PsychoBlonde

Casters can wear armor in Dungeons and Dragons Online without degeneracy. There are *numerous* ways to reduce or even eliminate spell failure. Most don't, though, because almost all of the really good caster items are robes anyway, and the difference eventually comes down to "do I wear this bitchin robe with +9 armor or this suit of leather that's . . . +11 armor." That, and a lot of casters just don't care about their AC, anyway. Actually, since the AC changeover the only people who really care about AC are . . . tanks. And even then, it's become a lesser concern because the very best you can do defense-wise is about a 70% miss rate on trash. Then again, in DDO you have sorcerers running around with 900 hp. They don't NEED 900 hp, they just . . . like to have them.

I honestly can't see anything in here that's worth having an opinion on, but if it matters--I'm the wizard that wears the gear that works for the way I want to play. Hopefully in reasonably subdued and matching colors.

Charisma is considered a composite of attractiveness, presence, and persuasiveness, yes. Attractiveness and presence, sort of. Persuasiveness is ruled by the diplomacy skill and an entire ream of situational modifiers. Charisma adds to it, yes, but does not fully encompass it, much like how strength increases your ability to swim but strength isn't your "swimmingness" ability. A baby can be extremely charismatic--it cries, and people jump to feed it, change it, give it a bath, play with it, burp it, etc. Children are excellent at forcefully impinging themselves on your consciousness. Unobtrusiveness is an acquired characteristic. Charisma is purposefully undefined in a lot of particulars because it doesn't matter whether you are suave, magnetic, adorable, or even repellent. The fact is that people are much more aware of your presence.

This is an interesting idea, and could be a way to limit a general points system--in order to raise some things past a certain point, you have to put a certain number of points in something else. That being said, I don't think cha buy should be glued to either wis or int. Why not? Ever met a really adorable kid? Did they act like they had ANY wis or int whatsoever? You don't have to be wise or intelligent to be charismatic. What they should have is NPC's whose reactions adjust based on your wis/int after the initial charisma modifier. Cuteness will only get you so far.

I think it'd be fun to have the opportunity to play a character who doesn't (and maybe even CAN'T) talk. I'd like to see "mute" as a background option. You'd get to see party disputes resolve without your interference, get to hear the wild-ass stuff your companions think when you don't argue with them, and get to communicate by staring people down. Could be quite fun. So I'm on board with the idea of letting/making an NPC companion do the talking.

I really would prefer some other kind of system if possible. I don't like being required to take a bunch of abilities that don't complement each other one bit in order to get the one I really want. If you think the top-tier ability is too powerful then make it cost more points or something. And if it's not more powerful, then why is it at the top of this friggin tree? Granted, a pre-req system is not immune to this problem. Most of the requirements for, say, Whirlwind Attack are lousy feats, and the pre-reqs make whirlwind so expensive to get that it's by far not remotely worth the expenditure. I'd much prefer a system where EVERYONE has a broad set of basic abilities from their class, and you gradually upgrade and modify these abilities as you go along until you get to select few unique whammies. This has the added benefit that you can have alternate uses for the general abilities (since you know people will have them) and further integrate the gameplay into the story and vice versa.

Oh GAWD yes. A thousand times. Having a dump stat should radically change your experience. That's not to say that it'll be unplayable, but it should feel very different. Although, I am in favor of having abilities that, say, let you change the origin stat for some specific bennies. I like build customization. Lots and lots of it. But it shouldn't be a matter of "casters use Int for hit and damage", it should be "certain kinds of casters, if they take this ability, can use their Int for to-hit." And then maybe you find a special unique weapon that lets you use int for damage. But you are still stuck with the low carrying capacity and other detriments of having a low strength or dex. Plus you can really only use that one weapon effectively. I also like it when it's perfectly possible to just play a strength-based melee caster and use your spells for buffs/debuffs instead of damage and other effects which rely on having a good int.

