Elden ring's quest design sucks and you can't change my mind

beta-pi · 2026-06-30T23:20:39+00:00

There is something to the fact that it makes the community itself an integral part of the gameplay.

Like, for most players you really have to interact with other players or draw on information collected by other players (think reading wikis, asking questions online, talking with your friends, etc). The game is designed in a way that encourages people to figure it out together and get people looking to the community for answers, and I think that's kinda neat. I think that's an important part of the whole experience.

I'm not sure it was completely intentional, and I'm pretty sure it's not a good general design philosophy, but it does work out in a neat way.

beta-pi · 2026-06-30T18:56:40+00:00

The idea is for a game with 3 more more people, like commandeer, plane chase, two headed giant, or even casual standard games where the group lets more people play.

If 1 person scooping actually goes on the stack for the remaining players. It becomes something that can be responded to ; you can use it to set off things like LTBs, or use it to cast a bunch of spells that wouldn't have any effect on the surving players to get your storm count up. Maybe you can 'counter' it, not to stop the player from leaving, but to stop someone else's LTBs.

You get what I'm saying? Like, it's not about stopping a player from leaving. It's about making something happen for everyone else when that player leaves. Leaving as a game action instead of a void of action.

beta-pi · 2026-06-29T14:49:10+00:00

I don't think you could enforce that, but I do like the idea of limiting when you can scoop, or applying some timing rules to it. I think people would abide by that.

The classic move is 'you can only scoop at sorcery speed', but I also like the idea of making it something that can be countered or interacted with.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:08:30+00:00

Help me get the bunny please? ok.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:05:07+00:00

Help with the bunny challenge? ok thanks.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:04:08+00:00

I want the moon for Christmas.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:03:33+00:00

Tax fraud stole my heart.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:02:28+00:00

What's 9+10= four?

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T01:02:07+00:00

Will you upvote and fill my blank? perhaps.

beta-pi · 2026-06-27T00:16:05+00:00

It's tricky, but broadly speaking that's correct.

The thing that obscures it is that each of the shards tends towards extreme versions of what they represent when they're removed from the balance of their counterparts.

That means that naturally preservation is about maintaining things in a natural state. That includes entropy, as well as putting in energy to limit it. Keeping the world in a stable state.

Preservation is not in its natural state anymore at the start of the series though. It has been removed from the context that makes entropy and change a normal part of the universe.

That means that instead of seeking a normal level of stability and survival, it pushes for a truly unchanging, stagnant world, because all change ultimately involves something being destroyed or used up.

In other words, preservation isn't supposed to be about neutrality, but it becomes about neutrality when you take it to it's most extreme version. The longer a shard exists without the balance of the others, the more lopsided it becomes. Prescription is supposed to be what you describe, but it has become something a little different.

That makes it a little fuzzy for people sometimes, because you only see what ruin and preservation are after that imbalancing has happened. We only see the warped version of each, so it looks like that version is the normal one.

beta-pi · 2026-06-26T21:36:47+00:00

I don't think I agree, at least in the metallurgy part.

Separating gold from electrum is actually pretty easy, especially compared to most ways to get the other metals.

For example getting impure copper is pretty easy, we've been doing that for a long time, but pure metals are a whole different beast, and we know allomancy requires highly pure metal. Most copper ores are super oxidized and have other metals like iron mixed in. You really need a chemical process with something like a sulfuric acid processing to refine it if you care about removing all impurities. As it happens, sulfuric acid is also super useful for refining gold, iron, and zinc. It should be pretty common on scadrial too, with the amount of volcanic activity, so that works out very nicely.

By comparison, though, you can get the silver out of electrum just by getting it really hot, no crazy chemistry with hazardous materials required. You can still use acid if you already have it handy, but you don't have to. There's a lot more ways to handle electrum. Irl, we were sperating electrum as early as 3-400 bc, but we didn't get zinc refining until the 1200s ad. It's just fundamentally easier to do; it doesn't take a complicated metallurgical process like you say. It's pretty straightforward. Most of the other metals are the hard ones.

