mcmanusaur

A fun game? Perhaps. A fun roleplaying game? Not in my opinion. Of course, "set in stone" with regard to character creation (during which you represent your character's background, prior to the events depicted in the game) and with regard to character progression (leveling and degree of choice- moral or otherwise- in the narrative) are two different things, as I believe you mean to assert. A game can define your character's past but still give you the freedom to decide their future, and the inverse (with some customization- if shallow- during character creation, and very linear narrative/gameplay) is also possible to some extent. In considering the four permutations (character customization x choice) here, it's ultimately down to what you want to get out of your roleplay experience. The "set in stone" characters you refer to are great for storytelling, but are simply not feasible for a game with any multiplayer functionality (lest we have everyone playing more or less the same character all at once). Lack of choices throughout the gameplay with regard to narrative also might not impede the storytelling aspect, but I personally value the sandbox elements and the ability to play my character's "role" holistically, outside of how it pertains to combat-focused gameplay or the central plotline. Even if Project Eternity has already been confirmed as exclusively singleplayer, I still like the idea of being able to customize my character's past, and in many ways I think it would be great for roleplaying games to have us wondering whether really we're playing singleplayer or multiplayer. Hopefully I'll have more time to respond to the rest of this later.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to oppose this. For all the uproar over perceived "replayability" or lack thereof in certain games, for me this is always secondary to "playability", even if I like sandbox elements (which are typically associated with replayability and the endgame). Cross-character/game/save file (or whatever you want to call it) unlockables like this simply don't belong in the RPG genre in my opinion, since I would consider choosing a new role (i.e. switching classes) to be the central and the only necessary aspect of "replays", and if I had my way it wouldn't be any game's business to restrict which roles we could choose in the first playthrough. I think cut/copy-pasting aspects of past character sort of violates the setting's fidelity from a roleplay perspective, and even if this was worked in with some reincarnation aspects of the souls bit in the game's narrative, I still don't see what this would really add. The only thing I can think of is maybe protecting players from their own tendency to choose the most blinged out and egotistic characters from the start- via restricting access to character backgrounds such as "noble lineage" that may confer certain gameplay benefits similar to the options you've listed- and even then I'm not sure that constitutes grounds for including a novel mechanic. I think that as long as the scope of our characters' "roles" in Project Eternity is adequately wide (via including elements of non-combat-focused gameplay and limited sandbox elements), the promise of a new role should be enough motivation for replay, and there's no need for meta-gamist challenges.

If increasing attributes are a must, then the thing I most want to avoid is the "increase one attribute of your choosing every 3rd level" system that DnD-based games tend to use. For one thing, why every third level? It's really artificial, and while this works well for pen and paper, we can do much better in video games. More importantly, how does this correspond with the real world experience of becoming stronger or smarter? You don't just choose one or the other arbitrarily; you devote effort to activities that develop one or the other and reap the reward of your efforts eventually. In this respect, the "define your character through your play" philosophy that has recently become popular (and which I have tended to view as leading to dumbed-down mechanics) is actually more valid and consistent with the real world. That doesn't mean I support a game like Skyrim completely getting rid of attributes (it is still important that the player is able to see their own progress), but if attributes must increase it should be due to practicing related skills or preferably even related to plot events, rather than an arbitrary choice by the player with meta/powergaming considerations in mind.

NPC-NPC interactions are of utmost importance to me, so I echo what eschaton and Pipyui have said. A setting that completely revolves around my character feels so artificial and shallow, and while interactive settings are great, settings that are dynamic even before you bring the players' actions into the mix are even better.

Actually, I'm getting the sneaking impression that the mechanics soul magic will be more akin to dragon shouts in Skyrim (not the vocal aspect, since that would overlap with Chanters, but otherwise), but I hope I'm wrong there.

