Joshua Sawyer is my favourite professional Hitman 3 streamer (I heard he was the first person to ever beat Hitman 3), but I have no idea how it translates into knowledge on RPGs.
There's a stigma on optimization in RPGs that come from tabletop but really doesn't make any sense when it comes to videogames. If you're playing tabletop with 4 people and your character is abusing some broken synergy while the other players aren't, let's say you're solving 75% of the problems (combat, skills, roleplay encounters, etc) without help, that can be bad because you're monopolizing the experience. Now in a single player video game it's the complete opposite, a big pull of the experience is solving it's mechanical complexity and your npc companions are taking no pleasure in solving anything because they're not a person, you're the only one getting something out of it.
for videogames the stigma is (or at least should be) on the developer's side, in the sense of creating enough mechanical complexity for a big range of players. some "roleplaying" games don't do that so well...
I get why someone would make the argument because, personally, once I'm min-maxing, I am utterly, terminally bored with a game - once I've "solved" it, I don't want to play it anymore, and it's much more fun to just go with the flow and feel things out. But that said, I think the real crux of why that article is misguided is that you're just never going to talk someone out of the way they like to enjoy games.
but it also works the other way round. In a single player experience there is no one else to compare yourself to, so you're not feeling bad if you're "underperforming theoretically", as long as you're still overcoming challenges. Your build doesn't need to be minmaxed, it only needs to be average. You're not missing more powerful builds when you don't know they're possible. (unless you watched other players on stream or sth)
Exactly! In a tabletop game, your character weaknesses can become RP strengths: the Barbarian is a lovable idiot, the Wizard is so absent-minded she wouldn't even notice if it's night outside, all these little hooks and idiosyncrasies that can make a character fun to play and interact with while at the same time making a powerful TEAM. And if you run into bad luck or have a frustrating session, the DM can fudge some rolls or alter the encounter to keep the players engaged and having fun. Not so in a video game RPG. The computer doesn't care about your simple country charm, it only cares that you have a -1 to INT. The computer doesn't care if your adorably clumsy, it only sees your poor AC and Initiative. The computer won't allow you to add the "Low-Cut Blouse" bonus to your Persuasion, only an unskilled stat roll. The computer only cares about numbers: if they're big, you win. Optimization doesn't deny yourself a quirky and fun character: it empowers you to meet the computer on it's own level.
The only thing is you might be taking your own enjoyment of an otherwise difficult game by using an exploit or abusing a strategy to get past the "intended design". But that's where it wraps around to the TTRPG influence, getting around the intended design makes the experience far more interesting for the party, DM and player by bypassing the "plan".
Within me there are two wolves. One says, "Just play the game, relax, and have fun," and the other says, "Min max and be the most optimal build possible." Both wolves are correct. They're friends, actually.
Yea its always a false dichotomy, the ideal system integrates the two so that good optimization's elevates the roleplay beyond banging two dolls together.
So min-maxers don't play video games to have fun and/or relax? Why are these two exclusive to each other? How do you think min/maxers specifically play the game? Do you honestly genuinely think they don't have fun?
@@GusJenkinsElite No they don't. Being a smelly number nerd makes it so you wont enjoy shit. You think you do, but you don't. Stop being a smelly dirty wannabe tryhard in a video game
The problem is "min-maxing" is rarely properly defined. Some people consider making a character with 7 INT "min-maxing", others think it means making some munchkin hybrid monstrosity with seven different class dips.
i loved your perspective here. i really hope you make more of this kind of content going forward. it’s fascinating to not just hear your opinions from a d&d perspective, but that of from a developer as well.
Thanks for the upload. Always funny to see the time-honored tropes trotted out for BG3's release. It was just as fun to see online discussion that came about during the early resurgence of crit role/pillars 1, where a new generation came in contact with the genre space. And now it happens again
I find Josh to be a remarkably interesting person. As someone who is fond of many games he's worked on its really cool to hear his thoughts on these things. I even showed his talk about managing small remote teams to my boss and we've learned/used some of it in our own (non game dev) work
It's all good as long as you don't turn into that guy from Eminem's Stan. And yes - Josh is pleasant to listen to. There's a handful of people on TH-cam I like having on in the background and he is one of them. Alanah Pearce being another. A lot of it has to do with neither being typical "TH-camrs". Alanah's sponsorships aside - their style is very early-TH-cam. Not really any fancy editing, transition effects, screaming at the camera, etc.
I think you really nailed the reasons why people powergame and why it's not always a blind focus on winning. Even video games that do allow you to fail forward like XCOM are still unforgiving enough that optimal play is still heavily encouraged.
Unless it has truly extraordinary levels of reactivity, I cannot imagine that the game is going to reward you with a better narrative experience or more interesting conversations for making a narratively coherent build, such as recognising you took a mechanically bad feat that happens to make sense narratively.. On the contrary, with class reactivity, unless you need to meet particularly level thresholds, you are probably going to be rewarded with the most content making some cheesy frankenstein build.
I agree that it terms of building your character, a video game is unlikely to reward sub optimal choices more in terms of narrative than it would more powerful ones. The article's message there would be more applicable in terms of narrative choices that are suboptimal in terms of accumulating raw character power but provide more interesting or challenging overall experience. That last point is also potentially applicable as a general reason to avoid minmaxing to some degree. Because in a game like BG3 that provides a ton of extra, less than obvious options for effective combat, building a character that can solve any challenge using only the most straightforward, number reliant once can hamper the experience.
To be fair, BG3 is so beloved out of the gate in large part for having extraordinary levels of reactivity. It's basically like as long as you are competent and/or creative in handling combat then almost any way you decide to build your character will offer you some kind of rewarding content.
Tbh because skill checks are more frequent than class checks you're rewarded with the most reactivity by being a drow bard and just having crazy good stats.
Interesting watch and interesting points. I am doing a replay of pillars 1 (I actually prefer it to deadfire) and man do I wish we could get a pillars 3. Damn it Josh make it happen somehow! :D Great to hear from you. Hope you enjoy BG3!
My major problem with POE is the way that the attributes operate. It's so counter-intuitive for Barbarians to be stacking intelligence or Clerics to be stacking Dexterity and it makes building a character feel odd.
@@Velot_ I agree but I adjusted fast. Its just different. To be fair might is an interesting stat as you could be a mighty powerful mage or a mighty barbarian :).....thats my way of looking at it but yes int I understand works differently but it is explained very well with the mouseover so I dont mind really. Odd though yes
Agreed. The "crit/hit/graze/miss" and "armor class vs. weapon/spell penetration" mechanics are hands down my favorite of any game I've played. Makes D&Ds basic "armor class=hit chance" mechanic feel really boring whenever I go back to it.
@@thewardenduncan DnD is a much, much worse and dumbed down system...Now, granted, i would not want to figure out all those calculations in a sit down game, but Pillars leveraged computing power in exactly the best way.
I think that’s why I loved Shadowrun so much, because as a system and concept, your characters are literal min-maxers weeded out and literally better than common people. It helps its just an aspect of an interesting setting/system.
Ya like, being a chaotic neutral? I always struggled with this concept of a dumb jocky action hero with a middle class, mundane, "everyman" background? When i think of battle and warriors i think roles, and specialties. I dont wanna see an every day hero, like John Mcclane? Theyre boring. I wanna see the neutral chaos of a min maxer elite true master in their field, KEEPING IT INTERESTING. I liked that you dropped SHadowrun cuz it was always about elite techies and people who just werent normal in any way. And i loved it. Like Snake Plissken or something, Hitori Hanzo, Kill Bill ladies, The Desert Fox, or Jackie Chan. Luminaries with tons of background doing very technical war stuff. Growing up we were taught to respect a true master the utmost because; the speciality cannot be taught. It must be earned through experience. I never wanted to worship everymans, john mcclane or john connors, im looking for people with min max throughput; like: Sarah Connor, Bruce Lee, Ripley, Einstein, Tom Brown, Usain Bolt, Sherlock. Both the snakes. All the snakes. I dont want to hear about Dr wilson, i wanna hear about dr house. He was the one slaying the big demons, Like Gut A hero should stand out in their field and now it seems like every day heroes are all we see, or marvel. Now should everyone be usain bolt? no. But its def more interesting
I didn't recognize your name at first but it sounded familiar and you've worked on games that got me into CRPGs (POE) so thanks for posting this and thanks for all you're work too.
as a power gamer myself, picking odd-ball choices just makes me want to min-max even more haha. it increases the pressure on your character to be built well and I enjoy this pressure a lot.
Building correctly is part of the challenge for me. Regarding BG3 - being optimal on tactician is a given and part of the parcel; playing an unoptimazed mish-mash build on purpose is another layer of difficulty you can give yourself, when the game cannot meet your difficulty wishes. Playing in an unorthodox way usually involves a lot of cheesing, and is more about metagame mastery than anything else. Making unorthodox builds that may, or may not work is one of the most fun experiences you can get in an RPG imo. After I'm done with my staple tabletop Oathbreaker Fiend Warlock & Lore Bard GOO Warlock I'll move onto other, less optimal builds like heavy armor wearing great axe swinging bard.
I mean heck you can play a naked barbarian and make it work. Thats the fun of the game, coming up with builds and ideas and optimizing it to make it work.Thats why from software games are so beloved because people can try to beat the game in different styles and ways.
