PsychoBlonde

This is my thought as well--I didn't mind that Khalid and Jaheera went on to Nashkell without you or Minsc got annoyed if it took too long to go after Dynaheir, because you could do that and then go finish non-time-sensitive stuff afterwards. I did NOT like the big overall timer in Fallout, because I didn't get a chance to explore or DO anything. I have no problem with there being some limitations on how much you can doodle around and do things in whatever order you like. I have serious problems with the game restricting you from doing ANY doodling around, especially if (like me) you have the exploration skills of a concussed bunny and it takes you FOREVER to get ANYWHERE when you're new to a game.

Personally, I don't care about beta access--I don't like betas of something I'm planning to play and enjoy. The only time I'm interested in beta is when I'm debating on whether a game is something I'll like and I want to check it out prior to purchasing. That does not pertain here. No beta for me, thanks.

One of the nice things about the BG games was that there was a day/night cycle and semi-random weather. So what I'm wondering is, do you want these factors to have an *impact* of some kind? Do you want to have to go to shops during daytime hours? Do you want to have different wilderness encounters at night? Do you want to have quests that require you to be in certain places at certain times of day? Do you want to have things that will change if you fart around too long instead of following up on them, or, conversely, if you fiddle with them too early you get burned, but they may resolve better if you wait a bit? And do you want random lightning bolts to hit your party during thunderstorms?

I like having a resting mechanic in the game, both to advance time and as a way to recharge your party, basically. However, I didn't really like how degenerate the resting system in BG was, where you could (mostly) rest anywhere at any time, and the primary benefit was that you could change out your spells or refresh the used spells. You also recovered a TINY bit of health. I also didn't like resting in the Neverwinter Nights games (the "take a knee" thing) because it was REALLY degenerate, you could do it every other minute if you wanted to. So, let's look at similar mechanics from a few different games: The oldest example I'm familiar with was in the old Gold Box D&D games. It was similar to Baldur's Gate in that you could rest pretty much anywhere (although some areas were limited), but in hostile areas you had a greater or lesser chance of being interrupted by wandering monsters. So, if you rested after a tough fight when you were low on resources, there was a chance you'd get a fight too tough for you to handle as a result. You *could* hoof it back to town, but there was also a significant risk of wandering monsters doing that, depending on the area you were in, of course. Occasionally, you'd have areas where you just couldn't rest for some reason. Unfortunately, if this was a large area, it could render your casters very quickly worthless in combat. The Eye of the Beholder series was very similar to that system. So was Baldur's Gate. Neverwinter Nights lacked the random wandering monster component. Next we have the Dark Sun games, where you rested at little "fire circles" salted here and there across the map. I don't believe there were any limitations on how often you could rest at the circle, but there were random encounters and you couldn't rest when enemies were nearby. Much like the above system, if you went too long without being able to rest, your casters could become basically worthless in combat. There was also a chance of random encounters if you decided to hoof it back to a circle in a "safe" location. In Dungeons and Dragons Online, you can only rest at certain locations, marked by "rest shrines" (usually with a resurrection shrine for reviving dead party members). It can be a little amusing because the game alternatively treats these rest shrines as if they were simple markers for "safe rooms" and as if they were physical in-game objects. There are also limitations on how many times you can use a rest shrine, and on whether you can use it a second time at all. (These are based on your game difficulty selection, which you select at the start of the quest.) Again, the primary purpose is to regain spell points, but you also regain item charges and limited-use abilities. You also heal a very small (and, past level 4 or so, insignificant) amount. It's not degenerate--you can't rest every fight even if you want to--but it can have severe limitations for new characters with limited access to potions, scrolls, wands, clickies, and maxed-out gear, causing party wipes which make you have to start the quest over from the beginning. Not fun. The Dragon Age games, of course, have no resting mechanic at all--and no attrition, either, you just regain everything at the end of combat, except for some utterly insignificant "Injuries" you acquire if someone gets dropped. This is, in my mind, also a degenerate system. So, with that history done, here's my suggestion for a potential non-degenerate resting system. Is this the only option? No. Is this the BEST option? Probably not. It's the one I came up with. 1. Get rid of spells-per-day or a spell point pool, and have spells/special abilities simply have a longer or shorter casting time and a longer or shorter cooldown. (Also, it should be possible to interrupt abilities during the casting time.) This way, ability and spell-focused characters will never become useless in combat. In addition, resting recovers 100% of your "hit points" or whatever they decide to call it. You may also switch out which abilities you have active from your known list or which spells you have active from your known list. 2. When abilities/spells are used, and at end-of-combat, your characters pick up an increasing "fatigue" stack, which increases cooldowns, casting times, and decreases attack speed. Fatigue can be reduced by eating food (available at inns/taverns/shops) or by resting, or, possibly, by using certain (likely rare) items/consumables. 3. When a character eats a critical hit, they get a number of "wound" stacks, which decrease to-hit and damage on all attacks and abilities. (They could also have special rare injuries that have other detrimental effects.) Wounds can be reduced by Healers and Doctors or (very rare) items, or eliminated by resting a certain amount of time. 4. There are two types of rests, depending on whether you try to rest in the open or in a special "safe" location marked by a shrine or campfire circle or a dancing gnome I don't care pick something. If you rest in the open, you do a "long" rest, which consumes 8 hours, has a chance for random encounter spawns, and, depending on the location, spawns extra monsters in the area. Interrupted rests increase fatigue stacks instead of decreasing them. If you rest at the shrine/circle/gnome/whatever, it takes 1 hour, has no chance for random encounter spawns, and does not increase spawns in the area. However, you can only do this once for every X number of hours of game time passed, probably 24. Or it could be different for each shrine/circle/gnome. 5. If you consider it a problem that people might go to an area, rest a bunch, then fight the resulting tons of monster spawns to level up (I don't, I think people ought to be able to level up however suits them, if grinding mob spawns is what they wanna do, let em), you can make it so that repeat kills on the same type of monster yield less xp. That's my idea for non-degenerate resting. Ideally, you'd want to rest as infrequently as possible (only when fatigue and injuries were really slowing you down), and at "safe" locations--unless you're grinding monster spawns for XP, which I personally have no problem with. I'm sure there are lots of other options.

