grunker asked:

Curious: being progressive with RPG design, why are you holding on to weapon proficiencies? They pigeonhole players into eschewing interesting weapons on their characters. Which: (a) keeps them from experimenting and (b) detracts from the joy of finding new loot (found an interesting spear? Too bad, you are specialzing in swords). I thought you might agree somewhat with this, but then you included prof groups in PoE and it seems PoE2 will have even more traditional/strict proficiencies?

I think it varies from game to game.  In Deadfire, I’m not concerned about it for the following reasons:

* The advantage of a proficiency is access to its related modal ability: Rapid Shot for hunting bows, Penetrating Shot for war bows, Savage Attack for great swords, etc.  It’s advantageous, but not vital, and most importantly, it doesn’t give you an inherent accuracy or damage bonus since any such modal abilities always have trade-offs.

* It’s a party-based game.  Between five characters, you’re likely to have someone who is proficient in the weapon.

* The number of proficiencies will be constant between classes (exception: the Black Jacket fighter subclass has additional proficiencies) and increase with level.

* If all else fails, you can always respec into a proficiency if you desperately want to use a piece of gear.

Being able to opt into proficiency allows a player to say, “This is something my character is good at,” which I think is worth something.  Proficiencies were a bigger trap in AD&D because so many base weapon types were inherently bad.  I wouldn’t suggest that PoE/Deadfire’s base weapon types are all equal, but we’ve certainly tried to make them much more competitive with each other.