Lephys

Of course, I'm not sure that we know, for a fact, that the designation between rest-enabled space and rest-prohibited space isn't whether or not you can build a fire there, 8P. Technically, we could still be able to build campfires. But, if so, the ability to do so would directly correlate to the ability to rest or not, in a given place. Most likely. @decado: I totally forgot Betrayal at Krondor had all that! I LOVED that game! Yeah, I remember occasionally not having enough gold to stay at an inn, and having to go sleep outside in the woods, and kind of muttering "crap" at the reduced stamina. But, that didn't make it impossible to complete whatever lay ahead. It just made you that much more careful. Also, the 0-HP thing! It was great! You could still simply revive your character with enough restful healing, but it gave character death JUST the pinch of spice it needed to make you think a little harder about how to make sure your characters didn't actually "die" in combat. I distinctly recall having to move people around a bit more and swap targets and adaptively change tactics so that that last enemy wouldn't pick off one of my people before someone took him down. Instead of simply thinking, every single time, "Well, there's no chance my whole party's going to die, so... EVERYONE! FULL AGGRESSION WITHOUT A CARE IN THE WORLD!" In a few other threads, people have mentioned how silly it is that, in a lot of games, the AI has pretty much any enemy just going balls-to-the-wall at you all the way down to 0 health, rather than stuff retreating/regrouping/changing tactics when it's circumstantially outmatched. I think to not expect the same (to some degree) of the player's party is a bit silly, isn't it?

Maybe just a glossary (including all the main proper names of people, places, and objects in the world) in the manual wouldn't be too much trouble, and would provide a nice little bit of "for those who need to know...",

As long as they still show up on thermals, I'm cool with that. Seriously though... I think the past decade-or-so of RPGs has suffered from a severe cloak shortage. And, as immensely splend-tacular as they'd be as purely aesthetically-functional in P:E, I'd hardly object to them working into some minor role in the mechanics (equipment concealment, negation of ranged weapon accuracy during a snowstorm, etc.). *nudge nudge*...

Such a system would be pretty amazing. The only problem I foresee is, hitpoints are an abstraction in the midst of other abstractions. It's like your well-being is exchanged into the same currency as damage and all the other well-being-affecting aspects in the game. So, the problem isn't really how complex just the wounds/damage system would get, but also how complex it would be to handle all the other things in the game that directly or indirectly affect that system. Take poison, for example... How do you know exactly what effect poison is having on your character? I mean, it's slowly killing you, but it's not actually causing injuries and bleeding. It's not opening up that sword wound even further. But, see, when we abstract everything (including HP) to numbers, now I can see that poison does 3 damage per second, and that I have 100 hitpoints. So, that gives me an immediate, intuitive grasp of how threatening poison is to my well-being, as opposed to a sword strike (I know that it does approximately 10 damage normally, and a critical could do up to 25-or-so damage). So, I know how I could POTENTIALLY die. I think it would be a good idea to maybe take some steps in the right direction, though. Maybe have a critical hit, at the very least, inflict a state of sustained damage (bleeding, organ damage, etc.). AND, maybe have localized damage to some extent. Different fighting styles/stances/equipment sets (shield as opposed to dual-wield) could alter the chance of being hit in given regions. A dual-wielder's arms would be a lot more exposed, etc. And critical hits could simply be made to represent actual serious localized injuries, even. So a dual-wielder might have to drop a weapon (lose function of one of their arms), or at least suffer penalties to actions made with that arm/weapon, if critically stricken in the arm. Or, if a leg is hit, your character loses mobility (moves more slowly, and/or bleeds worse when moving, etc). If the torso is hit, your total HP could drop (and your current percentage of remaining HP, respectively), and/or your stamina regeneration could be affected, and/or action-speed, etc. (to represent general vitals being in worse functioning condition). Hit in the head? Your perception would be affected, and you'd probably take more damage than if hit in the arms or legs (and maybe even more than the torso, even though the torso would probably be worse than arms/legs, as far as abstracted, total damage). It could work kind of like critical hit verification in D&D. You rolled a 20? Roll again to confirm! Except, your 2nd roll could simply be to determine, against percentage chances (based on stance/equipment/ etc) of hitting each portion of the body. Hell, the P:E attack/defense mechanics kind of already support this, as, if you have full plate and a tower shield (higher deflection), the opponent's critical hit range is pushed up toward the ceiling of the 1-100 range, resulting in a smaller critical chance range. Just like a person in full plate and wielding a large shield would already be much harder to strike the limbs/torso/legs/head of, to any effect. *shrug* The trick would be to not make it this completely random thing ("Oh, it JUST SO HAPPENS that everyone in your party just got shot in the eye by blowguns wielded by pixies, and are all dead!"), and for it to not be so detailed that you spend more time figuring out where exactly a sword blow landed and how badly your character is bleeding than you do actually playing the rest of the game and tactically handling combat. I'm very much behind a full-on no-HP system, but I'm not sure I'd want to see it in P:E, simply because, without revamping the entire game (which is already partially vamped), I think it would circumstantially overcomplicate things.

