Elerond

Agree about armor, damage types and skills affecting fight. But how you make same fighting style for 2H sword and for rapier? You mean you will swing rapier same as you would do with 2H sword? not going to happend and its going agains your own philosophy. And again you just cant put out different damages on different weapons. A lot of people in cRPGs love to gather more powerfull weapons. If ''power'' of weapong doesnt exist it will be boring to finding still same stat sword only with different skin. You guys would be great at designing something like Demon Soul but this is old skool cRPG (mostly based on P&P) Rapier with 2H style, character probably will get mostly negative bonuses from that as rapiers are not usually designed to be used with two hands, but if character wants to be stupid then why not? And of course there can be better weapons, for example steel sword would give more bonus to armor penetration than iron sword. So good sword don't make character become a swordmaster, but makes swordmaster work much easier. There are P&P systems that have more complex and realistic combat systems than that which I designed in 5 minutes (so it's far from perfect). And in my opinion old school don't mean that you must follow in D&D footsteps, in my opinion when you design entirely new rpg system you should probably take account what things you love in old systems and what things in your opinion are ridiculous or could been done better and then try to do fix them.

That is probably true if there is no need to hit on specific area. But in fight you must take account what your opponent does and where you need to hit him, her or it. Because if you wave your weapons like weather vane you will probably die. If I design fighting, weapon and armour system in the game. I probably would take approach where every fighting style gives it benefits to blocking, dodging and attacking. Character could use weapons with different styles, but weapons will give plus or minus to styles benefits depending on how good they fit on that style. Each weapon should probably also have damage types what it can inflict (for example slashing, blunt, piercing, thrust). Armours should have damage thresholds for each damage type and they should give plus and minus points to blocking, dodging and maybe even in attacking. And damage which character can inflict depends about his, her or its attributes, skills and feats. So character's damage dealing ability would mainly depend about his, her or its know-how and equipment and fighting styles only gives character bonuses or minuses on different aspects. In my opinion such approach would give more realistic feel and it's relatively easy to balance.

They would probably try do same thing what they did when they got hit from flaming oil shot from siege weapon. Dodge and hope that they don't die.

I think that no major healing/resurrection/etc. spells is very good choice lore wide, as it always destroy my the suspension of disbelief when there is assassination of major npc or s/he dies some other way and world is on turmoil and nevertheless that same world is full of people who have ability to resurrect dead. For example why our character in baldur's gate didn't have option to take Gorion's corpse to candel keep where there are several priest who can resurrect people. Or why my priest character in Baldur's Gate 2 can't resurrect Khalid, and etc. things that have always bugged me in D&D and Forgotten Realms. Or why there is people dying in diseases when every town has priest with cute diseases spell, it just don't make sense to me especially when there is no explanation in lore (in games) why it is so. So fully support lores that say that magic don't have insta healing powers and it can't bring dead back to life. Because then it much easier to make believable world where bad things happen. But if magic has ability to cure most of the misesry from world without any great cost to its users, but they some reason don't do such thing, I can only think what evil bastards those mages and priest are.

Balancing those things out is still going to be tricky though ... a lot of the combat in IWD or BG could run 4-5 turns (especially at the start) ... if my fighters all drop to the floor with fatigue after 2 rounds it is going to force consistent tactics like missile attacks or other things ... as long as they can balance it so my fighters can last more than 5 turns of combat without passing out I will be okay with whatever they call the two statistics In BG and IWD your warrior can drop dead after one combat turn if enemy got critical hit on you (especually at the start). And with bad luck fighter will go down in couple turns even if enemy don't get any critical hits, so in my opinion it is big plus if they only drop unconscious istead of dead. Usually fights last several turns because both sides missed most of their attacks, but that had nothing to do with combat resource points.

Megaversal?

