FlintlockJazz

As I said, I gave my reasoning in my first post and am not writing it out again on my phone, and as I stated if they can do both without affecting the quality of the other then great. They have already stated how long it takes Avellone to write one character, the time he has can only be spent on so many things and they can only throw so many quality writers at something. I was expressing an opinion on the matter, what this thread is for and what you yourself have been doing, backing up my posts with the reasons why I think the way I do.

Its bull is it? Please provide your reasoning as to why like I did. And as to all interactions costing resources: yes thats the point. I'm arguing that the non romance relationships should be given priority for the reasons I stated in my post.

Exactly! And I'd like to see bromances form between all party members, not just the PC! Or even rivalry and fighting between certain companions!

False dichotomy there mate. I 'grew up' on BG and PST, as did many others questioning romance, if you want it fine but don't attempt to dismiss those with differing opinions with such bull, present your argument without declaring unfounded statements please.

Let me sum up where I stand: they have already stated that writing up characters is quite intensive, something like three months for Mr Avellone to write one, and they gave up on their idea of one companion per class as they reached the max number they were comfortable with. This means that they are at max load already and everything they choose to do with characters means cutting something else they could do with characters. In this regard I would prefer that they focus on friendship tracks that can be experienced by all characters without cutting them out of experiencing interactions with other characters like romances do. Romance is a very selfish form of relationship that commandeers attention. It cuts off the possibility of romance with others. I suspect that its popularity is due to the lack of exploration with other forms of relationships, and so when people clamour for romance they are actually asking for interaction with the companions, they just don't realise there are other forms of interaction possible because it hasn't been done. If there are enough resources to develop romances then great, but only after the NPCs interactions and relationship with PC and other NPCs has been developed so that you get interaction on all playthroughs and not just on the "bone them" playthrough. This especially true considering that romance needs to be done right or not at all, and the resources required to do it right makes me question the value of it when compared to the characterisation we risk losing.

I'd find it funny if you could convince them that it was another NPC party of paladins and then watch them slaughter each other! :D Except they do. Dude, cite me one case where a guy goes on a killing spree outside of a war and gets away with it. Go out and try to murder a village yourself, and see how long it takes people to get away and inform the authorities. Serial killers cover their tracks, take precautions etc to avoid getting caught, why would they bother if they could just murder everyone and get off scot free? *Sigh* Killing everyone that moves in an entire village is not going to go unnoticed, no matter how hard you try, and if they are modeled seriously a party of six is not going to be able to murder everyone as people flee. Things don't happen in a vacuum, the lords will want to know why their villages are suddenly becoming depopulated, and there'll be people offmap who should really come and investigate but don't due to the limitations of the system and the like, and the player gets enough reward with the loot he gets when he kills them that he can spend in the short time he's got left, there'll be investigations and someone will put two and two together. If they don't feel the need to take the effort to kill someone quietly or subtly in order to avoid the wrath of the law then there is something wrong with the game, rampant murders should be reacted to realistically, which I've already explained.

Friendships should be done first and should take priority. I'd prefer to just get to know those I'm adventuring with and can be experienced by all characters regardless of gender or type and without locking you out of others usually. Romances can be added after all the characters have been fleshed out properly and only if it doesn't detract from the friendship tracks (if I have to listen to 'need to get back calibrating the calibrations' because I'm not romancing them then heads will roll), and neither romances nor friendships should be a case of ego stroking, especially not that of the player since that is what has put me off so many modern games, stop pampering to me godsdamnit. Plus, I'd like to see the exploration of relations other than sexual or romantic (because not all sexual relationships are romantic, something that alot of people on this thread seem to not realise in their definitions, are people really claiming that shagging a whore is romance...?). Camaraderie (properly done), parental, sibling, loads could be used for greater effort for 'characterisation' and enables you to have multiple characters being developed in a single playthrough rather than being forced with just the one with romances, so you could have an entire party chatting away and getting characterised without rather than just the one you want to bang while the rest stay strangely silent. If they do have romances, I'd like there to be no sex either, not because I'm puritanical but because I want to see how many of those people clamouring for romances 'for the characterisation' come crying when they find they can't bone who they want. Call it scientific curiousity. Actually, make it so that anyone who gets romanced dies horribly, so the player is forced to choose between boning them at the cost of their lives or letting them live by not romancing them. Why? Because I'm an evil twisted little **** of a bunny rabbit.