I'd just like to point out that, given the nature of soul-power and how it seems to vary in specific function/design as a core part of the various classes in P:E, I think class-specific items (especially of the quite-rare, "magical"/legendary kind) fit even MORE easily into the lore than they necessarily do in other lores. To clarify, in other games, you have to come up with a specific reason as to why that sword doesn't function for a given class, or how it even identifies a wielder's class, but, in P:E, that's pretty much built in with the soul mechanics.

Until your Wizard runs completely out of spells, and there's only one remaining, badly-wounded foe, and you're allowed to attack it with your piddly, unarmed Wizard, but heaven forbid he be holding a 3-lb piece of metal when he tries to swing his arm at the enemy... Then it just makes you make the Jackie Chan Meme Face. I'd rather have a -10 to all my rolls with a sword and still be capable of holding and swinging it, as a Wizard (for example), than to have some divine force prevent my hand from grasping a sword hilt.

That's actually an excellent example. See, I'd rather see effects of the heavy armor upon the Wizard be based upon whatever Strength value he has, rather than arbitrarily saying "You can't even use heavy armor less effectively with a lower Strength... you must have at least X Strength just to use it, and then you're STILL going to suck way worse than a Warrior with it." Basically, you have the choice of putting points into Strength (to reduce the effects of the armor's weight and movement impedance, which in P:E seems to mainly be action speed) at the cost of not-putting those points into, say, Intelligence (increasing the overall effectiveness of your spells and/or your ability to cast certain higher tiers of them, perhaps). OR you have the choice of putting those points into Intelligence, and being more limited in action speed by the heavy armor. That, of course, is just an example. The idea of the difference between methods, and the versatility provided. I'm not suggesting that the specifics of that example totally work perfectly in the context of the rest of the game's design.

