Is respeccing an admission that a game does not adequately preview to the player how the game or build feels later on?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Would allowing players to test late game builds or classes in a trial area before they irrevocably commit their skill/talent points help prevent players from feeling they committed to a build or class they don't like?

[rusty_shackleford]

When you got a sneaky guy, a guy with a sword, and a guy in a robe with a staff nobody is respeccing, everyone knows what they signed up for.

From this we can extrapolate that the issue is people don't know what they're signing up for.

[Oyster Sauce]

When you got a sneaky guy, a guy with a sword, and a guy in a robe with a staff nobody is respeccing, everyone knows what they signed up for.

From this we can extrapolate that the issue is people don't know what they're signing up for.

Your guy with a sword just found gloves that set his strength from 20 to 23. If you have the option to respec, you're hamstringing yourself by not lowering your strength to 8 and putting those points elsewhere.

[Just Locus]

If it's an online game that's constantly being updated, yes. Life's short and letting the player know ahead of time that their exotic gimmick build isn't going to turn out well can be beneficial.

Fine-tuning the build to be better in the long-term is better left in the hands of more patient players.

[rusty_shackleford]

If it's an online game that's constantly being updated, yes. Life's short and letting the player know ahead of time that their exotic gimmick build isn't going to turn out well can be beneficial.

Fine-tuning the build to be better in the long-term is better left in the hands of more patient players.

Being stuck with choices you make is cool, actually. In project gorgon(MMO), my dude was a werewolf that was required to be in Wolf form during irl full moon cycles. Meaning I was completely unable to access many NPCs and abilities.
On the other hand, I got to be a cool wolf and visit the animal village

There was no way to get rid of it, to be clear.

[Just Locus]

In project gorgon(MMO), my dude was a werewolf that was required to be in Wolf form during irl full moon cycles. Meaning I was completely unable to access many NPCs and abilities.

I know, but Online games often are built to be skinner boxes that make decisions solely around player retention, besides, what OP is asking for is basically a more elaborate built-in build planner. It isn't anything revolutionary.

[UltraFan123]

My own personal experiences with respeccing are for games based on the complex 3.5 d20 system; NWN, NWN2, and the Owlcat Pathfinder games to be specific.

In these cases I don't think it was a "this game didn't told me how these classes and abilities work" but rather it was more a "this specific combination of abilities didn't worked out the way I expected them to so I should try again".

Not really the game nor the d20 system's fault of me wanting to respec sometimes, but rather it's me wanting to make a gimmicky unique build that sounded cool in my head.

[J1M]

Would allowing players to test late game builds or classes in a trial area before they irrevocably commit their skill/talent points help prevent players from feeling they committed to a build or class they don't like?

No. Respecing and the theorycrafting that happens outside the game related to it is fun.

Given that the vast majority of players will only play a game once, locking people into a choice they made when they knew nothing about the game really discourages people from caring a lot about the combat systems. At that point, mastering them is likely to lead to unhappiness with things that cannot be experimented with rather than additional gameplay.

[Cloharp7]

I think it's not exactly an admission of not explaining things properly.

In some games, skills are not known until you level up, therefore the need to respeccing is kinda important, else you incur in a build you don't like or, worse, soft locking the game due to a completely non functional build.

In some other games you know what future skills will do, but it comes attached with so many modifiers and characteristics (looking at you two Grim Dawn and Path of Exile) that it is imperative to experiment to see which synergy works better.

Overall, respeccing is there as a failsafe from ******* up, so it's a good feature in my eyes.

If I were to pick an RPG where I thought skill selection was the best, was (oh boy I just joined here, I am going to get banned for this)... Maplestory. It starts at earlier levels with 3 generic skills until (IIRC) lvl 10, then in the second advancement you get 5 (each giving you a general direction of the build you want to go for), and then at further advancements the skills you can choose keep increasing in number and variety.

If it weren't for Nexon being greedy fucks, bloating their game with so much stuff you don't know what's what anymore, I would love to play that game again. I think the core of Maplestory was a gem, as flawed as it was.