I really hope that magic in this game is not abstracted as solely a combat skill. Even in the Baldur's Gate series (which didn't implement too much utility to spells out of combat), there were spells with no use in combat (find familiar, identify, friends, know alignment, knock, wish, etc), and ones with use both in and outside combat (charm person, haste, invisibility, wizard's eye, etc). Admittedly spells like this got less frequent in higher levels, but there's all sorts of ways a wizard could use magic outside of combat. This is a fair point, and something I've been trying to answer for a while. I suppose you could easily have it such that classes span combat and non-combat abilities, but simply ensure that every class has a reasonable amount of each, and have the two draw from separate allocation pools (this part has already been confirmed I believe). But it's quite difficult to come up with enough exclusive corresponding non-combat skills for certain classes to match all the rogue skills. However, I kinda like the idea of characters having a civilian "front" that's not necessarily related to their combat specialization at all, which the player has the freedom to choose (within the limits of attribute modifiers as I mentioned in my previous post). The blacksmith-fighter is an obvious combination, but what about the tradeskills- such as mason, chef, or miner- that don't necessarily pertain to any specific class? Are such skills just left out of the game on the grounds that they don't align with combat classes? And furthermore, what about the magical approach to non-combat activities? It would seemingly preclude non-magic-users from choosing such skills, and restricting non-combat skills to particular classes defeats the point of what I'm trying to achieve with such a system. Other than pigeon-holing characters into directly complementary combat and non-combat roles (warrior = blacksmith, ranger = carpenter, wizard = alchemist, which leads to stereotypical characters in my opinion), the alternatives would include changing the abstraction of magic as you mention or accepting the possibility of weird combos like a barbarian alchemist (though again the attribute modifiers might be prohibitive here). However, the latter doesn't solve the challenging issue of skills applicable both inside and outside of combat, as you mention, but I suppose this ultimately applies to magic (the spells you've mentioned) as well as non-magic (saves, perception, balance, intimidation, etc.). I don't have a great answer for that at the moment, but I'm not ready to give up on the otherwise worthwhile ideal of separating combat and non-combat abilities quite yet.

I think a simple "Energy"/"Fatigue" system works well enough, without even bothering to divide out "mana" and "stamina" (because the chances are that one of those two will just be neglected entirely depending on the character's class). The clunky "memorize X spells" and "X spells per day" mechanics of DnD-based games never appealed to me in the slightest, though I can understand the desire for more nuance than "cast until mana depleted".

I don't see how what you want is possible to have while still having a class-based system. Skills could be balanced, but if everyone got equal combat feats and magic, but mages got "mage combat" and conversely, warriors got "warrior magic," there wouldn't be any real rationale in terms of why the classes were specialized to begin with. I don't think giving magic to warriors and melee to wizards is necessary for any reason, as melee and magic are both kinds of combat. Everyone should be free to specialize within combat as much as they want; what I mean to say is that there shouldn't be direct tradeoffs between combat and non-combat. Ideally this would make "classes" really only relevant to combat specializations (whether melee, ranged, magic, and so on), and non-combat skills could be freely selected from a separate pool (though I would imagine that certain combat classes would work well with specific non-combat skills based on the attributes modifying them). Characters would then have their class level (which would correspond to their combat abilities), and then skill levels for non-combat activities, which would rank up separately. As far as different power curves, I see your point but I'm still not convinced it belongs in the game; I could definitely see different builds for the same class having different power curves, but having this apply to whole classes is needless in my opinion.

Not at all. We know they come from different pools, but we don't know that every class gets the same amount of combat versus non-combat skills. It could work out something like this for each level. Fighters : 4 combat points, 1 skill point, 1 soul point Rogues: 2 combat points, 3 skill points, 1 soul point Wizards. 1 combat point, 2 skill points, 3 soul points My understanding is that the point of having them draw from separate pools is to prevent it from being a direct tradeoff between the two, and what you have suggested is simply moving that tradeoff to a different part of character creation (from skill point allocation to class selection), which just decreases our freedom to customize classes if anything.

