bstrothe

Unless the AI is really cheating, I usually go for hard mode. In games where my party are brain-dead, and the monsters are supraintellegent I grudgingly slide the difficultly down to normal. If even that ends in total party wipes, if it is a good story, I will go easy mode, otherwise I just rage-quit (I'm looking at you Blood Omen 2).

It's amazing that we've already met the funding goal. Looking forward to seeing some awesome stretch-goals to entice more people to pledge.

Based on the OP's list, sounds like gnomes are the way to go

Mark Morgan gets my vote. Loved his work on Fallout and Planescape: Torment.

Scale the bosses if you have to, but yes please no uber-kobolds with epic-levels. It is my number one reason for not playing the elder scrolls games, it just feels too much like a treadmill, getting stronger but going nowhere relative to the power level in the game world.

At least for the boxed game, please have no DRM that requires online activation.

Toolset is a great stretch-goal, but I would humbly ask for a dm-client and locally hosted multiplayer servers as well, a la neverwinter.