A) I add my thanks to the pool for your taking the time to start this thread, and my appreciation to the pool for the amount of effort/detail going into these languages (instead of simply making up cool-sounding words for everything that are tied together only by roots of cool-sounding-ness, and possibly lots of X's, Y's, and Z's). B) I kind of share McManusaur's sentiments on this. I've read many books/series in which there were hundreds of proper names, of both people and locations, and many terms, etc. If I can't even figure out any kind of pronunciation pattern that's even remotely likened to more common root languages of reality, it becomes difficult to stave off the impact that has. It's like joining an organization that you're going to be involved with regularly and for a while, and never getting properly introduced to anyone. You feel like you don't really know the world as much, like you're lost in a foreign land with no way of reading the signs or speaking to the people. So, I definitely think there has to be SOME semblence of intuitive nature to the languages, in general. One suggestion I would make (or, rather, support, as it's probably already been thought of, to be honest) is to sort of forgo the complexity of pronunciation rules in the root languages with which you're dealing. Not so much that you make everything the same. But, if there are 10 different ways to pronounce "ae" between two consonants, maybe (since you're pretty much constructing a new language, regardless of how much it borrows from an existing one) reduce that to 2 or so. So that we're not guessing at every single word, "Is that 'ehh' and the 'A' is silent? Or is it a long 'A' sound? Or maybe it's pronounced 'aye' in this word? Or it COULD even be a long 'E' sound..." That's really the only thing that kinda irks me, even after everything's mostly intuitive in general. It reminds me of all the most ridiculous rules in the English language. "I before E except after C." Etc. Also, in doing so, all it takes is a few sprinkles of voice-over segments to tell us all we need to know. "Hmm... is that person's name Aidan, or AYEdan? Oh, he introduced himself. It's AYEdan? Okay." I admittedly feel a lot more connected to the world the less I have to worry about whether or not I'm butchering some culture-forged language. And since the languages are basically being hand-crafted, I think we'd benefit more from a much simpler pronunciation ruleset. I know you already touched on how you're simplifying some otherwise-rather-unintuitive things, but I just wanted to stress the more minor point of not having 17 different ways of pronouncing a compound vowel, however intuitive they all are, individually. EDIT: In light of the few posts that occurred while I was being a slowpoke with this one (see avatar), I just wanted to say that, if the game never audibly "corrects" my best-guess pronunciation of something I see, it's really not going to impact my experience at all, either way ("YAY I GOT IT RIGHT!" or "Curses! I'm butchering the language!"). Under those circumstances, it's just a simple matter of whether or not the words are fundamentally intuitive so that I can easily make a best guess. Also, I'd just like to say that it would be very interesting if there were established variations in pronunciation between cultures. You know, like the English "MISS-eyel" versus the American "MISS-uhl."

The solution is simple, then: Add features for the sake of quality and depth, rather than for the sheer sake of adding features (which is pretty much just "for no reason at all."). So, add features for an actual reason. Or, to put it with the title of this topic: "Resting isn't working; ditch the flaws with it." I mean, if you're suggesting that nothing can actually be problematic because of a lack of something, and that the necessity to add to a system's complexity to make it work better is always a purely negative indicator, then we should just get rid of anything that doesn't work like we want it to. "Remember that one dialogue with that guy, and it seemed like you should've been able to at least produce 2 different outcomes, if not more, but the game prevented your character from even being able to ATTEMPT to change the outcome? Yeah, I think that could've been better, so we should probably DITCH DIALOGUE!". Silly, no? Here's another one... "Man, I keep finding all these different weapons, but it turns out they all actually just do the same thing. But I don't know that until after checking each and every new one I find that seems different. We could actually implement functional differences/effectiveness factors for different weapon types, or we could GIVE UP ON THE WEAPON SYSTEM AND JUST HAVE A SINGLE WEAPON CALLED 'SWORD' IN THE ENTIRE GAME!" Yeah, that doesn't work too well. I'm thinking there's a different variable that actually makes something unnecessarily complex, beyond "well, we're having to add layers to this to make it work." Also, regarding actually trying to fix the resting implementation, I genuinely believe that simply making resting less effective in certain areas and more effective in others would work well, in some form or fashion. Look at the Fellowship's trek through the Mines of Moria in the Lord of the Rings. You wouldn't willingly decide to have everyone sleep for a normal sleep cycle in a place like that. You might say "Okay, this doesn't look like an extremely stupid spot to maybe take an hour for a breather and bandage a few people up a bit, maybe get some water, rest our muscles." Then you'd be on your way to get the hell out of there. Whereas, somewhere out in the open wilderness, you might actually be able to stop for the night and perform more lengthy wound-dressings and mix up (and scout for and find) herbs and such. All of that can be abstracted, though. But it makes perfect sense. I don't get why the topic of limited resting keeps sparking "I don't understand what would possibly keep your entire party from collapsing in a heap, right where you stand, in the dungeon of your enemy's castle. Why would where you are matter?" comments, and "why couldn't you just sleep for 97 hours in a row if you wanted to?" comments. I dunno, what's preventing you from making your characters dive into pits of lava, or apply bandages to themselves when they have no wounds? There's no railing on a lava pit, and there's no force stopping bandages from being applied to wound-less skin.