What I get out of the Sawyer quotes is that we may see something that combines mental and physical attributes so as to make each attribute hypothetically valuable to all classes: Power (Offensive Strength/Wisdom) Health (Constitution) Fortitude (Endurance/Willpower) Finesse (Agility/Dexterity/Intelligence) Perception (Awareness) Appeal (Attractiveness/Charisma) This rids the "simulationist" distinction between the mental and physical in favor of a zero-sum game- with no pointless stats like Wisdom for a Barbarian- regardless of class.

Probably mostly this, yes. But I'd take it a bit further. For me it's enough all classes provide utility, doesn't need to be roughly equal. For one, I'd separate combat and general utility. Like picking between a professor and a weaponmaster. One can help you get into the institute, while the other is way better if a fight happens. Just as long as you're not choosing from a weaponmaster vs a regular fighter, where the weaponmastar can do everything the fighter does, only better. But this seems to be better for games where you choose helpers for each mission from a worker pool. Like NWN2 or any of the Biowares recent offerings. Less suited for likes of Icewind Dale or BG where you basically want a dream team for combat and don't go swapping all too often. And the thinking arises from ME2. DA2 frustration. Yea, choose the party, only it doesn't matter who you choose because they're all equally useful in any given situation. (especially in DA2 where every given situation was you being rushed by a mob) In my opinion it would defeat the purpose of having combat skills and non-combat skills draw upon different pools, which has been confirmed, to have certain classes excel in combat and other classes excel in non-combat. Perhaps I'm reading this wrong but I disagree. I think that a Rogue should be less adept at martial combat than the warrior classes and be unable to cast spells like caster classes. They should get some unique abilities(like sneak attack) that make them something other than "Fighter-lite", but IMO a Rogue's greatest assets are the multitudes of skills they have access to and they should get the most skill points out of any class. The chances are that we'll see something like this, but I personally dislike the idea of one class getting all the skills very strongly, and I believe it does defeat the purpose of separating combat skills and non-combat skills if the class choice represents precisely that kind of tradeoff. But really it would require completely revamping DnD's utterly terrible skill system either way (and here's hoping for more non-rogue skills so that every class has an interest in skills).

It would. Should have made it clear when I'm talking of possible PE implementation and when just rambling about in general terms. One that still applies though, would be the (mis)balancing of companions. I'd like to meet... say bob the flunked guardsman. A nice guy and all, decent fighter but not good enough to not get kicked out from imperial guard. And then I'd meet Musashi the swordmaster. A brilliant fighter and a super smart guy. Now if it's a recent Bioware, then it doesn't really matter which one I'm taking with me. Their combat worth will be roughly equal. But I'd rather the other was just simply plain better than the other. ... and now I'm answering by switching the subject. Yeah. Yeah, I don't understand how this has to do with the classes being imbalanced (rather it's a case of more and less optimal builds).

Probably mostly this, yes. But I'd take it a bit further. For me it's enough all classes provide utility, doesn't need to be roughly equal. For one, I'd separate combat and general utility. Like picking between a professor and a weaponmaster. One can help you get into the institute, while the other is way better if a fight happens. Just as long as you're not choosing from a weaponmaster vs a regular fighter, where the weaponmastar can do everything the fighter does, only better. But this seems to be better for games where you choose helpers for each mission from a worker pool. Like NWN2 or any of the Biowares recent offerings. Less suited for likes of Icewind Dale or BG where you basically want a dream team for combat and don't go swapping all too often. And the thinking arises from ME2. DA2 frustration. Yea, choose the party, only it doesn't matter who you choose because they're all equally useful in any given situation. (especially in DA2 where every given situation was you being rushed by a mob) In my opinion it would defeat the purpose of having combat skills and non-combat skills draw upon different pools, which has been confirmed, to have certain classes excel in combat and other classes excel in non-combat.