@@WusterWasti From software games are different though because you can dodge 100% of damage, this allows you to still be able to theoretically beat the game even if every enemy has 1,000,000 health and you do 1 damage per hit. With BG3 you cannot do that, there is some amount of damage which is just unavoidable and there are fights which can just be mathematically impossible to win because your stats and build are just too poor.
Yes but how likely is that? That is an extreme case that nobody will experience, so my take still stands. Also it was more about how you play the game build wise. Which weapons, spells and combat tactics you use that make every run special. Or the challenges you impose yourself. I mean BG3 is out for just some weeks now and we dont fully know how you can break every inch of the game even when speedrunners are already beating it in 11 minutes. I think that we will see many more strats on how you can beat seemingly impossible fights. Just like when there where challenge runs in Dark Souls that where deemed impossible. @@NihongoWakannai
I have never met a person who rolls a fresh game with unorthodox characters. They beat the game. Again and again and the unorthodox characters is how they mitigate their boredom by making the game seem fresh. The unorthodox stuff comes later.
First of all I just want to say. Holy crap man thanks for what you've done for the genre of ttrpgs that's awesome! Second I agree. I have been playing for a few years and I am not super great at coming up with character ideas off the start. I rarely go "OH I want to try this this and this and it doesn't matter what else is happening". Usually I find out what the story is about and what my fellow players are doing and from there I build something I think will be fun. There is no reason that your RP can not be supportive of your character that also fills your teams roles. I like to build my personality of how I would want to play a character with the tools I have. I was in a party with a satyr, dragonborn, and lion race (I forgot the name? Leon?). And I decided to make a human druid of the sheperd that "could not wildshape" and was in love with animals and people who resembled animals. It was a great time for the short time we played. Is it so bad to make your character fitted to your enviroment? Heck no!
A lot of computer games don't make failing interesting enough and thus I understand optimization. In a tabletop game with a good dm this isn't the case and so I like min maxing semi good or even bad concepts, but min maxing something that is already strong, just to make it broken, would be something I would only consider in certain groups that are less roleplay focused or if everyone is power gaming. DnD 5e is too simple for extreme min maxing anyway unless you talk with the dm about what artifacts one could get.
I don't think it's that simple. Not in the least because of your added caveat of needing a good GM that runs their game in certain ways. But at the end of the day it also comes down to preference. Your fun is not someone elses fun. And this shows in how you describe your perception of min-maxing and powergaming aswell. The idea that it is necessarily about power or winning. The belief that if roleplay options were presented by your good GM they wouldn't want or need to do these things and could have fun the way you have fun. Fundamentally missing the point that, while you have great fun your way? Not everyone will enjoy that type of fun. There absolutely is a group of people who is drawn to what you describe. And obviously there are people who are drawn to a more roleplay oriented style, where "failing" still progresses the story in interesting ways. There are also going to be people who think both these groups are nuts and why are you wasting your time playing make-belief. Be it that they built their entire existence around productivity and disdain anything that does not directly contribute to that or simply because they have other interests. You pose an interesting premise "Minmaxing something that is already strong just to make it broken" -- wouldn't your "good GM" be able to present an equally strong counterbalance with ease if that were the primary concern? Let me shift that question into a different shape - is a chess player bad for chosing the optimal moves? Are they breaking the game? Because that is how some minmaxers approach the game, a complex game of chess. Where all the mechanics and class features etc are pieces they get to compile their side of the board with. Where you see someone trying to "break the balance", they see a puzzle to solve - an obstacle to overcome. Does having these disparate playstyles within the same group often lead to friction? Absolutely. But this is true for anything. When two or more people with different ideas and definitions of fun are forced to play with the same ball they will often both end up unhappy for it or worse. Let people have their own fun. You don't have to play with them or "teach them" your fun is superior.
Fully agree. I'm the type of player who will purposfully handicap myself or choose suboptimal abilities just so I can RP better. Could be fun with other gamers tho
@danjal87nl Can't say I agree with anything you said. I specifically said that I would consider doing so in specific groups and outside of those groups I wouldn't ! Simple as that. Tabletop is played as a group and if you want to play your super min maxed what ever and need to outshine everyone, thats your problem. Its not about YOUR fun and its not about me telling others what they can and can't do, but rather about the fun of the group. You think most would like that your char solves a disproportionately large amount of challenges, because you crunshed numbers ? Chess is a terrible analogy as its competitive, if that is how you approach a tabletop game, I don't envy anyone you play with.
Video games also put a much higher emphisis on combat. In tabletop if your character is only average to bad at combat you can still help the party in other ways, even if it is just coming up with creative solutions to problems. In a game a character that is bad in combat very easily becomes dead weight.
The one thing I did find resonant in the PC Gamer article was the idea that if you have a tendency towards making characters who are kind of trash at the beginning of a game when it is supposed to be easy and are pretty good at the end when it is supposed to be harder then you might want to try making a straightforward character for a change; fair enough. I have definitely played my share of characters who just die immediately in the early game if I do something wrong, and it might be fun to just try being a big tough dumb fighter for once or something
Every class is incredibly weak at low level. Honestly I'm surprised hit points were not more balanced properly with level ups, you literally near double your hp in 2 levels but basic weapon attacks do not increase by much.
Good discussion. My hope is that the article will help people who feel like they're /trapped/ into min-maxing to feel more freedom to do what they want, even as you said knowing that an intelligence fighter will be working at a disadvantage, the game is still playable and fun and the path is possible if that's what you want to do. As someone who plays games much more for the story than for the combat, there are some games that I won't go near because it doesn't seem like I'll be able to make the character I want. This game has that freedom even if it is a challenge, so I hope that that message has been spread well enough.
The first time I min-maxed my character was in Fallout: New Vegas. I had no idea that was even a strategy, I just wanted to make a character that was exaggeratedly strong but stupid. It made role playing easier when being convinced by Caesars Legion that I was doing the right thing. I also made a backstory where I had become a cannibal while being imprisoned by Tabitha. Eating tabitha was my real end game in that playthrough. What a game!
Always nice to hear your opinion, Josh! Ultimately, people should just do whatever they want to have fun. If it's power gaming or going strictly with narrative choices, but not optimized, then just go for it. Who gives a shit?
@@fafanir82 His portfolio is awful. Not a single good game to his name. Pillars of eternity 1 and 2 are some of the dullest rpgs Ive ever played. And Ive played almost everything this side of 1995. Hes just bad at his job.
3.5 minmaxing left such a wound in our collective psyche that people associate any form of optimizing with the most joyless, flavorless, game breaking type of play. Like, 5e is good, but there's _really_ not a lot going on mechanically or customization wise. You get +4/+5 in your two main stats _so you can interact with the game on a basic level,_ and that's about it. There's flavorful RP options for every stat combo, and I'm sure Larian was especially diligent in making sure no character felt left out.
They even gave it a dumb fancy name: The Stormwind Fallacy The idea that mechanically strong characters are inherently worse narratively and vice versa.
Favorable stat spreads is the most superficial optimization, and there's a lot of wiggle room available in the 5e skeleton not merely from stacking numerical bonuses together for effect, but from making the right non-numerical progression picks that allow deterministically solving challenges and advancing the game state. For example, having Speak With Dead opens up a lot of content that you simply can't engage with otherwise, both in tabletop and it seems in this videogame.
@@StalinsGhostYeah, there are two easy ways to have Speak with Dead: there's an evil necromantic tome you can find that a character can read and with the right skill checks (and not just intelligence, I think wisdom and maybe constitution can also pass the checks?) and learn Speak With Dead from as a permanently prepared ritual cast without using up a spell, and even easier, there's an amulet that gives you Speak with Dead too. Very straightforward!
@@NephilmXthe game literally hands you a speak with dead amulet. Are you complaining that spellcasters are inherently stronger than martials? Welcome to DnD. Where every spellcaster will dominate creative problem solving in out of combat scenarios while every martial that’s not a rogue will just twiddle their thumbs.
Well put. I had to remind myself what min-maxing is. I haven't played an RPG since Wasteland 3. I maybe played 20 minutes of Icewind Dale. Absolutely zero time with BG1 or BG2. Bits of NWN2 and of course a good bit, in pieces, of the expansions. But almost no PoE, no Deadfire, and, ugh, no Pentiment yet. I have a major backlog issue and possibly even executive dysfunction when it comes to playing for longer than an hour. At the same time I'm glad i know what a powergamer is, what min-maxing is. There's powergaming in RTS somethin' fierce. But a comforting understanding of the spectrum of play styles from casual to hardcore. Your mic is cool and patting the kitty is also cool.
Senergy is fun. Making a build that mechanically "clicks" is fun as hell imo. The only caveat is that when it breaks the game (e.g. make it a walk in the park), it stops being fun imo (some people have fun that way, though, and I dont judge). I even feel like the ultimate goal of a gamedev should be to make the players feel like they are "almost cheating", but *without breaking the game*. Btw, someday I might try making something like that (maybe when I retire 😂)
even then 'find the synergy literally breaking the game, like you have to be careful about what you're doing or you'll crash the game' is why i still play binding of isaac to this day, so
@@Denny_Boi for me it's the opposite, if I stumble upon a broken combination I feel like I'm cheating myself out of the fun challenge of actually engaging with the game mechanics by winning too easily. If you like wiping combat encounters why not just play on the easiest difficulty?
long time ttrpg player, love your thoughts on game design and rpgs, appreciate these videos and discussions. I think one thing for me, is that in a long game like POE/etc, I don't have the time to do multiple runs with different styles, so at some point, I have to pick one and go, hopefully in a way that experiences as much of the story/game as possible.
