Lungworth

This constant penalty for initiative and the malicious randomness have always been present.

Yes, that's true, but the penalty for initiative is getting harsher and harsher with each iteration. An expansion is supposed to offer something interesting to do. Therefore, players should be motivated to explore and complete quests, rather than just sitting in the tavern and eating meat. But what you're doing is the opposite – it's incredibly demotivating. We can always go work as day laborers in real life and eat meat. In an expansion, we want to be able to kill enemies without the risk of dying from a couple of blows from a random beggar. Okay, dying is part of the game. But in your recent expansions, our characters are constantly resurrected and subjected to all sorts of unpleasant things. So, you're essentially presenting us with a choice: stay in the city and work, or die, but not really die – instead, become enslaved by goblins.

I'm trying to balance variability/the ability to progress through events, quests, and interactions with the world against some semblance of balance.

I don't see the point in obsessing over balance. Entire game studios give up on it, and you want to do something super well on your own.

You're just fiddling with numbers.

I think Ment once tried to create some kind of program for calculating stats. It shouldn't be too complicated. I just haven't had the time to look for something online. But the calculations are really the most frustrating part.

Overall, what I want to say is this: it might spoil your mood, or you might have already gotten over it, but I'll say it anyway. If my expansions seem to be like: "Look, the game is going to favor us, and no one will die, or we'll have a chance to escape" (which is actually the case), then your expansions seem to be like: "Look, Revan is going to throw us a curveball, and we'll wipe out on the very first quest." If the NPCs in my expansion could annoy, amuse, or just do silly things (which is exactly what they're for), then in yours, it seems like they're intentionally making things worse for us. Astarion SUDDENLY agreed WITH ME. Not even with my character, but with ME AS A PLAYER. Because it's in his roleplaying, or because it made our quest much more difficult (as you yourself wrote)? I think it's the latter. The Nemesis that Alex encountered SUDDENLY decided to take revenge not specifically on him, but on all of us. She didn't find him in the city and didn't ambush him in an alley, didn't poison his beer, or push him off a tower. Instead, she bribed the villagers on a quest that affected ALL the players, not just Alex. And yet, you act as if all of this could have been avoided, we just needed to consider a billion nuances, and everything would have worked out. If in my expansion, an unkillable character/an impossible quest is just that – an unkillable character/an impossible quest. And no matter what you do, you'll die or lose. Then in your expansion, there are no unkillable characters and no impossible quests (there used to be), we just need to consider a billion nuances, and we'll win. If we don't, well, it's our own fault, we should have considered them. You act as if we can succeed. And then you do everything you can to prevent that from happening. Or, it's just impossible to succeed from the start, which is not so important.

This doesn't apply to the current expansion, but I still want to mention it. The behavior of your last two characters in my expansions looked like a deliberate search for trouble and death, so that you could then make the same accusations against me that I regularly make against you. You're saying to me: "Look, you also kill me with random beggars, just like I kill you, what's the problem?"

Everything written in the previous two paragraphs is impossible to prove or disprove, and I can't read your mind, but that's how I see it.