JFSOCC

Why are classes different? One answer is so that you can have distinct playstyles for different players. Does this limit the player? Yes. deliberately. Is that a bad thing? Depends. I wish to role-play my character and that does mean I want a fair amount of customization of how I play him or her, I also want my character to be distinct enough from other characters that we don't overlap much in how we play. I'm fine with limiting backstab bonus damage to rogues, or making it higher for them than other characters. I usually play my rogue character as a jack of all trades who is weak in combat, as long as I can keep doing that, I'll be satisfied with the rogue.

I'd just copy the save and place it in a different folder for retrieval.

overly bombastic battle music in an easy battle complete destroys immersion since the tone of the music belies the tone of the encounter. It's one of those gripes I have that I know come from good intentions on the devs' side. (obviously want to make battles more epic)

OK, I worked on this quite a bit, and I'm a bit nervous to throw it out there, but here goes. *note, I will be using some DnD terms, but naturally these would be different ingame. Premise: Of all the RPG games I’ve played, many have failed to deliver on the exploration elements in the wilderness, relying on set-pieces and tedious random encounters. Going into the wilderness, if at all possible, consisted of ticking off certain boxes “quest complete” and moving on to the next area. This leads to the wild areas to be empty of meaningful content pretty quickly, except for said random encounters. I have in an inspired moment come up with a suggestion which would hope to accomplish the following: Encourage exploration. Increase diversity of wilderness content. Make the world come alive with emergent gameplay. Avoid undesired content for those who simply wish to pass through wilderness areas without being delayed. Have more mechanical uses for ranger skills like "wilderness survival" without making them gimmicky. The idea is divided into sections. The road. The wilderness The "wisps" and forest lights. 1. The road. Players can decide whether or not they wish to remain on the road. The roads are well travelled and (relatively) safe. If a player wishes to continue on without exploring, all he or she has to do is remain on the road. Nothing (or little) will happen. 2. The wilderness. Players can venture off the road. When this is chosen wilderness survival skills will be useful. This might require some creative programming. The idea is that when venturing far enough from the road, the map becomes generated, and finding the road again may or may not be possible. Players would walk around in forest covered areas. (one example) And an area around the party would be cut away and navigable. A wilderness survival or similar skill would determine how fast surrounding foliage is cut (becomes navigable), how fast the track regrows behind the player, and how large a radius around the party is cut. This is to give the player the notion he is walking around in a vast forest (or other wilderness) without permanent landmarks. In the wilderness several things could be uncovered: Players may come across hostile spawns, goblin camps, forest traps, hidden treasure. These would be few enough between that a player wouldn't just stumble across it immediately. Returning to the road would be possible using fast travel. (and perhaps a high enough navigation skill) However, this would not be possible if the player started following a trail of... 3. The wisps and forest lights. The wisps are just a generic name for what are in essence may different types of guiding lights. These lights are different in shape, colour, and behaviour, but stretch out emergent in front of a player's party. Wisps are come across randomly, and should be fairly uncommon. (but common enough that any adventuring party will come across a few at least during their game if they choose to visit the wilderness areas) Wisps lead places, different wisps lead different places. Once a party has decided to follow a trail of wisps for a few moments, the following happens. Fast travel back to the road becomes impossible, you'll have to see it through. (you can choose to not follow a trail in order to avoid that. The game will have to register whether or not you were following it) Losing the trail of wisps (distance of your closest party member to the trail becomes too great) ends in quest failure. No encounters with monsters or loot, you're following a trail and it leads somewhere, you won't be distracted. Wilderness survival (or similar skill) will tell players the following: No or low skill: Forest lights exist and they lead places. Low to intermediate skill: following lights can be dangerous. Low to intermediate skill: some lights are worth following. Intermediate skill: Different types of lights lead to different encounters. (I'd love for this to be randomized for each game so no assumptions can be made) Intermediate to high skill: This type of light leads to this encounter. High skill: These are the types of lights and these are the types of encounters they lead to. Upon following these ghost