Tamerlane

Imagine you are in a bar. A sexy woman in revealing clothes is flirting with you. Animates you to drink, is touching you all over. You will never know what has hit you^^ Well, that sort of thing works a lot better if you have two people. One to distract, and one utterly unremarkable-looking person to steal while they are distracted. Sleight of hand is a lot harder when everyone's eyes are on you.

I really like this. Gives some sense of urgency when you're in a dungeon, and gives value to designated resting areas (no more trips to that one unused tomb, Mr. The Nameless One). And I always hated the "rest to recover all your spells", thing, too. One thing you didn't mention? Ambushes. I... really don't know how I feel about ambushes while resting. Are you really adding "tactical choice to your decisions" when it can all be avoided with a hit of "F9"? Rather importantly, people have to give good directions, here. You ever play a modern Elder Scrolls game with the magic arrow turned off? It's miserable. You never know where anything is, because the developers assumed that you would have the arrow on, so nobody gives directions. Nobody says "follow the dirt trail by the red house just east of town" because for most players, that's totally irrelevant. For me, there are two important things in the combat. First is that mages and non-mages have some semblance of parity. No stubbed-toe-insta-gib level 1 mages, no god-tier level 20s. Second: let warriors control space. Let them punish runby attempts and kite-micro. Attacks of opportunity, sure, but more than that. An attack of opportunity might take out 10% of a guy's health as he runs past you to gut your mages. Give defenders ways to tie up opponents who try to ignore them. Give them ways to punish. Something similar to the Practical Incarnation/Deionarra thang would be really neat, whether you get to do it, you can have it done to you, or you can see one companion do it to another. Whatever stat system they do use, I'd really like it if the stats were actually representative of something. It's common in JRPGs and even many WRPGs for your warrior to have 200 strength and 20 intelligence while your mage has 200 intelligence and 20 strength. Does that mean that the warrior is ten times stronger than the mage? Is the mage ten times smarter than the warrior? No, of course not, because those numbers don't actually reflect the characters' strength and intelligence. They're just there to slightly increase their damage multipliers and give the player a sense of progress. And I hate that. Just... y'know, not too restrictive. I loved SPECIAL, but that hard cap of 10 was painful. Taking a naturally strong character, putting him in strength-enhancing power armour, and giving him strength-enhancing drugs should make you feel like a walking POWERTHIRST commercial, not someone stuck at the same arbitrary cap you were at before.

Ah yes, the nebulous immersion. The reason why nudity is "meh" for me is that rarely I do I find it actually adds anything to my game experience. Prostitutes don't walk just walk around naked, so seeing them not naked seems perfectly fine. I think excessive blood/gore is also distracting, but if a game involves combat and I am hitting them with a sharp swing on an object, having blood makes more sense than not having blood. Hah. Now I want the game to have one and only one brothel, and set it in an area so cold that everyone is waiting around in heavy coats all the time.

Actually, I think if your society is subterranean, that the first weapon you'd invent would be the military pick. Aye, true. But I figure that that would be more of a peasant weapon, like medieval serfs defending their lands with sickles and pitchforks, or something used mainly for relatively open "common" areas. A tall, thick shield and long spear would be the dwarven equivalent to horses and plate mail.

Also, pet peeve of mine: choosing the right dialogue options to get laid. A female wouldn't be attracted as much to what you say as what you do and what you are. In a realistic situation, if you're trying to decide on what the right answer is, you'd probably have no chance anyway. Maybe just leave the romance thing out? Of course you can get "laid" with the right answers in real life^^ And omg its still a game you can not be as real as possible. If I just hear they never get animals right.... You can also do that with all the wrong answers if you are the right type of dude, and all the right answers won't help you if you aren't. But that's beyond the scope of this forum so I'm not debating this here. Just stating that the romance thing in RPG games ends up being a little juvenile most of the time. Baldurs Gate did again a fine job. This is not Bioware.... Why not trust them a little bit instead of trying to tell them what "tropes" (what terrible fad at the moment) they should avoid. But... Baldur's Gate was Bioware?

Y'know what I never understood? Why the guys that lived in caves were the axe guys. An axe is a woodcutting tool, first and foremost. If your society spends all of its time underground - presumably you'll have to send some people out to gather wood, but most of them are underground - the axe is going to be a pretty niche item. Why aren't traditional dwarves all about spear-and-shield phalanxes to control their tight corridors?

