Soranor

When I first played BG1 I made it to Baldur's Gate and then stopped playing - maybe because I felt the urge to visit every single unimportant home to see if I could find something valuable in a barrel so I was overwhelmed and lost interest. Still I really liked the game. But then came BG2 which I played through 4 times in a row. I loved it. A few years later I replayed BG1 and BG2 together and today I'm in the middle of my second BG1 playthrough with lots of mods. I have a 3rd character planned and will take all 3 of them through modded BG2 as well. So what I want to say is you should really try BG1 with mods, especially BG1Tutu or BGT.

I don't care if the ending is either happy or sad, but I'd like to have an ending that is not "you saved the world!" Give our characters and npcs motivations and goals that aren't completely overwritten by the need to stop the great evil that threatens all life.

I just have to add: please not Jeremy Soule. I can't stand his generic and cinematic music scores. Sure it's quality work he does, but I want my RPG music to be memorable and underlining the mood and atmosphere.

I see there are a lot of ideas that try to be pretty close to the real world. I like that and my approach is similar. I have been working on a roleplaying system and thinking about problems like simulating the effects of armor for many years. The statistics of each piece of armor should be balanced and diverse, so you start thinking about what type of armor you'd like to wear. These are the main categories I would use: Type. Pretty simple, fur, leather, studded leather, chain mail, and so on. You know them all. Weight, for full body coverage this would range from about 3 kg for leather armor to 30kg for reinforced full plate mail. The more the armor has, the more strength you need to wear it and to counter the sideeffects of slowing you down and hampering your agility/ability to dodge attacks. I don't know if you're working with combat rounds, but if you don't, then give armor a speed penalty to all moves which can be partly offset by very high strength. Ideally all light armors should have almost no encumbrance for characters with average strength. Both penalties can also be offset with armor proficiency, either as feats or skill ranks. Material. Deerskin and iron are typical low end materials, dragon leather and magical metals/crystals can be high end materials. A lot of statistics depend on the material, like price, availability, robustness and again, weight. This leads us to the next statistic and to two possible choices: 1. Assume a great material makes great armors, and set the quality of a piece of armor equal to the material used. You can now skip the +1/+2+/+3 of D&D and have a material based armor system, much like Dragon Age. I don't like this, because it's somewhat simplified. So we have the other choice: 2. Assume a great material (dragon leather) doesn't always make a great armor (bad craftsman) and give all armors another stat, namely... Quality, depends on how skilled the creator of the armor was. This is the +1 of D&D. Since I like to use a D100 (2*D10) system instead of D20, because percentages are often much more useful and accurate, I gave them a higher value (*5). Now you can go and multiply (or add) the protective values of your material, quality and the next stat, which is... Protection, against different damage types (i.e. slash, blunt, pierce, fire, cold, electricity, acid, explosion/shockwave etc.) The way I see it thin, flexible armor out of leather is weak against slashing attacks, while plate armor is strong against it. Now blunt damage is a different thing. Of course you still get hurt badly if hit in your leather armor, but plate doesn't give maximum protection either, because of the concussion. Weapons with metal spikes might be able to pierce even platemails. Ever tried to "tank" a lighting bolt in full plate mail? I'd rather wear a leather or even fur armor. Especially if it's fur of a rare lightning beast that gives me additional protection. What I'm trying to say is the base type of armor already sets different protection values for different damage types that is not necessarily equivalent to it's weight. To all this add magic. So we now have: Magical Material, so in addition to the statistics for non-magical materials these add special traits to your armor. They can be either sturdier as a whole, giving overall better protection values, boost specific protections (fire dragon leather and fire protection comes to mind), be lighter, or add special abilities (blinkbat leather always has this blurry effect, giving additional dodge chance to the bearer of armors made out of it). Enchantments are added later and may enhance all possible statistics, add additional abilities and so on. I think everybody can imagine the possibilities. If you want to use hit locations, then consider using more pieces of armor, ideally one for every location. That way a player can wear a full plate on his torso but leave arms and legs in leather. This makes area of effect spells/grenade-like weapons a bit complicated though. I think it's not worth the effort, since it's for a game like PE easier to just increase the chance to circumvent armor all together as fewer pieces of armor are worn. Let's see how what we have now could work in practice: A fighter is attacking your nimble swashbuckler with his longsword. Your swashbuckler wears a nice piece of leather armor. The first step would be to calculate if the attack hits. The swashbucklers dodge is pretty high, but let's assume rolls weren't in his favor, so the hit connects. The margin of success is used to calculate how hard the hit is. Had he worn a full plate, then the incoming hit would be better (worse chance to dodge), but the protection by the armor would be better as well. Leather armor isn't all that great against slashing, but it is well crafted, so let's say it absorbs 50% of the damage or a fixed amount. What's left goes straight to your hit points and stamina. Upgrading the leather to magical material would increase the protection and enchantments could further increase it. Spellcasting encumbrance is not needed with this kind of system. If you want to create a battlemage, you may do so. As a downside you have to add more points to strength to make sure he's not slow and clumsy, making him a good tank but also get hit pretty often. His Intelligence score will be lower though. He also has to invest in armor skills/feats in order to wear it efficiently. Good thing is the speed penalty won't hamper his spellcasting. In the end you will want him out of melee anyway, because his spellcasting might still be interrupted when hit. I could go on, but I think I'll take a break here hoping OE will read this and it doesn't go to waste. But if you do, I'm open to negotiations if you want to hire me.

I don't think there has been a statement that excluded stamina from being a resource for non-magic skills/abilities apart of being the non-lethal hitpoints. And I see how this can be balanced rather well by giving warriors skills/stats that increase their stamina by a large amount, like hardiness or endurance as a passive skill.