The lack of a "memorization" mechanic also means they can do without a degenerate "rest every 3 minutes" mechanic, because you don't need to be switching your spells in and out or recovering them all the time. I'm not that fond of the Dragon Age system because you instantly recover at the end of combat, so there's no attrition involved. I like the way DDO does it to an extent--you can pick your list of spells but you cast them out of a spell points pool. Wizards/clerics get a broader selection but fewer spell points than sorcerers/favored souls. You can recover sp one of two ways: resting at special shrines, which are placed intermittently (and there's limits on how many times you can use a given shrine), or by using rare and potions (which cannot be bought in-game, only found) or super-mega-rare and difficult-to-acquire items. I'd kind of like to see something like a system where you have lots of little spells with short cooldowns and casting times that you can freely spam over and over, some medium spells with longer cooldowns and casting times, leading up to a few big whammies with massive cooldowns and long casting times. I think resting should be a time to recover fatigue penalties, heal injury penalties, and possibly also a time to reset your ability loadout. I also think it would work well to have resting restricted to specific zones and specific numbers of uses (or, times per day anyway). Or, have resting spawn more random mobs in wilderness/dungeon areas. Granted, this could also lead to a degenerate situation where people rest in order to kill mobs, get XP, and level. But this could be solved (if, that is, you considered it to be a *problem* and not a *feature*) by having mobs grant less xp as you level, or have individual types of mobs grant less xp every time you kill an identical one. So you can only level up so far killing the respawning wolves and kobolds, and it gets a lot slower the longer you spend on it because it takes more XP to level AND you get less for your repetitive killing. There are always a lot more than 2 or 3 options.

