jamoecw

think of bags of holding, now what if you made it so that you could deconstruct it for the essence in order to make quivers of holding, that would be cool right? now someone plays the game and decides to make a sling of holding, but of course hurling what is in the sling means everything would come out, either that or you need to actually reach in to pull out what you want, and thus doesn't work. which means that you'd have to always make it that way otherwise someone could make a sling of holding. of course by now you are asking yourself what is so bad about a sling of holding? nothing in it of itself, but if someone can make a normal sized sling of holding why not an over sized one? say one that is large enough to shoot cannon balls, which slingers did in fact do such things, so it isn't impractical. now since cannonballs are siege weapons and balance meant that such things would deal damage through resistances, with the explanation that such massive damage can't just be shrugged off. so now the player is asking why he can't have such a weapon, or maybe magic won't let him, so he asks why he can't make a sling for just that anyway, he has the strength so what is the issue? maybe you can make such a thing, and the damage out of it is huge, and in line with getting hit with siege stuff in the game too, so the person who built up his character to deal massive damage from his greatsword wonders why his weapon is subject to resistances when it does the same or more than the siege stuff. i am not saying that deconstructing bags of holding should or shouldn't be able to get you something else bag of holdingish, it is just an example of how things can get with such a system. i am not saying it is a bad idea, but minecraft is a different game. it has weird logic as far as how mundane things work, like punching trees to get wood, and just by laying out logs you get sticks and planks and such. in a game that holds on to some semblance of realism of how things work, essences is the wrong way to go about crafting.

sounds like i won't be running around in a loincloth and a rusty dagger fighting off guys my exact same size wearing full plate and using my favored weapon for the first few levels. that's a total bummer, next thing you know you aren't going to go from complete novice to elite veteran in a single night while single handedly saving the world by preventing an overly convoluted plan from succeeding by keeping the villain's stalker from stealing the villain's toupee. in all seriousness, i like random, as long as i get what makes sense. i think those of us old enough to have played the original campaign of NWN1 right after beating BG2. constantly facing foes that drop 1gp per 5 while using stuff that could have sold for more if you just grabbed the axes and daggers they were using (or used their arrows to restock your own). random stuff that makes no sense sucks big time. the other campaigns tended to start you off fighting things that didn't use things against you, so that the loot drops made much more sense. IE games = mix NWN = random darklands = fixed

dump stat is an attribute that you don't need. like in DnD a wizard cleric doesn't need intelligence, and thus can take the minimum and it won't have any real noticeable detrimental effects, and the points saved can be put to better use, thus one can drop intelligence to its minimum and raise wisdom to its max and say constitution and end up with a potent cleric, while keeping intelligence at normal and only having above average constitution with high wisdom yields a cleric inferior to the low intelligence one. http://rpggeek.com/wiki/page/RPG_Glossary#D

the numbered things are nice, but things having essences that could be used ends up having other problems. having everything be useful in some fashion for crafting without needing gold for everything is good, but deconstructing things ends up with things like 'why can't i do X and get Y result, the magical crafting stuff is the same basic principal!'

as for ship to ship and fire spells, a fireball spell could save a ship from an unprepared pirate ship pretty easily, all one has to do is aim for the sail. druids could cast spells to give your ship a speed boost, or the enemy ship a speed debuff, or make a storm so that boarding is out of the question. magic becomes pretty important, and a side without it loses pretty much automatically. if you are a pirate and want to take a ship, just use chain lightning of the cannons. without getting into possibilities like alluded to with arcanum (technology and magic don't mix, technological stuff has magical equivalent, etc.) i don't see how you could do a battle where a non caster has any real use other than fodder, that is not to say that there can't be ship to ship combat, but if so either magic is quite different than in D&D or your hands are tied based on plot. in a sequel (of sorts) could be quite entertaining, sort of like a fantasy version of pirates, only you know, better.

