T w e n t y S i d e d

Here we come to the nuts and bolts of character progression. This is where I’m likely to get really fussy and obsessive. If you’re one of those players who uses “auto level-up” in a game, or who hurries past the stats page to get to the more visceral parts of the experience, then this post is going to be as compelling as doing your taxes. Adjust your reading habits accordingly.

Character progression in Eschalon is fun and interesting. My biggest complaint is that the much needed in-game minimap is bound to the “cartography” skill. That is, if you don’t spend skill points on it, you don’t have a minimap. The map is pretty limited until you’ve reached about five ranks in cartography. It costs three skill points to acquire a skill, and then an additional point point for each additional rank. So, it will cost you about seven skill points to make the minimap do what you want. Considering that you only get three skill points each time you level up, this represents a major investment of points. Once you know the game you’ll discover a few ways to acquire points without sacrificing so much of your potential performance in battle, but I still dislike this idea of spending in-game skill points to make the game interface more useful. I also don’t see a need for it from a gameplay perspective: There are already lots of great skills in the game. If the minimap just worked and the cartography skill was taken away you’d never miss it.

Aside from cartography, the skills are interesting and varied. I often found myself wishing for more skill points and agonizing over tradeoffs. The points you spend at level up matter. This scarcity forces you to focus on a few core skills and forego most of the rest, or augment these lesser skills with NPC training and magical gear. I like that the system is tight and that choices feel meaningful. It pretty much demands that you give the game more than one play-through if you really want to see everything. This is as it should be.

In comparing Eschalon to other roleplaying systems, the ubiquitous D&D has six attributes that define your character. (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) Most other RPG’s have that many or less. Fallout was a bit of a renegade and introduced us to a deliciously complex system of seven attributes. Eschalon’s system is broader still, with an astounding eight attributes in the game: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Speed, Intelligence, Wisdom, Perception, and Concentration. Eight in all, and it doesn’t even include Charisma, which is good because it’s very often a complete waste in a computer RPG.

The division of Dexterity and Speed confused me at first. Most games combine these two concepts. But I can imagine cases where you’d have one but not the other. A jeweler or a locksmith might be capable of lots of fine detail work even if they have slow reflexes. A boxer might be very quick yet imprecise. The distinction makes sense, although I’m still unclear on how it works in practice. Since this is a turn-based game and everyone gets a single turn no matter how high or low their speed is, I have trouble understand exactly what the payoff is for putting points into speed.

Mental prowess is now spread out over three attributes: Intelligence, Perception, and Concentration. There’s certainly some overlap with these concepts, but I don’t mind the division if it leads to interesting gameplay and compelling character choices. My first character to go through the game was a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks fighter who neglected or ignored all three of the mental stats. I haven’t finished my second run through the game yet. So, I don’t really feel qualified to judge on how these stats behave yet.

(You could also make the argument that Wisdom is another form of the intelligence stat, since it’s merely applied intelligence. At any rate, I’ve never been a fan of the “wisdom” stat in any game, because wisdom is a matter of behavior and therefore should be an emergent part of roleplaying. Like alignment, this should be something to guide you in playing your character, not resolve dice rolls. The way it ends up getting used in most games it should be renamed to “devotion”, “faithfulness”, or “tenacity”. The word “wisdom” implies all sorts of things to which you can’t assign a hard numerical value.)

Eschalon gives you three attribute points (different from skill points) to spend at level up. If you read the forums you’ll see lots of (usually conflicting) advice on how to best spend these. Dump them all into the stats you directly use in combat? Or spread them around and round out your character? My secret shame is that I’m a min-maxer at heart, so I can’t really comment on the usefulness of spreading the points around.

The last few posts on the game have spawned some lively discussions of strategies for character development. That says a lot about the appeal of the underlying system. I like it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The biggest loss that RPG’s have suffered as they have evolved over the years is the abandonment of text as a vehicle for environmental data. You know, the cute little text window. Planescape Torment had it. Fallout had it. (Although it was sadly underused in the Fallout series.) The newer games don’t have it, and the games are inevitably more shallow for it.

Modern RPG developers take note: I can see here that the town has been destroyed, but the text that pops up still adds flavor and helps establish a mood. Which is something your fancy full-scene anti-aliasing can’t do.

