I get over zealous when I post new stuff, so I will try to be more concise in my post.
Because "days" and "extended rests" won't really be a viable option for managing character resources, at least not from the perspective of a sandbox MMO, why not have cooldowns for magic/supernatural/awesome sauce abilities?
For examples, simple combat spells (low elemental damage or temporary debuff effects) could have a cooldown of 6 to 30 seconds. More powerful spells (moderate to high elemental damage, buffs, or low level healing spells) could have a cooldown of 1 to 3 minutes. Getting into the more powerful effects (AoE spells, group heals, summon monsters), you could have cooldowns anywhere from 10 minutes to 24 hours.
In this way, you keep spellcasters flavorful, scale spells with skill progression (reduce cooldown time, make lower level magic slightly more powerful), and give another dimension for power management. After all, if a spell from Pathfinder would be too powerful for its level in PFO, a long cooldown can help balance its power by limiting repeated use.
Just an idea. Could this work? And if not, why?
Goblin Squad Member
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@Pheoran
I would rather see an 'energy' bar of some sort. It opens the door for exhaustion abilities.
This also keeps a player from dumping all their high damage early, and makes battles with magic users easier to balance.
any combat ability with a cooldown above 3 minutes is too long, the idea is that a 3 minute cooldown means that it can only be used once in a fight. and IMO 3 minutes is a long fight. ease-of-use abilities that just make the game easier to play should get the 10+ minute cooldowns, such as fast travel or a temporary buff to get past that boss that is barely out of your grasp.
I want to see the necessary cooldown time to replenish spells / abilities to be 8 hour ingame time. lol (at least in wilderness)
Making it short and convenient felt like something else. Skills such as unlock / disarm trap / languages(?) would become obsolete with all the spells being free, less-dependent(no requirements to put extra skill training into it, no need for tool-kit, no stats requirement, etc.), if they can be cast every few minutes.
The spell-casters will be more resourceful than the none-spell caster characters, especially the one with less "activatable" abilities like pure rogue in the skill department, when spells replenish in short period of time. Probably will out-damage them as well, with less restrictions, more utilities, while having the same hp(? due to classless).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I want to see the necessary cooldown time to replenish spells / abilities to be 8 hour ingame time. lol
Making it short and convenient felt like something else. Skills such as unlock / disarm trap / languages(?) would become obsolete with all the spells being free, less-dependent(no requirements to put extra skill training into it, no need for tool-kit, no stats requirement, etc.), if they can be cast every few minutes.
The spell-casters will out-resource the none-spell casters, especially the one with less "activatable" abilities like pure rogue in the skill department. Probably will out-damage them as well.
You've got to take the PnP core rulebooks and throw them out. The only way for this game to work well as an MMO is to re-write the mechanics. It can lore and ability names, but that's it. The game has to build it's own mechanics.
If wizards are being able to do too much, you tweak the game.
It would be nice if Ryan or Vic could chime in with an official ruling on if any mechanics from the PnP will bleed into the game. They expressed incompatibility with using the tabletop to design the game in the 2nd post. That little bit of information would start driving suggestions in the right direction.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How about making spell casters use reagents to cast spells. Low lvl spell would only use say 2 ginseng, 2 garlic, 1 mandrake root, these reagents would be cheap cost off npc vendors.
Higher lvl spells would cost more in reagents and even some reagents could only be gathered from highend zones or drops from elite lvl creatures.
This would prevent spellcasters from spamming spells if it cost them a fortune, this way spellcasters could still have extremely powerful spells but only at a cost.
And with weight limitations and bag space one could only carry so many reagents at a time.
Having to pay for low lvl reagents also helps consume ingame gold, and high lvl reagents would give the adventurer something to find and sell for a good price on the market.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How about making spell casters use reagents to cast spells. Low lvl spell would only use say 2 ginseng, 2 garlic, 1 mandrake root, these reagents would be cheap cost off npc vendors.
Higher lvl spells would cost more in reagents and even some reagents could only be gathered from highend zones or drops from elite lvl creatures.
This would prevent spellcasters from spamming spells if it cost them a fortune, this way spellcasters could still have extremely powerful spells but only at a cost.
And with weight limitations and bag space one could only carry so many reagents at a time.
Having to pay for low lvl reagents also helps consume ingame gold, and high lvl reagents would give the adventurer something to find and sell for a good price on the market.
I agree with most of what you say, short of money actually being sufficient as a relative deterrent, in general we can expect the most obnoxious people to be the most powerful and thus be running some form of business which winds up with them being filthy rich, that being said assuming the main limiter is also space, perhaps through a spell component pouch that specifically limits how many components you can carry at one time, I could see this as a very viable idea. I recall this idea thrown around not that long ago. I think it may have been on the equipment damage thread I'm not sure exactly where in the topic the spell component pouch idea started to be discussed, but I linked to at least one of the posts in the area where the discussion started.
