DFALCON'S PROFILE

The stuff about RMN maybe not being the perfect target audience aside, I would find it pretty hard to decide I want a song in a game without hearing pretty close to the whole thing (as, e.g., here). Without that I can't imagine you'll get a lot of traction from people who don't already know the composer.

Please tell me that the Speechcraft minigame is dead (or at least somehow now decent).

Board games! We should get an RMN game of something going online.

Shinan mentioned all four gateway games I would normally suggest - Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, Dominion, and Ticket to Ride (though I prefer Ticket to Ride: Europe to the original).

That said, you may want to mention if it's important to be able to play 2-player. Several of the games that have been mentioned play best at 3-4.

Mostly I think there are a lot of games where seeing three cities on an otherwise uninhabited continent just feels really silly. A free-roaming world map first gives me the impression that I can go anywhere; subsequently learning that the entire rest of a sizable landmass is, except for one or two places, so uninteresting that it can't even be visited is a juxtaposition and a letdown. (Older games do get a bit more of a pass from me on this, I'm not sure whether that's just because they tend to necessarily leave more up to the imagination.)

By contrast:
- the game could take place in a small area;
- there could be many interesting places to visit (extreme example: Oblivion)
- a map like Baldur's Gate's is much better at leaving you the impression that PCs don't have the option of exploring an entire region in detail and have to pick and choose where they go.
Any of these tends to be much better at leaving you the impression that stuff is still going on even where the player doesn't or can't specifically see it, which is usually a pretty important impression to keep up.

In addition to the runaway problem LockeZ mentions, it would be good to have a reason to boost everybody's stats instead of just one party member's. Boosting multiple stats (especially, say, agility plus anything else in 2k3) tends to compound, making it more effective to stack all the bonuses on one character rather than spreading them around.