "concerned Kickstarters and role-playing veterans" was from the start. Obsidian's community team fell for it, though, and sold bullshit opinion from two highly self-absorbed people as representative of what every one of the backers who backed the project wanted.

Actually, I think the high point of the beta was when a community manager insisted, without argument, that any game that doesn't look identical to Diablo 3 is unsellable shit. It just was true. And so we had instant trigger-abilities with cooldown bars. Rather than preparation phases, interrupts from strategic mistakes, and casting sequence. Because gamers are just too stupid and don't understand what they /really want/, you see.

Which is bullshit stats that mean nothing, but /look/ like they have significance. And also deeply contrived and complicated micromanagement that /looks/ strategically complex and reactive. But that in reality is just an endless tedium with a number-popup reward at the end. What does matter, however, is to suck up to "rpg-game tropes". While bowing to the ground for anyone who insists that the height of role-playing is when you stack 100 healing potions, and click the potion button more often than you press the "cast fireball" button.

And look how much fantastic press that approach got you, Obsidian. Well done. I sure will support you the next time you run a kickstarter after this project turned out so well!

God damnit.

I wouldn't say stats are irrelevant, they just become relevant on higher difficulties and/or for more exotic builds - on normal you can botch your character all you want and it'll still be viable, somewhat, which does actually allow for more roleplaying than DnD games ever did.

Anyway, reading that wall of text, I'm so glad I don't partake in Early Access communities. So I just got a game, loved it to bits and I'm now happy to support Obsidian further :-P Wait, wha? But Pillars does only reward experience for exploration and completion of quests. Well also tiny amount for disarming traps and completing bestiary, but that's quite negligible.

...I guess it could be subjectively better than not enjoying the game in large part because you know all the annoyances were put in on purpose. While you also know you're missing out on a very deep role-playing system that actually was built, and that works great. Rather than what it looks like, that you're playing a "poor man's D&D", where Obsidian renamed attributes and skills to avoid being sued by the Wizards.

But then again, maybe not. Well, you get xp bonuses for completing "mini-quests". Which consist of raking a map for mobs, over and over again. And the last time I played the game there was bestiary and extra kill-xp that mattered. Just sneaking in and stealing the wagon-load wasn't rewarded objectively in the game.

Let me put it this way - I'm really excited by the idea of Doom being an RPG like it was supposed to be back in the origins of its design, but that doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the game. Pillars of Eternity, as it is right now after the vigorous patching, contains what is in my opinion one of the most elegant RPG systems I've ever seen in an RPG. It's flexible, it gives a ton of options - both role-playing and gameplay-wise, and it does its best to not give player "wrong" choices. It's not massively complex, true, but I think that's to its benefit - most really complex systems I've seen for story-driven RPGs were quite simply never used properly, many paths only offering a false choice, never to be really used in the resulting game again. Pillars does a decent job of avoiding that (altho it's not perfect in that area either, certainly) while also offering a buttload of choice.

It does take a lot after DnD, certainly, and that's not surprising given its target audience (in other words - it did not surprise me by being that, so I wasn't disappointed) - I will say, however, that this is a bit of a shame as some bits of the mechanics seem to adhere to standards set by DnD just for the sake of doing so. I'm not sure which quests are you talking about exactly, but the bestiary XP really is negligible. I do agree that it should be dropped entirely, along with XP for disarming traps, and I'm not entirely sure what is the purpose of putting those XP rewards into the game supposed to be - but even without all that XP, you'll reach max level well before end game, if you finish quests. But yes, some quests do require killing.

That's good.

What I did was support the kickstarter to see what Obsidian would be able to do without a publisher hanging over their necks. And I got to see a glimpse of that in the early beta release. I was very happy that Obsidian had pulled it off. Before it was quickly changed to something more linear and streamlined. To the point where really nothing is left. While a gigantic second helping of somewhat disconnected writing was piled on top.

I don't think people understand how much time Obsidian spent on making the game less interesting either. Time that could have been much better spent on actually fixing real problems (that also weren't fixed until after the release, or else made irrelevant due to changing the mechanics to something significantly less complicated, or by making the mechanical problem "obsolete". The turn and sequence system, for example, is like that).