[asf]

game shouldnt tell you anything

[1998]

It's just one of those mechanics many normies expect these days. Can't have that epic sword but I am maxed out on axe.

[rusty_shackleford]

Allowing a brief period to 'retrain' a choice like perks or abilities for a level or two might not be a bad alternative.

[J1M]

Wouldn't work if there were any sort of prerequisite chains or early decisions that feed into the power of later abilities. In other words, any synergies at all.

[Stavrophore]

I think it's more to do with encounter design and bad choice of companions, ie. not covering all avenues of damage dealing/protection/CC.

[Humbaba]

Respecs are completely fine, especially seeing as most rpg systems aren't balanced, dependent on what kind of encounters the game gives you and/or which types of gear the DM/game designer is biased towards. Let's say I wanna roll an archer but there's no good bows in the game. I couldn't have known that in advance now could I? So please let me respec into a knife thrower or smth. A game's gotta be fun in the end and they're not if you gimped yourself with no way of knowing that you did so.

[Xenich]

When you got a sneaky guy, a guy with a sword, and a guy in a robe with a staff nobody is respeccing, everyone knows what they signed up for.

From this we can extrapolate that the issue is people don't know what they're signing up for.

Or they do and they suffer from greener syndrome.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

When you got a sneaky guy, a guy with a sword, and a guy in a robe with a staff nobody is respeccing, everyone knows what they signed up for.

From this we can extrapolate that the issue is people don't know what they're signing up for.

I was thinking about each time you level up you get points to invest into your stat sheet, but when you are starting it you don't know which stats will be more relevant later on unless you had spend hours beforehand doing out-of-game research and looking up forum posts on builds (and how stats work in the current patch, which could be very different). So if you are new, you could invest a lot of stat points and then later on realize you have a really ineffective build for what you want to do, hence the need for a respec.

Another scenario I was thinking about is when there are multiple classes that are similar (ie, Warrior, Paladin, Dragoon, Samurai, Dark Knight in FF11. All armored melee damage dealing classes.) and a new player can't know from the start the nuances of how they feel later on before committing to one of them. Ideas that might sound appealing on paper like sacrificing HP to deal more damage might wind up being rarely utilized in practice due to how the game actually plays, so you might wish you had picked something else and had gotten use those abilities instead. This issue is exacerbated in games with even fewer differentiators between classes, like FF14 (all melee classes period are very similar, and there are 10 of them, and there are not really any meaningful differences in role or capabilities), so you could start off thinking you want to be a Dragoon only to then realize you don't like its rotation later on, so now you have to spend a lot of time checking out other melee classes and then levelling them up. Or BG3 where looking at the whole wiki list of subclasses it becomes difficult to parse as a new player how much they meaningfully differentiate from each other and which ones I would wind up actually liking to play later on.

[SoLong]

I'll tentatively go with "Yes", here.

Someone actually living in a fantasy world would know that magic strength to 23 gloves exist and where/how to get them or something similar.

I, the player, either do not know this before the game throws it at me or, if I do know, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to actually get the gloves in this particular game. So I'm left the choice of building a character around an item I might never get.

For PnP the problem is usually solved in sessions I GM'ed: for high level new characters the char gets X amount of free items of a certain rarity from previous adventures, which allows characters to tailor their builds to those characters. If starting at level 1, players know at which level the adventure will end (since playing to level 20 takes forever we usually only run a certain campaign and I can tell them how much XP I intend to give them at most) and I'll still tell them knowledge an in-game person should know, i.e. if getting your hands on item X is remotely likely.

So if you're some weirdo who wants to dump both CON and INT to wear your Headband of Intellect and Amulet of Health for your Paladin/Hexblade then please, go ahead. Just remember that your first few levels will be spent being a drooling vegetable with brittle bone disease if we start from level 1.

[Element]

Are you aiming to create a thread with the longest title on the site?

[Tweed]

Allowing a brief period to 'retrain' a choice like perks or abilities for a level or two might not be a bad alternative.

KotC 2 does this, lets you change your feat until the next level, or something like that as I recall.