Lephys

I'm sure some of it can be attributed to inspiration. Some of it's just coincidence, though. It's not that crazy, for example, to think that someone who didn't even know who Jaheira was would design a character who was a female warrior who had lost her husband. And there are probably a bajillion tales of individuals trying to ascend into godhood. *shrug*.

Thanks to the perfect clarity of the English language, obviously a "Cipher" is "one who ciphes." Cobbler - one who cobbles. Thatcher - one who thatches. See? So, we just need to look up the verb "to ciphe."

^ Twould be very nice to have one companion of each class.

^ Seconded. "Hey, I can fire some crazy-cool arrow, instead of just an ouchy-piercy arrow!" is a nice choice to have. As for the finity (that should be a word... it's just infinity without the "in") of ammo, the only beneficial purpose of that is the limitation of your tactical options for dishing out damage/effects. So, while "oh no! I only have 5 arrows, and I'll have to buy 5 more after I fire those!" does accomplish that limitation, it also introduces unintentional tedium. No player needs the game to simulate individual arrow management. It gets even worse when it comes to sling bullets, stones, darts, etc. In a tabletop game, to put things in perspective, you don't ask the DM "I'd like to search for the arrows I fired," then have him describe to you where all of them are. Then make individual rolls to pick up each and every one of them. That would just be silly. You just say "I'd like to retrieve all the arrows I can find." When it comes down to it, arrows and ammo are not scrolls. You don't use them once and they're just gone (except maybe bullets, but... they're bullets. Unless they're +70 Holy Bullets of Magicness, you're pretty much always going to stock up on plenty of them whenever you leave town. If you never run out before you make it to the next place to get some, then it just becomes a chore to restock on them. And their price isn't significant enough to warrant any kind of economical management.) So, its' understandable that you'd be able to retrieve arrows, for example. We talked about this in another thread, though. A lot. Tons of ways you can still limit the use of such items in combat and such, without requiring the tedium of buying and stocking them in inventory slots all the time, and manually refilling those slots all the time. "Oh no! I forgot to refill my quiver from 7 arrows back to 20 before this fight! I sure am glad the game requires me to do that, because that's something my Ranger, who's been using a bow since he was 3, would totally forget, and it contributes so much to the game besides being a thing I can annoyingly forget at times!"

I love that we've established there are only two types of people in the world: 1) Those who favor any and all romance. 2) Those who the-opposite-of-favor any and all romance. I mean, who could possibly evaluate things on a case-by-case basis? That would just be silly. Best to stick with the binary promancer/antimancer dichotomy.

I'm invoking Admiral Akbar, here.

How would HE know?! GYAH! u_u...

Clearly, he ported those two games so that he, along with the masses, could play them on their consoles, u_u... and also dumbed them down in the process.

*gasp*... HERETIC! Burn the heretic! She's trying to summon the evil entity known as Discussion! The seals must not be broken!

Maybe you could tie pickpocketing failures to the reputation system? Trying to snatch that lady's purse? Well, you "fail," and now everyone just thinks you're a pervert. But, yeah, that's kind of the whole point. That no one's going to keep playing with such a dire consequence as "everyone hates you now." But, that's really what would happen. Especially in most of the settings of medieval fantasy games. People didn't screw around. At the very least, you'd be locked up, and not conveniently let out again after paying some silly fine. But, shy of a game built completely around pickpocketing, there's no reason for you to even be able to just run around pickpocketing everyone in sight. Like I said, at the very least, you should have to find people on their own, or create diversions to give you opportunities to actually pickpocket without being noticed. Ultimately, however you do it, it's going to limit the number of instances in which you can pickpocket, from "is there a person? PICKPOCKET" down to only sometimes being able to pickpocket. Anywho, we probably shouldn't get too in-depth specifically with pickpocketing, because there's a thread for that. But, long-story-short, it needs to be somewhat emergent (i.e. not just "there's a thing you really need but can't get. Would you like to Pickpocket, in this one instance, if your skill happens to be high enough?"), but doesn't need to be a candy dispenser. You should no more be able to run amok pickpocketing everyone than you should be able to run amok killing people and taking their stuff. Or... simply robbing people by force. That's probably a more apt comparison. It's just not feasible. Sure, when you come upon a lonely group of travelers on a road somewhere, you could easily get away with robbing them at sword-point. Maybe they'll tell someone, but maybe people won't believe them. But, in town, I don't care how skilled you are. You can't just take all the things. And you certainly can't peruse people's pockets without even knowing what they have before even risking getting caught.

^ One reason I always loved that D&D Feat that allowed you to cast spells with a verbal component silently. At least I think that was a feat. I know there was one that let you bypass the somatic component. I might be imagining a bypass to the verbal component. *shrug*

I think either ALL the information should be above the characters (XCOM:EU/EW), or it should all just be with the portraits. Also, instead of watching bars deplete to decide when people are going to go again, what if we watched bars fill, instead? Maybe with some kind of glow/indication of "Ready for action"? You know, kinda like the old Final Fantasy "active" combat GUIs.

What if the square was diagonally divided, with one weapon showing in the top-left corner, and one in the lower right? 'Cause, I like the second variation better, too, but I'm wondering if it might be better if the offhand item wasn't so tiny. *shrug*

Regarding this -- and this may be a dumb question, but -- Knockdown can fail, right? Or is it a guaranteed Knockdown no matter what?

