Reply To: Give enough information to make decisions

[Holy.Death]

You cannot force people to play a game exactly the way you want when it goes against the nature of people. It doesn’t make sense. […] I am looking forward to a dev explaining the thought behind incentives to save/reload.

The fact that something is not following your point of view doesn’t mean it makes no sense. Here is the direct response to that:

I can imagine not having all character traits be permanent, and your reasoning on this is sound. One thing to consider, though, is that those character traits are also character-defining to some extent. Having “the fat guy” you came to love suddenly being “the regularly-sized guy” among a bunch of other regularly-sized guys makes him also less special, which is what those character traits are all about. Then again, maybe he just started out as “the fat guy” and has long since become “the axe guy, slayer of dragons and sole survivor of the battle of xy”. I suppose this warrants some more reflection once we’re further on with development of the campaign worldmap.

Regarding your other point, the thing is that everything can and probably will be “gamed”, as you put it. We can discourage people in this instance by making the difference between 2 positive and 2 negative traits just strong enough to be taken seriously, but not in any way crippling. We can discourage throwing away people for their traits with prohibitive recruiting costs and recruits being rare. But ultimately, that mindset of powergaming can apply to everything, and attempting to design the game in a way that suppresses this without having gameplay suffer for it is a fool’s errant. Some people will reload the game for everything, from unfavourable battle results to characters gaining negative traits like being traumatized, as Levi suggested. That shouldn’t stop us from adding such traits in the first place. We’ll do our best to make this a balanced game that doesn’t necessitate or encourage any such powergaming, but ultimately, it comes down to how each individual player chooses to play the game for him or herself.

Although I think the answer is intelligently put and correct in that the background is so much more than +5 x and -10 y as planned. It makes little sense to listing those bonus/penalties as it just forces people that care about it to go to a wiki or record it for themselves.

Nothing is stopping them. If people want to game the system, they’ll do it.

Anyhow. Thanks for clearing up where your view of devs intentions came from and (indirectly) why your argument was firm but inconsistent. I see now that you were right in your impression of what the devs said they would do.

Right. Impression. I actually read developer’s diaries (Character traits and backgrounds, Character generation, hiring, shopping) as well as the FAQ and some other stuff that can be easily found on the internet if you look for it. That’s not an “impression” when something is stated clearly.