That time instead went into systematically removing every element of the game that made it unique. Of which there were many. And then instead creating a D&D+ system with fun active abilities. Yes. And many of them literally have no purpose other than just being there. You don't see this very clearly from playing the game now, but the entire appearance with the familiar two-dimensional stats (that often even don't make sense in pnp either, except when you have fewer battles and opportunity to focus on some strength or other that a character has with some GM creativity) - really doesn't reflect what happens behind the scenes. The significant stats have simply been moved from the character sheet and into the class-tables that we can't edit.

Basically, the first thing that happened in the beta was that they added twice as many ability points, to let people max-min their characters without penalties. Because penalties were difficult to understand for mortal minds. Really, that wasn't how a power-fantasy should work! So when that wasn't good enough, they just removed the stats altogether, and replaced them with something else. And that's what you have now. Pointless character stats that largely have no effect compared to the class variables. Several of the stats in the stat sheet actually don't affect any of the derived stats (that rolls are made against).

In the same way, the turn/sequence system used to be dependent on a few more variables. The derived stats were fairly simple to calculate after that, but they fit together. And it was things that would have made, say, a blind monk that can only defend on close range - but in return is then supernaturally perceptive - a viable character mechanically. It'd make complete sense. Instead of like in D&D, where you will then just make something technically impossible, or just bad. Or in the current system, where what you have playing on the screen just demonstrates the dissonance between the names of the stats and what they actually do in the game. At least for anything with a narrative behind it that isn't explicitly a might-based character: "I have big muscles, therefore I can cut things in half really elegantly with this curved sword, although I have no inkling of an idea what "centre of percussion is". I also hit things harder and with more damage regardless of situation, ambush, flank, buff, sleet or snow, because BEEFCAKE! AAARGGH!".

That's what the character system is like now. On the other hand, the engagement system and the AI essentially guarantees that you will fight everything near the screen. And also that any scouting skills are pointless, any tracking skills have no bearing on how you play the missions, while stealth is reduced to an active "blink" ability in battle that allows the rogue to backstab for free (if you can micromanage enough). You see, none of this active ability spam bs was there in the game until six months after the game was, to quote Josh, "pretty much complete".

.. and sorry about the rant, and so on. But I'll tell you exactly why the xp-rewards in between are in the game. It was explicitly put in because 5 guys on a forum thought that otherwise there would be no incentive to "explore" ("explore" in this case meaning: "farm xp for the sake of farming xp, because I'm a completionist to the point where I would have a diagnose if this was about any other interest than video-games). While no xp for kills was laughed off as some weird primadonna convention forced in by design so the game would appear sophisticated. Etc. That was the level of the discussion, and Obsidian's community team embraced it.

What was in the game, though, was something like this: pretty much every area had some ceiling you needed to break to pass through it. This is pnp 101. You put in a threat in the scenario that the players have to overcome. And you make it so that they have to struggle hard to get past it, so they have a feeling of possible failure, and a sense of accomplishment when they get past it. This may or may not involve painful retreat, severed arms to be sewn on again back in the village, temporarily lost loot, alternative strategies, scouting parties, sabotage, undercover orc work, and so on. But that's the baseline for any good GM when you set up a story.

And PoE had areas set up so that you could - if you wanted to - explore and fight your way to the end of the dungeon (with a tough boss-encounter, for example. There was an optional sidequest-ish dungeon in the beta set up like this, it's the one under Dyrwood). But depending on your approach, you could be struggling by knocking down the front door, battling your way through all the minions and cultists, and then barely scraping past the boss if you were really lucky. And very likely you would fail at that on the first attempt, take too much damage and spend too many spells and resources. So you would have to retreat, camp, and get more supplies. Perhaps do some other quest, until trying again - or another approach to the dungeon would appear, that allowed you to bypass certain parts of the dungeon. Then again, maybe you would join the cultists after having seen the error of your weakling ways. Or you might just.. not fight the boss. Or his guards, if you were clever about it. That's what made Obsidian recognizable as a studio: this way to manage to translate world-class GM scenarios and stories into computer games. Because no one else does that.

And then you'd complete the scenario, and get some xp and level up, and get some new abilities and spells.