Given that this thread has already been necro-ed, I'll go ahead and state my opinions. I prefer fixed attributes personally, though I could see allowing the players to increase them at one or maybe two key plot turning points if the narrative justifies it. But I dislike the typical DnD system of increasing one attribute every x levels, and the idea that one can increase them far beyond their original value. Perhaps a bigger pet peeve of mine, however, is the existence of "conversions" between different kinds of increasing statistics; I dislike the idea that you can dump points into an attribute (ex. Intelligence) to gain more skill points. Similarly I don't really like the notion of feats that allow you to level up attributes (as seen in Fallout); generally I think primary statistics/traits like attributes, skills, and feats should be allocated entirely separate from each other, even if they can influence the same secondary stats, which is to say it's fine with me if you can "convert" primary statistics into things like health, stamina, or mana. Attributes, skills, and feats should each measure completely independent things, and each class should require them about equally (which means making feats less combat-focused, and more skills for non-rogues).

I also want to say a couple things about your use of the term "true roleplayer" with regard to powergaming and such issues. While I also have my own views about what constitutes "true" or "mature" roleplaying, I find that ultimately little good comes from trying to make such claims. Specifically with regard to your claim about powergaming and roleplay, I don't think that it's fair to say that any "true roleplayer" should accept poor ability score rolls. To me the dice roll system is more of a game mechanic than it is a roleplay mechanic, or perhaps more accurately it tries to game-ify roleplay (and fails to do so in a compelling manner). While to me it's fair and correct to say that a "mature" roleplayer should be able to accept playing a disadvantaged or limited character, they should be the one who makes that decision, not a random number during character creation. Introducing the random dice aspect simply game-ifies this question, and if anything it therefore decreases the incentive to make such a suboptimal character, since people will inevitably want to "win" that mini-game, and thus produces the opposite effect to what was intended. I believe that I share your dissatisfaction with the prevalence of powergaming, but game-ifying things further is more likely to lead to more powergaming than it is to improve roleplay.

1. A fireball to the face should be....a fireball to the face. It should kill you or horribly burn you to the point you can't attack, provided you're not armored. But then again, I've always disliked the way RPGs have dealt with damage in general. Hit points are stupid (and were originally brought into D&D as Gygax imported rules from a Battleship game). You can see how nonsensical they are from games like Fallout when you can shoot someone in the head and have them not only not die, but keep attacking you. A system of wounds with a high chance of instant death if you hit in a critical body part would be more realistic. 2. I dunno. I knew that in a lot of D&D games I could get away with an intelligence of 3 for my characters. It didn't mean I did it. Hell, when my BG protagonist was even a class where intelligence wasn't needed, I still tended to set my intelligence at 13 or so, just because I don't like playing stupid characters. 3. For the record, I actually don't like playing mages much, unless I dual over from something else which gives me more versatility (my fav in BG2 was Swashbuckler). I liked how I needed to think strategically about how to break through the defense of mages however, as it forced me to think through which counterspells I needed to dispell a mage's protections and make him weak. If I could just run in there with a warrior and zerg Kangaxx I'd feel cheated. 1. But when have the effects of a "fireball" to the face actually been tested? Most "fireballs" you'd see in real life are different from the more or less hollow kinds used in spells, in that there's an object being hurled that happens to be on fire, meaning that these "fireballs" impart physical force as well as heat energy upon impact. The closest comparison is a flamethrower, but even many of those propel flammable liquids so it's not entirely comparable, and the volume of fire being projected is much greater than the typical palm-sized fireballs you see in RPGs. Certainly it would cause burns, but can we really say with any certainty that coming into contact with the typical mage's fireball causes more damage than a sword or an arrow, whether it's someone's face or a limb? And that doesn't even take into account the differences in physics and biology that could easily be present in a fantasy setting, which would also influence this comparison. I don't mean to over-analyze the semantics of the word "fireball", but the point is that you can do this to the same effect with any spell; Should shards of ice really be any more powerful than crossbow bolts? I don't see what "realistic" evidence (in terms of energy and force differentials) we have for these conclusions. The whole hit points construct does have problems, and I have some ideas for alternatives, but that's sort of a different issue. 2. Alright, but your lack of powergaming in this instance has little to do with class balance or lack thereof, so I'm not sure what you want me to take away from this example. 3. Once again, the level of strategy required to play a particular build is a separate issue from how powerful the classes are relative to one another. While some people prefer to play warriors for the simplicity, every class should have relatively simpler and more complicated builds, and I think I agree that choosing the more strategically demanding option should be rewarded. However, that doesn't require certain classes to be more powerful, if each class has just as much potential for strategic gameplay, as should be the case.

