But what about the graceful art of battlemaimkillblarrghfighting itself? Once again, Obsidian’s approach is to keep the complexities of older D&D-esque systems while carving off the fat. Classes, for instance, might occupy traditional rolls, but they can evolve in all sorts of directions. Want a multi-rogue party? Go for it. So long as you get clever with your character builds, it’ll be entirely viable.
A lot of that stems from serious house-cleaning on combat mechanics. Sawyer practically beams as he tells me how redundant many old D&D systems were, pantomiming as though ripping the rotten entrails from some ancient machine.
“I think the fewer unique mechanics you have to teach to people, the easier it’s going to be for them to understand things. Second edition D&D has To Hit Armor Class 0, THAC0. First off, what the fuck? You have skills that only exist for certain classes, and they’re on a percentile scale for some reason. Almost every other die roll is on a D20 scale. Sometimes high is good, sometimes low is good. Some rolls always succeed on a 20, fail on a one. Some don’t. You have six different types of saving throws. You have abilities that scale at different intervals. You have all these things that are completely unique mechanics, not shared anywhere else.”
“For Eternity, we’re approaching it from a perspective of… Unless there’s a really compelling reason to have a mechanic be fundamentally different from similar mechanics, make it the same mechanic. Your accuracy is this, their defense is that, the difference is this, that shifts your chance to hit, graze, and crit by this amount. Always. Everywhere. We try to be very consistent and up front about that. The number of damage types we have is very clean and simple. An attack from a sword is a different damage type from a fireball hitting you, but the way the damage is ablated from it, resisted, whatever, it’s handled in a similar mechanical way. It’s very up front. Once you understand the way one element works, you understand the way all of them do.”
