Somna

I thought they mentioned doing objective XP? That is, you get XP for finishing the goal/quest, not killing things, so it doesn't matter how many creatures you throw in--they won't be bags of delicious XP.

Pathfinder's Magus class is a pretty effective melee-mage, albeit without high (7+) level spell access. Although the idea of a melee-mage taking a giant book and treating it like a really big hammer is very appealing.

Bleh. Just realized the clipboard didn't register my last copy, and it's not letting me edit my post now either. Last link should be: http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/109792-project-eternity-interview/page-2.html

I'm not sure why the consumable has to be "potions" specifically. It could just as easily be a mini "book" of paper talismans on a wristband -- locate and rip out a page to use with one hand by touch (like with Braille), add the page to the "book" to equip the talisman. Easy to carry, easy to use, and you can add limitations that don't have to start making sense with ingesting things.

suorce? I went here first: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61637-comprehensive-project-eternity-information-guide/ Then I clicked the link to here: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58186 Scrolled down to the crafting section in the gigantic list of quoted sources and have this: http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58186 Scroll down and you'll find this: (Responding like this because I don't think people are even remotely aware of Marceror's thread.)

They have already said that the crafting components go into a separate inventory so that they won't clutter your regular UI. As long as there is enough space in the crafting inventory to hold everything, having to lug around unique crafting items that only build one thing should be a non-issue.

You can also use the environment for added difficulty on harder modes. Walk into a really hot part of an active volcano? Take some stamina damage every round and boost the effectiveness (maybe harder to avoid/resist) of fire spells on top of whatever else is going on just from the heat, unless you can actually lay down some area effect cold spells to temporarily cool things.

Sort of. You can salvage the equipment, and with how the crafting system works, someone actually put up a FAQ on how to abuse this to mostly get the stats you want from one component to another to customize your weapons.

I'd probably like it more if buffs only affected your status against the opponents who are actually present when they are cast. Then again, I'm sure that could backfire somehow.

Skyrim's the most amazing fantasy hiking-sim I've ever seen. Still got 125+ hours out of it. I think if I were designing the crafting system, I'd do the following: A definition, so that I don't have to repeat it multiple times: Passively Active: You set an option and it starts working on that option when time permits. May be restricted in certain areas, and will pause while in combat. If you ever go into combat, requires 10 minutes in-game time before it starts ticking again. ----------------------------------------------------- - NON-MAGICAL Ammunition crafting (i.e. bolts, arrows) -- tied to your party level, automatically controlled by whatever ranged weapons your party has equipped, if any. Passive (automatically create a batch while resting). - Mundane weapon/armor crafting -- requires non-combat skill devoted towards it (so tied to a character level), Passively Active in town/city maps only. Can be queued. - Repairs (if broken equipment is ever used) -- Use up automatically scrounged parts or toggled option of gold if no parts while out of combat, Toggled Passive (as you may want the parts for something else) - Magical ammunition crafting -- Options tied to your party level. Passively Active in town/city maps only. Can be queued. Much slower than mundane armor/weapon crafting. (This is assuming that ranged weapons are treated like 3.5 D&D, where the weapon automatically gives its traits to the ammo being fired, so you'd be using this to craft specialty ammunition like Arrows of Slaying instead.) - Magical consumable item crafting (i.e. Potion, scrolls, charged items) -- Requires components or money. Passively Active in cities/towns or while resting. - Magical weapon/armor crafting -- Requires money and a town/city visit (or a safe area and high quality components) to finish and must meet prerequisite criteria. Example weapon: Make a Flaming Sword. Prerequisites: Sword to be enchanted, someone using said sword in combat, and fire magic to buff the wielder in combat (and keep him buffed). You may not change to a different weapon or use a different type of magic on the wielder while attempting to fulfill this criteria. Passively Active on finishing step, Passive otherwise. ----------------------------------------------------- I don't know, that's just what I think. I'm sure there's lots of holes in the ideas.

By horror, are you talking about how one of the easiest ways to clear Skyrim is to cap Blacksmithing and Enchanting (and Alchemy if you wanted to) and then plow through everything with really strong gear?

