PILLARS OF ETERNITY II RULEBOOK FULL

In any other RPG, a barbarian has some 'no duh' stats and some 'dump' stats.įor a game with 11 basic classes, in reality there are many, many more waiting to be discovered by players over the course of play.īut what about my party in Fallout? No amount of adaptive, divergent, new-age stats finagling was going to get me through that blasted door. Sawyer used the barbarian class as an example. What that means for players is that even seemingly strange combinations of skills and character classes have benefits over time and don't doom a particular build to irrelevance. We've also done a lot of work on the attribute system, and revisions of the attribute system, to try to as much as possible allow people to build non-traditional characters.' 'For Pillars, we tried to avoid stuff that was heavily dependent on prerequisites.

So the team at Obsidian went a different way. Players want to grow with their character, not research them for hours or even days before they start playing. That kind of planning, sometimes eight or even 10 levels out, takes away from the organic fun and natural process of discovery behind RPGs. In building Pillars' ruleset, Sawyer says his team wanted to remove the need to min/max a character from the outset. Some members of the team don't even like it anymore. While the team at Obsidian were making a D&D-like CRPG, they weren't limited to the D&D ruleset. If you don't have the right stats, for instance, you just won't qualify for certain spells.' If you don't have good system mastery, or if you don't plan your character out very well in advance, it's really easy to make a character where you don't get to take the feats you want when you want, or you don't get to take the prestige class at the level you want, which might offset your party by two or three levels, stuff like that. 'There's just a lot of stuff in there where you can easily build a shitty character. 'Third edition, even 3.5 has a lot of trap builds,' Sawyer said.

PILLARS OF ETERNITY II RULEBOOK FULL

you can easily build a shitty character.'ĭungeons & Dragons he said, the granddaddy of RPGs, is full of them. Much more common, Josh Sawyer says, is the kind of trap that dooms a character to mediocrity. The one I ran into with Fallout was a trap inherent to the design of the game quest itself. As it turns out, there's more than one kind of trap build. Project director Josh Sawyer is himself a veteran of Icewind Dale 1 and 2, as well as Fallout: New Vegas. Pillars of Eternity is a new intellectual property, but it is not the team's first rodeo. Their staff includes team members that worked on Fallout and Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil and Neverwinter Nights 2. There is perhaps no single studio in the world with more experience creating CRPGs than Obsidian. The result, Sawyer said, is a wholly unique and dynamic character stat and creation system. It wasn't easy, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer told Polygon, but the next generation of computer role-playing games deserved better. So when the team at Obsidian Entertainment sat down to plan the design of Pillars of Eternity, one of their goals was to avoid just this kind of situation. The game simply led them - led me - astray.Īnyone who's played a computer role-playing game is familiar with the pitfall of 'trap builds' as they're called. Rather than bury all that time (and bottle caps) into potentially over-leveling my characters for that one door, I just started over.īut that character, that party that I left behind? There was nothing wrong with them. My only option was to grind that party for four or five whole levels, dumping all of my earned experience fighting radscorpions and bandits into lock picking. There was literally nothing I could do to get the damned door open, and my story just stopped.

It was at that moment, in that dirty digital basement, that I realized no one in my party had the right mix of stats or skills to move on. I forget where exactly, but it was after dozens of hours of play that my party ended up in the bowels of a dilapidated building somewhere in the wasteland trying to bust through a locked door. The first time I hit a dead end in a role-playing game came while playing the original Fallout. So they threw out the rules, and built their game from the ground up to be something better. The team behind Pillars of Eternity knew they could do better. You shouldn't have to put in hours of study to roll up a great character, and games shouldn't hinge on your ability to guess what combination of skills designers thought make the most powerful archetypes.

Pillars of eternity ii rulebook