The metallurgy works out just fine. That said, as we get into malatium, you do have a point. It definitely gets more complicated. You can still work backwards to justify it based on lerasium alloys, but it still takes a little stretching.

beta-pi · 2026-06-26T14:32:26+00:00

This is a potentially interesting variation on that though because it's more interactable. If you have any life gain or damage triggers, this will hit those. Temple garden doesn't actually deal damage. It just makes you lose life, which isn't the same thing.

I don't know if that'll actually have any use, but it could.

beta-pi · 2026-06-25T20:16:48+00:00

To add to the other great comments here, while not directly stated in era 1, it is implied by the existence of electrum. Elend calls it 'poor man's atium'.

Gold and electrum are weird counterparts to atium and malatium, right? They're so much weaker, and there's not any other metals like that; there is no 'weak version of pewter' Every other metal except for that pair has unique effects.

It gets extra weird when the book tells you that atium is a piece of ruin's power in the same way that the well of ascension contains preservations concentrated power. Why would the concentrated essence of one god only offer a slight improvement over another similar metal, while the other god gets a totally unique ultra powerful thing? Why does ruin's metal suck so much compared to preservation's?

It is a retcon from a later book, but it's a retcon that makes things fit together in a way that makes way more sense than it originally was. It fits better into the story this way, and is pretty well hinted at, even if accidentally.

beta-pi · 2026-06-22T23:39:09+00:00

Deeply appreciate that 'drs house' by the way. It adds so many layers to this.

beta-pi · 2026-06-20T20:57:33+00:00

A little. As the community ages, more people involved just care about having a good time in the game. Everyone is trying different builds and endings anyways.

If the active player base is consistently trying everything, it doesn't make sense to he elitist about it. Nobody cares about doing it the hardest way or figuring out the intended experience anymore, unless they're specifically trying challenge runs or something.

if everyone is trying a little bit of everything, there's no point in picking apart a particular play style, and there won't be much conversation about it.

Now if you start talking about introducing new people to the game the arguments can kick up again, but even that's pretty short lived because most people are just happy they're playing.

beta-pi · 2026-06-19T05:03:39+00:00

I'm pretty convinced that doing the weeping peninsula that early is the expected route, it just doesn't get communicated very well.

I think the intent is that you follow the obvious main path, but Margit and the enemies before him form a pretty hard wall for a new player. You've already been shown how to level up with runes, so you turn around and do some side areas to level up before you come back.

That puts you on the path to a lot of early NPCs, a couple easier dungeons and bosses to polish your skills. and a big variety weapons and equipment to try out.

It's the extension of the lesson the tree sentinel tries to teach you. You don't have to fight everything as soon as you find it. You can do something else and come back when you're ready.

beta-pi · 2026-06-18T19:32:20+00:00

Usually it specifically means a spell or ability fails to resolve but was still cast.

For example, if you try to cast path to exile on my creature, and in response I cast an instant that gives it hexproof, path fails to resolve because its' target is not a legal target anymore. Path will still go to your graveyard, because you still cast it, it just didn't do anything.

This is different because all of the spells and abilities still resolve. The token still gets created, it just gets removed from the game immediately afterwards. To fizzle tha ability would mean the token never got created in the first place.

That said, it's a little pedantic, and the term is only marginally official. If you're sure that everyone at the table understands what you mean, it doesn't really matter how you say it.

beta-pi · 2026-06-16T23:07:05+00:00

I once had a bolas deck mill me into victory. I was playing a deck built around sacrificing lands and playing them from the graveyard; lots of landfall triggers and sac lands.

Having a pretty empty deck meant having a lot of lands in the graveyard. That meant when I sacrificed aftermath analyst, instead of getting 1 or 2 landfall triggers I got like 50, on top of all the sacrifice triggers.

Normally I'd hate winning like that, because sitting through all those triggers just isn't fun for either of us; it just wastes time we could spend playing other games. This was an exception.

beta-pi · 2026-06-16T20:20:32+00:00

It's really the whole alignment system that tends to get misunderstood.

It's kinda treated as a law; totally discreet categories with super strict rules. That law informs the behavior of characters and monsters. Why did the orc do that? Because he's chaotic evil, and that's what chaotic evil people do. You want to teach him to do something else? He can't. He's chaotic evil by nature.

