PsychoBlonde

Because this would be stupidly OP. There's a reason why the Persistent Spell metamagic effect requires you to take TWO feats, cannot be gotten AT ALL until like 16th level, and raises the level of the spell SIX LEVELS. I grant you that other games have always-on buffs (Dragon Age), but even then it's no simple matter of giving up a low level spell slot or two, it means losing anywhere from 10% to 70% of your entire spellcasting pool. Besides, remember all the casters who insta-apply like 4 effects due to that spell you can memorize that instantly casts 3 or 4 buffs? USE THAT. It is in the game for a reason. All spells, including buffs, need to have their cost/benefit value tuned to the overall game. Duration is part of that calculation. If you don't like it, build your casters not to be buff-reliant. There are ways to do this in every RPG I've ever played. Don't want to cast mage armor all the time? Play an armored caster. (Which you will be able to do.) Or be smart about keeping your caster out of the line-of-fire. Or they can do what Arcanum did, and force you to raise a stat that doesn't directly benefit casters very much in order to maintain more than one spell at a time. Are there lots of ways to tune this stuff? Sure. Asking for freebies is not one of them. NEVER encounter an enemy that is immune to melee?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I shall remind you, sir, of why Breach was my MOST FAVORITIST SPELL EVAR in Baldur's Gate 2? Because it got rid of all those damn casters who put up Protection from Missiles and Protection from Weapons and Stoneskin as their first bloody combat action. My GAWD that was annoying. Let's compare that to the creatures who were immune to magic: Arcane oozes. I grant you, liches are immune to spells below, like, 4th level. Rakshasa are immune to spells below 8th level--but you could one-hit kill them with blessed bolts from even the most mediocre crossbowman in the game, so that was not so bad. Golems are immune to all but 2 spells apiece--but you still got those 2 spells. (That and golems are quite rare--what made them awful was not their magic resistance but the fact that you also needed specific weapon types to hurt them.) A lot of critters have spell resistance, but that's not immunity to magic. And a lot more have immunity to specific effects, but that's not immunity to magic either. When mages have 300 times the versatility of non-mages, you have to balance that by forcing them to be more versatile. Besides, mages CAN pick up darts or a sling with bullets and still be useful when their magic isn't working. What are the melee shlubs supposed to do when their SWORDS aren't working? That's the only trick they got. And it still didn't stop Black Isle from spamming the game with casters covered in protection from missiles and protection from weapons AND stoneskin. Bojemoi. You could play BG2 perfectly well with an all-caster party (I did.) The converse . . . not so much. (Although I'm sure at least one crazy person somewhere did it.) What I'm hoping they do is to not have effects in the game against which there is ONE defensive or offensive solution: a spell. At no point should there be a situation like "you must have a caster with Breach memorized in order to hurt this foe". At no point should there be a situation like "you must cast Negative Energy Protection on every party member in order to have a chance of beating this area". And no Arcane Oozes, either. 2nd edition D&D just had too many freakin' on/off switches. I have no problem with things being of variable effectiveness given the nature of what you're fighting. That can be a lot of fun. I don't even mind *occasional* complete immunities as long as they make sense and are very limited in scope--if it lives in lava, yes, it makes sense that it'll be immune to fire, or, at least, immune to any fire the party has any hope of producing. I can deal with that. Every mob and his brother being immune to half a dozen different effect types? OH HELL NO.

There is this. Then there is also one of my favorite quotes from Heinlein (paraphrased): It may be better to be a dead lion than a live jackal, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier. Heck, there's a great line in Dragon Age 2 about this. "Andraste did not go willingly to the flame." A martyr does not choose to be a martyr--if martyrdom is your goal, then you are not a self-righteous, pure knight. You are a suicidal, death-worshipping crazyman. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to having a suicidal, death-worshipping crazyman in the game--or even that the game should necessarily restrict you from dying valiantly. Just that "let me martyr my PC!!!!! PLEASE PLEASE ZOMG PLEASE" without having ANY context on the story or themes of the game is pure silliness, equivalent to threads asking for things like "let me have a foursome!" and "I want to be able to customize my makeup!"