(from RPG Codex, but originally SA forums I think) This is really going in a non-standard direction. In D&D I think that the stats are the "realistic" base, with more abstract functions then derived from them, but in PE it's the other way around apparently. deflection is about shifting the angle of your body in response to an attack, dodging AoE is about being mobile. in hollywood people outright dodge arrows and such, but in real life you don't have the time, you flinch in a way to cause a direct blow become a glancing blow while tightening the surface so as to mitigate catching of skin and such and tearing a big chunk. being mobile is about being loose and quickly moving away from danger, which means having a less solid foundation to your stance. the difference between the two is largely psychological, one is about flinching but standing your ground, the other is about not standing your ground but not flinching. they are in fact two separate things that most people lump into one thing because either they have been fooled by hollywood or they don't think about it too hard. after all you don't deflect the effects from a grenade, and fencers that leap about to dodge aren't actually deflecting blows (they're dodging them). they pulled apart the components to DnD and put them back together so as to ensure that every stat is relevant to every class (no dump stats), there is a justification other than gamey balance to the ones i've seen thus far (at the very least as much as DnD), as such it is at least as realistic as DnD in its specifics, and more realistic in overall design (does real life have dump stats?).

depends, does the wizard kill everything in a targeted 30ft radius, while the fighter injures everyone in a set 15ft. radius? if so then i'd say that the fighter is spending too much time, or the wizard not enough. though that is more of a balance between classes and abilities and such.

same animation, the improved one has some wind effects, but that's about it, whirlwind (and improved whirlwind) are supposed to take twice as long to perform as hellball (full round action vs. standard action), you notice this in game with the pause for whirlwind before and after that isn't shown in the video (and it cuts out some of the animation too, taking from about 4 secs to 2.5), and you can move and such with hellball before it has finished its animation. a standard action is what it to swing your sword (3 secs somehow, while 5+ only takes 6, go figure), so pretty much most combat magic in DnD operates off of the principal of equal time for fighters and mages, more so than video games let on with the animations. lore wise there is supposed to be a lot of preparation before hand, for such feats, but it really doesn't scale (making something glow takes just as much preparation as leveling all enemies).

Good comparison. I think some of the claims about massive casting times for high level spells are grossly overstated, but that's just my opinion. High level attack abilities / sequences can be every bit as time consuming as spell casting. Two videos: First, a prolonged attack ability for a fighter - a whirlwind attack (try to imagine the longer sequence required for improved whirlwind attack): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PKgJs5e9u0 and next a high level spell cast by a mage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqEC0m-EAn0 seems like the whirlwind attack actually might take a bit longer to fully implement .... 2secs for whirlwind attack, about 5 for the full animation of the hellball spell. the hellball spell is by far the better move (quite a bit more damage output than 2.5* the whirlwind), but then again mages were a bit OP in NWN, and in DnD at the epic level, so mages at epic level in NWN even more OP. according to lore between levels 5-10 is the retirement level for most adventurers, which makes level 20 (max normal level) legendary, and beyond (epic level) is venturing into demigod hood (the weakest examples of gods made flesh can be taken on at around levels 30-40, depending on class and equipment). as a result epic level abilities for fighters make little sense lore wise (they should be using some type of magic, after all they are in the process of becoming a god at that point), probably something like monk magic (inner magic that lets them do fantastic things, gaining extraordinary and supernatural abilities).

keep in mind that mages generally are weak and frail in exchange for being able to do more damage than warrior classes as well, compared to a ranger wizards were able to do about 35 dpr (fireball at tenth level) while rangers did 18 dpr (longbow, 4 attacks per round) at double the base health and without taking defense or AoE into account (at which point wizards win out easily). the fact that rangers lack spells per day is how they can compete with wiards ignoring defenses (kinda) and do AoE at higher levels, throw that out and you then have to tone down wizards or boost the amount of time it takes them to do things. so with fighters having the same range of time taken for their abilities, that means that wizards must be toned down, which quite a few people don't like (not me though, spells per day thing is overcome with resting too much, which breaks balance and skewed things to make wizards seem more powerful than they were intended to be). so ya there is stuff to not like about such a decision, i can see it.