Josh, I'd love if you could talk about your experiences as a game designer, and how you got to where you are today. Game design as a career is something I've considered for a long time but never really took myself seriously about it. I'm sure there are others who would be interested in hearing your perspective on the career!
I engage in almost exclusively top-down design when rolling a character. I tend to find a mechanical interaction that I think is interesting/powerful and then flesh out a character that fits that interaction. Feels like a lot of people think if you optimize your character his name is Vanilla McWhiteBread when in reality coming up with a fiction that matches a chassis can be very fun and rewarding.
It looks like one of the most ambitious goals Larian set for themselves was fail forwarding as you describe it. We'll see the results soon. As for catering to different levels of ability or power gaming, being able to change difficulty midgame seems like quite a plus for that. Assuming tactician mode is truly challenging.
Little off topic but Just wanted to say, NWN2 played a huge part in my taste in video games, thank you from younger me for shaping dozens of hours of enjoyment with friends! I generally agreed with what you addressed in the video, good points all around in my opinion
Love hearing your takes, Josh! Either way I do not understand why people care so much. People will play the way they will play. Hopefully they play the way they have the most fun :)
In video games it makes zero sense to be against optimization. Play how you want. However on the table top as someone who optimized their character, it does get boring if you're always using the most OP combo of your powers. I often find myself choosing suboptimal abilities or doing a suboptimal thing in combat because it helps me RP plus it helps other people have fun
you are a legend man, I love obsidian games, owlcat games, and larian studios, top 3 best hard working, dedicated and passionate companies, bg3 is going to be amazing, i hope rogue trader and Avowed will be too!
So my problem with all of this is that if I power-game, games tend to become trivially easy. The supposed solution to this is to set a higher difficulty level, but I very much dislike how this is implemented in the vast majority of games. If I have a plate mail and the enemy guy has an identical plate mail, I expect both plate mails to offer identical protection. But because of a higher difficulty level, the enemy guy's plate mail protects better. Hence I'm usually stuck with the "authentic" difficulty level and have to artificially limit my options just to maintain a semblance of challenge within the game. For a BG3 example; no multiclassing, no GWM, no PAM, no casting two full spells with quickened metamagic, no bonus action abuse with certain items, no torch dipping, barrelmancy, hide abuse etc.
I don't think it's even possible to get through the game on Tactician without multiclassing, SS, GWM, PAM and strategically selected magic items. Unless you prepare for each encounter beforehand, I found it very difficult to beat some of them without "cheese" builds.
@@helgenlane I played through tactician with no multiclassing, no barrelmancy, no pre-fight preparation, no surprise rounds, no stealth, supplies modded to take 150 per long rest, and lots of other self-imposed limitations including what I mentioned before, and it was still too easy...
I didn't respec any companions. Main was a tempest cleric. In addition to raising main ability scores, I used feats for medium armor proficiency and shields for characters such as Gale and Astarion, and picked mobile for Lae'zel and Minthara. For main cleric I picked resilient(con) and war caster. @@helgenlane
Almost didn't recognize you, now that you don't look like edgar allen poe anymore, like you did in the excellent Obsidian documentary. :D Love your work, man, please keep it up!
My favorite types of games are the ones where you can make a "bad" character but still have fun, though that usually also requires the player to have a creative imagination, and maybe broad interpretation of the word "fun." I think, for me, the cumulative nature of leveling you talk about at 6:13 is really what drives me towards build optimization. I don't want to miss exciting high level content because I didn't optimize my build. But at the same time, I do like quirks in my builds, things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to fit together or which are maybe a little unusual, unexpected, or out of alignment with a build purely angling for optimized stats. Can make for some really fun RP at the cost of never reaching the power of other builds, which I think was probably what Robin Valentine was trying to get at? But it still requires you put care into your builds, carefully making up for built-in weaknesses to your suboptimal combinations. That's how I do things a lot, and I find most games come with a difficulty setting that can accommodate that style of play. So, uh, that's my takeaway I guess. I really like games where you can get yourself into bad situations with poor build choices, but get out of those situations with good gameplay choices. More games like that, please, I guess. I feel like there's enough stuff being put out there on the market, you're bound to find something which has a design philosophy which meshes well with your preferred playstyle, so what's the fuss, really. Also, I'm sure you get this a lot, but more Sesame please :) Very good kitty
I'm a tad confused, your tweet appeared to support the article but the video refutes the points it made. I think I may have misread it. Thanks for making the video, absolutely agree with the majority of it.
Power gaming in D&D makes sense when you understand its based around dice rolls. Even if you min/max you can still get unlucky and run into bad situations. If your character is overall balanced or worse, a charisma fighter as you said, if you get unlucky rolls chances are you just die.
In tabletop a DM can fudge dice or outcomes to keep players alive and the game interesting. A videogame is still just binary win/loss outcome. In fact BG3 introduced karmic dice to essentially fudge dice after an unlucky roll so players don't tilt and quit.
I think there's a difference between power gaming and optimising. Power gaming implies aiming for power as the priority; which tbh can be detrimental to a cohesive narrative character (though not always). Optimising, on the other hand, I feel simply means taking a path and trying to make it as good as you can. So you might optimise a dart throwing build, even though darts are never do as well as a longbow. This is about narrative character and making your concept play well mechanically. Both can be bad at a tabletop, it's all about communication and making sure the group is on the same page about what roles and power levels each characters is bringing. That might mean one character is powerful in combat and another is great at skills or social interactions. So long as the group is ok with it that's not an issue. But the group might want to be more balanced and then its up to everyone to communicate what they want and what's fun for them. Sometimes that means some people don't play together and that's totally OK. In solo digital gaming, I don't think it's an issue tbh. If you want to play a nonsense munchkin build that monsters combat but fails hilariously in social interaction, so what? It's only you playing, you're not harming anyone's experience.
OOO we're already talking BG3. this is epic. i was hoping this would be the case. would love a talk on BG3s writing and the heavy choice-consequence design used by Larian. I'm sure that might be a tired topic at this stage but I think this game is interesting enough to warrant its own take.
As a youth I spent endless hours playing and power gaming icedwindale 2 using mods that made that game significantly harder and all of it culminating to a solo sorcerer playthrough where even a single minor battle required multiple reloads in order to win. I can't imagine this would of been fun for 90% of people but it was fun for me. It was not about overwhelming the game it was being overwhelmed by the game (via mods or choices like solo play) and using the game systems to be on par with it.
I think what Larian has done with Baldur's Gate 3 that is so unique is that they DO incorporate 'fail forwarding' into the game! And strongly encourages finding alternative solutions to encounters. There are many dialogue checks where failing the check results in a richer story, additional story content, better results, or just a more fun situation. As a power gamer is very easy (in early access anyway) to make a super skilled party face and pass literally every check . . . I've done it. But you miss out on so much story, and you lose the fun of having to figure out solutions to encounters . . . its pretty boring actually. Its much more enjoyable to be good at some skills but weak at others . . . then every encounter you have to weigh your options and you will fail sometimes and experience unexpected adventure! Heck you even need to decide if you should be making dialogue checks in the first place or if there was a better check-free action you could have taken instead. The same holds true for combat . . . once you start combat you are pretty much compelled to 'win' the fight. But the majority of combat encounters in BG3 are optional (seriously 80% of combat encounters in EA can be avoided). And its really fun to find creative ways to either avoid combat entirely, or alter the encounter before starting combat so that you can have better odds. Many encounters have options to acquire allies, remove or incapacitate some enemies prior to combat, cause enemies to flip sides, etc. A power gaming team that is geared to optimizing killing everything can likely steamroll through encounters . . . but again I don't find that as much fun as accepting that my team might not be the strongest and figuring out creative solutions to get through things. The full respec option and ability to change game difficulty levels anytime encourages taking chances and not getting stressed out if your build doesn't measure up. I don't think Robin Valentine's PC Gamer article arguments were very well though out or written . . . but the basic thought of 'just enjoy the story' and don't stress about min/maxing is a good one.
It's not the first time an RPG reacts to player failure with interesting alternative reactivity. Disco Elysium did it, I think both Torment's did it. But yeah it's relatively rare and I hope if BG3 becomes a huge success that more RPG devs make the extra effort to focus on that aspect.
I don't really agree that BG3 has good interesting fail states. Sometimes I think they even actively want you to fail or randomly fail (outside of your control) because they think it makes it interesting (except said failiure isn't actually interesting). It's an idea they failed to execute on properly. I also really don't like randomly failing bigger things that are outside my control. I even think the very idea is flawed. "Failing should be fun". You're right there admitting that it's a "fail". If you want to make "failing" feel equally as viable/satisfying as a success, then you should not approach it as a "fail", nor frame it as one, during design. It's a flawed understanding of the actual "problem", which leads to an inherently flawed attempt at a solution.