I think this would matter more if we weren't going to have 1-inch-high character models. In all likelihood you won't be able to *see* stuff like this so there's a real limit to how much worth they'll get out of this level of customization.

I'm not certain specifically those little things. One of the most immersion-producing things in games was only possible in older text-based games where you gave commands by typing text. It is vastly more immersing to type "say hello" or "bow to person" than to pick it from a list because you're being much more proactive. Granted, that same deal comes along with tons and tons of failed commands resulting in "I don't understand flip", but those times when you'd find hidden commands that did interesting things were really awesome. What I'd really like, is if a.) they allow some little interactions of this type and b.) sometimes somebody NOTICES. Like, if you go into the Seneshal's office and sit in his chair, when he comes in, maybe he'll chew you out a bit for being in his seat. Or if you start looting the chests in someone's home, they'll yell at you for it. Stuff like that.

I would prefer that they not use ANY of the D&D classes. What's the point of designing your own system if you're just going to use the same old recycled names and styles?

I don't REALLY care that much either way, but it is getting overused. It'd be interesting if they did something where there's just an "animate" ability that creates different types of critters depending on where it gets used. Use it on trees, you get a walking tree. Use it on a statue, you get a golem. Use it on corpses, you get "undead". Ghosts, wraiths, liches, vampires . . . whatever. Let's see some creativity.

How is it "unbiased" to declare that a simple game is necessarily contra-immersion? Some of my all-time favorite games (Prince of Persia) were incredibly simple. No inventory. No leveling up. Yet they had incredibly deep immersion. Or some of the older FPS shooters, where I'd find myself physically ducking to avoid attacks. Talk about immersion. A game doesn't have to be fiddly and complex to be deep and engaging. Likewise, a fiddly, complex game isn't always engaging. Gothic had a spectacularly bad interface where you'd have to hold one key and press another in order to attack, and you had to let go of the held key to move while moving the mouse and pressing a bunch of other keys. You also had to TIME hitting the attack button or you wouldn't swing properly. It was AWFUL, the most fiddly, over-complicated combat I've run across before or since. Was it deep or engaging? No. Frankly I'm amazed I played it as long as I did, but the rest of the game was pretty cool and made up for it. And why does the ammo thing have to be either/or? What about having ability specs where you can create ammo? Or specific weapons that create their own ammo? Or returning weapons? Now you've got both options depending on how people want to play. Or, instead of having bows be useable or unuseable in melee--how about giving you a huge penalty to your defense against melee attacks when you're using a ranged weapon? Or even to your overall defense? If you want to get slightly more complex, you could have this diminish or even go away when you're moving instead of firing. Should there be tradeoffs? Yes. But the nature of those tradeoffs doesn't have to be this two-dimensional.

I don't really care if it's OP, it's fun to fiddle with. And it's not like economy actually matters in a single-player game unless you're trying to make some kind of Fantasy Economy Sim. Which could be cool.

Ever play Gothic? You bought and sold 90% of your items by bartering, there was very little "coin" in the game, with one exception . . . you almost always had to buy armor upgrades with cash. Which meant you were always trying to get your grubby paws on whatever actual "cash" was available and then never, ever spend it. It was an interesting system although they did not have any weight management whatsoever.

