aliksy

I rather dislike cool downs, especially if they're longer than a few seconds. Guild Wars 2 is all cool down, but you usually have a lot of options so you're rarely stuck with nothing to do. Magicka has no cool downs and has the best magic system in the world. I played a MUD (Project Bob!) that didn't have cooldowns exactly- Skills had an ideal recharge time, but if you used it again before that it would execute less effectively. Seemed like a good compromise. I dislike mana pools, ESPECIALLY if they are slow to refill. If I have to sit around and wait after each fight, that's a major design flaw. Arcanum was kind of okay when you could advance time, but if you were inside you had to use consumables or actually wait 10 minutes for your fatigue to refill. But the spells-per-day system is basically the worst magic system in the world, so I really hope they don't do that. I don't think anyone likes adventuring for 25 minutes and then sleeping for 8 hours. Or sitting on your best spells just in case a real fight starts.

You may have stumbled onto a great idea. Some crpgs have a full party form, but they just sit around when not with you. It'd be cool if you could ask them to do stuff on their own, and that had results. Hell, maybe if you're really bored with combat you can send your fighty people in to fight, have that resolved with some dice rolls, and you could go play the talky bits.

I'm pretty sure degree of success is pretty common in tabletop games. I vaguely remember some rules in d20 3.x (ew), even. I personally don't like a whole lot of randomness in my games, so I guess it depends on how it's implemented. I don't want to lose because the RNG gods gave me six fumbles in a row and the enemy was gifted six dramatic successes. That goes more into broad system questions and math, and why I like dice pool much much much more than 1d20+stuff.

If romance is going to be done I expect equally developed options to be available for straight and not-straight people. I think most people's exposure to romance in video games is from Bioware where they're not very well done. Whatever is done here should be better than that (which isn't a very lofty goal).