I think I've lost track of what we were discussing, but in light of this excerpt I have no regrets. The community has spoken, Obsidian: give us more opportunities for altering the altitude of our dogness!

1. You're making a huge leap of logic with your "stands to reason"; what is this conclusion based on? What in the real world corresponds with a magical fireball that would allow you to make that comparison on a "realistic" level? Yes, it's pretty much an oxymoron to try to evaluate magic "realistically"; a setting can have extremely weak magic or extremely strong magic, because magic is whatever the creator wants it to be. 2. How does an overall long-term balanced system detract from situational tactics? Isn't an unbalanced system actually asking for min-maxing because it encourages you to just "max" the number of powerful-class characters in your party and "min" the number of weak-class characters, rather than including a variety of classes since you'll never know which you'll need? 3. Wait, so asking for certain classes to be inherently more powerful isn't powergaming, but asking for a nice balance is? You could make that argument if it was somehow established that mages should objectively be more powerful, but that point hasn't been established yet. I don't really see how character class is comparable to socioeconomic background, to me starting as a famous noble would be more comparable to starting the game at level 20, regardless of class.

Well, I think it's important to differentiate between magic and fantasy, and different types of magic. In regard to fantasy, I think that the definition has to remain very broad, including anything that doesn't constitute the present reality or some possible alternate history. I suppose magic can be considered a non-physical property that certain entities possess and others don't, meaning that it's ultimately defined with respect to the setting. If everything in a setting possesses that magic, it sort of ceases to be magic and simply becomes the way things work for that setting. Thus exclusivity would be an important aspect of magic, but this still doesn't answer who or what magic is exclusive to. I personally find settings in which the world is magical, or certain creatures are magical, to be more interesting than settings that have humans or other playable races who can use magic. In the absence of the latter, of course the kind of balancing issues brought up in this thread are of less concern, and I think that's preferable to having to negotiate magic's power and exclusivity. When you start giving magic to certain playable classes, the whole exclusivity aspect gets a whole lot more complicated, as demonstrated by many of the recent posts pondering about whether every class technically has magic if their abilities are exclusive and more or less supernatural.

Well, my question with that is why it wouldn't apply to just about every settlement (with opportunities for negative outcomes as well as positive outcomes)? I'm guessing what's supposed to separate the stronghold from other places is that the player is the top dog.

I can pretty much only echo what other people have said about how classes should be balanced and have similar power curves. Personally I don't prefer heavy magic-using classes, and in many cases I don't see what claim they have to being inherently more powerful than characters who focus on other skills. After all, in most similar fantasy magic is subject to substantial limits, perhaps significantly less limited than non-magic but quite limited nonetheless. But if you really think about it, for many games most of what we have to go on regarding the relative strength of magic is the mechanics governing our characters, since there's not exactly any shrewd way for this topic to be covered within the setting's in-game lore, so questioning whether these reflect the setting's realism is a bit dubious. For me, the mechanics are one of the main things that informs our perception of the setting, and if classes are evenly balanced it's because magic is balanced in the setting's "reality". In some sense, balance may be the same thing as realism in certain games (because fantasy settings decide their own rules, and if this wasn't the case then magic wouldn't even exist in the first place), so I'd consider this a false dichotomy. Balance vs. imbalance is a question of what is realistic in game's setting. Magic is a very slippery slope, and for this reason I'd not even mind settings that didn't even include it- at least in a form that player characters could harness its power- at all. I disagree that magic is everything in fantasy (settings are the most interesting part to me), but it can be interesting if implemented correctly. However, it seems that as soon as you introduce any speck of player-controlled magic, you have the crowd that plays magic-users asking for extra power. Despite efforts to frame the issue in terms of "realism" or whatever, it becomes a bit difficult for me to convince myself that this isn't related to how the primary appeal of magic-using characters is specialness...