I think I'll be playing some NWN2 while waiting, I can see these forums running out of things to discuss and repeatedly arguing the same things ad nauseum.

Explain why one way should be and another not? They should both be rewarded with different and unique content. No, I think I have explained perfectly well, if the player wants to go around murdering everyone in real life they should accept the consequences of their actions, there is a reason why people who go on killing sprees end up dead.

The problem with playing evil is that it requires there to be good and then you are just going back to the good/evil axis as you are defining certain options as evil. Its better to have otions, ones that have relevant reasons even if its simply for the money. Going arpund murdering people is not dark just puppykicking jerk.

I disagree totally with the 'they shouldn't know' part. First off there would ne investigations into why a village burnt down. Second, you have six people in your party, that is not enough to make sure no one escapes and people should try to escape: parents would see the fighting and send their kids into the woods, people on the other side of the map should respond to a massacre going on and flee, etc. Killing someone withour people knowing it was you should require thought, massacring everyone does not and should not be rewarded. I'm all for letting people kill who they want, but they should then face the consequences of their actions and be pimpslapped.

I haven't read that, got a link?

The white rabbit welcomes you.

Funny that a rabbit wants to know about breeding... I'm a very innocent and pure rabbit lacking in worldliness and perversion. Honest...

Honestly, I just don't want the stronghold to be the typical 'keep management', wherein your character becomes a 'great leader of men', my mage probably doesn't care and just wants a tower to do research in and blow people up who get too close, otherwise I may just stick to the personal house for many of my playthroughs

Not really no. Usually 'sub-race' is basically the non-human version of culture in most RPGs, and as it has been said that different races share cultures now I don't really see the point. I'm more interested in what kind of crossbreeding is possible, are the races cross-fertile or are they unable to breed, if only certain races are cross-fertile why, and what kinds of crossbreeds are there.