@suplextrain sounds like you wouldn't like playing DND either. There is no bigger rolls or smaller rolls, it's all up to the same fate, and you get plenty of bonuses, especially with the inspiration system, if you let the roll be what it is instead of trying to "win" at everyone, when you actually want to get a good roll on something, you'll have inspiration gathered to roll again if you fail the first time.
@@artorhen The difference between a game and PnP is the human element of having a DM, things being more granular and most likely more tailored to the group. So "failing" in say your PnP group is not even remotely the same as "failing" in BG3. If in a game you frame something as success & fail, then obviously the prefered option is success. So by default you will not be happy with the fail. Even more so if it doesn't feel "fair" in that it was randomly given to you. This would just lead to people most likely just reloading. This is what I mean when I say it's a flawed idea from the beginning and results being too binary. To solve the problam Larian wants to solve, they would have to approach it from a different angle.
@@suplextrain I played the early access and it's not at all a regular game in the first place if your definition of a regular game is success=good, and fail=bad. It's literally Dnd as a videogame, with all of the dnd feel, and uses the exact same dice based system. And again, you get lots of inspiration from exploring based on your and other character's backgrounds, for example if you are a sage, you get inspiration from that when you find something magical and so do your companions that have the sage background, so you get multiple inspiration from just one thing that you can easily find of stumble upon in the game which you can use if you fail a roll to reroll. You also get a lot of bonuses from you proficiencies and should also have a system to switch characters so that you can roll with the optimisation of another character. So the game does nothing against the player. And an example of times where it's boring to succeed a roll would be intimidation, a lot of situations where an npc might provoke you or want to attack you, if you just intimidate a character, they don't fight you and that's it, but if you fail and fight them, you can convince them that you're badass by beating the leader up without fighting the whole crowd which sometimes gives you more dialogue, and companion comments. Sometimes an extra approval, or sometimes you get an approval regardless of whether you initially succeeded the first intimidation roll or if you just beat up the character and humiliated him afterwards or spared him or killed him. So you do sometimes get more choices if you are not always "winning" the first roll. A lot of the encounters are usually dependent on a sequence of rolls and dialogue choices and you can fail one and succeed at another, but it feels more fluid when you let it go than if you just try to succeed all of them when the outcome can still be in your favor regardless.
I agree with what you said, and i also didn't read the article, but my instinct when it comes to primarily single player games is, you play how you want and let me play how i want.
A testament to Sawyer's innocence, is that he didn't know the topic of BG3 is more about the same subject of Elden Ring. A testament to my innocence, I had to google what is "powergaming". A term I am going now to use all the time.
7:06 great example for why not having difficulty options can work really well. We all know who I can reference here about difficulty in gaming that people have shouted for difficulty options for. Those games are a great example of being able to trust the difficulty curve. I mean, you can beat them naked with your fists, it's hard and takes a long time but people do it! You can also go in with a +10 chaos zweihander and vaporize everything in a couple seconds. They're both fun.
Nice ideas and thoughts. But I do recall you expressing disappointment once with players min-maxing Pallegina, where the players were completely missing the point how her stats tie into her lore and background.
I feel like theres an inherently positive aspect of mechanical limitations for certain builds that doesn't get talked about enough. (at least in the context of single player videogames, in the context of a multiplayer tabletop experience there are social expectations at play and generally if your build slows the game down or results in you not doing your job, people can get understandably upset) Having suboptimal character builds and imbalances offers something of a natural difficulty slider where whacky builds can offer something akin to challenge runs in other games.
I just want to see JS make Icewin dale 3 or pillars3 with BG3's budget so that I can die happy. I love Larian to death, but the writing in pillars is on another level.
Curious timing, with Timothy Cain doing TH-cam videos, and now Joshua Sawyer. Will this be a sign that we can expect more videos from you in the future? I would love to hear more of your Game Design insights on here, or even you answering questions (I recall you had a blog site years ago where you did this).
I think there's also something to be said about the differences between a tabletop and video game approach, and the assumptions made for playing each. I personally don't like playing as a character that I think might fail at a lot of dialogue checks, or really any other skill checks, and I'm likely to reload my game when I fail, but there is narrative merit to going with what you get and embracing failure. I operate under the assumption that the developer centers content around success, or alternatives to success. I"m under the impression that a lot of risky assumptions have to be made about what players will like and do when developing a game, whereas, if a player assumes something about a developer choice, the stakes are lower. Really, players should just play how they like, minmaxing or not.
I agree with basically everything Joshua says here. Though an Elf wizard can use a bow without having to use an any additional resources to gain proficiency.
Hey Josh, have you ever played roguelike RPGs like Cataclysm, Caves of Qud, and UnReal World? They tend to have a lot of unique and very in-depth RPG mechanics unseen in more "visual" and story oriented games, but despite that they feel overlooked in the RPG community.
*Delighted to hear that you make d&d character is very similar to how I make them lol.* You start out with a vague concept of the character that you wanna play, mechanically refine that character through intense metagaming, and then bring it to a cohesive whole through roleplay. Some on my friends think that I'm an alien for doing it like this, but I think it has some advantages, other than making the character good at the game you're playing if course. The chief one being that limitations are good for creativity. One of my best characters that I still get compliments regarding years later is a hexblade warlock. And why did I want to play a hexbladr warlock? Because the classes nuts and I wanted to add my carisma to attack roles and damage! An ability that's so powerful it alone makes the class-a go to for multiclassing. I don't think there's anything wrong with it obviously, and they largely agree with your stance of who gives a shit. Articles browbeating people for minmaxing are douchey to say the least. While it can be shitty if a game demands minmaxing and that takes away from enjoyment, that only the really severe problem if there is not a good variety in ways to min-max. 5e being a great example of the opposite, 9 classes, all capable of minmaxing, and then even variations on those classes with the subclasses that require different minmaxing. That's a lot of variety, enough to facilitate a huge number of unique character concepts, and then suddenly min-maxing isn't really an issue, even if paladins are straight up busted
Could you do a video on how the concept of fantasy / high fantasy came about? Who invented it? Why did it become such a popular archetype in gaming and literature?
Min/Maxing is something I take great pleasure in with DnD style games. No joke, I love to agonizing for literal hours over what is the best build for all scenarios inside and outside of combat.
On Characters - I like the freedom to build a bad character or uncommon combo. If its bad... thats on me and on my RP ability and yes.. then it does rely on a ton of min/maxing to "fix" I just saw a video today on a guy who made a Half-Orc NecroBard in BG3.. and its crazy. Its basically garbage until level 11 then just gets silly powerful and he min/maxed very hard on this to get it to work out. I love that the character now exists and we will see nutty combos in months to come.
What does this guy know about rpgs
He played a lot of Swords and Sandals
Joshua Sawyer is my favourite professional Hitman 3 streamer (I heard he was the first person to ever beat Hitman 3), but I have no idea how it translates into knowledge on RPGs.
Ahh hbomberguy, still creeping on minors?
@@ryuhayabusa3302 context?
@@MidiaGC he made that up
There's a stigma on optimization in RPGs that come from tabletop but really doesn't make any sense when it comes to videogames. If you're playing tabletop with 4 people and your character is abusing some broken synergy while the other players aren't, let's say you're solving 75% of the problems (combat, skills, roleplay encounters, etc) without help, that can be bad because you're monopolizing the experience. Now in a single player video game it's the complete opposite, a big pull of the experience is solving it's mechanical complexity and your npc companions are taking no pleasure in solving anything because they're not a person, you're the only one getting something out of it.
for videogames the stigma is (or at least should be) on the developer's side, in the sense of creating enough mechanical complexity for a big range of players. some "roleplaying" games don't do that so well...
I get why someone would make the argument because, personally, once I'm min-maxing, I am utterly, terminally bored with a game - once I've "solved" it, I don't want to play it anymore, and it's much more fun to just go with the flow and feel things out. But that said, I think the real crux of why that article is misguided is that you're just never going to talk someone out of the way they like to enjoy games.
but it also works the other way round. In a single player experience there is no one else to compare yourself to, so you're not feeling bad if you're "underperforming theoretically", as long as you're still overcoming challenges. Your build doesn't need to be minmaxed, it only needs to be average. You're not missing more powerful builds when you don't know they're possible. (unless you watched other players on stream or sth)
Exactly! In a tabletop game, your character weaknesses can become RP strengths: the Barbarian is a lovable idiot, the Wizard is so absent-minded she wouldn't even notice if it's night outside, all these little hooks and idiosyncrasies that can make a character fun to play and interact with while at the same time making a powerful TEAM. And if you run into bad luck or have a frustrating session, the DM can fudge some rolls or alter the encounter to keep the players engaged and having fun.
Not so in a video game RPG. The computer doesn't care about your simple country charm, it only cares that you have a -1 to INT. The computer doesn't care if your adorably clumsy, it only sees your poor AC and Initiative. The computer won't allow you to add the "Low-Cut Blouse" bonus to your Persuasion, only an unskilled stat roll. The computer only cares about numbers: if they're big, you win.
Optimization doesn't deny yourself a quirky and fun character: it empowers you to meet the computer on it's own level.
The only thing is you might be taking your own enjoyment of an otherwise difficult game by using an exploit or abusing a strategy to get past the "intended design". But that's where it wraps around to the TTRPG influence, getting around the intended design makes the experience far more interesting for the party, DM and player by bypassing the "plan".
