Eiphel

that depends on wether there's something that creates a feeling of unity between Godlikes or not. Manic-depressives are a group, but they don't have their own culture. http://www.bipolaruk.org.uk/ Amongst others. (I would know.) And persecution or being seen as different is one of the biggest catalysts for creating unity in a group.

This is a bit of a jump in logic - Since even in the real world where everyone is human, we have subcultures and subcultural spaces. Punks, goths, gay villages, gentlemen's clubs, et cetera. Cultures can spring up around all kinds of facets, physical, social or otherwise. I think it would be pretty unrealistic if the godlikes didn't have any kind of culture of their own.

I find that quite an odd statement, because I totally agree with your first point, but the concept art for the elemental characters was the one I felt least fit that aesthetic.

P:E was title story in this magazine last month, the pictures are one month old. information: in the end you will be level 8-9 with side quest you can get to level 12(level cap). cipher: they can move objects per telekenisis you must target an enemy or a friendly target as anchor for your skills. An example they mentioned is that you can make a electronical field between you and your target and if one moves the field will move with it. Your skill effects will affect the area near your anchor. Everything I hear about Ciphers is great. I suspect I'll be playing a Hearth Orlan Cipher for the first playthrough. (Not ruling out a Godlike Chanter though.)

This is a simple notion, but I think it's a really great way to approach (at least one iterative pass of) roleplaying design.

I just want to point out - Several people have said 'But nobody considers themselves evil, they all have reason for their actions', or similar. That's (somewhat) true, but it's not directly relevant to the original post. We're talking about playing a character that we, as players, consider evil - not a character that considers themselves evil.

The original question doesn't actually say anything about thew game imposing labels onto morality. There can be choices of morality in the game without the game having to label one as good and one as evil.

I played New Vegas as a deeply disturbing character and I felt quite satisfied with my opportunities for 'evil' in that.

But at the junction where one class is 'essentially <another class>', why would you not just make it actually that class?

Because the renders are from untextured Zbrush models, you can't see the mottled skin patterns that hearth orlans have. This is also why some people are interpreting the wild orlans' body/facial hair as "wrinkles". The "wrinkles" are actually their hair. That's reassuring! At the moment hearth Orlans are the race that most intrigue me.

New Vegas's hardcore mode did that. The longer you went without sleep the less competent you became.

Well, I've never really been engaged by Paladins as a distinct class. To me I never saw why they weren't just a variant of Fighter. Clearly they have a lot of fans though, and they sound pretty much the same as they are elsewhere, so I'll assume they're satisfying the folk they're meant to. Their mechanical style sounds potentially pretty neat, but they're not a big draw for me. Orlans, on the other hand, I am all about. I am super excited by Orlans and that Orlan detective is my favourite piece of concept work to come out of the whole of PE so far. I love the look of the wild Orlans, being just how I imagined them, but I'm disappointed that the Hearth Orlans seem to have been more humanised and now are looking a bit like 'short hairy elf'. The renders in this update don't capture what grabbed me about that original detective art, alas. As regards the wild Orlans, I do really hope that the racial prejudice aspect will be handled with more nuance than I've ever really seen it be in other games. I've yet to see racial prejudice be well portrayed in any game.

Why simple when we can complicate heh living s*** out of things...right? It's not complication for complication's sake - The fact is that natural languages with universally clean phonetic spelling are near nonexistent. Such a language is obviously artificial and bespeaks no history or background for its culture. It's a complete flavour vacuum.

I feel like Strength might have interesting implications for armour penetration - The 13 year old can't drive a dagger through boiled leather, but the Rock might be able to ram one through chainmail.

That's what I expect, but I wanted to find out how much players care about their expected pronunciation matching the "real" pronunciation (for whatever that is worth). My assumption was that players don't really care as long as they don't stumble over the words while reading them, but it's a baseless assumption. Personally, I find it FAR more immersive if the languages are not all designed to be intuitively pronounced correctly. That's not the case for a selection of real languages. If every language in P:E is intuitively pronounced correctly by English speakers, that just makes them seem more artificial for all sharing the same pronunciation features. I'm far more interested in a range of languages whose orthographic features and phonetic features do not all correspond in the same way. Also I care a lot about rich and well developed languages in general; it's one of my favourite things.

To be honest, whilst I like my stats to be meaningful, I do also like them to be within realistic ranges. When max-strength human can be six, or seven or eight times stronger than average strength guy, it strains credulity.

Different checks could always look to different measurements, or even a combination. So busting a door down might be 'If any two party members have a combined STR of 30'. Bluffing a guy might be 'If at least one party member has a bluff of 18, the average bluff of the party is 10 or more, and nobody has a bluff of 3 or less'. I don't actually think that's a great or particularly feasible idea, but I figured I'd mention it in a spitballing sort of spirit. That said, it would be neat if you had your usual bluff outcomes of, like, 'Eh, sure, I guess...' and 'Nah, I don't think so...' but if you had Johnny Honest in your party, whose character shtick is that he's an awful liar, instead you get a new outcome of 'You're obviously lying, that guy just burst out laughing.'

I'm neither for or against them. As long as there's a consistent world and it's interesting and well realised, I'll likely enjoy it. But it was a surprise to me, because it wasn't the sort of thing I had pictured as being part of PE's aesthetic based on everything else we'd seen. The tone of everything else was much less 'magepunk'. I would actually quite like to see more settings where there isn't a 'magic-as-technology/electricity' trope, and I'd thought PE was going to go that way. But I don't dislike it if it's done well.

