PsychoBlonde

I'd prefer to skip the mystical prophetic hoohah, but I do prefer my character to be exceptional in the sense of "able to deal with situations that would be beyond the abilities of actual people in real life". Is it absurd that you can defeat entire armies (or sneak by them, or convince their commander to take up knitting instead, WHATEVER)? Yes. Is this more fun than having you get your butt handed to you by each and every schmuck you encounter? Also yes. But I prefer instead of "you're the ONLY ONE who can save us!" you get "well, you might be able to do the job, and you're HERE." Although it might be funny to have a side-quest chain where some crazy prophet person insists that you are the Chosen One and tries to send you off to do things.

I would vastly prefer not to have a repair system or a charges system like the Elder Scrolls games, particularly since having SIX CHARACTERS with the kind of gear woes you get on just your ONE character would catapult this from a minor annoyance to the level of total insanity. Now, here's the weird thing--I actually kind of liked gear repairing in Fallout 3 because it had a gameplay benefit--you could reduce the number of identical copies of X you were carrying by using one to repair another. The fixed one would be worth more, so you didn't lose as much cash as you would if you just dumped the item on the ground when you got overloaded. (Granted, if you were the type who would willingly shuttle back and forth to the store or storage container 15 times, you could make more money that way, but if you weren't, it was a neat mechanic.) However, the system could also be kind of annoying if you found a unique or unusual item that was difficult to repair. If they decide they want to do a mechanic like this, I don't want it to be a numerical durability system. Instead, I'd prefer it work more like this: 1. It only applies to weapons and armor. 2. It's tied to either the critical hit system or special "sunder" or "dispel" type abilities that work equally on characters and monsters. 3. Instead of taking durability damage, weapons and armor can get conditions like "torn" or "dented" or "dispelled" or "cursed" that change the way the bonuses of the item apply. 4. Most of these conditions are removed automatically when you rest. 5. Some specific conditions may require you to take the item to a particular location/person or use a special ability to restore them.

So, I'm curious as to what types of gear bonuses people like in a game. I, personally, am fond of the way Dungeons and Dragons Online does it. There are TONS of different types of bonuses, some completely unique to certain items. (I mean TONS.) The bonuses individually can be pretty large--30% increase to damage for a single bonus, for instance--but they have strict stacking rules so there's a hard limit on how high you can get those bonuses. (That, and special items that DO stack are at a premium.) The benefits from the magic on the gear are usually way, way more important than the item of gear itself--especially since, say, non-magical gloves don't do ANYTHING in DDO. I won't say this is the best system, but I'm curious about how people prefer it. Would you like to have fewer types of bonuses, without the unique (and sometimes bizarre or OP if you put them with other specific items) bonuses, or a huge, mega, crazy long list? Would you like to have big bonuses that (mostly) don't stack, or little ones that do? (Big bonuses that stack tend to get REALLY ABSURD, and little bonuses that don't stack are like, WHY.) Would you rather have the vast majority of the benefit of the item come from the basic underlying item, or from the magic on that item? Granted, this mostly applies to weapons and armor.

As long as there's a justification for it, like, that's where Fafhrd landed when they chucked him out of the bar for being obnoxious and drunk. Then later on he shows up and kicks your ass to get his sword back. Then he invites you out for a drink which eventually devolves into an orgy. Then when you can't pay your tab you go and raid the Supreme Majestic Temple together, steal the Holy Sacred Jewels, and impale the High Priest through the viscera. And the Supreme Majestic God curses you with burning hemorrhoids. And then you go terrorize the town by setting things on fire with your self-lighting farts. And Fafhrd is so impressed that he gives you the sword.

I can't eat pasta. I demand steak.

I don't expect 5 million. 2.5 million would be really nice and let us get all the stretch goals outlined thus far

Um, from everything I've seen thus far, the game is single-player. There's some discussion about them *potentially* adding some multiplayer functionality down the road IF they get enough money. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any developer updates about this so far.

I knocked out a quick logo: Eh, just messing around.

Well, I don't have a DeviantArt page, but I do have some stuff posted if you want to check it out: I do pencil sketching, painting, and I've knocked out a fair number of quick Illustrator portraits: Like I said, I don't claim to be any kind of a pro.

This is a cool idea. I'd be willing to pitch in--I need to work on my art some anyway. I'm not a GREAT artist (I'm CERTAIN others are better), but I can at least help get started. I could do custom forum avatars for people--lots of folks on this forum have blank avatars. I could stick a little "obsidian order" logo in the corner, too.

When you meet Drizz't he promptly EXPLODES some gnolls right in front of you. He didn't need to rely on reputation. :D That being said you can still kill him if you cheese it out with ranged weapons and kiting, cause he's melee-only. But it's rough, he's pretty fast and can one-shot pretty much any party member at that point. That being said, I prefer to start out decent (as in, no, my poor d4 hit point wizard won't have a 50/50 shot at getting ganked by a housecat) and get better slowly, rather than start out just ridiculously inept and within a few levels I'm sneezing and defeating 40-50 mobs. One problem also with a lot of games is that you spend the first 15 or so levels investing in getting a big top-tier ability . . . and then the next 10 levels you spend picking up stuff you don't need and won't really use, because you don't have enough points to actually progress toward another big ability and all the lower-level stuff SUCKS compared to the Big Whammy you already have. I consider this poor design--you should still be using your 1st level spells at endgame.