Continued in a separate post since I've lost the ability to edit my previous post: In online sandbox/persistent world roleplay, which is my background, it can definitely be frustrating when certain players try too hard to monopolize attention and make a shared world revolve around their character. I don't know about everyone else, but I want to feel engrossed in the world, not like the world is engrossed in my character. I also don't really understand how it's rewarding to have a shallow NPC who's programmed to stroke your character's ego do just that, but that's a separate issue I suppose. Just like some people aren't interested in the wider setting beyond its relevance to the narrative, I guess that certain people aren't very interested in the game's setting in so much as it extends beyond the influence of their particular character (not saying this applies to anyone who wants a stronghold), and to me that style of roleplay maybe is a bit immature. Of course there are countless styles of roleplay and it's all a matter of personal opinion which ways are "more right" and "more wrong", but that's my two cents.

Being new to this forum, I am not yet familiar with any of the more senior residents... but anyway, on with the discussion: I sincerely hope that the whole stronghold system will be implemented way before the endgame - simply because I really want to get the feeling (and have the time to do so) that I have shaped the place after my liking, really have made it my stronghold... and I therefore completely agree with you in that it needs to be a somewhat organic process where the player is given (or simply claims?) maybe a ruin, has to clear it from its former occupants (maybe a nice boss encounter or something like that), and then has to work on making it a real stronghold/hideout again. Edit: It might also be made completely optional and simply another choice you can take or leave... as long as it does not deteriorate to an afterthought, I'd be okay with that as well. As to the second point you make - I cannot agree with that at all, I'm afraid... which is not to say that I think your experiences wrong, but merely that I have made completely different experiences myself. Leaving the medium of video games and entering the world of good ole pen & paper rpgs, I have found that good or bad teamwork and thus how well the multiplayer experience works for all concerned does not really relate to wether any one character is magically gifted or comes from a noble house with ties into royalty or any such things. Wether or not the group as a whole can experience and enjoy their adventure as a team - in my mind - depends utterly and completely on the players themselves, how they act out their roles, and last but not least on the GM and how he lets the players act out their roles. While being a mage with talents far more wondrous than simply being apt with a sword may lead to immature roleplay, the decision to act thusly lies with the player - and so does the fault, if you will. My point is that certain roles/archetypes cannot and should not be blamed for how they might be played. All of that, of course, is really only relevant for multiplayer settings, where teamwork is essential to progressing through the given adventure - but since you yourself have agreed on the essential differences between SP and MP, I won't drag this out unnecessarily. As an afterthought though, I am still not sure if calling a certain (role-)playing style immature just because it does not correlate to one's own preferences is all that mature in itself... no offence of course, just a thought. Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I was "senior"... perhaps slightly "infamous" might be a better word, heh. I seem to have a knack for dreaming up suggestions to make the roleplay experience more holistic that are probably outside of PE's intended scope. And what I meant is not that those things are bad if one character is exceptionally gifted, or noble celebrity, or what not. It's just that in my experience around 70-80% of players cannot resist making such characters, and at that rate it kind of dilutes the setting's immersion for me by making the "average" characters more the exception. But if everyone plays some "exceptional" hero, really that just makes the people who try to portray a more average character exceptional. When you have a multiplayer roleplay setting, and 30% of players want to play the badass master thief, 30% of players want to play a magical prodigy, and 30% of players want to play a rich noble celebrity, it sort of overshadows the simple warrior/ranger or craftsman character in my experience. And in a game with no NPCs (perhaps this is what is ultimately at fault) that makes a society that is completely unsustainable and breaks my immersion; thus the situation is an issue of who will sacrifice playing these more indulgent roles for the greater sake of the setting's immersion, which generally takes a bit of maturity. Hopefully that explains my use of that term, as I wasn't meaning to broadly label other playstyles as such, and really I was making an irrelevant point more about different kinds of roleplay situations than Project Eternity (I always seem to find myself doing that on these forums). I suppose with a singleplayer game or a multiplayer format (such as what PE will likely be) in which you can just assume that the PC party makes up a small exceptional sliver of society, it could work differently. Ultimately, rather than a question of the objectively correct or mature way to play a game like Project Eternity I guess it's more a result of my past roleplay experiences that prevents me from enjoying certain kinds of characters fully, and I hope that Project Eternity doesn't confine our characters to the limelight.

