Tamerlane

I'm 99% certain I've seen Josh specifically mention electrical attacks doing extra damage to people wearing metal armour. Granted, that was a while back, and I guess it could have changed since then.

I'm of the opinion that if you're talking about descriptive text, you left intuition behind three towns back. Don't get me wrong, I think it'd be cool to have armour deal with electricity in a realistic manner, but what they're doing makes sense in its own way.

Making a full suit of armour behave like a Faraday cage would be realistic, but I guess this is one area where intuitiveness is more important. Magic not always ignoring armour is A Good Thing, at the very least. There will doubtless be some spells that don't give a damn about it, and lots that target reflexes and psyche rather than deflection, but spellcasters never caring about an opponent's armour is boring as all heck.

Armour doesn't much care if that rock it just got hit by was picked up off the ground and thrown from some dude's hand or conjured into existence and thrown via telekinesis.

Oh, totally. But between him and Candrian (a character with a lot less personality and charm than Ebb), anyone who wants to learn about the setting is in for a long ****ing talk.

Hey, woah, Mourns for Trees was cool, man. I mean, it probably helps my opinion of him a lot that I'm a bit of a silviculture dude myself, but still. If you want to complain about the dialogue of a character in PST, how about Ebb Creekknees and Candrian? Pages and pages of "so this is the planes, guys".

Actual cooking suggestion: flat-out steal the cooking competition minigame from Suikoden 2. Including the part where one of the potential judges was literally a wolf.

I have no idea what the current state of the priest class is, but at the very least: She looks like she could take a couple hits.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that a monk or whatever would be "as good as" a fighter at eating up attacks. If a class is made to be really ****ing good at something, as fighters are at taking hits, other classes probably aren't going to threaten it in its niche. My bringing up the monk and druid was more me saying "these dudes could probably take a fair few hits if you're willing to sacrifice (other things they're normally better at)", not that they'd be full-on fighter replacements. And yeah, barbs are gonna have naturally crap deflection, if my memory serves. Tank for your party by killing everything before it can attack!

Sorry to dissappoint, but its certainly not the druid and probably wasn't at your time of writing. The bar just seems so high because percentages are broken down separately within the two pools. The classes with most votes are rogue and wizard at the moment, if you can call ~30 votes statistically significant at all. That's not to say that an update on the druid wouldn't be interesting (although I dislike the concept and would never play one). Aw, dammit. Here I thought everyone was down to learn more about the rad wereperson class.

They'd been doing them every other week for a long while, and now that they're working on A Big God Damn Update, it's super unlikely that they'd start doing back-to-back updates.

Maybe a monk could sub in for a fighter in that role? Their wound mechanic kinda-sorta lets them heal themselves with their own attacks. There's also druid shapeshifting, which we know little about so far (and surprise, look what the most-voted-for class is). Paladins are buff-centric, but they're also frontline dudes, so they'll have decent defences (and paladins have buffs that further improve allies' defences).

So Skyrim, Morrowind, Witcher etc. are terrible titles for you? "Especially for a new franchise". God damn, man.

Is there a mechanic in which bow strings can critically fail due to humidity?

1: Bioware and Black Isle did not create those locations and did not create those names. They were already established D&D properties when the games were made. There is a reason I wrote "especially for a new franchise". I mean, I realize that we are in super ****ing subjective territory, but for me, naming a new game "Ixgarl's Lair" is a hell of a lot worse than naming a game "The Lord of the Rings: Shelob's Lair". 2: Even then, most of those are actual real words. "Gate", for example. "Dale", too. "Icewind", I'll confess, is not a word, but I think most people can understand what a combination of the words "ice" and "wind" is trying to get across. That leaves us with Baldur, a name from one of the best-known myths in Europe.

I specifically dislike "made up word in title", especially for a new franchise. I don't give a damn about Amalur, its kingdoms, or its reckoning, man. I'm fine with Pillars of Eternity, if for no reason besides keeping the PE acronym.

This, 1000 times this. At least with a 3D camera, terrans can't hide missile turrets underneath their floating buildings anymore, those jerks.

See, that BG screenshot... it doesn't really look like a forest to me. It looks like someone said, "Okay, I want one of these, and one of these, and one of these, and hey, a couple of those would be cool." And it's visually striking, but it doesn't look like a real forest. The PE screenshots, on the other hand, use a bunch of different models of the same one or two species' of trees. And that's... well, that's how forests usually work. Fairly homogenous in species and to some extent size. Now, you can certainly prefer how BG did it for style reasons - and I'd disagree with you, 'cause seriously, that's just a big ol' vomit of things labelled "tree" - but the waterfall screenshot in particular is easily the most "realistic" of any of the images in the OP. That said, I'd love to see some big-ass Haida Gwaii old-growth going on. Some of those big, mossy fellas. Aw yeah. That's the stuff, right there. Yeah.

Someone is always disappointed in something. No matter how good it is, no matter how accurately it matches what was promised, someone, somewhere will scream "BETRAYAL!" when the finished product doesn't mirror their idealized version of what it was supposed to be. This is exacerbated in the case of PE because 1: everyone here is partially responsible for funding the damn thing's creation, and 2: the game was pitched as a very specific thing (the most faithful adaptation of the Infinity Engine style of game ever), but many fans disagree on what was and was not a core part of the Infinity Engine experience.

No. Hypothetical: magic is more useful/potent/versatile, but has separate drawbacks that purely physical power doesn't have. Hypothetical: there is **** that magic just can't do (Horror of horrors!). Hypothetical: pretty much anything, because you can do that when you're making up a setting. Why did Gandalf sword people? Was he not the ballingest wizard in the land? Why didn't he just cast Time Stop? Maybe magic isn't a "do everything easily" option in a lot of fiction? Maybe using the same stat as a basic measurement of power doesn't make everything equally useful and capable in the exact same arena at all times? Oh, you spend your time learning how to manipulate the wind instead of fencing? Okay, now you can do (wind magic thing) to compensate for how crappy you are at (sword thing). See, here's a fundamental problem you're having. You're simultaneously trying to hold magic up as DIFFERENT and DISTINCT, yet every example you're giving of magic is "something a normal person could do, only your hands stay cleaner". DIFFERENT and DISTINCT isn't using magic to burn through ropes. That's a strength check by different means, and that's why you're having trouble with this whole damn thing. Of course they're going to be too similar if you your every example is doing the same damn thing slightly differently. Why did Gandalf stab dudes? Why did Greek gods need a blacksmith? Don't do this, dude. Jesus, you kn- What the actual ****?

... or bypass all that by saying that there's some inborn, genetic (or XxX~SoUlPoWeR~XxX) component that prevents everyone from doing it, or from doing it the same way. Because, y'know, class system with no multi-classing. All the gasoline in the world isn't going to help if some people are born with waterwheels instead of internal combustion engines. Fiction is handy that way. Also, "or people could just paralyze you" is a pretty silly thing to say. "Oh, hey, it's Pazuzu the Dread Mage! It's cool, guys, we don't have to go through the whole laborious effort of preventing him from talking, we just have to paralyze him now!" EDIT: And again, sheer hitting power is not the only way to measure something. Gate all the cool metamagic powers behind int, or... hell, anything.

Other: I am still a five-year-old-boy who wishes that "holding a sharp piece of metal" was still the dominant method of conducting martial combat.

Just say it, you horrible tease.