Lephys

When you see a man wielding that dagger, you can say with certainty, "... That man has balls."

Hassat Hunter... I'm failing to comprehend the relevancy of your "point," here. "Some things just suck no matter what, and that's why durability is one of these things." That's just a simple unfounded claim, arbitrarily made more elaborate with a turd metaphor. Failure to do something in no way proves its impossibility. Nor does it somehow verify that the very substance you're working with is simply refuse. Look how many times people failed to make an aircraft, sometimes using the very same materials from whence viable aircraft were eventually constructed. Maybe no one's going to come up with a viable-enough-for-everyone's-tastes durability system in time for it to even go into P:E, or maybe Obsidian simply sticks to the durability-less design despite a quality system being devised. Either way, your desire to give up on the representation of dynamic equipment quality in an RPG like this in no way begets the inherent crappiness of any and all attempts at such a representation. No one here is throwing diamond metaphors at you, are they? "Sometimes, no matter what you do to something, it's just super awesome and sparkly and valuable, because it's a diamond." No. That would be equally as silly. Obviously you can produce a durability system that's crap, and you can also produce one that's good. Even if it's still not a fit for a given game, it doesn't make it crap. It still baffles me that people in a forum specifically set up for discussion are so adamant about trying to arbitrarily shut down discussions that they just subjectively don't feel are worth carrying on.

Negative. In a given segment of a game, in which you make your way from one merchant-dwelling settlement to another, the person who sold all his spare weapons in Settlement A might get 100 gold. The person who sold all his stuff once he got to settlement B might get 110 gold for that same stuff. Since selling random pick-up-ables to merchants is not the only way in which to obtain funds in the game, you're going to have income outside of this, regardless of when you sold those weapons, from all the other stuff you did in and around both settlements, in this example segment of the playthrough. So, let's say that, just doing the other general stuff, you get another 100 gold (off of dead bandits or something, who knows). Well, person #1, upon reaching settlement B, has 200 gold, while person #2 has 210 gold. Person #1 can buy 10 more gold worth of stuff than person #1. Maybe that's a single thing that cost between 200 and 210 gold, or maybe it's an extra stay at the inn, or some potions, etc. You're not even necessarily going to spend anywhere close to 200 gold every time you arrive in a settlement. PLUS, there are other opportunities to go get gold. If you sold your stuff for 10% less, and you want to buy something that you need 10% more gold for, then you have to first go get some more gold. If you got 10% more, then you don't have to do anything else before buying what you wanted. Not to mention, the buying prices would be different, as well, for various goods. There might even be better/worse deals within the same settlement, as settlements can have more than 1 vendor. Also, prices might fluctuate every in-game week or so, making that whole "player who makes lists of everything in great detail" scenario quite moot. And finally... even if one player COULD make elaborate lists and backtrack everywhere and get everything in the universe, how would this be any different from oodles of systems in any other game? Fallout. Hey, a door that requires Master lockpicking! Welp, I'll have to make a note of this, and come back to it later when I get 100 lockpicking. The player who doesn't do that doesn't get what's in there. Does that mean the game sucks for the player who doesn't open that door, and the game's therefore COMPELLING him to both make elaborate notes of all the 100-lockpicking doors AND get his character to 100 lockpicking? Is there no one in the world who ever DIDN'T max out lockpicking and who just went through the game not-caring about those doors? The players that DID open all the doors in the game: did they get 700% more stuff than the players who didn't? Or did they simply end up with more accumulated wealth and extra ammo and such, at the end of the game, than the players who didn't lockpick all the things? A player who puts more effort into efficiency is ALWAYS going to be better off, at any given point in the game, than a player who doesn't. Should we remove all systems that allow for varying degrees of efficiency?

Perhaps it could be a cursed codpiece? Worst article of equipment to be unable to remove, EVER.

I think main, established-more-than-like-a-year-ago cities/towns should probably have a varying-though-relatively-consistent buffer of de-wildernessed land around them. But, of course, some little villages and outposts might be kind of right in the thick of things. Maybe they don't have large enough populi (populuses?) to really use up the natural resources in the area faster than they can grow back, and/or they're not as technologically demanding of resources, etc. Also... uncharted explorable wilderness, FTW!

