You do make assumptions, that much is clear. As the few dozen other people that liked the post clearly understood, my post was meant to highlight the absurdity of you asking the lead designer of the game a series of questions that were tantamount to, "so, are you planning on making the game fun, or what?".
My question wasn't
are you planning it was
how are you planning on making the game good, and I think that's an important distinction. It would be like asking any other dev how they plan to make their game good. Yes I know mike's a good designer, I trust him to make a good game for somebody, but I still wanted to know how he planned on or if he even planned on addressing the problems I have with RPGs. It's all just tastes, just because I think the combat in such and game is bad doesn't mean that it's bad for everyone. Some people love stuff the that I hate in RPGs, and if that was going to be part of the game, that's good information too. A lot of people here hate sf4 and marvel, isn't it fair to have question about whether a new fighter is going to have similar systems?
I'm really not enjoying having my words twisted into some kind of personal attack, because that's not my intention at all. Anyone who's met me offline knows that's just not my mo. I'm sorry that a lot of people have interpreted it that way and I'll try to be more careful next time.
You say want to have a serious discussion about game design? Then doing that before posting is not at all an unreasonable idea. Your "pfft" dismissal of it says a lot about how seriously YOU take the conversation, and I'm not going to take it more seriously than you do. :^) Broken Loose's attitude aside, if you wish to intelligently discuss a topic, educate yourself about the topic. If you don't want to attempt to play it, there are FAQs which explain VP's systems in great detail, written to explain to people in your position EXACTLY how everything works. Pointedly beginning a discussion without knowledge is like...is not great. Analogies are hard.
I could be more educated on VP for sure, but you said yourself that you don't want anyone to make assumptions of your game. It's like in all these kickstarters where people say their game is inspired by darksouls, that means nothing to me, I'd rather them explain the game to me as though no other game like it exists. I mean take mighty number 9, it's marketed as a spiritual successor to megaman but it plays very differently from classic or x. Not even in a bad way, it just has a very different flow and focus even though on the surface you would think them similar. I'm not going to be the only one with these questions that hasn't played VP, are you planning on linking a VP combat faq in your kickstarter?
My point was, simply giving you the ABILITY to delay your turn at will / decide exactly when you will act relative to the enemy fundamentally changes how combat works, and you just sort of wrote that off. That by itself adds huge layers of strategy! Imagine if you could move as fast as you could think in chess, or not move at all, rather than requiring white/black/white/black. The ENTIRE GAME would change (maybe not for the better, but it would change). Chess had to add a rule about not being able to skip your turn just to explicitly prevent one part of that freedom! And that's without changing any of the other rules.
You dismiss things that might have a huge impact somewhat arbitrarily
Just because I disagree with you doesn't make it arbitrary. The reason there's a rule against passing in chess is because it would make checkmates next to impossible, so I don't think that's a very good example of depth. I can't think of a traditional RPG where skipping all actions (including defending) and letting your opponent go twice is advantageous. Even in the chess example, inaction is still an action at high levels of play. The thing is it's still yes or no, either you skip or you go as fast as possible.. You would definitely see a change at low levels of play, because players would essentially be making execution errors, be it running out of time or making a move without thinking. I don't think that would factor heavily into high level play, especially in chess where there are whole gameplans that have been extensively mapped. High level players know what they're going to do so the effects of a timer are negligible. If the goal is just to cause players to play sub optimally, than yes having a timer will do that. But I don't think that's a good way of adding depth to a battle system, I would much prefer the timer is there to support the wide range of valid decisions you can make, rather than just to add urgency. Again, if that was in VP, then man, I've been playing all the wrong RPGs this whole time, I'm definitely going to have to go check that out.
You've said that indivisible will have a plethora of reasons to delay your attacks or wait for opportune moments to use your actions. That sounds awesome, that's exactly what I'm looking for, I am absolutely bristling at the opportunity to donate. I just wanted to know what you were going to do different, that's all.
you might want to examine why you do that. It makes it difficult to talk to you. :^P
That's fairly hurtful. Out of respect I'm going to go ahead and tuck that in under advisement and not continue that particular thread. :^)