Obviously our arguments are whatever you say they are. I think I've personally cited save-scumming as one of the main reasons for doing away with instant-death, at least... oh, 037 times, that being 2nd only to the sheer possibility of any characters dying, at all, under any circumstances, and not being able to change the fact that they're dead, once dead. Clearly, those are the two most numerously expressed problems in this entire thread. What would we do without you, Stun? *___*

The problem with resting is its typical jammed-into-the-game implementation, as it is an abstraction of SO many things at once. I don't think any lore is actually suggesting that you're quite literally just sleeping off sword wounds and poison and infection. Added to the problem is the separation of "resting" and "healing." If you use a bandage/poultice on someone, what that literally does is stop their wound/injury from getting worse, and bolster their ability to passively heal it over time. It does not inject them with hitpoints, or close up their wound. That being said, there are OODLES of factors that would prevent a group from making the decision to rest under certain circumstances. It's not that you literally can't fall asleep (again, sleep isn't the issue when it comes to anything other than, possibly, replenishing your spells -- mental prepwork and mental fatigue elimination, basically...). It's that you don't have the means of properly treating a given wound, injury, or condition. Which means that that particular wound/injury/condition is only going to worsen with the passage of time. You're not going to say "Hey, Steve's leg is cut completely open, and infected! 8D! We've stopped the bleeding, but in 12 hours, it's pretty much going to need amputation. LET'S SLEEP FOR 8 HOURS! 8D!" All THAT being said, we don't really need to play Medieval Fantasy Hospital Sim 2013 every time someone gets a cut or a scratch. Which is why all of that is abstracted into "resting." When you "rest," you literally stop your forward progress, and focus on recouperation and taking care of your party's well-being in a variety of ways. I mean, you also make a fire, surely, and eat food, and probably go poop somewhere, and I'm sure people keep watch (I doubt everyone just passes out without a care in the world, in the middle of a wild-animal-ridden forest... that would be a pretty terrible decision). But, again, you don't really NEED to specifically deal with each of those individual things every single time. Especially with how common the need to rest is in such games, due to other abstractions, etc. And, even with just mental fatigue and such, and re-memorizing/preparing spells, that's all an abstraction of how much your mind can handle in a given span of time. And you can't just be awake for 30 minutes, then sleep for 8 hours. Then wake up again for 30 minutes, then sleep for 8 hours. At some point, you are literally going to be unable to fall asleep, and you're definitely going to start suffering from too much sleep (yes, that's actually bad for you... all things in moderation, ). So, again, in the interest of lets-not-deal-with-7,000-individual-factors-every-5-seconds, the abstraction is a literal temporal sleep limitation. So, no, I really don't see a problem with resting, itself, as it represents perfectly legitimate things that, if unrepresented, detract from the game's depth and vibrance. The problem is HOW it represents them. And the other problem, honestly, is people's tendency to frown at limitations for seemingly no reason. "This limitation seems to be poorly implemented, so OBVIOUSLY WE SHOULD JUST NOT LIMIT ANYTHING!" No. That's a terrible conclusion. Resting can be balanced and implemented just as well as ANY other limitation-management system. If you feel it hasn't yet been implemented well at all, then why not join in on the effort to make it better? It's not as if game developers have already attempted every possible implementation of resting there is. Not to mention that how well a given implementation works depends heavily upon the specifics of oodles of other factors that are all different in each separate game's design.

I think that, functionally (as far as the player's access to the inventories is concerned, at least), there already is a shared inventory space in the design. I think, basically, instead of saying "I want to equip 5 potions with Sairi, but wait! Edgard is carrying those potions! Hang on... lemme open up both their inventories and move the potions over, THEN equip them," you'll just be able to access the "shared" items with any given character at any given time (granted, you'll still have to actually have them equipped to gain in-combat access). Whether this is simply direct access to the entire party's individual inventories, all of which are always conveniently displayed in the UI right next to each other in a "shared" UI space, or whether they're functionally being considered "carried by everyone" at the same time, I'm not sure, off the top of my head. I seem to recall the details being that they're still actually divided between people, but the UI eliminates all the opening-separate-windows-and-swapping-things-between-them-when-you're-not-really-worried-about-who's-carrying-stuff-anyway-because-you-just-want-to-equip-something-ness that goes on in other systems. The "infinite" stash doesn't seem to have any real, significant weight/size limitations, but the shared pack, I believe, does (they've merely stated that it will be "limited," so I don't know precisely how). So, I think it actually is just a sort of consolidation of each individual party member's inventory spaces. You can simply access "shard pack" now, instead of individually having to open up two different people's inventory windows, then dragging things in between them to interact with both at once.