You find out about the secret that the gods have been trying to misdirect the sheep populace from. You become an avatar of a god and gain forbidden knowledge. The fabric of reality unravels. A previous soul takes control of your body and makes you do horrible, nasty things (like hit on everything in a tavern, man, woman or animal). You die and somehow came back to life intact. Someone touched you in the wrong place.

I like an option not on the poll -- A "rune word" or "Word of Power" setup where you have multiple runes with base, predetermined effects that can be mixed and matched and generally monkey'd with for more complex effects. Having unique spells is fun, but only if there isn't a limit on the number of spells for the character.

I say, make the second city a secret city either floating in the clouds or on a different plane of existence.

Well, with implementing armor, you're eventually going to have to affect the combat system one way or another, in order to get it to work. Many games do this with multiple checks, instead of just one "AC" check. So to sort of condense what you're saying: One example that could apply here is a "To Hit" check, then a "To Penetrate" check, then a final check on how much damage got mitigated. You could have the stronger, more durable armors penalize the "To Hit" check while having a high bonus on the "To Penetrate" check and the DR check. So then, to apply what they've told us about firearms being able to overcome magic barriers to this kind of system to follow through on the example, you could say the firearms completely bypass the "To Penetrate" check and that magic barriers do not have DR. That leaves the result of the durable armor wearers still not taking much damage from a firearm compared to mages relying on magic barriers. The material-based system isn't talking about things like the Dragon Age style of equipment, where one material was clearly better. Here's the listing of "special materials" from D&D. Here's also a Pathfinder version, just to show you how crazy you can get with the special material stuff. Upgrading the armor a tier is more about making the armor a better kind of armor, like Breastplate -> Platemail -> Field Plate. Changing the material is more because you want the benefits of one material over another, not necessarily because one is clearly better than the other.

Wow what a load of BS. Every single word. I'd like to have you elaborate on that. I for one agree with most, if not everything, he said. Of which highly similar ideas have already been brought up earlier in the thread, from what I could tell by quickly skimming through. If you can make the strongest gear by yourself it for the most part makes all the professionals in the world redundant etc. If you can provide a believable explanation as to why anyone in your party would be able to outperform any professional who has years of experience in their given craft after rummaging around some dungeons, killing some goblins and picking up some materials, please enlighten me. If there had to be PC crafting, I think it should be very very limited, mainly because I just don't see it feasible for your party to be capable of the same levels of crafting as professionals. I mean it could be feasible if you were already a professional before setting out on your adventure, but in most cases you would effectively learn the trade little by little as the game progresses (and as mentioned earlier by someone, you'd often use the experience gained from slaying monsters to further those skills as well). Oh and all that player crafting would have to be done, while say resting or whatever. Definitely not freely whenever wherever. Since there's going to be a stronghold of some sort, I really like the idea of being able to "employ" people to practice their trade in the stronghold. Of course, assuming the stronghold would come later in the game, you would also come across professional craftsmen who you could pay to craft items for you. For some reason for the stronghold part, Crossroad keep from NWN2 is the first that comes to mind, I actually really liked that part, although it didn't offer crafting but the similar concept should still be more than viable. Given the track record of the previous IE games with crafting, I have a hard time taking his complaint seriously. Generally if you were trying to get something really nice created, the party had to gather the rare ingredient(s) needed and bring them to the specialized crafter. That may change with the whole non-combat skills thing, but that's still not going to be something stupid like spam items to increase a skill level from 1-400+ to farm items to vendor. MMO style crafting is incredibly unlikely with what they've described so far, which is pretty much where his complaint seems to be rooted in.

I have to wonder how many people would flip if they saw the Pathfinder Magus class (which I have nothing against).

I wouldn't consider something like just Manticore spines to be "unique" on its own. Now if you added addtional restrictions on the spines, such as the spines collected off a live Manticore tail from a specific Manticore infamous for shredding the toughest barriers, and you were going to use the spines as javelin heads...that would be getting there in terms of "unique."