Within me there are two wolves. One says, "Just play the game, relax, and have fun," and the other says, "Min max and be the most optimal build possible."
Both wolves are correct. They're friends, actually.
Yea its always a false dichotomy, the ideal system integrates the two so that good optimization's elevates the roleplay beyond banging two dolls together.
So min-maxers don't play video games to have fun and/or relax? Why are these two exclusive to each other? How do you think min/maxers specifically play the game? Do you honestly genuinely think they don't have fun?
@@GusJenkinsElite I said the wolves are friends!
They're roommates.
@@GusJenkinsElite No they don't. Being a smelly number nerd makes it so you wont enjoy shit. You think you do, but you don't. Stop being a smelly dirty wannabe tryhard in a video game
Minmaxing to get 100% optimal stats < Minmaxing to make a funny character work.
Exactly
The problem is "min-maxing" is rarely properly defined. Some people consider making a character with 7 INT "min-maxing", others think it means making some munchkin hybrid monstrosity with seven different class dips.
5:15 This video is obviously an AI construction - cats never exit when you open the door for them.
It's crazy how much of a level-headed discussion people can have once they get off Twitter. Great video!
Reddit is 10x worse.
Right?
What is Twitter?
Any discussion that doesn't involve text is the best option.
@@user-uy2sx9zw3w not even close.
what a pleasant surprise
"Also, who gives a shit?"
Honestly, super fair lmao
👍🏾👍🏾🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Pillars of Eternity 2 will always be one of my favorite games of all time!
i loved your perspective here. i really hope you make more of this kind of content going forward. it’s fascinating to not just hear your opinions from a d&d perspective, but that of from a developer as well.
Whenever Josh talks, someone is taking notes
A good listen, thanks for sharing
Love the video Josh! I appreciate these game design talks you post.
Loved watching this. Such insight with a down to earth perspective on game design. You are a legend sir!
wow, it's been a while since you've done one of these, happy to hear your thoughts!
Thanks for the upload. Always funny to see the time-honored tropes trotted out for BG3's release. It was just as fun to see online discussion that came about during the early resurgence of crit role/pillars 1, where a new generation came in contact with the genre space. And now it happens again
I find Josh to be a remarkably interesting person. As someone who is fond of many games he's worked on its really cool to hear his thoughts on these things. I even showed his talk about managing small remote teams to my boss and we've learned/used some of it in our own (non game dev) work
It's all good as long as you don't turn into that guy from Eminem's Stan. And yes - Josh is pleasant to listen to. There's a handful of people on TH-cam I like having on in the background and he is one of them. Alanah Pearce being another.
A lot of it has to do with neither being typical "TH-camrs". Alanah's sponsorships aside - their style is very early-TH-cam. Not really any fancy editing, transition effects, screaming at the camera, etc.
ck sker
I think you really nailed the reasons why people powergame and why it's not always a blind focus on winning. Even video games that do allow you to fail forward like XCOM are still unforgiving enough that optimal play is still heavily encouraged.
Unless it has truly extraordinary levels of reactivity, I cannot imagine that the game is going to reward you with a better narrative experience or more interesting conversations for making a narratively coherent build, such as recognising you took a mechanically bad feat that happens to make sense narratively.. On the contrary, with class reactivity, unless you need to meet particularly level thresholds, you are probably going to be rewarded with the most content making some cheesy frankenstein build.
I agree that it terms of building your character, a video game is unlikely to reward sub optimal choices more in terms of narrative than it would more powerful ones. The article's message there would be more applicable in terms of narrative choices that are suboptimal in terms of accumulating raw character power but provide more interesting or challenging overall experience.
That last point is also potentially applicable as a general reason to avoid minmaxing to some degree. Because in a game like BG3 that provides a ton of extra, less than obvious options for effective combat, building a character that can solve any challenge using only the most straightforward, number reliant once can hamper the experience.
To be fair, BG3 is so beloved out of the gate in large part for having extraordinary levels of reactivity. It's basically like as long as you are competent and/or creative in handling combat then almost any way you decide to build your character will offer you some kind of rewarding content.
Tbh because skill checks are more frequent than class checks you're rewarded with the most reactivity by being a drow bard and just having crazy good stats.
We're so lucky that Sawyer still sacrifices a little time to share his thoughts and experience about games and gaming industry
Thanks!
I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts on this, wish you the best.
Interesting watch and interesting points. I am doing a replay of pillars 1 (I actually prefer it to deadfire) and man do I wish we could get a pillars 3. Damn it Josh make it happen somehow! :D Great to hear from you. Hope you enjoy BG3!
Nah man, Deadfire is better. 😁But of course, we need a Pillars 3, or another CRPG in another universe that catch the amazing art that Pillars had
POE 1 and 2 is amazing games. 100%ed both of them (not all achievments though).
Screw Pillars, Tyranny II all the way baby!
My major problem with POE is the way that the attributes operate. It's so counter-intuitive for Barbarians to be stacking intelligence or Clerics to be stacking Dexterity and it makes building a character feel odd.
@@Velot_ I agree but I adjusted fast. Its just different. To be fair might is an interesting stat as you could be a mighty powerful mage or a mighty barbarian :).....thats my way of looking at it but yes int I understand works differently but it is explained very well with the mouseover so I dont mind really. Odd though yes
The combat mechanics in Deadfire are some of the best I have ever seen.
Same....weapons, armor and magic all made sense in the way they interacted with each other...each base stat also had a very good reason to exist.
Agreed. The "crit/hit/graze/miss" and "armor class vs. weapon/spell penetration" mechanics are hands down my favorite of any game I've played. Makes D&Ds basic "armor class=hit chance" mechanic feel really boring whenever I go back to it.
@@thewardenduncan DnD is a much, much worse and dumbed down system...Now, granted, i would not want to figure out all those calculations in a sit down game, but Pillars leveraged computing power in exactly the best way.
This is great, thank you. I would love to see more content from you.
I think that’s why I loved Shadowrun so much, because as a system and concept, your characters are literal min-maxers weeded out and literally better than common people. It helps its just an aspect of an interesting setting/system.
Too bad playing that system requires a special sort of person. Every group I've tried with falls apart after one session.
@@DisinformationAgent I know the feeling all too well...
At least up until third edition dungeons & dragons was also this way. "Commoner" didn't even have hitpoints.
a lot of games back in the day had a "level 0 filter" which was meant to weed out characters who wouldn't have made it through most of an adventure
Ya like, being a chaotic neutral? I always struggled with this concept of a dumb jocky action hero with a middle class, mundane, "everyman" background? When i think of battle and warriors i think roles, and specialties. I dont wanna see an every day hero, like John Mcclane? Theyre boring. I wanna see the neutral chaos of a min maxer elite true master in their field, KEEPING IT INTERESTING. I liked that you dropped SHadowrun cuz it was always about elite techies and people who just werent normal in any way. And i loved it. Like Snake Plissken or something, Hitori Hanzo, Kill Bill ladies, The Desert Fox, or Jackie Chan. Luminaries with tons of background doing very technical war stuff. Growing up we were taught to respect a true master the utmost because; the speciality cannot be taught. It must be earned through experience. I never wanted to worship everymans, john mcclane or john connors, im looking for people with min max throughput; like: Sarah Connor, Bruce Lee, Ripley, Einstein, Tom Brown, Usain Bolt, Sherlock. Both the snakes. All the snakes.
I dont want to hear about Dr wilson, i wanna hear about dr house. He was the one slaying the big demons, Like Gut
A hero should stand out in their field and now it seems like every day heroes are all we see, or marvel. Now should everyone be usain bolt? no. But its def more interesting
I didn't recognize your name at first but it sounded familiar and you've worked on games that got me into CRPGs (POE) so thanks for posting this and thanks for all you're work too.
Nice to see you posting again Josh. Hope to see more videos from you if or when you have time
as a power gamer myself, picking odd-ball choices just makes me want to min-max even more haha. it increases the pressure on your character to be built well and I enjoy this pressure a lot.
HELLO SESAME
Building correctly is part of the challenge for me.
Regarding BG3 - being optimal on tactician is a given and part of the parcel; playing an unoptimazed mish-mash build on purpose is another layer of difficulty you can give yourself, when the game cannot meet your difficulty wishes.
Playing in an unorthodox way usually involves a lot of cheesing, and is more about metagame mastery than anything else.
Making unorthodox builds that may, or may not work is one of the most fun experiences you can get in an RPG imo. After I'm done with my staple tabletop Oathbreaker Fiend Warlock & Lore Bard GOO Warlock I'll move onto other, less optimal builds like heavy armor wearing great axe swinging bard.
I mean heck you can play a naked barbarian and make it work. Thats the fun of the game, coming up with builds and ideas and optimizing it to make it work.Thats why from software games are so beloved because people can try to beat the game in different styles and ways.
@@WusterWasti From software games are different though because you can dodge 100% of damage, this allows you to still be able to theoretically beat the game even if every enemy has 1,000,000 health and you do 1 damage per hit. With BG3 you cannot do that, there is some amount of damage which is just unavoidable and there are fights which can just be mathematically impossible to win because your stats and build are just too poor.
