Lephys

It's not even "changing," really. It's simply deciding that, until that point, wasn't previously decided. In overly simple terms, if one relationship-interest favors evacuating the burning orphanage before it collapses, and one favors looting its valuables before it burns (to hell with the occupants!), then you pick whichever thing you want to do, and the interest who likes what you did likes where your head's at. It's that simple. You didn't change for that person, unless you were forced to BEGIN evacuating the orphans, THEN stop doing so, shove them all back inside, and loot the valuables.

Heh, that's pretty much what I ended up doing in both Oblivion AND Skyrim. Well, and Fallout. Well, sort of. It was more bartering heavier items for lighter items (like gems), so that I was still carrying around value, but maybe not actually currency. I know currency weight wasn't an issue in those games, but, still... As far as the "what to do about money and loot and the economy" bit, all you're really dealing with is balancing. A lot of factors, sure, but it's just balancing between them, nonetheless. I think most of the problems we see nowadays with RPG economies stem from the fact that about 80% of your money gain is dependent upon looting and selling. Instead of items simply being capable of providing monetary income, they are pretty much THE means of doing so. You might complete a quest and get 1,000 gold, and you might sell 7,000 gold worth of loot that you acquired whilst completing that quest. If you could only get about 1,000 gold from all your looting, and the quest gave you 7,000 gold, you wouldn't be so worried about looting everything you can get your hands on PURELY to sell for money (dealing with encumbrance or huge inventory lists is just a chore at that point). So, if loot sale isn't the only viable means of getting enough money to buy new things, you can now find loot less often and be completely cool with it (because you didn't want those 17 Longswords of Minor Strength anyway, they just happened to be your means of making money). That's just one factor. That's just shifting the income potential of things around, and it affects the system that much. You'd probably want to do more than that. But, you could have some optional quests (with actual, engaging story significance that you'd expect from any other quest) that were a challenge but provided more money, and other quests that, in accordance with sense, didn't provide a lot of money (but maybe provided reputation that leads to different sets of quest options or outcomes down the road, or some kind of skill training, etc... something useful to the player). It's a case like this in which variety is your friend. So, sometimes you take on a specific quest for money (helping some wealthy merchants, perhaps, or doing sneaky, sneaky Rogue things to steal/cheat people out of money, etc. Again, variety), or maybe sometimes you still find some really nice gemstone, or magical weapon or armor piece that's valuable, or maybe sometimes you just kill some bandits with fat coinpurses because they've just had a good day (that you ended). *shrug*. However you get it, what really matters are two things: 1) You aren't obligated to toil away finding (and expecting to find) 500 articles of loot every 10 minutes and sell them back at town, dealing with whatever degree of encumbrance/inventory system there is, and 2) that the wealth-gaining options available to you are balanced (and paced) well in-line with the values of the useful purchasable goods available to you. You shouldn't be finding way more money than you can spend, or way less, and you shouldn't be expected to buy new equipment every minute, nor should you go 72 hours of gameplay without being expected to be able to afford new equipment. That all really just comes down to balance. Another way to offset the off-balance dependence upon loot-selling is to have the loot be situationally valuable. Examples: Maybe instead of all those generic longswords being worth piddly money, they're only worth crafting materials (IF you need the materials of which they're constructed) to you, OR even worth the crafting materials to a blacksmith. However, maybe, instead of giving you 3 silver per longsword, he gives you a free equipment upgrade or offers a free single crafting service because you did him the favor of supplying him with some much needed metal to melt down for some big order he's got. Maybe that's even something that changes as time passes. The same could go for all those herbs and trap parts and various "something to pick up" things that we typically grab by default simply so we can get at least 1 shilling for it when we get back to town. Maybe you don't want to craft alchemy stuff, but you're in the market for some discounts at the potion shop, so you pluck all the herbs you can find. Or, maybe they'll offer you some better wares for doing them a favor. I know, to some, that sounds dangerously like piddly fetch quests. But, I'm not talking "Hey, go out to this cave and collect 10 mushrooms and come back to me." I'm just talking about having different reasons for doing things, and not just the ever-valuable coin. Money ALWAYS helps you, because everything's for sale for coin. So, think of generic swords or herbal ingredients as almost different currencies. Want certain things from the blacksmith, or feel the need to help equip that band of revolutionary peasants so they can take down a corrupt lord? Then you might have reason to grab all the swords and armor you can find (and you don't have to go any further out of your way, because everyone who wields a sword or wears armor who fights you, you just either take it or don't). But, you might not want to grab all the herbs, or the trap components, because maybe you're not a fan of using oodles of potions, or traps. Or maybe you just want the traps and not the swords. The point is, you give stuff DIFFERENT values, instead of "the ability to purchase anything else" value, and you've got options, and all the little loot is suddenly a lot less of a chore. It no longer feels like everyone drops generic weaponry every 5 seconds PURELY so that you can weigh the benefits of 15 more gold against the consequences of 70 more pounds of stuff. When you have a handful of options, and the only reason for all of them is the acquisition of money, things can get pretty bland.

