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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
(Side rant: what's with the pervasive idea that parents must pay for their child's college education? Students are adults by that point; can't they pay for it themselves? What's next, parents paying for their child's first house?)


look who's jealous :3
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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
(Side rant: what's with the pervasive idea that parents must pay for their child's college education? Students are adults by that point; can't they pay for it themselves? What's next, parents paying for their child's first house?)

(After a minute of second thought, I realized that I'm going to get a lot of flak for this statement. Don't want to derail the topic; something for General, perhaps?)
Many people do pay for their college education because their parents are unable or unwilling. However, parents often pay for college education in order to keep their children free from crippling debt as soon as they get out of college. College tuition is very often much more expensive than the average 18-year-old can afford, so they must take out student loans and must start to pay them back after graduation whether they have found a job or not.
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College is hugely expensive and predictable from about 18 years away. Children can't start saving before they're employable, and the amount you can make in your teens won't really put a dent in college costs. Parents can start saving early and save their children from the burden of debt. Given the difference in total spent—parents benefit from compound interest, and children have to pay back debt with interest—saving for your children's college tuition makes sense.

 

Plus, it's pretty standard for your kids to pay for your costs later in life. Expensive healthcare? Nursing home? That's probably on your kids. They'll be repaying their debt to you anyway, and it's in your interests to make sure that they're bringing in as much money as possible.

 

—Alorael, who searched and found that Steven Peeler does have a wife and two children, just like Jeff. Unlike Jeff, he's also worked for a major developer that isn't himself, for what that's worth.

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(Again, should this topic be talked about somewhere other than the Avernum forum? I shouldn't have brought it up...)

 

"Crippling debt"? "Hugely expensive"? Are things so much worse in the States? My undergrad tuition was a bit under 6K a year once all fees are taken into account, and that doesn't include room and board. A quick Google search brought up this, which implies that things are about the same for public institutions in the States. If you work full-time during your summers when you're in high school and college, and part-time during high school, you'll be able to get by without too much debt.

 

I understand that it's not going to be that easy for everyone, especially for people who go through college while supporting a family. But by then we've drifted away from the original example of parents paying for their kids to go to college.

 

EDIT: Want to emphasis; I realize that tuition + cost of living might be more than ~12K per year, but it shouldn't be an order of magnitude more.

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In state, the cost is often somewhere around $10,000. That's expensive, but no, it's not crippling. Even a minimum wage, part-time job can defray a noticeable part of that, too. But if you go out of state, even to a public university, the cost usually jumps up to around $40,000. That really is a whole lot of money. Four years of that and if you don't get employment right away you're in serious trouble.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the problems are strangely distributed. A lot of the very top colleges have more generous need-based financial aid, especially non-loan aid. The middling schools are the ones that cost a lot and don't always offer anything but loans. That may be okay if your degree is in math or science, where you probably will get a job and at least make an acceptable living, but if you get an English or philosophy degree, you could be paying that down for a long time.

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Quote:
(Side rant: what's with the pervasive idea that parents must pay for their child's college education? Students are adults by that point; can't they pay for it themselves? What's next, parents paying for their child's first house?)


Because they care about their children, and want them to succeed? Many parents don't so much have to pay for their kids' education as want to pay for it. The point about support into old age is also a good one.

Quote:
In state, the cost is often somewhere around $10,000. That's expensive, but no, it's not crippling. [...] But if you go out of state, even to a public university, the cost usually jumps up to around $40,000. That really is a whole lot of money.


And it bears noting that in many cases a given state won't have any public universities with good programs for a given subject. This is especially the case for smaller states and more esoteric courses of study. This means that if a student wants a good education (valuable in itself, and necessary for employment or close to it in more competitive fields), they have little choice but to go to a private or out of state public school, meaning anywhere from 20 to 50 thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Financial aid can make up for much of this, but as other posters have pointed out, a lot of financial aid is a matter of loans, rather than simply waiving costs.
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Originally Posted By: Dintiradan
(Side rant: what's with the pervasive idea that parents must pay for their child's college education? Students are adults by that point; can't they pay for it themselves? What's next, parents paying for their child's first house?)

