Nerei

Personally I would go with making armour reduce the damage a person takes. Wearing a suit of plate does not really make you harder to hit, I would actually say it makes you easier to hit as it does restrict your movement. However a nice sheet of steel plate with a decent amount of padding will reduce the damage you take from a sword by dissipating the energy over a larger area. Add a dodge mechanic of some sort and have armour affect it negatively with the more restrictive (not heavier) armour giving a larger penalty and it is a matter of weighing the chance of dodging the attack vs absorbing part of it.

While I would really like to have a large selection of weapons, I do not think it should be at the expense of them basically being nearly identical. Take polearms, there's a very large number: Halberd, pike, ranseur, bill, glaive, guisarme, glaive guisarme, ranseur, bardiche, brandistock and quite a few more if you start digging around. Not to mention oriental weapons like say the naginata, although if you would call them identical to some western weapons is another matter. Naturally it is possible to make all weapons distinct, but the question then is if that is desirable as it would basically mean making an extremely detailed combat simulator.

Personally I would prefer having to do some sort of ammunition management, as long as it does not become too much irritating busywork. Having larger stacks can help a lot on the management issues, though naturally it also needs to not be a non-issue in which case it might as well be cut. If there are going to be infinite ammunition I hope it will only be the basic type and we can still find a limited amount of better ammunition. That said I am more concerned with balancing "special" ammunition with melee weapons as it really felt underpowered in the IE games. Sure it was nice to find a stack of fire arrows and sure I would use them if I got them for free, but it was not something I would ever consider buying. Only exception being if they where near mandatory like say for troll slaying in a group with limited acid and fire assets. Ultimately it felt like the gold was better spent on just buying a magical sword. Even if the base damage was slightly less it was not a way too expensive finite resource. Like Christliar I like the arcane archer approach to things and it is something that could make the ranger really strong as a ranged character. I found it quite disappointing that it was moderately crappy in the IE games as a ranged combatant. Heck in Neverwinter nights I'd not touch a ranger for an optimal ranged built and even in the Icewind Dale games I would probably go with a fighter.

Personally I would prefer the way it worked in arcanum where you get a certain amount of gold depending on your background (class might also play into it here, arcanum did not have those) and are then dropped into a basic shop right at the start. Maybe supplemented by certain free items depending on your class like say a free set of lockpicks for a rogue.

If you want to give credit to anyone for inventing the lines of archers alternating between firing and reloading it should probably go to the chinese, they used fairly similar tactics to those of the pike and shoot infantry formation well before the european middle ages Okay removed a few old quotes to keep it from turning into a wall of text. The problem though is that mail or similar types of armor is only resistant to arrows fired by a longbow, you really need steel plate to get close to immunity. The peasants are the most vulnerable to arrows yes, but in no way are men at arms safe. During the later parts of the middle ages the overall armour of the armies did improve quite a bit yes, but not really enough to make the average infantry immune to arrows. The standard around the time of the english civil war was something like brigandine, which while leagues ahead of what levies wore, is still vulnerable, especially at shorter ranges. That is not to say you are not safer in brigandine or mail than wearing nothing but cloth or furs, but it would not guarantee you anything in terms of safety unlike the plate which is almost guaranteed to protect you. I think the consensus we can reach is longbows are deadly vs lightly armoured targets with reduced effect as the armour gets heavier and becoming nearly useless against full plate. Actually come to think of it how would the game represent things like this, if they go with the IE/D&D model it is just about the character having a decent BAB and the armour is useless. Funny how the topic is about firearms and we mainly focus on the longbow

I am mostly with The Guilty Party on this one. Personally I like realism, and could accept having this as an option and only an option. However I am also pretty sure that basically screwing the players over for something they cannot control and cannot predict will really force a large to reload and many other will just hate the mechanic and ask why it is there. Many will simply not take it for fear of it biting them at some point. Any sane person definitely would not bring firearms to an ironman run or similar where a bad die roll could leave permanent harm It is definitely something only for an "expert" or "realism" mode and even then I would say implementing it should be a low priority.