In regard to the voice-acting bit, I like to look at it like this: Gollum, in the LOTR films, has what COULD be an annoying voice. It isn't a pleasant sound, let's put it that way. BUT, I think with his lines, and mannerisms, and the way in which he delivers the lines, it works very well. Whereas, with that SAME kind of vocal style, if you pushed it a bit farther, you'd have Donald Duck. If Gollum sounded exactly like Donald Duck, I'd hate it. It would irk me to no end. NO END, I say! I don't know exactly what all the technical differences are in between Gollum's voice and Donald Duck's, but there's something there that's just overly adjusted and misses the mark. It's kind of like the English voices in a lot of animes. Technically, they are the right sound for that character, but they just... I dunno, they're off-key or something. The big, burly guy doesn't just sound like a big burly guy, he sounds like his voice is trying to PROVE he's a big burly guy, even though you already know it. I think that was the problem with Neeshka. I didn't hate her voice, but it did border on "Hey, did my voice mention I'm wily, sarcastic, cute, and opinionated?" It's sort of the difference between an assassin visciously stabbing someone's back without remorse, then fleeing and an assassin leaping out of the crowd with a big "I love stabbing people in the back because I'm so, so evil and don't feel any remorse for such actions" sign on his head. It's 100% accurate, but it's so unnecessary, it detracts from his portrayal.

The party AI/behavior serves the awesome purpose of making sure your party is performing somewhere above 0% combat efficiency, but it definitely shouldn't have them performing at 100% efficiency on its own. So, nothing but manual control (while I'm not against that being a togglable option, if you so choose) would be a little overkill in the "I have to spend all my time just making sure we don't die to rats because my party's just staring at them while they gnaw all our feet off" respect. Honestly, the Dragon Age (1 and 2) "tactics" system was a good system, it was just SO crude. The 2nd game was far better than the first, but in the "Yay, now we're in beta instead of alpha!" way. Something like that system would be pretty nice. Especially if, say, spells and abilities have a lot more tactical utility than in many other games. Let's say a Monk ability has a powerful knockback as well as deals crushing damage. Well, you may want that character to use that on heavily armored foes, for the damage effectiveness. But, you might also want them to use it on some melee berzerker enemy, simply to knock it across the room (and you don't care how much damage the ability dealt to it) so that other characters (or just other attacks/abilities) can take it down while it doesn't shred one of your party members. The latter scenario might be a priority (damage prevention) over the former scenario (more effective damage dealing to a foe who may or may not be an immediate threat). It would be very nice to be able to set some pretty specific behaviors. I'd much rather have that than the typical 3-stage overly-simplistic "Be aggressive!/Be defensive!/Be passive!" thing, which sometimes gets coupled with the "Throw spells like there's no tomorrow!/Use some spells sometimes!/Maybe once a year, on your birthday, use a spell, if you feel like it!" options. When you get into the tactical rough, you end up either manually controlling everyone every second (rendering the behavior settings moot) or changing them 4 times for different stages of the battle (which takes about as much time as the manual control, therefore also rendering the behavior settings pretty moot). Example: "Wait! That troll is changing targets! YOU, blow all your mana! YOU, start attacking this little Goblin, and stop using so much mana! There, that should... WAIT! He's switched targets again? Okay, okay, go back to what you were doing!" (I realize the details of the example systems aren't necessarily going to be present in P:E, but the effects of the party's AI/behavior controls carry over to pretty much any similar RPG party combat system.)