I don't get how it's more "realistic" to include the bad stuff. Where I live, having any of that stuff would be supremely unrealistic, because this is BoringLawabidingsville. And cannibalism as a result of being poor? No. As a result of being extremely lost in the wilderness, maybe, however even in areas where the diet is perforce unusually low in protein, you generally only get cannibalism if there is a cultural or religious significance thing surrounding it. Sometimes you get it when people are high as a kite. Cannibalism when you're simply malnourished is actually contra-survival because malnourishment mostly kills through disease, and you can get INCREDIBLY sick from eating other human beings. It is the nature of a game that you can only view or visit a very tiny fraction of the theoretical overall world, so your chances of encountering horrors should (statistically) be pretty low. You could argue that you will naturally only be visiting the loci where horrors are pretty usual, though, because horrors are somewhat of an adventurer stock-in-trade. So there's no real way to determine what the statistical incidence of horrors ought "realistically" to be. So, this isn't a realism poll, it's a poll about how gritty you want the game to be. I won't even say dark because a game without explicit anything can be HORRIBLY dark and depressing, whereas games with buckets of dismembered babies flying about and people dropping the f-bomb every other word can be laugh-out-loud comical. (Watching characters get gibbed in BG was pretty laughable, for instance.) I'll be happy if they do some good moments of serious misery--and also some ones of serious triumph. The squick isn't really necessary either way, it just depends on whether you want to incorporate some shock value into a given moment.

AKA "metagame", which some people conversely think is a dirty word. Some of the worst metagaming necessity comes out of the Vancian spell system, I grant you. Oh, here's a mage who's cast Immunity to Normal Missiles AND Immunity to Magical Missiles AND Immunity to Normal Weapons AND Immunity to Magical Weapons and Spell Immunity! Hope you loaded 3 or 4 Break Enchantments, because you ain't hurting him otherwise! The trouble with potions in the BG series, at least, was that they were rare enough that 95% of the time, when they'd actually be useful, I still wouldn't use them because I'd be worried about saving them for some hypothetical future fight where I'd NEED them. So the only time I used potions was when I wiped and had to re-load the game. That's not thinking ahead. That's remembering what happened and capitalizing on it. And even then, except in unusual situations like the Basilisk Area, I could still get through the fight without using potions if I was more careful about how much aggro I pulled or I was more thorough and aggressive with the CC. Now, if you can actually buy the potions and have them on hand, that'd be different . . . but then they'll just re-scale the combats with the assumption that you'll have access to X amount of resistance. If they really want to make you play smart and think ahead, they ought to put some serious SCOUTING into the game. I tried this with my rogues in BG, but there were serious problems with it, not least because the mobs could usually see you anyway. Or they can let you lay down traps, which gets interesting with friendly fire. Or hit enemies with some damage-over-time abilities and a slow and run the fook out of there. There's lots of stuff they can do that doesn't involve the whole haha, I'm immune rigamarole.

How does making certain weapons 100% non-viable against certain foes give you MORE options? It gives the player FEWER options. And it doesn't "dumb down" the game to remove this particular type of mechanic because the mechanic itself is pretty stupid to begin with. You can remove it from the game and nothing will really change--you can even keep your Hilarious Gag Monsters via different methodology, as I stated earlier. Having the acquisition and deployment of various different weapons that have *no* utility other than to break DR or immunity restrictions and fill up your inventory slots doesn't increase the depth of the game--complexity is not depth. If you want to do this, just give the mobs more hit points (or make defeating them an environmental puzzle), hand out fewer inventory slots, and the whole thing is a wash. You know what does add tactical complexity? Enemies who retreat around corners and won't come out. Enemies who concentrate fire on a single foe. Enemies who go down the hall and around the corner to flank you. Enemies who stealth and appear in the middle of your party. Enemies who target the healer. Enemies who can bank attacks around corners. Dozens of enemies who imitate a Zerg Rush. All this sort of thing can be done without ever having to resort to "My weapon does nothing".