Yes but how likely is that? That is an extreme case that nobody will experience, so my take still stands. Also it was more about how you play the game build wise. Which weapons, spells and combat tactics you use that make every run special. Or the challenges you impose yourself.
I mean BG3 is out for just some weeks now and we dont fully know how you can break every inch of the game even when speedrunners are already beating it in 11 minutes.
I think that we will see many more strats on how you can beat seemingly impossible fights. Just like when there where challenge runs in Dark Souls that where deemed impossible.
@@NihongoWakannai
I have never met a person who rolls a fresh game with unorthodox characters. They beat the game. Again and again and the unorthodox characters is how they mitigate their boredom by making the game seem fresh. The unorthodox stuff comes later.
Pure Gold as always listen to you Josh!!
First of all I just want to say. Holy crap man thanks for what you've done for the genre of ttrpgs that's awesome! Second I agree. I have been playing for a few years and I am not super great at coming up with character ideas off the start. I rarely go "OH I want to try this this and this and it doesn't matter what else is happening".
Usually I find out what the story is about and what my fellow players are doing and from there I build something I think will be fun. There is no reason that your RP can not be supportive of your character that also fills your teams roles. I like to build my personality of how I would want to play a character with the tools I have. I was in a party with a satyr, dragonborn, and lion race (I forgot the name? Leon?). And I decided to make a human druid of the sheperd that "could not wildshape" and was in love with animals and people who resembled animals. It was a great time for the short time we played. Is it so bad to make your character fitted to your enviroment? Heck no!
Great talk as always.
And bonus points for the cute kitty!
Great comments, thank you very much for sharing these ideas.
A lot of computer games don't make failing interesting enough and thus I understand optimization. In a tabletop game with a good dm this isn't the case and so I like min maxing semi good or even bad concepts, but min maxing something that is already strong, just to make it broken, would be something I would only consider in certain groups that are less roleplay focused or if everyone is power gaming. DnD 5e is too simple for extreme min maxing anyway unless you talk with the dm about what artifacts one could get.
I don't think it's that simple. Not in the least because of your added caveat of needing a good GM that runs their game in certain ways.
But at the end of the day it also comes down to preference. Your fun is not someone elses fun. And this shows in how you describe your perception of min-maxing and powergaming aswell. The idea that it is necessarily about power or winning. The belief that if roleplay options were presented by your good GM they wouldn't want or need to do these things and could have fun the way you have fun.
Fundamentally missing the point that, while you have great fun your way? Not everyone will enjoy that type of fun.
There absolutely is a group of people who is drawn to what you describe. And obviously there are people who are drawn to a more roleplay oriented style, where "failing" still progresses the story in interesting ways. There are also going to be people who think both these groups are nuts and why are you wasting your time playing make-belief. Be it that they built their entire existence around productivity and disdain anything that does not directly contribute to that or simply because they have other interests.
You pose an interesting premise "Minmaxing something that is already strong just to make it broken" -- wouldn't your "good GM" be able to present an equally strong counterbalance with ease if that were the primary concern?
Let me shift that question into a different shape - is a chess player bad for chosing the optimal moves? Are they breaking the game?
Because that is how some minmaxers approach the game, a complex game of chess. Where all the mechanics and class features etc are pieces they get to compile their side of the board with. Where you see someone trying to "break the balance", they see a puzzle to solve - an obstacle to overcome.
Does having these disparate playstyles within the same group often lead to friction? Absolutely. But this is true for anything. When two or more people with different ideas and definitions of fun are forced to play with the same ball they will often both end up unhappy for it or worse.
Let people have their own fun. You don't have to play with them or "teach them" your fun is superior.
Fully agree. I'm the type of player who will purposfully handicap myself or choose suboptimal abilities just so I can RP better. Could be fun with other gamers tho
@danjal87nl Can't say I agree with anything you said. I specifically said that I would consider doing so in specific groups and outside of those groups I wouldn't ! Simple as that. Tabletop is played as a group and if you want to play your super min maxed what ever and need to outshine everyone, thats your problem. Its not about YOUR fun and its not about me telling others what they can and can't do, but rather about the fun of the group. You think most would like that your char solves a disproportionately large amount of challenges, because you crunshed numbers ? Chess is a terrible analogy as its competitive, if that is how you approach a tabletop game, I don't envy anyone you play with.
@kingplunger6033 nah I just meant I agree with your take, and then I was just saying my personal style. My bad if I wasn't clear
Video games also put a much higher emphisis on combat. In tabletop if your character is only average to bad at combat you can still help the party in other ways, even if it is just coming up with creative solutions to problems. In a game a character that is bad in combat very easily becomes dead weight.
The one thing I did find resonant in the PC Gamer article was the idea that if you have a tendency towards making characters who are kind of trash at the beginning of a game when it is supposed to be easy and are pretty good at the end when it is supposed to be harder then you might want to try making a straightforward character for a change; fair enough. I have definitely played my share of characters who just die immediately in the early game if I do something wrong, and it might be fun to just try being a big tough dumb fighter for once or something
Every class is incredibly weak at low level. Honestly I'm surprised hit points were not more balanced properly with level ups, you literally near double your hp in 2 levels but basic weapon attacks do not increase by much.
Thanks Josh. I could listen to you talk about RPG topics all day, whether CRPG or PnP. Design, development, mechanics...whatever. Keep it up.
Always nice to get one of these videos
Had no idea who you were but having played both pillars games you've had a massive influence on my gaming experience 😂. Great video
Thanks, thank you. You've put into words what I felt about the subject.
Good discussion. My hope is that the article will help people who feel like they're /trapped/ into min-maxing to feel more freedom to do what they want, even as you said knowing that an intelligence fighter will be working at a disadvantage, the game is still playable and fun and the path is possible if that's what you want to do. As someone who plays games much more for the story than for the combat, there are some games that I won't go near because it doesn't seem like I'll be able to make the character I want. This game has that freedom even if it is a challenge, so I hope that that message has been spread well enough.
The first time I min-maxed my character was in Fallout: New Vegas. I had no idea that was even a strategy, I just wanted to make a character that was exaggeratedly strong but stupid. It made role playing easier when being convinced by Caesars Legion that I was doing the right thing. I also made a backstory where I had become a cannibal while being imprisoned by Tabitha. Eating tabitha was my real end game in that playthrough. What a game!
Thanks for your input, Josh. You are a legend. Pillars 2 is my fav CRPG. :)
Always nice to hear your opinion, Josh! Ultimately, people should just do whatever they want to have fun. If it's power gaming or going strictly with narrative choices, but not optimized, then just go for it. Who gives a shit?
more like this! I can listen to josh talk about game design for hours and not get bored
he's just the coolest game dev in the industry, straight up
Not even close. Hes an awful designer.
@@LhynnBlue L
@@LhynnBlue this is like calling Scorsese a bad director. If you still question his game design skills look at his portfolio and you will be convinced
@@fafanir82 His portfolio is awful. Not a single good game to his name.
Pillars of eternity 1 and 2 are some of the dullest rpgs Ive ever played. And Ive played almost everything this side of 1995.
Hes just bad at his job.
3.5 minmaxing left such a wound in our collective psyche that people associate any form of optimizing with the most joyless, flavorless, game breaking type of play. Like, 5e is good, but there's _really_ not a lot going on mechanically or customization wise. You get +4/+5 in your two main stats _so you can interact with the game on a basic level,_ and that's about it. There's flavorful RP options for every stat combo, and I'm sure Larian was especially diligent in making sure no character felt left out.
They even gave it a dumb fancy name: The Stormwind Fallacy
The idea that mechanically strong characters are inherently worse narratively and vice versa.
Favorable stat spreads is the most superficial optimization, and there's a lot of wiggle room available in the 5e skeleton not merely from stacking numerical bonuses together for effect, but from making the right non-numerical progression picks that allow deterministically solving challenges and advancing the game state. For example, having Speak With Dead opens up a lot of content that you simply can't engage with otherwise, both in tabletop and it seems in this videogame.
@@NephilmX everyone basically gets speak with dead though, the game drops it into your lap many which way.
@@StalinsGhostYeah, there are two easy ways to have Speak with Dead: there's an evil necromantic tome you can find that a character can read and with the right skill checks (and not just intelligence, I think wisdom and maybe constitution can also pass the checks?) and learn Speak With Dead from as a permanently prepared ritual cast without using up a spell, and even easier, there's an amulet that gives you Speak with Dead too. Very straightforward!
@@NephilmXthe game literally hands you a speak with dead amulet. Are you complaining that spellcasters are inherently stronger than martials? Welcome to DnD. Where every spellcaster will dominate creative problem solving in out of combat scenarios while every martial that’s not a rogue will just twiddle their thumbs.
Well put. I had to remind myself what min-maxing is. I haven't played an RPG since Wasteland 3. I maybe played 20 minutes of Icewind Dale. Absolutely zero time with BG1 or BG2. Bits of NWN2 and of course a good bit, in pieces, of the expansions. But almost no PoE, no Deadfire, and, ugh, no Pentiment yet. I have a major backlog issue and possibly even executive dysfunction when it comes to playing for longer than an hour. At the same time I'm glad i know what a powergamer is, what min-maxing is. There's powergaming in RTS somethin' fierce. But a comforting understanding of the spectrum of play styles from casual to hardcore. Your mic is cool and patting the kitty is also cool.
