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[Sir Pseudonymous]

My point is that the idea of a firearm is rather unintuitive, especially when you have something else that does essentially the same thing, only in a much more powerful and portable form. At the very most, you might get black powder bombs as a sort of pseudo-layman's fireball, but a man-portable metal tube that uses an explosion to launch a chunk of metal at something? Firearms only seem to be an obvious extension of "fast burning powder" to us because we are familiar with them.

I recall someone commenting that they'd never seen an RPG where NPCs would avoid stationary hazards like walls of flame or whatnot: in Dragon Age NPCs will run around the large persistent area of effect spells that can be cast, like earthquakes and storms, rather than through them, if it's possible to do so while still getting to their target.

That was me, and I have indeed never played Dragon Age. What if they can't get to the target? Then they'll just run through?

Yeah. So, if it's cast in an enclosed space, they'll just charge through it rather than sit on the other side to get picked off (since the spells do shit for damage ), but if there's room to run around it they take the detour. Of course, there aren't many areas where it won't be well over the walls to either side, but still, I was actually impressed/annoyed by it when I noticed it.

[scriver]

Crossbows are "upgraded", easier-to-use bows, not much more. While the first record of crossbows, if I remember correctly, depicts a stationary one, it was by no means a siege weapon. Unless by "siege weapon" you refer to a defensive weapon used during sieges (semantics, I know), but from the context that doesn't seem to be what you're saying.

I suppose I lumped all particularly heavy weapons into the category of "siege weapons" there. It doesn't help that I recall bringing down gates and walls in Total War games with ballistae... My point was that in both cases even the primitive precursors of the device were upgrades in their respective field. In the case of applied gunpowder vs magic, it's a distinct downgrade, as mages are the equivalent of early twentieth century artillery in a more controlled, man-portable form [...]

Except for being usable by expandable footsoldiers. Knowing how to fire a crossbow or a cannon takes a relatively short time to learn. Magic is a life-long commitment, and takes years of study to master.

The latter part of your statement also relies on magic being commonplace, which is obviously not the case. If it were so conventional, there would be no need to give soldiers weapons or armour in the first place. The reasons they're still supplied with arms, despite magic existing, is the same siege equipment would still be used and needed.

Magic does appear to be pretty common, and there's no indication that it's arbitrarily restricted to certain individuals who are just "born with the gift" or some other nonsensical idea. It would appear to require formal training or somesuch, meaning it ends up restricted to those who happen to buy such training or stumble into it, which would be much the same sort of circumstances that would restrict engineering and such.

It's pretty common, but limited to the with privileged? That's rather contradictory. Just that is does require training and studying means it's going to be restricted to those who can afford such luxuries, i. e. nobles, and the fact that there are so few magocracies (they do exist, yes, but not as many as ordinary-cracies) means that there isn't much of a culture of magic-using among them. Okey, so I realise I'm rambling a bit now, as well as jumping to conclusions, but yeah.
Furthermore, as I said before, I view the frequency of mages in the games to be a simple case of selective exposition. They're cooler, so there's more of them. And the reason the PC has it so easy when it comes to learning magic (buying spells, for example), is simply game mechanics. Actual studying is not fun gameplay, so it's handwaved away. The same reason you can become a master swordfighter in a few weeks, when in reality it would take years and years of training.

Considering that gunpowder was thought to have arisen from alchemical experiments by the Ancient Chinese searching for an elixir of immortality, I find it extremely dubious that the people of Tamriel wouldn't stumble upon it as well.

There's a good reason I said "proliferation," rather than invention. There's a whole lot more to a device being proliferated, studied, and improved than it coming about in some wizard's laboratory. If I recall correctly the Chinese only used the gunpowder for fireworks, rather than anything practical, so the use as a propellant in a firearm is not as obvious as it seems in retrospect (and even the obvious use of "oh look, pretty colors and explosions!" requires the same level of expertise and training that producing similar (or more likely far nicer) illusions would).


People are taking the view that these devices are obvious. When you have people who can fly and rain exploding balls of fire onto their enemies, and they constitute the educated class, why would one think "hey, let's put this fast burning powder in a tube, with a little metal ball in front of it, and then jam a burning piece of wood through a little hole to launch said little ball really fast, so that maybe it hurts someone!"?

If magic were so common and easy to use, why would weapons exist? Like cannons, halberds and swords wouldn't be needed. Armour wouldn't be needed either, when you have shielding spells to protect yourself. But magic isn't available to the vast majority of people, so such equipment is still valuable. It's the same for cannons, catapults, ships, pulleys, plows, or most other equipment.

They aren't going to bother trying to train commoners. Why would one teach them how to fight when one can summon an already trained and equipped army of demons out of thin air?