I'm now actually curious as to how functional a 1"-thick duct-tape suit of armor (just solid duct tape) would be, haha. Also, TES crafting is quite strange. "Dude, I melted THIS metal down, and it instantly formed into the shape of a shortsword! I tried hammering it into a cutlass, but it JUST WOULDN'T RESHAPE! Even the hilt shaped itself! But then, THIS metal over HERE, it formed into a chakram, and nothing else! This is soooo weird..." And, for what it's worth (no longer direct response to Adhin), I don't think the value of discussing the potential of durability implementations is solely dependent upon the odds of Obsidian putting it back into the game. If they had never even mentioned the possibility of durability being in the game, it would still be prudent to discuss potential positives and pitfalls of durability mechanic implementations, and how to improve on what's already been done. If we can't come up with anything useful, then great. No one got hurt. We enjoyed discussing it anyway. If we can, and they don't put it in the game still, then great. If we can and they DO put it in the game... well, they're only going to do that if it's just stupendous, so you still have no worries. I'm not seeing any negative consequences here from discussing something, just because it may or may not ever make it into the game. The only negative consequences I see come from arbitrarily avoiding discussion of it.

You know what's weird? People in fantasy worlds can develop a single potion solution to counter-act ANY poison in the entire world, no matter what it is. But, they can't seem to develop a vaccine to even a single one.

2 things: 1) What if durability only affected, say... critical hits, with weapons? And with armor, what if it just shrank the graze range? I mean, still improve other things about durability, but, all that aside, it was just a little thought I had. Instead of degraded equipment just reducing its overall numbers, what if it only applied to certain things? 2) ... Dangit! I forgot #2! Oh! got it! Okay, what if the material your equipment was made from didn't actually make it any BETTER (i.e. steel sword isn't somehow any sharper and more damaging than an iron sword), but it simply affected the durability? So, if you don't want to mess with durability, you buy mithril, for example, chain mail, to get that awesomely-designed 10-armor chainmail. OR, for a lesser price, you can get iron chainmail, which gives you 10 armor, but you've got to maintain it much more often? These are standalone thoughts, meaning, I'm not suggesting them in lieu of anything else we've discussed so far. Anything else in combination with them is fair game. They are just silly little thoughts I had.

It's a good thing they don't have major accents, because then their accents would outrank yours.

Soooo, fetch quests. "You there. Bring me 10 rat butts!" Rat butts may not even be useful for anything else. But this guy wants them. "Thanks! 8D!" You are awarded 50 XP and 50 gold. Awesome. Right? Yeah, so those are lame, and we should kill them. With fire, preferably. Right? But, wait... what if they weren't forced into the role of "give player some means of acquiring gold and items and XP," but instead were allowed to actually just be an event in the game world that you had a choice of whether or not to even handle, or even find out about, for that matter? What if, instead of being captured and dressed up and made to dance in a cage, they were set free, and allowed to roam for miles in their natural habitat? What if someone in town needs herbs? And, if you supply them with herbs, they just thank you and go on about their business. First of all, let me just say that herbs should be pretty useful to you, too. Not just some item that's pretty much worthless, anyway, that this person happens to need. Annnywho, back to the example scenario, this person actually needs herbs. Meaning that if you give them herbs, they actually do something with them that somehow comes into play in the rest of the story. Or, to put it more simply than that, at the very least, SOMEthing happens if you give them the herbs they need that's DIFFERENT from what happens if you don't. But it's not about you. You don't even get called over to them as you walk down the street, in "Hey, YOU look like you're skilled at herb-fetching!" manner. Maybe there's not even quest text and all that jazz. You just find out they need herbs. Maybe you know a little more than that. They're some sort of healer, etc. So, you give them herbs, and on down the line, hours further into the game, some crazy shyte is going down in that same area, and you need to garner support to take down some lord. Well, since you supplied that healer with those herbs, it turns out she was working with the local underground to help counter-act the local lord's unbeknownst-to-many-at-the-time cruel, terrible treatment of significant portions of the populous. So, now, not only are more people alive than would've been if you hadn't helped the healer get her herbs, but they're already willing to help you out. If you HADN'T given her herbs, because, who has time for herbs?! Heh... If you hadn't, then, you could maybe still garner support from those same people, but maybe it turns out there aren't as many, because they were thinned out by whatever disease/wounds she was treating. But, they don't HATE you, because they never specifically asked you, in uber-official quest form, to gather some herbs for them, specifically, and you never said "Yes, I will totally do that," and put it down in your "Things I will totally do or people will call me a liar and also I won't get XP or gold" ledger. That's just one simple example. You could give some seemingly harmless old man some wyvern eggs or something, and he could end up creating friggin' medieval Jurassic Park, which you later have to deal with. The point being that people who live in places and exist in the world need things that they may not obtain if someone doesn't help them get them, and those people perpetually exist and actually do something different with what they get when they get it, than when they don't get it. So, it's only really when they pretty much only exist in the game to supply you with a task, just so that they can give you a reward for that task, then warp to another dimension, apparently, that they become the dreaded "fetch quests." I'd love to see oodles of little "events" here and there like this, with bunches of different outcomes depending on how exactly you handle them, or whether or not you even do. I'm also aware I'm not inventing something here. This type of thing can be seen in many other games, but it's most prominently in the form of some optional quest objective or some kind of "hey, invest some money with me, and you won't regret it!" 'quest.' The reason I bring up fetch quests is that, they're so seemingly insignificant (because in most games they're programmed to actually be insigificant) that it would be pretty awesome to actually have them be significant in the long run, in various ways.