sounds like the OP is looking for ME2 style casting. in IE a character's round starts when they perform an action, so someone standing around will start casting immediately, if you didn't have the option set to pause after casting and didn't cast a spell that took less than a round to cast, then the person would start to do something else (assuming you didn't turn off AI) which would mean that they might have to wait for the next round to start casting. but in essence that was all it was, spells that cast in less time than a round meant standing around for the rest of the round, or moving, or attacking (which you couldn't do in DnD), much like in ME2 where you had global cooldowns for your spells, but could run around and attack in the meantime. hardly random in either case, the IE games just didn't have a cooldown/round timer so you had to guess (or count, or use autopause). actually that equation doesn't actually work. it is stated that a non automatic firearm can potentially kill multiple people, where as ancient soldier using a spear can only kill one person. the reason given for this is range, which is bogus. the equation only works with equally armed soldiers with equal training, that decide to only fight spaced so as to only allow this to happen, so that a spearman can only reach one person, and a rifleman can hit multiple. very few actual battles did this, and the results often differ from the results from the equation. maybe he read about how colonial era battles were fought and drew conclusions from that, as you would have masses of people lining in front of each other and firing at one another, potentially having the bullet pass through multiple people, but that didn't often happen, and that style of warfare had other factors to throw a wrench in such equations as well.

gauls used chariots to get around the battlefield and didn't fight from them, saxons rode horses and dismounted to fight, though most cultures that used horses in war rode them into battle. most games do mounts wrong in combat, while it is weird to not have cavalry, but i'd rather have them absent than done wrong. that being said i don't see why they can't be eye candy for inns and garrisons and such.

i was hoping that the final battle at the end of DA:awakening was you defending your keep, running off to hot spots to do certain tasks, all while your forces/resources are being expended until you can get to the next hot spot, using all those things you spent the earlier game building up, while choosing what to sacrifice in order to defend to keep (maybe hard decisions like sacrificing your forces to keep the villagers huddled in the keep safe, or conserving forces by and sacrificing the villagers safety). maybe even have it so you can sacrifice your keep's resources to make the battle easier on yourself, or make things harder on yourself to preserve your keep's resources. i found the decisions in the final battle of ME1 to be far more compelling (sacrifice humans to save the council or not, though it could have been phrased better) than in ME2 where it was just your party members on the line, and they had right and wrong decisions (instead of upping the difficulty in order to save your party members, and thus a cost benefit for 'everyone lives' ending).

actually in 3.0 (and 3.5) wizards can discover new spells as long as the DM approves and the wizard does the requisite research stuff (3.0 was mainly time). the language in a spell book is specific to the wizard that wrote it, as it is just something to get the wizard to understand what is the spell, not some universal wizard language. the ability to read someone else's wizard writing is done via a spell, otherwise it is unintelligible. magic comes from the weave, and the god of magic keeps mortals from messing with it, mainly due to the damage done to it from mortals before it was protected. anyone can become a god if they achieve enough power and get people to worship them, or you can defeat a god and take their thing they represent/have control over. charisma is the uberstat since it influences your ability to influence others and gain followers. as they have a demographics where wizards make up less than 5% of the population of the world, and wizards are supposed to be balanced with fighters, which make up about 15% of the world's population. thus with high charisma you can convince a large group of people to fight a wizard for you, which they should be able to overwhelm him just by attacking him 1 after another at 8 hour intervals (a wizard needs 8 hours rest +1 extra hour to study to get spells), eventually he'll run out of spells and end up being weaker than a non PC class (or about 60% of the pop). now take into account that without any moral restrictions you can have arcane spells (with magical healing via bard's spell list while casting in armor) and you have magic, a small army, and physical traits via spells. bards are more numerous than wizards, and nothing says a bard can't also be a sorcerer, with the same key stat those people will have tremendous power for ruling the world, rivaled only by paladins, which with most settings do in fact make up key people in founding nation rulership (and there is even a minor god that was just a really successful bard that aspired to godhood in forgotten realms). as wizard make enchanted equipment (and they are the best at this) they become valued members of an established nation, however due to being vastly outnumbered by fighters, tend to either rule in the shadows, or be ruled by charismatic fighter types. most people just gloss over this stuff, which is why it isn't as well known and generally not used in games. wizards tend not to be that great of adventurers, in 3.0. i think this was due to high level characters having a small kingdom in previous versions, so they gave the class some perks for when they reached this level, but at the same time balanced things so that you still had need to adventure at those levels, plus gaps in the rules for custom content without any sort of structure for extrapolating things in those gaps meant that DMs were loath to venture into those areas for fear of unbalancing things, and kingdoms weren't as much of a perk as it was before (what with needing to run off for every little thing, since unless you had some great nation you didn't have the resources to have someone else handle simple things like a goblin invasion, and thus there was a gap in power levels, so the adventure would have some major boss for a whole party, or the DM would need to run an adventure of one for each party member to deal with weak periodic stuff for a kingdom). DnD had plenty of lore, and given that 3.0 and up didn't feature a setting that meant it was lore for all sorts of how the world works sort of thing, but the mechanics didn't always match up as you started to get off the beaten path, which lead to confusion on how to handle things that didn't fit neatly into existing rules. which meant that it didn't usually find itself in games, and thus has been largely forgotten, but DnD did have lore behind all of that stuff you talked about to make a more sensical world.