While I do to some extend like this idea, it really needs to be done right in order to ensure that you do not end up with effectively useless characters either through late recruiting or (un)intentional neglect. After all how fun is a situation where you have a party member half your strength that you really like, but in order to use them you either have to drag them through low level content or drag them through higher level and risk them dropping from an accidental bolt to the face. That is assuming you do not have to go through monster grinding or scavenging for quests you would not normally have done for RP reasons. Yes in later playthoughs you might plan a bit ahead, but first few times it is very possible to happen. Having it as an option and perhaps an option to allow them to gain a percentage of what you get (after all what are they doing back in camp? just drinking?) might be the way to go. So if done well, then yes. If it mainly ends up as a nuisance or something where you curse at the design then no.

Definitely the third one, it always bothers me if an enemy has a weapon or suit of armour I want and I for some reason cannot take it. On the other hand having wolves drop longbows, maces and daggers is just silly and to me fairly immersion breaking.

To me it really depends on what types of quests it is. The gather X and return them to the questgiver then wait Y time and the quest becomes available again feels a bit too much like mmo's to me. however if they are more like "a vendor will pay well for any pelts you bring him" and the quest is basically bringing these pelts and selling them for say 150% of their actual worth then it is okay to me as it can be explained ingame. naturally if you want to call it a quest or not is another story

It is far from certain that something akin to blackpowder can even be made in a given fantasy world, just like electricity does not necessarily exist. Chain lightning anyone? How about a thunderstorm?

