Kelandon

Usual caveat, answers come from reading the scripts, I may have missed something, etc. 1. The Mayor's Aide doesn't even have dialogue involving finishing the quest, so no, you can't get any kind of reward from him. 2. You can trade the Shiny Item to Meuric in the Lost City for an item of your choice. Gabriel in Scurftown can use the Heart of an Imp or the Acid Gland of a Giant Slug to enchant armor. 3. Not that I can see. There's nothing in there anyway, though.

Someone else who knows more about this than I do might correct me, but I'm pretty sure that if you want to play in 1920 x 1080, you need a laptop that can go up to a resolution of 1920 x 1080, and it sounds as though you're saying that your laptop doesn't.

If I remember correctly, Niemand has more or less explained it. Chika absorbs your statuses, including negative ones, so give yourself some negative statuses (e.g., poison/acid). (And that solution was actually in the spoiler tags before one board update or another broke them.)

A ton of work under the hood this past week. I tested the Prologue, and it is done! Which also means that special spells and warrior abilities work; you get your first warrior ability in the Prologue (which has a small amount of combat to introduce the player to the new combat system). There were a few more bugs, and I immediately found that I had to rebalance the warrior abilities, but fixing all that was relatively painless because of the way that I've structured the code now. I'm trying to make Homeland a complete scenario in a way that none of my scenarios have been to this point. Details like area descriptions, shops, summoning — I'm intentionally working on these things from the beginning instead of doing a very little work at end of the scenario or, in the case of summoning, tossing my hands up and letting it be completely broken. (In my defense, it's kind of broken by default, but my total lack of understanding didn't help.) I'm trying to be careful about every single combat I design; literally every monster is edited in some way (many rather substantially) for this scenario. I'm also doing a lot of other things for my own sake that players won't even see. The default creature list is totally disorganized. For example, the demonic beings are all over the place: a Hordling is creature 145, but Imp/Demon/Haakai is 59, 60, and 61, respectively, and a Mung Demon is 95. Slimes, undead — they're all like this. It's impossible to find anything. So I'm moving a ton of things to group stuff better. (Because I've already placed a number of creatures, this at one point turned Legare — who appears in a flashback in the Prologue — into a mutant lizard. It was quite a spectacle, adoring crowds watching Legare's heroic verse appearing over the head of a mutant lizard.) As I work, I'm becoming more and more intimidated by the size of this thing. It's becoming clear that it's probably going to be longer than Exodus. Exodus was 60 towns and 26 outdoor sections. Homeland has 24 outdoor sections and almost certainly will have at least 70 towns by the time it's done (possibly closer to 100). That's... not great. But I tried to shorten it before, and it just didn't work. It has to be like this. I mean, the worst that can happen is that I won't finish it, and that's already happened. So, for the time being, I'm plunging ahead. Chapter 1 is probably 30-40% done, and I'll probably finish about 70-80% of it before I start testing it and then move to Chapter 2. (That is, everything but a few major side quests and some extra dialogue, which I'll come back for later.) My hope is that the engine work I've done in the past couple of weeks will make the rest of Chapter 1 go relatively quickly, but we'll see.