Fable 3's system's core idea was the friggin' shyte. Their implementation, though? Meh... It was often "do this really tedious thing that no one in their right mind would even want to do for any reason, like flip a coin 100 times and have it land on heads, or kill 7,000 wolves, and your weapon will gain... the increased ability to influence people whenever using random social interactions because you couldn't choose which ones you wanted to use in that game!" One would think that a good implementation of such a system would react to the majority of whatever the player chose to do, in various different ways for different weapons. Not "Marry 100 people and get +10 fire damage! 8D" That's like... a weapon-morph fetch quest. But, yeah, the idea, itself, was super ultra awesome. And you know how you fix the problem of the rest of the loot always being lamer than your uber morph-weapon? You design the game such that the rest of the loot isn't always lamer than your uber morph-weapon, which you don't make uber. Problem solved. And we didn't even have to arbitrarily remove an entire system mechanic just because there was a problem somewhere with something involving items. 8D! In short, I'm all for some variant of this proposal (in the OP). ESPECIALLY in a game brimming with soul lore.

The rate at which you improve as an "adventurer" as opposed to the commonfolk is already significantly greater (albeit abstracted). There's no need for semi-phenomenal cosmic powers on top of that. Going from "I kinda know how to not die against someone with a sword" to "I'm one of the toughest opponents with a sword you'll ever face, in the entire world" is plenty good. I don't need "And also I can level villages with a sneeze" thrown in. As for the HP thing, I agree that the amount of inflation we tend to see serves no other purpose than to make people feel good, 'cause big numbers and stuff. It's not so much that we need to make sure HP never increases. It's an abstraction. So, whether you increase HP a bit, or reduce incoming damage a bit, you're representing the same thing. And I think some amount of natural HP gain/toughness increase is okay (though not at all necessary). But, most of your improvement needs to come from your damage avoidance and mitigation capabilities. Not your ability to just take damage and laugh at it. A huge boulder falling atop you should be less of a threat now because you're able to stop/avoid it so much more easily. Not because your skin has developed an immunity to boulders.

Yeah, but in the context of abstracted systems that measure numbers to represent things, I can see someone getting a boost to some skill check because someone else in the group (a "specialist", in the OP example) told them specifically what to do in this situation. It's like a permanent feat for one character, and a situational feat for other characters. Basically, I don't think that and active teamwork coolness are in any way mutually exclusive.

Every class can fill any combat role. Doesn't mean they will, or that they can fill every role. I don't see why this is a problem. At worst, this means you can have 6 different classes and specialize them all into single-target damage dealing. How is the ability to do that with 6 different-class characters any different from being limited to only being able to do that with 6 same-class characters, and still having the option to just roll with those 6 same-class characters?