Most importantly, it's probably a matter of game balancing. I prefer guns to be balanced rather than game breaking. Then our real world is one thing, the engineers in PE might not have developed their guns as well as we have. From a game perspectives it would be more about overlapping weapon. Penetration against heavy armour (plate) is about equal, reload speed is about equal. Damage against unarmored targets probably favors the arguebus (bullets tear the target while the bolt cuts through it). User-friendliness (ease of aiming etc.) should also favor the arquebus from what I have read. Ultimately the potentially unbalancing weapon would be the longbow. Given that the training factor (by far the main disadvantage of the longbow) is not really relevant (we can assume the pc knows how to use the weapon effectively) it would by far win over the other weapons. I once found an article that stated that the longbowmen Henry V had at Agincourt more than matched the muskets used by the russian soldiers during the crimean war in rate of fire, penetration power and range. There is a long-standing argument amongst historians about how effective the longbow actually was against plate armor. A big part of this debate is that we don't really know how powerful the things were. A particular point to keep in mind is that an arrow loses a large amount of its velocity over range, while a musket ball doesn't lose as much (the arrow has more drag due to its surface area). I did some quick research into weights and velocities of muskets vs an English Longbow. It seems like a 75 pound draw longbow could shoot an arrow weighing one ounce at around 185 fps. This gives us an initial energy of 45 joules. A more powerful bow (100 pounds) is estimated to shoot a 1.5 ounce arrow at the same velocity, for an initial energy of 68 joules. If we totally abandon the evidence, and increase the longbow's numbers to some of the most ridiculous claims (2.5 ounce arrow at 250 fps), we still only get 206 joules. An arquebus ball of .80 caliber weighed about 1.77 ounces and traveled between 650 and 750 fps. That's an initial energy of between 987 and 1315 joules. (calculator used: http://billstclair.com/energy.html) As you can see, there's just no comparison in the punch of the longbow and the arquebus. Even if you ramp up the English longbow's numbers to the level of the most absurd claims, there's still no competition. Now let's look at crossbows. An important thing to remember about the crossbow is that while many of them had impressive draw weights of 1000 pounds or so, the distance across which they applied that force to the bolt was much shorter than a bow, so the transfer of energy wasn't nearly as efficient. They applied greater acceleration, but over less distance (and therefore time). I found one test of a powerful crossbow that provided both bolt mass and fps. It was a 780 pound draw arbalest, firing a 4.5 ounce bolt at 159fps. this comes out to an initial energy of 150 joules. Again, this is far weaker than the arquebus. Even if we give a more powerful crossbow very generous numbers (I chose a 6 ounce bolt at 200 fps), we still only get 317 joules, which is less than a third of the lower estimate for the arquebus. Regarding accuracy: It is difficult to find reliable accuracy data for medieval bows and crossbows. However, there are a few points of info that will help us get a crude idea. According to a couple of bowhunting sites I looked at, hitting a deer at 100 yards with a modern crossbow (far superior in terms of accuracy) is considered a shot only for very talented crossbow hunters. This is not actually that bad when compared with an arquebus, and when firing at a mass of men the point becomes moot. An important fact to consider is that the slower your projectile is traveling, the higher angle it has to be fired at in order to prevent it from hitting the ground. Projectiles fall towards the ground at the same rate no matter how fast they're traveling horizontally. If you fired the crossbow I mentioned above, from eye level (~5'6" for a 5'11" person) at an enemy's head 100 yards away, but you didn't elevate it at all, the bolt would strike the ground less than halfway to the target. (This is disregarding air resistance, which would make it fall even faster, but is hard to calculate) The longbow fired in the same situation would go slightly farther, but still fall pathetically short. The lower range arquebus shot fired in the same circumstances would still be about three feet from the ground, and impact the poor sod in his dangly bits if it flew true. Also, increased velocity makes it easier to hit a moving target, since the target won't have as much time to get out of the way. (Projectile drop calculations from http://hyperphysics....e/grav.html#bul) Let's look at the specific angles you would need to shoot to hit a person's head with these three weapons. To make that shot with the crossbow, you must elevate to 11.2 degrees. With the longbow, it's 8.2 degree. With the low end arquebus, it's only .65 degrees. (calculations from the section titled "angle of launch" at http://hyperphysics....traj.html#tra16) Greater projectile velocity = a much flatter trajectory = a much easier shot. Also, a steeper angle of shot means the projectile will spend much more of its flight above the height of your enemy, giving you less wiggle room in estimating the range. Basically, the steeper the angle, the less you can afford to be wrong by. Also, when the angle gets really steep, people become smaller targets. A projectile traveling fairly flat has a much larger target to hit than a projectile plunging downwards, because people are much taller than they are wide. Alright, I think that's about enough of this. It's 5:25, and I've had my fill of math for the week. Later. Not going to argue about longbows penetrating a well made suit of plate armour, there is no point. It has limited success against those. I know that and I agree it will not work well against those. However remember the armies that the longbowmen went up against, by far the majority of soldiers did not wear a nice well-crafted suit of steel plate armour. Basically the medieval army consisted of the core elite (knights etc.) with some support from men-at-arms and maybe mercenaries, however the majority of the army was made up of levied peasant troops. Yes the longbow will have a limited success against the plated knight on a horse, but maybe 90% of the army, the peasants, will be eaten alive by the arrows. Even the men at arms, which most likely wear mail etc. will have much fun out of the arrows as they can penetrate mail at a decent range. Here rate of fire is what matters as a hit is likely to take the combatant out of the fight or at least slow him down and that is very much in the longbows favor. As for the knights in plate they can then continue the charge after the peasants have broken ranks and half the men-at-arms have fallen down bleeding. At that point the battle is pretty much over. Only the guy in full plate will have a good chance of being fairly immune, but then again he is also going to have a decent chance against a crossbow or arquebus except maybe at point blank range. However both weapons will have a problem with their reload times and definitely do not get more than one chance at point blank range against a knight on a horse if they even get that. Considering that the majority of the enemies the PC will face in PE is very unlikely to wear a suit of gothic plate armour (after all if the brigands could afford that they could also afford a life in comfort) I will still say that the rate of fire would make the longbow far more deadly than a crossbow or arquebus against light to medium armoured opponents, which should be the majority.

Yes, it would. We're afraid of anything spider-shaped, whether it's an actual arachnid or something else. I once had a panic fit when someone threw a spider-shaped plant at me and I thought it was alive. I'm arachnophobic, but oddly, giant spiders in video games don't scare me. I think they're too unrealistic to affect me; when I modded ambient creatures into Skyrim, tiny peaceful spiders creeped me out, but their larger friends didn't. I know other people find them uncomfortable, though - hence my question: would it be feasible to include a no-spider (and a no-snake while we're at it) button turning these creatures into something else? Or at least to mod it in when the tools are released. TES games have mods which replace spiders with bears. How difficult it would be to add a button turning it on or off is hard to tell without knowing how the game is made. The same with regard to modding it, it could be really simple if say creatures are controlled by a simple, easy to read text file, then it would just be a matter of changing what mesh, texture and animation it uses. Might have to change spawn lists which would be harder, but again if in plain text just a matter of bulk editing On the other hand it could be a matter of editing 10 files where half the information is well hidden, or require specialized tools to be able to edit them at all. Given that modding has been promised to be simple hopefully it will not be something like say modding icewind dale, that was a nightmare.

