The Guilty Party

I'd like to have a party of adventurers with diverse skills, and not a party of mostly combat monsters and one charisma-boosted skillbot that just hides in the corner and throws darts or whatever. I don't think there's any particular difficulty with making a system where everyone has some use in combat, and everyone has some use out of combat. Maybe if you favor strength/damage in combat, that influences what type of non-combat stuff you'd be good at (intimidation, helping people move, etc). But saying 'it's one or the other' is either designer laziness or an appeal to a tradition of the poorly made games of our past.

As long as the villains aren't just doing it for the lulz, I'm fine. It drives me nuts when people in stories are portrayed as doing evil for the sake of doing evil. Human beings do not work that way. People do terrible things to each other because they think they're *right*, not because they like the interior decoration options that the Evil Overlord Shopping Club presents.

In general, I prefer a slightly more high-level strategy-type control and assume my characters will do relatively reasonable things most of the time. If you're standing there and a bandit walks up to you, please stab him. But no, don't chase him into that trap. So, rule-based/script-based controls work well for 90% of the fights, with an option to pause and get in there and really micromanage for tricky bits.

A big as it has to be, but no bigger A quality tale is not better for being longer, and good movies don't have a minimum length. It's our nature to want more of a good thing, but if we got it, maybe the thing wouldn't have been as good.

Ornate descriptions fit better in a planescape world, as the world itself has strong tinges of steampunk and victoriana and other things with ornate connotations. I personally think it'd feel somewhat out of place in what I know of PE's world.

In the end, it's more about whether you prefer more, weaker fights (attrition style, which is the BG system) or each fight to be a more-or-less standalone tactical challenge (NWN, Dragon Age, etc). Both have their advantages, I like each in their own way. The only problem comes up is when it's done wrong, and an attrition system requires constant tactical perfection, or there's cheap tricks to give you your full power each fight in an attrition system. In short: whatever, as long as it's done right.

I like people to have realistic reactions to things. I like conversations to be realistic. I want the world to be internally consistent, so that if fire burns a door down in chapter 1, I should be able to burn a door down in chapter 3. The degree to which the game world models the real world though? I don't really care. Some kind of reasonable approximation is fine. (Sharp things cut better than dull things). In the end, this isn't a medieval combat simulator. If you're looking for it to be, you are almost certainly going to be very disappointed. This is a medium to explore a world and experience a story and meet and master some tactical challenges in a rpg-style system where your character's skills are what matter and less what your skills are.

Thank god you all aren't game designers. You do realize most people play video games to have fun, right?

I like BG-style movement speeds in general, maybe with the option to run (or just default run) during combat. edit: The problem with a run/walk toggle is that those games are built as if everyone runs all the time. Meaning if you walk, things are just incredibly tedious. I felt the walking speed in the infinity engine games was reasonable enough to get around without being bored, but not so fast that the world felt tiny, or everyone looked weird sprinting everywhere.

It would be cool, certainly. But if I had to put it on a big ol' list of priorities alongside all the other things I'd want to see in the game, it'd be pretty low I'm afraid.

Saying 2d5+3 instead of 5-13 is needlessly obtuse and adds nothing aside from some mild nostalgia. It made a little sense when you were trying to capture people who were familiar with that way of displaying numbers. CRPGs can stand on their own now though, and don't need the help.

IE style identifying is just kind of pointless, as people have pointed out. It's a speedbump that doesn't add much. But a more fulfilling system might be fun. Maybe something where most items are automatically identified, but rare artifacts have quests or something to unveil their powers. (Maybe with choice in the quest so that the item is different, depending on your choices. At least in some cases).

Turn based is nice for some games, but for this subgenre, I feel like you would end up with too many tedious battles where you're just doing 'move closer, attack, next, move closer, attack' until everything's dead. The complex battles would be cool, but maybe not worth the tradeoff.

As examples, IWD and Wizardry I-V is Not At All Independent. Wizardry 8 is more Slightly Independent. The Mass Effect series tends towards Extremely Independent. BG is in the Very-to-Somewhat Independent range, slightly moreso than Dragon Age. (I feel it's easier to lose characters in BG than DA).

Just curious how people like their party. Are they uncontrollable guests in the party that you meet and who do what they will while they feel like it, or mindless automatons that bend to your will? Or, as likely, somewhere in the middle?

