How to address the respec issue?

[rusty_shackleford]

I'm playing Of Orcs and Men, which has no respec. My issue is: I don't know if a skill is actually good before acquiring it and spending a skill-point. Some of the skills I've picked up have been either useless or not to my taste.
OTOH, I find the ability to respec in RPGs breaks them for me and really hurts the overall immershun.

What game has best dealt with this?

[Oyster Sauce]

Does any game limit respeccing to just the previous level? That could let you test things out while still having you commit to early decisions.

The Pathfinder games have like 30 weapon types and each has like 6+ feats you can grab to make them better. If you commit to a specific type you simply have to pray that the developers added a suitable one for you and that you make the right choices to get it (or cheat and look them up). There's a mod that condenses the feats into broad categories, like combining spears/longspears/shortspears/pikes/voulges/billhooks/fauchards/glaive into just polearms which is significantly less ********.

I'm on record for hating gear that sets your attributes to specific levels. It's **** like that which causes people to demand respecs.

I like games that have ingame reasons for ******* with a character's build. PoE 2 gives you 2 choices of appropriate classes when you get a companion, and NWN2 has the dwarf fighter who wants to become a monk.

[wndrbr]

Make a save before levelling up.

[rusty_shackleford]

Make a save before levelling up.

In a way that doesn't involve meta-game mechanics.

[1998]

I'm playing Of Orcs and Men, which has no respec. My issue is: I don't know if a skill is actually good before acquiring it and spending a skill-point. Some of the skills I've picked up have been either useless or not to my taste.
OTOH, I find the ability to respec in RPGs breaks them for me and really hurts the overall immershun.

What game has best dealt with this?

Allow for one respec, after the tutorial/first chapter whatever. Show the player what he is up against with and let him do an informed choice. After that he has to roll with it.

[Tweed]

Look it up online.

[J1M]

I'm playing Of Orcs and Men, which has no respec. My issue is: I don't know if a skill is actually good before acquiring it and spending a skill-point. Some of the skills I've picked up have been either useless or not to my taste.
OTOH, I find the ability to respec in RPGs breaks them for me and really hurts the overall immershun.

What game has best dealt with this?

D&D 4e codifies the ability to retrain a skill or feat or power at each level up into the rules. I think this, combined with loading a saved game for avoiding obviously broken abilities, would thread the needle of your concern.

Personally, I like the ability to completely retrain a character when at camp because generally speaking, there is more gameplay in playing with character creation than with encounters designed by modern developers.

I suppose you could justify this with an in-game magic item called a memory crystal or something.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

World of Warcraft Shadowlands gives you new abilities/advance classes via joining one of the four new factions (called Covenants). During the base game's story, when you are questing around each Covenant's home territory, the Covenant lends you their magic and you get to try out their different class abilities before deciding later on which Covenant to join. So I guess a try before you buy system might work.

[BosanskiSeljak]

Does any game limit respeccing to just the previous level? That could let you test things out while still having you commit to early decisions.

The Dwarf Run.

[DDC]

When the feasible solutions are dismissed out of hand (no metagame mechanics, don't like to respec), the ways to address the "problem" become very limited. It can really only be preempted with those constraints--balance the game well and make all of the builds viable, give the player lots of information about the abilities (video tooltips, descriptions detailed enough to number-crunch them, testing grounds, etc.).

A lot of games are just incredibly ****** at letting you know what an ability even does. The description on a passive will be something like "occasionally strengthens ranged attacks," and you won't know how often it procs, how much the attack is strengthened, and perhaps even what qualifies as a "ranged" attack (for example, it might mean a bow and arrow but not a thrown spear). And video tooltips are important to see the area and speed of an ability, etc. If the game is balanced well and you have good information when making choices, respecs shouldn't be necessary if you don't want them. Those goals are often failed so respecs are just a clumsy necessity. They're also probably needed from a marketability standpoint because most players will want them.

[Norfleet]

Buildfaggotry was a mistake. In the old days, you picked a class and that was it. You got a roster of abilities that came with the class that unlocked as you levelled up, and how you performed was a function of how you used your abilities (your tactics) in conjunction with the equipment you had (loadout). The only variables involved were all mutable attributes, so there was never a need to "respec".

Things have only ever gone downhill when buildfaggotry entered the picture and people started customizing classes and thus having ways to permanently pigeonhole or gimp themselves.

[SoLong]

Make a save before levelling up.

In a way that doesn't involve meta-game mechanics.

Allow people to exchange skills on level-up. Keeping with the rule that they would have to fulfill the conditions to take the new skill of course.

You forget lots of skills as you get older and more experienced IRL. Why not have that reflected in a game rule like this?

[Xenich]

Never liked respecs. I do agree it tends to "ruin" the game a bit.

I think it was something that was more common from the MMO genre, which came about due to the constant changing of class mechanics. In those rare cases, I can see the logic in it, but at the same time, I think that the lazy approach of developers concerning nerfing and buffing classes was just pandering to the narcists who constantly whined about other classes and "muh balance!"

[Lhynn]

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

[J1M]

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

Builds, and changing them, come out of the design antipattern of being expected to invest dozens of hours into a character before the interesting part of the game happens.

[rusty_shackleford]

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

Builds, and changing them, come out of the design antipattern of being expected to invest dozens of hours into a character before the interesting part of the game happens.

Tabula rasa is ******** tho.
No matter how much some people try, they will never get good at dancing or painting. They might, with enough effort, become OK at something.

[J1M]

At the end of the day, a "build" is a psychological trick to make people feel good about picking the things they are locked out of doing.

[WaterMage]

Imo let the 0c sees the ability before picking it or make pc learn spells from books not menus

[Lhynn]

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

The whole "Build" idea is ********. There should be unlimited lateral growth coupled with rng.
You can only get so strong, and circumstances make you what you are, but you can always keep learning new things, such is human nature.

Builds, and changing them, come out of the design antipattern of being expected to invest dozens of hours into a character before the interesting part of the game happens.

Tabula rasa is ******** tho.
No matter how much some people try, they will never get good at dancing or painting. They might, with enough effort, become OK at something.

Nowhere did I call for tabula rasa.
Basic attributes can determine how far you can go in each skill and knowledge.