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gem helper

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About gem helper

  • Birthday 08/30/1987

Retained

  • Crystal Wifes

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  • Gender
    Female
  • Location
    YES!
  • Real Name
    חַוָּה
  • Favorite Games
    concord grapes, chardonnay grapes, shiraz grapes, all kinds grapes
  • Interests
    lesbianism as extreme sport

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Seasoned Roamer (5/17)

  1. I am a huge, huge fan of Exile 2, and kind of a partisan of the original series (one of my primary games growing up was Blades of Exile, after all), but I have been cautious about recommending it, or the Exile series, to friends. I do find the mechanics more generally satisfying, and absolutely have a powerful aesthetic affinity for the old graphics. But I've had to recognize that the way I came to know and love the series was wholly contingent on how I first encountered it. Me and the first boy I had a crush on bonded over playing Exile 1 together (and in retrospect we were completely terrible at it, constantly starving to death). What I read of its dialogue and events stuck with me hard, and Exile 2 was an improved version of that experience. It hit me at the exact time I was capable of understanding the plot and themes - 10 or so. Having gotten the demo on AOL, I was served an old 1.x version rather than the 2.x versions with the updated graphics set. (This separates me from even a lot of other people who grew up thinking of E2 as one of the best games they'd ever played. And that's fine!) There's a primal magic to all of it, a sort of itch being scrached, that wouldn't be there for my friends even if the version I played could be trivially delivered to them. (It's a hell of a jury-rig.) They're not children figuring out what spells and items work best from trial and error, or PC-exclusive kids stepping into a slightly foreign and strikingly pretty visual dialect. The combat is liable to be confusing and clunky, the graphics crude and dark. But genuinely I think there are things to these games beyond childhood nostalgia. The writing is fantastic; the setting and plot are both pretty outside the beaten path, treating themes and including people that video games even now are kinda uncomfortable with. I think those things shine just as well in the remakes, and there might be a twinge of regret and an odd sense of loss to it, but they're what I recommend to friends. I am excited about the A2 remake because it is bringing something that I loved, something that was a big part of me being the person I am, to people who would not otherwise have played it. That's kinda cool, you know? A part of me wishes the people I recommend A2:CS to - or the modern 10-year-olds saving coins and doing odd jobs to buy it - could cross the same river I did, but that's not really possible. The river they get to cross is still pretty nice.
  2. did the throwing book actually work as designed in E3? i thought that the code for infinite ammunition items was broken until BoE (and sketchy even then)
  3. it feels a little mean in any context really, and a bit of a relic of a time when non-bottom-feeder internet culture was more casually ableist (not an accusation or anything, just an extended sigh)
  4. uhhh... 1905, aka what historians call "the nadir of american race relations"? a time at which a massive flood of immigrants attempted to integrate into white supremacy in a foreign and xenophobic country by positioning themselves as agents of violent racism, stepping through a groove cut into the white american psyche by the late history of slavery? sharecropper times, jim crow times, grandfather clause times? and let's not even get into the fact that american railroad and steamer companies of that time put out massive advertisement campaigns in europe promoting the ready availability of good agricultural land under laws which were set up to dispossess natives, sometimes straight-up referring to it as "good indian land". for many central european nationalities, this promise, directly or indirectly, is the entire reason a population exists in america. the homestead infrastructure supporting this was a direct outgrowth of the tension over slavery and an attempt to construct a counterproject to plantation slavery without redefining what america was about. or, like, the fact that your family immigrated into a country that was in the process of shooting civilians and looting their resources in the philippines? this is also a thing. i guess i just wanna say this is a really morally reckless claim and you should be careful about making it.
  5. my primary goals right now are to escape my suffocating house and power through gatekeeping for access to surgery and vital documents; for things to stop feeling like a nightmare i'm too weak to wake up from. the only true goal in life, though, is to becoming a perfect and perfectly self-contained goat
  6. I'm rewatching Boardwalk Empire because the last arc hit me like a ton of bricks and recontextualized a lot of the first three seasons pretty hard. It's okay. DS9 is pretty great too. I liked Hannibal enormously but I feel gross about the end of the second season. I've not been loving Better Call Saul so far, but it's something to watch. If I had to point to the best thing on TV right now it'd be Steven Universe. The way my friends have been talking about it has used the phrase "positive subversion" a lot and I feel that pretty strongly.
  7. *small voice* you ever wonder if the zombie genre making a huge comeback in the US after bush gutted the federal emergency infrastructure and especially after hurricane katrina might mean something
  8. the way you deal with a zombie apocalypse is by having ideas aligned with the author about the social problem his or her zombies metaphorically represent, of course. what other way could there possibly be?
  9. Hey! If you have cool or good rocks or crystals or stones or anything else you want to share post them here. Please! The forums need this. This is a cube made of shungite that came for me in the mail! I don't know why or how. The cut is actually pretty far off from cubic but it's still a cube in my eyes and I am proud to call this amorphous mineraloid my child.
  10. i didn't have one so i made myself a desktop image (here if it's broken)
  11. they have pretty quality lower body products, although the selection is kinda limited if you're not smal