Even summoning scamps is dangerous. There's no guarantee they'll do your bidding at all.

Edit: fixed the formatting, I hope.

[Virtz]

Because they can only summon one each and they risk their lives while doing it (at least the way it worked for the player character)? And there's not much "teaching" when it comes to firing a gun.

And why are they going to waste time inventing the gun when they can simply teach them how to fire a longbow and issue enchanted arrows?

Because it's harder to teach someone how to properly fire a longbow? Maybe with crossbows that'd work, but then they're apparently banned in Cyrodil.

[Sordid]

My point is that the idea of a firearm is rather unintuitive, especially when you have something else that does essentially the same thing, only in a much more powerful and portable form. At the very most, you might get black powder bombs as a sort of pseudo-layman's fireball, but a man-portable metal tube that uses an explosion to launch a chunk of metal at something? Firearms only seem to be an obvious extension of "fast burning powder" to us because we are familiar with them.

That's true, that's why I said that if an alchemist discovered gunpowder, he would probably consider it nothing more than a neat toy. But then it's not like TES works by any rules of common sense that we know. Military defense seems to rely on classic stone walls despite the fact that a half-decent alchemist could whip up enough levitation potions in an hour to bring a whole army right over them. TES seems to run on the rool of cool, and I still maintain that dragons + cannons = cool.

That was me, and I have indeed never played Dragon Age. What if they can't get to the target? Then they'll just run through?

Yeah. So, if it's cast in an enclosed space, they'll just charge through it rather than sit on the other side to get picked off (since the spells do shit for damage ), but if there's room to run around it they take the detour. Of course, there aren't many areas where it won't be well over the walls to either side, but still, I was actually impressed/annoyed by it when I noticed it.

Yeah, so that's not much of an improvement over the general status quo. IMO the greatest problem with RPG AI is that enemies are way too determined to kill you. Unless it's a scripted plot element, they never ever give up or run away. "I must kill that guy and take his purse," thinks the bandit, "even if it means I'll get horrible burns on most of my body." Ridiculous.

If magic were so common and easy to use, why would weapons exist?

Exactly. I think the best indication that magic is not at all commonplace is the fact that the vast majority of people don't use it. Just because the player always can doesn't mean everyone could, even with training.

[Virtz]

Yeah, so that's not much of an improvement over the general status quo. IMO the greatest problem with RPG AI is that enemies are way too determined to kill you. Unless it's a scripted plot element, they never ever give up or run away. "I must kill that guy and take his purse," thinks the bandit, "even if it means I'll get horrible burns on most of my body." Ridiculous.

I'll just go ahead and assume you don't mean modern RPG AI and mention Teudogar and Ultima IV as examples of games where enemies do retreat. Also in FO3 and NV sometimes enemies would try running away and eventually just start cowering in some corner. Although yeah, could use more of that in RPGs.

[Sordid]

Oh sure, there are some. Mount&Blade: Waband also has enemies that run away. Hell, even in Oblivion they sometimes do. But it could still use a lot of improvement, specifically in that the AI thinks in terms of hitpoints, not in terms of pain. When set on fire, instead of dropping everything and trying to put himself out, an enemy will just drink a healing potion or two without even taking is his eyes off me. It's kinda like what Howard talked about in that podcast, that spreadsheet aspect of magic. It doesn't feel like I'm setting people on fire simply because within the game mechanics I'm not, I'm just applying a damage health effect to them, and of course the AI responds to that by using a restore health effect. The pain it would cause isn't taken into account at all, the visual effect of fire is completely arbitrary and wouldn't even have to be there.
That's kinda what I was going for with the wall of fire thing. An AI that thinks in terms of hitpoints runs straight through. An AI (or a real person) that thinks in terms of pain would not.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

That was me, and I have indeed never played Dragon Age. What if they can't get to the target? Then they'll just run through?

Yeah. So, if it's cast in an enclosed space, they'll just charge through it rather than sit on the other side to get picked off (since the spells do shit for damage ), but if there's room to run around it they take the detour. Of course, there aren't many areas where it won't be well over the walls to either side, but still, I was actually impressed/annoyed by it when I noticed it.

Yeah, so that's not much of an improvement over the general status quo. IMO the greatest problem with RPG AI is that enemies are way too determined to kill you. Unless it's a scripted plot element, they never ever give up or run away. "I must kill that guy and take his purse," thinks the bandit, "even if it means I'll get horrible burns on most of my body." Ridiculous.