I really don't see how a specialization in submersible operation would help anyone out in P:E, regardless of class. o_o

Fair enough (though I'm still unsure why you "blargh"ed at that first quote). I'll start by saying that I can't really think of anything, off the top of my head, that's added "just for immersion." Well, maybe like... animated grass and trees. But, nothing that directly affects gameplay systems and mechanics. Look at the sword variety thing. We DERIVED that from reality, but not for realism's sake. The purpose of a rapier and a broadsword both existing in the game as options for the same weapon type (sword) is so that the specifics of your weapon can have variance in the midst of the field of other factors that the specifics of your weapon affects. So, yes, I do see value in regional pricing, as it provides you the option of using your information-gathering capabilities, as well as your decision-making capabilities, to potentially utilize your funds/resources to greater or lesser efficiency. It is to finances as weapon-type is to combat. Enough damage will get you through combat, and enough money will get you through the game. But which weapon you have and how, exactly, you use it, against varied foes and encounters, can alter the short-term efficiency/outcome of individual battles or sets of battles. In fact, if you look beyond just money as "cost," and include all resources, it's almost a direct comparison. You just spent less (in HP/durability/healing items/trekking-back-to-rest-spot-time, etc.), because of your decisions, than you would've spent had you made OTHER decisions. Maybe you see a group of super-tough trolls protecting a cave. Maybe you can beat them just fine, but it's going to cost you. Well, maybe you say "Let's wait 'til we all have more armor-piercing capabilities to try those trolls" (Example trolls are heavily-armored, apparently). So you forego the trolls and the cave for now, but you come back later, and dispatch them much more efficiently (with much less resource cost) than you would have. So, yeah, that's why I asked "why should ANYTHING vary in an RPG?" Maybe it seemed like a silly question, but, I'm honestly not sure how to explain the inherent value of variance. Not without moderation, of course, but even moderation has to be moderated, . Part of the principle of an RPG is dealing with factors outside of your character's control, while using factors that are within your character's control. You react to the game world's factors, and the game world reacts to your factors. Well, you're changing your factors, and it's reacting accordingly. Why shouldn't it do the same, and have you react accordingly?

Definitely, haha. The Fallout 3+ system of repairing your stuff with other stuff is exponentially better than just gold-for-repair alone. However, it was still kind of a chore, and not much more. I think that's durability's biggest problem. Not that it's something you have to maintain (there's plenty of that in almost any RPG), but that that's ALL it is. It's just a steady thing that ticks down the more you play the game, basically. And it's inherently a negative. Something the player would like to prevent, or mitigate. But the only ways to mitigate it are to use your equipment less (avoid combat, which also isn't very fun by itself), or pay money. At least the ability to use other stuff to fix your stuff is neat, but, that was still in a game where you pretty much frequently needed the extra money from selling that stuff. Plus, like you said it doesn't really work with swords. Even... even though it worked with swords in NV... haha. "I'll just take some blade chippings from THIS machete, and Gorilla Glue them into THIS machete! VOILA!" Annnnnnywho. Durability definitely needs to provide more than just something to manage. It's kinda like "Your stuff gradually sucks until you do unfun things to fix it back to just regular, neither-sucking-nor-rocking state. Deal with it." Every other managed thing in the game has a dynamic with it. Even inventory management. "Only have one slot left. Do I take this potion that will heal me to full, or this thing that's worth a lot of money?" That's two different things filling up one spot. To compare durability, it'd be like having an inventory system with only 1 item in the entire game, that could only be used for one thing. So, if you have one slot left, your choice is whether or not to pick up another Item. 5 Durability is always 5 durability. It doesn't change its value. It's not like 5 hitpoints. You have 5 hitpoints, you can alter the rate at which you take damage (with a protection spell, etc.), or change your combat tactics (get farther away from the enemy) and keep on fighting in a different manner, and live. You can even take a hit and still live (see protection spell, above). 5 durability? Either stop hitting things with your weapon, or it's going to break in (as per the previously revealed-then-removed P:E system, just for example) 5 more hits. You can't do anything different with 5 durability in any given set of circumstances, from any OTHER given set of circumstances. It's just a perpetual cup with a hole in it, and you've got to keep water in the cup, the whole game.

