rjshae

Hahaha... amusing stuff.

Did you ever see the film "Mazes and Monsters" (1982) with a very young looking Tom Hanks as a roleplay-addicted college teen? Not a great IMDB score by any means, but it came about from all the negative press D&D received around that time. It's a crying shame there was so much misunderstanding back then. I'm just grateful it was able to withstand the test of time. Yes I did. The fact that some of the most decent people I ever knew were gamers flew in the face of all that nonsense. But it did leave me deeply skeptical about organized religion.

No offense, but I don't see a particular need to design the game in order not to offend the religious beliefs of one person. There are other games out there from which to choose. Try Wasteland 2 or such. P.S. The moral panic over D&D permanently burned out my interest in placating the religious groups over gaming. If we let this one slip through, then more demands are sure to follow. Just... no.

Slide rule, assuming you don't count the pencil and paper.

I believe it can be used for both. Yes, that would be a consistent way to use it. Perhaps a divination spell could also be used to "sense danger", reducing the odds of a surprise attack along a dangerous trek? Potentially divination could also be used to find a safe place to build a camp, lowering the odds of a monstrous encounter. Another use would be to predict foul weather, if the game incorporates environmental effects.

I can't say I'm all that interested in watching somebody else play a computer game, but I would enjoy reading Mr. Chris Avellone's reflective game design comments in the aftermath, if he has an interest in such.

One of the elements I recall with a certain fondness from the table-top experience is the role that cleric divination spells played in the game. Being able to stand before the entrance to a dungeon and augur whether it would be a favorable or hazardous experience, added a lot to the magical flavour of the game. Now I wonder whether something similar could be done with a CRPG, albeit in a more limited fashion. Could a divination spell be used, for example, to determine whether a particular site is something that we are capable of handling, or is it much too dangerous for our current party level. Likewise, are we on the "correct" path for our destiny? Or is this just a side trek? What do you think? Does divination have any role in a game of this type? How can it be implemented in a sensible manner?

Tenser's floating disk.

I don't see that a thrown javelin is quantitatively any different than, say, a hurled axe or dagger. Now granted, it's probably not the ideal weapon for a party of adventurers to lug around, but it might be a nice change-up for an enemy attack.

I do hope you're talking about goats here...

The context matters here.

First we need to know if it naturally regenerates at all. My preference would of course be: no. Zero regeneration is essentially the same as slow regeneration unless the combat is really, really long and characters can pull out and rest. Hence: no, you only need to know if it is slow(zero) or fast. But no matter.

Seems like the rate of regeneration would be more important than whether it does or not. Slow (or zero) regeneration makes Priest restorative abilities more important. Fast regeneration benefits the guy with the heaviest armor.

me either. I'm not playing the game for the animations really, but this was one of those "I'm not really invested in it, but I'm interested in others' thoughts" kind of thing. On second thought, maybe we should have a special melodramatic death animation, but only for the Chanter's class.

^^^^ I wonder though whether flank/rear attacks would compensate for that somewhat. That is, even if your attack odds are low, if you can attack from the rear you will still have some chance for a crit. In that case, a mob attack becomes something to be feared.

For the purpose of simplicity, perhaps an "endless supply of X" is something you can gain during the game by cutting a commodity deal with a merchant's guild? Say, 500 gp to supply the party with ordinary arrows; 5,000 gp for improved flight arrows, and so forth. A cool-down would then just represent you drawing from this stash. Sure it's somewhat abstracted, but it would smooth out those pesky logistical details. I could actually see a savy merchant guild cutting deals like that. They may calculate that as an adventurer either (a) you will die before collecting the net worth of all those arrows, or (b) you will want to pay even more to get a commodity upgrade. If the merchant guild cuts enough such deals, on average they will come out ahead. The "endless arrows" commodity can just be treated like an item that has a cool-down power.

Meh, I'm not hung up about it. There's usually so much going on in a party-based game that I usually don't spend much time focusing on the particulars of the character animations. As long as they aren't jarring, I'm okay with just a few animations. They could always just implement rag-doll physics for the death drop.

Perhaps, but that would appear to go against the canon in the films. Yoda didn't use healing to cure himself from the lightning attack in the film series; he withstood it.

Sensible group AI behavior is probably difficult to implement because there are so many interactions to take into account; increasing as n-squared. But it might be reasonable to implement a type of cooperative AI based upon the nearest neighbor's behavior. I.e. find your nearest neighbors within a certain radius, see what they are doing, then give a percentage chance to cooperate with one of them. If the neighbor is badly damaged, the character could counter-attack his attacker. If the nearest neighbor is charging an opponent, then join in the charge. If the nearest neighbor is an archer that is being melee attacked, battle the opponent so the archer can withdraw. &c.

Why do they need a healing power when the game already has healing packs? If the draw is the Jedi from the films, then why do they need to add powers in order to make them non-boring? That makes no sense.

Looking at the perks in the OP, I think I see one issue there: my understanding is that the developers are not leaning toward social skills like Intimidate. Your character's thuggish nature would come across just from the way that you respond to dialogue choices. "Dutch Courage" (sometimes called "Liquid Courage") seems like a reasonable perk; you gain some type of performance benefits from being inebriated -- perhaps an improved willpower and the ability to ignore "miss" wounds. The ability to summon a war dog... well, that might be crossing over into class-specific abilities a little too much. I tend to prefer taking perks that don't just replicate something that you could gain anyway just by advancing in level. Thus, I don't care for skill bonuses, but I do like unique tactical abilities.

The KOTOR series overplayed the whole Jedi powers ability. In the films it was generally a subtle thing; mainly consisting of some TK, intuitive hunches, and remote empathy. There was non insta-heal ability apparent.

Well, they could start by getting rid of the name 'feat'. The word 'talent' seems more appropriate.

That (loot damage) would be okay for random loot drops; less so for pre-positioned treasure and quest items.

In BG it's a real nuisance to know who still had the Find Traps mode enabled, so I'd like a simple means to identify whenever a character has a stateful mode active. For example: search mode, power attack, or tracking. An icon next to the character portrait would be nice for this, or some type of visual effect.