If you've read many of my other posts you'll know that I am very keen on the concept of being able to play one's character outside of their relevance to the central narrative, and I started this thread for that reason. However, that's a different issue from being an in-game celebrity (as in Fable where you are so clearly the center of everything for example). I'm not meaning to say that there's anything wrong with a bit of ego-stroking in the endgame; after all, everyone wants to feel like they've achieved something, but for me the issue is whether this ego-stroking- explicit or implicit- permeates into earlier parts of the game before one's character has even proved oneself. However, I hope that such gameplay is not restricted to the endgame, and yet I feel that it does cheapen the experience to reward the player with a stronghold any sooner than that; my solution to this would be to include stepping stones. Hopefully this doesn't come off as too self-righteous, but I must admit I consider the tendency to desire celebrity centers-of-attention/magically-adept/special and misunderstood/glorified self-insert kinds of characters to be slightly immature forms of roleplay, but I suppose the player is granted this indulgence in a SP game. However, when you try to do that in a multiplayer setting (my experience here being the reason for these views) it doesn't work as well; players have to share the limelight, and if everyone has exceptional characters then it loses its meaning. In the communities I've been a part of, this has become such a problem that there even had to be measures put into place to ensure that people made relatively normal characters who wouldn't overshadow the wider roleplay with their "special" exceptional nature, so hopefully that explains a bit of my cynicism. While I certainly support playing one's character's role for the sake of it, I do feel that too often these gameplay aspects are almost fan service, tailored towards rather simplistic/indulgent/immature roles, instead of merely being used to broaden the scope of the roleplay to a more holistic range, which is what we both seem to want. I'm sure that Project Eternity wouldn't stoop to Fable's level of ego-stroking regardless, but a sort of progression would make the stronghold feel more organic. Hell, I suppose I'd be happy enough as long as they incorporated a legit progression into the stronghold, such that it doesn't start off as a large homestead and actually takes effort to develop, rather than having my character suddenly move from traveling adventurer to landed aristocracy with upgrades only for the most luxury aspects.

