Found this on greenlight yesterday. Looks like an awesome turn-based tactics game. For PC/Mac/Linux, no consolitis. Apparently borrows heavily from games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem and Disgaea, but adds more as well, loads of tactical complexity. Also: no randomness, entirely deterministic, not dicerolls, will determine outcomes. Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=111308792&searchtext= Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1426761469/telepath-tactics?ref=Greenlightยจ One of the most promising games I've seen on greenlight. I gave it thumbs up, favorited, and pledged $10 to the kickstarter.
The gameplay looks interesting, but I'm not a big fan of the aesthetics, it looks... off somehow. I presume most of that is placeholders though. Personally I prefer when things have some kind of luck rolls too so it might just not be for me. It's not particularly crazy - the latest final fantasy tactics has something like 50 classes.
I believe you presume correctly; part of your contribution is supposed to be going to: Hiring artists to create more art: tilesets, destructible objects, character portraits, NPC sprites, and a second gender for each character class. Estimated cost: $4,000 So unless he is dead-set on having that exact same graphic style, it'll change.
You mentioned luck rolls. Check out the newest version of ToME. It has recently been patched to beta 43 and has prodigies. You can buy a prodigy that gets you a permanent +40 luck roll. (Buy with prodigy points you get by leveling up to crazy levels. No money is required to play the game.) You will like it. The changes are many, and the price is all of your free time forever.
Yay, pledged. Nothing fancy due to the exchange ratio killing my funds, but that's still 10$ closer to the goal. It all depends on whether the classes are discrete enough, and with just 22 it is possible to make them so. Heck, it is easy to see if you just take a random RPG and ask yourself "how many different builds that are actually different and are played differently can I make?", because the answer is usually higher than just 22.
The problem as I see it is that there is no set in stone plan for those 22 classes. They could be plainly awful and only added to satisfy the claim that there will be 22 classes. I remember games that could have easily had Mages choose what elements to use, but instead wanted to make a fake buzz by blabbing about extra classes when in reality they just made Fire Mages and Ice Mages and such. They ruined the game with such gimmicks. I hope this is a well planned game and not the monster I remember. But as most things, I remain skeptical until something set in stone is released that denies my fears. Given, a well made RPG can have any number of classes. But for the game to be worth playing, each has to have real value and balance. DoD would suck ass if one skill owned all others... You get my point. In most RPGs I *HATE* class locked skills. I actually sometimes cheat to gain access to a few key class skills. Take for instance ToME. I edit the classes to gain the skills I found worked best. Usually I just edit one class to include the skills I want, and ignore the rest. Then I rebalance things so they can actually use those skills proficiently. Spoiler: Want to see my cheated character? Click here!
Actually, there is a class list somewhere on the Kickstarter page. I remember thinking that some of them seem pretty similar, but there most of them are discrete from each other. Other than that, I'm impartial towards the idea of RPGs having class-locked skills. Sure, it annoys me when I can't get everything, but it's the "darn, now I have to plan how to build my character" sort of annoyance and it actually is rather pleasant because it forces me to think. And I really like games where you have different skills available depending on whether you are building a specialised character or a jack-of-all-trades one. That being said, the tabletop RPG that my group is playing right now is one where you can have all the skills, but there is a catch. To have absolutely everything you need to get all the skills (rather easy, though usually you don't care about two thirds of available skills because you don't need skills overlapping in their use or ones that you never use anyway) and all the specialities, and every speciality has in-story requirements (and nothing more, but the point is, why would you spend time to give your character access to manoeuvres from every school of sword-fighting if spending that time to just train your fighting skill will allow you to get better use out of those of the one school you knew [that is, unless the character has an in-story reason for that, and is a character who is supposed to be too versatile, though that begs the question of "why not learn how to fight with a different weapon too, instead?"]), so it is possible to get everything if you ignore the time required.
I like when you can theoretically have everything but you never can anyway because it'd take too much time / xp. Then again I also often enjoy enjoy class-locked systems, though they tend to make me suffer from some extreme alt-itis. Some of my favorites have been where you can do a LOT, with tons of customization, but there are still limits. An excellent example is the Minions of Mirth MMORPG, which has triple classing, and I've played characters such as bard/paladin/wizard, and monk/cleric/shaman.
