I haven't played SWTOR but in almost every other MMO they have had a bad system of inventory management, armour breakage and merchant interface. I can't believe WoW still has subscribers with the awful quality of their gear management system, nevertheless everyone has to copy them.

I remember in Fallout 3 having to go hunting for Super Mutant Masters just so I could get their Chinese Assault rifles to repair my own. And I always had to keep a half dozen or so in my inventory whenever I went into those long dungeons. Really the epitome of a bad system: when you are hauling around useless junk just to make your soon-to-be-useless weapon useful.

My idea of a good system? Gothic! Sure, realism, blah, blah, rabble but at least you didn't have to constantly run back and forth between towns and dungeons to sell all your dead weight and repair your gear.

Lately I've been getting sick of the RPG audio. You are always the biggest bad ass who everyone loves to love but everyone hates to refer by name. Probably a good thing, though because my RPG name is usually Dick Johnson, hearing that all the time would get too hilarious to continue. Kaleid will always be in our hearts. Now Jahiera, if you will accompany me to my quarters for a comforting back rub....

I just noticed that, I will now change the subject of the thread and pretend that I meant it like that the entire time. Hipster Mode: ACTIVATE!

Did you ever play Dink Smallwood?

I'll send you a PM on this.

That's it in a nutshell. Arcanum actually makes a high charisma/persuasion character build a viable option (i.e. the stat really is functional in gameplay, which is one of the things I really like about the game), and the scarring is a random penalty. It would be different if you could get a similar penalty for any stat (like losing dexterity by being hamstrung), but charisma is singled out.

I agree that features like degrading armor or the need to identify items in a Diablo clone bring little but annoyance and repetition to the table. I guess the idea is that it adds realism and depth, but it doesn't really... it's just a tedious task you're forced to continously indulge in that doesn't require any meaningful resource- or micromanagement. Skyrim isn't a lesser game for having ditched degrading equipment, and I feel like the need to identify items in Torchlight, for example, partly stems from the developer's understandable insecurity about the depth of their game. Don't know about Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2, tough, if they've they gotten rid of unidentified items or evovled the feature into something... less pointless.

In TL2, only the rare & unique level items need to be identified with scrolls. Of course the farther you progress, the more of these items you find.... I think they did it to make you feel those items are more important somehow.

Anyone remember (or still play) the roguelikes where you can equip an unidentified item and get its bonuses, but risk it being cursed?

I always liked this. In Baldur's Gate and the Wizardry games, you can use items just fine unidentified, but you won't necessarily know what it's doing. (In BG you can't use any spell-like properties of the item, but you can still wear weapons&armor fine.) In BG, cursed items are all bad, but in the Wizardry games there are a lot of really awesome cursed items, which I think should be done more often. In some cases being unable to remove it is the ONLY drawback to the item (though there are plenty of purely bad cursed items too). I think the super-useful-but-with-a-drawback cursed equipment is sadly underused. Some of the cursed items in Wizardry are the best available, provided you can counteract the health degeneration.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

They also get automatically identified when you level up :)

Don't have to go too far back, as far as I recall Baldur's Gate allowed for this, though that one wasn't a roguelike.

I like the way they do it in FO3 and FO:NV where items wear down and you can repair them, but usually not to 100% by giving up things you find or you can pay an NPC to repair it for you.

It seems natural and you can generally avoid it by not getting hit or not shooting your weapons an excessive number of times. Which adds a bit of strategy to the game that wouldn't otherwise be there.

You mean that really annoying thing in the Fallout games?

No, the really annoying thing in the Fallout games was inventory weight.

You mean that thing that limited how many ruined books I could carry?