Oh, I agree. I wasn't suggesting that. Or that there even should BE full voice acting. I just don't know first-hand, but have to guesstimate that it's actually possible to get good-quality voice acting done without spending 17 billion dollars. Easy? Probably not. Possible? Probably so. You know, for however much voice-acting they want to do.

Regarding the "arbitrary" class restrictions... I think the better way to go is simply to make sure there each class is robust enough to react to various build choices in different ways. As Josh Sawyer put it in update #29: In other words, heavy armor fits into the Wizard's deck of cards in a different way than it fits into a Warrior's, because a Wizard has different abilities and factors to consider, already, than a Warrior does. So, there's not really a need to say "Meh, unless you're a Warrior, you can't wear heavy armor." Better to say "Well, it's going to cost you something to wear heavy armor, but if you want to take that hit, and you can find a clever way to build around that, then more power to you," and simply provide a robust enough class/build/customization system to actually support a variety of viable formulas for different classes. Even though D&D's ruleset let Wizards wear heavy armor (at least as of 3rd Ed, I believe, if not sooner), they still had that "Of course, your spells are gonna start failing left and right" clause thrown in. Spell failure literally isn't even a factor for non-casters,, so heavy armor was pure good for a Warrior, and a little good + a bit bad for an arcane caster (mainly Wizards, since we all know bards aren't real people. ) So, yeah, now, the fact that you CAN have a Wizard with good armor means that's yet another wrench you can throw into the enemy's battle plans. The norm is for Wizards' raw, ranged power and utility to be directly balanced by their extreme squishiness. But, you can actually sacrifice just one factor of your power (like casting speed, as it seems you will be doing with heavy armor in P:E, at least) for a boost to melee resilience. So "OMG, DON'T EVER LET ANY PEBBLES STRIKE MY WIZARD!" doesn't have to be an automatic concern just because you have a Wizard. To use D&D terms, maybe now your Wizard can use touch spells against certain opponents against whom a melee-range spell attempt would've been suicide. Is that worth slower cast times? You decide. Either way isn't inherently, purely negative. It's simply a tradeoff.

1) The point was that you have no significant incentive to forego oodles of Constitution for some other attribute (with the exception of simply intentionally hindering yourself for challenge's sake, in which case you're admitting it's an obvious detriment and the point stands). So "STR + CON" is pretty much your standard formula, with some spices sprinkled on for flavor (maybe some CHA, maybe some extra WIS to beef up perception and the like, etc. 2) True, but wouldn't it still make sense that full plate + a shield hinders your agility to an extent (hence the "maximum DEX modifier"s in D&D)? Also, the difference from the previous "norm" means we're already re-allocating the effects of the various values within the system. Someone said "Hmmm... maybe armor shouldn't prevent you from getting hit, but rather... the actual dodge/redirection of a hit and the actual nullification of damage should be separated into two individual factors?" Is that not simply the same exploration attempt I'm making, here? 3) A fair point, yet again. But, as I said before, I'm not suggesting Charisma is POINTLESS if you're a Warrior. I'm simply asking "Should STR and CON really be the only two things you really need if you want to be a combat-oriented Warrior?" I merely think it could, potentially, be more complex than that, in a good way. Kind of like how it's more interesting to be able to use a fire spell on a target who's currently protected from fire, to blind it rather than burn it for damage. Instead of just "Oh well, fire won't hurt it, and that's that." I simply wish to explore the attributes and say "Ahh, but Strength could also affect THIS, which other systems don't account for, and that provides more interesting options for classes that typically ignore Strength as a largely unimportant stat." I won't know whether or not its feasible until I actually explore everything and figure out that answer. But, I think maybe it's a worthwhile effort. Well, I don't think we should just do it for everything, necessarily. Maybe even just one additional attribute could be more versatile and less tertiary for each class. *shrug*. Again, I won't really know without trying. Plus, have you seen some of the formulas for things in games? They tend to get pretty weird. And, I don't even think my example would be all that weird. Simple things like caps and relative values between the two stats would do it, I would think. And the goal isn't to "force" the player to do anything other than maybe consider more individual factors for a more fine-tuned character build. There are several games that derive factor values from multiple stats in conjunction. Naturally I fail to think of any specific examples, off the top of my head, heh. Well, a simple example that I CAN think of would be how a lot of games have ONE stat determine your maximum mana pool, while anOTHER stat determines your rate of mana regeneration. Not that I'm opting for mana pools and mana regeneration in P:E, but the point is that 2 different stats unite to form the workings of your mana. I like that idea. The alternative would be to either not allow the player to affect one or the other, or to have them both decided by the same stat. That provides less versatility in character development on the player's part, I think. Also, I like your philosophy, but how did anyone even know that the current typical system made sense, and to go with it, until they explored options? I'm sure they didn't just dig it up out of the dirt.