In my opinion subtraction is probably best method to use. Because this make it possible that there difference between dodging/blocking the blow and armour stopping it and I don't like pure percentage reduction as it means that armour can't stop even weaker blows fully (except when armour gives character immunity against certain kind of damge). Damage threshold and percentage reduction could also work, but in my opinion pure threshold system is better, because it tells outright how much damage armour can endure before it gives up and in my experience it make balancing damage dealers and protection easier. And if there is need for different damage types you can give an armour different thresholds for each damage type, for example chain mail could have damage threshold 4 against slashing damage and 2 against piercing damage (this with presumption that most weapons do damage with in range 1-10).

I vote NO for talent trees in PE. In my opinion they are stuff of more action oriented games. Talents in rpg's should be limited only by attributes or skills.

You haven't chose what will be your title

Isn't the point of Kickstarter specifically to avoid the pre-order legal issue by stating all the backer levels are donations? There was some long discussion about it in one of the Update threads pertaining to international stuff, but I didn't pay that much attention to it--as to specific reward levels, I suppose that could be listed as "gift" for customs, but I really don't know how that would work out ultimately. Legally, there were no purchases. It is, but for example here in Finland there was depate earlier this year about are kickstarter product rewards gifts, pre-orders or something else and this was because Finnish law don't recognize such thing as crowd funding. Reason for depate was of course taxing issue and it ended without court ruling as writer whose book funding caused depate returned funds, when she got funding from else where, so I don't know what Finnish court of law think about issue, but it is not as right forward as one would think. And I have told that Finland is not only country with such legal issues with kickstarter projects. But when we are speaking about foreing (from Finnish perspective) kickstarter projects our authorities don't care as long we pay VAT for product what we got. And how contracts will work is issue where we will haven't aswer until in future after first court ruling or law change (as it with all new things, goverment is always in the second train). And I don't know about that Legally, there was no purchaces part, because you can find this part from kickstarter's terms

The mega-dungeon would be a perfectly contained testing ground for mechanical purposes. The only item that Obsidian can't and won't allow for full testing is a full game based on dialogic content (as Adam's quote says), and that's great. With the sheer number of potential beta testers due to their KS add-on setup, I'm sure there will be leaks, and Obsidian probably won't be able to maintain power over an NDA. Even though we know the beta won't be the full game, there's still a huge range of what content would be available for testing--percentage of landscape quests, how much of the mega dungeon, etc. But it's too early to tell, not to mention everyone has a different level of spoiler-tolerance. For people who got a bundled beta key, no point in trying to decide before the late 2013/early 2014 beta period, I'm sure. For people who did an add-on and need to decide earlier whether to convert to something else.... um, well, decide your own tolerance, I guess? And even if more of the game is available than you want to spoil, you could always limit yourself to a specific area. In many countries you can't add conditions after purchace of the product and many of this countries view that product rewards from kickstarter are pre-orders, so in these cases Obsidian can't add legaly binding NDA anymore to their beta-keys, but I don't see why they would even have such needs as they openly share information about game and discuss it with us, which was one of the reasons why they wanted to PE via kickstarter. So if person has really low spoiler tolerance I would suggest that s/he keep away spoiler allowed parts of the forum after relase of the beta.

For me beta can't ruin the game, because I can see them as different experience from final product, and spoilers don't really bother me as in my opinion great plot gets better every time you experience it and you found new viewpoint for the story.