I think you guys should all make little NPC cameos in the game. That would be splend-mazing. Maybe even little quickie voice-overs, here and there. Inside jokes could abound.

I dunno. Why should anything at all vary in an RPG? Why should we have both rapiers AND broadswords? Why should this bandit drop 5 gold, and that bandit drop 1 gold? Why should one quest that might earn you 500 gold only exist in city A, while some other quest that only earns you some faction reputation boost exists in city B? If you can't figure it out without some kind of specific explanation from me, then I'm not really sure how much good an explanation is going to do, besides just give you something else to deny any value to. "That has absolutely no reason whatsoever to even be in the game, and performs absolutely no function" isn't even a remotely rational argument, as whether or not something like this (a simple factor variation) affects game mechanics in oodles of ways isn't even a question. Now, arguing that the cons outweigh the pros... that's at least a rational stance. And I'm all ears. You've done a bit of that stance already, so I'm not sure what purpose falling back on "Wait... MAYBE THAT DOESN'T EVEN HAVE ANY REASON FOR BEING IN ANY GAME, EVER, IN THE FIRST PLACE?! 8D!" serves. I don't even comprehend that question. That's like asking someone "Why would anyone even come up with the notion of painting something blue, instead of any other color?". As if it's obvious prices aren't a thing that varies. I suppose they vary in real life just to adhere to realism, eh? Not because of actual factors and such. Just like Rapiers and Broadswords differ JUST BECAUSE! There's actually no reason whatsoever. They don't affect anything, except our subjective liking of realism. And reality, itself, only does things because realism. Why do I try not to eat poison? Realism. Why does my arm heal when it gets cut? So life can be immersive.

*Ponders*... I think "money sink" should always be a secondary objective of any mechanic. Just for what that's worth. And three things: 1) Durability shouldn't ALWAYS decrease sheerly with weapon/armor use. I think it would tie into the weapons-vs-armor-types system very well. Use your sword against some plate armor... degrade your sword blade. Use a maul against plate armor... probably doesn't degrade your maul. And vice versa. If an enemy with a rapier is attacking your plate-wearing Fighter, then there's almost no way his armor's going to degrade. This actually gives you tactical means of affecting item degradation. 2) There needs to be some actual positive incentive range for durability. Maybe everything above 85% actually provides new bonuses/effects (like bleed damage/chance, cripple/impale chance, etc.)? Maybe weapons you buy in shops start at varying durabilities? But, when the best-case scenario for item repair is "you go to spend money to stop your stuff from sucking," there's not a whole lot the mechanic is providing to the player. Even with HP, having it be high means you can take a greater hit without dying. But there's no significant durability damage variance, so you don't even have that with durability. Add to that the fact that HP doesn't always cost money to regain. Just for comparison. 3) Unless you're just constantly thwacking rock walls with your blades, and diving upon jagged boulders in your plate armor (see point # 1), durability should take a while to significantly degrade. Complete item breakage, if it is included, should be QUITE rare. In fact, instead of any kind of effect simply having a chance to break an item, I'd rather see a very tiny chance for something to deal 10-times normal durability damage (like a durability critical hit). Kind of like what they did with missing. There's still a dynamic as to how well you can hit in combat now, but there's much more nuance. You're rarely going to have a 30% chance to completely miss someone, or score a critical hit. Same idea with durability, only, the numbers would be even MORE different, because the expected, abstracted frequency of you just getting your armor torn in half or your sword blade cracked in two is even lesser than the frequency with which you expect to land a critical or suffer a miss in combat. And, because it was mentioned some, I got to thinking that it might be interesting for magical items to have some sort of durability. I don't think permanent, passive enchantments should lose anything (unless maybe the item breaks, but that's more because you can't wear the armor/wield the weapon anymore, feasibly, and not because the enchantment just somehow doesn't work anymore). Honestly, I think it'd be AWESOME if your sword blade snapped in half, and you could still fight with the half-a-foot jagged nub of a blade to much less effect (almost like fighting with a broken liquor bottle in a bar brawl or something, heh), and STILL have that nub deal +5 fire damage, but without your swords initial 5-10 damage or whatever (maybe it's 1-2 now?). But, ACTIVE magical items (wands, staves, things with charges, or with toggleable magic effects, etc.) could suffer their own form of durability. It would be more temporary, time-sensitive durability, though. Sort of... magic focus/channeling fatigue, if you will. That staff casts Chain Lightning? Great! Maybe the first cast fires 30-damage lightning, and jumps to 6 targets. If you cast again right after that, maybe it only fires 27-damage lightning that jumps to 5 targets. And so on. However, if you wait 20 seconds (arbitrary example duration), THEN cast again, it's able to produce maximum-efficiency Chain Lightning again at 30 damage and 6 jumps. It kinda works the same way as some like... I dunno, invisibility ring. Maybe it only makes you invisible for 3 minutes, then it deactivates and goes onto a cooldown. Well, with Chain lightning, it's kind of like you're activating an effect, then immediately deactivating it.

