[Gulnyr]

It's a valid point, but the counterpoint is that a subject is treated by the players (and their characters) in the same manner it is presented.

Gnomes, for example, are very rarely taken seriously because they have been portrayed extensively as bumbling eccentrics who can't make anything that doesn't fail spectacularly, and that idea has almost completely spoiled gnomes for the whole genre. I actually wouldn't be surprised if some guy at WotC revealed that gnomes were removed as a standard race in 4th edition for just that reason.

Or take pack space in NWN, or pretty much any game that uses the grid style of inventory. No one seriously considers the utter ridiculousness of hauling three sets of full plate, six longswords, three short swords, and a crossbow and still being able to sneak by those nasty bugbears with all that clanking metal on the way back to town to the pawner, as if the size and weight of all that stuff alone weren't silly enough. Almost no one takes inventory or encumbrance seriously because it isn't really treated seriously by the designers, and, except for the warm-fuzzy of being the guy who stands firm and roleplays being unable to carry all that garbage, there is no benefit to taking it seriously. There's actually a penalty - not getting the extra coin from selling the junk, since the loot from bodies is technically the reward for being an adventurer. That leads into the whole weirdness of why exactly the primary source of money in the world is monsters, but that's a topic for a whole different thread...

Those are fairly extreme examples, but my point is that combat will be treated the way it is presented. If it should be something to consider carefully as if it mattered, then the combat system should be designed to make it feel that way. If it's supposed to give us something to poke at to make loot fly out, then make it as simple as possible and move on to more important things. Make it what it should be.

Though I understand the limitations of NWN, that's something that has gone wrong with the perception of the world. Consider the size the in-game world is supposed to be - continents of distance. According to the map, the road from Port Hempstead just out to the intersection of the next main road to only start traveling south toward Dapplegreen is like 500 miles long or something crazy like that. 500 miles and you haven't even gotten anywhere yet. Traveling to Wayfare or Vehl should take months. No one plays it that way, for the most part, and I can't fault that at all. Even GMs usually play it as if traveling from pretty much anywhere to anywhere will take some indeterminate but unimportant amount of time, because virtually nothing will have changed while our characters should have been lost in transit for a few months. No fault there, either. It's the only way to get anything done, sometimes. I haven't said so before, but I actually applaud the choice to have the MMO start out only covering the old Rohden Alliance. That is a much more manageable area to be able to represent closer to the right scale and should give people the sense that the place is actually part of a planet, that it's big.

So, to try to stop rambling, I guess I'm saying that overly complicated is bad, but so is overly simplifying the things that should be important.