Combat resources Information tidbits what we have got from Obsidian, we know that they plan use at least two combat resources Health and Stamina. Where health represent characters overall condition, like how many wounds, broken bones, bruises characters has and these can be healed only by rest and time. And stamina represent characters how badly characters are shaken by hits which they have suffered, like hit to stomach causes character to be winded up, blow to head causes blurry vision for the character, so such damage which character will recover quickly if character can take short break from the battle. But started to think if there should be more combat resources than this two for example fatigue. My idea about fatigue is that character's actions like hitting, using soul powers, running, etc. will consume fatigue points and when fatigue point go zero character's actions would be slower or otherwise hindered or maybe they start eating stamina, as character tries to operate in state of exhaustion. So fatigue would represent character's exhaustion level. Adding fatigue as combat resource could also work as one way to explain why some characters wear light armor instead of heavy armor. As fatigue gives option to give armors an exhausting factor, for example full plate will stop nearly all damage from hits, but it will also double/triple amount of fatigue what character's actions fatigue cost. How combat resources should be determined? Usually in computer role-playing games characters get more health as their level rises which causes them to be some what utopistic god-like creatures that don't die from anything less than apocalyptic feat. In my opinion this is not the best approach to this question. So with more than one combat resource in use I would like to see that character's health would be quite constant through the game. I think that amount of the character's health points could be determined for example by character's constitution (or similar) attribute, using it with factor of one or two. So if character has constitution of 15 character could have 15-30 health points and only way to get more health points is by rising character's constitution or possibly by feats. In max level character should be able to have max double of health points compared to level 1. This way normal weapons from the start of the game will not become useless against character and this will lower need for utopistic high level magic items and they can be as rare as they should be. This system also makes armors to be more important as your character can die fairly quickly without one. Stamina point development in my opinion could follow health point development from other games and so in end game to knock out a character you probably need sleep or other spells, abilities or weapons that do great amount of stamina damage and otherwise character will fight to bitter end. Why stamina should increase if health don't increase, I come with this idea by watching boxers, as newbie boxers are usually pretty easy to knock out where professional boxers can much more hits in their head before they are knocked out, so my opinion is that one can get better tolerance against knock out via training and regular beat downs, but gut wound will be serious even for most trained and experienced characters. And if fatigue is added as resource it should have similar development with stamina, and you only need to look professional long-runners to see why. Armors Often in role-playing games armors are represented so that better armor will make hitting harder, which is not bad way to do it, but in my opinion it is somewhat over simplified way to do it. And I would like see rather system where armors absorb damage from the hits. For example plate mail could absorb 5 point of health damage and 10 points of stamina damage and regular broad sword could do d6 points of health damage and three times of that stamina damage, so only most deadliest hits from sword can penetrate through armor but half of the hits will cause stamina damage. And against critical hits armor don't give any protection as critical hit means that character was hit in such place where armor don't give protection. Addition to armor characters should have dodge ability which gives them change to avoid blows or make it harder to hit them. Dodging should cause loss of fatigue for character and so character can't anymore dodge blows when s/he is too exhausted to move. I am not sure if armors should cause additional hindering for dodging than added fatigue cost, because that is already very punishing for low level characters, but for high level character it may not be such punishment but I am not sure that it should be. That is quite enough for this time That was my vision which direction combat resource usage and presentation in PE should go, with some opinions about armors and dodging, but I am also interested about your opinions and visions about subject and combat as whole in PE, so be good and share them with rest of us.

I like more Värtinä when it comes to bands that sang songs that use Finnish folk song thematic style in them. But both are wonderful band and nevertheless I don't think that this kind songs or artists are good fit to Project Eternity, but one can always still promote them .

Yes it is possible to create destructable objects that are not pre-rendered, but it is also possible to create destructable objects that are pre-rendered, as you only need make destructable object different image from baground (a sprite). When you have destructable object as different image you can do another version of that image where object is destroyed and swap destroyed version of object to be shown when object's statuts is destroyed or you can do even destory animation where you have multiple images that illustrate destruction of the object and in game you show them as series of images in short period of time and it looks like object explodes or something like that (this way you quite easilly do trees that look that wind moves them or water which looks that it flows). But artists workload is added by every object which you want be destroyable, moveable and etc. able, which is reson why I think that such objects should be quite rare unless artist have too much freetime .

