Imagine

[Hoihe]

You are fighting a mage. You have at least 8 intelligence and wisdom.

You never saw this person before, so when they run into your compound you chase them around, trying to overpower them. Your buddies join in.

For some reason, you end up being left behind as the guy stops and you go and catch your breath, him not running away and your buddies wailing away.

They seem to be unable to hit this weird person. They are probably magicked. No problem, your buddies should get a strike or two in!

Suddenly, they drop dead from INSERT AOE.

Seeing this, you go and inform your other buddies not to go close and to stay spread out as to not be caught in INSERT POTENTIAL AOE.

You set up an ambush with archers and pepper the mage with arrows while sending in the foolish/brave people amongst you to distract the mage from the archers in melee.

Or you have the mage dispelled by your local INSERT MAGIC USER.



As a wizard, doing the round-up-and-blast is metagaming the fact that without DMs, NPCs will not do this.

It is also metagaming the fact that without DMs, traps only deal resistable, and a few times, small irresistable damage, but still damage. You are metagaming the fact that without DMs, you won't run into a sudden bell being dropped on you with Silence effect to starve you to death. Or that the ground won't open and drop you into SOMETHING IRRESISTABLE. Or you just won't get crushed by a boulder.

As long as your character has AT LEAST 8 int/wisdom, which as a wizard they should, then they should realize that sapient enemies will make counter-plays to being lured into explosions. So they won't do the classical explanation of "how to play a blaster."


Imagine someone with years of front-line experience, including hands-on encounters with her foes making counter-plays. In fact, they were literally trapped in a bell that had Silence cast on it and was only rescued due to being in a party with a trained engineer in it who knew how to lift the heavy object..

Imagine this person having been dispelled/disjuncted numerous times at the worst moment to barely survive. Why would they ever risk being surrounded by more enemies than they can get away from in a moment's notice when they know they could be dispelled and mauled to death from 360 degrees?

Why would they do something that they know anyone with a sliver of intelligence would never fall for, knowing that the counter-play of the stupid tactic will reap stupid rewards of best case being peppered with arrows and having to hit enemies spread out with more spells than needed, worst case them getting dispelled after making too much noise and then killed?

Didn't people want permadeath for its "making people act more realistic"?

[Aspect of Sorrow]

You mean in all the same ways a nation capable of the sciences that brought us atomic energy and centuries of warfare unsuccessfully handles Vietnam? You can 'know better' and still make poor decisions that aren't in your favor.

[Hoihe]

And here's a simple fix for it:


Tie primary progression reward - also known as experience points - into completing objectives.

And how to do that?

Reward most XP for clearing the dungeon/encounter area, not for fighting the mobs within.

Clearing is defined as, to prevent cheating by teleportation without making teleporting out impossible, interacting with a set of objects or visiting a set of landmarks within the scenario in the right order (which is obvious from an IC standpoint or happens subconsciously).

Make it once/day or whatever and tie it into a level range as XP rewards already are.

We even have the framework for it in form of areas giving a combat log message/interacting with some items giving XP and a message. Or we can also tie it to the quest system.

Et voila - you get rewarded for finding solutions.

You play a sneak-thief who wants to steal all the loot? You can! And you get handsomely rewarded for making it to the end of the dungeon.

You play a mage who is smart enough not to want to die? You use single-target instakills to remove threats and keep threats on the down-low by choosing the right paths away from dangerous foes. To counter low level wizards solving hard dungeons/scenarios, make mandatory interactables/landmarks that require breaking eternalness/invisibility.

You play a fighter who wants to do something without dying? You navigate the scenario like the mage would, except you can afford to use your Truck-style over the Turtle-style as you don't get punished for not picking fights, thus you can do more risky encounters and be more liberal with heal kits since you don't need sustain, you need sustain until success.


The only drawback of Objective-based rewards over kill-based rewards is that grinding isn't rewarded the most anymore. And that it takes extra work for an area. But from perspective that values internal consistency and sensibility, it's absolute perfect.

[aaron22]

because AI at that level has not been introduced to this server... YET!

the cyborgs(compliment) behind the scripting for our community are awesome. So i would not be surprised if one of them is working on this.

i think i saw a bit ago that Sony was working on an adaptive AI, but i havent checked out their games in a few years so don't know if that ever really worked.

