Iucounu

Well, I think that are actually good ideas. Especially leaving out HP inflation would give developers the opportunity to find more specific and intelligent ways to seperate power from weakness. And focus and skills and feats should be important in any good RPG anyway. However, I don't share your opion on power limits. It's already sure that there will be soulpower in the game as a supernatural element anyway, so no need to discuss this.

@Trashman I wonder if you actually enjoyed the IE-Games, given your preferences on power-levels. What you're proposing sounds almost like some Half Life game, where you only gain strength by collecting new gadgets.. sounds boring to me, especially in a fantasy game. In any case, PE is supposed to be a game that resembles the IE games, so I'm afraid you have to look for another game that better fits your expectations on that matter. For me a very important thing would be to have really powerful magic in the game. I just loved the crazy powerful mages and spells in BG (especially that it was not that obvious for beginners), and missed them in most other games I played. I'd say if you can't find a convincing concept that gives other classes the means to compete, than to hell with the balance of power. Just build in awesome mages, and every fantasy game needs a unsupernatural John Average figher for flavor anyway, right?

I wouldn’t find this so bad, if the mage can make up for this with crowd control or massdamage spells that have an impact on even more powerful foes. I also found the explanation in earlier D&D solid , that mages need to travel with fighters and other group members in the wilderness because they require protection, as they would use up their spells alone rather quickly and are fragile as well. But yeah, giving the mage the potential to kill foes one on one to greater extent would be perhaps more dynamic, if made good, that is. I only know that for example in Dragon Age, I didn’t find it very appealing. But that can have other reasons too. As long as skills, stats etc. have still a great impact, perhaps I would be ok with that. For me I guess it’s most important how it is explained in the game. If the inner logic of the game can coherently explain me why a fighter is equally powerful as a mage at every level of experience, fine.

Which people have stated it is more fun? I don't know, I have yet to see a game in which I find this "homogeneity" fun. It rather strikes me to be artificial that everone must have the same power at every time. Guaranteeing that every member can contribute in an equal way is perhaps more important in a MMORPG, but not so much in a single-player party RPG imho. A great part of the fun I had with these kind of games was to create strong and rather weak characters. And in a system that allows a great difference in power there will in most cases be party members who are more important than the rest. But I believe it is still possible to let have everyone a meaningful way to contribute. Like in Baldur's Gate, the Wizard had the greater power potential and was the joker in major fights, while the fighter did the hacking and slashing in between. I don't say this is optimal, but I didn't find it that bad either. A good system for me would be perhaps, where certain characters come to play and can shine in certain situations, or whose abilities get useful in cooperation with certain other characters. But that doesn't mean they must have the same raw fighting power.

That's true. But if you had become immune against normal weapons in hell, and posessed the big metal unit, things would turn out differently :D But that's just the philosophy I like in games: You don't become all powerful just because you're high-level. You need more than that. As for powerlevels in general: I think classes should be differently powerful for different levels. A mage should be rather weak in the beginning but at high levels a force to be reckoned with. Fighters should be able to wield certain magic, but that shouldn't be something every fighter can. It should depend on your "soullevel", your awakened state, that kind of thing. Apart from that, I think especially at the beginning power should depend on the race. A Godlike fighter could be a challenge to a whole group of "normal" people.

Sounds awesome, but the advantage should be limited. Like when the level difference is 5, after 15 rounds the advantage should be at maximum. It's generally an interesting idea to let the fighting prowess fluctuate against a certain opponent depending on certain stats, skills etc. Although it can become unnecessarily complicated that way. Sounds awesome, but it's hard to tell how it would play. Maybe the stances should have greater advantages and drawbacks, to make them tactically more significant. Another idea would be to introduce somekind of paper-scissor-stone mechanics. For example the charging stance could be effective against the defensive stance, while being suicide against the offensive stance. A high level fighter should be able to switch from one stance to another without great risk, and punish his low-level opponent for switching stances with deadly attacks. But this might become too complicated, and require too much attention from the player.