The BG1 parties of assassins worked well, because the level disparity was not that big and a PARTY of adventurers can give even people higher in level a run for their money--that, and if you used your tactics well, you could give THEM a run for THEIR money if THEY were higher level. Plus, many of them were specifically after YOU, the Bhaalspawn, they weren't just random bandits. It was very well done. I don't like the kind of level scaling they had in Oblivion, where late in the game common bandits are wearing glass plate and swinging Daedric weapons. If you can afford Daedric stuff, why in the world would you be robbing people in the middle of nowhere? Sell your quiver full of arrows, buy a house in Bruma, and RETIRE. Skyrim did better--even high-level random encounters would only have basic steel armor and weapons, it was just that they had more HP and higher stats so they were still a semi-credible threat. I don't believe, however, that you need random encounters of this kind to keep the game interesting. Oh, sure, early in the game they are nice because they provide a readily-avalible source of extra loot, challenge, and XP. As the game continues, though, the encounters seem less organic because you've had enough of them that the numerical system that drives them begins to be apparent. It's like the randomly-generated quests--the first few are cool. When you get sent back, twice, to a dungeon you've already completed, they begin to pall. And good grief, how many times do I have to kill the same dragon on the same mountain?! If you're going to have a random-ish system of this nature, It's best to let it taper off before it becomes annoying. Make it so that when you hit certain reputation or gear levels, the bandits that pop become non-hostile. It's not the same as having no encounters, it just means that encounters with would-be bandits are the same as encounters with, say, deer. You can chase them down and kill them if you REALLY want to. And, this can actually ADD another layer of fun to the game. How cool would it be in, say, Skyrim, if once you hit level 45 or so, the random-encounter DRAGONS see you, yell, "Dovahkiin!" and then fly off as rapidly as their little wings can take them? It's not like you NEED more dragon bits at that level anyway, and you can always revisit their static locations if you're trying to accumulate dragon souls. I also like the idea behind (although the implementation was ****e) what they tried to do in DA2 with the random night city encounters--you'd kill so many, uncover their stronghold, and after you whacked their boss you'd get a small prize and there'd be no more "random" encounters in that area at night. During that act, anyway. I actually suggested they do something like this during DA2 development, because I missed one of the great things about the original Gold Box Pool of Radiance: being able to CLEAR CITY AREAS. You'd do the static encounters in the area of the city and X number of random encounters, and then it'd be cleared, the city would reward you, and you could wander it at will without being ambushed by 47 kobolds. It was great, because the plot of the game actually revolved around this simple idea. It was a terrific example of integrated story and gameplay mechanics; fantastic game design in an incredibly primitive game. These are the things I'd like to see devs considering. How do we make this random system non-annoying? How do we ride that fine, fine line between allowing for random variability and the inevitable uncreative repetitiveness of a computer-operated random system? How does this mechanic interact with the story? How does the story reflect the mechanic? Have we properly attached it to the story as opposed to just tacking on a story justification? That last one is incredibly critical because it makes the difference between something being viewed as filler or padding to the game and something being viewed as a part of the game. I think that last one contains a good 60-70% of what's been the worst problems with the Dragon Age games. They get these cool ideas, and, yes, there's almost always A story justification tied to them, but they forget that they aren't telling three or three dozen dissociated stories, so none of the stuff is tied in any way to the overarching story. It gets so bad that even major side quests that are thematically tied in with the main plot and only need one or two little references to finish the job just don't have that last necessary bit of consideration. Everybody always wants more content. KotOR2 and Neverwinter Nights 2 (the official campaign) felt weirdly bare because they lacked the expansiveness that filler can give. But that doesn't mean it's *better* to make Bioware's mistake and have tons of filler that is OBVIOUSLY filler. Both are bad. I'd almost say that the LATTER is the worse of the two. People can forgive a game that lacked the time and funding to deliver on all of its potential. They don't forgive thoughtless delivery. TL;DR: the bones of your design quality shows the most in these little side areas, so make it count.

You mean, apart from Haer'dalis and Aerie, Khalid and Jaheira, Xvar and Montaron, Aveline and Donnic . . . Heck, even Zevran in Dragon Age: Origins had a previous love he tells you about. Granted, that's ANOTHER unfortunately common trope--the "dead wife" or girlfriend. That's one that could stand to be subverted. Where's the bitter divorcee with child support and alimony payments? That sure describes a lot more guys I know than any other trope I've seen.

