Just read this piece of a very insightful series of Shacknews articles:

https://www.shacknews.com/article/1...y-engine-era-of-rpgs?page=24#detail-view
I also didn't know that Pillars Of Eternity 2 initially got rid of the grazes -- you don't merely hit or miss on Pillars, you can also graze, which softens the "frustration" for some, apparently. Pillars is purely dice based, no softening or "stabilizing" as such, although it's a Dice 100 rather than a 20, technically.

Quote
Craddock: What have you found to be one thing that most players fail to grasp about game mechanics? Something that you find needs to be explained, or should be explained, regardless of genre?

Josh Sawyer: I don't know. It's weird. I feel like roleplaying games are in a weird space because there really is so much about them that's built around tradition. I guess a thing that needs to be taught, really, are basic dice-rolling mechanics. When people come to a roleplaying game like Pillars of Eternity, or like the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, if they haven't played a tabletop roleplaying game, the role of dice and randomness is something that I don't think comes easily to people, especially for players who play more contemporary games such as action-RPGs and first-person RPGs.


Quote
Probability is very difficult to communicate. There have been so many instances of that. I remember one while making Icewind Dale II. Third-Edition D&D switched over Rogue characters: They no longer have backstab damage, they have sneak attack. Every few levels, a Rogue got another die. So, you'd start with 2d6, and then three [d6], four, and five, all the way up to fifteen d6. That's fifteen, six-sided dice. The actual maximum you could get is ninety points of damage, and I got a bug from QA at Black Isle saying, "Why do I never see ninety points of damage?" I was like, "Well, it's fifteen, six-sided dice being rolled." And they said, "Yeah, so I should see it sometimes." I'm like, "No, dude, that's not how probability works. There's a really, really steep bell curve in operation, here."

They wouldn't believe me. They refused to believe me. I showed them a chart of distribution, and they still wouldn't believe me until I took fifteen dice into a room with them, and I rolled, in front of them, fifteen d6 twenty times, and I added them up and charted them on a piece of graph paper. I said, "Do you see how this falls inside the bell curve?" Finally they kind of grumbled and accept it.


Quote
Craddock: Do you think that visual systems would benefit orthographic RPGs like Pillars of Eternity, or do you think dispensing with traditions like showing percentages and dice rolls would alienate long-time players who want to simulate that D&D dice-rolling experience?

Sawyer: I do think there's a risk of alienation, there. One thing that I think solved the problem somewhat is we included a graze range, which I think did help a lot. Graze was a mechanic we introduced in the first Pillars. We initially got rid of it in Pillars II because some traditional players didn't like it. What graze did was, let's say you have a fifty percent chance to hit. That meant there was a fifty percent chance of hitting, straight up, but beneath that fifty percent, there was a small margin—I think in Pillars 1 it was thirty-five percent, which was pretty big—that you would graze. A graze only did half damage, and status effects [as a result of hitting an enemy] would only have half their duration, but you still made contact. You still did something.

For example, if there was a thirty-five percent chance [of grazing], if you saw sixty-five percent chance to hit, what that really meant was that there was a one hundred percent chance that you were going to land something: thirty-five percent chance it would be a graze, and a sixty-five percent chance to land a hit or better. That really helped because when you got into those high percentages, even if you didn't land a capital-H hit, you landed something. That, I think, avoided that feeling of, This is fucking bullshit.


On a somewhat related note, Sawyer's current project is probably the one I'm most curious about. It's small-scale, thus doesn't have the problem of big audience expectations -- and it's apparently also "non-violent", whatever that means in the end.


Last edited by Sven_; 06/11/20 12:07 PM.