[Steve]

You're right, Hoihe: all our Characters are stupid, act recklessly against their Life, and increase this recklessness as they progress in experience.

Kinda hard to change that—except by limited paths of RP like NOT adventuring.

Mechanics are geared to giving Players a good time, yet unfortunately, you in particular choose sub-par Builds that outright suffer because you go against the limited mechanics.

Sorry to say, but the experience you seem to be looking for is probably only possible in PnP, or with a DM and Event that is focused on best recreation of PnP.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

Dropping in the ruleset to Tensorflow and letting the AI come to it's own conclusions will almost always make the player lose.

[Hoihe]

because AI at that level has not been introduced to this server... YET!

the cyborgs(compliment) behind the scripting for our community are awesome. So i would not be surprised if one of them is working on this.

i think i saw a bit ago that Sony was working on an adaptive AI, but i havent checked out their games in a few years so don't know if that ever really worked.

Point, but It feels dirty and cheating to exploit the fact that the A.I is not at that level. As I previously said, your PC doesn't know what you as a player do.

I feel however that we could ignore the whole issue if we rewarded objective-clearing gameplay over "kill-clearing" gameplay. It'd encourage adventuring and actually playing D&D over having a tea party. And it'd not require some weird mental gymnastics to justify.

E.g: You're a paladin. You know the tradeway is threatened by Monsters! You go and clear the den of monsters, or if you're a Divine Seeker style paladin, you go and try to discourage their leader (sneaking through area and avoiding hurting the underlings except in self-defence), assume you fail (while it's still an assumption, it's at least not that far) and kill the leader. You get rewarded quite a bit of XP.

If you did this now, you'd get maybe 300 XP for doing it to the Yuan-Ti temple. Which can take quite a bit to clear if you try to avoid needless killing. And this is a generous estimate. Just getting to and killing the queen gives you at most 75 IIRC. Now do it as a sneak thief who doesn't kill anyone and.... you get like 100 XP for opening chests. You need 29k XP to get to 30.

Objective-based, it'd give you X amount of XP, which was decided as fair for the difficulty of solving it and the time it takes. AND on top of this - the already existing XP/kill!

[chad878262]

It'd encourage adventuring and actually playing D&D over having a tea party. And it'd not require some weird mental gymnastics to justify.

Unfortunately, it would encourage exploiting and a new way to grind XP, nothing else. Players would go through an area once, learn the objective and then proceed to invisi-clear the server as the path to most XP. It would be the new way to grind, except instead of being limited to specific areas there would be players in any given area ignoring RP, ninja jumping the group RP'ing and adventuring through an area to go complete the 'objective' and get their XP for that area before teleporting to the next areas start point so they can then apply invisibility and haste before completing that objective while ignoring other players using the area.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

encourage exploiting and a new way to grind XP

It reminded me of Guild Wars when you could level a pal up by doing all the work save for the last thing.

[Hoihe]

It'd encourage adventuring and actually playing D&D over having a tea party. And it'd not require some weird mental gymnastics to justify.

Unfortunately, it would encourage exploiting and a new way to grind XP, nothing else. Players would go through an area once, learn the objective and then proceed to invisi-clear the server as the path to most XP. It would be the new way to grind, except instead of being limited to specific areas there would be players in any given area ignoring RP, ninja jumping the group RP'ing and adventuring through an area to go complete the 'objective' and get their XP for that area before teleporting to the next areas start point so they can then apply invisibility and haste before completing that objective while ignoring other players using the area.

Make the mandatory interactables/landmarks break invis/stealth/etherealness, and maybe even force a skill check that will surely be met by someone in any of the 3 archetypes.

encourage exploiting and a new way to grind XP

It reminded me of Guild Wars when you could level a pal up by doing all the work save for the last thing.

Actually GWII has sort of this system. You get rewarded handsomely for exploration. My original idea was that, but needed sth to counter exploiting it by stealthing/invising through stuff -> Force a few stops when people need to break stealth to either fight or avoid with a skill check.