Definitely a step in the right direction. You have a reason for why it is there but I am going to go ahead and say it anyway... You still need to get rid of those large black obsidian art panels. I would still advise finding a way to make the quickbar buttons bigger, they are still the smallest thing in your ui and yet are the most likely thing to be clicked throughout the game. They just need to be bigger. Assuming the extra obsidian was gone I would kick the dialog box over to the left corner and trim down the obsidian "flow" over the quickbar so that it was smaller and slid off right past the buttons. Beyond that.... definitely the best side panel UI mock up in this thread. However we are now to that time. With their most recent update and UI related commentary I am reasonably happy they are going for a more compact UI. We will have to see what they have in mind later. I had already been working on a final "version" of what I made earlier just to satisfy some people so I will post it now. Superlative! This is by far my most favoured design of the ones I've seen. Give me the ability to expand the text box into the middle of the screen for dialogues and I am sold.

Yeah, I pretty much just agree with your other points. Not much to add.

It depends how hands on the gods are - again, a lot of this discussion is running far ahead of the known info, as is inevitable at this point. It's quite easy to consider that some gods might be relatively uncaring about the individual. And even the caring gods might not micromanage their followers on an individual level. It all really depends on exactly how divinity works in the world. I believe it's Wodica who's the god who actually walks the world? I can easily imagine that she might not neccesarily have the awareness/power/inclination to personally go and strike down anyone who turns from her faith. And it's also possible some gods might not be jealous and self-centred, and actually understand people's change of heart. It depends how deep Obsidian want to get with it, but really it's more realistic if different gods respond differently. (Also personally I really like the idea that you could play an atheist or fallen priest.) On another note, I hope that characters in classes other than clerics will still be able to be played as religious and faithful.

If the gods are competing against another there is no way the gods would allow you to pray to a different god. I don't think we know enough about the setting to know exactly how all the gods relate to each other. It's not neccesarily going to be the case that every god is absolutely opposed to every other (that'd be pretty bizarre, actually). And even aside from that, there are real world pantheistic religions in which the gods opposed one another and warred amongst themselves, and the people still worshipped multiple gods. Now, you might say 'But those gods weren't real, in PE the gods are objective fact'. But remember, to the believers in those real world religions, they believed the gods WERE objective fact, and yet their religion still allowed for the worship of competing gods. You've slightly misunderstood what I'm saying. I'm not saying you shouldn't choose one at the start, I'm saying it shouldn't be chosen by clicking a button. Just like you might decide you want to be an arrogant bastard, you wouldn't click the 'Arrogant Bastard' button on the character creation screen, you'd simply play your character that way, making choices according to that nature, and acting as you'd always been one. I feel like your religious inclinations should be handled the same way. I just want to point out that, without restricting the starting point of your character in the world/narrative to "you've literally JUST decided to become a Priest, without any prior thought or action on the matter," your character surely would have some amount of accumulated dedication to one deity or another (or even multiple). So, getting to make a selection of this sort at character creation may not be entirely out of the question. It just shouldn't dictate how you progress in your faith (class development), and/or how you worship said deity(s). Good point, this didn't cross my mind last night. Ideally it could be handled more organically than a button click, though (like the ability to demonstrate your current faith in the opening sequences). Ultimately my thing is that I prefer the clicky-button character creation choices to be just for mechanics, and roleplay choices to be emergent from roleplay. I realise that making this an absolute distinction in practise isn't really possible, especially with cases like Clerics where the roleplaying and mechanical sides blur together to a large extent. I wouldn't be disappointed if the game didn't implement a system to the degree of what I've described - I don't really expect that it will - the real underlying sentiment of what I'm saying is that I'd like the mechanism for demonstrating roleplaying choices not to be a wholly mechanical one.

It'll be quite hard to really judge the godlikes until we see what the actual impact of the gods themselves is upon the world. Personally I'm hoping for something more akin to Aasimar and Tieflings than Genasi. (Aasimar are one of my favourite PS races.)

Mmm, I sure would love to see that list. ;o On that note, I would have expect the balance of spells to abilities to be far less equal. There are more classes with abilities than spells, after all. One of my pet peeves with games is when the magic users get five or six times more abilities to choose from because the devs come up with swathes of spells but didn't put the same work into the abilities.

The idea for whole-party dialogue contributions is full of potential, although for roleplaying purposes I do tend to like my personal character to be focal in the dialogues. I like the idea that in situations where a certain character's nature is relevant to the discussion, though, you might get a bonus conversation option where they speak. And hey, maybe sometimes a character might feel so strongly they actually interrupt (used sparingly and non-obnoxiously). To avoid the issue of 'With a six man party, I am great at everything', the contributions of other party members should be tied specifically to character. So having a barbarian who is hugely intimidating doesn't guarantee you'll simply be able to cruise through intimidating anyone you wish, because the conversation option for him to involve himself would only come up when he'd be particularly compelled to make a threat. So if you're just trying to beat cheaper prices from a smith, you can't have him throw his muscle around, but perhaps he hates Orlans, and the smith is an Orlan. Then the '[intimidate; Barbarian] Blaa...' option comes up along with the usual ones. I like to be the focus of the dialogue because I want to feel like I am roleplaying my individual character. But I do like a mechanic that actually makes it feel like the whole party is present and has opinions, rather than simply all standing back and nodding in silent agreement.