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Discussion thread for new blog entry Goblinworks Blog: An Echo and a Stranger's Hand
Before I start reading: Nice new avatar, Crystal Frasier.
RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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Wow, very in depth blog this week. I like how attacks of opportunity from the table top has translated into an Opportunity state in PFO. It feels intuitive and flowing while enabling some exciting tactical options.
Working out winning combinations and counters is going to be amazing one-on-one, and mind-bending in mass combat.
I definitely like that each weapon will have unique "styles" it supports. It'll be interesting if a guy comes to dread not only certain classes but certain weapon wielders.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Hopefully this should silence those people who are worried that combat would end up being a race to 0 hp. I can even see a use for having more than one weapon of the same type equiped just so you can have different combat options.
Slot A has a hammer with several stunning attacks attached to it, slot B has a hammer with pure damage, and C has weak-but-fast attacks.
Squeee!
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Hmm, complex but manageable. Intriguing.
Will players be able to "build" attacks through a combination of stems and affixes?
For example: "Swing" is a stem and "Wrath" is a prefix, creating "Wrathful Swing"
Right now, the sword attacks are loosely based on some actual broadsword fencing maneuvers. Lee and I were looking through a German fencing manual and were both like, "there's a historical attack called 'Wrath Guard'? That's totally going in!" Hopefully it winds up feeling close enough that fighting reenactors don't think we're abusing the terminology :) . So that's to say that "Wrath" isn't really a game mechanical prefix.
But to answer your question... maybe, eventually.
Every piece of an attack is modular. For example, "Stuns for 2 Seconds" is just a mechanic that can be added to any attack. They all feed into a formula to output the final costs and results of the attack. But that's likely to just be the starting point for playtesting. We can expect situations where "Effect A is worth X... except when it's coupled with Effect B, in which case it's worth Y and really also needs to have Restriction C."
The goal is to get the value of effects refined so they can be used as consistently as possible. And if that proves viable, and we get a consistent list of contingencies that keep certain things from being abusable, we might be able to create a "build your own" system. But until then, we'd have trouble charting a middle road between something that'd be way too limited to be fun and something that allowed players to heavily min-max the system.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I got this message
You now have access to the following download on your My Downloads page on paizo.com:
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Goblin Squad Member
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I got this message
You now have access to the following download on your My Downloads page on paizo.com:
Pathfinder Society Chronicle: Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Backer PDF
Visit https://secure.paizo.com/paizo/account/assets to download this file.
But can't find it on my list, do I need to wait for it to show up?
Scroll right down on you downloads page. It's in the Paizo section. Check?
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Goblin Squad Member
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The opportunity state as I understand it might do away with circle strafing pvpers, if you manage to pull that off I shall tip my hat to thee! I always disliked that part of MMORPG PvP. If ranged attackers are forced to switch to melee weapons for close quarter combat then that is icing on the cake :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really like what I read. @Skwiziks I love the idea but I am not sure if it will be desirable without making it overly complicated or leading to a min/max game. I personally prefer the rock/paper/scissors method of keeping things balanced as opposed to playing the min/max game. People will always try to min/max, but the less we make it about that, the better IMHO.
I am interested to see more into details about this, especially concerning the different weapons (daggers and other "stealth" weapons).
@DeciusBrutus, I support the same idea. While I am not sure weather I will use them myself, I fully support making magic and wands, ect. as unique and exciting as weapon attacks will be. Granted, spells will have their own pizazz but still. Each should have it's place and flare.
Well done GW. Now get back to work, I wanna play already LOL.
I kind of feel that some of these special effects should only 'kick in' when you meet/exceed the Defense value, not just be reduced by the same X% that damage is when your Attack ends up lower. Maybe even EXCEED the Defense value by a certain amount (at least to have full effect, i.e. barely exceeding the Defense will be X% lower than the full value which you need to exceed the Defense by N amount to have full effect), i.e. have a second, higher Tier of Defense which special effects are calculated against. Or at the very least, things like duration on special effects should be decreased by a larger rate than just damage is, i.e. if damage is decreased by 10% when failing to meet Defense by a certain amount, special effects duration/power is decreased by 30%.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Say you're a sword and board guy, with standard long sword and round shield. You fight other sword and boarders, and sometimes a two-handed claymore user. This strongly leads me to believe (and I hope I am right) that my characters attacks will by necessity change when I am fighting a dual wielder with daggers, or a wizard with a two-handed staff, of a player trying to bash with a giant war hammer. All these weapons will have specific types of attacks, the weapons themselves having certain keywords making some attacks and defensive move more effective against particular attack types.
