Well, there are randomizers for many (usually console) games that have appeared in recent years. For example, there's one for Zelda: A Link to the Past, where depending on the seed, you might get the Cane of Somaria and Silver Arrows (normally late game items) early, or it might be a while before you find the lantern (normally the first item you find) or first sword (normally obtained before you encounter any enemies).

A randomizer for Alpha Centauir could work on similar principles. In any case, I think this doesn't need to be a core part of the base game, and could work fine as a third-party program; run it with a seed and other options (should earlier engines be guaranteed to appear before later ones? should there be a chance of Ascent to Transcendence appearing "early" in the game, or should it be guaranteed to not be possible to build it until much later?) Also, the randomizer would give every civilization the same tech tree, so that the civilizations would be on even footing; you wouldn't have one civilization having access to a key advance much earlier than the others.

Yes, there would be options, like the ones I mentioned in that parenthetical note. Having Ascent to Transcendence available right away (well, after someone builds Voice of the Planet, which would also be immediately available unless one randomizes the placement of Secret Projects within the tech tree) would lead to some very short games.

And of course, if this is a third party mod generator, not everybody would be forced to play with it; only those who want to make their games more chaotic and/or who might be bored with the vanilla tech tree would install it. To put it another way, what I am proposing here is a mod (or technically a program that generates them), not a change to the base game.

I can't really think of any particular game right now, but if we were to talk about rpg games where you could create your own character, I would really appreciate an option that allowed you to change the character's height rather than just sticking to a default height.

Maybe it's the kind of RPGs I've played, but I can't think of any where the height matters.

It's actually just a nitpick of mine haha.

Anno 1404 and 1800:
Just bug fixes man. Those games are so bugged it makes grown men cry.

STALKER series:
I would give the faction system more permanence and consequences. You can join a faction and fight battles with them, but at the end it doesn't change anything in the game. I would make it so you can take over areas and gain benefit from that, and of course have those areas then be vulnerable to attacks. Also fighting bandits it would be cool if they become afraid of you if you keep defeating them, yet have bandit squads hunt you, and you could call for help from close by faction members to defend you.

While they don't actually fit my definition of "RPG", height actually does matter in Oblivion and Skyrim; the taller your character, the faster they move. (In Morrowind, it's weight; heavier characters move faster.)

Also, when reading this, my first thought was to think of games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, and Fell Seal, in which the battlefield has height variation, and auch variation matters in terms of where you can move. (Also, Fell Seal apparently has a passive that boosts the damage you do if you're at a higher height than the enemy, and FFT's Math Skill can target based off height.)

Neither does e.g. hair color. It's still nice to be able to change it. Granted, some RPGs maybe go a bit overboard with the details of character customization, giving you all kinds of options to move eyebrows around and sculpture your nose and chin, and then you hardly ever see your character's face in-game anyway. :D

Is it really meaningful to bring up Morrowind here? It's moddable, and thus already fixed!

With regards to the infamous combat system, I'd argue it was more an issue of perception than anything else. The simplest way to fix this that I can think of is that instead of weapon skill being surfaced to the player (or not, really, that being the problem) as a chance to hit", it could be done purely as weapon damage (I'd be surprised if there wasn't already a mod for this).

So if in the current system you do 5 hits of 0, 0, 0, 4, 6
The new system would do 2, 1, 2, 4, 1

I would love to think that you got this idea from my post recommending Stonekeep to dtgreene.

Now, I would be hard pressed to call SK "one of my favorite games", but I'll answer just the same a few things I would change to turn that game from "flawed gem" to "epic levels of awesomeness, everyone should play this, SMAC+BG /10".