(After a minute of second thought, I realized that I'm going to get a lot of flak for this statement. Don't want to derail the topic; something for General, perhaps?)


My parents didn't put a single cent towards my tuition. They did, however, pick up the tab on every one of my brothers' and my sisters', which is why I have, ah, quite strong feelings on the subject. Even though I managed to get scholarships that were not negligible, I was still over 100k in the hole from undergrad alone, and I had to pick up the entire tab for grad school years later, so it was probably pushing a fifth to a quarter of a million if you totaled it up (I did work off the undergrad debt before going to grad school. Wise decision). However, I did manage to land a good enough job that I was able to make the debt go away without crippling myself with finance costs, but there was really no guarantee of that, and certainly that wouldn't happen if I graduated today.

If I ever had kids (hahahaha fat chance), I'd probably just pick up their tuitions without comment (iff they got a useful degree, of course) because I had severly disadvantaged myself for the first half of my life with that debt, and I wouldn't want them to go through that if I had the ability to stop it.
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Okay, there's no way for me to try and elegantly lead the conversation back in its original direction, so I'll just completely ignore everything previously said and use the sledgehammer.

 

Putting aside everything financial, economical, organizational, what have you - what CORE GAMEPLAY would you like to see? In any imaginable scenario? Would you like to click on things? Level stuff up? Customize yourself? Is there a self? Complete and utter abstraction? Story or no or what? Or huh? Or whatever? Will there even be conflicting sides, like nations, or... red and blue dots? Must the characters be persons? How bout playing a stone? Or a god? Build or destruct? Could you make something in which music is the central element? Or... vomiting? Hitting yourself in the face for no reason? Will there be bananas? What would the elephant king say to all this? Medieval GTA? How bout fantasy that isn't medieval but classical age? Or a Terminator scenario in which you are SkyNet? How bout your standard RPG type guy(s) wakes up as someone else every day? Could you play a dream demon who has to scare children to wet their pants? What in the fricken. world. could you. imagine.?

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Truly, I would like for jeff to keep making games where the class defines the unique experience you get. Avadon does that so well (even more so than geneforge did) because you can use 3 different classes one go and play it almost completely different through skills a second go.

 

Besides epic stories, epic characters like redbeard really are a welcoming change for SWS. I found that the more i played avadon, the more i wanted to know about redbeard and why he is the way he is.

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I'd like a magic use system that lets you get better with practice. In other words, the first time you cast a particular spell it isn't very strong. To level up in it, you have to cast it a lot. Like maybe for every 10 or 20 times you cast the spell, you gain a level of competency.

 

Melee could work the same way. After 10 fights with a particular weapon (or weapon class like broadsword) you level up. Then you have to think, "I just found a really cool longsword with extra damage and a cool defense bonus. However, I am at level 15 in broadsword use. Do I want to change?"

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Skwish-E, systems like that are common, and I find that they bring out the very worst in OCD gameplay. There's usually insufficient limitation on ridiculous levels of skill grinding, and it's a huge pain.

 

—Alorael, who would be interested in seeing a different skill tree topology. What about a classless system where you start in the middle and work your way out, so each ability unlocked in turn unlocks several more abilities? Your class comes from specializing in one direction more than others. Or Master of Orion skill trees where there are several options at a given point on the tree and you can only pick one of them? Or both?

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I happen to think what skwish said was right on the ball. You dont usually see game roleplaying games done right like that. I found that ones that did it wrong were oblivion and morrowind. Made no sense and was tedious. I have to run around an island to increase athletics?

 

I think that jeff could do that system really well and it would be fun as staying with a weapon type will be more crucial. I never understood ultimate munchkin characters that can essentially handle every situation, ranged/melee/spells/healing all at once. Sticking to a set class is important because it lets you know what your set strengths and weaknesses are. Real characters that are "somewhat" realistic are not perfect.

