Pillars of Eternity Interview with PC Gamer

In an interview with PC Gamer, Josh Sawyer from Obsidian Entertainment talks about the aesthetics of game design and how they tried to inspire nostalgia and capture the feel of old infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate. For many people Baldur's Gate gave them that D&D fix that they may have been missing, either between sessions or because they could not find a group. But whereas the earlier games used a modified version of AD&D 2nd edition, Pillars of Eternity uses its own custom ruleset.

The setting of the game differs from D&D standard, but they try to distilled the archetype of characters down to capture the spirit of the D&D classes without necessarily having the exact same mechanics. Additionally, while the characters still have six ability scores, these scores have been rethought to facilitate the idea that all ability scores should be useful to all characters in one way or another.

The example they give on how ability scores will work is a barbarian that focuses on intellect. In a D&D game intellect would usually less than ideal for a barbarian, but intellect affects duration of abilities and the size of area-of-effect abilities. This is a very interesting direction to take, but it looks like something that would be difficult to implement in a pen-and-paper game, at least to the same level of detail.

Initiative is a fairly useful abstraction, but the use of attack speeds, the ability to interrupt attacks, and casting duration could prove fairly difficult to use in a table top setting without a spreadsheet or a decent amount of math. It is not so much that you would need to find the derivative of an integral and more that either the DM or players would need to constantly add or subtract small sums, which can wear down on you over the course of a long combat.

I do like the idea of a more involved initiative system, and I see how interrupts could add another level of tactical play, but I will have to think long and hard as to whether an increase layer of complexity is a decent trade-off for more involved player. Perhaps more involved play is not actually desirable in and of itself.

Pillars of Eternity's use of six ability scores also makes me reconsider the use of nine ability scores in my own system. Tradition is a powerful force, and an attempt to make all ability scores useful in some way may result in diluting the characters focus too much. On the other hand, I like symmetry, and the power/finesse/resistance and physical/mental/social framework is difficult for me, personally, to ignore.