But, of course.. that wasn't good enough. This wasn't enough to "reward" "progress". So that's why the dungeons are full of bs exp gain, along with non-stop active trigger ability spam in a non-stop stream of pointless engagements. Because that's what "gamers" think is popular, according to whatever.

Because make no mistake about that the way the game seemingly caters to "hard core rpg-gamers" is a huge sham in the worst of all possible ways. It has the appearance of an rpg, with all the right labels and functions any GM will recognize as exploits of the intended use in pnp. Down to the pointless rest-spam, the frequency of potions, the healing magic inflation, and on and on. And all of that is in the game now. On the other end, the game made all the mechanics that actually were interesting completely transparent to the player - actually to the point where the mechanics are so invisible they make no difference to anything. Since the way the game is played has been changed until you don't make strategic choices based on the situation, but instead work hard to figure out the "optimal" sequence to open with to win any fight. Which you then spam until you have to rest.

It's diablo 3.5 with a pause-button. And the game was literally a completely different one six months before release. With a much more tactical approach to battles, where the way you fought them could vary a lot from one to the next.

But honestly - even if I didn't know exactly how badly Obsidian mangled their own design, and postponed the release six months to do it, I wouldn't have enjoyed what they have now. Because it's tedious and pointless. Which is a crying shame, because you can of course tell from just the slides Josh had there, that he's obviously on to something completely essential about making a "computer rpg" actually work.

See, here's what's so infuriating about it. The people who were the least approachable and the most comically rude when explaining how ridiculous they felt the entire PoE setup was - who are they, really? They're people who play "crpgs" as if the conventions chosen in the d&d licenced games should be there - even if they make little sense in a video-game context. I.e., if you can't chug potions like people drink wine-coolers on a rave, then it's not an "rpg" any more. Somehow people write books and get published for writing things like this, and they claw themselves into some sort of niche of role-playing gamers who worship numbers and the abstract functions -- that represent something mysterious and fulfilling when applied to the meditative act of playing the video-game.

It's very silly. And Obsidian, of all possible studios, fell for it. They took it seriously enough to drop the remaining 73k backers who didn't spam them on their beta forums. And then they're saying, literally in fact, that we should be happy they didn't just take the money and make an action-game or an fps from the outset instead.

I didn't have to kickstart a project like that, though. Neither would Obsidian have needed to seek out alternative funding for it. So from that perspective, I'm quite unhappy with this on so many different levels. I really am unable to "just enjoy the story" and play through the game as well... Because it is so unbelievably tedious. If I could read a GM's lore guide by Josh and Chris Avellone instead and be done with it, I'd do that instead.

...incidentally, it would probably be helpful if the gog.com forums said things like "no asterixes please, and no dashes and backslashes too near each other either, because reasons", when the posts don't go through.

Actually, that there is one of the biggest reasons as to why do I love Pillars of Eternity - in White March alone, there are like 3 major locations you can sneak and talk trough in their entirety. I'm now trying a new run with as few kills as possible, so we'll see how does that translate into the original game, but I know that you can finish Raderic's hold purely using stealth (as long as you side with Raderic that is - he won't commit suicide on account of you asking him to, altho it would be cool to see an option to actually assassinate him without anyone noticing I suppose.) It's quite possible that these possibilities and approaches diminished since beta, but they're still there in sufficient amount to appear more common and more essential than in most other RPGs I have played (that is unless you're Age of Decadence which sadly has its own laundry list of problems.)

Now I'm not saying that you would love the game if you didn't watch it evolve - that would be bullshit, obviously. But your judgement is definitely clouded by doing so, just like mine is clouded by having pretty much no expectations whatsoever of the game, which by no small amount lead to it becoming my game of 2015. That being said, the game has massive issues with coherence of its design - specialized abilities of classes make often no sense given lore of the game in many instances, limited camping supplies are in stark contrast with limitless stash (both design decisions I love in isolation, but they're certainly strange when combined and I'm sure there would be better ways to explain limited rests in dungeons) and generally, story and mechanics don't gel together - you've made note of that yourself, I'm just repeating this to point out that I don't necessarily disagree.

