KaeseEs

I should say first that I don't think that the fact that 4 of the Ranger's 11 revealed Abilities give bonuses to ranged weapons necessarily makes him unable to step up in melee in a pinch (provided you've put points into the right Attributes and Skills), but you raise a good point. A common choice in classed RPG systems is to give the player some opportunities to either mitigate weaknesses of their character's class or accentuate/amplify their class's strengths. I would expect that PE will offer you this choice via its Talents. What we know about these, quoth the wiki: From this, I surmise that there could be two ways to make your Ranger more competent in melee: Grab some non-class-specific Melee talents Grab some class-specific Melee talents The tradeoff for either of these, of course, would be not enhancing your ranger's ranged abilities.

If new stretch goals were added, how would that work? Would new KS pledges be accepted then? My ulterior motive: I didn't hear about PE until after the KS was done, and I'd rather make a KS pledge than just preorder the game

In my playthroughs of Arcanum, I've never run into a problem with the way combat XP is rewarded (as others have noted, there are a few more wrinkles to it - Drog or Muro at the Terra Arcanum forums could probably give the somewhat byzantine details), even though I usually play charismatic characters. Part of this is just because there's a ton of quest XP and character points to go around, so it takes a bit of doing to make a character that hasn't acquired a fair amount of combat talent by level 20 or 25 (the level cap is 50). Honestly I like to switch to the inferior real time combat mode and run around while my companions murder things for me to prevent my party from levelling up prematurely - eg. I know that Virgil will switch levelling schemes and be set to level 25 after you "talk to" (fool, seduce, murder, pickpocket or various combinations of those, hehe) Min Gorad and exit Tsen Ang, so I don't want to be level 35 or whatever at that point in the main quest or I'll have ended up with a gimped Virgil. You can't dodge main quest XP, and some side quests (eg. those on the Isle of Despair) are only available once, but you can at least dodge combat XP from main quest combat and random encounters this way. Wrt. the various imbalances of Arcanum, it's interesting to note that some of those were patched in rather than out! Eg. a bunch of the mid-late game Vendigrothian guns got nerfed severely in one of the patches. Of course, despite all the crying people do about tech characters (especially gunfighters) being weak, you can pick up lots of mid-late game viable guns pretty early - heck, you can pick up a Hand Cannon within about a half hour of the opening cutscene! The arrangement of the tech disciplines, however, is another matter - it just stinks. And called shots never worked as well as they did in the Fallouts.

In a system like PE's where DT is a dominant defensive stat (and to a lesser extent other systems where DT is a significant but not dominant stat), DPS is not the best way to compare two weapons. For illustration, let's look at the even simpler case of a purely DT based defensive system found in unmodded FONV. You might have a chaingun that does twenty damage per shot and fires ten shots per second, and a large bore lever-action rifle that does 100 damage per shot and fires 1.5 shots per second. The DPS of the former is 200 and the DPS of the latter is 150, so it looks like the chaingun is a clear winner, and in a system where DR was the dominant stat it would be. And against "soft" foes with a DT near zero each weapon does near its theoretical DPS and the chaingun is the mathematically better choice. But against enemies with a DT of 15, the chaingun is putting out only 50 DPS and the levergun is doing about 128 DPS, and against enemies with a DT of 25 it's a non-competition. So what looks at first glance like a slam-dunk is actually not so: some weapons are better at chewing through soft enemies, others excel in punching through turtles or "cracking tough nuts", so to speak. On top of this, if DAM of some weapons is balanced such that it can one-shot some enemies, it may be preferable in some circumstances to use a high-DAM weapon even when its effective DPS after DT is applied is lower than that of another faster-firing weapon. On top of this wrinkle, we can add weapon accuracy, making some weapons better close range choices and other weapons better long range choices. On top of this, in some systems we may have variable ammo types, the ability to dip a weapon or projectile in poison to alter or augment its damage with damage of another type, etc. On top of this, in PE we have a variety of different armor types to attack which resist physical attacks from different weapon types with different efficiencies (I don't recall whether this is based on having DR-ish ratings against each attack type, or whether it's a different ACish bonus to the roll that determines whether an attack is a miss/graze/hit/crit). And on top of that, we of course have in PE the various defenses against different classes of attack (deflection, psyche etc). So, to borrow a phrase the team has a great number of "knobs to turn" to make different weapons feel different while remaining useful. As you said in the OP, this will certainly be a challenge to balance, but given the goals the the team has espoused (esp. Mr. Sawyer) wrt. having multiple options with distinct tradeoffs and different effectiveness while retaining viability (I think the video for update #28 goes in to this), and having plenty of content to use each different specialty spread throughout the game (I think it was in a formspring answer where Sawyer noted that "If there's a read ancient poetry skill, there had better be a bunch of ancient poetry in different places" or something to that effect), I think there are good reasons to be optimistic that the result will be satisfying.