"All myths are true" is even worse. Oh, there's a legend about this mythological sword of the gods being hidden in this cave, huh? Oh, will you look at that. There it is. You just came by here yesterday and hid it, didn't you. As Ayn Rand said, cliches are cliches because they were good once. It doesn't have to be a disaster that there's a trope being revisited yet again. But if you're going to take 60 hours to tell a story, something good would be nice.

I'd appreciate at least the occasional attempt to hang a lampshade over these ridiculously over-confident people. I think they actually do this at one point in BG2, even, when the one scimitar-throwing dude assaults you from nowhere. Even the thought of single street thugs threatening anyone who is VISIBLY ARMED is pretty ridiculous. They could do a much cooler version of this, though, where a dozen dudes with bows ambush you from atop buildings and so forth. Dudes with bows were so lethal in Baldur's Gate that it'd be a credible threat. It'd also be nice if you could "solve" the stupider of these encounters by beaning the guy over the head and leaving him in the hands of the local law enforcement.

Why not? Aren't you bored by the fact that every single game must have a predictably happy ending? You mean, aside from Kotor2, Nwn2, Dragon Age 2, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum, Oblivion (they killed Sean Bean!) . . . I'd count Skyrim as lacking a happy ending because it LACKS AN ENDING, PERIOD. There are many games without conventional "happy" endings. I'm not sure Obsidian believes in happy endings. Mask of the Betrayer made me so mad I wanted to reach through the screen and slap Kelemvor in his ugly self-righteous FACE. So, I wouldn't worry about this "problem" if I were you.

*twitch* Third time I've seen this today. "Eek" is what you shout when somebody puts a spider down your shirt. When you're squeezing something for all it's worth, that's "eke out" whatever it is. This has been a community service message.

I like it when the math is simple, as in D&D: roll a d20, add modifier, compare to DC. Simple. What I like to NOT be simple is manipulating those various numbers. I want tough tradeoffs, like "I can't both wear the +5 armor item AND the crit resist item!" or "Well, I can increase my fire spell damage by 12% but that means my magic attack value goes down by 2". I want ALL attributes to be valuable for ALL characters, so you are always wishing you had more stat or skill points. That being said, I hate, HATEHATEHATEHATE diminishing returns systems where the more you raise something the less benefit you get out of it, especially when (bleargh!) the only way you have of knowing whether you have "enough" attack or defense is some worthless tooltip that tells you you have a 75% chance to hit monsters "of your level" but everything you ever fight is somewhere between 3 and 500 levels higher than you are so god only knows what your defense numbers actually look like. I am not going to sit there for hours and let monsters beat on me so I can tabulate this crap and determine that when the tooltip says I have a "75%" defense value, this actually means I'm going to be *hit* about 3/4 of the time. THAT is what pisses me off about a lot of games--that the numbers they give you mean NOTHING because they are *relative* to the numbers of theoretical enemies WHO DO NOT EXIST, while the enemies who DO exist have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NUMBERS which you cannot see. At least with the d20 system you know one thing for certain--your range of random variation. If monsters start to miss you, you know for a fact that nigh-invulnerable AC vs. those mobs is only 20 points away. Likewise if you're hitting sometimes, hitting consistently is no more than 20 points away. Every point you raise your AC or attack = 5% fewer or more hits. That is what I want to see. I don't want or expect them to use the d20 system. What I want is to know, for a fact, that if I raise my dodge percentage by 1%, that means if I go and tabulate every time I get hit vs. every time I dodge, I will see a 1% increase across the board. Even if there are enemies that reduce dodge chance so I would theoretically need 120% dodge in order to avoid their attacks, if I go from 59% to 60%, they're going to be missing me 40% of the time instead of 39%. Also, in my opinion, if a bonus is too small for you to detect just by "feel", i.e. when you raise your attack, it seems like you're hitting more consistently, it is not a big enough bonus for late-game. (Likewise for penalties.) If you have to drag a bunch of people in and sit them in front of computers and have them play alternatively bonus-on, bonus-off, so be it, but I want to be able to TELL when I pick up that mega staff. I don't want no piddly-ass 2% increase over my old staff. Harrumph.