If Project Eternity does well we may see a rush of copycat games going back to 2D. Wouldn't that be awesome. It's stupid how expensive games have become because of Feature Creep on expensive 3D.

I do like needing to do some significant exploring and fighting to get Teh Ossum Lootz, but no grinding please. Grinding in a single-player game is a HORRIBLE mechanic. That being said, I also like it if there are a lot of gear tradeoffs in the game--like you can get random items with single large bonuses, or get a legendary item with 8 good bonuses on it, and occasionally that random +80% fire damage staff is just so tempting anyway. Basically, I don't want a situation where by the end of the game you're wearing 100% of your unique/legendary loot and you've sold 100% of your random or base level loot. Because if the base level loot is going to be worthless, they should just give you cash instead and save you the running around.

You could submit yourselves under a group name, so the group will get the credits mention, like "The Purple Hill Mob" or something. I'd ASSUME that when go time comes you'll get an email or other contact asking you to specify how you want to be referenced in the credits. Otherwise there are going to be a lot of credits mentions for ffg4#@nt and Killzbob. We're all going to be getting emails about what delivery method we want for our digital copies and so forth, anyway. I'd be willing to bet the devs will bend over backwards to see to it you get what's coming to you. It's not like the length of the credits list is a major expense for them.

Armor doesn't impede you directly if you're on a nice flat surface. It does make you tire out faster, and climbing ANYTHING is a huge, huge problem. If you're going to be out in the wilderness, that armor is going to slow you down because there ain't anything even remotely resembling a nice flat surface in the vast majority of the wilderness. And heaven help you if you get knocked down. It's going to take you extra time to get back up just due to the weight and the fact that even in the best armor, you still can't bend as freely as you can without. That's why I suggested that heavier armor grant +fatigue (which you get at the end of combat in my system), and that it also give you -resistance against movement-impeding effects (like spells and traps etc.) Not that it grant overall slower attacks or overall slower movement. Although, if you wanted to add an extra component, you could have it induce movement penalties when you're going up/down hills and so forth--all you'd have to do from a mechanical standpoint would be to designate certain areas as "slanty" and when the armored character entered that area, they'd slow slightly. I'd really love to see this sort of thing in the game.

I'm not sure I understand the problem. Characters with lower HP totals who withstand the same amount of damage need more healing than do more resilient combatants. This makes perfect sense to me, and shouldn't be a balance problem provided that low-HP characters can find other ways to not die, including not only armor, dodging, and blocking, but also personalized healing methods, arcane shields, elemental resistances, and so forth. Playing a character who's frail and weak is going to require that character be sneaky or skilled or magically powerful in order to stay alive; I don't see that as a flaw, I see it as rational design. Erm, if you have 200 hp and take 50 damage, you need 50 points of healing to be restored. If you have 60 hp and take 50 damage, you need 50 points of healing to be restored. They both need the same amount of healing. It deducts the same amount of healing resources from the overall party fund. Having a big block of HP does not a superior tank make. Oh, it can help--so they don't get one-shot--but you can have all the HP in the world and if you don't have damage avoidance, mitigation, healing amplification, and threat generation, you're just a mana sponge. A mana sponge who probably doesn't do much damage, either. Trust me, my main in DDO is a healer. An 800 hp monk tank with 185% healing amp, a 100 AC, 100 phys resist, and 18% dodge is a delight to heal, and half the time they heal THEMSELVES. A 1400 hp barbarian with -10% healing amp, 40 AC, 20 phys resist, DR 13/-, and 0% dodge is a nightmare. Oh, and there are WIZARDS in DDO with 800+ hp, and they die just as much as the ones with 4-500, more, even, because they don't watch their health, they wait until they're at 20% or worse to throw their 300 point reconstruct, which barely gets them back up to half. The ones with 500 health don't charge and get all the aggro in the first place.

If I enjoy the game I get absolutely giddy over in-game swag. Don't ask me why. Some kind of hoarding reflex.

Balance + Single Player = Null Program Dump even the concept of "balance" as being desirable and let's have interesting and deep systems instead.

I have joined the Obsidian Order! I wish to be entitled Grand Rhetorist.

Actually, that's still not quite accurate, because in Baldur's Gate it wasn't enough to know the area was THERE, you also had to first travel to an area that physically adjoined it. So you HAD to do some physical walking around (and exploring, because the area was black when you arrived) in order to travel. You can have just as much (if not more--they gotta put SOMETHING in the corners of those big square areas) exploring in a game where the map is a series of discrete areas instead of a single contiguous surface. I actually get fed up with just "exploring" in most "open world" games because of all the annoying random monsters, particularly in Fallout 3, whereas I dug into every. nook. and. cranny. in BG. Oh, and the technology doesn't preclude an "open world" exactly--you could physically walk to every possible location on the overworld map in Arcanum. Granted, it was AMAZINGLY boring to do so and took FOREVER, but it was possible.

