The problem I have with RTWP is mainly that the formular isn't Difficulty vs Skill anymore but Difficulty vs Skill + frquency of pressing pause, and that there is almost no "cap" on this "frequency".
Now what I mean is: In most games, like NWN2 or Dragon Age 1 you profit massively from pressing pause. As your characters are doing abilities not at the same time, and moving your units can profit from a lot of fine tuning. So in these games, you can press the pause button every 0,3 to 0,5 seconds of "real time" and your performance in combat would still be a massive improvement to "only" pressing pause once for each second.
The only game with RTWP I enjoyed was FTL, because in FTL the usefulness of a higher Frequency is very capped. Of course you could still pause every 0,3 seconds. But as you have much fewer actions to modify (like not queueing spells, hardly any positoning) you don't get any profit from that in the majority of cases. In fact in lots of fights you could press pause once each 3-5 seconds, just to synchronize your weapon attacks and only when you have to micromanage your crew you will profit from pressing pause more frequently.
I know that lots of people enjoy RTwP, and I am probably in a rather unique position as I am playing everything on hardest difficulty and try to get the maximum out of each combat, which "forces" me in "usual RTWP" games with pause, into a gameflow which is much more stop and go / interrupting than Turnbased games could ever be.
Now my question to you is: How much will you actually profit in Masqueradas combat from "pausing" the game frequently? Will you need to fine tune positioning? Will it be necessary to cast spells in the right second? What is the cast / cooldown time of a common skill?