Powerful compared to what? I don't like it when the end of the game is basically identical to the beginning only they've taken all the numbers and multiplied them by 10 or 100 or 1000. This is tedious and uninspired, not to mention they usually couple it with a system where enemies scale up with you so now the ENTIRE WORLD is mysteriously populated only with level 500 badasses when 40 hours ago it was full of level 1 pushovers. Bleh. Do I like to be able to find some level 3 dudes when I've hit level 10 and one-shot the whole lot of them? Sure. But you only need to be about twice or 3x as powerful as you were in order to do this, and it's more fun if you still get some benefit from going and doing the areas with level 3 stuff. You can't have this if level 1 is mook and level 10 is superhero. But, if they're going to give you godlike powers, I'd prefer to save that for the sequel at this stage.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Throw in hit points and I'm 100% behind you. Actually, the system I'm talking about (Mutants and Masterminds) *gasp* DOESN'T HAVE HIT POINTS. Instead, you have a damage save that you roll when you take damage (similar to fort save, it also uses constitution as the base), and depending on whether you make or fail or how badly you fail the save, you get various conditions starting with -1 to future damage saves and going from there to stunned (lose next action) through to knocked out. It's meant for a four-color comic book feel so you can't actually die from combat unless you use the optional "grim and gritty" rules with bleeding and lethality. It's actually really cool, fastest d20 combat EVAR. Makes up for the fact that it can take upwards of 2 hours to make a single character.

In the original system, curses were the result of partially failed magical item creation. The only way to know whether you'd succeeded or not was to try using the item. Therefore, most wizards would delegate this task. That, and there are a few cursed items that are actually useful to malicious people. Give a Cloak of Poison as a gift to someone. When they put it on, they die. And you could take them off--with the remove curse spell.

Do you not recall Baldur's Gate? It had a game speed option that radically affected how fast everything in the game moved and acted. It's substantially harder to play on a higher speed with only manual pause because you need quick reactions and you need to know what you're doing. I'd like to see difficulty modes that embrace features like higher action speeds rather than just giving mobs more damage and more health and calling it a day. As for your comment that the game only moves as fast as the player . . . not in combat, it doesn't. And 90%+ of the game difficulty is usually anchored in combat. Can't see how this'd suit a toggle? Turn off all auto-pause, for starters.

Now, I have kind of an unusual play style with RTWP games, in that I see the pause as kind of a safety valve that I use as infrequently as I can manage. I NEVER have ANY auto-pause options. I view the progress of events as part of the game difficulty, and consider that it's up to me to react in time to changing circumstances. The thing is that, depending on the speed of the game, as the game progresses, it can start to seem too slow. (Or too fast, depending.) So, I think it'd be interesting to have game speed be part of the game difficulty settings, perhaps to replace the usual round of "enemies do more damage and have more health". It wouldn't really affect the people who use auto-pause for every conceivable thing, but the game does get harder if it moves more quickly.

My personal preference is for a system where ALL of your attributes (stats, skills, abilities, whatever else) use the SAME POOL OF POINTS. So you can have a character with really bitchin' stats and few skills, or with lots of skills and few abilities, or whatever floats your boat. And, as you get points, you can increase anything as it suits you. The downside of this system (and I do recognize that there is one) is that it lends itself to catastrophic build problems--that is to say, builds which are completely unplayable--not to mention character creation can take HOURS as you weigh the benefits and detriments of every conceivable combination. There are ways to mitigate these downsides. You can have pre-built characters with a few leftover points to spend on customization for those who don't want to micromanage every last point. And you can have build point diminishing returns, where once you raise a given attribute, skill, or whatever above a certain threshold it costs more and more to raise it further. This helps with game balance as well because you can aim for most abilities to be at or slightly above the threshold with outliers that are extremely above or extremely below to provide some goodies for people who do wonkus stuff. Basically, you arrange your check frequency on a bell curve, with the threshold being at the center. This sort of system also provides a benefit in that it rewards breadth. I really, really like systems that reward breadth, where characters don't get that much more comparatively powerful as they go on but instead have the ability to do a wider variety of things well.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

This can actually be done if you create the system in such a way that you can have access to all the abilities but switch between loadouts, and most of your power customization comes from gear, so you can swap out your Frost Mage stuff for Fire Mage stuff if you're having a hard time getting into Frost Mage. I have yet to see a game that makes explicit in the manual which builds are good and which aren't. Heck, this depends a lot on your personal playstyle, anyway. Some builds are good for people who like to charge in. Some builds are good for those who like to play more cautiously. Here's the thing, though--it's very difficult to tell which is which, particularly if you have a complex system with a lot of options. So what if it's not "realistic". It's not "realistic" to believe that somebody would only know half the available spells or sword moves, either. Or that they progress by learning one new move at a time. Or that they can quadruple their combat effectiveness in a week. "Realism" is a null argument.

How do you know this? The map doesn't include wind and rainfall patterns. Heck, you don't even know which way the planet rotates, whether it has a similar axial tilt to the Earth, or what kind of sunspot cycle their Sun has, all of which radically change growth and rainfall patterns. There's nothing wrong with the map, only with your arrogant assumptions.