BG1 had great exploration. BG2 also had some great exploration, but it was more linear to reflect the storyline. I'm not sure what they'll be able to do with the technology they're using, so I don't really have a preference regarding really specific details, but I do hope there will be a fair number of areas that are accessed "blind", by going to the edge of the current map and clicking, or by discovering them when traveling past and deciding to stop. BG1 in some respects was almost "too big", because there wasn't an overaching reason to keep exploring other than to level up because everything to the north of you was Too Dang Tough. Well, that and you were curious. I'd prefer that you keep on picking up weird tidbits of information as you explore, so that the relentless poking-every-corner process also contributes to the story.

OMG. /RANT MODE ON CAPS ARE BULL****. I cannot say this enough. If someone figures out how to get 100% defense, this is a result of the devs being unable to do basic math. Do not penalize the player by putting in some lazy-ass hard cap on how much defense they can "actually" get. If you want 80% to be the max for some bizarro world reason, then only put in 80% worth of gear and abilities. It's not rocket science. DIMINISHING RETURNS ARE ALSO BULL****. This is the second lazy way devs go about preventing you from enjoying the benefits of your stacking efforts--every bit you add has less and less effect. No. DO THE MATH, figure out what the player can get, and tune your tradeoffs accordingly. Don't make every build hover uselessly around Mediocreville no matter how hard they try. You know what systems like this accomplish? They turn boss fights into exercises in creative kiting/glitch-finding/exploiting, so you wind up with people building their characters to be as exploit-centric as possible rather than actually choosing to pursue excellence in this or that area. /rant mode off

Except this isn't quite true, because healing spells will heal that godlike for just as much as they heal the scrawny elf unless you use a mechanic whereby you get healed for a percentage of your hp instead of a flat number--but this tends to penalize characters with low HP instead, because fewer hits are a larger percentage of their health. Healing always needs to be calculated into your system. Big HP numbers may allow you to take more hits (or bigger hits) before you need healing, but in a lot of games they seem to forget that you need a correspondingly large amount of healing when you have the big HP. Otherwise all that HP total does is front-load you so that the healers can maybe do a few other things like throw buffs or some crowd control before they have to start spam-healing to keep you alive. Damage output ties into this system as well. That's why I suggest some kind of multilayered or multifactoral system even IF you assume different character types will have radically different HP totals, because, as you said, it allows for lots of emergent gameplay possibilities and oddball builds.

I suggested this in the Degenerate Resting thread, although I don't claim that's where you saw it. The more I think about it, though, the more I like it as well. Doing stuff = +Fatigue. +Fatigue = harder to Do Stuff. Resting = -Fatigue. Simple, but you can build an entire game around a mechanic like that, with all kinds of ossum tradeoffs, yet without the silliness that comes along with Mana or Spell Slots. I added some mechanical ideas relating to this in this post here. This really could be elaborated into an entire system pretty easily.

I'd really like it if they avoid copying any systems from D&D without serious scrutiny--D&D is a pen and paper game. It's not real time with pause. The calculations in D&D are meant to be (relatively) easy for humans to do. Take advantage of what the COMPUTER can do and remember. I'd like to see use of terrain become a major part of the tactics of combat, as well as modification of terrain. I don't mean cosmetic modification like the ability to make holes or knock over trees, I mean like, giving a caster the ability to set up a screen that stops missile attacks from passing through it. Or throw up another kind of wall that blocks enemies from closing to melee. Or having your fighters run around the corner when you see that fireball coming, so the corner shields them from the blast. Banking lightning bolts off walls. Having your melee people use doorways and choke points. Sending your big DPS around to flank. Setting traps. I'd like to see classes who have the ability to move quickly from, say, a higher level to a lower one via teleport or jump, forcing (some) enemies to go around the long way. I'd like to see classes who can grab enemies and yank them closer, or knock them down, or push them back. I want to keep running across new situations until the very end of the game. I want ranged and melee options for all classes, and rapid switching between them. I want a non-degenerate resting system. I want to be able to re-spec abilities without loading the game. (I have this AMAZING ability to pick things that I wind up HATING. Don't make me start over to fix it please.) As far as the rest of it goes, I don't have serious preferences. I'd like there to be romances. If there's some LGBT inclusivity, I'm happy for people who care, yay for you, but it doesn't get my personal goat either way. I'd like to have long-term relationships (good or bad or mixed) with NPC's who don't join your party, maybe even have these be some of the romance options. (Much easier to do all sorts of actual *options* that way.) I'd like to have NPC's who notice when you try to take their stuff. Or sit in their chair. Or start a big fight in their house. The funny thing is that Infinity-style, for all it's lack of "modern" appeal, is uniquely suited to do a lot of this stuff.