o_o... *Rolls percentile*... Actually, it seems they do, u_u. Haha. Sorry, I had to. No, no, back to seriousness, I will say that, thus far, they haven't stated that there will be any situations in which damage doesn't always apply to Health. BUT, they also have not stated that there will never be a situation in which damage doesn't apply to health. So, it's kind of one of those "Here's how damage works, but we haven't actually said that's all there is to the damage system" things. I can see discussing the possibility that damage always applies to health, just as I can see discussing the possibility that it sometimes won't, 8P. It's slightly silly to act like either one is fact and disregard the other. And I get your point about the level of D&D ruleset purism that pops its head up from time to time, heh. There's nothing wrong with taking from D&D systems what is beneficial to cRPG design, and changing what is not, no matter what it is. Changes aren't bad until they're bad. They're not automatically bad because things are now different.

It's good to know that all their hard work this week will be so... fulfilling.

Yeah, I get the PnP to in-game rounds transition. But many RPGs, for a while now, have not used the round-system and instead have used real-time, yet they still have weapon speeds like 2.7 seconds and such, even though your character completes a huge axe swing in about .5 seconds. So you get that *swing, wait... swing, wait... swing, wait...* thing that feels very artificial. You can generally even treat it like a cooldown, and time things so that you run away right after you swing, then are back within melee range at the 2.7-second mark so your character can swing again. Since actions aren't tied to rounds, this will sometimes delay your opponent's attacks, since they can only swing at you when you're in range, and you're only in range when you're ready to swing. Kudos to the player in that respect for such a degree of micromanagement, I suppose, but that's not a melee fight. You don't just do nothing, nothing, nothing, swing, nothing, nothing, nothing, swing. You might sometimes stand at the ready to parry the next attack before swinging again, or prepare to dodge, or reposition yourself, or change stances, but you're constantly engaged in combat, dealing with things and preparing for your next move. You don't just happen to be standing near an opponent, waiting for that instant attack proc at 2.7 second intervals. Feasibly, if it only takes you .7 seconds to swing an axe, you should be able to (within fatigue limits and whatnot) swing it every .7 seconds, each time swinging from the end-position of your previous swing. Obviously I'm not expecting heavy axe combat to consist of 10-straight minutes of your character speed-swinging the axe. I just think it's been long enough since we've progressed from the round-based days and the "we can't really do that with graphics and processing" days to be able to visually represent the flow of combat. *Swing-swing, kick, dodge, swing, get hit and stagger for a second, regain footing and swing again, parry, swing*. Something like that. In other words, it just shouldn't feel as if nothing, or simply waiting, is all that's occurring between actual actions in combat, methinks. It kinda baffles me that you don't see that very often in RPGs (if ever) when we've come so far in game design. You see it in more Action-type games, like Assasin's Creed's fighting system, and such, and it'd be even easier to represent with an auto-attack flow. It's not a necessary improvement to the cRPG genre, but I think it would be a welcome one.

I just want to note that when I said "Level-scaling could be used in a limited fashion (not 'everything is always your level') to accomplish some cool goals under certain circumstances, some folks pulled the Luke Skywalker "That's not true... that's imPOSSible!!!" bit on me. Then, our beloved Josh Sawyer comes along and says "We're going to use limited implementations of level scaling to accomplish some cool goals under certain circumstances" (paraphrased), and suddenly it's entirely possible and makes perfect sense to those same folks. *shrug* I apologize for observing things that were simultaneously both true and false. For what it's worth, I support Josh's views of and intended implementation of scaling that involves level values. Seems like it takes raw level-scaling ore and refines it into nice, contextually-functional ingots.

^ Fair enough, but also don't underestimate the level of quality the graphics will possess. I don't think "This is as good as we can do, feasibly, 13 years ago" is really an integral part of the style they're going for. But, yeah, we're not gonna be playing isometric Crysis 2 or anything. People keep sort of acting like we're gonna be dealing with Super NES sprites or something, but you'd be surprised how small a character model can be and still be quite impacted by poor animation/aesthetic details. I think someone referenced Starcraft II. Look how small those units are, and you'd notice if they just fidgeted between a few pixels of difference in animations. Or DOTA II. The heroes and units in that have nice, fluid animations, and detailed armor and weaponry. Hell, people pay MONEY for cool aesthetics in armor and equipment in that game, all the time. So, obviously it's a level of detail that's capable of being noticed by the human eye and brain.