This is... kind of a "thing" with me. Animals in games. They never do it right. Ever. Maybe hunting games? I dunno. Let's not talk about them. Bears are extremely cautious creatures. If you ever end up in a fight with a bear, it's probably because it either feels like it's defending something (typically its cubs, in which case it will probably fight only long enough for its cubs to get away) or a food source (stay away from dead animals in the wild, yo). The other major cause for attacks? It's starving to death. It's probably a year-old black bear (which may or may not actually be black), a relatively small, inexperienced creature that can't hold territory and gets chased away from easy food by older, bigger bears, not the giant death-machine brown bear (which may or may not actually be brown). In which case, it's probably not going to fight to the death, and will run away as soon as you do any significant damage (or shoot some fire its way, because holy **** would bears ever be terrified of mages). Far more likely, the bear will just avoid you. Like, 99% of the time. Especially if you're in a group. A hungry bear might go for a lone human or even a group of two, but six people walking and clanking along? That's about the most terrifying thing he'd ever encounter. Hell, most of the time, you don't even know the bear was ever there, because it smelled/heard/saw you first and got itself the hell away from you. Not that bears and wolves and what-not are common creatures to begin with; they're few in number and highly territorial, and you're far more likely to encounter... well, pretty much any other animal than a bear when you're just walking through the woods. Of course, I'm not asking for a realistic simulation of animal behaviour. That'd be crazy. I'd rather you just... y'know, avoid the issue entirely. Don't fill up the woods with wolves and grizzlies. You have total power to put in whatever bizarre and awesome creature you want, so why would you waste that potential with real-looking creatures if they're just going to be mindlessly aggressive sword-bait? And if you have to put an animal attack in, make it a moose. A cow with calves or a bull during rut. Those things scare me way more than bears.

Whatever system it is... ... just make sure I'm not fatigued if I travel to a location 24 hours away. I think it's assumed that my party would rest at some point along the way, yeah?

That would keep me from wondering how the hell my orc squeezed in to the armour I plundered from the corpse of an elf. I likes it.

Hmm. Perhaps some people should join forces-like? Never knew the guy, but I'd be down for joining in on some manner of let's-get-a-thousand-bucks-together-and-make-this-character scheme.

Y'know, I really liked KotOR 2's bashing system. Aye, you can break open the chest, but you might destroy the contents. 'Course, that didn't work so well for door locks. *nongenderspecific brofist*

Francisco Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son". Signature is also a Goya painting, albeit a bit less famous.

... Who loots underwear?

While I share your distaste for the jack-of-all always being the best, I think that that largely stems from The Elder Scrolls being solo affairs. The renaissance hero is ideal in an Elder Scrolls game because you need all those things to be fully effective but you can't rely on anyone but yourself for them. In a party-based game, you're probably going to get a lot more mileage out of a bunch of min/maxed characters than six magethiefwarriors.

Hey, I get to quote Dak'kon: "Balance in all things." For me, the important part is that mages not be useless "I cast light!... and then get gibbed by a coyote..." waifs for their first however many levels, and warriors not be useless piles of metal that get destroyed by summoned creatures (or even transformed mages), debuffs that they're powerless to fight, and nuke spells. Mages should be competent in the early goings (or if you prefer, early-game fighters should be as weak as early-game mages), and shouldn't be walking gods by the end. So, uh... I guess that puts me in the "nay" category on the vancian magic thing. If we're voting on that.

Six is ideal for me, though down to four is alright. Really, so long as I have an actual, in-game reason for party limits and am not just fighting at half strength for no discernible reason (aside from game balance/ease-of-management), I'm cool with whatever.

Crates should be fewer in number than crates. Mind: blown. Consarnit. That was supposed to be keg. Now my shame is immortalized in quote form.

Yeah, better safe than sorry I think. I actually think some (especially older) JRPGs have done romance decently, however. Like JRPGs in general they were highly scripted, but effective ones were developed slowly and generally told by the small things with an element of real, albeit sometimes somewhat childish, humanity. Lots of room was left for the imagination of the player. I don't think I've ever felt emotionally invested in a WRPG romance and often it's just the opposite--I'm frequently annoyed and distracted by them. Eh. While it's often done wrong, I'm plenty willing to trust Obsidian to handle the "romance" angle. It's a pretty major part of human existence and something that naturally happens when you have a set group of people undergoing adversity together; I wouldn't want to see it gone simply because "a lot of developers" do it poorly. A lot of developers do basic plot and character development poorly; that doesn't mean Obsidian should abandon those, too. This isn't me going "Every RPG must have a romance subplot also I'm a dinosaur roar," just... well, "small groups of people from all different backgrounds going through incredible hardship together for extended periods of time" is something I've got a lot of first-hand experience with. And here in the real world, that leads to whole lot of tent sharing on those long, cold nights. No comment on whether or not I am indeed a dinosaur, roar.

Crates? Hrmph. I suppose there can be crates. But only if they are fewer in number than the clearly superior barrel, crate, and/or cask.

Aside from "no good/evil slider" - and seriously, please, no good/evil slider - there are two big things for me. One is not punishing middle-ground. KotOR: Playing a "grey" Jedi? Lower stats, equipment limitations, only meet Visas when you get to a certain light/dark level. Dragon Age 2: get rewarded for either angering a character or making them your friend, but if you do a bit of both, they... might leave half-way through? What? This isn't about not making actions have consequences, this is about not punishing nuance and character development. The second is that whatever system is in place should not be easily "gameable". About to do something that Party Member X disagrees with? Leave X behind for a bit, do your dirty business, then re-add them to avoid all consequences. Never sat right with me.

I'm with this guy/gal. It gets done so clumsily so often that people are naturally apprehensive, but it can be very conspicuous in its absence. Whatever y'all do, I trust y'all will do it well.

We're just happy that this exists, trust me. Now the question is how much dirty, dirty money I give.