Which is what I meant by slang. Given the right context, and enough time of spreading within that context, a Word, thus a name, can change meaning - in that context. Which Monk obviously has, in the context of RPGs. Your example of Farmer, in the right context, given enough time, could change meaning in certain circumstances - if it couldn't then what you see with a fictional Monk in an RPG, versus a real Monk somewhere in actual time . . . wouldn't be possible. And it is. If it weren't you wouldn't have all the classes named Monk throughout various RPGs that have nothing to do with the actual role of various real Monks in various cultures throughout actual history. Accept it for what it is, not just in this RPG, but in many - many - RPGs? Maybe? No? Then . . . Do you want it renamed? Would it change anything? If yes . . . Okay, sure, but, again, what has really changed? The name doesn't change in any of the other RPGs that already use said name (which are quite many, out of curiosity I went digging for information, it's a very popular name for this sort of class apparently). The function of what was once the Monk in this setting won't have changed for the name change either. Like I said earlier, I'd just apply random nonsense words to each class to avoid these very sorts of, "but that actually names mean this" discussions, but not because the name Monkis inappropriate but because the name, in the context of a fantasy series, doesn't mean a thing. The writer can take any given name and apply any given meaning to it, no matter how widly out of place. Developers that use terms like Monk, Warrior, Priest and so on tend to stick with them for very practical reasons - familiarity with how they've been used in past RPGs. For example let's take the Paladin as Obsidian have presented it . . . you could apply the same issue with the name of the Monk to the name of the Paladin. Want the Paladin's name changed? It wouldn't change the intended function it it were, and it'd just irk all the people that wanted something called "Paladin" in the game. I'm not sure changing the Monk's name would really do anything positive, and the few people in this thread that might support such a change? I'm not sure they're a good measure of a community wide reaction . . . In the end I think it's better to just stop thinking of a fictional Monk in a fantasy RPG in any real world terms, as they have had a meaning in the RPG community, for a very long time now, that is obviously not realistic. It's neat to note what real world Monks do, they come in all the shapes mentioned here and more, but, it's obvious, these fictional Monks are not them. Why not change the name when they have already done the same with the Bard anyway with the Chanter? Then they could vary it up a bit, have martial artists from all sorts of backgrounds instead of monastic ones! Hell, I wouldn't be opposed to a religious hand to hand specialist if they called them Dancers and based their martial arts on dancing with the premise that it reflects the 'movement of the heavens' or somesuch as it would fit in well with how the Chanter works. Then you could have them wearing different things like dancing clothes instead of the usual monk garb and maybe even something like masks, with the choice of mask reflecting the 'role' the Dancer wants to take on in his fight. Why would I want to name a monastic order of martial artists when my argument is that is not what defines martial arts? Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question. The reason why you can't find a trainer in those martial arts these days had nothing to do with them changing with the times, on the contrary if you take any modern day martial art it HAS evolved since then, quite often to the extent that it no longer resembles the original form, and the reason why the West can't find a 'zweihander' specialist is that the chain of 'passing on' of knowledge was simply broken, whereas others such as Eastern kung fu and Western fencing carried on. Feudalism as a concept is currently being challenged, no one called it feudalism at the time, and if you look across Europe it varied drastically. The idea of the 'peasant army' is believed to be Victorian romanticism, most combat was done by knights and yeoman archers or their equivalents, and the training of knights was an intensive affair as it was a case of life and death, and to say they won simply because they had better armour and were mobile is quite insulting (thoughout most of the middle ages knights or their equivalents did not wear plate but rather chain mail). A knight was trained in a variety of weapons, not just as cavalry (in the 1400s it was common for armoured knights to duel with glaives for instance) and also in leadership. And the use of a variety of weapons is actually an indication of a more complex martial arts system, not the opposite as your M16 example gives: if you only use one weapon you are not an artist, you are a moron. Martial artists are actually trained in a variety of weapons, samurai for instance used a variety of weapons including the bow (which was actually their main weapon, not the katana) in addition to swords and fists. As for training for unusual positions and situations that were not practical, Bruce Lee would like to talk to you as the impracticality of modern martial arts was one of the reasons he developed his own, believing them to no longer be of any use except for sport. I have a best friend who has four or five black belts in martial arts (I forget which ones, I'm too busy noting what he's got in his Menoth army), hell he was showing me a video of him when he was younger breaking the usual stuff martial artists do last weekend when I wrote the last post, and one of the things he has told me is that martial arts is, basically, a sport, that's it. He's also done Iaido with his wife, the martial art of drawing your sword and killing someone with it at the same time, and you want to know what that was developed for? Not for some philosophical reasons but simply because samurai wanted to kill peasants quickly in peacetime in an intimidatory way. That's not intended as derogatory, in fact it's quite smart: in peacetime you don't carry your sword out, you keep it sheathed, but if you need time to draw your sword then not only is an attacker going to get blows in but his mates are going to have time to think about joining in. By killing a person quickly as you draw your sword and then quickly flicking the blood off and sheathing it you don't give time for his mates to join in and by sheathing it you let it be known the matter is 'done' in an intimidatory way. It is pure intimidation, pure and simple, and is a tactic used in modern militaries around the world now. Same reason why fencing was developed, for a specific role, in the case of fencing it was developed for one on one dueling against another using the same weapon and style of fighting. Take capoiera, it was not developed as a spiritual thing or philosophy, it was developed as a martial art in the form of dancing so that it could be practiced in front of their slave owners without them realising that they were actually preparing for combat, yet it is still considered a martial art. And Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, it is purely military training yet it's still classed as a martial art. I'm not trying to 'win' the argument, I don't really care what you want to believe and if you were to actually prove me wrong then I would like that as it meant I had learnt something, but I do feel the need to point out when something like this is wrong when someone tries to use it as justification for an argument as there is already enough misinformation going around as it is. In short, I try to combat this: I'm not sure it's effective however...