I actually already agreed with that exact situation. The ability to restore a burst of health is quite the tactical ability. In the grand scheme of things, it's very much like a time-altering block ("Ha-HAH! That crossbow bolt's effects on this person suddenly NEVER HAPPENED!"). However, that in absolutely no way changes the fact that an entire role dedicated to constantly granting people bursts of undamage is not necessary, except as a balance to the design of the expectation for characters to NEED more health than they actually possess. No one's against the sheer ability to heal. It's the role which is a bit unnecessary. As "It's fun and tactically different to be able to heal" is already covered by the sheer ability, without "this is what you do all the time, and what your class progression is completely centered around" being thrown into the mix. There is no fundamental difference between the relationship of potions to the character in the single-player Diablo-esque scenario and the relationship between the healer ROLE and the other characters in the healer-class RPG scenario. Either the desire to be a health battery demands inadequate health pools, or inadequate health pools demand a health battery. If you remove either one, the other becomes blatantly arbitrary and imbalancing. Also, I'd just like to emphasize that I'm simply making a point here. Nothing more. There are games without dedicated healers, and all's well, so obviously they aren't needed. That isn't to say I'm just trying to make a big deal out of this, and I don't play games with dedicated healers. All that aside, they're either necessary, or they aren't. And they aren't. Not without being arbitrarily MADE to be necessary. Honestly, I just wish that, at the very least, they were given a better offensive capability-to-healing ratio. The problem you run into is either: A) They're a weak, obvious target, so the enemies focus fire them and take them out, leaving the rest of your party screwed because the game's design made sure it fabricated a need for a dedicated healer (all because you lost a single party member), OR B) The enemies simply focus fire the people your healer is trying to keep not-dead, basically burst-killing them, leaving your weak, lack-of-offensive-capability healer to pointlessly toss pebbles at the enemy. Obviously those things could happen to varying degrees, but I had to use slight extremes for the factors at play to actually be evident. PoE was single player, and the role of a healer is to prevent losing, not to win, thus someone who can't lose without someone to bring about a win is pointless. in JA2 they did have dedicated healers (some mercs were no good at anything but healing), thus dedicated healing classes are entirely possible with the JA2 method, the difference is the trade off in tactical power vs. strategic power. in JA2 they made it possible to do what you needed to do without a healer, but a bastard healer could suffice to boost tactical capability by giving a boost of health in combat to someone who needed it. yet during rest a dedicated healer could get a party on its feet faster, and mitigate long term debuffs (that third class you were looking for is the debuffer, also known and the anti healer since it helps cause damage without doing damage). so a dedicated healer in BG could be used to boost a health bar of a teammate, and could be used to fix a few debuffs, after battle they boosted health recovery rate. bastard healers couldn't perform in battle as well as a healer, even if your entire team was a bastard healer rotating so that you were only down 1 man while healing (like having a dedicated healer), and ensuring some one was always casting (to counter the less number of spells they had), and they would be performing fairly close to full fighters when fighting, so no loss there, they wouldn't be healing at the same rate as the dedicated healer. they should have enough spells to counter any debuffs, and overall their health point regen increase for the party while resting would be similar. so overall the tactical advantage went to the dedicated healer in the BG style method vs. the bastard healers, while they had the same strategic level ability, overall you were weaker in combat with bastard healers than with a dedicated healer. in JA2 a party full of bastard healers would have better response time and thus reduce the health loss during a fight, which is an opposite net effect from BG style bastard healers, while a dedicated healer is better for resting than the bastard healers, while in BG they are the same. so in BG there is no give and take when picking between bastard healers instead of a dedicated healer, instead it is always inferior, thus the choice is more binary in BG (healing in party = at least one dedicated healer). diablo 2 had a healer class, but that class was outshone by health pots, which was what combat was balanced around, so the healing aspect of that class became worthless. healing classes that sacrifice in order to heal, but fails to match the existing cost benefit worth of the balanced method of healing is too weak to be worth anything, while being too strong will make the other classes worthless as well. ultimately sitting back and undoing damage shouldn't be the issue, as it is a play style that some find fun.

