J.E. Sawyer keeps on talking

[mobucks]

Now im torn. Damn you BN!!
I played Albert in my last Fallout playthrough. He actually isn't a bad build. 7ap, Skilled, Good Natured I think. One of the worst possible characters to go through the game with. But as I played, he did fine. Is that the kind of thing we're talking about here?

 

[WorstUsernameEver]

That's a misrepresentation. I mean, I'm sure that viewpoint exists, but it's not about "badly gimping" your build, it's about not every choice having to be necessarily the best one, and allowing me to invest points to balance my character as I want to, and allowing me to mess up my build. If I want to attack the king and his guards even tho the game explicitly told me it's a bad idea, I should be allowed to. If I want to put all my skill points into herbology and poisons even tho that has very limited use, why shouldn't I be allowed to?

I don't remember Sawyer ever advocating about something like being unable to attack guards and to stop the player from making bad moment to moment choice. He's always being a proponent of a no-bad choice strategic design, where things you do much earlier in the game come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.

As for me, I personally think separating combat and non-combat skills in games such as the IE games, where most of the gameplay *is* combat (except for Torment, though Torment always struggled with its ruleset) and weighing non-combat skills is okay. I'm not a huge fan of implementing skills half-heartedly though, so IMO a skill with a "very limited" use is kind of worthless and maybe should have been either merged with something else or got a few more instances where it could be used in the game.

What? Like Fallout?

Anyway, I'm a very strong proponent of not sticking to P&P notions just for the sake of sticking to them. Tagaziel brought them up so I guess you're talking to him, as I haven't mentioned them until this post, and my argument isn't related to pen and paper notions, but to choice-related notions.

Your choice of words "gamey", etc. strongly implied that there's a less gamey alternative, which I assumed was pen and paper design. Besides, I don't think Fallout particularly resembled a normal pen and paper campaign, for a variety of reasons. It tried hard and sometimes succeeded, but my personal opinion is that, given that videogames aren't pen and paper, they should be trying to emulate it. Too many structural differences that make some design choices that are fine for tabletop kinda drab for playing on a PC/console. That said, I apologize for making an assumption on your argument.

 

[Tagaziel]

I'm not, but you are. The idealized explanation you're given has been offered before but it's not something Sawyer has made explicit in that way, as far as I know, and is in fact very much so not how he approached character creation in Van Buren, New Vegas or how we should expect him to approach things for Eternity. Did he explain, expand and improve viability of different builds in Van Buren? No, he slashed down skills, limiting choices until you could make no bad ones. Not once did he talk about better informing players, that I recall.

He's improving, as anyone would, but your representation of his design philosophy does not seem accurate.

I'm closely following his Formspring, and he did elaborate on it quite a bit. Other elements come from P:E videos.

Some responses on his design philosophy:

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/383412445110097211

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/378965687013505643

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/377213823058210236

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/376730408441642308

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/374603143389921481

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/374607763612924150

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/374252814160910832

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/368523127581334461

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/362774131134983616

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/357792778802973254

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/357780046724746911

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/352126040920847365

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/350917477821080522

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/350728493404804533

That said, I don't it's sensible to be inherently opposed to skill merging. Reductio ad absurdum applied to skill merging or skill explosion eventually produces skill sets that are undesirable by almost everyone. The number of skills present in the game should, in my opinion, reflect the number of distinct gameplay types that can receive consistent utility throughout the game. Obviously it's the designers' responsibility to support that gameplay, but they also have to balance their tasks to the amount of time available to them.

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/350127999909119648

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/1053454931

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/907635918

http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer/q/743074393

Some of them are less design-related than others, but I hope that provides some more info for you.

There is nothing wrong with informing players. That is not really relevant to the point of "improving" a system by gutting it. Those are separate questions. If Sawyer wants to improve informing players and create clever staggered character creation (like perks), fine by me. That doesn't justify cutting out skills.

A matter of preference, I guess. Cutting out skills that don't have meaningful applications and for whom one cannot be conceived strikes me as logical. I was fine with dropping Big Guns and merging them into other classes, or with the merger of First Aid and Doctor.

They should not. Given that, we're left with two options, expanding ingame choices and making the game more complex until more playstyles become viable, or gutting the system until you can only pick viable playstyles. Guess which one Sawyer utilizes? Budget realities are what they are, and if you want to defend his approach as pragmatic that's very justifiable, in fact if I had to defend his approach that's exactly how I would defend it, but that doesn't mean it's an ideal or desirable approach an sich.

What do you mean by gutting? Removing traps (deceptive, yet useless skills) from the system feels more like pruning, than gutting. Again, the Fallout/Fallout 2 example. There's one, optimal build in the game, surrounded by several useless skills, traits and a ton of bad or really bad perks. Stripping it of the traps and pitfalls improves functionality.

This discussion is a bit academic, though. JES has his first opportunity to make a system entirely his own, without pre-existing constraints.

Not in the slightest. I guess you don't play much P&P? Some pen and paper systems compensate skill usefulness with skill weight (like DSA) or skill groups (like MERP), but in many you just make the choice to invest in a skill like dancing or music and it'll feel great when you find a creative way to use it, but those points will never be the equal to investing in more commonly used skills. And that's fine. Sawyer doesn't believe it is fine, but it is. P&Ps have shown that people don't mentally extrapolate point values like that, that they don't feel gypped by limited usage of skills as long as it feels clever and worthwhile. According to Sawyer, they do, and limited usage is a skill. I find that a very limiting design philosophy, that necessarily cuts into the complexity of character systems.

They might don't feel gypped, because the utility of a skill is limited by the imagination of the player and the GM's tolerance for it.

The lack of utility for skills is mitigated by the open ended nature of PnP systems. There's no such thing in computer games, making Sawyer's pragmatism that much better, at least to me.

 

[Sobboth]

I liked his work on establishing F:NV skills.
All the skills were useful and you had a dozen of them which is way more than in Fallout 1/2. A good point.
Now what i disliked is that all the skills were almost perfectly balanced in the same way.
Choosing gun instead of energy weapon almost didn't matter for example.
And what i really disliked is that you had systematically too many ways to resolve each problem making everything boring.
The game was not rewarding you by thinking yey i max out this skill otherwise i should not have being able to do this quest.
Even if it's a good design to allow multiple solutions to quest, not everything should have 3/5 "boring"solutions, it is a big dumping down.
Moreover this feeling was strengthen by the fact you had too many skills points (nothing worse to see that you can succeed a dialogue check 4 diffrents way because you have skills/stats high enough).

 

[UniversalWolf]

...he needs someone next or above him to check his worst excesses...

The George Lucas Syndrome.

 

[gumbarrel]

Even if it's a good design to allow multiple solutions to quest, not everything should have 3/5 "boring"solutions, it is a big dumping down.

When will this phrase "dumbing down" die already? It has lost any little meaning it ever had at this point.

You don't give players enough options, it's dumbed down. You give them too many options, it's dumbing down. If you ever strike a balance, it's still dumbing it down, because now there's even more disparity in opinions.

 

[Akratus]

Even if it's a good design to allow multiple solutions to quest, not everything should have 3/5 "boring"solutions, it is a big dumping down.

When will this phrase "dumbing down" die already? It has lost any little meaning it ever had at this point.

You don't give players enough options, it's dumbed down. You give them too many options, it's dumbing down.

U wot m8?

Personally, I agree with Tagaziel. Even if Brother None is correct. . . what's the difference? He might cut options too soon? Is that your argument? Doesn't really stand out against Sawyer's successes, and positive changes in his rpg's.