You have perfectly described the Bard class. No, I have not. Bards can't do traps (no trapfinding and those skills aren't class skills). They stopped being a "do everything" class some time ago. Nor are there "bards" in Eternity--only Chanters, and who knows how they work at this stage. The way I'd do (er, making some assumptions about how the game will work, anyway) it is that rogues get ONE ability tree from each class, only with the abilities renamed and a couple of the top abilities removed. From Monk, for instance, they get the Unarmed tree, only it's called Pugilist. From Wizard they get the tree that throws stationary triggered effects on the ground, but they're called Traps for the rogue. From Ranger, they get the Stealth tree. From Fighter, they get, oh, the dual-wielding tree, renamed Fencing. From Priest, they get the tree where you can make potions. Etc. Etc. Etc.

I had some thoughts about this kind of thing last night, but I think it all depends too much on the methodology used for making the classes different. I think, what I, personally, would really like to see is that Rogue is the "do anything" class. They are literally designed from the ground up to be able to make use of abilities that nominally belong to other classes. They can mimic caster spells through traps. They can choose specials that let them use abilities from the martially-oriented classes, so you can have a fighterish rogue, a monkish rogue, a rangerish rogue, a barbarianish rogue. I think this could be a lot of fun--it'd give an option to play around with for people like me who want to make a character that does everything. They'd have a TON of build options, so it'd be very complex and extremely entertaining to play a rogue.

Heh, actually, you know what I'd kind of like to have in addition to black/white choices and quandaries? Some real opportunities to just **** with people. I mean, options where you can complete the quest in such a way that everybody involved winds up yelling "WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?" Including your party companions. For an example: Let's say you have a fairly typical quest where Sad Woman's kid got picked up by slavers and is going to be sold in the market. So, there are a few fairly standard options here. (I'm not going to include the option of just telling her to bugger off, because that's more refusing the quest than a way of completing the quest.) 1. Buy the kid at the auction and return him to his mum. This is the shortest option, you don't get in trouble with anybody, Sad Woman gets her kid back, but you don't otherwise interfere with the operation of the slave ring, so in many ways this is a sub-optimal outcome unless you're just not that interested in the quest. 2. Break in and set the kid loose which perhaps enables you to rescue lots of other slaves, but also gets you in Serious Trouble with the slaver ring. Granted, you also get to kill them, loot their base, loot their corpses, and wreck their operation, so in many ways this is actually a much better outcome. 3. Some kind of **** move, like convincing the mom to trade places with her son, giving her to the slavers, then taking the funds and leaving. I don't much care about the specific details of this. What I'd like to see are the occasional additional options like: 4. Set the kids loose, arm them, and use your powers of persuasion/magic/tactics to turn them into a crazed mob and enable them to take their revenge on the slavers, including gruesome tortures. Then you take Sad Woman's kid back to her, give him a spiel about how she was weak and sinful to let him be captured in the first place, and order him to kill her. Then you set the kid up as the leader of this new street gang you've founded. They recruit all the little slum children and begin a reign of terror over that section of the city. Periodically, you can come back, get news from them, bring them presents, and get them to help you with occasional related quests. or 5. Go to RichTown, pull out your Pipe of Charming, and play until all the local kids come out. You then lead them out of town to the river, where you threaten to drown them all unless their parents send the local guard to clean out that slaver ring. or 6. You notice that Sad Woman's son bears a striking resemblance to the son of the local Duke, so you talk the slavers into this elaborate plot whereby you kidnap the Duke's son and hold him for ransom, and when the ransom exchange happens, you turn over Sad Woman's son instead. You then give the Duke's son to Sad Woman. or 7. Exactly like option 1, except you use Amnesia on the kid so he doesn't remember his mother when you reunite them, and throws a fit. or 8. You use Amnesia on the woman so she forgets she has a son. The more bizarre/surreal, the better.

I kinda do the opposite--I prefer to micromanage my quasi-invulnerable "tank" and setup all my support/dps to run on autopilot. Which is why it pisses me off when I can't make my PC of any class be the "tank", because I want to be running my PC. I HATE playing a glass cannon.

