The War Table - is there a better way?

Anything is better, even throwing yourself at a meatgrinder is better. Books, quests, a website, lore hidden in porn videos, an easter bunny reading lore for you while you walk, tetris like words falling on your screen while you play, Jesus taking you to heaven to lecture, anything really. DAI's wartable is one of the worst ideas ever. Obsidian as always fixed this by making an interesting "wartable" with the Conquest in Tyranny. They managed to do a "wartable-keeper" and made both infintitely better. But it is not Bioware's fault, Obsidian have better genes, it is biology. Bioware makes everything wrong (KOTOR, NWN, etc) and Obsidian fixes everything (KOTOR2, NWN2, etc)

I liked the basic idea for the War Table and for what I recall a first attempt at something like this it wasn't horrible, I think it was done much better then the Garrison system for World of Warcraft.  I think efficiency of use would be my biggest problem with its implementation.

Things I think would improve it in no particular order.

1) One map instead of two.  I do think this was a hardware limit for the older systems, but it was a frustrating experience when looking for new missions or specific ones.

2) Instead of timers, have cool downs on the participating characters.  I understand the need to prevent people being able to exploit the system, but I think a cool down system works better for a single player game that people might only play in small chunks.  I am not sure if this would work, but to have two different rates of the timer decreasing, one if you are playing the game and another outside of the game.

3) Rewards match the time involved.  Kinda like #2, the amount of time required for finding crafting materials on the War Table made it useless for that type of activity, compared to going into the game and finding it myself and I would get a lot more materials spending the time myself.

4) Questing.  I wasn't a big fan of the chain questing in them for between the timers and how often I played I really didn't pay much attention to the quests I just burned through them to get the reward.  For me a single stage quest works better and I pay more attention to the details of the quests then.

5) Going back to World of Warcraft, I think instead of having dedicated people for War Table missions use party members that you aren't using so they are more involved with the story and they don't seem they are doing nothing but hanging out at my base of operations.

6) I did like the idea of using the War Table to unlock quests in the world and it could even be better then just having quests that chain in the War Table.

7) Easy of access could be more improved as well, just have it closer to where you spawn into your base of operations to cut down travel time for at least with Inquisition it was generally the only reason why I returned as often as I did and it got boring taking that long run all the time.

I love the war table. How some quests actually come with a failure. Or better yet how some (like the Sutherland boy) evolve if you make the right decision. More of thst. I really don't understand why people are upset about the timers. Instant gratification thing?

Apologies for the lengthy post.

I assumed that the purpose of the war table was to broaden the scope of the game to allow the player, as Inquisitor, to feel like they were truly the head of a large organization. Keep in mind that this is the first game in the series where the character is in such a position. In the previous two games, while everyone deferred to you because they decided that they would follow you and accept almost every decision you made, DAI is the first game where it was an official leadership position. The next closest was DAA, but that was an expansion with a much smaller scope.

With the war table, you were provided with several choices. Although each of your advisors had an idea of how best to carry out the mission, the ultimate final choice was the Inquisitor's. Once you made that choice, then your orders were carried out by various people; things were delegated rather than the player having to do everything themselves, as in previous games, just like in a real-life situation of that type.

I don't have a problem with this concept, and in fact do think it's pretty neat, except as it relates to one thing: crafting. We as the Inquisitor can delegate all sorts of things, but for the most part we need to find and farm all of our own crafting materials. While yes, we can use the war table to obtain some, the amount is negligible and the types and amount of materials aren't guaranteed compared to what we would get if we got it ourselves. In addition, for any player that is interested in the standard war table missions, taking the time (even if 30 minutes) to scavenge crafting materials seems like a waste. This is where that great concept breaks down for me.

As for the method of using the war table itself, it seems to me that the war table was designed with a certain playstyle in mind, specifically that the player would hop on for a couple of hours, check the war table, set up new missions for that time of play and to be going after they turned it off, and repeat the process the next day. This method fails for a couple of reasons.

The first is that the developer can't guarantee how a player is going to play the game, whether that is playing for an hour at a time over the course of weeks, or knocking the entire game out over a couple of days. Because the war table is based on real time, not game time (non-existent), the player is forced to play in the way the developer wants them to play.

The second is that there is very little opportunity for role play and that the war table decisions don't seem important beyond whatever headcanon the player may choose to create. In the past, I've stated that you can base your decisions on roleplay ("What would the Inquisitor do?"), and I still believe that, but it's not worth much unless you can see the results of that in the game, even with a couple of dialogues. There were very few opportunities for this, notable examples being the whole adventure of Sutherland and his crew, and the Orlesian couple who can get married (the Inquisitor can bless their marriage in person). One of the worst examples of lack of response is for the Dalish Inquisitor who can inadvertently cause their entire clan to be wiped out. That Inquisitor has no opportunity to emote about this and no one express any concern over it. For a group of people who seem all up in each other's business, even their sex lives, this is a terrible oversight.