And yes, many fights go down with me pressing 1 -> Q -> Click on opponent, 2 -> Q -> Click on opponent etc - at first I really loved the sheer amount of active abilities, but when it gets reduced to rote mashing of the same buttons for any of the easier encounters, well... That's not great. For them to work, the game would need a lot less encounters with each being a lot more significant. Then again, I guess I could just leave fighting to party AI (but I really don't trust AI in these games)

Anyway, nice rant, it's just a shame I can't reply meaningfully to most of it as I neither watched development of the game, nor am I particularly experienced with actual pen and paper gameplay :-P All I want is a bloody ajax response which goes "You've got an error dum-dum." You know, just catch that fucking exception and throw it back at me, I don't care.

Well, all that is way over my head! All I know is that I really like the game, including the mechanics, and they've managed to fool me into feeling like I'm role playing a character. Maybe but it was only when I switched to hard that I really had an excuse to learn all of my Druid's spells, rather than using the same few in most encounters. Now, careful use of spells that have debuffing side effects becomes both interesting and fun. That would assume all party characters have high stealth skills, right? Unfortunately for me, I'd have a hard time trying to justify why a Barbarian like Maneha could sneak :)

But if nipsen doesn''t like PoE, let's see what they do with Tyranny. It almost sounds like a case of "PoE was the game we had to do for KickStarter. Tyranny is the game where we can completely unleash". We'll see.

Not necessarily - there are locations where opponents turn non-hostile due to your dialogue choices which are easiest to go trough with your entire party as you don't need stealth skills. Then there are locations where your opponents have regular patrol schedules - you have two options in these. You can either leave the rest of your party back in Caed Nua and go in alone (yeah, you can do that easily enough), in that case, you only need PC with high stealth.

Alternatively, albeit this is a lot more difficult approach, you can use a member with high stealth to scout the patrol routes and then run trough when patrols can't notice your other party members. In White March, NPCs even properly reacted when I managed to sneak my way trough bits of the game, it was great.

..problem is that Obsidian apparently employ a whole bunch of people who wanted to make Diablo. Who genuinely think that Diablo mechanics is no hindrance to role-playing. And they have people who will jump at any excuse to change their original designs completely on the head. "Oh, two guys on a forum doesn't understand the nuances of accuracy just from looking at the stats-sheet and some combat rolls in the log - I guess it's too complicated for everyone then, and is a failed design!". Until they end up with combining everything in some dark blood- ritual, until they get the looks of an isometric crpg, the gameplay of diablo, and a complex rpg-ruleset underneath it all that no one can see, and that is never interacted with by the players.

And no amount of freedom from publishers, freedom from kickstarter, freedom from fans, freedom from criticism, freedom from Chris Avellone, freedom from money, or whatever - is going to change the fact that Obsidian chose an approach like this for PoE - after the initial design was actually made and put into a playable game. And no one demanded any of this from Obsidian in a way that they couldn't have rejected with a shrug. They chose to respond to internet bs like "Kickstarter fraud: there is no potion chugging, the staple of crpg convention, and Obsidian promised a traditional crpg in the tradition of Baldur's Gate! Rabblerabbble!!" - and they won't admit that.

The worst part is that while they were making these changes that cut Josh's design in half, they still successfully sold that design and approach to making an rpg to reviewers and gamers. That they were doing something interesting here was what motivated a lot of people to even look at the game. So while they were successfully raising crpgs with team dynamics from the grave, they were making these changes to the design behind the scenes. Because they were compelled to do it.

And by what? Two guys on an internet forum? I don't buy it.

Bumping because I just added a link to the actual presentation to the OP.

Awesome, thank you!

Thanks :) was annoyed I missed this for a long while >_<

"These are the attributes.. um...not necessarily what we started out with *cough* mm..". ...yeah.

edit: So what I'm taking from this is that Josh feels subjective perception about value and entertainment in the game is always the guide -- as long as the subjective feedback goes in the opposite direction of what Josh's design wants to accomplish.

In other words, "This game sucks ass" on Gaf is an order to destroy your design (as creatively as possible until Gaf threads start loving it for no reason - in which case the system is now superior and perfect, objectively speaking. Now you nailed it perfectly, and everything you say is amazing).

*shakes head*