Most importantly, it's probably a matter of game balancing. I prefer guns to be balanced rather than game breaking. Then our real world is one thing, the engineers in PE might not have developed their guns as well as we have. From a game perspectives it would be more about overlapping weapon. Penetration against heavy armour (plate) is about equal, reload speed is about equal. Damage against unarmored targets probably favors the arguebus (bullets tear the target while the bolt cuts through it). User-friendliness (ease of aiming etc.) should also favor the arquebus from what I have read. Ultimately the potentially unbalancing weapon would be the longbow. Given that the training factor (by far the main disadvantage of the longbow) is not really relevant (we can assume the pc knows how to use the weapon effectively) it would by far win over the other weapons. I once found an article that stated that the longbowmen Henry V had at Agincourt more than matched the muskets used by the russian soldiers during the crimean war in rate of fire, penetration power and range.

Unless you change the morphology it's not plausible no matter what respiratory or circulatory system you pick. If I make my spider 10000 times larger it's effective muscle strength becomes 1/10.000, which would not be enough to support it's body. Add to that that the effective strength of the chitinous outer shell or internal bones also drops rapidly compared to the mass of the creature and it effectively will shatter when it hits the ground. If we want to be scientifically accurate the creature would really not resemble a spider very much as it would have to have quite sturdy legs and a much reinforced body to not die from gravity

Like JOG said, as long as it does not become an inconvenience it is fine and could add some immersion to the game. If it is difficult or not to implement is another story, there need to be some sort of waypoint mapping unless they are to wander completely random and there is the issue of day-night cycles. I have seen Neverwinter nights modules handle this though so it should be fairly easy to do all things considered.

Not really sure why an arquebus should have such a terribly long reload time, I have seen tests where reloading an arquebus was about as fast to reload as a windlass reloaded crossbow (effectively the heavy crossbow in d&d). Remember, the arquebus replaced the crossbow as the ranged weapon of choice for the european armies of the 16th century, that pretty much means it has to be an effective weapon. At least as effective as a crossbow. Now a skilled archer with a longbow, there's your ranged death incarnate Personally I find the idea of adding firearms great, if for no other reason than it being different from the plethora of fantasy settings that for some reason never invents gunpowder.

I am personally not afraid of spiders, actually I find them to be interesting creatures and I have more than once had fun examining them through either a magnifying glass or a microscope. That said I tend to agree with you, if for slightly different reasons. For one the tendency in games to let you fight rats and big bugs initially tends to make you feel like a glorified pest exterminator. Further I find them illogical and it irritates me when I have to fight big bugs, large insects are practically impossible, both their respiratory system and basic morphology prevents this. Spiders have a slight advantage in respiration but from what I remember can still not support a body the size of a cow. Yes I know this is fantasy but I would still like a bit of realism, especially if there is alternatives. Just replace the huge spiders, insects etc. with some other animal, goblins or something.

I would argue that the evil person would go rob a merchant instead or something along those lines and score perhaps 200 gold No I do not mean that there should not be any kind of reward for being good, but consider this: People are generally not evil or at least they do not believe they are. The reason people (both real life and fiction if written well) does evil deeds is as a shortcut to get what they want. Few do evil deeds for fun. The drug dealer sells drugs to make money, the thief robs people to make money, the traditional evil CEO that cares only about money strangely enough does it for the money. All could be said to be evil and there is plenty of additional examples if you try to look for them. Odds are that the far majority of these does not have any predisposition towards evil. The reason they do evil deeds is to get ahead in life. call it laziness if you want. Again that is not to say that there should not be any rewards for doing good deeds, your example is completely valid and I agree with it, let the player get a reward for returning the puppy. But the "evil" option should generally reflect at least at first glance a bigger reward to give all the non-psychotic evil people a reason to pick that option. It could even be smaller (say the butcher offers 10 gold for the puppy) but it should just be more direct and/or visible. If there is no visible incentive to be "evil", to do evil deeds over the good ones we basically have to assume the people that are doing these are raving psychotic maniacs that do it for fun. Naturally those people do exist, but having those as effectively the only option for evil players is just bad design.

