Should I reload if the main character I make dies? How is that different than reloading if someone else I made, which is also my main character (since they all are)?
And that's exactly the problem here - they all are. Your character is a six-man band, basically. It works in some cases, but not all.
At least make it in the Colony Ship game that only my non combat skills work.
A forced solution, don't you think?
All of them are forced solutions. Your answer causes issues that require their own solutions, and historically are really bad solutions. Such as make combat suck so all parties of all levels of idiots can beat it with all types of members or no members. How do we know if they have a thief to pick locks? Lockpicking becomes flavor. Lets add pickpocket skill but never let anyone pick pocket anything good so it is just a skill dump for idiots that will find out too late just how much of an idiotic decision putting points into pickpockets was. Don't let them recruit anyone with thief skills until halfway through the game so they have to go back and redo everything and waste a bunch of time finding out everything locked was shit.
Six characters is too much. I like four characters. Think of WL2 without being able to recruit two extra people. There is no way to effectively cover every skill you would want to. Chargen becomes a huge strategic element of every facet of the game. I bring up WL2 because I can remember the asshole trait as an example. This allows you to cover one trait fully, and forget the others and be better able to cover more room for your whole party. If you look at the closest example to your game's system - Arcanum - you either are forced to stick with certain NPCs for skills or try to be a jack of all trades or read a walkthrough to find out who, what, when and how the game decides to allow you to pick up another character with the skills you want. This, to me, is the antithesis of what a rpg is supposed to do and be about.
Now, you could (during chargen) give when and how to get a recruitable for a specific skills highlight so a player doesn't have to ruin their experience by not knowing when you will allow them to pick up a character with a skill, what they will miss until that point, and not have to ruin their experience by reading a walkthrough. There are a million solutions, and all of them are far worse than the specific answer to the question.
I enjoy how diverse the rpg systems were in Arcanum, but that doesn't eman the game had no faults. I believe the combat was the fault of the publisher requiring RTwP leading to the hybrid system, but I'd like to know what you think of the recruitable placement in regards to needed or very useful skills in regards to chargen and, playing blind and through normal game direction pushes. Do you think it had any issues or opportunities for improvement?
Lastly, how do you make a game without shit combat or meaningless chardev and gen with such a diverse player party spread? You have to agree, the solution from the big guys has been to make combat retard-proof and thus removing the main reasons behind chardgen, dev, and party building and making itemization worthless as well.
I'm no genius but I cannot think of a way of you providing reasonably intelligent players of necessary information for them to make the informed choices needed to keep the bang and significance of chargen, dev, party building, itemization, etc, without big spoilers, shitty combat, or both.
You could have come up with solutions I haven't thought about and just want to play your cards close to your chest so they aren't stolen, but that isn't really how you approached anything so far as you have been very open with your ideas and mechanics.
I don't want to put words in your mouth or misrepresent your reasons (since I have recently had my memory come under question) but one of the big reasons you wanted to make games was to make good games without shit combat. And I'm just not seeing this in the CSG from the information we know so far. Bioware and the other console devs have the recruitable talking heads games with shitty retard combat on full throttle. What we have a dearth of is party based crpgs with good combat.
Oh, one other thing I forgot about the Mystery at Westport thingy for NWN2 - you can tell a non-writer built the three party members it inflicts on you because they were built somewhat competently, unlike any of the other NWN2 main things. But they still were not built as I would have, even within the confines of a set class. At least inflict on us blank slate characters that we can build competently or as we see fit within the confines of the class or spec you want the recruitable to be. PoE did it with no issues. And even within a classless game it can still work by having minimums. Character X has a minimum stat Y and skill z, and here is the rest of the points to do what you want with them.