That wasn't at all the point. The point was all games are made that way because it is inherent to the process of making a game. How do you even know how much world/story you need if you don't have ideas for mechanics, first? "Alright, we've got this awesome world. Now let's make Tetris!" Sort of like "Hey, all things seem to be pulled toward the earth's surface." Now you decide to account for gravity. You don't say "well just because everything else is being pulled to the surface of the earth, that's no excuse for accounting for gravity." And that's yet another lovely idea and example. However, it's still not mutually exclusive with specific situation details. Do people in your world in which awesome writers write in these concepts not have lords and/or daughters? Is there not magic? Is there transformative magic? Do they have roads, upon which lord's daughters might travel, and might not these daughters be escorted by men trusted by the lord? Could not the main character/party also travel upon these same roads, and coincidentally encounter one of these lord's daughters, who happens to have (it turns out, but is not immediately known to the player) befallen an unfortunate, transformative magical curse? Could not the players now make a decision as to how to handle the situation at hand, all whilst everyone explores the question of whether or not everyone simply believes everything or people actually think maybe logic dictates what's true and what isn't? I'm just not seeing how quest/situation ideas in this thread are incapable of inspiring in-context ideas for the development team. There is value in your words, Micamo. But "this thread is pointless and the very idea behind it is inherently problematic" is not part of that value, unfortunately.

No fault in that, . Artistically, it is quite lovely. Methinks all it's actually preventing is sneak-attack bear hugging. Really though, the problem comes from a game like P:E declaring a strong basis in historical reality. When you say "this is going to mainly be like real, historical melee combat," then you say "but people are going to have these huge spikes on their armor that are easily hookable by many a weapon -- which you wouldn't want in actual melee combat for various reasons -- just because they convey aesthetic coolness," you run into a bit of a snag. It's not so much that "ALL ARMOR MUST BE REALISTIC AND CANNOT BE FANTASTICAL!", as it is that you're specifically mixing unrealistic defenses with allegedly-realistic combat thrown in. I suppose if they managed to come up with purely fantasy melee combat, in which such spikes weren't infeasible, it wouldn't be so bad.

Nowhere in any of that did I say anything about the quantity/frequency of death spells playing too big of a part "... in anything." I specifically spoke of chance playing too big of a part in something. Such as deciding whether infinite damage is dealt, or 0 damage is dealt. The deciding factor of whether you die or don't die is a dice roll, and nothing more. That's chance overstepping its bounds. Where on earth, in ANY of that quote, did you get even the tiniest shred of "chance and tactics are mutually exclusive"? The entire basis of my text was that they should both work together in appropriate amounts.