Hi Ses.
Senergy is fun. Making a build that mechanically "clicks" is fun as hell imo. The only caveat is that when it breaks the game (e.g. make it a walk in the park), it stops being fun imo (some people have fun that way, though, and I dont judge). I even feel like the ultimate goal of a gamedev should be to make the players feel like they are "almost cheating", but *without breaking the game*. Btw, someday I might try making something like that (maybe when I retire 😂)
Btw, the "feels (almost) like cheeting" feelig hits better when it's not super obvious.
even then 'find the synergy literally breaking the game, like you have to be careful about what you're doing or you'll crash the game' is why i still play binding of isaac to this day, so
I'm definitely in the camp of breaking games, I always find it fun to wipe combat encounters haha.
Kindred Spirits, We Are
Street Fighter 6 MODERN MODE Gang
@@Denny_Boi for me it's the opposite, if I stumble upon a broken combination I feel like I'm cheating myself out of the fun challenge of actually engaging with the game mechanics by winning too easily. If you like wiping combat encounters why not just play on the easiest difficulty?
I for one am stoked to see you do Tim Cain-esque vids.
long time ttrpg player, love your thoughts on game design and rpgs, appreciate these videos and discussions. I think one thing for me, is that in a long game like POE/etc, I don't have the time to do multiple runs with different styles, so at some point, I have to pick one and go, hopefully in a way that experiences as much of the story/game as possible.
Josh, I'd love if you could talk about your experiences as a game designer, and how you got to where you are today. Game design as a career is something I've considered for a long time but never really took myself seriously about it. I'm sure there are others who would be interested in hearing your perspective on the career!
Love your cat Josh. Thanks for everything youve done good sir
Sesame is the real star of the video.
If I can't sit on a screen rolling dice for six hours straight just to miss the god roll I won't be happy.
I engage in almost exclusively top-down design when rolling a character. I tend to find a mechanical interaction that I think is interesting/powerful and then flesh out a character that fits that interaction. Feels like a lot of people think if you optimize your character his name is Vanilla McWhiteBread when in reality coming up with a fiction that matches a chassis can be very fun and rewarding.
Really great breakdown!
Absolutely love pillars serie and great take on this.
It looks like one of the most ambitious goals Larian set for themselves was fail forwarding as you describe it. We'll see the results soon.
As for catering to different levels of ability or power gaming, being able to change difficulty midgame seems like quite a plus for that. Assuming tactician mode is truly challenging.
Little off topic but
Just wanted to say, NWN2 played a huge part in my taste in video games, thank you from younger me for shaping dozens of hours of enjoyment with friends!
I generally agreed with what you addressed in the video, good points all around in my opinion
Love hearing your takes, Josh! Either way I do not understand why people care so much. People will play the way they will play. Hopefully they play the way they have the most fun :)
In video games it makes zero sense to be against optimization. Play how you want. However on the table top as someone who optimized their character, it does get boring if you're always using the most OP combo of your powers. I often find myself choosing suboptimal abilities or doing a suboptimal thing in combat because it helps me RP plus it helps other people have fun
you are a legend man, I love obsidian games, owlcat games, and larian studios, top 3 best hard working, dedicated and passionate companies, bg3 is going to be amazing, i hope rogue trader and Avowed will be too!
So my problem with all of this is that if I power-game, games tend to become trivially easy. The supposed solution to this is to set a higher difficulty level, but I very much dislike how this is implemented in the vast majority of games. If I have a plate mail and the enemy guy has an identical plate mail, I expect both plate mails to offer identical protection. But because of a higher difficulty level, the enemy guy's plate mail protects better. Hence I'm usually stuck with the "authentic" difficulty level and have to artificially limit my options just to maintain a semblance of challenge within the game. For a BG3 example; no multiclassing, no GWM, no PAM, no casting two full spells with quickened metamagic, no bonus action abuse with certain items, no torch dipping, barrelmancy, hide abuse etc.
I don't think it's even possible to get through the game on Tactician without multiclassing, SS, GWM, PAM and strategically selected magic items. Unless you prepare for each encounter beforehand, I found it very difficult to beat some of them without "cheese" builds.
@@helgenlane I played through tactician with no multiclassing, no barrelmancy, no pre-fight preparation, no surprise rounds, no stealth, supplies modded to take 150 per long rest, and lots of other self-imposed limitations including what I mentioned before, and it was still too easy...
@@Diwwah what were your classes and feats?
I didn't respec any companions. Main was a tempest cleric. In addition to raising main ability scores, I used feats for medium armor proficiency and shields for characters such as Gale and Astarion, and picked mobile for Lae'zel and Minthara. For main cleric I picked resilient(con) and war caster. @@helgenlane
Almost didn't recognize you, now that you don't look like edgar allen poe anymore, like you did in the excellent Obsidian documentary. :D Love your work, man, please keep it up!
Makes sense. I indeed thought that min maxing was on the player but i think you're right and changed my mind.
The Josh Sawyer Tim Cain Coop live stream would be fucking epic
between the tim cain uploads and this, I am very satisfied with youtube atm
same. rpg fans eating good
You allowed me to be a gun mage in Pillars and for that I'm forever grateful 🤣
CAAAAT!
(a very nice calm discussion also)
My favorite types of games are the ones where you can make a "bad" character but still have fun, though that usually also requires the player to have a creative imagination, and maybe broad interpretation of the word "fun."
I think, for me, the cumulative nature of leveling you talk about at 6:13 is really what drives me towards build optimization. I don't want to miss exciting high level content because I didn't optimize my build. But at the same time, I do like quirks in my builds, things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to fit together or which are maybe a little unusual, unexpected, or out of alignment with a build purely angling for optimized stats. Can make for some really fun RP at the cost of never reaching the power of other builds, which I think was probably what Robin Valentine was trying to get at? But it still requires you put care into your builds, carefully making up for built-in weaknesses to your suboptimal combinations. That's how I do things a lot, and I find most games come with a difficulty setting that can accommodate that style of play.
So, uh, that's my takeaway I guess. I really like games where you can get yourself into bad situations with poor build choices, but get out of those situations with good gameplay choices. More games like that, please, I guess. I feel like there's enough stuff being put out there on the market, you're bound to find something which has a design philosophy which meshes well with your preferred playstyle, so what's the fuss, really.
Also, I'm sure you get this a lot, but more Sesame please :) Very good kitty
I'm a tad confused, your tweet appeared to support the article but the video refutes the points it made. I think I may have misread it.
Thanks for making the video, absolutely agree with the majority of it.
Power gaming in D&D makes sense when you understand its based around dice rolls. Even if you min/max you can still get unlucky and run into bad situations. If your character is overall balanced or worse, a charisma fighter as you said, if you get unlucky rolls chances are you just die.
In tabletop a DM can fudge dice or outcomes to keep players alive and the game interesting. A videogame is still just binary win/loss outcome. In fact BG3 introduced karmic dice to essentially fudge dice after an unlucky roll so players don't tilt and quit.
I think there's a difference between power gaming and optimising.
Power gaming implies aiming for power as the priority; which tbh can be detrimental to a cohesive narrative character (though not always).
Optimising, on the other hand, I feel simply means taking a path and trying to make it as good as you can. So you might optimise a dart throwing build, even though darts are never do as well as a longbow. This is about narrative character and making your concept play well mechanically.
Both can be bad at a tabletop, it's all about communication and making sure the group is on the same page about what roles and power levels each characters is bringing. That might mean one character is powerful in combat and another is great at skills or social interactions. So long as the group is ok with it that's not an issue. But the group might want to be more balanced and then its up to everyone to communicate what they want and what's fun for them. Sometimes that means some people don't play together and that's totally OK.
In solo digital gaming, I don't think it's an issue tbh. If you want to play a nonsense munchkin build that monsters combat but fails hilariously in social interaction, so what? It's only you playing, you're not harming anyone's experience.
Pillars of eternity 2s RTWP is the best RTWP combat ive played in a while!
I can listen to Josh talking about anything for hours.
OOO we're already talking BG3. this is epic. i was hoping this would be the case. would love a talk on BG3s writing and the heavy choice-consequence design used by Larian. I'm sure that might be a tired topic at this stage but I think this game is interesting enough to warrant its own take.
As a youth I spent endless hours playing and power gaming icedwindale 2 using mods that made that game significantly harder and all of it culminating to a solo sorcerer playthrough where even a single minor battle required multiple reloads in order to win. I can't imagine this would of been fun for 90% of people but it was fun for me. It was not about overwhelming the game it was being overwhelmed by the game (via mods or choices like solo play) and using the game systems to be on par with it.
I was sitting here waffling on if I wanted to watch this video or not, and then I noticed the cat in your lap. So, here I am!
I think what Larian has done with Baldur's Gate 3 that is so unique is that they DO incorporate 'fail forwarding' into the game! And strongly encourages finding alternative solutions to encounters.
There are many dialogue checks where failing the check results in a richer story, additional story content, better results, or just a more fun situation. As a power gamer is very easy (in early access anyway) to make a super skilled party face and pass literally every check . . . I've done it. But you miss out on so much story, and you lose the fun of having to figure out solutions to encounters . . . its pretty boring actually. Its much more enjoyable to be good at some skills but weak at others . . . then every encounter you have to weigh your options and you will fail sometimes and experience unexpected adventure! Heck you even need to decide if you should be making dialogue checks in the first place or if there was a better check-free action you could have taken instead.