Shields too are in play here, as different shied types can be used. I am a big shield user myself and there are many types of shields (buckler, round shield, tower shield, coffin, kite, scutum, Greek, to name a few) which should each carry their own defensive abilities and some having very specific attack moves (spiked bucklers come to mind). IF GW can get non-twitchy turn based combat using the six second round from tabletop to work in a smooth manner, this should be a blast!
IF GW can get non-twitchy turn based combat using the six second round from tabletop to work in a smooth manner
They've already explicitly detailed how they are NOT using a turn based system akin to TT.
Having a Stamina Pool on a 6 second reset timer doesn't substantially resemble a turn based system,as the action IS all happening simultaneously, which is the exact opposite of a turn based system.
So... a Leap/Evade combo attack would be the equivalent of Spring Attack? :-)
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Goblin Squad Member
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But to answer your question... maybe, eventually.
Every piece of an attack is modular. For example, "Stuns for 2 Seconds" is just a mechanic that can be added to any attack. They all feed into a formula to output the final costs and results of the attack. But that's likely to just be the starting point for playtesting. We can expect situations where "Effect A is worth X... except when it's coupled with Effect B, in which case it's worth Y and really also needs to have Restriction C."
It would be a fun system, but you're right in that it would be very difficult to balance. If there is a wide enough variety of attacks with a modular system under the hood that sounds like a good formula for engaging combat.
From the blog it sounded to me like a "build-your-own" system was what you guys were going for, so I had to ask.
@Milo, I agree with you about min/maxing getting out of hand, but rock/paper/scissor can be dull unless there's enough variety, and this sounds like there will be enough variety.
I think the game will have complications enough without having 'build your own' actions.
GW should be able to make enough which cover a wide enough range of variation.
Just with that, I think many players will have trouble keeping track of every attack/action and how class abilities may affect them.
To some extent being able to recognize an action by it's animations and effects will be part of the skill of the game.
Every action should have it's own animation, so I'm not sure how custom actions' animations would be handled anyways.
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Goblin Squad Member
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They've already explicitly detailed how they are NOT using a turn based system akin to TT.
Then you and I disagree on what we each mean by a turn based system. A six second period is a round, and that is your turn (in my interpretation). You may interpret it however you like. Either way, it sounds pretty cool.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm sorry Hardin but that isn't a matter of interpretation
Real-Time systems and Turn-Based systems are well defined.
In a Turn based System only 1 player is performing actions at a time, He takes his turn, others wait for their turn. When all players take their turns that concludes the round.
While in Real-Time games players take actions simultaneously and play "in real time"
That said after doing some research I would have to say you are both right.
The game is a real-time game, however because of the pseudo windows of action it is a bit unconventional.
This is very similar to a Sub-Type of turn based games referred to as Ticks based games.
"Tick based games" where you are allowed a number of actions that are refreshed or reset after each tick which can be hours, days, weeks, ect..
So it would seem, the most accurate description of this game with a tick based system on such a micro time scale would be Real-Time Tick based game or a Tick based Real-Time game.
which would be considered a sub-set of the real-time genre with heavy influence from the turn-based sub-set of tick based games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turns,_rounds_and_time-keeping_systems_in_gam es
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Goblin Squad Member
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Would it be useful to talk about "hundreds of units in a stack", or an attack "adding 20 units to a stack", rather than saying that a character may have "hundreds of stacks" during a fight, and an attack might add "20 stacks" to a stack? A stack is a group of something. "100 stacks" seems to imply that I have a stack of Dazzle, a stack of Stun, and a stack of 98 other conditions, when I think it's meant to imply that my Dazzle stack contains 100 units.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Would it be useful to talk about "hundreds of units in a stack...?It's easier to say "20 stacks" :)
I guess if I have 20 Dazzle, 15 Stun and 30 Fatigue, I have a whole stack of stacks of stacks.