I think an in-game chronometer would mitigate a lot of the problems these games have and also allow the developers to expand the variety of quests. Let's take Skyrim as an example. While that game does have a calendar and passage of time, it doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things. If there are time dependent quests, then I'm not aware of them. So having this sort of mechanic doesn't automatically lock the developers into a rigid structure where the player MUST do everything in a set order. They can still have a free form style using this method. Even Skyrim's fast travel causes the advancement of time, so there is no escaping it.

The benefits are manifold. Not only can they add (a few!) time sensitive quests, but they can also add some natural dialogue pertaining to the passage of time that has largely been left out of these games (aside from the DA2 time jumps). How long did it take for the whole group to actually find and settle into Skyhold? How long were they trekking across the mountain range? I'd like to know that. Even with non-linear events, such as the choice to pick Abyss OR WEWH, certain elements become unlocked after the completion of a single one of these, so you can still have mention of time. After both are done, the same applies. They can have varied and life-like environments where spawns change depending on the time of day; maybe a certain magical quest item requires moonlight and so the player needs to return after dark.

How long does it take to travel from Skyhold to the Western Approach? We would know if they had in-game time keeping.

I think the response to this would be, "But what if player A completes the game in (game time) six months, while player B completes it in three years?" If one player does more traveling than another, I can see this as a real possibility. If player A stuck to the main plot points and did little else, while player B went everywhere and did "all the things," I can definitely see this as the case. So what happens when something like Trespasser rolls around that they want to happen in a particular year (9:44)? Well the developers just have that be, which is essentially a compromise between the times. They've ignored other player-related things before, and this would be another such example.

How does this relate to the war table? It would add more realism. However, there is a problem with this, too. Players who want realism in this would find it even more tedious and have to wait even longer. Let's consider the lengthy Grey Warden chain. These missions take a few hours of real time each. In reality, they would take days or weeks, not only for the messenger birds to fly wherever, but for the group to carry out whatever orders and send further response. With in-game time it might seem like this would initially be faster, but that is incorrect. Using Skyrim again, whose default game:real time is 20:1 -- for every 20 minutes that passes in the game, only 1 minute has passed for the player -- a real estimation of the time needed for such a mission might have the player waiting days in their own time, for weeks of game time. What timescale do they use? Too close to real time and things are too slow, too fast and you end up feeling like the Harvest Moon games where there is barely enough time to harvest your crops and feed your animals before you have to sleep again, to say nothing of various optional activities.

I don't know what the solution would be. I don't think that completely removing time from the war table is wise, as it throws off the pacing. Perhaps it's just as simple as cutting everything in half.

This would be fun on the first visit, like those bits we got with Harding, not so much if I'm popping over to some Keep to see if a merchant has some item.

As for day/night, I thought DA2 dealt with that in a fun way, but I'd like to see a more natural cycle rather than something player-controlled. (Or you can sleep/wait the time away, as in Skyrim.)

Thanks for all the great thoughts, some really good suggestions so far.

What do you think about the apparent inversion of responsibility? That Cullen, Josephine and Leliana got to spearhead what could have been interesting quests, while your PC was off gathering flowers for a healer or ram meat for starving peasants. Seems backwards, yes?

This also touches on something Hrungr  has mentioned before, that there needs to be a mechanism for a leader to send minions off to gather resources. Need 120 blood lotus for some upgrades? Send a team of minions to the Hinterlands and Storm Coast.

It's okay if the PC's role in DA4 is down-sized, all you really need is one minion to do your bidding. Bertie Wooster only had Jeeves and look what he was able to accomplish.

My main problem with the war table was how self-contained it was. No one even so much commented on ANYTHING that happened in war table operations even if it was something like Clan Lavellan dying out. So if I would, I would have at least some ambient dialogue added into the main base depending on how the missions ended. Perhaps not a lot, but at least enough to cover the major operations that are expected to affect the people inside the main base.

But if I could have it my way, I would have every table operation voice acted. But I honestly have no idea how much that would cost so maybe not.

Maybe it would simply be easier if we tied the table operations to in-game captures and resources? That way the player is encouraged to go out and do stuff and the game simply has to wait until X and Y are completed before hashing out the operations instead of relying on a timer. And maybe tie actual quests at the end of certain quest chains (ex. saving Clan Lavellan) in order to give the PC a tangible reward for participating in war table ops.

I think that more WT operations should have had a Power cost rather than a time requirement. That would have helped address the Power glut in the main game. And if they had it so that the resource-gathering missions cost Power but brought in more resources, that would be even better.

There is only a power glut if you do everything, which is not guaranteed. On my very first play I was struggling for power. As I said in my post, you can't control how people play the game.

It could always be an optional way to complete the missions as well, such as using the power of the Inquisition allows you to decrease the time it takes because you are using your influence to get it done.