so why not just grab some trollish blood and fix up the eye you lost last winter? if injuries happened with every critical you would accrue them far too often, if removing them is as trivial as in DA then why bother? to do it right you need to balance it just right, and have the situation about the injury back you up story wise, random stuff seems like not the way to go. part of a quest, maybe.

I don't want to replace a healer with a potion. I would like to be able to take an extra damage dealer instead of a healer. And in most games I could. And in this game I probably could too. The problem is that I don't have a good way of healing up my character out of combat. Well anyway, it would be nice. Probably off-topic here though. that was what was nice about JA2, giving someone some rudimentary skills could suffice for the mid combat healing and let him focus on doing damage. a dedicated healer was better for out of combat healing, but it wasn't needed to the same degree as in BG. PoE's potions work in this regard as well, as the damage they deal ends up healing them, when they want it (unlike vampirism), and slower than you took damage so as to prevent the potion spam. existing BG style potion/healer system has a dedicated healer easily outpacing the benefits of potions (due to rarity and cost, both gold and time usage) both in battle and outside of combat. while at the same time the potions are superior in battle to the bastard healing classes, yet inferior out of battle (due to rarity and gold cost). given that extra damage dealers kill the enemies faster, you take less damage in battle, and thus should need less healing in battle, but as you said you still need out of combat healing, the BG system is backwards to both JA2 and PoE.

that would be something to see, i do like his comments and watching him tackle things for the first time as a game developer. definitely more entertaining than him reading the manual.

How big the dungeons are is irrelevant. Going half way through a dungeon and then having to turn back, is a hassle. Firstly due to having to travel back and forth over the place you've already been to, secondly because it interrupts the "flow" of the game. It's annoying to be interrupted when you are having fun. It's not going to be like Diablo where you get town portals or something. In a game where you control 6 (I think?) character, I wouldn't have through actually having a dedicated "healbot" healer would be a problem. It's different in a game like World of Warcraft where you play a single character. Though actually, I'm against being forced to bring a healer along with me*. So I want some way to heal up my characters after a fight, a cheap or free alternative to bring a healer along. Whether that's potions, or auto-healing or bandages I don't care. *I'm actually against being forced to bring any particular character along since I only want to bring companions which I like along with me it sounds like you have never played JA2 at all, they had dungeons of a sort, and you could clear them out without returning to town, in fact there was less downtime than in BG in a dungeon with all of the resting you had to do. the secret is that the whole dungeon was balanced against the whole health bars of the team, not so much balancing a fight against the health bars, and the number of fights on the number of healing spells you should have. you could even finish a fight with no damage done against equal level opponents, as positioning, timing, and use of resources was more important than most rpgs. you could spray the enemy with lead to boost the chances of a hit, which decreases their chances of hitting you, but spending that much ammo means that later in the game, or maybe even in the dungeon you will have less resources and have a harder time, while you could go the marksmanship route and be efficient with your ammo, but as that means lower dps you need to worry more about defense and sticking to cover, you could also try the whole sneaking thing and get close enough for some stealth kills so as to focus on a few at a time, the thing is you had loads of tactical options so you could adapt as the situation demands if something does go quite right early on in the dungeon, in most rpgs you have to return to town and memorize different spells. in JA2 you could decide not to have any healing at all, and meet with the same success as BG when not having any healer classes. now if you gave some rudimentary first aid to someone and lacked a dedicated healer, you could do better than in BG with one of the lesser healers. now if you went with a dedicated healer in both then you'd have roughly the same success in both. the reason for this greater amount of options is the increased importance of stabilization and basic first aid, without removing the value of dedicated healers, thus it allows more options for your party. as for just ripping JA2 healing out of JA2 and throwing it into BG, or ripping PoE healing potions out and putting it into BG, it does seem off, but on the other hand i think both are better potion wise than the current BG potion system, though i am not sure which would be better in BG. in either case though learning from them and making a new system would be preferable.