Crafting skill in this kind of circumstance could end up being a time saver rather than a money saver. For example, let's say the game introduced a "downtime" option where you could list the passive things your party wants to do while visiting a town/city location. (This can include the minorly annoying things like selling loot that you don't care about with a "haggle" skill of some sort to try to increase the funds gained.) A character with a blacksmith utility skill can use town downtime to take an offer up with the local blacksmith (or pay him/her) on learning the region's smithing quirks and techniques. Once learned, you don't have to go back to that location in order to do its upgrades, although you're still going to have to pay whatever the material cost is to upgrade the item yourself. Unique materials should generally be shied away from unless you're creating "endgame" equivalent equipment. Even then, it should only be used in the creation of one specific item, not a range of items. That would make it a non-issue. It's really not fun to have to pick one of X things to make if you could only make one of them, because then it just boils down to a "which is the best" question...which can get irritating. Better quality/grade material could do that though. For example, you go through the game in the equivalent of...let's say Plate mail, and as you go through the game, the metal you are preferring for your armor is mithril, after comparing benefits/drawbacks. But you're really not finding any mithril plate mail, just mithril daggers and mithril chain mail and other equipment. As a result, you could take the equipment to a blacksmith to convert into the armor you want instead (or you could do it yourself if you could find a forge/anvil closer and were a blacksmith).

A full respec is definitely highly under debate, but I'm starting to think that a partial respec can actually fit in very well in very specific circumstances. Think of this scenario: Let's say that they start up character creation with a set template. All you are picking is the character name, race, base stat distribution and the character class...and that's pretty much it. Events progress in the game to the main event that kickstarts the actual game, and the event that occurs is what lets you break your template mold, so to speak, and respec your race/class/feat/skill characteristics to what you actually want them to be. You can keep the default settings for the class, or you can customize it as you see fit. You already had time to play around with the available customized equipment and spells, so you should have some idea what is going on even if you didn't RTFM. The downside would be that this obvious tutorial section would be very annoying subsequent times through if there wasn't a skip option available. The upside is that this respec would not be viewed as a respec because it'd be treated as an extended character creation process.

That's sort of how the mix-and-match enchanting works in 3rd edition D&D with all of the +Xs. Considering they don't want Scale Mail +Xs floating around though, they are definitely going to need an alternate system in place. That doesn't mean some of the stuff in place in D&D can't be carried over though. For example, item hardness strikes me as a good way to compare material durability -- if you want to enchant leather to be as tough as metal, what you are actually doing is enchanting it to make the item hardness match up. If they did this though, they'd probably want stats for other factors of the material. Maybe a stat for item "flexibility" where the higher the flexibility stat, the less hampering the armor gets. Then if you get it high enough, it can enhance the character's own movements.

I'm guessing you meant regent. I HOPE you mean regent... (If he's a reagent, we're most likely using him for some unmentionable experiments... ) Sorry, couldn't resist that typo.

Both problems aren't necessarily problems. Upgrades can be gated by region. Start off in a poorer area that can't afford the parts for the higher tiers anyway. Then when you transition to an area that can afford it, you can upgrade the armor at the blacksmith/tanner/whatever for a nominal fee (and possibly some time). They don't even need to all be available at the same time. And then later or more specialist tiers would require you to find an armor specialist to upgrade and customize the armor further. When you're dealing with mass produced armor, there's no reason why you need to go gathering for parts. It's when you get to the magical stuff where that might be an issue.

For AD&D Magical Item Crafting was basically another form of an adventure hook. The difference is that instead of "Go help the locals fend off the rampaging horde" for your hook, you can get something like "go to X to locate a Y, you need Z under G conditions" (if the DM is being really cruel). For later versions of DND, crafting as a whole was more of a discount option -- go buy the goods, or make it yourself for half price if you meet the prerequisites and spent the time to do it. However, in a low magic setting, crafting is often the only way to enchant items. So depending on the campaign, getting item crafting abilities on a character was possibly worth it.

Just to clarify: Ranged = arrows. Firearms = bullets.