My opinion to on going depate is that when you have character which you can yourself define like in bgs or fallouts. Game should not need to know your characters motivations it should only react to what your character did. And even if npcs in game for some reason want to ask what was pc's motive to do things what s/he did, it should be made possible pc to give any motivation s/he thinks will best suite his or her purpose with said npc, this should not be necessary the real motivation behind pc's actions. For me defining my own character and deciding his or her motivations, goals and ways to acomplish them are those features which makes game to be a rpg. More this things a resticted in game less I feel it to be a roleplaying game

I liked AP's idea and general feeling to be James Bond style spy. Multiple options to solve thigns was nice too. What I didn't liked was boss fights, skill development and mini games. So my final vertic is that game is good, with some flaws, but should definetly give it a try, at least one play through,which take usually 20-30 hours.

So what, by your definition, wouldn't be lazy design? Having everything look exactly the same? Because that's what would happen if the designers went for functional realism. Going back to cars all we'd have would be a sea of Corollas and Lancers with the high end ones only being distinguished by their Nos decals (your diamonds and gold accents). You can do different looking things that are designed to function in their intended purpose. You only need to look how many different looking functional historical full plates or swords there are. If PE includes all of those designs they will have thousand different looking weapons and armours in the game. And you can distinguish better versions of equipment from weaker ones by saying that they use better materials and visualaising them using decorations that don't nerf their purpose. Here pile of rapiers that which all have more or less differing look. Here group of broadswords Here are several cavalry sabres And for example also poleaxes can have several different looks And nice picture which shows how sword design changed during middle ages.

As for the things like weak points, hammer heads being too large, etc. those can all be explained away by simply saying "magic fixes it" since all the fancy top end gear is going to be magical in nature. How does Drizz't's scimitar give you better defense stats? How does the Flail of Ages even work; wouldn't 5 heads be way too cumbersome? What about Dak'kon's zerth blade; that thing is just bananas! All of this is explained by magic makes it work. Which is just lazy design. Magic is nice thing in fantasy worlds but rules what it follows should not change from one subject to another. Because without straight forward rules for this mystical force, it is very easy to end up with magical cannon that saves and changes whole university, but it is ok because it is magic. So if you have mystical force called for example magic which gives people in your fantasy world ability create metal that is lighter and stronger than steel for example then designing weapons that uses this metal should use logical and practical design patterns to show how people would use such metal to make best possible weapons and armours. If people have ability harness this force to intresting looking runes that gives bearer of the weapon ability make light up in fire, or absorb all heat from their body, or call magic veil to protect wearer from blows, it should not have any effect how weapons and armours basic functions are designed, except if these runes need different designs and if it so then these weapons and armours should have weaker basic functionality than their better designed counterparts. But sadly it is usually so that magic some reason makes absurd design work better in every way than practical designs, and there is not even explanation why, except that it is "magic".

I am for BG style, but I would also like if journal and automap were magical items (like in lands of lore), which explain very nicely why you can so easily sort your journal or why your map gets new areas as game goes on and etc..

And every one of those ornamental weapons that Dronios linked also fulfill all the basic functions. Lambos have almost no redeeming qualities outside of looks (their mileage is awful, sitting in them is like being in a torture rack, and they get beaten by cars that cost 1/4 to 1/2 as much). Hell, the newest one (Aventador) doesn't even put it's power down well since the transmission is **** and the breaks are awful. Despite all that people still buy and use them 'cause they look awesome, and this is in the real world. In a fantasy world where magic enchantments could offset a lot of the detriments of "ornamental" weapons and armor (who cares if a weapon is balanced like **** if it weighs nothing) it is even more likely that super expensive things would look amazing. No they don't. They have rain guard's that don't work as they should, they have ornamental structures in their blades that weaken them and make them broke more easilly. Hammer has too large head to be very useful or even useable. First of the blades has too long blade considering its grip. So they would be nearly as useful in fight as toys. Speaking about Lambos, they have many redeeming qualities, like good reputation, imago bonus, and they are fast for example LP 570-4 Superleggera has max speed of 325 km/h (202 mph). As in my example I don't think that dimonds on rain guard, or gold ornaments on armour give any bonus in combat, but nobles put them in their weapons because they looked cool, to show their status or monetary wealth and I am not against such coolness, but I am against coolness that in reality hinders weapon or armour main purpose and gamemechanics don't show that hindering. It would be like long-haul race game where lambos have same mileage as Honda CR-Z, because they are so cool looking.