Well, to put it concisely... when their updates have a decent number of folk complaining "I thought this was supposed to be like the IE games!", I think you can rest assured there's sufficient innovation going on. (For what it's worth, I honestly believe those complaints are a bit of an overreaction to the good kind of innovation we want to see, while P:E is keeping the actual spirit and style of IE games that's so important. Just because a new model of car comes with a CD-player instead of a tape deck doesn't mean it's straying from the design of the original. 8P)

I don't think Sawyer hates luck. I just think he hates it playing too big of a part. Randomness is a wonderful supplemental element in RPGs, but the whole point of an RPG is to actually get to make decisions that impact things. If you make excellent tactical decisions in combat, for example, then you should always do better than someone who made worse tactical decisions in combat. With luck thrown in, you can possibly do a little better or worse than someone else who makes the exact same decisions, but simple luck should not overturn all your efforts and cleverness. With insta-death spells, you're using extremely narrow tactics. "Resist this effect or die." So what do you get in return? The same kind of narrow counter-tactics. "Resist this effect or fail to produce the effect that I must either resist or die!" What happens when you run into an enemy "party" of necromancers, and they all start hurling insta-death at you? The person with 6 mages in their party might be okay, I suppose. You could cast 6 mass-silences, and hope that the overwhelming odds mean that the necromancers don't resist ALL those silence effects. Then, you hope that your party resists whatever death-effects come your way. Tactics don't depend on the absence of chance, but they're also overruled when combat becomes sitting around watching completely-random dice rolls single-handedly determine such huge outcomes, like "there was totally nothing wrong with you, but now YOU DIE!" If I move into the best possible position to attack a given enemy, and use the best abilities, I'm going to miss/fail part of the time, but the same is true of attacking from a terrible position and using the worst abilities. But missing 5 out of 10 times while using significantly better tactics produces a better outcome than missing 5 out of 10 times while using terrible tactics. When facing things like insta-death spells, your tactical decisions take a backseat to the dice rolls, because the outcome of JUST the dice rolls, themselves, is so great. Basically, when chance and tactics don't work in conjunction, things aren't as interesting. That's why chance is in there in the first place. You don't want to just go "well, I'm making the best decisions, so they ALWAYS WORK PERFECTLY!" Hence, chance. But you also don't want to say "well, the only thing that really matters here is whether or not this dice lands on less than 50 or greater than 50." So, like I said, I don't actually mind the death effect, if it requires actual tactics to pull off. If it's not just a single dice roll, then awesome. If something's going to kill you (within a tactical combat setting), it doesn't need to be instant. It needs to be tricky to pull off. I just think the threat of death from a spell that causes it should be just as complex and tactical as the threat of death from damage or any other combination of combat factors. Not a simple "Avada Kedavra." That's all.

I haven't spun my stance a single time this entire discussion. If I failed to make myself clear, then I've merely re-clarified to shed unintended details, contexts, and possible word meanings. If you weren't so busy pretending I was spinning it, maybe you'd see my point. "instant-death" isn't a functionally different "type" of ability. It's simply infinite damage. So, any finite-damage ability already does the same thing (even possessing the possibility of killing you in a single blow, if the damage happens to be enough, under the circumstances, to do so). Therefore, all you're introducing is a narrower version of the same thing. "This ability deals damage to you, but it's never not enough to kill you, as opposed to the other ones that can be not enough to kill you." Because of that, it even presents you with a narrower set of viable options (all of which are already included in the broader set of options all other abilities present you with) for "countering"/handling that ability being used. That's what you're not comprehending. Lore(style)-wise, it's doing something "different." It kills you, rather than simply damaging you, or issuing a status effect. But, mechanically -- functionally -- (which is all that affects combat's tactical offering), it simply deals infinite damage. Once again: Sword swing? A range of potential effects, including death.. Normal spell/ability? A range of potential effects, including death. Insta-death spell? A single potential effect; death. (remember, a failure to affect is not an effect, but, rather the absence of an effect. As in "it has no effect." I'm well aware that pretty much every existing ability has the potential to generate no effect.)