Well--sort of. What it should be is a reactive skill. Instead of using it to lie, you should use it reactively to avoid people using sense motive on you to detect some character trait. It shouldn't matter whether you're lying or not, it should work more like this: PC: I am not a crook! NPC: *uses sense motive* PC: *bluff fail* NPC: You're full of ****. I'm not giving you my stuff to deliver. vs. PC: I am not a crook! NPC: *sense motive* PC: *bluff success* NPC: Here you go! What they should do is tie bluff to reputation, so what bluff does is let you pretend that your rep is much better (or much worse) than it actually is in the situations where rep should matter. Detecting reputation should be an active thing that NPC's do at certain points during conversations which is resisted by bluff. This would allow discrete uses for the trio of Bluff, Intimidate, and Diplomacy which had mechanically different functions. It can be done mechanically without trying to somehow mechanically represent player INTENTIONS. GAWD.

Ambitious, yes, but still doable because you wouldn't necessarily always need to write different responses for the NPC's. It'd be a lot easier if you get your programmers on board and have them create the conversation form with the different major PC voices embedded so all you need to worry about doing is adding the occasional oddball option. It's actually pretty easy to write many permutations when you have a nice form telling you exactly what you need 90% of the time. Once you get in the groove it isn't much more time-consuming than anything else.

I'd like to see a quest where you get assigned to escort an NPC and they bitch about how much you suck and how hard it will be to keep you alive--and it turns out to be true. At some point, they really ought to call you a noob.

If you're going to give people "better" dialog options for being smarter/wiser/a better conversationalist, then ALL the dialog options should be improved. So, an idiot might have options like: 1. Whut? 2. Dat's wrong. 3. I kill you! while your intelligent character should get something like: 1. This analogy makes no sense. 2. But it isn't true that spiders are vampires. 3. I tire of your imbecile prattle. Or your wise character could get something like this: 1. Right, I get what you're trying to say, but you're still wrong. 2. So, you think I should base my behavior on bugs? 3. Is this really the time for a debate? While your charismatic character gets dialog more like: 1. I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds fascinating! 2. Don't worry, we're not going to turn into spiders. 3. You worry too much, friend. Let's get going!

Erm, no it wasn't. You could set the BG speed so high (if your computer could hack it) that the characters looked like they were on meth. It was hilarious.

Stamina for running always becomes tiresome to me, nor is it "realistic", exactly. Trained humans can run all day and all night without ill effects. Persistence hunters do this, chasing 4-legged game animals until those animals fall over from exhaustion. Heck, during the historic Route 66 race, some of the one-day stretches were 70+ miles, and they ran day after day without a break. Our body layout is actually pretty mechanically advantageous over long distances. If they're going to have nasty jerky awkward running animations, though, I'd rather stick with the walking. I did like that you could increase the game speed in Baldur's Gate though.

This would be really cool for crits.

Heh, irony. I feel your pain, though, I used to manage a transcription company and it's amazing even how many "professional" transcriptionists are functionally illiterate, and all they have to do is write down what someone else said. That being said, I have also run the logistics on this kind of enterprise, and it's doable. The best way to do it is to make people prove up front that they can produce quality work and have integrity instead of just asking for "submissions"--you have to weed from the beginning not try to institute weeding after the fact. As for the legal side of it, it's perfectly legal not to pay people if they volunteer. You can even inform them that they won't get direct credit for it. The legal hassles begin when there's money involved. Volunteers are much less of a logistical hassle.

I brought this up months ago on the BSN, and some of the devs on the Dragon Age team considered it a bit, so I'm wondering--would it be possible or helpful to offer volunteer labor for the most tedious, low-skill aspects of the game? I'm talking about, say, writing blurbs for books you can find in dusty corners, or writing journal entries or bestiary entries or any of those myriad of tiny details that can really flesh out the game but are a huge drain on the valuable time of devs who need to be doing things like writing character dialog, designing plots, creating cinematics, etc. This game is going to have an ENORMOUS amount of content, and maybe having volunteers pick up some of the details would be a way to make it feel content-dense AND huge. This wouldn't be like the rewards for Kickstarter donations where you'd get to design it, obviously, you'd be little more than a glorified typist. But I think it could be a fun way for people to pitch in provided it could be done in a way where it saved time for the devs rather than being one more logistical hassle.