The mechanics of text window itself aren’t important, but the idea of giving the player some text to further describe what they are seeing is. No matter how good you make the graphics, there are things you can’t convey visually because they aren’t things you can see. What does the room smell like? What’s the temperature like? Humidity? Stuffyness? Low level vibrations? Greasy, oily surfaces? Odd taste in your mouth? Eye irritation? What’s the floor like? Spongy? Muck that pulls on your boots? Slippery? Wobbly or loose bricks? Loose gravel that rolls underfoot? These details add flavor to the gameworld, and you can’t convey them with polygons or sound effects.

Text is also a great way to convey things that the player might not know, but their character would. “These soldiers are wearing the uniform of the royal guard. They probably spend most of their day in or around King Pancibald’s throne room.” I think it’s much smoother to convey that sort of thing in narrative text, as opposed to clumsily working it into NPC dialog and hoping the player stops to chat.

Eschalon Book I reminded me of how useful the text window can be and how much we’ve been missing out with newer games. Words are powerful. Words are potent. Words are so powerful that you can run an entire tabletop game and relate a new, unfamiliar world using nothing but text which you read aloud (or make up on the spot) and convey everything the players need to know. Visuals complement text nicely, but visuals in lieu of text can deprive the player of tremendous depth and subtlety. That’s fine if you’re playing a quick game of “Kill the Monsters and Take Their Stuff“, but most games aspire to be something deeper. And nothing adds depth like well-written prose.

In Eschalon, I liked when I would enter a room and the game would give me a bit of descriptive text. It was, in a lot of ways, like a minor reward. I could have done with more of them, and I would have liked a way to have a description repeated later (hey GM, what did you say this room is like again?) but even the classics I mentioned before were annoyingly short on text for my taste.

The economy in this game is nicely balanced. Far too many games starve you at the start, but then allow the player to accumulate vast sums of wealth, to the point where they should be able to buy and sell towns. Certainly adventuring should make you money, but if it makes you enough cash to employ an army it’s not clear why the player – now one of the wealthiest people in the world – would continue risking their neck for more. Eschalon doesn’t have this problem. At the start I really was starved for cash, and every bit of loot was important. But even in the late stages of the game I still felt like money mattered and I was still being careful with my resources.

I would say the biggest drawback of the game so far is the sheer randomness of it. Aside from the dice-rolling at character creation, there is dice-rolling when you loot objects and (naturally) dice-rolling during combat. It’s not that things shouldn’t be randomized, it’s that the outcomes vary so much. I can trade a few blows with an enemy and die. I reload the game, fight the same enemy and walk away with half my health. In some cases it feels like the strength of my stat-building is overshadowed by the noise of the random number generator. There has to be a pretty big delta between two combatants before the outcome of their battle is at all certain. Randomness should add flavor to a battle, but it shouldn’t be the driving force.

I waited for nightfall so I could sneak back behind this building and loot some containers without getting caught by the town guards. Turns out they’re empty. How disappointing. However, if I load the game I might try again and discover them loaded with fabulous cash and prizes.

Given the tight, well-balanced nature of the economy, the randomness in looting is a bit unwelcome. Loot is randomized when you click on the container. You might get a set of worthless rags. Or you might hit the jackpot and find some great armor. My first character (which I eventually abandoned) never got lucky and I was poor for the first few hours of the game. Note that this is not a bad thing. My second time I got lucky more than once, and ended up with a comfortable surplus. This is also not necessarily a bad thing, although the fact that I had such wildly different outcomes due to randomness led inexorably to the realization that…

I can keep clicking on the same barrel and then reloading the game if I don’t get something good. By doing this, I can make more money in 30 seconds of clicking & reloading than I could in a half hour of just playing the dang game. The incentive to act this way is just too strong, and the rewards are too great. Again, randomizing loot adds variety, but the randomness shouldn’t overshadow the other factors. Randomness should be spice, not the main dish.

Still, I’m now on my fourth character, which should be seen as an indirect endorsement. I wouldn’t have spent so much time with the game if I wasn’t enjoying it. This is, despite my nitpicking, a fun game. The story and character progression are the meat and potatoes here, and I haven’t even touched on those yet. I’ll get to that eventually.

UPDATE: Can I get an “amen”?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.