rjshae

I think we need a stone tablet, written to Ob Nua by his chief architect, demanding a more dangerous dungeon with all but two of the exits closed off. Plus some muttering about a "turn-based system" and the need for a class on necromancy.

Hey, I can get behind this. Maybe an exit at level 5, one at level 10 and one at the bottom. That's fine by me. I'm not thinking there's a need for an exit every level or every other level. I got the impression the OP wants only the entrance at the top and maybe one at the bottom though, which I do not agree with. Well they can certainly make it more of a dungeoneering experience by presenting some uncertainty about your ability to safely use the exits. Perhaps some will be structurally weak and may collapse if you use them too much. Others may be guarded by a powerful wandering spirit that will sometimes show up to suck out your soul if you try to escape. There may be warded exits that require the sacrifice of a soul stone to use. And so forth. But there should be at least a few that are reliable and don't force you to trek through the dungeon for a half hour of game time to reach. That's just pure tedium.

You go to sleep in a city side street, then wake up to find dozens of cats jumping off you and scattering to the four winds. What were they up to? Hmm...

Maybe they will implement feral cat swarms? A big fur-ball of purring kitties.

It wouldn't surprise me to see them schedule it for 18 months, but it ends up taking two years. It's a big project with lots of bottlenecks. Things happen; problems come up. Ideally they can get it out before the 2014 holiday season and it ends up on everybody (else's) gift wish list. But if not, that shouldn't be a big deal. But I have been known to be mistaken... from time to time.

I think they should have a self-flagellation option. The more you bleed, the more you lead.

No thanks, I most decidedly do not want to get stuck in this dungeon for three months of gaming. Put me in the "heck no" camp.

Sure, turn-based is fine, and is usually better when there are more things to control on the screen and you want detailed tactics. But I can live with the pause approach.

You can always make it hard for yourself through the available options like Trial of Iron. It should be a challenge, yes, but others may not want it to be so obscenely difficult that 90% give up before reaching the end.

A rat swarm, per the D&D v3.5 MM, would be an interesting challenge as a 4 HD monster. I wonder if they will implement monster swarms? That would be a nice improvement over the old IE games. What a joy to see a seething mass of rats coming at the party.

Probably PayPal charges will be run separately?

I'm guessing it's a statue of Od Nua.

Well, no offense, but I have to disagree. Writing a realistic grey persona can be more complicated because you need to get inside their head and see how they tick. By comparison, good and evil seems over-simplified; the characters just need to follow (or violate) a code.

It doesn't sound like there will be good or evil in this game. But maybe you can really annoy everybody?

The levels below 10 look to be flooded in that drawing. We might need to find the rebreather gear first.

That's a very respectable chunk of money. Wasn't it mentioned at the start that $1 million will fund about six months of development work? Nice!

That's just cruel. Sure, the music was great and there were a few neat ideas in the world background, but nobody should be pushed into such a terrible ruleset against their will. I think it's more he just didn't have the time to play the game, I don't think he'd put that in the goals if he didn't already want to play it. Sometimes you can learn more from people's mistakes than you can from their successes.

Hopefully they don't lose too much to bad pledges. Yep. It'd be interesting to hear how other Kickstarters fared in that department. Some attrition is probably inevitable, but hopefully it's only a small percentage.

My initial sense on this XP issue is that in the end the rewards are the same and you'll end up at the same class level; it's primarily a difference between whether you receive immediate gratification for your actions or a delayed reward. If Obsidian wants to cater to gamers who like continually slaying random monsters, they can always implement things like achievements (100 XP for slaying 500 bloodbugs => gain 'Royal bloodbug slayer' title) and bounties. In that case, the net difference will be that you'll be actively seeking particular creature types (or group types) rather than just killing everything that moves. Shrug. Any issues with their approach should come out during play testing, at which point they can modify the XP reward system accordingly. I'm sure that most of us won't be disappointed.

I think you're reading waaaayyy too much into that.

Woo-hoo! Plus cats and beards.

How about something comparable to this gadget in the corner of the screen?

It's possible that the split Stamina/Health approach may allow the designers to make first level characters more plausibly robust against puny creatures. I guess we'll see.

Grappling animations would be difficult to implement between creatures of significantly different size ranges. If it were limited to humanoids and humanoid-shaped creatures, that seems more do-able. They could just show a wrestling cinch hold with some back and forth movement. Grappling would definitely give more value to small weapons like the dagger.

That is a nice idea. But will we be able to tell when the dwarf is in a good mood?