lights, wisps, foxlights, forest lilghts, glowing mushrooms, whatever, players will be led to an encounter relevant to the type of light-trail they followed. I've come up with a few quest ideas, but naturally many more are possible. Upon completion or failure of one of these quests (which would be removed from the questpool afterwards regardless) players are returned to the road. Possible outcomes for following a trail: "spiritual" Players are led to a druidic ritual in a grove, if there are druids in the party, they can assist, if not the player will be able to observe the ritual and guard the druids (or not) as they complete the ritual. If no PC druids participate, you'll see the death of said druids after ritual is completed. "spiritual" players come across a scrying pool in the forest. It shows the player one random vision. (multiple instances possible) "spiritual" players come across a stone henge circle, players with a high knowledge of the arcane can use the circle to learn a powerful ability, alternatively the site could be destroyed with disastrous consequences (deliberately or not). Ideally each site offers multiple ways to experience the encounter. So a stone circle might be seen differently by a wizard than a ranger, or cleric. "trickster lights" leads no-where, party eventually admits they are lost. "trickster lights" leads to a clearing where if the party rests, they are set upon by enemies. "trickster lights" leads to a nymph in her pool, she may or may not torment the party with riddles or tricks. "trickster lights" leads to an Elven feast. When trying to enter the feast clearing, it vanishes, after 3 encounters players are confronted and asked why they keep barging in. multiple outcomes possible, one of which is that they join the feast. If they do, they're subtly (I'm counting on you MCA!) enticed to stay. "oh, right before old george here was about to tell you this ancient piece of lore!" staying might lead to more information, trinkets, but eventually players would figure out they're being duped into staying. After they leave camp, they'll find the road again, alternatively they might decide to stay in camp long enough that they wake up in a compromised position with no elves in sight, leading the party to wonder if it was ever real. "firelights(encounter lights)" leads to a monster to be defeated "firelights" stumble across a bandit camp "homelights" lead to settlements, either hermit houses, the house of a powerful witch or wizard, maybe a sapient monster (I always enjoyed the DnD monster manual description of a Rakshaka, living in a swamp.) You may or may not find yourself welcome. "unresolved issue" lights lead to ancient wrongs you might be able to right, or at least learn about. I've some other quests I thought of shortlisted, I'll just name the title, as I am sure you can think of interesting encounters. "Dead town possession" "wizard's mighty spell" "angry dead"(maybe unlikely what with the soul mechanic) "zombie swamp"(idem ditto) "hermit" "wandering traveller" "mysterious mist" "firefly display" "ancient battle" "ancient ruins" "death pond" "fake trail" "dragon's den" I believe these encounters and quests would be much more memorable because: They'll be your main focus, you won't be busy doing other quests in the meantime. You found them through exploration, making acquiring these quests a reward in it's own. They'll be unique. These quests are not forced on you, you will only do them out of a desire to see more of the world. You can't go back, the experience will be all the more mysterious and special for it. They reward players for different play-styles in different ways, the wilderness lore/survival trait makes your decisions more informed, but you can also choose to randomly follow trails. So a city-bred party may make more mistakes and find themselves lost once or twice, while still having had an interesting thing occur. Furthermore they remove a nuisance from the game for those players who don't enjoy random encounters. They'll be random, but unforced. The player gets to decide how much of this content he or she feels up to doing at any moment. Want to go from A to B? you can. Want to mindlessly or mindfully stumble upon bandits, goblins and treasure chests? You can. And do you wish to get lost in the wilderness and find some special content? You can. What do you think?

http://extra-credits.net/articles/finding-myself-in-the-wastes/

friendly fire from non-aoe spells.

There was a powerful thunderstorm at the top of Mount Everest on the day I was born, which also happened to be where I was born. I didn't cry, I smiled. as soon as this happened a double rainbow appeared, clearing away the powerful thunderclouds and shining the sun. I whistled an Eagle's cry, and a majestic Golden Eagle came to carry me down to my domain. That day, all sorts of records where broken. People claimed that they felt more energetic and happy than before. Butterflies followed in the wake of my passing, and crops have been said to have grown particularly large bounty that year. All the sick in hospitals within a 2000 mile radius of my birthplace suddenly got better, and the Dalai Lama himself mentioned a "Great Leader" was born.

