I remember having a long discussion on this topic with Falotar on the old cyberlore boards. I was actually very skeptical of the notion at first- partly because I was worried about the 'delayed reaction' effect of heroes stuck in day jobs being unavailable to react to military crises. Over time, though, I've seen a couple of Indie RPGs where heroes-with-craft-skills can work out surprisingly well, and I've really come around to the idea, at least in certain cases.
* 1. The 'delayed reaction' effect is a potential problem if heroes do *anything* besides fight. This is a subject that needs to be addressed as a fundamental question of game premise/assumptions/timescale.
* 2. Sooner or later the map runs out of major monster threats. If you want to keep playing, it would be interesting if at least a few hero classes had craft skills to keep them busy and contribute to the town's economy. Similarly, heroes might want to retire and settle down in their old age.
* 3. Some hero classes really *need* crafting skills to keep them occupied. Healers, for example, shouldn't really be directly involved in combat or warfare at all- they're supposed to be pacifists who abhor and shun violence and love all living things.
* 4. The kingdom may well have a legitimate need for a 'core' of full-time professional soldiers, but in that case, they probably need a regular salary of some kind, and could probably be ordered around directly. In other words, that's not the role of adventurers, but of a city watch or standing army.
So, yeah. Doubleplusgood agreement here.
Personally, I feel the best way to implement this would be to have monster lairs spawn up to a fixed number of 'residents', who would attack the settlement in occasional massed raids rather than a steady trickle. I'd also like to see the severity of those raids start out very low and grow slowly but steadily- up to a limit- as your settlement expanded and they started to feel more threatened by your encroachment. This gives the player a bit of initial 'breathing room'- and perhaps even a chance to establish friendly relations with certain monster groups (such as charming animals using cultists or wooing barbarians using rangers)- while allowing for slightly more challenge in the later game.
I'm guessing this is probably something that would require a fair amount of trial-and-error, but that's my intuition anyways.
100% agreed. What might be interesting is the idea of heroes/characters gaining or losing traits over time, to represent character development. In other words, traits wouldn't just feed into the attractiveness of a given activity, but that the success/failure of particular activities could induce the hero to adopt/abandon associated traits. And I want them to pass the Turing Test. ...And a toblerone.
Oh, while we're on the subject- I would like the game to stop treating henchmen as ever-renewing and oblivious cannon-fodder. It really undermines the game's core 'theme' when heroes are supposed to exhibit something vaguely resembling common-sense-personality-simulation yet peasants and tax collectors blithely allow themselves to be maimed by harpies, rather than running for cover (or, preferably, finding help.)
I wouldn't have described the architectural scheme for Maj1 as inconsistent per se, since it helped to give a sense of how radically different the various religious factions were, and how they came from different historical backgrounds. What I would agree with (as did Fal) was that their effects or requirements should be more pervasive or better integrated in terms of ambience.
e.g, Temples to Krypta or Rogues' Guilds should probably not be associated with flamboyant buildings like the royal gardens or straw-thatched cottages. Where are the oppressive slums!? Temples to Krolm and Fervus or Rangers' guilds should need to be out in the wilderness, or Temples to Dauros and Agrela might furnish craft goods that help promote fancier housing.
Personally, (though this is a minor issue,) given the evidence of a well-populated Eastern Provinces reflected in many of the buildings- royal gardens, temples to krypta and agrela, elven architecture- I'd love to see an Ardanian 'chinatown'. And where are the great cities of the east? (They must be there, but they're never expressly mentioned on the map of Ardania. Curiouser and curiouser.)
Yeah, co-op was fun. The only thing I'd say here is that trade skills might actually make this rather more interesting, in that settlements with different race/temple combinations might have different craft commodities available, thereby making trade much more profitable (as long as you can prevent their associated heroes from going for eachother's throats. *sigh*)
What I'd actually love, rather than a purely randomised map-creation system, is to be able to pick an arbitrary point within the overall Map of Ardania in which to found a settlement, and be able to establish external trade/migration routes, either with known major cities (Volencia, Thallis, Valmorgen, etc.) or with settlements that you established in prior missions (assuming they got large enough to merit it.) Then there are possibilities for war, diplomacy, intrigue, etc. In other words, that the main 'game' would be the micro-scale for which something like a simplied version of Europa Universalis would be the macro-scale (a la the Empire view in Caesar III.)
I mean, I find the term 'sandbox' to be faintly perjorative, since it suggests that the only alternative to brutally railroading the player down a fixed plotline is to keep them in this insulated, safe environment where nothing can really harm them and no outside force will impinge on the character. I think the simulationist approach is just to consider the nature of the larger world and consider how the factions or politics at work there could affect the characters who live there- and conversely, how the player's actions, expressed through particular characters, could help shape the world or setting/situation at large.
Fascinating as I find the idea, I'm skeptical this could be made to work.
1. Some members of the community want radically different things, to the point that getting general concensus on the issue would be a nightmare. I'm glad that some folks enjoyed Maj2 more than the original, but we might as well be from different planets.
2. You might try to see if particular demographics or subsets of the player base exist who *could* be reasonably catered for by a single product offering, but I doubt you'd get an adequate sample size at this stage. I guess that was always a problem with picking up a franchise ten years after the main event.
3. By all accounts, the success of a game is often in inverse proportion to the length and detail of it's design document. (I say this as someone extremely prone to drawing up design documents in hideously excessive detail that I then wind up throwing away most of. *sighs and shakes head*)
There. I have elaborated.
). This is just one example but it shows how a non-questing related game element might translate into a better overall game experience.