'Pillars of Eternity' and Proper Attribute Tuning

Who wouldn't want a mindbogglingly specific "niche" panel topic? This is good.

I personally love the ruleset for Pillars. I was so glad they moved away from the min-maxing of D&D and it made it a lot more exciting to create more fun and personalized characters. There was still room to optimize and min-max if you wanted to, but I never felt encouraged to do so; it felt like a choice, rather than an obligation. In that sense, I feel they certainly achieved what they set out to do, when they designed the rules for Pillars.

Sometimes these talks make me want to buy a game more than any amount of marketing

Watched it before, but I find myself watching again. Very well-thought out and insightful. If any other game devs are watching, I think this is a really good point: "If something is required for viable play, why is it optional?" -- meaningful choices vs. illusion of choice.

Josh is such an amazing speaker. I could listen to him talking about RPG design for hours.

13:18 And now I finally understand why the berserk AoE works the way it does.

Every playsession of Pillars i ask myself like 'how did they get to this design of attributes?'. Glad this talk was made and published open.

Companion stats barely matter once you get a bunch of good gear. After a fair few hours you can boost companion stats into whatever you like with rings, cloaks and enchantments anyways. My rogue has like 25 might because of all the equipment he has and I still had enough to boost my other party members as well. And I do like the shift away from stats being "the most important thing ever skill be damned if you picked bad stats" kind of system that characterized older CRPG's. In Pillars your stats aren't as important as your tactics and your party composition. There are so many buffs whether they be from gear or from spells that you can play the game in almost any way you want and I think that's genius design.

I was trained to repeat questions when answering a Q+A session in a public speech class. I assumed this was a rule for public speaking 101. I was wrong. It is awesome to see someone clarify and restate a question (regardless of whether a microphone was used to ask the question) into his microphone. This is one of the first Q+A sessions where the speaker has done this and it makes a huge difference! Thank you!

Khalid is my favorite BG companion, I even named my Dwarf Paladin in WOW after him...

The better companions mod made me laugh. That 3 perception, haha. I'm personally not a fan of the companions, myself, but I appreciate the thought that went into them.

Ironically, I'm about 8 hours into Pillars 2 (never played one) and this makes me want to re-roll. Mighty Wizard....

I could watch stuff like this all day. Wish there were more crpgs out there, playing around with stats and minmaxing, solo challenge builds etc is one of my favorite things to do

when i played pillars of eternity, when white march released, i thought to myself, once i figured out how the stats work, that it was a really special way and genius way of doing things. now, feels like a year later, i see how much thought josh and the staff put in there, and how they did it. fascinating to watch. I am super happy to see more of them in Tyranny!

POE has everything that I ever wished for BG/IWD. What a game!

It is fun to see how many people that think their own design philosophy is the universally "correct" one and that PoEs system sucks for having another philosophy. I personally enjoyed being able to build whatever I wanted and not feeling like I was going to be deadlocked 2/3rds through the game for not making an optimal build, but I understand that others enjoy the min-maxing experience and “git-gud” attitude way more than me (that is what higher difficulties are for btw). At the same time, it gets really boring to me when there are only a very limited “correct” ways of building different classes and you limit the viable builds. It just forcing the player into narrow formula slits once they have discovered (or more likely googled) optimal builds (a feeling I often have playing other RPGs). You don’t need choices to ruin your character to make them different and interesting, and I think they did a solid attempt at creating such system. I am really happy I backed them and got a great experience from it, but that is just my taste and I understand that others like different things and maybe want different experiences. We all like different fun.

This is awesome. Very helpful for understanding how the developers made design choices.

Masterclass. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.

This is great! It's really nice to have things explained in this way. Pillars of Eternity is one of the best RPGs I've ever played. I just started Deadfire, despite having bought it a while back. This video helped get me acclimated to character stats again. I wish more game designers/developers would produce helpful talks like this.

This is fascinating, and something that I would struggle with as a designer. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are people who are experts and dedicated to this one very narrow part of systems design. It's so important!