laxtonto

Just some stream of conciousness ideas... I love weather in these types of games, but I would like to see it actually have some form of impact. Make a section of the map inaccessable in a driving rainstorm due to the river overflowing. Allow an intense draught to dry up a pond to show a lost chest. Have sandstorms actually cloud your vision. Make things like lightning to be a legit worry if you are incased in steel walking across a flat open plain. Can we finally add some better "evil" skiills to manipulate the overall world? Crafting items and selling them can be used as a way to create income and can easily follow on the path of good characters, but why not allow me to instead learn to counterfit items or currency? Make it essentially have the cost to do as item creation and the same general payout ,based upon a risk/reward creation style, but allow it to better match my character's more nefarious leanings. Crafting is really just either a gold sink for high level useful items or a way to provide characters revenue at lower levels with easier to craft items. Why not allow evil characters or rogeus to benefit the same way. Let them craft fakes that are easily introduced into the economy for a payday at lower levels of diffuclty and also craft much more intricate much more expensive fakes when trying to steal something of great value that can be then traded to the person commissioning the theft for an item of benefit or maybe just stashed in thier stronghold as an item showing thier greatness as a theif. Why not show some variation when dealing animal companions that actually make sense in the world. Why is it a generic wolf when something as intersting as a panther or as simple as a mastiff can add some simple spice to a boring generic concept. Let me pick my animal companion and have that pick have an impact on whether that companion can be in town with me. I have always thought it silly to have someone that can have an animal companion and then just freely walk through town with a drie wolf at thier side an no one freak out. Same can be said for familars as well. Houses... I want to go into all of them... I want to break in any door.. Sorry, just me, but the barred from the inside door is maddening to me. Why can't I instead then just push up the window? Same with cellars and for that matter any opening.

To continue down this dogged path... I think the real issue is not the stronghold itself but how the PC becomes the person stuck with his own stronghold and the associated responsibilities that come with being the landed lord of all he )or she) surveys. NWN2 pretty much forced it on you, and with it be an integral part of the back half of the game it was pretty much a required function to build and strengthen your fortress. By reading the pushback on this topic, I would assume some would not be interested at all in having the stronghold a required part of the game mechanic. If that is true, then how do you add the stronghold while still keeping the part of the community happy that wants it while not forcing it on those who have no interest in land management and commerce? How do you end up with your stronghold is going to be the biggest part in truly building PC buy in of the concept. If it is given to you for no reason, then it can easily become an annoyance or burden. If it becomes essential to the game mechanic you turn off a subset of fans who don’t want to be lord of the manor. Finding the right balance is key and I am not real sure on how you can do it without some form of aristocratic title or divine motivation. Building the adequate reasoning that falls within the dynamics of the world and does not raise the PC to godlike status will be a hard balancing act. Needless to say, I fall much more into the "I want to be a lord of the manor and final arbitrator of justice in my little part of the world and have my minions run the keep while I am away" camp than most. I just prefer to have some form of fallback commerce or give and take decision making environment to deal with when I am not in the mood to go and quest and progress the story line. With that being said here are some of my thoughts that I would love to see implemented: I would love to have first person type view of just the treasure room that you can get individual personal trophies hung or placed in. In a word of epeen and people wanting achievements I would love to have a personal hall of fame in my stronghold. Borrowing a little from the great game Evil Genius, let these items give a subtle bonus to your subjects all the while slowly building infamy among the evil characters and renown along the countryside that would slowly have more powerful and better equipped NPC's attacking or just trying to sneak in and rob the stronghold to acquire your stash of loot. If you keep finding these classic epic weapons or armor or artifacts, that you can't/don't equip and yet you take then back and leave them in the stronghold, after a while people with sticky fingers will try to take them. It would be a borderline gold sink. Either you keep expanding your forces, keep spending on making it thieve proof, keep winning the hearts in minds of your subjects or at some point a great robbery or an unprecedented raid will take place (I would love to see a dragon attack a stronghold and the PC try to fight it off with the help of his guards and ballista...). I would love to see a dynamic setup that would allow a PC's stronghold to exhibit influence over nearby communities or influence specific traders or merchant guilds. As you build your stronghold, say in a nice cold bleak mountain province, a jeweler comes calling and wants to establish residence. Do you protect him from the jeweler’s guild when they demand him to join? Do you pay the fees for him? Can you build a guildhall for the jewelers and then use that influence in the 2 great cities on the map? There is so much that can be tied to being a landed lord that tends to get pushed to the side. I would like the see some recognition of the power or influence of the PC without it getting to the point that all the NPC's just bow to you in awe as you approach. It would be great to make the location, design, and even what buildings/shops you have in your stronghold have both positives and negatives. If you have a tanner, yes he makes hide armor types but also there is a great stench to the place and no one else will want to build or live close to him. On the flip side he also can provide leather for skilled craftsman so your farmers may have better shoes, your cavalry better or cheaper saddles. This would only take a little bit of forethought but it could make a legitimate dynamic environment. I don’t want a generic stronghold on a bleak peak (actually I might, but I want a choice!!), but instead I would like to put a little thought into where I am going to build. Are we taking over an existing structure? Are we taking a ruined keep and fixing it up? Are we just rolling into a town and saying "Ohh by the way, you are all my subjects now. Where are my taxes!?!?!?!" Having a choice makes the roleplaying side easier to sell to the PC. If I am an evil character I would love to take over the seaside town of pleasentville and slowly morph it into a haven of commerce and thievery best suited in the likes of Amn. If I am playing a paladin I would I rather rebuild an abandoned or evil fortress or build my fortress of light? Each PC should have the ability to use their own personal style to influence the selection of their stronghold. Many of the mechanics as far as placing building would be the same, but the general shape of each could be different. Have it so that as your population in your stronghold increase you can actually tell. At some point there will be houses being built and eventually there will be a foregate area that pops up just outside the walls as the population outstrips the room inside the stronghold. That should once again have a positive and negative impact to the stronghold itself. Simple issues like the people in the foregate have now filled the moat with trash and it is no longer a viable defensive structure or the added crush of people outside has led to the need to create a hamlet that could require their own small bailey and could force you to choose between sending forces to protect them and patrol the roadway or to better use those men elsewhere. I am not asking to do this in such a scale that would take over the entire global map, but even having 1 or 2 or 3 zones that could be transitioned to that are in fact part of your authority would be something interesting to fool around with. More than anything I just don’t want the stronghold to be just a place I go to drop off my gear and swap out companions. Why would a companion just hangout and wait for me to come back anyways? Why not force me to only take so many people with me, but if you don't give them something to do or leave them for too long they go off and adventure on their own? Why can’t I assign my non-active NPC party members to go do much weaker quests while we are away and then go from being the person that walks ups to the "quest board" and grabs them and goes traipsing off into the wilderness to the guy paying for and selecting that quest to be put out there for other adventurers. I want the stronghold to mean something.. Maybe I am asking for too much and what I really desire is probably going to be closer to a standalone game. The problem is that the only way you can mesh two totally different gameplay environments, a 3rd person classic RPG and city/world manger simulation, is to do it very well to the point that they are seamless. That is a daunting task, but something I hope to see pulled off.