I think people still didn't get that when you are hit, you get hurt (health goes down) and you get exhausted (stamina goes down). When your health reaches 0, you die. When your stamina reaches 0, you can't fight on and fall unconscious.

The "power to endure [...] fatigue". There you have it, stamina is correct.

And there's another problem. You find a great new weapon, now you either lose the familiarity bonus or the great new weapon. Choosing weapon/armor proficiencies are enough limitations on equipment choice already.

I like the idea of diplomatic avoidance of fights, though from a story-telling perspective some villains should be near impossible to pacify. I don't mind having to fight my way through encounters, but I'd like them to follow a few rules. 1. I can understand some NPCs (and PCs) having out of the ordinary powers, like the Baalspawns with their special abilities. If I meet an antagonist that is strangely mutated, half-dragon or whatever, then give him something to surprise your party. While you're at it, add some abilities like these to the PC character creation or to be obtainable list through quests. 2. Boss battles are nice, and as long as these bosses are supernatural, like dragons, they might have supernatural strength, agility etc., but in this case, please be reasonable. This is a thing most games don't do. A dragon should be slow moving, but if he steps on you, you are squished. I remember seeing the teaser video of Dragon Age's Ogre battle before the game was released. The ogre's signature move is to grab one of your characters, shake him in his huge fist and then throw him down again. It does a lot of damage, but by the looks of it, a frail mage in robes should have just been squashed with no hope of surviving. Then again, a "grab and shake" attack is a very bad combat move, so the ogres shouldn't have this attack at all, because it would be highly ineffective. So please: slow attacks with lots of damage, but quite easily avoidable. 3. Humanoid NPCs should have abilities that are pretty close to the PCs. No triple HP of your best fighter and no magic immunity or spells of mass destruction that your best mage can't match. Give them great items, but most of all, give them lots of allies if you want an encounter equal to a typical boss fight. I'd love to fight my way into a castle that is filled with soldiers, traps and maybe even siege weapons in tactical positions to reach the final boss, who won't fight you in a duel but with his bodyguards and what is left of his army. A lot of the bigger fights in BG did that very well. They were challenging, sometimes very challenging, but it didn't feel like the AI cheats. 4. Cutscenes can be nice if well done. Not well done is a cutscene that lets your whole party stumble onto a trapdoor, fall down into poisoned spikes that are surrounded by a horde of monsters squeezed into a small room with a locked door. This is just a cheesy dungeon design that no dungeon architect would ever devise. I don't like the feeling of acting like a dumbass as the skill checks I should have had are ignored. While I'm at it, how about making the 15 levels of dungeon a home to a cult of some kind, so that every floor serves a logical purpose and the closer you get to the bottom the higher the ranks of the cultists get? I can image gameplay imitating the action in the "Die Hard" movies with cultists reacting to your moving and moving between levels, mostly upwards and towards your party.

Also remember that full plate armors were not worn when traveling through the wilderness for miles on foot. Encumbrance is for me a more important aspect than historically correct appearance.

I loved quests that sidetracked you a bit from the main quest, ideally like in BG1 where for a while you didn't even know what your main goal was, so you started out just exploring different paths. For example I remember a quest in Amberstar, where you found an abandoned wizard's home, fought a few smaller monsters that he seemed to have left to protect his home and eventually got into his cellar. In this cellar you found a teleporter and a snowglobe-like device that showed a small island with a house, where a skeleton lay in the grass in front of the house. Now you had to figure out that the wizard was experimenting with artificial places he created, like that sole island and that he went there by this teleporter. One day he didn't take the key to another teleporter that was in the house (you couldn't see it in the snowglobe) and would have taken him back to his cellar with him. It was possible for you to get stuck on the island like him. And it was your guess if he was ending his life on the island on purpose or by a mistake. What was so great of this quest to find your way back from the island? The sense of exploration and the vision of how this wizard was living in his time. Maybe we should start making a contest of subquest writing, eventually voting for the best among them and offer them as a gift to Obsidian to make use of them if they think they fit in. What would be of help of course would be if we were granted access to some descriptions of the world they're making up.

Someone falling unconscious usually stays down for a time that is longer than a fight lasts. I don't think the stamina regeneration should make them wake up at this point so as long as the whole enemy group is down (no hostiles present) the game might count them as defeated. You now could either kill them or take them prisoner (well, maybe) and I imagine a button in the loot screen to finish them off or pick them up being not much of a hassle for the player.

I can imagine a hit to my full plate hurting my 'stamina' more than my health, as in making me fight worse afterwards due to light bruises and the strain to withstand the blow. I can also imagine being able to regenerate stamina in combat, fighting defensively pausing for a moment while trying to anticipate my opponents next move. That kind of regeneration would be quick compared to health regeneration, which should be so slow that it won't matter in a fight that doesn't last for more than a few minutes. I won't have a problem with very rare magic items/potions/spells that increase the regeneration of stamina and/or health, but they'd have to be very carefully balanced. Ideally health regeneration should only in a few cases make a difference of one hit you take (or just leave that out of the game) while stamina regeneration should make a difference of 2-3 hits you can take or 2-3 special attacks for fighter classes (I imagine stamina being a resource for special attacks as well as a damage buffer for everything that tires you).

I like the idea of stronger potions with shorter durations. Don't forget drinking animations though. Since PE is going towards a more realistic health system, you shouldn't be able to empty a bottle in no time at all. Again, The Witcher does that pretty well.

I think Diablo 2 did really well to depict a non-asian martial artist in the assassin class. Remove the claws if you want, but keep elemental damage added and you have a reason to use your fists and feet - they're pretty fast, so a good way to spread the (elemental) love. Also, if your spirit is the source of magic it sounds reasonable that fabricating elemental (or other combat enhancing) effects out of your fist is easier to do than putting it on a blade.