The same holds true for combat . . . once you start combat you are pretty much compelled to 'win' the fight. But the majority of combat encounters in BG3 are optional (seriously 80% of combat encounters in EA can be avoided). And its really fun to find creative ways to either avoid combat entirely, or alter the encounter before starting combat so that you can have better odds. Many encounters have options to acquire allies, remove or incapacitate some enemies prior to combat, cause enemies to flip sides, etc. A power gaming team that is geared to optimizing killing everything can likely steamroll through encounters . . . but again I don't find that as much fun as accepting that my team might not be the strongest and figuring out creative solutions to get through things.
The full respec option and ability to change game difficulty levels anytime encourages taking chances and not getting stressed out if your build doesn't measure up.
I don't think Robin Valentine's PC Gamer article arguments were very well though out or written . . . but the basic thought of 'just enjoy the story' and don't stress about min/maxing is a good one.
It's not the first time an RPG reacts to player failure with interesting alternative reactivity. Disco Elysium did it, I think both Torment's did it. But yeah it's relatively rare and I hope if BG3 becomes a huge success that more RPG devs make the extra effort to focus on that aspect.
I don't really agree that BG3 has good interesting fail states. Sometimes I think they even actively want you to fail or randomly fail (outside of your control) because they think it makes it interesting (except said failiure isn't actually interesting). It's an idea they failed to execute on properly. I also really don't like randomly failing bigger things that are outside my control.
I even think the very idea is flawed. "Failing should be fun". You're right there admitting that it's a "fail". If you want to make "failing" feel equally as viable/satisfying as a success, then you should not approach it as a "fail", nor frame it as one, during design.
It's a flawed understanding of the actual "problem", which leads to an inherently flawed attempt at a solution.
@suplextrain sounds like you wouldn't like playing DND either. There is no bigger rolls or smaller rolls, it's all up to the same fate, and you get plenty of bonuses, especially with the inspiration system, if you let the roll be what it is instead of trying to "win" at everyone, when you actually want to get a good roll on something, you'll have inspiration gathered to roll again if you fail the first time.
@@artorhen The difference between a game and PnP is the human element of having a DM, things being more granular and most likely more tailored to the group.
So "failing" in say your PnP group is not even remotely the same as "failing" in BG3.
If in a game you frame something as success & fail, then obviously the prefered option is success. So by default you will not be happy with the fail. Even more so if it doesn't feel "fair" in that it was randomly given to you. This would just lead to people most likely just reloading.
This is what I mean when I say it's a flawed idea from the beginning and results being too binary. To solve the problam Larian wants to solve, they would have to approach it from a different angle.
@@suplextrain I played the early access and it's not at all a regular game in the first place if your definition of a regular game is success=good, and fail=bad. It's literally Dnd as a videogame, with all of the dnd feel, and uses the exact same dice based system. And again, you get lots of inspiration from exploring based on your and other character's backgrounds, for example if you are a sage, you get inspiration from that when you find something magical and so do your companions that have the sage background, so you get multiple inspiration from just one thing that you can easily find of stumble upon in the game which you can use if you fail a roll to reroll. You also get a lot of bonuses from you proficiencies and should also have a system to switch characters so that you can roll with the optimisation of another character. So the game does nothing against the player. And an example of times where it's boring to succeed a roll would be intimidation, a lot of situations where an npc might provoke you or want to attack you, if you just intimidate a character, they don't fight you and that's it, but if you fail and fight them, you can convince them that you're badass by beating the leader up without fighting the whole crowd which sometimes gives you more dialogue, and companion comments. Sometimes an extra approval, or sometimes you get an approval regardless of whether you initially succeeded the first intimidation roll or if you just beat up the character and humiliated him afterwards or spared him or killed him. So you do sometimes get more choices if you are not always "winning" the first roll. A lot of the encounters are usually dependent on a sequence of rolls and dialogue choices and you can fail one and succeed at another, but it feels more fluid when you let it go than if you just try to succeed all of them when the outcome can still be in your favor regardless.
I agree with what you said, and i also didn't read the article, but my instinct when it comes to primarily single player games is, you play how you want and let me play how i want.
A testament to Sawyer's innocence, is that he didn't know the topic of BG3 is more about the same subject of Elden Ring.
A testament to my innocence, I had to google what is "powergaming". A term I am going now to use all the time.
Always love hearing you talk about game design and mechanics. Say, have you ever tried playing NWN:EE on a persistent world RP server?
7:06 great example for why not having difficulty options can work really well. We all know who I can reference here about difficulty in gaming that people have shouted for difficulty options for. Those games are a great example of being able to trust the difficulty curve. I mean, you can beat them naked with your fists, it's hard and takes a long time but people do it! You can also go in with a +10 chaos zweihander and vaporize everything in a couple seconds. They're both fun.
Nice ideas and thoughts. But I do recall you expressing disappointment once with players min-maxing Pallegina, where the players were completely missing the point how her stats tie into her lore and background.
I feel like theres an inherently positive aspect of mechanical limitations for certain builds that doesn't get talked about enough. (at least in the context of single player videogames, in the context of a multiplayer tabletop experience there are social expectations at play and generally if your build slows the game down or results in you not doing your job, people can get understandably upset)
Having suboptimal character builds and imbalances offers something of a natural difficulty slider where whacky builds can offer something akin to challenge runs in other games.
You danced around all topics gj
I just want to see JS make Icewin dale 3 or pillars3 with BG3's budget so that I can die happy. I love Larian to death, but the writing in pillars is on another level.
Curious timing, with Timothy Cain doing TH-cam videos, and now Joshua Sawyer. Will this be a sign that we can expect more videos from you in the future? I would love to hear more of your Game Design insights on here, or even you answering questions (I recall you had a blog site years ago where you did this).
Hope josh does more with this channel
Thanks Josh
What are you working on these days Sawyer? :D Love your work!
I think there's also something to be said about the differences between a tabletop and video game approach, and the assumptions made for playing each. I personally don't like playing as a character that I think might fail at a lot of dialogue checks, or really any other skill checks, and I'm likely to reload my game when I fail, but there is narrative merit to going with what you get and embracing failure. I operate under the assumption that the developer centers content around success, or alternatives to success. I"m under the impression that a lot of risky assumptions have to be made about what players will like and do when developing a game, whereas, if a player assumes something about a developer choice, the stakes are lower. Really, players should just play how they like, minmaxing or not.
I would love to hear your opinion on the state of RPG's after BG3's release, also are you working on avowed?
Hey Josh, thanks for the video. There is a sound sync issue, just so you're aware. Look like sound is lagging by half a second.
here it's not lagging but sounds very bad with very frequent stuttering, probably buggy sound compression
I agree with basically everything Joshua says here. Though an Elf wizard can use a bow without having to use an any additional resources to gain proficiency.
Hey Josh, have you ever played roguelike RPGs like Cataclysm, Caves of Qud, and UnReal World? They tend to have a lot of unique and very in-depth RPG mechanics unseen in more "visual" and story oriented games, but despite that they feel overlooked in the RPG community.
it's true, one of my favorites is dwarf fortress adventure mode.
Underrail rides the line between both styles and is a fantastic game. Incredibly atmospheric.
*Delighted to hear that you make d&d character is very similar to how I make them lol.* You start out with a vague concept of the character that you wanna play, mechanically refine that character through intense metagaming, and then bring it to a cohesive whole through roleplay. Some on my friends think that I'm an alien for doing it like this, but I think it has some advantages, other than making the character good at the game you're playing if course. The chief one being that limitations are good for creativity. One of my best characters that I still get compliments regarding years later is a hexblade warlock. And why did I want to play a hexbladr warlock? Because the classes nuts and I wanted to add my carisma to attack roles and damage! An ability that's so powerful it alone makes the class-a go to for multiclassing. I don't think there's anything wrong with it obviously, and they largely agree with your stance of who gives a shit. Articles browbeating people for minmaxing are douchey to say the least. While it can be shitty if a game demands minmaxing and that takes away from enjoyment, that only the really severe problem if there is not a good variety in ways to min-max. 5e being a great example of the opposite, 9 classes, all capable of minmaxing, and then even variations on those classes with the subclasses that require different minmaxing. That's a lot of variety, enough to facilitate a huge number of unique character concepts, and then suddenly min-maxing isn't really an issue, even if paladins are straight up busted
Could you do a video on how the concept of fantasy / high fantasy came about? Who invented it? Why did it become such a popular archetype in gaming and literature?
Min/Maxing is something I take great pleasure in with DnD style games. No joke, I love to agonizing for literal hours over what is the best build for all scenarios inside and outside of combat.
On Characters - I like the freedom to build a bad character or uncommon combo. If its bad... thats on me and on my RP ability and yes.. then it does rely on a ton of min/maxing to "fix" I just saw a video today on a guy who made a Half-Orc NecroBard in BG3.. and its crazy. Its basically garbage until level 11 then just gets silly powerful and he min/maxed very hard on this to get it to work out. I love that the character now exists and we will see nutty combos in months to come.