Morrigan was trying hard to be Kreia, she sometimes even succeeded, which made her the most memorable character of that game.

A scarverger hunt is where you hunt scarves. a little miniquest where you need to steal, beg, or take the scarves of certain npc's in town. when you have all of them you'll be the envy of every man in town... In KOTOR2 you had sections in which certain party members had their own side missions. Atton getting a drink/assassinated, Mira going to the 'tar. I really liked those side quests, but not that they were forced. I'd be nice if there was some sort of mechanic where you could click "Gather information" and the party would split up, each npc offering different ways to get information. So a rogue might eavesdrop somewhere, a bard would go into a bar, have a drink with some of the fellows, play a little music, and loosen some tongues, the fighter offers to infiltrate the guard, until he knows what he needs. the wizard will consult the academy, etc... That has never been done before (to my knowledge) and I think it is strange that it hasn't. Gather information quests should be a staple. Something fun to do in town. and your individual characters each get a chance to shine. Also, failing to get information won't be tragic, so you can have failures (for once) without needing the player to retry. Makes the game world more flowing and I think would encourage players to play without save scumming. (as it wouldn't even come to mind)

What? Yes it does. The rest of your party waits a bit as the rogue does his thing. "But that is boooring" you might say? Your face is boring. If you want to go from point a to point b without any enemies knowing, you can only take your stealthy characters. So basically you'd be forced to fight every encounter you want to avoid, unless all your characters have high stealth.

I very much would like my rogue class to be familiar to me: sneaking and stealth, many skills, and sneak attacks.

The only dev comments I've seen is in threads which concerned them directly. I think it is wise for the devs not to get bogged down in the discussion. As tempting as it may be, they might influence the discussion. And we punish them a little for doing it. In another thread Josh posited an example of lockpicks and we fell on that like a hungry pack of wolves. It's cool to get to discuss things with the devs, the highlight of my day if one of them responds to something I say. But that engagement seems pretty intense on their side, I think. All in all I think it's cool they respond when they do, but I can certainly understand the reasons for not doing so.

Good reply value means the content you get is significantly changed from another. to me that means getting different quests, not different choices and endings in quests. I'll still register the quest as "done before" So, a good amount of class-specific quests, or mutually exclusive questlines (such as going for one faction instead of another, and the quests are not the same narrative.) Otherwise I wouldn't rate it very high as "replayable"

good shortkey mapping is always very comfortable, especially if you're the type who doesn't pause during combat. (not me, but I certainly think many)

So the global warming is mostly a threat to animals, is that it? As is noted in my quote above, the Little Ice Age lasted 400 years, the Medieval Warm Period 300 years, not thousands of years. And if you look at the tree ring article I posted earlier, temperature was peaking in a matter of years, not thousands. In fact there was a peak just in the 30's, remember the Dust Bowl? So basically you're just making stuff up at this point. Look, you're asking some good questions, if you are actually interested in learning how it works. So for that Kudos.But you're presenting them as arguments with the idea there are no answers to them and that because of this, climate science stumbles and fails. That's just not the case. let's deal with them one by one. Mostly animals? well, no. It affects where our crops can be grown, whether we need to invest extra resources into maintaining farmland. (like irrigation during drought) and some food producing crops won't yield as much in poor conditions. further more, many of them are dependent on animals. For instance bees are responsible for most pollination of our fruit-crops, and they are currently dying out. (different reason, suffering from an unknown epidemic disease) so we've been needing to import bees, and needing to "breed" bees and them set them free on our fields. Imagine that this would be necessary for all our fruit from now on. Also heavy winds will every year destroy part of the harvest. Forest and brush fires will spread to farmland, soil-bacteria can die out in places and kill the fertility of farmland, that's the type of thing we'd be looking at. Second The little ice age lasted shortly, true, wasn't man-made, true and didn't kill all life on earth, true. That's not to say it wasn't terribly damaging (with starvation well recorded). And the medieval warm period is unproven but likely true, it was most likely a very localised change in climate, since there have been no signs of it other than in Europe. (And even there only coastal North-western Europe) One possible explanation for this is a possible shift in the Mexican Gulf Current. But you're comparing a fire to flames. What we're dealing with now if just of a completely different order.

