Keyrock

I've always thought of magical armor (which should be at least somewhat rare) as strengthening the existing material, making it more resilient, not creating a forcefield aound the character. That doesn't do much if said material is only covering 5-10% of your body. It's great if someone is slashing at your groin or pecs, but what about the rest of the body? Now if we're talking about a shield spell around the character (either a temporary one from a cast spell or a permanent one from a magical ring or whatever), well that's completely independent of the armor, unless it's some kind of artifact armor that puts a shield bubble around you (that should be VERY rare). Now if you're a sorceror who's particularly confident in his or her spellcasting abilities and thinks that it's strong enough to deflect any physical attack, be it blade, bludgeon, arrow, or bullet, then by all means, prance around in your skivvies. Personally I'd rather have another layer of protection underneath, just as a last line of defense. More importantly, what about those that don't wield magic? There are other classes than magic users in the game, quite a few actually. In fact, this thread is likely centered more on non magic users.

So you basically want Witchblade?

Ironically, originally Scarlett was wearing a bikini top in that picture, but so many people griped about it, myself included, that Larian Studios touched up the picture to make it look more like some sort of leather vest. I definitely still have gripe with that armor deign, easily the biggest being the comically gigantic single pauldron, and that goes for Roderick too. I know it's a slightly cartoonish art style, but yeesh! Sorry, comically gigantic pauldrons are a pet peeve of mine.

High level DnD was always a pain in the ass. Everything either works too well or not at all. Agreed. I've long considered levels 5 - 12 to be the sweet spot for D&D, and that has carried over from edition to edition, all the ones I've played, anyway (AD&D 2nd, D&D 3rd, 3.5)

Absolutely. I just want to be able to be able to glance at my characters and be able to quickly and definitively be able to say "that's a woman" or "that's a man", without having to think about it too hard. I don't care if it's realistic or not. And yes, I also want to be able to tell apart males from males and females from females and say "that's Hobart" and "that's Frederick". In my opinion that illustration of male and female plate armor is perfect for what I'm looking for. Subtle differences for the female plate like a slightly more rounded look and a more slender waist are enough for me. I don't need boob plate, the armors in that picture say "woman" enough for me.

Well, the book isn't out yet, I have time to learn restraint.

Scooped up GRID today because it was mad cheap on Green Man Gaming and because I heard it was really rad. Once I downloaded it, I intended to play it for about half an hour, just to check it out. Fast forward about 3 hours and I had to just about force myself to put the controller down and turn the game off. Preliminary verdict: Indeed really rad.

I agree with everything Lephys wrote. I like realism, but there's a point at which realism becomes cumbersome and takes away from my enjoyment of the game. That's where I draw the line. I'm not looking for sexualized female characters, or male ones for that matter, with the exception of where it would actually make sense, a harlot for example. I'm not looking for Red Sonja or Witchblade. Still, I'd like my female characters to look at least a little feminine, even when covered in armor.

I just hope Microsoft DRM for future DLC content doesn't mean <horrific Microsoft "service" that shall not be named>. /shudders If so, that means no future DLC content for me.

Fair enough. It's a rad as **** concept. Someone needs to make it a reality.

I kind of like my male and female characters to be clearly distinguishable from each other, realism be damned. That's just me, though.

From that article is a video of a 2006 Road Rash game that never saw the light of day: ****! How did this never see the light of day? That looks ****ing rad as ****! Anyway, I definitely want a new Road Rash game. I have so many great memories with that game. Yellow stripin' it through sick traffic at 200 mph is the greatest. I hope at least one of these projects actually gets made. I don't know if I can support them financially, but I'll get the word out. It's the least I can do.

While the points that an adventurer would never actually wear plate armor and it being only used in formal battles are completely correct, games are games, and they should be fun, first and foremost. I like realism as much as the next guy, but there's a point when realism becomes cumbersome and steps on fun's toes. If people want to roleplay their characters to reflect as much realism as possible, I say do it by all means, more power to you. Don't wear plate armor in the wild, don't carry extra weapons and armor with you for switching armor/weapon sets to suit the situation (what person would realistically carry an extra sword, shield, and armor into the woods with them?). I'm all for players limiting themselves to play a certain style, but I'm vehemently against the game forcing those limits on you. There's plate armor in games because it looks cool and players want to use it. Games allow you to have armor/weapon sets to streamline gameplay and expand tactical decisions. Characters have 20 or so inventory slots to streamline gameplay (otherwise you would have the frustration of either leaving loot behind or having to make several trips back and forth). Realism is great, but it will always be secondary to fun in my book.