If the rest of the party had them, too, we would have a stack of stacks of stacks of stacks, but that's just silly.
whatever people want to define these things as doesn't really matter, i was just responding to Hardin's post referring to PFO's system as "turn based combat using the six second round from tabletop" when this system just does not substantially resemble tabletop's system (which does conform to traditional definition of a turn based game). i was just trying to clear up any confusion he had on that, or prevent anybody from getting that mistaken impression from his post. now, i can see why one might see PFO's 6-second Stamina Pool as 'vaguely parallel' to the tabletop 6-second round (both limiting what you can do in 6 seconds). i think that is something they are trying to achieve with alot mechanics that are very different yet aim to 'line up' as much as possible with the tabletop game... but that is very far from "using" the tabletop's turn/round system. tabletop is a turn-based system. this is not. (note the distiction between tabletop's TURNS and the 6 second ROUND which may contain many turns of different characters, which are resolved sequentially and not in parallel)
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Goblin Squad Member
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its a real time system with cooldowns.
Not really, there hasn't been any mention of cooldowns. It is a real time system with an action point pool that refreshes every 6 seconds. If you have enough stamina (action points) to spam 12 fast attacks with a half second animation time within 6 seconds, you you can attack constantly with no cooldown forever. That will likely not be optimal even if there is a way to do that, but it possible.
I'm pretty sure that Leperkhaun was using cooldown to refer to the fact that you gain Stamina ever 6 seconds, even if the 'action' to 'get Stamina' is automatic. All Stamina-consuming actions are thus subjugated to that cooldown even though they individually don't have a cooldown 'per se', the 'get Stamina' cooldown is being 'fractionalized' to yield combinations of actions it allows for. If spending Stamina on '3 medium attacks' blows your Stamina, then '3 medium attacks' effectively has a cooldown of 6 seconds. There could be some actions which are more limited by animation time than by Stamina, but clearly the general Stamina cooldown is what is being emphasized by GW.
As currently described you can execute one mega-Stamina-consuming action (say, using 100% of Stamina) near the end of the 6-second round, and IMMEDIATELY execute another one right after the first, since the next 6-seconds have begun. I'm not sure if a 6-second cooldown/regen period tied to each action individually (if you spend X Stamina, you get that X Stamina back 6 seconds after that action, not all Stamina resetting at the same 6 second mark independent of actions) wouldn't be a better approach, effectively having a 'rolling' approach to Stamina Regen...
Or even more so, instead of waiting for 6 seconds without any Stamina after spending it all on one big 100% Stamina action, it could be 'continuous' regen while still having the same RATE of Stamina regen/second, so if you want to do another big 100% Stamina action you WILL need to wait the full 6 seconds, but if you wait just 2 seconds you should be able to make a smaller 30% Stamina action (or even quicker for lesser actions). That still is similar to the Blog system in many use cases, but it allows for alot more flexibility and doesn't have worries about 'wasting' unused Stamina at the end of each round:
Assuming your Stamina total is 10, i.e you regen 10 Stamina every 6 seconds, so you can spend and regen 100 Stamina in 60 seconds... If you have an action that consumes 6 Stamina you could execute that action 16 (+2/3) times in 60 seconds time, while by the Blog system you could only execute it 10 times, because 40% of Stamina is wasted since that isn't enough for another usage of the action. That is assuming you only wanted to do that one action many times.
So the current system is basically forcing you to do other 'little' actions to make the most of each round's Stamina ("use it or lose it"), which is OK, but I don't know if the 'continuous regen' approach might be better (also preventing back to back usage of high-Stamina actions which happen to be split between rounds), and there can be other reasons why it is beneficial to use the smaller less expensive actions. For one, the tabletop incentivizes lots of attacks by having 'crit triggered' events, which happen more often with more attacks, the current Blog seems to apply 'rider effects' on ALL attacks (just scaling along with damage), but if there was a 'threshold' to make 'crits' more unique, then doing lots of (cheaper) attacks has it's own merit. The Interruption system described in the Blog also seems amenable to cheaper more frequent attacks, if you are using big attacks less frequently, you are less likely to take advantage of those Opporunity windows. Regardless, I think there can be many reasons why many cheaper attacks could be equal or better on a sustainable basis than fewer big attacks, and the "use it or lose it" approach needn't be imposed in any way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Quandary, what you just described is the way stamina refreshes in Guild Wars 2. Every second, X percent of your stamina returns, unless it's full. Oddly, the only action that uses stamina in GW2, a dodge, use up exactly 1/2 of your maximum stamina. I guess people just feel better about a re-filling bar if they can see continuous movement, rather than a lurch from zero to 1/2 or 1/2 to full every X seconds.