So, let's brainstorm. I like the idea of having much loot be crap, broken down and worn pieces, which with a high enough craft skill, can be made useful. I enjoy the idea of upgrading, but not upgrading slots, or limitations. If you can upgrade a weapon with I dunno, +.05 ice damage, and +1 damage, why shouldn't you be able to add both? If the ingredients for upgrades are few and far enough between, and other weapons compete with what you have upgraded, I'm sure your upgraded weapon would never be the BFG9001. Unless perhaps you focussed all your efforts on it, in which case, why not? it'd be on par with other weapons... Mostly I like the items to be fairly unique in how they play, so if you could craft to adjust. (+x damge for -x combat speed, +x combat speed for -x against zombies) you could get a fairly personalised weapon. If you could craft single-use items, then they should be stackable in inventory. it might be a way of managing your inventory? Should you salvage items into component parts for that? That was one mechanic in Guild Wars that I liked, but then, that is a grind-tastic MMO. Better Crafting skill also allowed you to salvage more from items there. The problem with this is that you might very quickly be loaded with stuff, either useless, or swimming in money. Perhaps placing a few merchants and blacksmiths that will be happy to take your stack of iron ingots for a small reward might sound good in theory, but I fear a descent into grind. Then there is the special sword of awesomeness +9001 you might try the entire game of building, finding pieces. I wonder if you need a crafting skill for such a quest to exist though. I usually don't like these quests because they focus on a few weapon types which I might not want to use on my characters. And if it is so special, selling it seems a bit callous and foolish. If you work with ingredients, you should ALWAYS be able to use them for something useful, and not marginally so. Otherwise you'll end up like me carrying 94 deep mushrooms in your inventory after having played most of DA:O without needing them. I tended not to sell crafting ingredients because you might not being able to buy them back, or only buy them back expensively. But most of my crafting items I was unsure what I could do with them, or their use was incidental or marginal. Or you'd be searching for certain items to reach a high enough stack for most of the game because they were random drops. I enjoy the idea that you could craft forgeries, would be nice if in a quest you could steal something, and you'd be chased or there'd be an investigation, but if you forged a replacement, no alarms would be raised (provided it is good enough) If crafting is going to be added, it should not be incidental (like any skill really, if it exists, you should be using it in the game at more than a few points)

city of union!

I agree I want my rogue to be more than DPS, but I do like the backstab bonus.

The problem with climate change is not that it never occurred and is new, nor that it is occurring now. the problem is the speed with which it is occurring. Such changes should happen over thousands of years, not a couple of decades. Animal species do not have time to adapt to the new reality, they cannot move to where the climate would be more favourable for them because they'd have to cross large areas that are not their natural habitat, (and their habitat itself isn't fast enough in adapting either) and doing so requires crossing many obstacles, such as human settlements, roads, rivers, and seas. And while I'm sure some species can cope, vast numbers of them simply don't have the time to adapt.

Only if the wizard later comments on some of the more mundane features with pride. "I designed the fountain myself!" (while discussing a level where the fountain, while pretty, was the least of your worries.)-- Well, I'm not a big fan of clichés but I'm ok with some mentioned here. Personally, I like having travelling entertainers who tell stories well, juggle and dance and make music in all the (better) inns in town. Traps in dungeons that withstood the ages and are still in perfect working order- No problem with those. because, magic, right? And I do actually like the "kick-ass" girls. Frail looking things that somehow manage to be powerful.