I would love it if achievements were awarded similarly to how most fate points were doled out in Arcanum - in short, for doing interesting and consequential things in the world rather than for completing stages of the main quest (Half-Life 2 is the worst offender in the latter category off the top of my head).

I doubt religion can ever be handled particularly well in a crpg. Fallout 2 used it for comic relief, most D&D settings (and nethack, and other games from that era) portray it as a vending machine, Arcanum vaccilated between portraying the pagan religion/cults as vending machines and the not-the-Church church as a cruel joke according to the Gnostic fashion of the time, etc. (To be fair, Arcanum's pair of forays into philosophy are both pretty sophomoric as well, although those may at least be intentional reflections on the setting's Dwarves and on Kerghan rather than accidental reflections on Troika). The problem, as vividly displayed here (especially in the OP), is twofold: pretty much nobody in the modern era, or at least very few rpg grognards, have ever done a serious study of any particular religion, let alone practiced one as an adult (and those which are practiced today in Europe and the Americas are more or less affirmational therapeutic Deism rather than a real faith, with some small-but-loud pockets of morally-assertive but mindless Deism mixed in). Thus both observational knowledge and experiential knowledge are absent. When people use theological language, they don't even know what the words mean, freely substituting folk pseudoknowledge and making logical leaps from foundations of sand. It's cringe-inducing, similar to listening to someone speaking of physics when they clearly don't know what the terms "force" and "power" (much less "uncertainty" or "spin") mean, then going on to assert various absurd feats of mechanical engineering are real based on their faulty major premise. Even in modern prose fantasy (I hesitate to call it literature), the supposedly mature and nuanced portrayals of religion can only be considered so by people who are utterly and brutally ignorant of religion. I refer, of course, to George Martin's never-to-be-finished series Here too we find the author telling us more about himself than about his world or ours, and the attempt at sophistication by taking a purely anthropological approach and asserting little about the reality of the world is both shallow and unsatisfying. (In a similar vein, the author's portrayals of women and (ab)uses thereof in the plot are mostly pretty shallow and I have no idea how they are so widely praised. Maybe because the fanbase enjoys luridity and Shyamalan-esque shenanigans to care? The series' "moral grey areas" are often inexplicably complimented too despite the cardboard cutout portrayal of most characters and actions. It's like Social Text after the Sokal affair: a complete lack of self-awareness exhibited by people in a bubble who nonetheless make sweeping assertions and ignore anything contrary to their preconceived conclusions). There has been one real attempt to portray religion in an RPG in a less crappy way as mentioned earlier here: the Honest Hearts DLC for FONV. It's shallow to be sure, but at least not condescending (nor is it celebratory, of course). It's at least clear that Sawyer tried to get some observational knowledge of his topic before using it in a game (as is his wont, to his credit - I think he even recorded a video explaining his philosophy in that regard, it was pretty neat). There just isn't much there. I suspect the reason for that is the very short timeframe in which the FONV DLCs were made, and their relatively short play-time. Really the more interesting portrayal of religion in HH than the overt portrayal we get from the Mormon characters we interact with is found in the writings of the Survivalist, though - I don't know if it was intentional, but I got from that some insight into the failings of the uniquely American approach to religion characteristic of the 1950s when the **** really hits the fan. It was a deep portrayal of both man's psyche and religion and the interaction between them, while remaining critical enough that it won't disturb your average grognard. I will conclude my post with two thoughts: first, that the style of portrayal of religion found in the LotR books is probably the best way to handle the subject in an RPG (not the later Tolkein stuff, which is more overt and also peels away too many layers a la George Lucas. Frankly that sort of background stuff should remain with the author), and second that I am sorry if I took too much of your time with a long-winded post; I am at heart a gasbag :V

Josh goes on and mentions when combat starts that character either buffs your party or does some other thing like cast a spell at the enemy. This is what usually happens in pnp. You don't pre-buff your characters before you open the door to a room full of enemies. Horse feathers. You've never had your rogue listen to a door before going in? Or peep through the lock hole? Wouldn't you try to find out what you're up against then prep yourself accordingly? Yeah, then the DM rolls two dice, pretends to look at a table and announces your rogue didn't see/hear **** . Same thing that happens if you try to beat down a door or pick the lock when you don't have the key - it turns out the wood door has a steel core or a non-tumbler lock or some other bullpoppy. (Aside: obviously with a quality group this sort of railroading happens much less frequently. Furthermore it ought to be a strength of a good crpg - that the number of times that your skill check is guaranteed to fail should be severely limited, given that your "session" and its quests were planned over a period of months/years rather than hours/days and thus the "DM" has had the opportunity to design in numerous satisfying ways to get through the quest).