Sacred_Path... I don't understand why you insist upon taking extremely specific factor values for granted in every one of your arguments. You're basically arguing that the entire idea of location-based price fluctuation is bad, because of possibilities that you're just assuming are definites for some unknown reason. "Omg... if you hear prices may be cheaper on swords in a mining town, and you just drop everything you're doing and, for absolutely no other reason than you hope to possibly maybe get a better price on swords, travel through miles of frozen tundra and deathclaws, armed with only a small metal wisk as a weapon, only to discover that the prices were only 3% cheaper, then you'd have to backtrack that whole way, STILL without having accomplished anything beyond discovering the actual price of swords in that mining town. Hence, price differences = bad." I mean, obviously you couldn't, like, weigh the risk and trouble of traveling so far with nothing else to accomplish there against the mere possibility that a price could be lower to some unspecified extent. You'd be COMPELLED to travel there, because you're a player, and that makes you inherently incapable of rational thought. "OMG! I could save MUNNY?! MUST PUT SELF THROUGH HELL TO FIND OUT!" I don't understand why that's the unquestioned definite here. Everything you've pointed out is something that might happen, and you act as though it's not dependent upon ridiculous, ridiculous factors. Like it's just the norm. Why would anyone NOT travel to the mining town? Or wait until they actually need to head that direction? Or why would the game world possibly be built so that there were CLOSER towns that had cheaper prices on things? There's no need to insist upon sticking to worst-case scenarios when making arguments in this discussion.

Yup yup. Seems like some of the stuff the system was trying to do with a skill/skills fits more with traits and/or talents ("feats").

Not cool, man... not cool! My party now has a 30% chance to indiscriminately cast/use abilities in a panicked fashion whenever arachnids are about. In all seriousness, it's not that bad, haha. BUT, I have actually, on multiple occasions, had nightmares involving an invulnerable clockwork spider that relentlessly tries to climb onto my face and do God-only-knows-what... all the while slicing me with its little metal legs as it climbs and clings as I try to swat it off. No me gusta. o_o

