BlueSalamander wrote:But weapon specialisation feats represent a big chunk of the Fighter feats. The narrowing down of choice is the reason I came up with the weapon groups. The fighter would have enough feats to specialise in many weapons while the other classes may not need to specialise in weapons at all (even if they specialise they only have access to the simple Weapon Focus). Improved Critical could be changed to a Fighter-only feat (or removed entirely - with Keen weapons it's redundant).
I'm not with Grunker on the "narrowing = bad" thing. On the contrary, I very much think it's a good idea to allow and reward characters to focus on a particular subset of the things the class can do. Whether it's longswords, lightningbolts or limericks.
But if you go that route, you kind of have to commit to it. Letting characters focus on a subset of their abilities, at the expense of the rest, and then failing to cater challenges to, or reward their focus, that's... Not good GM'ing. If you ask me, your system shouldn't allow things your design doesn't or can't take into account.
An interesting idea, but more complicated than just saying 'there you get the Avenger sword'.
Only if you don't have to hand out a lot of Avenger swords.
If you only have to manually generate 10 unique rewards in the campaign, doing it manually is almost certainly much faster than designing a system that can do the same automatically. But based on KoTC I'm assuming we're talking rather a lot more than 10 times, especially when crafting is out and you're considering the inclusion of a NWN-like custom module builder.
Do real-life DMs decide the weapon type on the fly according to the needs of the party?
No and yes. You can't know in advance if the right reward is an Avenger sword or halbard. All you do know, is that the sword version has a higher chance of not being wrong, and that dropping both sword and halbard will screw up your game economy. So to you it becomes a question of whether you:
- Want to screw the 20% [number pulled from hat] who don't use swords.
- Drop both and tank your economy by overloading players with valuable magical items
- Create a system that can determine whether it should be the sword or the halbard on the fly.
I'm not in the same situation when I design tabletop modules for us. I don't have to cater to a multitude of character & party builds, I only have to design my modules for 1 particular party. And I not only know exactly what that party is, I know the players too. So while I absolutely do design both challenges and rewards specifically for the player characters, I'm never in the situation that the Avenger weapon has to be a sword most of the time and a halbard some of the time. I never have questions with multiple, mutually exclusive, correct answers. Honestly, I don't think I could be bothered to write modules for us if I did. I don't envy you.
The sword or halbard problem is just an example of something much larger, though. I don't mean this as an attack on any game or developer in particular, but take IWD for example. The campaign is excessively challenging for a party of wizards or thieves and, amusingly, nowhere near challenging enough for a party of multiclassed wizard/thieves. And it fails to deliver satisfying rewards to all three.
I completely understand why the IWD campaign can't accommodate those three party builds. I very much doubt I could build a module that provided interesting challenges and rewards to traditional AD&D2ed parties, and to those 3 extremes at the same time.
What I don't understand, is the purpose of giving players options that you can't design interesting modules for. KoTC did a pretty good job of not giving players useless or overly powerful options, but that's an extremely rare thing. Especially in D&D-based/derivative strategy CRPGs. Don't let it go to your head, but as far as I'm aware nobody has done as good a job of it as you did in KoTC. Still... I worry about the class inflation of KoTC2. A lot of bad or boring options is - at least in my opinion - not at all preferable to a few fun ones.