I am all for fight animations that don't look like that character hack each other with sticks. And I have told my preference for relistic/functional looking equipment in http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61306-armour-weapon-designs-a-plea-part-ii/

For me it makes world feel more believable. And it is not really realism what I am after, but functionality, so if get vote how weapons and armouts should be designed in game, my vote always goes for designs that look like they could work in our world, in other word armour should look like it purpose is to protect it's wearer and weapon should look like it's intended for battlefield and killing not to look pretty in showcase. This of course don't mean that I can't enjoy games that don't follow my design ideology. For example I love Warhammer even though it has over sized weapons, some times very ridicilous looking armours, and mages that poses like they want arrow in their chest. But my love for fantasy orgins from Tolkien's, Eddings', Robin McKinley's and Ursula K. Le Guin (and other whose names I don't now recall) books, where warfare was descripted to be functional or there was reason why it was not. If everything was made to be functional all the armor and weapons would look pretty much the same. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of Corollas and Lancers and Focuses (Foci?), but there should also be some Ferraris and Lambos. But every one of those fullfill basic functionalities what one ask from car (get from place a to place b, with higher speed than walking), even Ferraris and Lambos. But base functionalities are not only functions what person seeks, some want cheapest thing that fullfill basic functionalities (cheapness is in this case a function which car much fullfill), others want car with large cargo capacity, or with low fuel consumption, or with powerfull engine and high max speed, or they want car to look nice, or have confortable insides, but at the end of the day nearly all people want car that fullfil basic functionalities of car plus those functionalities which in their opinion will make car more suitable for their need. One thing what I don't believe is that there is many who wants a car which look über cool but you need to push it from place a to place b if you want to move with it. This same logic goes for armours and weapons, they should be able to fullfill their basic functions first and then comes other functions like movability, looks, etc.. So here swords that you could say to be ferraris of the swords, without need to reduce their combat effectiness And here same for full plate armour

Those aren't very functional weapon designs, they look more like ornaments than real weapons. But they look awesome. Metal armor isn't very functional when facing fire but I don't see you complaining about that. They don't look awesome, they look more like toys in my eye. Metal armor works fine against bursts of fire, but against constant fire there is very we suits what one can wear that it will protect its wearer against continuously rising temperature. So against fireball steel armour is pretty good, but middle of inferno there is not really anything what one can wear so tha s/he can survive long period of time. What is the meaning of chasing the full realism in an unreal world ? For me it makes world feel more believable. And it is not really realism what I am after, but functionality, so if get vote how weapons and armouts should be designed in game, my vote always goes for designs that look like they could work in our world, in other word armour should look like it purpose is to protect it's wearer and weapon should look like it's intended for battlefield and killing not to look pretty in showcase. This of course don't mean that I can't enjoy games that don't follow my design ideology. For example I love Warhammer even though it has over sized weapons, some times very ridicilous looking armours, and mages that poses like they want arrow in their chest. But my love for fantasy orgins from Tolkien's, Eddings', Robin McKinley's and Ursula K. Le Guin (and other whose names I don't now recall) books, where warfare was descripted to be functional or there was reason why it was not.

Those aren't very functional weapon designs, they look more like ornaments than real weapons. But they look awesome. Metal armor isn't very functional when facing fire but I don't see you complaining about that. They don't look awesome, they look more like toys in my eye. Metal armor works fine against bursts of fire, but against constant fire there is very we suits what one can wear that it will protect its wearer against continuously rising temperature. So against fireball steel armour is pretty good, but middle of inferno there is not really anything what one can wear so tha s/he can survive long period of time.