Using this logic we can basically assume that 1 stronghold can work for all classes. You could, but not all strongholds work for all classes or types. A military keep would be of no interest to a wizard. Having different strongholds for different focuses covers more types and allows for more replay while keeping the numbers down allows for more specialisation, its getting the balance right that is the question. Personally I think giving the player an area of land that he can manage would be best. There could be a settlement that is fixed for all playthroughs (but can be built up), the player can order a home to be built (such as a tower for wizards, churches for priests etc) that utilises the surrounding resources to produce stuff and that determines the type of guards you have and how they are produced (normal guards from keeps, holy warriors from churches and golems and automatons for mages). The base stronghold stays the same but the home building and inhabitants vary.

That is actually an insanely good idea! Though I suppose that would mean the game devs would have to in effect make 10 versions of it and I don't think they would do that :'( Awesome idea though! Actually they wouldn't necessarily have to make one for each class. A 'wizard's' tower would work for both mages and ciphers, military outpost for fighters, barbarians, paladins and rangers, and a temple for priests, chanters and monks. That's just three that covers nine of the classes(can't remember the other two).

No offense, but thats bull of the hughest quality, propaganda used to sell you on certain martial arts in the same way fencing tried to make people believe it was more of an art than the older swordfighting schools. The term 'martial art' is of western origins and is Latin for 'Art of Mars' and was being used in fencing manuals in the 1500s. As to the rest of your post, please do some research before theorycrafting, as you'd learn just how indepth the martial arts were developed in the middle ages. Young boys from the age of 7 underwent a training regime that was comprehensive and a true 'art' that rivalled samurai and other 'ethic cool' warriors. EDIT: in short, martial art refers to a codified training regime and there were manuals in Europe describing many of the training regimes used for many of the different weapons from swords to halberds to maces, how to overcome armour with said weapons, etc.

No. That woman's proposal was bull and shows what is wrong with Bioware: That combat and dialogue was disconnected and had no bearing on each other. Also, she was fundamentally wrong with the 'well you can skip dialogue...' part, as you can't skip the CHOICE you have to make in dialogue, you are essentially just skipping the animation. That woman wanted to increase the disconnect between the parts of the game that should be increased, and is one of the problems that people complained about DA2: that you could be a mage and use spells in combat and no one will notice or say anything. If you don't like combat then try to avoid it ingame!

I'd like a good story, and everything else to be determined by that. Grimdark and fluffyness should therefore be determined by what is best for the story, though from personal experience grimdark is usually bad and contrived.

NOT to be building an army to lead as some great leader. Sure, you may need to hire on guards and the like, but I am more interested in the things the OP mentioned about getting libraries built for wizard characters, temples for religious characters and, along with peasant homes built nearby, be taxed by you for extra income. The ability to be a harsh but fair ruler, a benevolent ruler, or a blatant mobster who extorts money from his people would be good ("Bob hasn't payed his protection boss!" "Send the boys round to remind him...")

All limited, with the capability of ranged being balanced with this in mind. Usually ranged needs to either have limited ammo or it has to do less damage to compensate for the advantage of ranged, and even with limited ammo they need to be careful how they balance it as it is.

The fact that even mages are wearing armour in this game makes the lack of armour for the monk even more out of place. Side note: martial arts refers to all forms of combat, firing an AK47 is a martial art. Also, medieval Europe had many forms of martial arts, especially the knights who were brought up trained for warfare and trained in many forms of unarmed combat that rivalled anything from the East, it was just unfortunate that most of it has been lost instead of preserved. I personally would have liked to have seen a 'martial artist' built around the style of the rest of the world: an armoured monk, one who may still fight with fists but wears armour for the same reason as the mage: counteract the use of firearms. In fact, the stated reason that mages have to wear armour due to firearms getting through their mystical defenses raises the question of why that is if the monks are able to counteract it. A gladiatorial martial artist would have been rather intersting, or a monk habit wearing badass. I'm not a fan of Fortan's appearance and see it as a wasted opportunity to do something new with the class like they have done with many of the others.