Tim Cain said in interview here.
http://www.etoychest.org/interviews/interview_009.html
I am a little confused. D&D is a turn-based system, so I didn’t take ToEE anywhere. I am more surprised that you don’t wonder why the developers of those other games felt compelled to license a game system and then rewrite many of its rules to cover a mode of play that it was never intended to support. I wanted to make a computer game based on D&D, not some hybrid system that I invented myself.
J.E. Sawyer
I have met Mr. Cain only a few times. He is a very smart and cool man.
However, I will address this statement, and I'll be pretty blunt about it. The answer to his rhetorical question is: because you're putting a pen and paper game onto a computer. Isn't this obvious? This doesn't apply simply to "turn-based vs. real-time". It applies to every aspect of the game that you review for implementation.
The environment and atmosphere when you play a pen and paper game is not the same as when you are playing a CRPG, period -- especially a single player RPG. You have no DM, you have no other players. There is no soft adjudication for any given application of a combat rule or skill. There are no players chatting to each other softly and telling quiet jokes while all of the other participants in the battle play through their turns. Turn-based combat in a five or six person pen-and-paper game is not the same experience as it is in an CRPG. Even the most pedestrian turn-based battle in a pen-and-paper game can be made fun for all participants -- even if that combat takes two hours of real-world time. Your experience goes beyond the statistics of the characters involved and the mechanical choices you make to resolve that conflict.
But in a single-player CRPG, that is what you are left with. You can put every rule in the 3.5 PHB into a game to the letter, dot all is and cross all ts, but you are not going to get the same experience that you would in pen and paper. This is a different medium. You're playing all the members of your party without any soft adjudication from a DM. The manner in which you draw pleasure out of a combat is not going to be the same as it is with a group of live people sitting around you -- whether it is turn-based or real-time. D&D is a pen and paper role-playing game. By putting it on a computer, you are already trying to make it do something that it was not explicitly built for.
I'm certainly not going to slam Troika for making ToEE in the manner they are. I really want to play it. But all developers have to make implementation choices when dealing with a licensed ruleset. AFAIK, Troika isn't implementing the Jump or Climb skills in ToEE. I don't blame them for leaving that out -- those are hard to implement in a CRPG. But that does affect classes like the fighter and monk, who have those as some of their (very few) class skills.
In a pen and paper game, the player can ask the DM at any moment, "Hey, man, can I climb that tower/tree/rock/fallen giant's corpse?" and the DM can wing it. If the player wants to climb up a corpse and jump off behind some guy while making an attack, he can just ask the DM if he can do it. There's no mounted combat or mounted combat feats in ToEE, which affects the paladin. TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE, BECAUSE MOUNTED COMBAT SUCKS TO IMPLEMENT. Again, this is because you can't just say, "Oh, here's a pony, follow the rules." Lockpicking, picking pockets, sneaking. All those things you can't reload from in a pen and paper game -- they're different. It's a computer game, not a PnP game. How you make it, how you use it, the experience you take away from it can be completely different.