I think it comes down to game balance. Magic is always much weaker than it conceptually should be, even in instances where it's considered grossly overpowered. In Dragon Age, where, as I said, Mages are considered the most singularly overpowered class, you have Fireball spells that hurl enemies backwards in a large area, you can freeze targets solid or turn them to stone, and hit them with flying stone fists that launch them backwards several meters, yet all of these things do only a little more damage than hitting them with a sword (which is also much less than impaling someone with a sword should do...). In most other games (particularly The Elder Scrolls), fire does less damage than you'd expect even hot water to. "Oh, I just wreathed them in unholy flames... that's as damaging as a particularly dull dagger... huh..."

So, if they sat back behind a wall of unusual warmth masquerading as a wall of fire while you shot arrows at them, it would be kind of weird. For once I'd like to see a game where magic is realistically overpowered and/or realistically impractical. If a giant exploding ball of fire can't cause the sort of damage being caught in a powerful explosion and being covered in flames should cause for game balance reasons, then don't let every two-bit mage summon giant balls of exploding fire.

[Soadreqm]

That's kinda what I was going for with the wall of fire thing. An AI that thinks in terms of hitpoints runs straight through. An AI (or a real person) that thinks in terms of pain would not.

Well, the PLAYER also thinks in terms of hit points. If the NPCs felt pain and the PC didn't, that would give him an unfair advantage. That's okay to do in a more actiony game, but in an RPG, the PC and an equally high level NPC are sort of supposed to be equally powerful. It definitely would be interesting to have a more detailed damage system actually capable of portraying the effects of taking damage.

[Sordid]

You're right, the player is also thinking in hitpoints. The player character is supposed to be somebody on their way to becoming a legendary hero, so perhaps superhuman willpower and ability to mentally block out the pain could be justified with that. But I think that would be the wrong approach, I think it would be a lot more interesting to actually give players an incentive to avoid being hit. As you say, a more detailed damage system. Wouldn't even need to dispense with hit points, really. You could have your regular health bar and in addition to that a pain bar. You could have different attacks do different amounts of damage to each, so you could kick somebody in the plums for lots of pain with little physical harm or slash them lightly with a poisoned knife for a relatively painless attack that takes away a lot of HP. Pain from being punched would fade away quickly, but stuff like getting burned or slashed with a sword would have a lasting effect on the pain bar until properly treated, and the more pain your character is in, the worse he fights. Moves slower, hits less hard, stumbles, vision blurring, etc. Too much pain and you just lie writhing on the ground, becoming an easy kill for your opponent.

[Duke 2.0]

 It would probably work better if integrated in the stamina bar and made stamina an actual thing to manage. Although considering all the ways that bar has been annoying I dunno how to feasibly add pain without it being a pain.

[G-Flex]

This relates to a major problem with this kind of RPG in general. Historically, the assumption in an RPG is that if you fight, it's to the death. There's no such thing as just punching a guy because you're mad at him, it's always "THIS MEANS WAR". I don't know how it's been recently, but we need to can the assumption that one dude hitting another dude means they want to kill each other.

[Tellemurius]

Diplomacy, haven't seen that in rpgs for years now (if you want to count Fable 3 then go right ahead).

[Sensei]

At least in Oblivion you could talk them down. And some people don't attack you the first time you hit them either (even if that's mostly in case of friendly fire).

Still, nobody fights with the intent of knocking out or dissuading their opponent.

[Sordid]

It would probably work better if integrated in the stamina bar and made stamina an actual thing to manage. Although considering all the ways that bar has been annoying I dunno how to feasibly add pain without it being a pain.

Eh, stamina's something different. Personally I wouldn't mind having all three, to be honest. They're different aspects of one's health. I think a DF-style health system would be totally overkill in a modern RPG, so I think having a pain bar would be a happy medium. See, stamina is how tired you are, which in turn affects how fast you can move and how hard you can hit. And there already is an attack that targets stamina, namely punching. Way I'd see it, the pain and stamina bars would determine how well you can fight, while the health bar would determine how fast the other two regenerate.
Obviously care would need to be taken to not make it annoying, as you say. But I think with a robust, slow-paced, and tactical combat system it could work very well. I cannot express in words how much I despise combat in Oblivion, everyone running around flailing their weapons wildly. I would like to use my brain during a fight for a change, and giving the player different ways to take down an opponent (wear them out, incapacitate them through pain, or just kill them) would be interesting.

Diplomacy, haven't seen that in rpgs for years now (if you want to count Fable 3 then go right ahead).

I haven't seen that in RPGs ever. Unless it's a scripted story element, but even those are rare.

[PTTG??]

Come to think of it, in fiction in general, attacks are:

90% Try to kill somebody
9% Sneak up and hit someone on the head, knocking them out with no side effects
1% Other

Perhaps there is a little bit of that which is "wrestle an ally to the ground to stop them from doing something"

Maybe all attacks could do some stamina damage in addition to the health damage, and health could cap stamina? Or maybe we need to have body part damage including a kind of "general" health that ties into this system.