That's kind of what I said earlier, Jymm--when you know your options are all bad, you may as well flip a coin because there's no real criterion for deciding. What makes you squirm is the belief that ONE of these options is a better choice and if only you knew just a LITTLE BIT more, you could figure out which one that would be. Even if that better is so narrow you could cut yourself with it. Well, knew a bit more, or had some more time, or could get more bandages . . . nothing hurts like falling just short. OMG I just described the freakin' election. So sorry.

I like to have the hidden tie-breakers because that way people who like to play games "clean" (that is, making the good or the bad decisions) can do so. That, and it actually makes people squirm MORE if they find the tie-breaker AFTER the fact. That, and the agonizing tends to get old on repeated playthroughs so it's more fun in my experience to think you can dispense with it easily. Cause, see, THEN what you do is you NEST the quandaries. Suppose, based on the situation I outlined, that the tie-breaker reveals your questionable guy to be an undercover working for a benevolent group who lost contact and got trapped in with these heinous criminals. He left his wife because he feared his undercover involvement would result in harm to her. Pretty straightforward. Now for the nesting. On playthrough 2 when you actually discover the vital piece of evidence and release the guy, he returns to his wife. And the malicious secret agency financing the heinous criminals kidnaps her, forcing him to spy on his bosses in the benevolent organization. All right, now you're like, rescue the wife, okay. Can do. Except when you get to her to rescue her, it turns out her kidnapping is a sham and she's actually converted to the bad guy side. She pleads with you to let her go because her exposure and death would be horrible on her husband. She promises she'll leave the country and never return. NOW what do you do? Do you let her go, hoping that this lying slitch will keep her word? Do you kill her, thus possibly making the husband hate you? Do you tell the husband? Will he believe you? SQUIRM BABY SQUIRM!!!! Now suppose there's a tie-breaker to THAT situation in the form of a way you can arrange for the husband and wife to meet and let him question her much more thoroughly, revealing that her defection was the result of her contracting lycanthropy sometime earlier, which the Bad Guys had the means to cure. So you let her go. However, if you do this, the Benevolent Organization that originally sent the husband undercover refuses to believe his story about why HE defected, because his only witness (the wife) has left the country under suspicious circumstances. So he gets kicked to the curb, loses his livelihood, and eventually commits suicide. Aren't I just a fountain of delights. :D Just because there's a tie-breaker that resolves some questions, that doesn't mean it'll get you to a good outcome. Even just with these 3 nestings there are so many possible outcomes (particularly if you add sideways options like "turn the guy in but refuse to let him be executed") that knowing the truth won't necessarily help you decide what to do, possibly even AFTER you know what the outcomes are.

This makes no sense whatsoever from a logical standpoint. If your primary means of defense is dodging rather than letting attacks be deflected off your armor, you have far fewer opportunities to attack. If you insist on this particular kind of tradeoff, it'd make more sense that lightly-armored people have a radically increased critical chance (or much higher critical damage), due to them placing their attacks with great precision because they aren't being rattled and half-dazed by enemy blows every couple of seconds. That being said, I generally only enjoy extreme micro in two situations in these types of games: rare Super Mega Colossal Boss fights (not necessarily only against a single big monster, but it should be a big, tough, and unusual fight), or when attrition has turned the battle into a duel between the Last Character Standing on my side and maybe the Last or Last Two on the other side. Or, in other words, either EEEEE Big Hairies! or Can I Pull This Disaster Out Of My Ass! The rest of the time I kind of enjoy throwing my characters in all willy-nilly and watching monsters faceplant on their chests.

I would like the game to be big enough and complicated enough that I can get myself turned around and confused. If I pronounce the words "where the fook am I now?" or "where the heck am I trying to go?" even once during the game, I shall be happy.