  12. carries are nerds by definition. as someone who is inherently buff and strong despite having almost no money, i enjoy being a feckless nerd who thinks she's real tough hiding behind a vlads and bkb. like a little vacation from being cool
  13. As I've said a thousand times, my policy is that if a crystal wants to go along on an adventure with me and my squadron of murderous gay thieves it will signal this by being inherently worth money.
  14. For the second, let's say I'm having the party choose between good mundane weapons versus mediocre and common 1-handed weapons specially designed to do damage to unprincipled blobs: an easy way to do that would be to throw Giant Slaying on it and make all unprincipled blobs Giants (and nothing else the party encounters a Giant). Throwing a "special removed on scenario end" flag on that would ensure I didn't just ruin some other designer's day. Alternative possibilities: a platinum ring of fire resistance whose power can't survive the light of the sun, etc. I guess I mostly was thinking about it because the specific ways specials were removed or not removed between scenarios imposed design considerations on authors. For the third, there's a lot of other things you could do with it than that. "Traders pay 200% of normal, charge 100% of normal" would mean, for example, that buyer NPCs pay an item's listed cost - think of this as something like being presented with the opportunity to buy exotic reagents at a magic bazaar, or being offered ore by a miner at less than cost to save her the danger of hauling it downriver, or a junk merchant not understanding the value of everything they're selling. The opposite situation - "traders pay 100% of normal, charge 200% of normal" - might describe an item like an heirloom sword, a cursed stone of greed, something like that. We could even envision combining the two - "traders pay 10% of normal, charge 50% of normal; special removed on leaving scenario" for, say, orichalcum dust and ingots for a scenario in the area of an orichalcum strike. In other words, this would allow you to engineer situations where the party can buy things for much less than they're worth anywhere but where they're currently buying them. Selling for 200% of normal would also make the player's expected return for a received item the same as the listed price, instead of half as much. (That's a little annoying, I think.) This is all stuff it's feasible to do (or kludge like you've done) with specials right now, but it'd basically add flexibility and portability to those mechanics. Maybe the default "special encounter" dot, or an exclamation point, or a question mark?
  15. eh: you can buy food from sliths, and a party of sliths doesn't seem to eat any different. i'm willing to accept a handwave over that as a gameplay element, but nothing really suggests that sliths have any inherent edge over humans in living in exile except being amphibious (or well-adapted to water) and thus being less endangered by the caves' cold, vicious lakes and rivers. they live in the wettest parts of the caves, and they're the most threat to human settlements along the water. if i had to headcanon something up to explain the discrepancy you're pointing to, it'd be cultural. humans are still, after generations in exile, pretty squeamish about eating a lot of meat sources that don't seem to be poisonous or vile. humes and nephs also use weapons which are objectively worse for the conditions in exile - swords and bows, not exactly great for a dark and twisty place with little metal. incidentally, it'd be worth thinking about that a common strategy for cold-blooded animals without easy access to consistent temperature conditions within their comfort range is eating more... i always got the impression they were banished, but other people have said that was more of a "pushed to flee by human aggression" situation. also, i think i was unclear - i didn't mean they sent things down to exile to be killed by the exiles, i meant they sent things down there as a way of leaving them tantamount to killed (much like the exiles themselves), presumably in the hope the caves themselves would kill them. or else the other things they sent down there would. i expect it's not a humanitarian thing but a cost/effort thing. the lizards are likely native. (there's giant lizards in valorim, but also in the vahnatai caves. who knows?) less clearly native, still possibly so: basilisks, gazers/eyebeasts, giant rats, giants. nativeness indeterminate or stated both ways: gremlins, goblins, ogres. categorically not native: humans, human domestic animals besides lizards, nephilim and nepharim. not native but not from the surface either: sliths, vahnatai, chitrachs, null bugs. who can say: giant spiders (esp. GIFTS), slimes, giant bats. undead don't breed and hence don't really count, but isn't it interesting that there are no new forms of undead in valorim? i'll confess when you put it that way it sounds silly, but it's not hard to imagine a situation where the teleportation magic requires a valid target (i.e. not into solid rock, magma, a giant nephil smiley face, etc) and all they knew about it, before the first expedition confirmed where it actually was, was "straight down a few miles and far away". in that scenario we can assume they'd have thought they more or less sent the dragons to hell - maybe literally - but found to their displeasure that the dragons (perhaps along with other nasty things they gated away as part of the campaign to clean up the surface world of dangerous nonhumans) still lived somewhere it was possible to walk. i mean, that is what the old-timers emphasize about micah and the mages! i'm not gonna go out on a limb and say no one from the early days credits the mages with exile being human-habitable, but nothing about the tower of magi or any of the other mages' abodes or bodies of work screams "agricultural engineering". (patrick, a little? maybe?) the closest any of them get to obvious magical research into apparently mundane things is erika, and i think if we can agree on nothing else it should be that if anyone's lying about their contribution to exile and getting away with it because they're powerful and deranged, it's probably her. the long and short of it for me has always been that the party is roughly as capable of surviving in the vahnatai lands, and in their unreclaimed outlands, as they are in exile. erika or the triad sure musta been prescient to fill the dark waters with luminous and edible fungi, eh?
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