Does that really fit what Project Eternity is though? I mean, I could see it working in something like Wasteland 2 but healing spells and potions and pretty much stables of these kinds of games. I don't see why it wouldn't work. After all, JA2 is also a RPG in a way. There is a problem with peoepl getting so accustomed to playing a specific game with the same mechanics over and over, that they start to associate the mechanic with the genre. Frankly I think that causes stailness and lack of creativity. True, a game with a more JA2-like health/injury mechanic WOULD play differently. Resting and visiting town would beome more iportat - as well as activities you can do while there. Battles would be more dangerous, but also smaller in scale (you wouldn't fight endless hordes) And heal-bot classes would be gone. That is something I wouldn't mind, as it's especially horrible in MMO's. Over-specialized, 1 trick ponies who are boring to play. Stand behind the fighter and heal, heal, heal, heal, heal, heal. It's also downright silly when you think about it. healing classes would be different, even in JA2 you needed healers, their importance would be to keep people alive in combat, and to aid in their recovery outside of combat, the general idea of clerics from PnP would be kept, but the whole no downtime thing would be scrapped. i only see good from this, unless we are talking about diablo style cRPGs. i could see clerics grabbing some mobility over say the fighter, so they could get to injured people quicker, and i could see lesser healing classes being something other than a waste of space in a party with a dedicated healer.

as for potions expiring, diablo 3 did this by having health orbs, the more you kill the more was dropped. so if you were a barbarian that threw caution to the wind and slew everything in sight, you healed more and faster. so by raising your offense you raised your defense, except against bosses that didn't use minions, also by killing things faster you took less damage, so offense was better in almost all situations. so if you planned ahead and ensured that you had enough defense so that you didn't have to rely on the enemy to save you, you killed slower, and thus was inferior, essentially penalizing planning and foresight. ultimately this holds true of potions expiring, which would effect gameplay, making it harder to gain offense as it is so good (assuming the devs care about balance), and then having everything hard to kill, which means that things become slow and ponderous, some would say boring. in diablo 3 the devs needed to keep things fast and action packed, so they eschewed balance in exchange for such, in the end kill happy characters were better at all but the hardest difficulty level (which favored certain 'broken' builds until they were nerfed, last i checked which has been a while barbarian reigned supreme for solo play). as for healing in the midst of battle, perhaps something akin to PoE mixed with JA2. say have something gain power when you do damage, and you can use it to gain health over the course of a few rounds up to half the damage you have taken or equal to the amount of current health that you have, whichever is less. that way the more you fight (and thus the more healing you should need) the more you can heal, but it probably will at best offset the damage you are currently taking if attacked, and damage first taken will always leave its mark until properly healed.

well what if you had a necromancer who raised those that died to natural causes, and used them to defend and serve the living, doing all that was dangerous and unwanted to ensure a better life for the community? well his actions would be good, but since he does necromancy he is automatically evil. so the paladin that rides in and slays him and crushes his army leaving the community to fend for itself and woefully ill equipped to survive is automatically considered good. most cRPGs will have the paladin be misguided, and the necromancer misunderstood, just to muddle things up. but those that kill people that they sincerely think are evil just because tend to be considered evil, so the necromancer has to have some skeletons in his closet otherwise we would see the paladin as evil. without all the extra stuff it is hard for us to see the perspective of those in the story due to how disconnected we are. take new vegas, if the slavers only crime was slavery, even if the slaves were never mistreated our modern method of determining who was evil would demand that they were evil, because slavery is evil. so making them good aside from that means that would make people angry since it would seem that new vegas was pro slavery propaganda, so they need to have the slaves mistreated. which means that the opposing side needs have some evils attached to it in order to muddle things up and make it a real choice instead of a simple good versus evil choice. you see necromancy is something that isn't real, so we can make a detached decision about it in a game, but slavery is real, so it has baggage that prevents it from being used as the sole means of making something evil, other things need to be added to reinforce its evilness otherwise you might get a 'hot coffee' incident costing money and getting the game pulled from shelves due to being immoral. thus you can't an immoral thing in the game on its own without casting it in an evil light, and if you have too much evil it gets pulled due to being too graphic (manhunt). that leaves cartoonish evil as the only evil society will accept in its games, and thus evil in the games is just silly, while good can be thoughtful and meaningful (like the sacrifice one for the many question). i hope people reading this understand what i am saying i am being vague and rambling, mainly so i don't start a flame war or get banned or something like that, if asked about stuff i might get more specific, but i purposefully stayed pretty vague about most stuff.