Yeah, but no one's suggesting you just toss the sword into a big vat of molten swords, then have the blacksmith make another one out of that sword soup. You're quite literally taking a sword, doing a bunch of stuff to it, then reshaping it into a sword. You took a sword, and ended up with a sword. It's not going anywhere. There's no technicality, or question about whether or not that's the same sword. Let me pose this scenario: If you were a Wizard, and you got your arms chopped off. Then, a Cleric called upon the power of his holy deity and regenerated your arms, are those still your arms? Are they now non-magical arms? Would you cease being a Wizard? Obviously there's no realistic answer to that, since it's fiction. But, one must assume that an enchanted item bears the enchantment as somehow (it doesn't really matter how) bonded to the object itself. Which, an object is just matter with certain properties (shape, size, density, color, structure, etc.). So, it must be assumed that, so long as that matter is together, the enchantment holds. And there's gotta be a decent bit of leeway there, or scraping a few metal shavings off your blade in combat would render the enchantment null and void. "Oh no! The object isn't whole anymore! It's only 99.9999% whole now! Enchantment: DEACTIVATED!" You see what I mean? And the silly Wizard example wasn't even using the original material (although regenerating pretty much uses our own DNA and bodily materials to make new cells... we just typically don't regenerate entire arms on our own.) Reforging a blade is literally re-using the exact same object, and returning it to its tip-top shape. I'm not trying to make it a big deal. I just wanted to point out why we're thinking of it as not a problem, and as the same blade. I mean, if you dull the crap out of a Sword of Flames that does +5 burning damage and lights things on fire, to the point that it doesn't even physically have an edge or cut anymore, then it would suck as a sword, but why would that affect its 5 burning damage? It would basically be a magical, metal torch at that point. If it used to do 4-7 damage +5 fire damage, then now it would be something like 1-2 damage +5 fire damage. If you snapped the sword in half, then maybe the enchantment can't work properly, because you've severed the "flow" of the enchantment throughout that object. Maybe it's still there, in the material (since it obviously persists in the material even when it's not being used). But, maybe the material has to be joined. Almost like electrical wiring. *shrug* Who knows, really. But, if there's ever been any kind of explanation as to why you can only enchant a sword as a whole, complete sword, and why the material doesn't actually retain any enchantment once you make that object too different from what it was (in shape, structure, etc.), then I've never heard it. If that were the case, then why can a sword AND a maul have the same enchantment on them? If you were to melt the Maul down and shape it into a sword blade, would it not just think it was now a sword? Why does the magic care what shape the object is? For that matter, one would think you could even find/create magical ores and woods and such, and fashion things out of them. Also, on a slightly related note, I think it would be cool if purely-magical (like... active-spell-effect magical) items actually suffered a different kind of durability. Maybe they suffer strain from frequency of use, as only so much magical energy can be focused/channeled through them in a given amount of time? So, maybe that wand of Magic Missile works infinitely, but the missile gets weaker if you use it back-to-back-to-back, until it simply can't even produce a missile anymore. But, if you give it some time, it will "recover," and function again. *shrug*

... "supposed to be"... When someone makes a house from wood that they claim is a well-built house, and it falls over under its own weight, that doesn't get me doubting that someone else trying to construct a wooden house is somehow going to fail. True, but wooden houses are a dime a dozen, BG spiritual successors are not. Now if someone's underwater dome collapsed would you then equally trust the next guy's dome to not, or might you be a little more wary? Not unless circumstance dictated that the next guy's dome was, for some reason, EXACTLY the same as the now-collapsed one. That's kind of the point. A guy's dome collapsing doesn't lead me to believe that domes just collapse, or that a functional dome is impossible to build, just like an airplane crashing into a house doesn't lead me to believe that if I live in a house, It's inevitably going to get smash-sploded by an airplane. In other words: I attempted to do Thing A, and I failed. The fact that Thing A is what was being attempted doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with the fact that the attempt was failed. Dragon Age was made via a huge publisher, for one thing, on whose list of priorities "make sure this game represents the spirit of some old '90s cRPG" is at the bottom, I assure you. Rolling with your glass dome analogy (in response to my simple wood-constructed-structure analogy... we're wading a little thick int o the analogy forest here, hehe), I'd point out that Obsidian doesn't even necessarily have to build their dome underwater. Thus, they could fail and still have ENTIRELY different results than Dragon Age. If I tried to go climb Mt. Everest right now, I would surely fail. Yet, a blind person did it already. So, I'm not sure what my inability to do something, within my own factor set, has at all to do with anyone else's ability to do the same thing with a completely different factor set. Jumping to "well, that task is probably just highly failable" is an extremely large leap and doesn't do anyone much good, I'm afraid. It's basically unbiased paranoia, at that point. Just like looking at Dragon Age and going "welp, I'm worried P:E is going to end up like Dragon Age." (Not that I think you're suggesting it's going to resemble Dragon Age... just that it's somehow going to resemble Dragon Age in its failure to spiritually represent IE games, purely because they both happen to be attempting the same thing)