[chad878262]

3 archetypes.

but...but....D&D has 4 archetypes!

in any case, would require some changes since invisibility potions are uber cheap, and wands cost about 90 gold per charge if you recharge them once, even cheaper if you get a second or third recharge out of them. Breaking invisibility/stealth isn't exactly the end of the world, unless you have a metric ton of checkpoints.

[aaron22]

Dropping in the ruleset to Tensorflow and letting the AI come to it's own conclusions will almost always make the player lose.

DO THIS NOW!!!

OMG!!!!

starting a new suggestion thread....3.....2.....

[Hoihe]

3 archetypes.

but...but....D&D has 4 archetypes!

in any case, would require some changes since invisibility potions are uber cheap, and wands cost about 90 gold per charge if you recharge them once, even cheaper if you get a second or third recharge out of them. Breaking invisibility/stealth isn't exactly the end of the world, unless you have a metric ton of checkpoints.

Skill check at the checkpoint for either succeeding or fighting something that sees through stuff and must be either killed or survived for 1-3 minutes. Survived is to allow for solipsism and whatnot to be relevant. Make it less likely to spot sneakers though, since while Invisibility isn't much high arcana to improve oneself, sneaking around and avoiding danger should be rewarded for stealthers.

Problem is the amount of work would be even higher.

[Reckeo]

I dunno. I was at Orc Caves outside FAI yesterday. They were pretty good at using bows and staying a distance from me and my AoE's. Got me down to half health too, with ghostly visage and mirror image.

Of course, it doesn't stop me from engaging them in melee, tumbling back, and getting a group and then using AoE....but it still took careful planning and tactical maneuvering on my part. I don't consider it meta. Death by AoE or death by my sword, it's all the same to the mobs. But I can only speak as far as my experience goes.

And I'm having fun.

I think it's not a matter of AI, but a Wizard with an intelligence of 24 would easily try to manipulate her situation to make best use of her spells, would she not?

Adaptive AI would only go so far. The enemy in question would have to be able to adapt to ever changing threats, when (for most PvE mobs), they have relatively short and violent life spans, underdeveloped communities (they are very much mostly tribal, like gnolls-orcs etc), going up against superior civilized/established races that have learned to thrive by peacefully working together and uniting against threats in order to survive, and then passing on what works to the next generation through training, experience, and education (wizards, warriors, it goes on and on).

I am only using these for examples since OP suggested 8 intelligence and 8 wisdom, which makes me think of orcs, goblins, etc etc. This would not be the case for example, Drow etc etc.

[Hoihe]

I dunno. I was at Orc Caves outside FAI yesterday. They were pretty good at using bows and staying a distance from me and my AoE's. Got me down to half health too, with ghostly visage and mirror image.

Of course, it doesn't stop me from engaging them in melee, tumbling back, and getting a group and then using AoE....but it still took careful planning and tactical maneuvering on my part. I don't consider it meta. Death by AoE or death by my sword, it's all the same to the mobs. But I can only speak as far as my experience goes.

And I'm having fun.

I think it's not a matter of AI, but a Wizard with an intelligence of 24 would easily try to manipulate her situation to make best use of her spells, would she not?

Adaptive AI would only go so far. The enemy in question would have to be able to adapt to ever changing threats, when (for most PvE mobs), they have relatively short and violent life spans, underdeveloped communities (they are very much mostly tribal, like gnolls-orcs etc), going up against superior civilized/established races that have learned to thrive by peacefully working together and uniting against threats in order to survive, and then passing on what works to the next generation through training, experience, and education (wizards, warriors, it goes on and on).

I am only using these for examples since OP suggested 8 intelligence and 8 wisdom, which makes me think of orcs, goblins, etc etc. This would not be the case for example, Drow etc etc.

Actually, the Orc caves. Atria wrote an IC report on that for CK commenting about "Orcs are oddly smart compared to giants" just because of that.

Imagine if every mob did like the orc cave ones, but maybe with more tact!

Most mobs however just run at you as if they were random animals and die. A wizard doing the round up/blast would work perfectly with animal style mobs. I'd argue even trolls are smart enough to realize "if i stands backs, humie not hurts mes. If I throwsies rocksies at humie, humie cannot hurts mes. If I stands farsies from Bobsies the Trolsie, Humies cans kills Bobsies without hurting mes. I gets more humie meats!"