All of those moves are 100% standard in knife fighting. Something like 95% of knife fighting is actually wrestling, you just do it with a sharp edge in play. The point is to force your opponent into a position where you can get your knife at something worthwhile AND they can't do likewise to you with whatever weapon they're wielding. The idea that you sit there 5' away with them and just poke away randomly until they fall down does not even begin to resemble actual knife combat. Oh, and the wrestling moves take less time yet do a lot more damage than the silly hypothetical poking. The only weapon where the whole "a few thrusts" concept might actually be valid would be with a fencing foil/epee, which is, in fact, not an actual weapon. Oh, I grant you could kill someone with one if you got lucky (or they were unlucky), but you could do the same with a potted plant or a bag of nuts. A light enough rapier would have similar problems, because the blade is a.) too long and wrestling and leverage moves while simultaneously being too light and fragile to have an impact in any other way. But that would apply equally to nearly any type of enemy. The only "combat" where such weapons were used actually used was in formalized duels, and even then, actual immediate death or even incapacitation was pretty rare. It was not uncommon, however, for both participants to take a thrust that caused internal bleeding/infection and led to death for *both* participants hours or even days later. "Piercing" weapons like rapiers and foils aren't even that useful against regular old humans with internal organs you could (theoretically) pierce. One, because it is AMAZINGLY easy to render your opponent's blade useless even with bare hands (the only POTENTIALLY deadly part is the point at the end, and the sword is so light that they have basically no leverage against you--they'll snap the blade before they'll get it away from you). That, and people can survive having the entire sword pass completely through their body with amazing regularity. There is almost nothing you can do to someone with a weapon of this type that will consistently produce rapid incapacitation and prevent them from executing violent retaliation. Granted, they might die in a couple of hours, but that doesn't do you much good if they've cracked your skull open in the meantime. This is why wrestling or laying your hands on your opponent was expressly forbidden in duels. When these gentlemen went to war, they changed their fencing weapons for firearms, sabers, greatswords, pikes, and halberds. Now, there's no reason why there can't be duels in the game (this would be a neat mechanic), but you're not going to use or abide by the rules of a duel when you're fighting an animated skeleton.

Of course not. Which is why just about every cRPG ever made generally makes sure that if you enter a werewolf den withoout a silver weapon, you'll quickly find one in that dungeon just waiting for you to loot it and equip it in time for your first werewolf encounter. And, here's the thing--how is this an argument in favor of having this mechanic at all? It's just flavor. They put the tool RIGHT THERE for you, so it's not like you have to "plan ahead" or "use strategy" or even really pay much attention. Heck, they could have the Mystical Cleric Dude standing at the entrance to throw the special Silver Blessing on all of your weapons and it'd mean pretty much exactly the same thing. Granted, there's a small mechanical impact in that you can't use whatever mega-weapon is your current preference, however, the encounters are weighted with this fact in mind already. And if they don't do it this way, they're also using up your inventory space and possibly also making it so you have to reload an earlier save or go back to town. So, either it's stupid-easy, or it's stupid-annoying, and either way it's kind of stupid-pointless. If you want to do something along these lines, why not make it more like the Blessed Crossbow Bolts and Rakshasa from the old gold box games, where your special item will insta-kill the enemy, but you only get so many shots, and if you miss . . . there's your insta-kill used up. Or, you have the very rare unique fight where, say, only the person wearing the Special Amulet (or with the Special Aura) can hurt the boss, and the fight becomes more of a challenge of keeping that person alive long enough to kill the boss rather than just a matter of "did you leave six inventory slots free". There are a lot of ways you can do this kind of thing rather than making the mechanic a hassle that permeates the game, uses up your inventory space, and still probably lands you in situations where you have to do some kind of ridiculous jumping-through-hoops to progress.

So, your *preference* for a big heavy phallic weapon is a logical argument how? You prefer it that way? Use the hammer. Nobody's stopping you. That's not a reason why you ought to FORCE other people to adhere to the game mechanics that are YOUR preference.