Haha. It even made ME laugh. "I can't believe I just voluntarily killed my soul mate! I'M HYSTERICAL WITH POWER-BOOSTING GRIEF!" The final boss would be so very confused...

^ True. Although, most of the armor and shield-boosting was worked into abilities in Mass Effect, sort of like buffs, sort of... Except it was like if you cast a buff, and you gained plate armor, or your plate armor could be destroyed, and you restored it with a buff, or boosted it temporarily. So, interestingly enough, in their system, your weapons loadout directly effected the frequency of your damage mitigation, too. Just an interesting tidbit I thought of.

It might be based on total equip load. Weapon weight, etc. He's just saying that armor will effect it. So, other things still could, easily. Also, this reminds me of how Mass Effect 3 did things. You could carry up to 4 weapons I think (if you were a Soldier class?), maybe only 3 if you weren't a Soldier... But, anywho, the more firepower you carried, the greater your ability cooldowns were. They got pretty extreme, but it was really a pretty good trade-off system. If you had a heavy shotgun, an assault rifle, and a sniper rifle, your abilities might take 12 seconds instead of 6 to replenish, but the usefulness of the weapons was plenty to make up for that. And if you wanted to be a full "mage" (biotic would be the closest in ME, I suppose), you could just equip a pistol, and all your abilities came back in like 3 or 4 seconds, instead of the standard 6 (arbitrary numbers to show relative changes). So, the fact that you didn't have as much weapon firepower was made up for with the fact that you could create biotic combo-detonations every 5 or 6 seconds. The weapons and abilities obviously don't do the exact same things (without a sniper rifle, you couldn't easily take down some distant, potent threats with extremely-damaging headshots, etc.), but they were equally as useful. You were just as capable at taking down enemies with pretty much any equipment loadout.

Yes! And that 2-second stun could actually be a stagger animation. Dodge would actually look and feel like a dodge, in the midst of ongoing combat, and block/parry would actually result in a little animation segment that shows a blow being parried rather than taken, etc. It's really nothing THAT complex. Just enough to make it look like two people fighting each other, rather than two people dealing damage to each other. It just tends to feel like they took a turn-based RPG and simply sped everything up, in most games. Which is silly, because turn-based gameplay abstractly (and understandably) separates the actions of both parties involved, for the sake of turn-by-turn decision-making complexity. But, when you just mash 'em back together, it feels very disjointed. At the very least, my character swinging his sword in 3 different aesthetic ways every second for 4 damage per swing is 37-times more interesting than watching him swing once every 5 seconds for 20 damage and stand still the rest of the time. They could go as complex with it as they wanted, but that alone would be loads better than many typical games.

Welp, since we don't have actual game mechanic news to discuss, I vote on developer sickness specifics speculation! 8D Who's with me?! I wonder if it's a plague that reduces their Constitution AND their Strength, or just Constitution? Do you think it affects their Negative Comment Fortitude? Maybe they're more vulnerable to eccentric suggestions for game systems! Quick everyone! Suggestion Death Blossom!

*snicker snicker*... I'm sorry, but that talk about the person you love's death contributing to motivation made me think of a literal RPG mechanic translation. "Guys, the evil Lord Galthresk is too strong! We're not going to be able to stop him!" "*ponder*... *looks at love of life*... I'm REALLLY sorry about this. *kill*" *You just gained a state of Vengeance! +5 to all stats and skills!*

^^ Break them off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar, even... u_u