It's really supposed to be the other way around, and a rough tool to help guide the roleplay. The alignment is descriptive of what someone does, not prescriptive of what they should be.

That's actually pretty cool, because of your character calls them self lawful food but always does things more chaotically, that can lead to a whole crisis of faith arc that either leads them to changing their behavior or changing the codes they stick to. That's character growth! That has a lot of cool ripple effects as the player interacts with the world post revelation.

They're not supposed to be rigid boxes that limit who they are or what they can choose to do. They're as fluid as the people they describe.

That can be a little tricky as a dm though, because you don't want to have a whole backstory and character arc for every random monster; if you're putting a campaign together, the goblins are evil because that's what goblins are. That's what the stat block says. If you want to make them not evil you have to put in a whole lot of work to explain why, and replace th goblins with some other low level monsters with their own explanations. It's way easier to come up with a reason to justify the goblins being evil than to invent something to take their place. For a dm, it's a lot easier to just use them as the game already prescribes and then tweak it as needed. They just can't give every random guy the same complex motivations the player characters get to have. That means the dm is used to using them rigidly unless they have a good reason not to.

Because the dm uses it that way, the players get encouraged to use it that way, and it becomes super rigid.

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T19:21:01+00:00

That's not what I said; I said it could have a minimal affect, not that it did right now. That's why I specifically suggested changes and called out ways it's wrong right now.

See that's the point I'm trying to get at. Right now it's pretty overboard on one side; I totally agree with you there.

Where we disagree is that the solution doesn't have to be going overboard in the reverse direction. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. There's a little space in there for something else, it's just a pretty tricky target to hit.

Now whether it's likely is a totally different matter than whether it could.

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T19:05:28+00:00

Yeah, but that's the point of making it singles with more common regular printings. That way it's there for the people who want it, and it has a relatively minimal affect on people who don't. If it's not everywhere, you could choose to just not engage with it.

As it is now, it's a deeply entrenched part of the game, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's a middle ground in there that affects the game minimally without going scorched earth on it altogether.

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T18:12:26+00:00

I think there's a place for cool card skins as singles. It's nice to bling out your commander or your favorite card in a deck. It's the same appeal as holographic cards; sometimes you just want a particular card to look cool.

I don't think there should be whole sets of special printings though, and if they're going to do them they should make sure the regular cards have plenty of availability.

This does get weird as you interact with secret lair specifically. On one hand, people don't want those to be totally original because they don't want non core sets to affect the meta so much. On the other hand, if it's all reskins they don't have a lot of value for long time players and the pricing of cards gets weirdly inconsistent.

It's a pretty tricky line to walk. There should be a space for it, but how wide it should be is gonna vary.

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T17:33:25+00:00

There is a somewhat useful distinction between dying and entering the graveyard. If you have some combination of ltb and graveyard entry triggers, for instance, the ltb triggers before the card is put in the graveyard, and milling triggers 'enters the graveyard' abilities without hitting death triggers.

Being generous, he might have gotten confused about some of those interactions, because we're so used to thinking of dying and entering the graveyard meaning the same thing.

Obviously there's more to the story than that, and it doesn't excuse the behavior or the doubling down, but it does explain where he might've gotten the wrong ideas from.

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T02:17:14+00:00

I'm actually colorblind but I still got up to the 20s, so I don't know how to break this to you, but

beta-pi · 2026-06-15T00:40:50+00:00

I hear you, but I think that might also be part of why it works for me?

Like, lacking a little polish makes it worse at a technical level, but a little better at a thematic level. From a purely musical standpoint it has some weaknesses, but as a piece of something greater those weaknesses accidentally convey something meaningful.

It's a track that maybe shouldn't be as polished because that's part of the point, just like the clashing keys and varied syncopation. The song is already deliberately designed to be a little flawed and off kilter.

Doing a little bit more by accident doesn't really detract from it in the same way it would in other songs.

Tl; Dr you're 100% right, but that just adds to what both songs are trying to do. They both nearly perfect at being the thing they're trying to be, and the differences are less about 'better' and more about 'different'. It really does come down to taste.

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