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Original post by JasRonq Do you really put the onus on the designer to make idiotic choices usable?

No. The onus is on the designer to remove 'idiotic' choices altogether.
A choice between being "gimped" and "not gimped" is not interesting at all, and serves only as a gotcha that will spoil the enjoyment for players who are less familiar with the ruleset.

How do you suggest fixing the above situation then? None of the skills are to blame, they are not bad skills. The games main game play of violent confrontation is not a bad design choice either. Its the player making a bad choice about which skills could work that is at fault here. Would you force the player to choose at least one skill from column "offense" and one from column "defense"?

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Original post by JasRonq Would you force the player to choose at least one skill from column "offense" and one from column "defense"?

a lot depends on the game, but something along those lines might be a reasonable solution.

You don't necessarily have to optimize all their choices for them: there can still be good choices and bad choices: but at least do what you can to keep them from gimping themselves to the point of uselessness.

Mainly my point was that while it is often possible to gimp yourself, many of the choices that lead to that are quite obviously stupid ones to make. Mostly in reply to this:

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To be honest, if you can't complete the game with a skill set that you can choose in game, then that skill set should not be included in the game.

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Original post by JasRonq Mainly my point was that while it is often possible to gimp yourself, many of the choices that lead to that are quite obviously stupid ones to make.

"Quite obviously" to whom?
These kinds of assumptions are just bad design. Seriously, there are no dumb choices, only dumb designers. If you intentionally leave in a "bad choice" then that choice should be recoverable or at least early-out as part of teaching the player about the game.
If you make it guesswork which choices are good and which choices are bad, then you're designing an unfair game. Only those players that correctly guess the mindset of the designer will do well (or those that read walkthroughs by other people who've finished the game).

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Original post by MadKeithV Quote: Original post by JasRonq Mainly my point was that while it is often possible to gimp yourself, many of the choices that lead to that are quite obviously stupid ones to make. "Quite obviously" to whom?

Exactly. Even in a game called 'Warmonger' it is not necessarily stupid to take only defensive skills. You might plan on playing defensively to begin with and develop offensive skills later, only to find that you can't change your skill set and you're screwed.

Also: Welcome back MadKeith!

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The onus is on the designer to remove 'idiotic' choices altogether.

So an idiotic choice, say "getting hit by an enemy attack", should be taken out of a game.

To win a game you have to select the optimal choices. This by definition requiers there to be non-optimal choices. If all choices are optimal, then the player can not loose the game at all. There is no longer a challenge. There is no longer need for interactivity, you may as well just go watch it as a movie.

Sorry, I can not agree with this as it take all reason that something is made as a game rather than as a movie or a book.

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Original post by Edtharan Quote: The onus is on the designer to remove 'idiotic' choices altogether. So an idiotic choice, say "getting hit by an enemy attack", should be taken out of a game.

I think you're stretching the limits of the definition of an 'idiotic choice' in your example.

In combat I don't generally "choose" to be hit by an enemy. There's no "be hit by enemy" button that I can click that will cause the enemy to hit me, and if there were, I would probably never click it. Such an option would indeed generally be idiotic, which is why it doesn't show up in all that many games.

Getting hit is a risk that is taken which is balanced against the reward of XP, drops or whatever that the combat offers me. The decisions are therefore: "Do I engage this enemy?" and "How do I engage this enemy to minimise my risk and maximise my gain?"

There might be some special attacks that trade defense for attack: again, these are tradeoffs, and therefore generally not idiotic. For example, a frenzy type ability might sacrifice defensive fighting (and thus increase the chance of being hit) for increased offensive power, working on the principle that the best defense is a good offense.

There are even cases where being hit is desirable. NWN had a couple of spells that did retributive damage to enemies that attacked you: if you cast these, you often WANT them to hit you to maximize your damage output. In these cases, a "Get hit by enemy" button might even prove useful. Of course, you'd only want to use it if the retributive damage it does to them is proportionally greater than the damage they can do to you...

I can see where you're coming from though. Where do we draw the line in terms of protecting the player from himself? At what point does a particular choice cease to be merely "bad" and becomes "idiotic", and thus deserving of being removed from the game?

I'm not sure there's an easy objective answer. In the example given of character creation, it's easy enough to see that allowing the player to create a character you know right from the start will be unable to complete the game is not going to result in a good user experience. Expecting the player to make intelligent choices right at the start of the game, before he's had any real chance to explore the game world and familiarise himself with the mechanics is a little too much, and if the consequences of those choices are guaranteed failure then it's simply not fair.

You are right that asking the player to be psychic and know how your game works before they get into it is bad design. Im not talking about that. Im talking about the player having to use common sense. Choosing all defensive skills and nothing offensive at all will, in a game based around fighting as suggested by the title, create a situation where you will probably die too often to enjoy the game and may not get to a high enough level to expand your skill set to offensive skills.

In an open skill system, you leave skills in and take them out based on their individual usefulness to the player and how they fit into different builds. If it adds a lot to many builds, it should be left in. That doesnt mean that every potential build you can make in the open system has to be viable, but if every skill is strong in many but not all cases then none of the skills deserve to be removed.

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Original post by JasRonq Choosing all defensive skills and nothing offensive at all will, in a game based around fighting as suggested by the title, create a situation where you will probably die too often to enjoy the game and may not get to a high enough level to expand your skill set to offensive skills.

As someone who knows nothing about your game mechanics, I disagree. I don't think it follows at all that going all defensive is necessarily an obviously idiotic thing to do. I think it depends very much on the ruleset, which the player does not know until he's played for a while.

Consider the tank archetype. The tank doesn't really care all that much about doing damage, he's a walking shield designed to absorb damage while others inflict the real damage. Knowing nothing about your game besides the title, how do I know that creating an uber-tank is going to make the game unplayable?

The D&D ruleset used in NWN2 is somewhat skewed in favour of defense: A maxed out defensive character can get his AC far higher than a maxed out offensive character can get his AB. Furthermore, the defensive character sacrifices far less offensive ability than the offensive character sacrifices in defense. The net result is that defensive builds beat offensive ones, and this is purely an artefact of the rule set.

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In an open skill system, you leave skills in and take them out based on their individual usefulness to the player and how they fit into different builds. If it adds a lot to many builds, it should be left in. That doesnt mean that every potential build you can make in the open system has to be viable, but if every skill is strong in many but not all cases then none of the skills deserve to be removed.

If a build is non-viable it should be caught at the earliest possible moment. Ideally, that would mean it is not possible to create such a built at all, due to an intelligent mechanism for restricting the player's choices to something viable.

Anyway, I think we're veering off-topic here. Perhaps this discussion should be in a different thread.