rjshae

My understanding is that the elements of the scene are initially being rendered in 3D, then projected onto 2D followed by artistic touch-ups. That means they will have the 3D information and can use that to determine shadows from the Sun/Moon directional lighting as well as from fixed point sources. If they wanted to, they could use the 3D information to generate the shadows only for each Sun/Moon position (and other lights), then turn that into an overlay. It should be monochromatic data, so I wouldn't think it would take up much disk space.

They could be found on coastal areas. Kind of like sahuagin from D&D. Sahaugin die within a day if they can't immerse themselves in water. You could change it to lizardfolk, but their primary advantage is a thick hide: you don't need an aquatic race for that. ... and coastal areas don't have any water nearby? I don't see your point. The party travels a day's march from the sea on a quest. Your aquatic companion dies. The point is that an aquatic physiology is at the minimum not a benefit, and possibly even an encumbrance, for a non-aquatic campaign. If there are balancing factors then that would be fine. But an aquatic nature in and of itself usually isn't useful unless there is swimming involved.

"Monk" is no more out of place than "Druid" would be in a non-celtic setting. What matters is that the class is integrated into the society, culture, and history; there needs to be a valid reason for those roles to exist in this setting.

I like having a distinction between defense and damage resistance. Beyond that, "keep it simple" usually works. I'm sure the developers will come up with a good design that works for their system.

To give item identification any depth, I think they would need to provide more than one set of descriptive information for every magic item. For example: Unidentified -- it looks like a well-made sword and is very useful for opening envelopes. Qualified -- it is unusually well balanced weapon and has some magical properties, giving it a 5-10% better chance of striking a foe and inflicting around 4-8% more damage. The weapon seems to hum slightly when you breath upon it. Identified -- this is the long lost sword of the winds. It improved attack odds and damage by +9%, while gaining a +24% to critical attacks against winged creatures and air elementals. The wielder gains a +1 to Parry and once per day it can cast gust of wind. You get a Qualified result after using it for a period, or by studying it with a low Lore skill. Identified requires a much higher Lore skill, either by a player or from an expert using various identification techniques.

I wouldn't mind seeing a method for displaying skills as a "group". That is, certain skills can benefit from the synergy of the group working together. For example, the sneak skill of the group would not necessarily be equal to the lowest sneak skill within the group. The more skillful members can signal the poor sneak skill members to avoid noisy surfaces, move more slowly over certain areas, halt until a distraction occurs, and so forth. Another example is the Appraise skill, which can benefit from multiple members with that skill, even if just one party member has a high skill ranking.

Troll with a capital 'T'...

Can anybody answer the question of how difficult it would be for a complex, 2D object to self-shadow? I guess you would need to simulate it through an invisible 3D model, then project the resulting shadow onto the structure's 2D image and subtract out the concealed parts. For something like a tree, that would seem to be be messy and compute intensive. A thought occurs: they could use a series of pregenerated shadows as semi-transparent overlays. Just fade between each over the intervening time. (Probably storing the shadow deltas would be the most efficient.)

They could be found on coastal areas. Kind of like sahuagin from D&D. Sahaugin die within a day if they can't immerse themselves in water. You could change it to lizardfolk, but their primary advantage is a thick hide: you don't need an aquatic race for that.

An aquatic race would seem to be handicapped as a surface creature.

...now just imagine that scene 20 pixels tall.

Dude, you're just digging yourself in deeper. Try taking the mental perspective of a female player.

That does have a certain cultural connotation, particularly if STDs don't communicate well between the different races. It may lead to some decadent cultures where the most desirable prostitutes are non-human. Long-lived elven consorts could develop their expertise into a political tool for manipulating short-lived and weak-willed humans. After 500 years, an elven Cipher consort may be a beautiful but very dangerous individual with a lot of influence.

Yeah, another skewed poll. I think women should be small, pixilated figures with barely discernible features in the game. But the text can paint just about any picture it wants in your mind short of soft porn. The only aspect that really matters here is whether figures can appear nude in the inventory/paper doll panels. I very much doubt that they will. But it would be good if they weren't overly prudish with granny panties and so forth.

If it's done in the medieval pattern, then a military stronghold is a right granted by the nobility, or earned through force of arms. It's not a house paid for by the owner.

For the really expensive stuff they could do away with most of the currency and just use barter, possibly combined with auctioning. The barter could be represented by a rare and precious type of object greatly desired by the most powerful individuals; such as a "Spirit Stone". If you want that +5 long sword, it'll cost you a basic sum just to get you in the trade, plus 20 Spirit Stones. These stones can be made too precious (and dangerous) for trade with normal merchants, so the natural tendency is to horde them (or go to a limited number of places to sell them for a heavy mark-down). If the stones can be made useful for other activities, like item crafting, the player will need to decide whether to use them up or horde them. Their very usefulness for powerful individuals is also what makes them hazardous to own. Using Spirit Stones as trade items for expensive gear allows the game's other currency requirements to be lowered.

^^^^ It's GURPS...

Gear repair in Fallout 3 and Oblivion was an interesting element of those FPS games. But I'm not sure that armor and weapon degradation wouldn't be just too much detail in a game of this scope. It's kind of like food and drink: you can more or less assume the party is taking care of it during their spare time. But perhaps it is something that can be added to the Expert mode?

I'm fine with the standard progression of treasure in D&D. It's an important part of the game experience and one of the more enjoyable elements of the PnP version.

Grappled!

Au contraire. Charts and data without a proper design is just wasted effort.

The whole thing sounds pretty fishy to me...

Doing otherwise would probably have taken a fair amount of coding effort: you've got to hide the benefits of the item from the player while still providing those benefits during combat. Otherwise, what is the point of having an Identify spell or a Lore skill? Perhaps they need a different mechanic than the old Identify magic item concept. Maybe magic has to be attuned to a person (or party) before its powers can be used? If it is not attuned, then perhaps it is liable to act in a mysterious manner with the benefits varying chaotically?

Another approach is fractals. I know they have fractal-based systems for generating terrain. Somebody must have done comparable work with fractal texture generation. That may be useful for generating consistent, non-repeating terrain patterns, such as grasslands or desert sand. Basically trading disk memory for CPU load. Fractal-based, non-repeating? I thought fractals were about a pattern repeating itself so it looks the same close up or far away. It's the way nature repeats itself, so it makes sense to have fractal patterns in tile systems of nature. Yes they are self-similar, but that doesn't mean they must produce identical, repeating patterns like tiles. For example, you can use fractal algorithms to generate any number of trees, no two of which are the same. But it's probably too much work to be worth implement anyway, unless there's a graphics library handy.

The main benefits of fly and levitate to a mage would be two-fold: to get beyond the reach of melee weapons and to move to places you can't reach as easily through ground movement. It should be possible to simulate either of these capabilities without building an elaborate flying simulator. Flying, for example, could be a point-to-point teleporter with a visual effect. Levitation moves the character slightly higher above their ground marker, accompanied by a visual effect, and adds melee immunity against those on the ground.