Geeze I'm starting to feel old... that or like the guy who yells out "Simpsons did it" on south park.
In Unearthed Arcana (back in the day), they had a spell casting variant for spells that had cooldowns instead of just being expended. In essence, you would select your spells of each level per day, and when you used that spell, the cooldown timer would start on it. Casters that prepared spells could change their spells each day, just like normal, but spontaneous casters who could not change their spell list would recharge their spells faster.
A majority of spells had cooldowns that lasted a single modified die roll (depending on the level of the spell compared to the highest level spell the caster could cast), but certain spells had non-standard cooldowns, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours to even 24 hours. Such spells were the most powerful (like raise dead) and usually also had long casting times (like consecrate).
Besides, I think non-spellcasters should have access to similar abilities but with a martial bent, like maneuvers from Book of the Nine Swords.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Pheoran Armiez, excellent question, and a welcome departure from the wall-of-texts that you've had a tendency to excite yourself into.
Valkenr touched on this, but one of the reasons you don't see many long cooldowns in most MMOs is basic human nature: if there's a combat ability that can only be used every 20 minutes, you'll find that people never use it - they always save it for a real emergency. One way to counter this is to give the player a different ability that instantly resets the cooldown on the other. Apparently, this frees up the player to actually use the ability, knowing that they can save the reset for the real emergency. I'm not sure how well this works, though.
Personally, I'd really like to see an Exhaustion bar (see this thread) that can be used for all Archetypes. Casting spells would increase exhaustion, which decreases less rapidly the more exhausted you are, until ultimately you need to return to civilization (or your camp if you're an outdoor-type) to fully recover. This creates a strong incentive to hold back from a massive power dump at the beginning of every fight, but gives players a way to accomplish something similar to using Hero Points in that they have a deeper well to draw from in "emergencies".
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. This game doesn't have to be like every other MMO out there and one thing that seems almost religious about MMO's is that they all have cooldowns.
Why not use a system of resting (just like in Neverwinter Nights). This effectively slow down gameplay also and forces more interaction between players in the group.
Besides being much closer to the core rules which I hope is what we all want right? Cause this is still a pathfinder/D&D MMO we are talking about. Making another MMO is according to me not just slapping on different looking characters and enironment saying its now an 'X' MMO. (Like Star Wars and Warcraft where the only difference is just that.)
Now to slightly stray off-topic a bit:
All MMO's for some reason put most of their focus on the first 'M' in MMO instead of the second. We must not forget 'Multiplayer' is still in the equation. Especially for a wannabe D&D game this is extra important. Lets remember people...we want to get closer to pen and paper D&D, not WoW.
To get back more on topic:
Using some kind of Diablo-like (with meters for mana and hp) system is even worse and will just make this game fall into the actionRPG pitfall that all RPG games today seem to fall into.
The ingredient method is slightly better...but then again...this is not Ultima they are making here....
In EVE (probably the closest thing we have to PFO right now), your character is essentially your ship. You have character resources (energy from your core, which recharges over time), modules (which use the energy to perform certain tasks), and your basic shield/armor/structure for hit points (which determine when your ship is destroyed).
In PFO, a correlation could be fatigue (maybe a single type of energy that fuels everything from martial maneuvers to arcane/divine magic), abilities (which may be interchangeable, like modules, so you "set" your abilities for the day, but may reset them outside of combat), and hit points/dodge/parry/deflect/damage reduction (maybe PFO will focus more on damage mitigation or avoidance than on damage absorption).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Spellcasting abilities must have parity with what we typically consider "martial" abilities in an MMO or you'll see some strange and less than ideal emergent behavior.
Likely examples: a strict port of tabletop rules means as a magic user (particularly wizards/sorcerers who lack martial skill) you'd basically only be able to contribute to combat for a few moments over the course of an entire days worth of real time game play (since one can't do any sort of time dialation as is common on the tabletops). A wizard player then would likely play PFO for only a few minutes (60ish) before logging into that sweet Paladin character to go out and do stuff all the rest of the day. Personally, this doesn't sound like much fun.
Partial compliance with pnp(re: regents for spells): you generate unusual and seemingly unfair penalties between casters and non-casters. As Bromton pointed out above, having to manage inventory in order to match the efficacy of a dude with a sharp stick seems unfair. As a sidenote: even the tabletop world has moved significantly away from managing combat spells on such a level. now... for something like construction skills or enchantments and other non-action non-combat abilities, reagents and such are a great way to generate the type of economic forces a sandbox game is likely to want.
