Hi Larian and Fans,
Here is a list of ideas I have to improve the game. Let me know your thoughts.
1. 2 short for every long.
2. 2 long rests a day, not 1. Days are too short for people with tadpoles in their heads and long rests are like 8 hours in D&D, not a whole day.
3. Long rest changes day to night or night to day so we can move about by night, allowing us to sneak better into the gobbo camp for example.
4. Food is ONLY able to be used during resting to heal, either short or long. Every HP you heal requires a food or drink item. This makes food different from potions, making them both more important for different reasons. Either this, or make it so that food is required to stave off fatigue and just keep HP recovery to potions and rests.
5. Give us Hit Dice like 5e is supposed to have. I need to heal 10 HP, I roll d8, I get a 5, I eat 5 apples or maybe 1 cheese wheel, I decide to spend a second hit dice, I roll a 7, I'm fully healed and consume a pitcher of water, or something like that.
6. If you rest outside of camp, you risk a random encounter. The more dangerous the area, the greater the risk. Perception checks are rolled if encounter triggered to see if surprised.
7. Limit Fast Travel so that if you are unable to safely get to a Waypoint rune you can't fast travel. This way, I'm not short resting in a hostile gobbo lair or teleporting to camp and back right in the middle of the base somehow getting past tons of enemies. Thus, short resting in a dangerous place might actually be a necessity. Find a corner and hope they don't find you.
8. Stop using "I'm tired, let's call it a day" to let people know a dialogue can be triggered. Instead, just have the dialogues able to be triggered in some sort of order. Whenever you go to camp, if dialogues are available the exclamation appears. With 2 long rests a day and dangerous resting outside of camp, players will be forced to camp more often to trigger dialogue. Even short resting in camp would be safe so people might go to camp for short rests too. Either that, and more preferred, just uncouple key dialogue from having to go to camp at all. Just trigger the key dialogues on the road or whatever just like you do now with many of the convos.
9. Auto-Search Area feature. As you are moving about the map, your character(s) are auto-searching around you within a 30 foot radius, or something of that nature. The rolls are hidden, so players do not know if the characters succeed or fail. Every mundane item is still on the screen and is able to be picked up, but important items all have a difficulty number. This would include even common weapons, armor, lockpicks, etc. If the characters roll high enough to beat the difficulty of the item, those items are highlighted in the room so players can see them easier and know they are good items and worth something. This would negate players having to play a Hidden Objects game to find all the good stuff in a room. If they succeed in the roll, the items are highlighted and can be picked up. If the characters fail to meet the item's difficulty, the item is undiscovered and cannot be found even if you manually search for it. This would be very true to tabletop D&D. DM makes you roll a Perception check to search a room. If you fail, you don't find the hidden object. Period. If you succeed, you find it and can pick it up and take it if you want. I have read many posts, and there are many people who dislike this current treasure hunt method of opening every empty container and looting every body that has nothing but junk on it or nothing at all. This Auto-Search area feature would provide players with a much better and faster paced gameplay plus provide replayability because in different playthroughs your different characters might find different, special items. Items of great importance should have lower difficulties so that it is more likely to find them or impossible to not find them. If you can implement this feature for a room full of traps, like in the Dank Crypt, you can do this all throughout the game to make our lives easier.
10. Limited Inventory. It is ridiculous how much stuff you can carry, and it makes managing inventory a hassle. Instead, limit the inventory. I have recently been doing a playthrough where I am limiting myself on inventory space and I'm only picking up items that are actually worth something. What I am finding is that you only need roughly 30 inventory slots per character in total if you aren't picking up and carrying every little key, book, scrap of paper, fork, knife and spoon. So I say, give each character their equip slots and maybe 6 inventory slots to start. Then give each type of pouch, sack and backpack a certain number of inventory slots as well, so if you pick up a pouch or backpack you can carry more stuff, which makes more sense. Each character can only carry 1 backpack at a time and maybe 2 pouches. Provide players with the ability to find 1 or 2 pouches in the prologue. Thus, if each character gets 6 base inventory slots without any carrying items, and each pouch provides 2 slots, that's a total of 10 inventory slots per character and that's without a backpack. Now, if a backpack provides maybe 10-30 slots, depending on the size of the backpack, each character could easily carry 20-40 items at a time. That times 4 is still a sizeable amount of items. Add to this proper weights for items, like a suit of leather armor weighing 10 pounds and ringmail weighing 40, like they should, and proper D&D 5e weight limits (5x's Strength and once exceeded the character's move is reduced by 10 feet), and suddenly you won't be picking up and storing all sorts of useless items you can only sell for 1 GP anyway, and inventory management won't be so clunky and cluttered and full of junk, AND people won't be lugging around 10 suits of armor per character because they won't want their speed reduced. This also gives backpacks, pouches, etc. more meaning and purpose. In my playthrough where I'm limiting what I pick up, I'm finding inventory management so much easier simply because I'm not picking up all sorts of 1 GP item. Guess what, if I don't pick them up, I still wind up having enough GP to buy better gear at the shops. So picking up a bunch of stupid, useless junk is meaningless and just slows the game down and makes inventory management a pain.
