tajerio

The blank slate approach is best, particularly since it seems like there's a fairly broad range of cultures and belief systems in the P:E world, and it'd be hard for the devs to do a background for each possible combination that wouldn't feel either implausibly narrow or uselessly general.

I couldn't agree more. Interacting with druids in D&D influenced settings gets remarkably boring, because druids have the same predictable knee-jerk responses whenever anything remotely nature-related comes up. And predictability can really kill a good story or character.

The answer to this heavily depends on whether I can convince myself to play with permanent death--if I can stomach losing a companion NPC for good, then I imagine I'll end up using the Adventurers' Hall. If not, then not.

I think the Endless Paths, since they're an enormous dungeon, would be an excellent place to meet another adventuring party, whether it's one of the backer-designed ones or just done by the folks at Obsidian.

Just upped my pledge--excited to come into work this morning and see the 3.5 million surpassed. Could I have "Sabertooth Cat of the Obsidian Order"?

They'll die permanently if you're playing on Expert or have the permadeath option turned on; otherwise, they'll be "maimed," as per today's update.

I also am very much pleased that we won't have to deal with resurrection, mostly because the effects it would have on society are never well realized.

This is the obvious counter to the issue of the timed lockout exploit. Also, per what Josh mentioned on formspring, it seems highly unlikely that any truly powerful spells are going to be on the timed lockout system. Moreover, there's no guarantee that those spells are even what the situation calls for. What if you need to lead in right away with a particular second-level spell, but then immediately have to switch to a sixth-level spell? The potential use case for barraging all those low-level spells seems to me like it'd be limited to encounters you're likely to win anyway.

Sign. Please don't make another comic-style game. I want a mature, dark and greedy world. Handcrafted and fine-grained backgrounds with dark age flair like Inquisitor, Diablo or BG are perfect for a game like this because they build a certain sense of atmosphere. And they don't look so artificial like recent 3D games (Dragon Age, Diablo 3, WoW, Amalur, even Skyrim)... Exactly. There's a sense of texture and depth to the world that often gets lost with an attempt at photorealism, but really shine forth with a darker stylized approach.

I'd like a system not dissimilar to that in SoZ--fast travel decreases the world's verisimilitude for me.