"zero" compliance with tabletop (WoW model by example): type of actions (magic vs martial) don't really determine the efficacy of the character as much as define the style of the character. in terms of time spent, you can slow/med/long cooldowns on abilities and it matters very little to the player as long as they get to "do stuff" all the time. A wizard can go "do stuff" all day right next to his fighter buddy and not have to resort to being some sort of lame crossbowman.
i also think it might be worthwhile to say that while the Theme Park Style of WoW and SWTOR and other games is certainly not how PFO will develop, the underlying mechanics and design decisions of those games are not necessarily bad, or ought to be thrown under the bus in favor of a more radical approach. I support renovation as much as the next player, but wholesale exclusion of proven playability seems a bit drastic.
'Proven playability' .... gimme a break...
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Goblin Squad Member
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'Proven playability' .... gimme a break...
So you'd prefer a system that could reduce a player to having say one encounter a day? If I walk out to go questing and I run into a difficult PvP encounter and need to blow most of my spells to win, I should be content to need to walk back home and recharge for 8 hours? That is not acceptable.
You need to take into account that this is a game intended to be played at any time, for random amounts of time. A cooldown system allows for multiple encounters as long as you want to play each day. It does not need to be strictly the same as the one in WoW, but it's a starting point.
There are things that other MMOs use that are part of the reason they are successful. No, making a WoW clone is not, nor should be a design goal, but you cannot deny that playability is something it has. Reinventing the wheel entirely, just for the sake of reinventing the wheel, sometimes leads to a square wheel.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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The Vancian system of spellcasting doesn't even work well in tabletop gameplay. Why should it fare any better in a medium where days elapse at a constant speed?
A good compromise might be a spell preparation system: Spend time (minutes?) preparing spells into slots, then time (seconds) and mana/energy/stamina to cast spells from slots. Casting spells off-slot would take slightly longer and have somewhat higher costs and/or reduced effectiveness, or might not be possible at all. Perhaps abandon the idea of preset spells entirely, and instead provide seeds from which effects are created; an acid seed with a ranged seed would make acid orb, and several fire seeds with a cone seed would duplicate the effects of burning hands.
I guess none of you people have played Neverwinter Nights 1 on online multiplayer worlds? It is a game that actually uses the D&D system and has come a long way of being a compromise between MMO and PnP...still the best if you ask me...
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Goblin Squad Member
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I guess none of you people have played Neverwinter Nights 1 on online multiplayer worlds? It is a game that actually uses the D&D system and has come a long way of being a compromise between MMO and PnP...still the best if you ask me...
Pathfinder Online will not be published under the OGL, and so we don't have free access to everything in Wizards of the Coast's SRD. Now, US intellectual properties law says that game mechanics are not copyrightable—only the specific *expression* of those mechanics is—so that *doesn't* mean we have to avoid the basic concepts—just a fairly small subset of things that are uniquely "D&D". However, even some of the basic concepts that we *could* use simply don't work as well in an MMO as they do on the tabletop, so we won't necessarily even use everything that we *can* use.
In short, this topic is complicated enough that answering the question with specific details isn't really possible. But what you really need to know is this: Pathfinder Online will seek to capture the general feel of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, but it will *not* be an electronic adaptation of the tabletop RPG rules. (Neither will it be a "testing ground" for a future edition of the Pathfinder RPG, as some have speculated—it's a different game and it has different requirements.)
You are correct that many folks on these boards are getting mired down in the concept of adapting mechanics from the RPG. When we talk about features, the community trying to evaluate them in terms of specific RPG rules is, more often than not, likely to be limiting and counterproductive.
Valkenr,
is your last post a reply to mine?
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wouldnt even know how to turn a single player game into multiplayer(nwn)
however , think like savage lands, the abilities are just abilities where you can then determine the trappings( heal with magic or technology is still heal) similer can be used here with slight changes, example;
fighter can use glaive to atk 1 tgt 10 ft away, a wizard can use fire magic to atk 1 tgt 10 ft away. a fighter can use a sweep atk to hit everyone in front of him, a wizard can use a cone spell, etc fighter hits harder but wizard hits area
factors which can shift balance between different chars; tgts/area, dmg, ability to hit, dmg type, inflicted status effects, defense piercing, etc the fighter rates high on dmg and ability to hit but rates low on tgts/area and status effects. whereas the wizard rates high on tgts/area and status effects but low on dmg and defense piercing( actually normally i would suggest that wizard would be versatile with a fighter specialist but that wouldnt work for pfo)
certain things differ because defenses work against different dmg types and the wizard gets more utility abilities but the fighter gets more dmg and defense abilities. this keeps things on par but still allows the flavor to affect game play.
wouldnt even know how to turn a single player game into multiplayer(nwn)
What do you mean?
NWN is both single player AND multiplayer if its that you're refering to...
Yeah lol...kids theese days :-P
It was actually pretty big at its time which was like 2-4 years before WoW even.
Still 12 years after its release community members are "patching" it and creating multiplayer worlds...as well as playing on them of course...