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rjshae

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Everything posted by rjshae

  1. I'd like to see a mechanic that differentiates comfortable rest in a warm Inn from just sleeping on the ground. Since rest is already going to cure your health damage, another differentiator is needed. The first that comes to mind is disease. Resting in a safe, warm, comfortable place should improve your odds of recovering from a bout of disease. In fact, resting up should improve your resistance to both disease and possibly poison as well. It should also clear your thoughts and rest your worn body, so it seems reasonable to allow a small bonus to skills for a day or two.
  2. That'll teach me not to post on Christmas morning. This should have been on the Chanter thread. Sorry.
  3. I'm not sure that an endless dungeon would be worth the effort. The game developers have enough on their plate.
  4. I concur, but more importantly the events that follow your witnessing of the supernatural occurrence are what shape the plot. Hence, it's really your character's story that is being told.
  5. Sigh. And another name goes into the Ignore prefs... bye Game_Exile.
  6. I do hope they don't follow the path of those ridiculously overpriced backpacks in DA:O.
  7. I have a notion for a Cipher-specific combat ability: Combat Lore. Each round that the cipher has been fighting a civilized or semi-civilized creature, he automatically makes a lore skill check (opposed by the opponent's intelligence and level). On a success, he recognizes specific aspects of the fighting style and preferences, allowing him to draw upon obscure knowledge and make crafty adjustments to his tactics. This grants him a +1 bonus to attack and defense against that specific opponent.
  8. In that case, we may have a position open for you in upper management...
  9. The scene flashes forward to your funerary rites. Your friends and companions are standing around your grave. Each, in turn, presents a eulogy in their own inimitable way; on the whole it is a sad, moving experience. Finally they wander off. You try to move your character, to cast a spell or sing a song, but nothing happens. Gradually the light fades into the evening twilight. A gloomy storm rolls in and the rain beings to fall. It grows every darker as night falls and the precipitation grows heavy. The seasons pass. Occasionally one of your friends drop by to leave some flowers and say a few words. But this happens less and less frequently. Spring turns to summer, then comes fall. The leaves from the towering oak gently fall onto your grave. Finally, your lingering soul loses its grip upon the mortal realm and returns at last to the great wheel.
  10. But that (50% or less) is pretty much the tabletop gaming experience. I suppose if you were only going to play it through once then you'd want to hit most of it. That spoon-fed approach isn't for everybody though.
  11. Merry Christmas everybody! Santa's on his way...
  12. For me, the linear flow in IWD2 doesn't make an area feel better designed. It just feels pipelined like a factory floor. I've attempted IWD2 twice, but became bored from the linearity. The looser area designs of BG gave more of a sense of choosing my own destiny. Yes there were some bottlenecked areas leading to boss battles, but the looser mix of destinations felt a lot more like the table-top experience.
  13. Yeah, that forest was a nuisance. But at least it was satisfying to finally finish it. I like forests in RL and the map for PE seems rife with them, so hopefully the game will include at least some wilderness exploration with multi-map forested areas.
  14. Prior discussions mentioned Chanters being able to chain spells, so I'm pretty sure they will. If anything, I'd guess that blasts will be unique to wizards and that chanters will have some direct combat capability. I wonder though if by chaining spells they just meant a queue of spell actions, or if the chained spells would interact in some manner? Shrug.
  15. The one exception I'd like to mention is that of skills that normally take an extended apprenticeship to acquire. Realistically, it should be decidedly difficult to acquire such skills, unless you've already attained them as part of your starting class.
  16. A few points: Just to enhance the plausibility a bit, I think there should be some circumstances in which the party can not access their Stash. For example, if they step through a one-way portal into another dimension, there's going to be no way they can transport loot back to their resting place. Hence, any circumstance in which they do not have access to a resting spot, they shouldn't have access to their Stash. Likewise, any time they are operating under a countdown or when they are being held prisoner. To limit potential exploits, they may need to limit what you can do while your stash is open. For example, if you are placing new loot in your stash, they would need to prevent the older stash-based loot from being transferred or dropped. What I would like to know is whether you get access to your stash when you're at a store. Will you need to transport salable goods to the store, or will it always be available?
  17. It doesn't matter what the developers do; somebody isn't going to like it. Squeaky wheels are going to squeak.
  18. Considering that underground areas are normally pitch black, creatures that hunt by touch and use entanglement and/or paralyzing toxins probably make evolutionary sense. Perhaps something that uses a Roper-type range attack to catch and paralyze its prey, while employing feathery antennae to sense movements. It could have a worm-like body so it can slither through cracks, then unfold its arms when a prey is near. For giant insects, I suspect that a centipede-like form is more realistic. The individual arms don't need to be too large, yet it can grow to a significant size. Perhaps give it a stinger arm and grappling mandibles. It would be relatively slow compared to other animals, so it may need to rely on surprise. Perhaps the outer shell has developed a chameleon-like camouflage ability that allow it to remain in place, then ambush a passing animal. For draconic beings, I'm not too fond of the color dragons from D&D. Instead, creatures that have adapted to individual biomes would be fitting. For example, a Forest Dragon could be long and sinuous so it can wiggle its way between the growths. The arms would be long and grasping, allowing it to pluck victims off the ground then bite their heads off. It may still have wings, but they are built for gliding across open meadows.
  19. It might depend on how they display the inventory. With a grid system, tabs might make less sense. But they could always do a combination: a grid tab for inventory placement, then item-type tabs for displaying item properties.
  20. One of the best ever pets in a video game was in Torchlight (and its ancestor: rogue-likes such as Nethack). Totally unrealistic, of course.
  21. If any of the classes are restricted by weapons, it should be based on practical reasons like cultural preferences, legal restrictions, roles in combat, or training availability. Hence, rogues may tend to carry weapons that are easy to conceal or are useful from ambush, while druids would likely use weapons that can be crafted from natural materials found in their area. Possibly the chosen character background could be used to determine what weapon training your character has received on a per-class basis.
  22. At least the isometric view removes one of the reasons for pausing: rotating the camera to see what is going on. Another reason for pausing is to see what sequence of actions your characters are up to. Drakensang did a decent job of communicating this by showing action icons next to the character portraits. The problem there, of course, is that you had to keep looking up from the battle to see the character portraits. I'm not sure if there is a better way to communicate this information, besides the animation sequences. Shrug. In the IE games it helped that spell casting was made obvious.
  23. Yes, that was my thinking as well: that it functions like a storage chest. A portable storage chest so you don't need to keep trekking back and forth to your base. It's a reasonable approach and I'm still not seeing a cause for significant concern. If there are some specific design issues with it, well then presumably those will show up during testing and the designers can fine tune it. What I didn't like about the inventory system in the old IE games were cases where you would overfill your carrying load, then need to spend several minutes shifting pack loads around until everybody was mobile again. Hopefully the Stash will reduce or eliminate this problem. That seems like a positive in my book.
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