Sorry for the delayed response. I was away for the weekend. Yeah, I'm pretty analytical. It doesn't always provide helpful immediate results, but it does help me to figure out where to look and where not to for the heart of the matter. But, I do apologize when people are trying to have serious discussions on results, and I'm here going all "Well, let's look a the relationship between these things, and maybe that can give us a better idea of what can be ruled out and what can't, and THEN we can go from there! 8D!" Heh. I don't mean to be obnoxious or anything. It's just what my mind likes to do. I don't think having sandbox content is bad, or automatically hurts anything. You're right in that people can just ignore it. But, see, people can't just ignore the narrative. If you can ignore the entire narrative (or even the vast majority of it), and it still develops all the while with you being highly significant to it, then there's something wrong. You can't be a major focus of the narrative AND just be perfectly fine when absent from it. "A bunch of things happen in the world, for like 75% of the game, and you just gather pine cones and investigate ruins. Then, for the last little homestretch, you actually come in and take part in the story itself." That's not very interesting. You can't go back in time to that village that was slaughtered and question that one guy about that thing only HE knew. You had to do it back WHEN. HOW you get the info from him, and whether or not you kill him, or let the village burn, anyway, is one thing. I'm not talking about making sure only specific things happen in the narrative. Just... the player should have to participate. I mean, that's why the game ends when you die. With you dead, the story pretty much writes itself from there, without you, and without you, everything falls to pieces, and not in the way that you wanted it to even when you have the freedom to make it fall to pieces in a controlled fashion. I mean, take any book you've ever read, and imagine that the main character, at key points in the story, just left wherever they were, didn't handle situations, didn't talk to people, and just went out exploring for their own personal gain. That doesn't make for very interesting narratives. That hardly makes for narratives at all, really. And yes, the mature thing to do is not to railroad, but to provide narrative consequences for the player's lack of action/influence on the events and situations therein. But, see, the player's influence on situations throughout a narrative is very much a core part of an RPG. So, that's what I'm getting at. And I think the best way to handle the whole thing is with good design balancing. If you've got 10 hours of exploratory content (I realize it's hard to EXACTLY measure such things, as people can take more or less time exploring), then you don't need to have a narrative that demands all but 1 hour of your time in the game. No "Okay, you've got about 15 minutes between every quest!". And, again, I don't mean the game's literally set up so that there are timers in-between a bunch of linear quests. I just mean, you've got to have appropriate windows of NON-urgency. You know, "We need to make our way to Villethdale, to find such-and-such. We don't really have much to go on, though." So you're headed to Villethdale, but you can explore at your leisure, because we can assume your leisure isn't 752 weeks. OR, hell, maybe the party even comments on how long you're taking to get to Villethdale, after a couple of weeks (if it's a 4-day journey to Villethdale or something). But, the player shouldn't be punished for simply taking part in the unknown provided to him by the game's own design for the sole purpose of being explored. Sure, it should tie into the world lore/narrative and all that, but, if it's not discovered or explored in any capacity, how can it really do that? You can have "If you had explored here, you would've found out about THIS" bits in the game, but again it comes back to balance. If you literally have to sacrifice narrative influence just to NOT sacrifice exploration that would have, in turn, allowed different actions/influences upon the narrative... well, now we're in a big scary loop of nonsense, haha. So, in short (why didn't I just do it in short from the beginning? ), you can have both awesome exploratory freedom AND restrictive, reaction-inducing narrative structure, but it's highly difficult to have them both be the focus of the game (unless the narrative itself is about exploration, I suppose). Don't worry; I appreciate your style of reasoning. I guess the point I'm trying to make is... What if people could ignore the narrative? And instead of this limiting their character's mobility (if they're confined to a particularly linear part of the game) or freezing time until the player wanders back, this would gradually affect the state of the in-game world in a way that their character's (and not the player's) motivations were what led the player to resume participating in the narrative? Let the player see the results of their complacency, and let them decide if it's worth it or not. Allow the player to reenter the narrative at any point but their character's influence on the overall outcome would be reduced accordingly. Don't force the player into having a character who everything must revolve around, but rather give them the opportunity to have as much or as little influence as they like. I don't know; maybe I'm the only one here crazy enough to not want to be the constant center of attention in a video game world, but... yeah. Obviously this is all quite ambitious and perhaps even unrealistic, but I feel that it's a worthwhile ideal. Maybe most people wouldn't consider what I'm asking for a true RPG due to the importance they place on central narrative, but I'm at a loss for a better term. I'm probably repeating myself but it's just a matter of whether you think the character's role that the player plays should be confined to what is relevant to the game's narrative, or whether the role is wider than that. On a slightly different note, I'm not really sure how I feel about games whose urgency/pace changes back and forth as you progress through the narrative. And the last bit I'm not sure I understand fully.