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Spiderweb already does that. In Avadon, your class dictates to some degree what you can do. In all the games, you're limited by having far too few skill points to be good at everything, or even most things. You have to pick your specialization.

 

But you get to pick and build your character as you want. If, at some point, you need to try your luck with a bow despite being bad at it, you're free to do so. All games that I know of that build your character's skills by what they do suffer from one of two problems: you can either build skills indefinitely to make those "ultimate munchkin characters" if you're willing to grind enough, or you can't, so using that bow for an hour means you've wasted some of your character's skill point equivalents on something you don't want. You actually have to make your playing style extremely specialized to avoid falling into the pitfall of being an underskilled generalist.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the best implementation he's seen is something where you assign points to get your character's maximum potential in each area and then have to use the skills to get your actual values up to their maxima. The downside, of course, is that it's a clunky, grindy way to have a skill point system.

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Since Spiderweb games are the only games I play (Father of 5, Full time college student, and full time employed), I don't know any of the other games that are referred to. As far as limiting the grinding, There should still be limited opportunities to do certain things. So sword fights are limited to the number of enemies there are. All magic spells are limited to the amount of ingredients available in-game, etc. This does bring up a real problem for someone who used all of the healing herbs in the game two-thirds of the way through. Perhaps a few vital spells (like minor heal and firebolt) would require infinitely available ingredients. To limit my OCD gameplay (guilty), the system should have a cap limit on proficiency in every area.

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Originally Posted By: I made a vow with zombies in it.
sing that bow for an hour means you've wasted some of your character's skill point equivalents on something you don't want. You actually have to make your playing style extremely specialized to avoid falling into the pitfall of being an underskilled generalist

Limiting ability to raise skills and tying it to the skills you use makes it quite possible to funnel yourself into a build you don't want by accident. Limiting reagents makes it likely that players will run out of reagents to use their favorite spells in the progress of getting better at their favorite spells.

—Alorael, who knows he should let this go. It's a style of character advancement that some people like. He just happens to find it horrible.
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It reduces your skills in the relevant weapons relative to what they could be if you hadn't used the bow. This wouldn't matter if enemy power/difficulty were static throughout the game, but they aren't.

 

Opportunity cost: learn it, love it*, live by it.

 

*For a somewhat peculiar definition of "love."

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Originally Posted By: Trenton the dragon lord
What does it matter of if you use a bow or not? It doesn't bring down your skill points if you kill them...

Imagine that you're making a swordsman, but there are some areas where reaching enemies is difficult, and it's easier to kill them with a bow even though your character isn't very good with bows. Do this too often, and your character is no longer a very good swordsman because of all that training that didn't go into swords. Now you're behind the power curve—effectively underleveled in your combat stats—and you either give up and start over or turn to increasingly exotic strategies to make up for lack of power. But actually catching up is impossible, so you either stabilize at a point where you can slog through a game made more difficult than intended or you're stuck using esoteric tricks to make up for your weak character, who will thus have more and more points allocated to the strange skills you're forced to rely on.

That's a worst-case scenario, yes, but games that punish you for trying different strategies are generally bad news.

—Alorael, who can come up with many ways to make the system idiot-proof so it's impossible to ruin a character like that. It's just hard to idiot-proof in a way that makes the system interesting, meaningful, and not grind-heavy. The best might be simply having skill increase faster when they're lower to a hard or soft cap limit, where the worst consequence is probably just making single specialization objectively worse than multiple equal specializations.
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I usually find that the only character type that truly never made sense to me in the avernum later series and possibly this, was the ranged/melee type. Your better off sticking with one instead of munchkinizing. However mixing magic is a good choice if you know what your doing. Im just hoping that this time around you actually benefit from the rogue type character (high dex plus melee) instead of the strength juggernaut. The previous games make it almost no point to making a finesse character as there was no backstab or finesse ability you get.

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