My only concern is that it is too easy to make a stronghold an always positive attribute in a character's develop and hierarchical status within a game environment. Where are the drawbacks and failures to tend to be common with new settlements or isolated towns/provinces? I LOVE strongholds for gameplay and the added complexity that having a more world-centric viewpoint that inevitability comes with them, but most are set so that failure is not ever a real option. There is no real decision process or risk to force a true emotional buy in with the stronghold. The problem I have seen in the previous games is that strongholds become a repository of just stuff and a forever forward moving economic machine that has a self-perpetuating economic environment that essentially "gets too big to fail" because there is no real emotional attachment to them. I would prefer to have a system that will allow shops to fail, to have a fledgling stronghold to be wiped out and looted ( including all the senseless goodies a PC left there because it is an endless storage space), or to have a uprising within your stronghold due to poor management or outside manipulation. Make the stronghold important enough that there are legitimate issues with leaving it unprotected or in poor condition. NW2 had a fun stronghold, but the entire goal was to build towards that final battle. Wouldn't it have been maddening to instead when you were out on an adventure to have the lizardmen to have stormed your unprotected keep with weak poorly equipped soldiers because you spent more on trying to boost the initial economy and merchants? Have it so you would have to come back and either hire a tracker or track them yourself to reclaim your lost items before they were dispersed to the wind on some set time frame? Make it one of those things that you receive word from the stronghold that something has happened and you can either ignore it and face the repercussions or drop what you were doing and go back. Make it so that you lose progress in your current quest to go back and defend your home. If you don’t care about it, then losing the items there is not an issue, but if you are attached to the stronghold or what you have lost then you really have a legitimate choice to make. I would love to see the PC have some choice of location of where they are going to have a stronghold. If you are in an arid desolate mountain environment, I want to see you forced to mine and trade for resources instead of having the generic farm and have a bonus to say forging. If we are on the coast, I want to see the need to further develop the costal defenses and breakwater to make sure sea trade is viable while receiving a boost in the amount or quality of goods going through your stronghold. If they can pick 5 or 6 specific areas and have directly tie in to the stronghold, with both positives and negatives impacts, it would allow for a better “feel” for your stronghold. The goal should be to get the PC to have a vested attachment to it. If you aren’t interested in it, then a basic manor in the city might be all you need and the option to play with or without the stronghold should be there in the initial game start. (sorry for the Holy Wall o'Text Batman!!)