Not true. How conflict plays out when you're detected is entirely separate from the circumstances that govern your ability to go undetected. And honestly, I don't see why a masterful thief SHOULDN'T basically be able to either knock people out in one hit OR kill them in one hit. If you sneak up behind a human, and you've got 2 daggers, I think you could probably slit their throat or stab them in both lungs. Without their knowledge you're there, they're completely defenseless. Armor doesn't mean anything if you have all the time in the world to strike wherever you want without any resistance. And, if there was, instead, an ogre in a corridor, you might just want to sneak past him rather than attack him. The goal being to avoid engaging him until you've completed some other task (or all together, perhaps), so how quickly you can dispatch of him is moot. Also, I just want to point out, for what it's worth, that I don't see the act of saving and reloading as inherently degenerate. I mean, if you're fighting a very challenging fight, you might die completely (unable to continue the game in any capacity) and be forced to reload again, but that's just part of gameplay. You're not circumventing anything. You should be presented with the opportunity to gather enough information and control your party in a sufficient manner to complete the fight in a single try, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't ever end up having to try a second time. So, yes, you shouldn't be required to save and reload JUST to gather the required information to be ABLE to complete a task. That's just terrible design. But, save/loading is really only degenerate when it's intentionally used to achieve a better result with less than the intended amount of effort. Just a side-note, really.

Let me ask you a question. If a story boss is only encountered once in a playthrough, and the player gets to talk to him, and ask him a variety of interesting questions. They lead to the same response though, but the player doesn't know that because the dialogue system doesn't let you repeat previous dialogue nodes. Would your game experience be fine for the whole first playthrough if you didn't know that it was all fake and immediately be ruined on your second playthrough when you found out that your dialogue with him and others was a fake-fest with questions massively leading to the same response? Yes, I would be bothered by both examples. Although, I wouldn't need to play the game twice to know there's level scaling and/or lots of fake choices. I inform myself about the game beforehand. You know what's not very effective? I wonder how level-scaling creates fake choices, and you give me an example of dialogue (that has nothing to do with levels, or scaling) literally and blatantly offering fake choices, all together in a little dialogue interface, all at once, and then say "...See?" How's about we take an actual level-scaling scenario and point out, within that same scenario, what fake choices are offered. I can tell you about a lack of choices. In a game that offers 10 level-5 quests, you give the player the choice of completing all 10 of those quests, in any order he chooses. But you know what isn't an option? Actually having quests 4-10 retain challenge. Sure, if you want to go bask in your level-5-stuff-stomping abilities, you can. The person who wants to do that has a field day. But what about the person who wants to help this faction, or explore this cave, or rescue this kidnapped child? Why should he be presented with dilemmas which are progressively easier and easier, no matter what? You know how you solve the "Oh my crap, nothing's incredibly easy as I progress!" problem? You vary the difficulty of content. At level 10, you might be confronted with some easier quests, and some more difficult quests. And guess what... if you somehow reach level 15 before you get to this batch of level 10, range-of-specific-difficulty quests, and the game ups them to level 13 (not 15, you might notice), they're STILL easier because you leveled up, and some are STILL easier than others. See, here's the point you're missing, because you just don't care to even consider it: If your argument is "THOSE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE LEVEL 10! YOU'RE RUINING THE PLAYER EXPERIENCE!", then what's to stop you from having the exact same argument about them in a non-scaling game in which you couldn't go above level 10? What if you thought one was too easy, and it should've been more challenging? Or you thought they were too challenging, and should have been easier? Whether or not the challenge presented is appropriate for each bit of content is the only thing that matters, not how you arrive at that value. If you ask me to add 2 and 2, I can scribble an entire page of ridiculous math, and as long as whatever I did results in 2, and I just write down the answer and hand it to you, then the problem was solved. If you're trying to say that it's the principle of the thing, that an enemy's level COULD be 8, or it COULD be 10, and that very possibility is inherently wrong, then you automatically hate actual (non-fake) dialogue choices and different outcomes, which you so love to use as examples. "Oh snap! If you play the game specifically THIS way, you get one outcome for the rest of the game, but if you play it THIS way, you get another for the same conversation?! THAT'S EVIL!" Your argument, in such a case, would be against mutually-exclusive circumstances in games. Because, in a single playthrough, you can't encounter that boss 2 different times at 2 different levels. So, whatever level he is is whatever level he is when you fight him. If it's too high, then they did it wrong. If it's too low, then they did it wrong. Whether it's scaled, or just a static value. It doesn't matter. As a matter of fact, your whole "What if all dialogue options produced the same outcome?" example is more pertinent to static levels than it is to any form of scaling. No matter what you do, you get the exact same encounters. With scaling, you actually get MORE possible outcomes. Combined with encounter-scaling (numbers and makeup, instead of just levels) and you've got a system that is capable of providing much more robust encounters that are never arbitrarily stupidly impossible or not-even-worth-your-time easy relative to your given area/level/capabilities. So, please, if you would be so kind, explain how THAT'S bad. Not how level-scaling's badness is bad because it's bad. How about what makes it bad, without ignoring everything I've just addressed?