LOL another straw man. Sheesh. The argument you're making here speaks of the erroneous implementation of Dragons in crpgs, not of the viability of Daggers for effective combat. LOL another straw man. Sheesh. The argument you're making here speaks of the erroneous implementation of Dragons in crpgs, not of the viability of Daggers for effective combat. I find the entire concept that you can have "realistic" combat in a CRPG to be so absurd that any arguments based on any kind of "realism" fail simply on those merits. You want to claim it's not realistic to do X? Well, I can point to a thousand areas where any would-be system is not realistic. The concept of having a *numerical representation* of damage is ridiculous from a "realism" standpoint. That, and the fact that you could quite easily "kill" a skeleton with a dagger by using said dagger as a wedge to shove it up under the skeleton's jaw and lever the skull off. Or slide it in between a couple vertebrae and give it a twist. Presumably you're not dumb enough to sit there and try to chip away at its femur with the blade making "grr!" noises. Or, heck, if it's an animated skeleton held together by magic . . . how can you "kill" it anyway? Shouldn't the bones and bits of bones reassemble themselves? You ought to need something like a disintegration beam or a really hot fire to take one down. Or, if the magic isn't that strong, you ought to be able to "kill" one by giving it a good shove.

Define "effective". Effective at smashing a stationary target? Yeah. Effective at slicing muscles and arteries on glancing hits? Not so much. You have to get a serious momentum swing with a bludgeoning weapon to be "effective" in this manner. (Granted, if you train properly for "rabbit" style attacks, you can still do some nasty stuff even at extreme close range.) Even swords aren't used that much for cleaving people in twain (thousands of movies to the contrary), and you're quite likely to break or lodge the blade if you try using one like that. The abstract system of a computer game does not in any way simulate real combat. What it does do is be fun or not fun, and having to interrupt an adventure or dungeon in order to run back to town so you can pick up silver weapons is generally Not Fun. If you don't actually need to be able to apply power in order to defeat the foe, then it's more of an Hilarious Gag Enemy than an actual challenge. (DDO has a number of what I'd consider to be Hilarious Gag Traps--in that you don't actually need to find and disarm them, you just need to know they're there so you don't spit yourself on them by accident.)

The idea of an animated skeleton being a viable threat to anyone is pretty absurd anyway. Best weapon for fighting skeletons ought to be a pushbroom. I find it amusing that someone could be so irate over the idea of attacking a skeleton with a knife, but they're perfectly fine with the concept of someone with a knife going up against a FULL SIZED DRAGON and still doing damage.

I'd rather have this kind of variability come from different weapons having different situational values rather than a bunch of cheap immunities. For instance, switching between ranged weapons and melee can have great strategic and tactical consequence. Or switching between a sword and a spear for the extra reach.

The real problem, for me, with gold having a weight, is that you need absolutely STUPID amounts of it to buy anything magical. That, and there aren't any in-game mechanisms for turning it into stuff that ought to be more readily portable, like gems and jewelry. Gems and jewelry in games are often LESS portable because they take up the same amount of inventory space as a full suit of plate armor. If you're going to do one thing (heavy cash) in the name of realism, then you ought to do the FULL realism, which means a.) lighter trade items being readily available, b.) a barter system of some kind, c.) tiny, very valuable items taking up very little inventory space, d.) items with minor magical improvements not costing thousands or tens of thousands of times what a basic item costs, etc. Failing all that, I'd rather they just treated gold like what it is: a numerical scorecard.

The thing that bugs me in games isn't urgency or the lack thereof, but FALSE urgency. If you *can* take your sweet time doing something (which is fine), don't have the NPC quest-giver be all "please hurry!" and "every moment you delay could cause disaster!" Also please don't put in an actual TIMER a la Fallout. Yes, that's real urgency, but it's also real nasty GM fiat. Instead, if you're going to put in individual tasks where time is of the essence and it defaults/fails if the player farts around, have THOSE be the times when the NPC's GENUINELY tell you "time is of the essence!". I'd be happy with that.

I know. That's why I'm making a SUGGESTION that they NOT COPY this aspect of D&D which got completely out of control with 3rd edition. Heroes shouldn't carry around a golf bag stuffed with swords. And making suggestions inherently means talking "about things that don't exist yet". It'd be a little weird to make suggestions about stuff that's ALREADY DONE and CAN'T BE CHANGED.