The poll is ridiculously biased, so to answer with an option not provided: it doesn't really make sense. How can you distinguish between 'split up and meet me there later', 'just hang out here for this one mission' and 'that's it, we're through'? It'd make more sense for them to just claim a share of every quest they go on. Except then they're not going to be spending it intelligently and bleah. Doesn't seem worth the trouble except maybe for a special case character that is explicitly greedy/mercenary and you make it into a plot point.

Damage reduction from armor, damage avoidance from shield, dodge, etc. Edit: AC made sense in a pen and paper game so that you cut down on calculations. Now with these new fangled computer things, we can dispose of such crude abstractions.

I'm pretty confident that they are more creative than changing the vowel in a monster's name to avoid copyright and calling it a day. I'd rather explore a world with monsters that I've never heard of than say 'ah, kobolds again, I know how this works. Oh and there's an ogre mage, gotta silence him'.

I would throw out all the weird preconcieved notions that various d&d systems have put on rangers. Dual-wielding makes no sense (to limit to rangers, or have them magically good at it). Wilderness skills do make some sense, make them be useful. Some degree of stealth makes sense. Divine magic doesn't really make sense. Something along those lines. They can build this world from the ground up, might as well have it make sense where it takes basically no effort to do so.

Pre-generated based on your class/skill choices. Seriously though, who cares? Why should they spend more than 5 minutes coding this? You throw that gear away in short order in pretty much every game out there. Drakensang is pretty much the only exception I can think of here where your gear isn't outclassed within an hour. And even there there's a variety of drops so that if you wanted your mage to use a sword, they'll have a sword within minutes.

A meta-dungeon could be like the dungeon in BG2 (in watcher's keep, I if I remember right) where your character ran a character through a dungeon. Except nah. Honestly it's fun for a little diversion, but those things tend to outlast their welcome.

To some extent, you can boil down *any* quest into a few very basic, very dry sounding elements. It's the same thing with stories. Strip out enough detail and you're basically reading the same dozen or so stories over and over again. So saying 'no fetch quests' isn't really helpful or accurate. I am guessing what you mean is 'Please, no quests that are plotless, meaningless character builders/time wasters'. I mean, even the basic format of the ME3 fetch quests could be made something good. You come across some journal on your travels and you have to find out who owns it, and it segues into what they were doing in the middle of the forest in the first place. Or it's filled with incriminating information. Or some old lady sending you to get something from her house that she had to abandon when war swept over the region. But it was never there, and she's working as an informer because her son is held hostage and all you have waiting is an ambush by imperial patrols. I'd be interested in both of those quests, even though they are ostensibly fetch quests. The upshot is quality over quantity, maybe? Or that doing something for the sake of the reward is not interesting.

Not really. The amount of exp needed for each level ramped up pretty steeply so if you got a level 1 wizard or whatever she would quickly gain levels until she all but caught up in a pretty short time. So ... why do it then? What did it add? If it's inconsequential, then it's just a mild, tedious, pointless speedbump. If it matters, then you would have had to tote around an easy to kill character that contributes nothing for some number of hours. Which one is the fun part? Look at it this way: say you meet some character that's the same class as you. They're redundant, so you leave them at home most of the time. Then, 75% of the way through the game, a quest pops up that is about reclaiming their lost homestead. Do you drag along someone who is barely competent because it explores more of the story and their character? Do you grind away for a few hours to bring them up to speed? Do you just shrug and say 'oh well'? This is not an interesting decision to make, in my opinion.

If you add too many situational/random drawbacks to a weapon, you make it so that it's basically pointless, since there are tons of other weapons that work just fine in the rain and don't ever explode. And if you try to do a 'really powerful, but rare chance of big backfire' you end up just encouraging people to reload their save when something bad happens. Introducing that kind of realism just doesn't usually end up with fun game mechanics.

This is just a rephrased 'balance' discussion. Powergaming is just searching for the most unbalanced, powerful build and/or path through the game and taking that. To some extent, discussing it makes no sense in a single player game. You're not harming anyone by doing what you're doing, so do whatever the hell you want to. Enjoy yourself, cheat like crazy or try to finish the game naked. As long as you're having fun, you're fine. Except ... that's not entirely true. It kind of sucks when you make character-building choices that are presented as reasonable (say, magic or technology, or strong fighter vs dextrous fighter) but one turns out to be vastly easier/more rewarding than the other. That's part of what they're talking about. So to the extent that they try to make all the options they give you viable options, and try to make sure the benefits of one option do not heavily outweigh the others, I think it's a good thing and makes a game both more fun and more replayable.