Exactly. There should still be a random factor in each permutation so you don't get the same patterns recurring too often. I just mean there should also be some logic applied to where each successive blow lands, based on the previous blow, but not necessarily sticking to any predefined combat chain. I guess maybe it's a combination of both historical and random in that case. I've often thought about this, in almost any RPG. Why does my Level 1 character take up a goofy "I'm gonna swing my sword like a baseball bat at yer head!" stance and swing once every... oh.. 3 seconds, in combat, and deal 12 damage, when he COULD swing every second (in a flowing sequence of little animations that rely on a handful of resting-point poses for all animations) and just do like 4 damage per swing? Hell, even dodges and parries could be worked in, because, as has already been said, a modern computer can process these rolls STUPIDLY quickly. I would say that, instead of gaining attacks-per-round (or basically attack speed, in a non-round-based game) as you leveled up, you could increase your auto-attack reportoire of moves. There'd be 4-5 different little weapon-swing (and enemy weapon swing) animation permutations to start out with (so it would actually look like you're both fighting each other at the same time, rather than just focusing on swinging a weapon on a cooldown and see who dies first), not including dodges and blocks and parries and whatnot, and then you could gain different essentially passive abilities as you went. For simplicity's sake (and example's), you could just throw in typical RPG things like stuns, knockback, trips, etc. Your "auto-attack skill" could be Swordplay, or Axe Mastery, or whatever (also already in a billion other progression systems in the universe), or there could even be a General tree that would provide a lesser degree of bonuses at the ceiling, but would apply to any weapon you were using. The only difference from typical systems is that auto-attack combat, in between active skill usages and movement active commands, would flow awesomely nicely, and you'd actually see an improvement to this as your character supposedly became the supreme master of all things blade, rather than him just standing around Rock'em'Sock'em Robotting away like a doofus until you click "Axe Hurricane of Impending Disintegration" and select a target. I just think this would do well in support of the whole "player skill and character skill are separate things that are both at play" idea. You could take any existent combat system (that's not turn/round-based) and work this in, simply reducing the amount of damage dealt by weapons proportionate to the increase in attack speed, and the combat pacing stays exactly the same. Combat just rocks a lot more is all. By the way, the little passive bonuses and effects I was talking about in your general auto-attackery would be quite minor compared to other things. No "50% chance to stun on each hit!" or anything. Pretty much any effect that's usually passive, in combat, could be applied in this situation. Because your auto-attack damage is pretty much passive. I think that's the problem. That's what it feels like in most games... That you might as well just have a damage aura that only hits your selected target every (insert weapon speed here) seconds, and there happen to be "Oh look, I'm supposed to be attacking him" animations attached. Guild Wars 2 actually does this, slightly. Your slot-1 skill (1-9 keys on the keyboard) is pretty much your auto-attack, no matter what class and weapon you're using, and on most of the melee weapons, it actually cycles through various slightly-different attacks (they actually have different tooltips and everything, and some of them apply effects, so you can halt your auto-attack at a certain step to save it for its knockback or stun effect at a slightly more useful time) much more quickly (probably an attack at least every second, because each attack is just a type of axe swing, or kick, etc... minor individual "moves" that one would probably perform whilst engaging a foe in melee combat.