I haven't played PnP in about 10 years either, but we have made some pretty interesting boardgames with my pals based on the PnP games we played younger. If you have a little gamedesigner in you, you can probably adapt the numenera rules to a conventional board game (so far as I've heard, they're going to be simple). I know I'm waiting for the rulebooks to arrive; we have an ongoing nice boardgame concept in the making where we try to mix Monopoly, HoMM games, and old school dungeon crawling into a nice, not too longwinded boardgame, but there's some trouble with the rules. That is a cool idea. The biggest downside to that is that board games are more dependent on physically being there than even PnP. While it wouldn't be impossible to play a board game over the interwebs, it would be significantly more difficult than PnP. Still, it's a cool idea if I can get a crew together physically. Sorry for hijacking this thread.

I think the armor Cadegund wears is entirely reasonable for what archaic armor would look like in a world where female warriors are not uncommon (or less uncommon): Note: My favorite parts of Cadegund's armor are the reasonable pauldrons. My biggest current gripe/nitpick with fantasy armor designs is comically gigantic pauldrons, other than bikini armor, of course.

I haven't played PnP in likely a decade, if not longer, but I'm kind of excited about Numenera. I'm going to see if I can find a group to get together with and play it, once it's out. Even if we can't get together physically, the interwebs can make it possible to get together virtually via skype, or some other means.

This is all likely working out quite well for Monte Cook. I, for one, have gotten just as excited for Numenera itself as for TToN. I went ahead and pledged at a level where I got the Numenera Players Guide (digital) and topped it off with the Numenera Torment Source Book (digital). I also plan to get the Numenera Core Book in the future (I actually want a physical copy of that). I'm willing to bet that I'm not the only one that's going to buy a Numenera book because of TToN.

Shovel Knight is down to just over 2 days left. The campaign has done really well, and it looks like they may even hit all their stretch goals. As a fan of anything and anyone associated with WayForward (Yacht Club Games is made up of people that worked at WayForward) I'm really excited about this game. These folks really know how to do 8/16-bit era sprites, chiptunes, and 2D platforming goodness. This game looks like the offspring of Mega Man, Castlevania, and Duck Tales, and has a nice low entry point ($10 for Steam Win/Mac/Linux version). Count me in! Edit: Youtube links, Y U NO SHOW UP AS EMBEDDED VIDEOS? Also, I COMMAND you to go to Steam and vote for this on Greenlight. Yes, that means you. Go on, don't keep looking at this post, get over to Steam and vote.

You pretty much nutshelled how I feel about KoA. Sold my Sabre M4 (light fighter) in X3: Terran Conflict and scooped up a Terran Baldric TS (transport). I went with the Baldric over a Boron Dolphin or Teladi Vulture for two reasons: 1) I'm at the very start and since I've been doing missions exclusively for the Terrans I don't have a high enough reputation to buy transports from anyone else at the moment. 2) The Baldric is overall the best ship in its class. The OTAS Mistral and Split Caiman are the only ships faster, and only the Boron Dolphin has more cargo room. The Baldric has the best balance of cargo room, speed, maneuverability, and shielding. It was expensive, though. This leaves me without a true fighter for the time being, I have a couple of M5 scouts, but those don't really count. My next (storyline) mission is an escort mission, so I'll put that off for a good while. In the meantime I'll start trading until I can afford to build a station, likely an Ore Mine, and really get my trading empire going. Eventually I'll go back to the escort mission (homeslice can sit there for weeks in space waiting for me) in a shiny and pimped out M3 heavy fighter. Once I have an M3, I generally feel good about showing any would be aggressors what's up.

I'm not sure they could have actually, I thought that was one of the stipulations of using Steam as a distributer. There's tons of games that that use a different system inside of steam for DLC etc. For example Bioshock 2 uses GFWL for DLC, all the Trackmania games use its own crappy frontend for all addon stuff. /shudders at the mention of <horrific Microsoft "service" that shall not be named> Don't speak its name, it can sense when you do that! //hides under table ///covers self with blanket

I think the top one looks kinda friendly.

That I can live with. I'm still not buying and XBOX720, but that's reasonable.

That's great to hear. That was the most glaring negative least positive in that whole video. Obviously a few little tweaks here and there could help the scene even more, but for a very early proof of concept, it's extremely impressive.

I need to change my tidy whities now.

They touched up the picture on the front of the pitch video to give Scarlett more coverage.