I think the same effect is being used in modern computer "time left" bars, that appear to move continuously so people don't think the process has crashed if the bar stops moving.
At the processor level, every game is turn based (unless it's running on a "million-core" processor). They seem real-time because we can't detect turns that are a few milliseconds long.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@KarlBob Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, reality could be 'turn-based' by that definition. (With each turn lasting one plank time).
I'm a little concerned with pacing; are players expected to identify and react to status changes basically instantly, and are we expected to learn what every animation signifies?
But to answer your question... maybe, eventually.Hmm, complex but manageable. Intriguing.
Will players be able to "build" attacks through a combination of stems and affixes?
Perhaps as the highest focus ability (or whatever the term is that replaced capstone)?
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I'm a little concerned with pacing; are players expected to identify and react to status changes basically instantly, and are we expected to learn what every animation signifies?
I kind of had questions about this myself...
And the system as described seems very different than how we expect combat to go in the tabletop version, in the system described you are almost certain to have multiple conditions afflicting you once combat has gotten under way, and same for the enemy, so recognizing what condition is on who seems pretty important. I rather do prefer something closer to tabletop, where debilitating conditions are rarer, and certainly not triggered on 'failures' of an attack (as is the case per the Blog, with durations just scaled down the same as damage).|
Goblin Squad Member
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The idea that duration and intensity of effects scale with the degree of hit success is definitely new and interesting. Having most attacks apply at least one effect is new, too. In an MMO like EQ2 or GW2, player-triggered attacks often have effects, but auto-attacks (garden-variety swings that don't need to be triggered individually) usually don't.
To be clear, that things like duration on effects scales with attack roll is fine by me, it's the sort of thing that computers can handle better than tabletop, I'm just doubtful of whether rider effects ALWAYS need to apply to every attack, to the same degree that every attack does some damage. Having a higher threshold, only starting to have effect when you actually beat the Resistance DC is what I mean, but it can/should scale up from there. I assume that either way, characters could get spells/gear/abilities increasing their effective Resistance vs. certain classes of rider effects (Bleed, Entangle, etc).
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Secondary resistances have IIRC already been discussed; they add to your defense value for the purpose of determining the duration of the effect.
e.g. if you have bleed resist 16, an attack that was 9 below your defense value would do 85% of the hit damage but only apply 75% of the bleed; if the attack roll was 12 over the defense value, full damage on the hit but 90% of the bleed.
And teamwork is more important than ever: I predict massive coordination where one character puts a debuff on an opponent and another immediately drops an attack that takes advantage of that new debuff.
Oh, and the case remains rather much like tabletop in terms of the number of conditions in effect; things like Protection from Evil, bleed damage, being flanked, threatening, fear effects and fatigue effects all play together.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A great blog entry in all, with depth and a lot of info on mechanics.
The system sounds promising, and I like it already. It is quite interesting to see how concepts from the tabletop game will enter the game (like the 6 second "turn", conditions, etc.)
IMHO, a much better and tactical approach from that seen in Neverwinter.
Now, I still have the concern that the attacks may seem a bit TOO much complicated. We will have to remember all the states, buffs and debuffs and try to act accordingly in 6 secs? And this for all of our attacks?
I guess the long time between learning skills will allow us to familiarize and become experts on our existing ones, but I hope I doesn't get too complicated.
The whole system screams for extensive beta testing, to test the parameters and all possible action/reaction instances, in order to get a balanced system (let's not forget that there will be a lot of pvp and in case of imbalance people will go for that "best build")
Therefore the Pit Fight becomes increasingly important