Shadenuat

It is a way to let player know of the existence of feats and their prereqs. In Fallout, you would never know there is a Living Anatomy perk, unless you have Medicine 70. In NWN2, you would never be aware of Feint feat, unless you read Silent Blade prestige class description. Sure there are manuals, but it's a good taste to let player know what his options are and let him plan ahead inside the game. Skill Trees can be used just for that. There are other ways to do it (for example, a list of feats with avaible feats at the top and not avaible at bottom and being darker ot transparent), Skill Trees just one of them.

Talent tree is just a visualisation of skills and their prerequisites. You can take Power Attack, Improved Power Attack, Cleave, Greater Cleave and Epic Cleave and make it look like a talent tree.

Hire Cecile Corbel instead to play harp and create whole celtic-oriented soundtrack for the game. :|

Yeah, some were - like smithy in Beregost (or rather, there were't anyone around at night... so you could rob some stuff from there without being noticed). In Arcanum, some were actually opened - like Necromancy shop hidden around the corner of a regular "day" shop. It's all cool.

Name three.

Unknown items, cursed items, talking items, teleporting items, possesing your soul items, sages, Lore, Identify, belts which change wearer's gender... all fine to me.

We're still talking about basic reading comprehension here, right? Also, who said dialogue is't part of the gameplay, and should't have challenge? I don't think you'll secure the future of RPG gaming by supporting feature that takes away literature part of it (with tags, you don't really have to write long, bookish sentences like Planescape had). Seriously, that's your argument? Lol.

Your example have nothing to do with skills, it's just a shorter way of explaining player's motivation. All three out of four might as well check Charisma.

You have your character sheet for that. There is a general rule in roleplaying which people around me tend to follow as a sign of good taste and which I follow myself - roleplay what you can, leave mechanical stuff to dice. If you're going to pick a lock, I'd ask you to roll your Lockpick skill, and success or failure would be transparent as lock can be either locked or not. However, if I'd try and bluff you and you'll ask to roll a Wisdom check to determine lies, I'll throw my box of dice at you. Well, at maximum. At minimum, I won't tell you if your check was actually successful or not.

So what? Your expectations for those characters you've spoken were wrong, what's so alien about that? Was your heart broken by every "Morrigan dissaproves" line? Easy. You pick the line which you feel your character had the highest probability to say at that moment and stick with it. You either roleplay, or use your own morality, whichever you prefer.

That's one way to do it. Or give player "2. (Shout at the guy threatingly): Give me the information I want!" line. You know, like IN THE BOOKS.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. When you see "Diplomacy" or, worse, "Diplomacy 44/50", the game itself pushes you to metagaming. If you know there is a chance of failure, you will try to get the best result - either by saving a few skill points, or carrying items which raise them, like that. It's meta information. When there's little to no meta information, you make choices on your roleplaying basis. That's why I like Fallout, Arcanum and Planescape's dialogues so much. They are pleasantly surprising when you beat the game with one character, then make another one and see new dialogue lines coming up.

Barrels and even some stuff like wardrums and towers in IWD2 probably were handled like monsters (they even had circles around them) and two sprite sets - "alive" and "destructed". As they are making characters in 3D in PE (?), I'm sure it's possible to create some sort of destructable objects, like containers, doors and maybe even parts of walls which are not pre-rendered?

Underrail is a little indie which made additional layers of armor like upgrades; for exaple, you can craft a leather armor, and when crafting it has two slots, and you can put a padding or some plates in those slots which add new properties to armor. Actually, I think it's a feature from Jagged Alliance, you could change armoring plates inside vests there. KOTOR had something like that too. In Rage of Mages you could wear a breastplate on top of mail.

If you take the concept straight out of the book it often feels crude (and it's often handled crude with all the hippie or park-ranger attitude developers shove in players throats *ugghh* Ellani *ugggh*), but the basic idea is that Druid in D&D is a mediator between civilized and uncivilized. You could find a lot of druids in books (like the Complete Druid from 2d edition), from some priest who is concerned with agricultural state of his land to barbaric shaman making dealings with monsters for the sake of his tribe. I really like that they don't have an exact "formula" there, and instead present players with a set of archetypes to choose from.