11. Adding to Point 10, Take All should NOT include all useless junk items like skulls, spoons, bones, knives, etc. I say create a Take All button with a GP value indicator on it that the Player can set. So if I only want to Take All items of 5 GP value or higher, then I will pick up only those items that are 5 GP value or greater, leaving behind all items that are pretty much worthless. Thus, it will make my inventory management easier because I won't just Take All and grab all the dumb items I don't really need to pick up, lug around, and sell for practically nothing. It's just useless clutter. If you are going to keep these items in the game for immersion value, at least give me a way to easily NOT pick them all up. Right now, it's easier to just pick them all up by hitting Take All, but then I wind up cluttering up my inventory with useless junk I don't want and frankly isn't hardly worth the GP I get by selling them. Either get rid of all the useless junk entirely, or make it easier to NOT Take All of those items. Letting the player set the value allows players who are scavengers to pick up every little item and sell it. More power to ya!
12. Adding to Points 10 and 11, implementing limited inventory would also allow you, Larian, to combine several elements into 1. If each character only has maybe 5-40 inventory slots, you could easily fit all of the characters' inventories on the left side of the screen, stacking them one above the other with your main at the top. Start from left to right, equip slots for head, neck, torso, hands, cloak, rings, ranged, etc., just as on the Character Sheet screen except removing the character's full image from the display to allow more room. You don't need the full image for inventory management and equipping characters. Show stats for changes on the right, so if I equip a new set of armor it shows me my Defense total in a box to the right of that character. So similar functionality to what you have now on the Character Sheet screen. Same with weapons' To Hit and Damage Values, etc. Then, on the left, show each characters inventory slots. Only show slots available to them. So, if no packs or pouches, they only have 6 item slots available on the right to put items. If they have 2 pouches, they have 10 total item slots to use. If they have a really good backpack, they have 40 slots, etc. That's 4 rows of 10 slots, easily able to be fit onto a screen even if you have 4 characters with 4 sets of 40 slots plus equip slots and stats. This would make it so much easier to equip characters and pass items back and forth between them without too much hassle, and it would reduce the total inventory clutter that we have now. Weight limits and total weight would be below each inventory showing how much of a penalty you are getting to movement (-10, -20, -30, etc.). Finally, provide a View Character Button to allow players to pull up a window with their character's image so that if they want to see how their character looks with the equipment they are putting on them, they can do so. This would be as an option for cosmetic purposes only, and it would be in this window that you would select whether you want your helmet to be displayed, etc. In other words, I don't need to always see the full image of my character when I'm equipping them. Let me equip, then view one character at a time and close the preview window so I can manage items more easily without always looking at my character. The Inventory Screen pics you have now for inventory and equipping characters works just fine for most instances.
13. Multi-Select, Drag And Drop Items. We absolutely need the ability to hold Shift and select multiple items to move from one character to another and from our characters to the shopkeeper. Forget the Wares feature. Give me this functionality and we're good. Just let me hold Shift and select whatever I want to move, and then let me drag the items and drop them from one inventory to another. We don't need a Wares feature if you limit inventory and provide a Multi-Select function.
14. Reduce the repetitive conversations. I don't need to hear "I care about our lives; our FUTURES!" said a thousand times over and over as I'm moving around in the Druid's Grove. I actually just want to kill them all to shut them up because they just have the same convo over and over again. One time through the convo is enough. After that, just have there be some sort of ambient background conversations going or something to simulate that people are living and breathing and talking and going about their daily lives. Also, shopkeepers don't need to say the exact same thing over and over again every time I need to buy/sell something. The halfling in the grove doesn't need to tell me each time that there are others in need. Once is enough. After that, a simple, "How can I help you?" or something super simple is enough.
I'm sure I have more, but this is enough to chew on. I think these are the most important ones to implement. If you could put these into place, I think the game would be a 1,000 times more incredible than it already is, and it would probably make a lot of people happier. I could, of course, be wrong, but after reading a lot of the discussions out here, it seems like this could solve a lot of the present issues.