What really gets my goat about unsolvable quests is when they let you pick up the quest and complete 80-some percent of it and only THEN, after you've done all the grunt work clearing the demons out of the privy pit and they're dangling the reward in front of you, only THEN do you find out that YOU CANNOT COMPLETE THIS QUEST AND IT WILL HOVER UNCOMPLETED IN YOUR JOURNAL FOREVER BWAHAHAHAHAHA. THAT, I hate with the white-hot heat of 10,000 suns. If, on the other hand, you cannot even GET the quest if you do not fulfill the requirements, I don't mind in the least. It can even be a lot of fun on playthrough #2 to come to an area that seemed to lack interest and, whoa, surprise bonus quest!

Why would 500 pages be a disaster? I can read a 300 page book in under 3 hours. Besides, weed out the people with terrible spelling, grammar, and incoherent thoughts and you'll be down to 50 pages in no time. If it's longer than that, it means you have an unusually coherent, focused, and erudite base. So you win either way.

Or, they could organize the effort like intelligent people do (and volunteer work groups everywhere do), and make it their first step to audition and appoint a qualified volunteer editor/manager who vets all submissions for quality before passing any worthy examples on to the actual pros for final acceptance. Granted, these efforts sometimes implode because the bag-holder gets tired and fed up, but it's not like you lose anything significant if the source of free stuff dries up. The times I've seen it done well, it was planned in advance from the perspective of "if anything valuable results, yay, if not, oh well". The extra work for the editor/manager pays off for them indirectly (provided they have the free time and the drive to manage such an undertaking) because they can put in their CV when applying for paying work. I've seen people put managing MMO guilds on their CV and have it count in their favor. I know one person who got a managerial position solely on the strength of his management experience in an MMO guild. It's pretty clear that none of you guys have ever had to seriously organize or manage volunteers before.

I generally find the whole "moral quandary" thing to be incredibly difficult to implement well. If they give you a simple black-and-white choice (save the baby vs. eat the baby), there's no quandary. If they give you a choice between two bad things (kill innocent person A or kill innocent person B), it's still not a quandary because there's absolutely no criterion for deciding something like that. The best you can do is pick the one you like and move on. Oh, you can agonize over it if you wish but the end result will be as if you flipped a coin anyway. If you really want to make the player squirm with indecision, you need to confront them with options that all have something positive going for them, but also all taste REALLY BAD. Do I violate my explicit orders and let this nice-seeming dude go? How do I know he's telling the truth about his lack of involvement? What if I know my boss is crazed for blood and plans to have these prisoners executed out-of-hand? What if the group he's with is guilty of some truly heinous crimes and they DESERVE to be executed out-of-hand? And then what you do is you hide information that the guy is ACTUALLY like the right-hand-man of the boss of this criminal organization you've just raided somewhere 14 levels deep in a really obscure and complex conversation chain with his ex-wife's sister three towns away. Only the sister clearly hates the guy's guts for leaving his wife so it may just be the venom talking . . . It's even more fun if you make it so every new thing they find out makes the problem WORSE and not better. If you're in a nice mood you might put a tie-breaker in the game somewhere, but make it involve them running back and forth between 3 or 4 locations and reading people's journals or breaking into their home or something. Now THAT is a QUANDARY.

Erm, it's been my experience that the vast majority of quests in games have moral implications, even if it's something as simple as "return the valuable gem to the starving widow" or "sell it for 15 gp". I find I prefer it if the "good" choice depends more upon where you stand than upon conventional shallow ideas of good vs. evil equating to "save the baby" vs. "eat the baby".

Not surprised in the least. There are all kinds of "cloth" and padded armor out there, including layers of linen laminated together with resin. From what I've seen, people can and have made armor out of every conceivable material available and some that aren't.

One thing I think historical types need to keep in mind is that steel, in quantity, for anything, is a relatively new material. It requires fantastic amounts of charcoal to make good steel and it's very easy to screw up your heating and burn your iron during the process. During Roman times the metal du jour was not always steel but very often plain iron.

You clearly have never put out your hand to save yourself from falling and grabbed a mature rose cane by accident. Oh, and biker leathers will protect you a fair bit from having all your skin ripped off when you lay your bike down. That's not trivial damage. Leather gloves and chaps are also made out of soft leather, not leather that's been boiled hard and shaped. They make helmets out of that stuff. You are basically spouting a version of "plastic motorcycle helmets could NEVER protect you see if you put saran wrap over your arm it totally has no benefit". Pft.