It's closest you can get to play pagan priest, and neopaganism has it's fans. Druids rarely get any attention from designers to make them interesting. You can't commune with fairies or dead (or dead fairies!), you can't burn people in wooden cages or use their heads as missile weapons - already a bit boring. You don't get any political unfluence druids enjoyed, though regular clerics rarely get anything like that too. If anything, druids are usually secluded sages than a powerful cult in fantasy games. Now, there are D&D druids, who are about "balance" - idea probably has it's roots in some of the ancient religions which had priests caretake to holy animals which were forbidden to eat and places forbidden to enter. The problem of balancing two natures of a human (nature and culture) is pretty cool and you can take it into several directions, and maybe the problem of finding place for animals in society. Just having a character who is a concerned veterinarian in a world where souls change bodies could be cool, although idea of protecting animals from abuse would probably feel too modern for lots of people (but, as I said, it's nothing new, there were laws and beliefs akin to that). I prefer AD&D druids over 3ed and overall more restrictions on class. Having a character who believes in natural but can "cheat" and shapeshift while wearing armor and weapons does't seem right to me. When speaking with animals, I'd rather not see a Snow White archetype with cute little wolves and nice little birdies instantly falling for "connected to land" hippie, because, again, it goes against the whole idea of what D&D druids believe in. If a druid wants a help of wolves to kill some orcs, it would be cool if he has to turn into a wolf himself and battle with local alpha for a pack to follow him. That would make much more sense than just casting a "charm" spell or passing "animal empathy" check, because he would follow rules of nature, he should't instantly get on top of food-chain just because he carries a sickle and an oakleaf amulet. This is why his gods, or spirits, if any, give him power - to learn, understand, and to play by the rules of nature, not to cheat around them. What else... in D&D druid books it's often noted that animal companion is an animal which comes to druid's aid at some point of his life and acts as his friend. That's another thing which would seem to make more sense - do not let druid control his summons or his animal companion, it would be nice if they sometimes act on their on natural instincts, maybe retreat when wounded or stay outside of heavy populated areas. Giving animal a command could act as a "animal empathy" check, and if failed, animal would rather act instinctively than intelligently. Well, I could go for a long time as I like treehuggers and often play that class, but it's rather pointless concidering there are already eleven (or eight? I don't remember) classes, so, I think we'd get to treat wounded animal's leg once as a side quest and developers would leave it at that, like they always do. My only hope is that celtic influence over the setting would open at least a few other possibilites and maybe, just maybe I'd get to lead a small army of brownies, fairies and dead against infidels and play all-Faldorn style. By the way, Faldorn was probably my favorite druid from games, all time. Cute little eco-terrorist who hates everything, she was such a treat.

Wat

Both systems are okay as long as they provide fun and intuitive gameplay. DR is not an angel from haven saving people from hellish unrealism of AC, if it can't mimic AD&D experience when you finally clad your warrior in full plate and take a breath, feeling you're now a tank and can take some punishment. Lot of DR systems have too low or too high absorbtion rate rise. If it's too low, armor does't really affect the gameplay. If new armor gives 4% more damage reduction than starting armor, there is no point in trying to get new armor. The other way DR can fail is basically making character invulnerable to low level damage. If an arrow does 1d6 damage, and crits double, that means you need 12 DR to be immune to regular archer. If so, I'd prefer a statistical probability of old and worn AD&D, where twenty archers shooting at a character in full armor still don't lose chance to score crit and wound him. Also, AC's being abstract has it's own value. It is possible, statistically, to hit armored person so often that you start wounding him. With DR, with added a more "realistic" approach, new questions also start to rise. Like, if you shoot a hundred arrows at that chestplate, why it retains the same DR level? And some others.

Good news everyone! I'd give you 2 out of 10.

This question is from Micah Beaumont. "What are some of the specific things (such as Movies, Artists, Books, Games) that greatly influence you?" I take a lot of inspiration from history. History books contain some of the most interesting characters and conflicts I've ever seen. I like the histories of "great men" (and women, like Joan of Arc and Lucrezia Borgia), but I'm really fascinated by the lives of ordinary, less well-known people put in difficult or unusual circumstances. In particular, figures like Martin Guerre, Domenico Scandella (aka Menocchio), Matteo Ricci, and Hans Böhm are really inspiring to me. St. Waidwen in Project Eternity is based on legends of Hans Böhm, aka the Drummer of Niklashausen. Along the same lines, I like history and historical fiction, both in films and books. I really enjoy the historically-focused works of Umberto Eco, especially The Name of the Rose and Baudolino. Lawrence of Arabia and Roland Joffé's The Mission are both favorite films of mine and were inspirations for the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts. Haters can suck on our huge metal codpieces on our gothic plates.

If you're using a game as your deliverer of story, you should know your tools of trade and make the best out of them. I think *that* is a sign of good story-teller. Lot of people grown up and can't come up with a story using only two sticks and a cardboard box, you know. That's why Bethesda-style reactivity does't work for me, for example.

Womyn, u not want to be oversexualizated?

It would sound subjective and lazy like ****, like, I'm not really contributing anything, but: ultimately, author projects his own morality into his creation, and what matters is if his views are interesting or boring. Frankly, Obsidian's views on the matter seem a bit more complex than Myleunex's angeldevilonshoulder/cutedoggie/goodisthehardway, and that makes them interesting for me.

Projecting your own problems into outside world and irrelevant areas like games instead of getting treatment seems like a hit nowadays. OTOH thanks to designers lacking any imagination giant spiders (and dragons, by the way) are so overused that if I'd make a monster manual for game, arachnophobes would sleep well knowing there won't be any. Seems like any RPG has them in their trailers, and developers have a bet of some sort of whos spiders would be the largest and awesome than of their rivals. Let's add giant armadillo bugs instead, which could commune with player telepathically.

Both, duh. That's why it's so hard to make a good RPG.