Dragon Age Forum News (Mar. 08, 05)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

David Gaider, Designer

A good idea from KOTOR 2 for DA..
I'm not against the idea of splitting PoV away from the main PC to other party members... so long as it was done sparingly and even then only for short periods. The PC, after all, is supposed to be the hero of the story.

There are, however, definitely some grand things that can be done with such a feature.

A good idea from KOTOR 2 for DA..

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what happens if you're not the hero
what if one of your companions is the hero of destiny & you're just a sidekick

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You're always the hero of the story, if not necessarily heroic. Playing a sidekick would be silly.

There is no "hero of destiny" in DA, though. You are not chosen by destiny, by prophecy, by parentage or any other confluence of events whereby you could be pronounced somehow the Chosen One.

A good idea from KOTOR 2 for DA..

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The ONE time in KOTOR it worked well; 'cause it fit that particualr quest plus it wans't overdone.

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And that's how we'd do it in DA, if we do it. Specific instances as appropriate to the quest. The idea would be that it might be fun to split up for short periods, but not that the intention is to role-play a character that isn't your own. So no need to get your collective role-playing pantyhose in a twist or anything.

Time travel....Yes, time travel.....
There is no time travel, nor magic that affects time directly. Just like there is no teleportation (not even for NPC's), no dimensional portals and no resurrection. Zounds! Amazing, I know.

Time travel....Yes, time travel.....
The difference between having resurrection magic and having it so that characters simply don't perish all the time may not make a big difference in gameplay but it makes a huge one in the coherence of the setting.

And we've not stated what kind of death system we're using. Having the "no death unless party falls" system is an assumption (one I wouldn't mind, though, if that's the way we went) just like the "there's four playable races and the fourth one is the mystery race" thing I keep hearing about.

Character advancement/development, character ageing.
Doing a game that took place over a large period of time, complete with jumps forward in time in-between sections, would be kind of neat.

We're not doing that in DA, though. DA centers around a very specific historical event.

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Anyone know of Shadowrun?

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I much prefer the rules of shadowrun in comparison to dungeons and dragons. Everything just seems alot more well rounded. It all fits together. And the way the rulebooks are written are way better too. Source books are written from the perspective of people within the world, describing everything from personal accounts. It works.

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Indeed. The rules are so simple and streamlined that my group tried to adapt the old West End Games Star Wars RPG into ShadowRun rules. the only problem is that ShadowRun isn't really set up for complex melee combat or vehicle combat. But their fire combat rules are second to none.

Anyone know of Shadowrun?
They do have rules to prevent you rolling a bijillion dice, you know. I think it's something like an automatic success for every die over 10 or something like that (I don't have the rulebook in front of me).