- Like I said before I would add sidestep movement right away. It would cut down on key presses by 20% or more, saving thousands of keyboards around the world.
- I would modify the inventory management, adding the possibility to move multiple instances of the same item (without removing the ability to move them one by one). I'd also create some way you can choose which scroll you want to read from all those scrolls that are lumped together in the inventory.
- I would make sure there aren't any possible softlocks. I remember unpatched SK was rendered unwinnable if you explored until you got a certain party member before you found the somewhat secret entrance to the Fairy Realm. AFAIK the official patch removed this problem, but I'd confirm and make sure there aren't any others with all your party members tagging out. (I'd also make sure your equipment is given back when they leave, f*ing thieving dwarves!)
- I would also find some way to confirm which planet is in your hand when it gets really important. I remember I had two spheres and wouldn't know which one was Yog-Sogoth and Kor-Sogoth (Neptune and Pluto) by the ending when it is very important you know it. One of them was also incredibly alike to Venus's sphere so you wouldn't be sure which one you were handling when it mattered most.
- Lastly I would remake the ending to answer all the questions left pending by the original video. No more "But what happened to X, Y and Z?"

Really? Which mod fixes the static NPCs? I know of Morrowind Comes Alive, but that one just teleports NPCs to different cells at given times.

There's also the problem that everything revolves around the player character; I don't think it's even possible for two "actors" to interact directly at all. An NPC spell caster can hurt another NPC via a mass damage spell, but when that happens the entire guard force of Vvardenfell instantly homes in on the player character. That's how broken Morrowind is, a game that was released a year or two after Gothic which did things correctly.

Yes, but none of those are the character's height. It's not the same thing Vingry was talking about

I think the commonly used term for what you're describing is "softlock".

Of course, I have seen it used a few ways:
* When the game is in a state where you can't do anything, but (say) the music is still running. (I don't usually use the term "softlock" in this case.)
* When you're stuck in a battle or other sequence and can't get out. (For example, if you're in a boss arena (that you can't leave), you've killed the boss, but the game hasn't ended the boss fight. Yes, I have encountered this situation (it happened to me in Tangledep). Or you could have a situation like the one I encountered in Final Fantasy 6, where I'm in a fight, but winning, losing, and running away are all impossible.)
* When it appears you can continue the game, but some flags have been set, or some item no longer obtainable, so that it isn't actually possible to finish the game in this state. (One could argue that Daggerfall softlocks if you fail to do the first part of the main quest in time, for example.)

(As a side note, I like to distinguish between saveable softlocks, when it's possible to save and are still in that situation on reload, and non-savable softlocks, where it's impossible to have a saved game in that situation.)

I know, but when I first read the post, I was initially thinking of the kind of height I was talking about, not the character's height.

(With that said, I could see an ability like Math Skill being based off the target's height.)

Let's start with one that should probably go better:

Arcanum:
- Bugfixes
- Companions whose level is below yours when you take them on instantly jump to your level, so they won't remain always behind as they do in the game as it is if you're higher level when you take them on.
- Combat experience is granted in the typical fashion, per kill, and definitely regardless of which party character hits, not only for the PC.
- Companions can learn to craft things you find the instructions for.
- Redesign the Black Mountain Clan Mines to be far less tedious.

And now the one that will rub people a very wrong way:

Heroes of Might and Magic 1/2/3/5:
- Make it like in HoMM4! Heroes are actual units in combat, can have multiple ones in a party and don't need other units with them, and other units don't need heroes to move either.

That said:
Please don't. AoW2 had it right imho. SM sure bothered me with how they changed things.

You're right, it is a softlock I was thinking of but the correct word had escaped me. I'll go back and correct it, thank you.

BTW unpatched Stonekeep's softlock is the last one. You just don't get a particular item after you kill an important enemy and then you just wander around not knowing what to do next. Made much worse by the fact you can save over your last winnable savegame, and you probably will want to save your game because you just killed that important enemy.

I agree, this could make for an interesting skill. I would be curious to see it implemented.

I remember discussing this with someone on the form (you perhaps?) who didn't experience it as a negative that the heroes effectively become demigods. To each his own of course :)

It's at least not a problem for me for the majority of the game. It's only round about somewhere beyond the halfway point in a campaign that my hero becomes strong enough to defeat entire armies single-handedly. In AoW2 (might've been SM not sure) I remember at some point I just sent out my hero towards the enemy city and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
Personally I'd prefer it if the strongest that a hero could become is somewhere approximating 2 top tier faction units.