in the original M&B when the mod was made (in beta) the best stuff in game was only found at merchants and it was rare and expensive, but random. so you would get the money and then run around to the different shops looking for a great helm or a charger or some such. you'd go to one and then another, then another, so on and so forth all in a big cycle until you found it, just hours of traveling. so telling someone what you want and paying for them to get it was great. in BG not every merchant had unlimited +1 bullets, so if you needed more then you had to find a merchant that had some, wouldn't it be nice to ask someone where to get them and have a quest to go to some smith or something. what if you wanted another full plate suit? couldn't you ask someone for it and have them generate a quest for you to go off somewhere to secure some smith's services or some decent iron or something. things made with forgotten lore i can see, and those things should be rare, but mundane for the world seem like something you should be able to get somehow, and not just randomly.

What I would give for a game, where you can actually say, "I want a _" to a shopkeeper, and you could get it. Whether it is common, rare, or original. As in, I want another set of full mail armor, as I bought your last set, but have another member of my group that doesn't want to wear splint mail anymore. Or, could I get another Crossbow +1? Or, "I would like a sword that does fire damage and is at the minimum, +2." And then, the price would be calculated, perhaps you would have to wait for a period, but you could get it. That would be grand. Maps!!! Yes, I would also LOVE these... So, maybe you could find a really famous adventurer, or traveling scholar, and they could mark locations of potentially lucrative ruins on your map for a price. Or, maybe you could go to a cartographer, that would provide you a detailed map showing all sorts of things the normal one doesn't. Maybe having this resource would decrease your travel time and or chances of being ambushed... Or even increase how much rest you could get in the wilderness, as you could use a good map to find good places to camp during your travels... Maybe you could hire local guides that would show you to possible ruins, or teach you shortcuts to get around the region surrounding their village/town/city. someone made a mod for mount and blade (the original) back when it was beta, and you could browse every weapon in the game, and tell the merchant to get it for you, you pay a price and then come back a couple of weeks later and pick it up, very awesome mod. running around looking for a specific weapon or piece of armour gets old fast, more games need to do something like this (one of the reasons i like crafting so much in rpgs).

A good 40 yard dash is around 5 seconds, so its safe to say a 30 yard dash will be around 4 seconds. It makes a lot of arrows in 4 seconds, I know some masters archers may manage that with 30 pounds bows. But in 4 seconds I think that most good archers with a strong bow would manage only one good shot. It think it's safer to say that a ranged weapon work as good at range as a melee weapon work in close quarters. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o9RGnujlkI as for masters? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1KC1Os-_NE though if we assumed the same level of proficiency, we would have to really curb their ability to do other things in order to make it balanced with melee. Clearly bows at 90 pounds. Com on there no way you would do anything to an armored guy. And this is mostly a very close range bow, I'd say by the video below that it's utterly inefective beyond 30 yards. You may get one shot at 10 yard before the guy is one you and 2 shots if hes at 20 yards So I do think it may still be equal to a melee weapon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SycS4QSH9Ek If you look carefuly, the drop for 10 yards is really big. that isn't drop, he's aiming down. besides aren't we talking about shooting fast at 30 yards? so a 90# bow at haf draw shoots well enough for 30 yards, a 180# bow shoots slower but can shoot from further away unless you are using quarter draw to shoot fast at close range. now keep in mind it is compared to 2 hander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWYT5-8zyT4 most hits aren't too forceful, so not a lot of armour penetration there either.