I advocate some form of improvement/progression that affects your resting. Well, the only problem I had with the "you can only rest if you have food, and you can only have (insert number here) foods" scenario is that people are still just gonna rest after every battle, however many times they can until they run out of foods. Then, they're going to complain that they either had to return to town for more food (if you let them, or its cost, etc.) or that they were unable to rest for the remainder of the dungeony/unsafe area (if you limit returning to town to buy more food). Either way, the only purpose of the resting limitation is lost. Take the spells. If you ONLY regain 90% of your spell casts when you rest, then it doesn't make much sense to say "You can ONLY get these spells back after every single battle!" If that's what you actually wanted, then it'd be much less convoluted to just have the spells return every time combat ends. If the design intention of the game is to balance the potency of the spell repertoire against the limited use of them, then the best way to do that is with a time limit (cooldown, pretty much). OR, even better yet, the specific resting areas. If you require the player to make it to the other side of a field filled with enemies before his party can rest again, then you require him to, however he does it (and on whatever difficulty) preserve his party's resources and employ some degree of strategy and efficiency to make it through that field. Some people won't like that, but, it's either that (or some other type of enforcement of that limitation), or no limitation at all. So, yeah, a food quantity just wouldn't really reinforce the limitation very well. You could easily argue that, since you can only get 7 foods, and you can only return to town at certain intervals, the player would be required to conserve those 7 foods. But, not really. People who embrace reason would say "Oh, then I hafta make these 7 rests count until I can go back to town." People who don't would say "OMG! THOSE 7 FOODS ONLY LASTED LIKE 7 BATTLES, AND THERE ARE LIKE 10 MORE BATTLES!" Do we need to make sure unreasonable people are accomodated? No. But, using the set rest points doesn't even give them the possibility of being ABLE to use their rests inefficiently, then complain about it. Disliking limitations in general doesn't really make any sense, since they serve quantifiable purposes, so I'm honestly not worried about the people who don't think there should even be anything tied to resting, or any resting limitations. Just like I'm not worried about the people who want infinite hitpoints, or to deal 1,000,000 damage. That's what cheat codes and mods are for. And if you're having trouble with the current degree of limitation, that's what difficulty settings are for.

Commandos! MAN I loved that game... Its stealth systems provided complexity in a pretty simple fashion. Plus, it's already isometric! 8D! I think inspiration could easily be drawn for some stealth elements in P:E. Also, if your plate-wearing fighter wants to be sneakier, he can just remove his armor, or put on some leather or something. BOOM! He doesn't need 700 points in Sneak. He just needs to not be wearing loud armor, and now he's much, much quieter. And your Rogue will still be able to blend into walls at high levels, and move within 3-feet of a guard, and generally be a stealth BAMF. But, in general, the situational conditions would have much more of an effect on your chances of being detected than just a simple stealth roll. I like it.

I kind of like the idea of having a lot of the purely "this stuff happens to be going on, and you can do something about it or just keep on walking" side quests that typically are just strewn about a town be, instead, "random" encounters. They could even still sometimes occur in towns. Some person who's had something stolen, or who's just had her kid taken or something, and who's holding their battered wounds, crying in an alley. Maybe the quest involves tracking down some human trafficking hideout, so it doesn't really matter which alley the person gets attacked in, or exactly when. So, instead of simply "When you walk over to THIS particular alley, there's a crying person there who'll initiate a quest, it would be more, "Oh, hey... look, apparently something's happened, and that person's crying. They weren't there before." I know it requires more resources, but it instills a sense of change and action in the game world. Also, the random encounters whilst exploring the world map (outside of dungeons and "safe" areas such as towns and cities) should be a lot more varied than mere ambushes and groups of enemies to fight. These could also house a lot of side-quest material.

The most extreme version of this I'd be fine with would be to have option ranges for the different types. Like... say you have over 14 STR. Now, you cannot pick the little twig people, but you aren't necessarily the hugest person ever. You'd have to be at least slightly muscle-massy, but you could still be more lithe, or stocky, or toned, or padded, etc. This way, you could have an 18 STR (just using D&D values as an example) character who was just mid-range on the buffness scale (and as tall/toned/padded as you wanted) and a 13 or 14 STR character who was literally the buffest model the game was capable of producing, if you so chose. I don't see any benefit gained by making sure the appearance is 100% derived specifically from your exact stats, but I do see a little benefit (and not much detriment, really) in organizing the character creation options so that someone with 5 STR isn't the Hulk. I mean, that kind of inconsistency is bordering on "I want to have a sword equipped, but I want a bow to appear in my hand, instead," or "I want to be female, but I want to use a blatantly male character model."

Or maybe planting inordinately large seeds in an Elf/Druid city, and then they grow.

Only 100%? Pff... My Surety Bonus makes me 137% sure.