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NWN2 crafting system seemed to kind of take away from the heart put into weapons because by the end, especially if you were aiming purely at maximizing damage, the best weapons were crafted ones and it seemed like a tedious thing to do. I don't even know if BG2's system could be called crafting, you were effectively finding item parts and having them assembled by someone, it's not like said parts had any other role on their own really, so you could just consider them "incomplete items". Thing is if you're going to make crafting skills how powerful do you want to make the items that you create with said skills? Obviously you want to make the skill a worthwhile investment and if you constantly find better items, well then crafting would be a waste of a skill and thus a disappointment. Balancing items so that relative strength of found loot is very close to crafted loot would be very hard (with small differences depending on the stage of the game - because you could potentially buy/steal a powerful sword early one with high risk and you wouldn't be able to craft a sword that good with your current skill unless you add a randomness factor into crafting which would encourage grinding and is kind of lame). Overall i DO want consumable (potions and scrolls) to play a bigger role and a fallout-like crafting system of consumables to exist there, it would be very meaningful and i also like the idea of having powerful items that were split up in multiple pieces and can be found and reassembled a lot. Crafting stuff from 0 to strong items that are comparable to found items would be interesting, especially if you can split the crafting process between multiple classes (like only fighter types can blacksmith and type of metal plays a BIG part in weapon strength and mage-types enchant based on success of blacksmithing) but would be something harder to balance.

To put it in a way that doesn't stray too much off-topic: i think it makes sense for stealthy chars who focus on finding stealthy solutions to their encounters to naturally improve on this aspect, same for fighting. If none of these (fairly big as it seems) aspects have an impact on my XP, and thus levels, than i'm improving myself from said levels in these aspects by doing something completely unrelated to them, which doesn't really sound all that logical to me. Ideally you'd want scarred veterans to become better at what they do (fighting) and the experience they gain outside of fighting to sustain them bot at crushing skulls AND at doing other things with their time (like being better diplomats, idk). Technically you have to commit to one type of resolve at one point with this (which is okay) because it's not like you can keep solving things with combat while using your otherwise earned XP to level up your stealth so you can suddenly swith to a shadowy type halfway through the game (unless you want to become considerably weaker at combat because your opponents will improve in that regard and you'll stay low). Though i suspect there's more to be heard on this aspect anyway so i look forward to more information before trying to go more in-depth about it

As someone who picked up the first Fallout games AFTER playing 3 and eventually New Vegas, i was impressed by how well implemented the design of armor mechanics were implented there, this while fantasy cprg's were still operating with a primitive first edition ad&d system that seemed clunky as hell. Then again Fallout as a game didn't have to face the same challenges a class-based RPG would face where you have a mulitude of types of armor that work with certain classes and you want to keep the selection relatively even in terms of effective power (advantages-disadvantages). I think that having 4-5 types of physica damage, with all armor bringing an evasion (and a max dexterity bonus increase to that) and damage mitigation is fine, though perhaps some weapons should not be doing a single type of damage - for example while i can imagine a rapier doing only piercing damage, i can't imagine a 1m+ big chunk of metal yielded into what is a two handed sword doing only slashing damage where slashing damage is something a katana would also do (i.e. a 2h sword should prolly do blunt damage too, maybe piercing). On the concept of armor and armor-damage interaction which Josh spoke of some time ago - the way i understood it was that something that does piercing damage would have more "armor penetration" as an innate thing while having the potential disadvantage of doing less normal damage to everything else which sounded like a simple, beautiful and great way to implement a weapon-armor interaction What i'd like to ask is: 1. If blunt weapons or weapons that do blunt/crushing damage or if blunt/crushing damage as a whole goes through heavy armor/big DT easier (or has more "armor penetration" as i've put it before) are we to expect blunt-damage dealing weapons to have a harder time versus ligh armor - it would make SOME sense because they're heavier weapons that attack slower and you could give something like the "speed factor" stat from BG2/PS:T etc a bigger role in that bigger speed factor weapons do worse/get a roll penalty versus high AC's (for example). Basically are weapons with their respective damage types going to come with their advantage/disadvantage factor as well to complent those of the armor? 2. Are we to expect enchanted weapons to get an innate ammount of "armor penetration" - or to put it differently, i should be expected as a player, controling a party of 6, to mix and match weapons such as all damage types would be available to me (it wouldn't make sense to make everyone use longswords anyway since everyone would fight over the same pieces of loot and it would be horrible management on myaccount). BUT does that mean that if my front line of warriors have all slashing-damage-dealing weapons (or if i just want to solo the game) and i meet up with a heavy armor opponent i have to switch to a blunt weapon which my party is not proeficient with and can't hit for the life of them? I mean meeting clay golems in BG2 when the only blunt-weapon user of my party was my cleric who had horrible Thac0 was fairly frustrating but those encounters were few and far between and added some flavour, i can't imagine meeting that type of situation frequently to be fun however.