- Weapon/equipment concealment. From daggers up the sleeve that the guards can't spot to that walking stick that's actually a sword-and-scabbard. Maybe even rare illusion enchantments that hide an item's true nature. Of course, then you run into the question "what makes them rare?", yet, if they're plentiful and easy, then why would a lack of concealment EVER be a problem? 8P - The ability for multiple casters to cast in conjunction to produce an effect similar to metamagic feats in D&D: More potency, greater duration, quicker cast time, etc. - Party-knowledge-based looting. Instead of just equipment (and magic items) showing up as unidentified, any sufficiently specific item of which your party has insufficient knowledge should simply show up as the basic item type. No one in your party have any plant lore? "Nightshade Berries" should simply show up as "berries." For that matter, magic items shouldn't automatically show up as "unidentified" unless you've passed some kind of "sense magic" check on them. Maybe anything below a certain difficulty rating would just be passively sensed. Otherwise, you'd have to check to see if that ring you found is actually magic. It could even be as simple as a sort of "detect magic" spell that you could cast, then look through your inventory. Anything within your character's abilities would show up as magic. Or, maybe even just a sort of magical perception check when you pick up the items.

I'm not sure I understand what your actual biggest concerns are, specifically, then. Are you meaning that, even if they can simply use the equipment, it's much the same if they can't be proficient with it? Because, while they're not using the exact D&D system, I believe they are going to emulate the structure of general feats (they're called "talents" in P:E). I'm pretty sure if you want to make your Wizard skilled with a Greataxe and Plate armor, he can be. But, the Warrior will still get very warriory things that the Wizard can't get. In other words, you can't make a Wizard character and just build him to BE exactly like the Warrior class (what would be the point in distinct classes at that point?). But, he's not destined to suck with all manner of weapons and armor, and melee combat, for that matter, simply because he is a Wizard. However, a Wizard who focuses solely on magical things and DOES suck with melee weapons and armor is definitely going to be much more magically potent and versatile than one who focuses lots of effort on melee prowess and armor proficiency.

@Jajo: Good one. I'm gonna go cry now. @Stun: Do you not understand that "permanent" doesn't necessarily mean "ETERNAL!"? That's why sharpies are "permanent markers," and yet their ink CAN be removed from things. Splashing a chemical in your eyes can cause "permanent blindness." The marker's ink isn't going to ever fade or wear off on its own. Your eyesight isn't going to recover or get any better on its own. Obviously you could get surgery, and get some bionic eyes, and your eyesight would "return." Really, though, it's not the same eyesight. You were blind, and you were granted eyesight. @RandomThom: Arguing with me about simple, objectively-true observations being false is probably cause for frustration. I can't help it that people constantly want to argue all around my point, then act like they nailed it. This really isn't the "either everything I'm saying is true and everything YOU'RE saying is false, or vice versa!" argument everyone seems to like to pretend a simple debate is. My one-and-only actual point is that an instantaneous, all-or-nothing death spell is quantifiably more tactically-restrictive than any other spell/ability in its place that offers a range of potential effects rather than a single effect. I really don't see how that's so difficult to comprehend. I've said like 73 times, that doesn't make the game instantly terrible. It doesn't cause a time paradox and implode the universe. It's not really that big of a deal. It's just a simple fact. Arguing that it's wrong, and, worse, that the OPPOSITE is actually true, is pretty ridiculous. I don't think insta-death spells are stupid. I just think they conflict with a game whose combat thrives on tactical variance, and whose health system isn't even designed around in-combat resurrections. But, apparently it's more fun for people to pretend I'm saying 17 other things, and that's not one of them. *shrug* Hmm... maybe I'm just a ****, and I actually get my kicks out of typing hundreds of words in an out-of-my-way effort to clarify my points and bridge the gaps of misunderstandings? Gyah... who DOES that? I should just resort to personal attacks that have nothing to even do with the topic at hand. That's probably way more constructive.

That first one (purple armor)'s a little iffy. It's not the lack of coverage that bugs me, really, so much as it is the fact that the armor appears to be some form of plate/platelike armor. I can see someone being more lightly armored (coverage-wise) AND wearing actual lighter armor, itself, for the sake of mobility, etc. But it's hard to think you'd go through the trouble of wearing heavy plate armor on only 40% of your body like that (not even the most vital parts).