Thumister

I voted yes. If we're missing 3 companions and you need another stretch goal or 2 to round them out, then let's get them funded! I also enjoy the dungeon crawl as much as the next person, but what really caught me off guard in Baldur's Gate was the outdoor exploration which I thought was great. I'd be happy to see additional stretch goals to fund more outdoor areas. The worst thing that happens is that the community feels like it's not worth it and it doesn't get funded - no? I'm really intrigued by the idea that crowdsourcing the funding to the game can allow you to fully realize your artistic vision, rather than having to deliver something half-baked because the studio needed you to "just ship it". Not taking advantage of the crowdsourcing aspect to fully realize the game - even if there is some additional delay in the delivery date - seems like a missed opportunity to me. Do we have to have previously funded a goal to fund one of the new stretch goals? Of if someone missed out on the funding the first time around, will they still be able to participate?

Wow - I thought they looked great! I was really impressed by how cool the dynamic lighting and water effects looked vs. [for example] Baldur's Gate. If that's the alpha animation...

Great update! I'm glad you're addressing the engagement issue: it was hugely annoying in the Infinity Engine games.

I always liked the idea that gods exist because people believe in them. The more people that believe in a god, the more powerful that god is. Conversely, when the last believer of a god dies, that god also dies. I wrote an adventure once where one of the story lines revolved around a woman who was trapped in Limbo - between her life and her afterlife. In life, she was a preistess of a [very spiteful] minor god. She betrayed her faith, and her spiteful god killed her lover. To avenge her lover's death she killed herself - suspecting that as one of the last people who remembered this god it would either kill him or severely limit his power. Fearing that she was his last worshiper, he trapped her in limbo so she couldn't die. Unfortunately, since she was his last worshiper, he was trapped in Limbo with her. In the adventure, the characters meet up with the former priestess as she's on her final journey to kill this god once and for all. "Crazy God ideas": I always liked the H.P. Lovecraft Azothoth - "the blind Walpurgis god". Lum the Mad was good for a laugh or two.

I don't really see where this statement fits into the rest of your post which seemed to root for taking the game in mature and unexpected directions. Yah - sorry - it was late. I started to ramble there towards the end...

I enjoy stories that challenge preconcieved nottions about things (people, ideologies, history, etc.). As a GM, there's nothing I enjoy more than smashing my PCs preconcieved notions about a story elemet. We recently played a Babylon-5 adventure where the PCs had to infiltrate a cell of the Free Mars terrorist organization. They were expecting a bunch of rather stereotypical "crazy terrorists". Instead - I unabashedly ripped off part of the story line from Les Miserable which I knew none of them had seen and they were confronted with a bunch of disorganized college kids who saw themselves as liberators attempting to overthrow the oppressive Earthgov. Stories like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Full Metal Alchemist (which my players are all fans of) - have meant that I had to up my game as the GM and bring a lot more political intrigue to the party. When we were kids, we enjoyed smashing the orcs and piling up gold. As we've gotten older the campigns have become much more politically motivated. Smashing up orcs (or mechs) still works when we don't feel like thinking too hard. My larger point I guess, is that if you're going to make an M-rated game for people who played a lot of D&D when they were kids, I'd expect most of your older players to appreciate the political machinations more than the kids who will likely be playing the game in spite of the M rating. My players enjoy the opportunity to be heroes (or anti-heroes like Clint Eastwood). They prefer obvious moral delimmas (opportunities to behave good or evil) to moral delimmas where the outcome is ambiguous. They dislike choices between two or more equally bad outcomes (you can save the father or the mother but not both). They enjoy being able to set factions against each other. And as they've gotten older they enjoy playing weaker characters where they're awareded for more creative gameplay. One adventure, they were too weak to kill ogres digging up the graves in the graveyard so they came up with idea of bathing in whitewash, pretending to be ghosts, and attempting to scare the ogres away. That was totally not a solution I had come up with, so I gave it to them.

For me; I guess it depends on what you're trying to achieve. I probably most enjoyed the armor system in Mythus where you had "body areas" (chest, armor, head, legs, etc.) and you attached armor to those (curiass, greaves, helmet, etc.). Rather than 1 armor score for a player, you had an armor score for each area that was a total for all the armor on that body area. That was kind of a pain for humans to keep track of on a character record sheet, but something that a computer keeps track of very easily. I don't really feel like the goal needs to be to exactly recreate the feeling of D&D, which frankly had kind of a limiting armor system as you point out. Of course, if that actually *is* the goal, then I'm fine with that too. :D