I'm going to be a Wizzy. I will most definitely be taking all companions (no "soulless" adventurers), but I'm not really sure which ones, to be honest. I tend to try to use all of them for at least a bit. Unless I just hate how they operate, or their character personality, etc. I'll probably take everyone along for a bit when they first join, then go back and put people back into the party every so often.

^ That's a bit odd, innit? "Guys! Thanks to my expertise with mechanical things, I noticed this gemstone lying in the dense, tall grass of this field! 8D!"

With ammo, I'd even be fine with you buying "Frost Arrows," and equipping them as "an item," and just being restricted to so many per-encounter or something, and having infinite basic arrows, etc. But, I'm not really against the "buy 10 arrows, then fire 10 arrows, then be out of arrows" system. Regarding #2, I think it would've been cool if Might (or maybe even Athletics or something) affected your carry weight (even if the weights of all the things weren't perfectly measured, it could be something as simple as "You can only stack 3 potions in a single quick-slot by default, but because of your ability, you can stack 5") AND the effects of armor on recovery time. Something that affected that would be nice. I know Might would probably be a bit OP right now if you just tacked that effect on, but, in principle, "Oh, you have 18 Might? Then that armor increases your recovery time by 20% instead of 50%" would be pretty great. And lastly, with Pickpocket... I just really kind of hate how it becomes a "free random stuff" button in games. I think it needs to be limited in some way, or it's just a little silly. Even in a PnP session, if you just went around pickpocketing everyone, the DM would see your character dead before very long. I don't think it should only be limited to situations in which pickpocketing something will be the "I win" button or anything. But, I'm not at all against it at least being limited to significant situations. OR, at the very least, there needs to be some kind of "find out what people even have" system or something. That's really the only thing that encourages rampant pickpocketing; the fact that you have no idea what you might miss out on if you don't pickpocket everyone. If most people didn't have crap on them, or would catch you pretty easily, and you had to actually set up situations in which people were distracted, and/or you had to find worthwhile marks in the first place, it could definitely be very interesting. Also, I think going with an ability like "Sleight of Hand" is better, since you can use it of for a lot more than JUST stealing from people's pockets. You could use that in dialogues and interactions, to make people think you had given them something you actually palmed, or to entertain/distract people in a tavern, or to make some brutish troll in the woods believe you're actually a mighty wizard, etc. Pickpocketing needs to not be a "Probably get stuff for free" mechanic. That's too simple of a mechanic.

I think if it's reasonable, it's really not that bad. More-over, though, I think another problem is that a lot of times, it's just a hard switch. Oh no, time ran out... YOU FAILED! Or, oh no, time ran out... A COMPANION LEFT! But, it doesn't really feel like that impacted the world or story much. It just impacted your gameplay session. I think if the effects were more story related, such that "failure" didn't actually mean "the game ends here, RELOAD" or "well, you'll just do without this character forever," it would be a lot better. That, and the time limits can be a little exaggerated for gameplay's sake. I mean, there's still room for "Oh crap, those captives aren't going to survive the night!" But, really, I much prefer it when the recorded passage of time by the game's triggers/mechanics is more relaxed/relationary. For example, you shouldn't be tasked with "Go across the world and find this big fortress, and get in there and rescue such-and-such... IN 15 hours! It takes 12 hours to get there, and time's ticking away whilst you fight your way through the fortress!". In that instance, measuring the exact amount of time that's passing is just plain annoying. Now, if you're near some bandit camp, and you find out people have been taken there and are being interrogated/tortured or something, and it's right there (within a few hours travel of you, roughly, in game world time), then yeah, choosing to jog off somewhere else first should be bad. But, for gameplay's sake, it should probably let you camp first. But, even then, I'm okay with it not counting how many times you camped. OR, at the very least, exaggerating that. If you do have some time-sensitive thing 100 miles away, and you start heading straight there, but you're not as awesome at combat as someone else, so you have to rest a few times, you shouldn't be punished for being less-good at the game. Simply put, urgency should be about your choices on how to handle a situation, not some accumulation of all your precisely-measured actions in the process of deciding to tackle it "as quickly as possible." The "as possible" part should suffice. And as far as captives that you need to rescue go, you could even have it just be "oh crap, we dilly-dallied too much, and those bandits beat a bunch of information out of them. This isn't good." Instead of "GAME OVER," you get "GAME DIFFERENT NOW!" Sure, it's "bad," but it's more interesting bad, because the story has actually changed in a significant way, and not just in an "everyone died" way or "you lost" way.

^ I think Anti-Speed Runs would be interesting in some games. Like... "How long can you drag this boss fight out without dying?"

^ I do tend to read all of Sensuki's responses as if spoken by Geralt of Rivia.

Hahaha. That's splendid! See, it's objective, so it's true. u_u

Snow tellin', really. 6_u I hope so, though. I love icy environments in games. I do not know why.

Unless you like... select "Indie" in the genre to browse. Or sort by pretty much anything other than "new/popular." In fact, there's now a Discovery Queue, which has shown me all kinds of games I had never even heard of before. That, and a lot of the little games tend to get put on ridiculous sales when they come out, to get the word spread. I understand people preferring GOG, or just not liking Steam for various reasons. But, it's not exactly pure evil. I'm not going to try to convince anyone to like Steam, but at least hate it accurately.

If it's night-time, then perhaps the tables were previous bitten by vampires or werewolves, and now, the tables have turned! o_o . I agree that the little details in this game are pretty awesome.

You're stark-raven mad if you truly believe that! u_u... The game will actually come packaged with a digital-to-Morse receiver, and the patches will be Morse-coded to your computer. It could take some time for that transfer process to complete, so free up a month.