Depending on how factions are made you could also get a bonus. Like say if a town is a faction helping people there even without a reward would improve your standing while robbing and killing them strangely enough would make them like you less Logically people like others that do good deeds, heroes are more liked that murderous villains. That alone would be a reward though not (directly) a material one. But yes I agree, less gold and less badass weapons for doing good, it will also help explaining why people would pick the evil options, material rewards or shortcuts to them. Only completely insane psychopaths would wake up and say " I'm evil and today I will demonstrate it by butchering a town"

I really do not understand this obsession with preventing any kind of potential exploitation in a single player game. If it was a mmo or had any kind of competitive multiplayer, I could understand it, it hurts other people, but here it affects none but the player. No I do not really care about the "vision" or whatever the dev has to how a game should be played, they are not the ones playing, I am. It is a bit like people saying "there should not be any cheats in a game" It's a conscious action for people to use those. If you do not like it, do not use it, but do not dictate how other people should play the game they paid for! Play the game the way you want and let other people play the way they want! That is not to say I want a "press to win the game" button or there should specifically be made cheap ways to cheese the game. Neither should it mean not fixing bugs etc. However neither should they try and prevent any kind of mechanics that normally would work okay and only if the player really want to use it as an exploit really is it! Further do you seriously think you can eradicate all kinds of exploits? I know Firaxis tried it in their new Xcom game by saving the random seed in each mission and locking the data files, and it took me about 2 minutes to break the majority of it! A simple executable explorer and a bit of creative reloading and it's at best a nuisance. No I do not care about cheating in that game except when it is pulling cheap tricks (chain panic can break a 4 man squad in one round, almost no matter what you do), but I love to find ways to break it. Yes I will try for this one too if they try to design specifically to prevent all kinds of exploits. Finally apparently this game will have some modding support or at least fairly open control files, this alone pretty much means that any kind of exploit control will have a snowballs chance in hell of succeeding! Sorry to go on a rant but it seriously irritates me when people argue for and even more when devs actually make mechanics specifically to prevent what they might be exploits if people really intend to use it for that.

While I believe that there should be consequences for the PC's action, be it good or bad, I am a bit ambivalent towards the "good is about (self) sacrifice", it is so much more. It can be a part of the solutions sure but it should by far not make up the bulk of the options. It also has a bit of "pay 200 gold to see the happy-bunny-filled-sunshine-option". On a slightly unrelated note. If it was about rewards related to good/evil rather have the game give a small rewards for going the evil route, not as much that the game should promote evil, but rather that there should be a logical incentive for the PC to do something evil. If there is no reason to do "evil" deeds other than "I be evil har har" it basically turns any evil options into "evil"= psychopath. As mentioned by Ghostofanakin there is other options that are just as good for a rpg, and options that leave more of an impact on the world than "-1 point to strength". If we move into more "lesser of tho evils" solutions it could be "save the refugees or save the village" solution, both of which could leave a lasting effect on the world. I would so much rather see that kind of effects of a quest resolution.

Import option like in the IE games is fine, it should be a fairly easy solution to make. However effectively making a whole new difficulty level for this alone I would say would consume too many resources for it to be worth it.

From what I have heard the "drow" tombs are really supposed to be "drowned" but the last letters have been cut off by the map border. The placement near the edge and the other number of cut-off words makes it a fairly realistic explanation.

Add a bit of non-linearity to the game and that balancing is all over the place. There is other ways to mess it up

Not sure how food could be implemented without being simply an inventory filler unless you also add some sort of hunger/thirst mechanics, which really should be an optional feature. The way New Vegas had it was okay, if they go with that route fine.