rjshae

This is clearly a case where the experienced professionals are much better informed about just how much QA to plan for. I just appreciate the fact that they are willing to share this much. The backup plan for this concern can be covered by the enhancement pack, which can include post-release bug fixes for the game engine (and so forth).

Nor should dumb mimes be imprisoned in invisible cages.

Does that really count as ironman mode?

It depends on how you feel about tactics as a gaming art. If you just want to line up and whack at your enemy until they drop, then exploiting terrain advantages probably isn't for you.

Well if the outdoor combat all takes place in grassy fields with level roads then it wouldn't add much value, true. But terrain effects are a big part of what makes wilderness adventures different. Adding them in would give the game more of a table-top feel, assuming that the party will be adventuring in areas with actual terrain features.

Yes, I agree, although coding the effects of height and slope would likely be a little more challenging. Another aspect that occurs to me is that terrain effects from vegetation features like brush and swamp growths would make Rangers and Druids more valuable during combat in the wilds. A sniping enemy ranger using hit and run tactics through thick brush could be a real headache for the party.

Another reducio ad absurdum argument. I very much doubt that adding a somewhat more detailed inventory system is going to add significant overhead to your inventory management activity.

I'd like to ask what you think about terrain features in OE and how much detail their effects should have on the game mechanics? It is certainly possible to implement a number of interesting effects from different terrain types. The terrain effects in DnD v3.5 included movement costs, skill modifiers, concealment, melee combat modifiers, difficulty of footing, and terrain hazards. Slopes had a significant impact, with movement being reduced when going uphill and eased going down, plus a combat bonus was received when fighting uphill from your opponent. I don't recall seeing much impact from terrain in the IE games. But I would definitely like to see terrain effects in PE, primarily because they can add a lot of detail and variety to the combat tactics. Of course, that would mean that the enemy AI will need enhancement so as to compensate for terrain and exploit it for tactical advantages. Thoughts?

Tl;dr, but I agree with the OP in the general sense of preferring civil discourse, both here and elsewhere. Then again, it's convenient when obnoxious individuals expediently identify themselves, as that makes it trivially easy to maintain my Ignore list.

That's about right for a more detailed armor system. Anything below about 5% of the target surface area (*COUGH*codpiece*COUGH*) is probably not worth bothering with in terms of armor. Something I wonder about is the wearing of rings in combination with gloves or gauntlets. If a ring is bulky, it may make it difficult to draw the glove onto the hand and make it less flexible.

Frankly I wasn't all that excited by the character portraits in the IWD series; they seemed a little too drab and uninteresting. I suppose that fit the setting, but personally I prefer the warmer, more vibrant style of Fantasy artists like Igino Giordano.

In DnD at least, the effect of the attack bonuses is not that major; a +5 weapon is just improving odds of a strike by +25%. But that +5 to damage is a whopper. For a 1d8 weapon, that just doubles the damage right there. It'd be good if there were a better balance between attack and damage effectiveness.

It might be interesting to have a party member give his (or her) life for some just cause, but then have the soul become trapped in a reliquary as a result of special circumstances. The mission of the party then becomes to find a new vessel for the martyr. Perhaps from a choice of bodies that have lost their souls as a result of some diabolical experiments? Your Paladin could then get an entirely new set of stats and skills, as well as a whole new outlook on life and death.

If a low-level character gains the equivalent of a +5 spear, then, realistically, there should be some repercussions. Once word gets out, then powerful figures should come looking to see if the character can be 'persuaded' to give it up.

Per the original message: Anything else, we get when we get.

It depends a great deal on whether hit locations will be used, which may in turn depend on the impact of garb on skills and spell casting. It should be possible to wear heavy body armor with little or not arm protection, in which case lock picking should be close to normal. If if hit locations are used, then more detail for armor slots is preferable: greaves, helm, arms, legs, feet, chest, necklace, belt, two rings, and shoulders, plus a slot for underlying garb. That allows for more variety in garb, with mix-and match items. Sticking with just the DnD slots is too vanilla and limiting.

Maybe they need to build some slow-moving human 'swarms'?

I don't know if I'd call this is an annoyance, but spell selection in a game can start to feel like a loadout for an airstrike. In effect. magic seems like a (slightly weird) form of technology. Magic should feel non-scientific, which means is should be unpredictable, inexplicable, and almost chaotic in nature. Hence, using it as a mundane adventuring tool should have consequences. For example, I'd like to see some type of mysterious drawback for relying on the same set of spells over and over. As if you were burning a hole in your arcane linkages from overuse of certain spell patterns. Perhaps a spell becomes weaker and more inconsistent after a certain number of uses per level.

I simply can't take this seriously.

Wait for it... wait for it...

The problem with having just a few skills is that it starts to feel like DA:O, which made the skill system feel very vanilla. If this approach is taken, I'd also like some means to tailor each of the handful of skills into particular sub-specialties. That is, you still get to spend points to increase selected skill ranks, but every few rank increases you get to select a focus for those skills. Take a Mechanics skill: that would give you skills with lockpicking, disabling traps, setting traps, repairing devices, and so forth. At, say, every two ranks, you could select a focus in one of those areas. Like +5% bonus in lockpicking padlocks, for example. At higher levels you would continue to improve in mechanics, but you could then also select a +5% in lockpicking doors. &c.

That does imply there may exist a multiverse of extra-dimensional planes. I wonder if it will be D&D-like or a different concept altogether?

I just want the politicians to scurry back in their holes so we can return to the normal flux level of disinformation. So, hooray for the election!

A shared swag bag would be okay, just as long as there is a combat penalty for accessing it. That inventory can represent the bags of goods that get dropped at the start of combat, so they wouldn't count against the weight restrictions for combat movement.

I'm really not seeing a problem with the vanilla good vs. evil (or law vs. chaos) trope as an underlying mechanism for an enjoyable game. It's quite possible to use that background and still include a lot of subtlety and complexity in the game.