I don't remember if anyone has ever collected this information before, so I did a whole bunch of work this morning on how summoning works in BoA. I typed it up just to organize it for myself, and I figured I'd post it in case it's useful to anyone else. The following are the default summoning classes in BoA: In general, mage spells depend on summoning classes, as follows: Call Beast: Summons monster of summoning class = spell level/2 (rounded down, as BoA always does) Create Illusions: Summons monsters of summoning class = spell level Summon Aid: Summons monsters of summoning class = spell level + 1 Arcane Summon: Summons monsters of summoning class = spell level + 3 So, for example, if you know Summon Aid at level 2, it will summon monsters of summoning class 3. The default summoning classes are kind of funky. Assume that monster level is a loose proxy for the power of the monster (which is essentially true). At low levels, increasing your spell level will get you stronger monsters on average but not consistently. For example, if you raise Call Beast from 1 to 2, your average summoned monster goes from level 2.5 to level 3.25, but you have a chance of summoning a Goblin, which is weaker than anything you would've summoned at the lower spell level. At higher levels, the increase is confusingly not linear but also not anything else. The largest jump is from summoning class 3 to 4,where your average monster goes from level 8.4 to level 16.5, but again the spread is confusingly large; in summoning class 3, the levels are pretty consistently clustered between 6 and 10, but in summoning class 4, they range all the way down from a Imp (L9) to a Drake (L25). Summoning class 6 also has a relatively large spread, from a Unicorn (L22) to an Augmented Giant (L35), although at higher levels the spread is less significant. But, weirdly, the average level declines from summoning class 6 to 7 (from 27.4 to 24.25). In other words, if you raise Arcane Summon from level 3 to level 4, the monsters that you will summon are weaker on average. I attached a graph so that you can easily see what I'm talking about. This also illustrates the vampire summoning problem. Vampires have a summoning class of 5, which means that Arcane Summon L2 summons them. But vampires also have their Mage Spells adjusted to 15, which gives them Arcane Summon, and all spellcasters default to having their spell at level 2. In other words, vampires are summoned with Arcane Summon L2, but they also can cast Arcane Summon L2; vampires can summon vampires that can summon more vampires, and so on. One easy solution is to change their summoning class to 6. In contrast, priest spells depend on set creature numbers rather than summoning classes: Summon Shade at levels 1-3 summon creatures 120-122 (defaults to Shade, Greater Shade, and Vengeful Shade, respectively), and at 4 and 5 summon 177 (Fierce Shade) and 178 (Divine Shade) respectively. You're sort of not supposed to raise Summon Shade above level 5, but if you do, then you summon creature numbers above 178; Summon Shade L6 summons creature number 179, etc. Those creatures default to undefined. Divine Host, meanwhile, summons creature 122 (defaults to Vengeful Shade) and at level 4 and higher summons creature 178 (Fierce Shade).

Forgive me for being dense/out of touch, but what is the point of this Discord chatroom? (And I mean that as a question question, not as a rhetorical question; I'm not saying it has no point, I'm asking what the point is.) That is, under what circumstances might a person want to use it, and for what?

I have no clue. This sounds like the sort of thing to email Spiderweb about.

I'm on 10.12 and it runs just fine for me.

"Some of the writing was a bit flowery." LOL! Yes. Yes, it was. When I'm lapsing into actual Latin (virtus, etc.) , you know I'm indulging my lofty side. LP was, in many ways, sort of a hodgepodge pastiche; I borrowed freely from more or less everything that I was reading at the time that I liked, and a lot of it was fairly grandiose — in college, I had just finished a year of Shakespeare and a semester of Vergil — which left my writing fairly turgid at times. Well, that was fun! I may watch another episode or two at some point if you play something that I think I'll find amusing (Canopy, maybe?), but other than that, I wish you well as you continue your Let's Play, and I will end my comments here.

I intended to test the Prologue this weekend, but when I loaded up the scenario, I encountered something I hadn't anticipated: for some reason, BoA rejected my scenario script as having too many variables when I had more than 10. (The docs say the maximum is generally 20.) Not sure what happened, but I had to replace a bunch of variables with flags, which isn't going to do anything good for the readability of the script. Still, I tested it, and special spells work! At least, getting info works, and that runs through almost the same logical flow as casting the spell does, so casting also ought to work. I'll test that more later. I also got distracted by layering in dialogue and characters in Chapter 1. I'm following more or less the development process that I used for Exodus, which is to draw all the towns (floors, terrains, stains, etc.), then add NPCs and dialogue (including one-shot messages as you enter rooms and such), then add in combat in the dungeons. At some point along the way, whenever I've hit a block, I add junk items, more terrain/stains, etc., to make the town look finished. This is chapter-by-chapter, so I've drawn almost all of the towns for Chapter 1, and I'm in the middle of adding NPCs and dialogue for all the towns in Chapter 1. One of the things I hadn't anticipated is just how many character names I need. In Exodus, there were all of five friendly towns other than camps in the whole scenario (Vasskolis, Neoss, Thassaka, the Temple of Sothana, and arguably Possanatheon). In Bahssikava, there were even fewer. In Homeland, though, there are five in just the Prologue and Chapter 1. Each one has a bunch of NPCs who talk, so I end up needing a ton of names. I'm also finding that this scenario is much more in the style of the Avernum Trilogy than any of my other scenarios have been. Much of the early game is more or less open exploration with lots of sidequests and seemingly tangential dialogue. This is different; I've never made anything quite like this before. There are already more quests that can appear on your quest list than in any other scenario I've ever made, and I'm not even done adding quests from Chapter 1 yet.

I mean, the tl,dr of the last few posts between me and Sudanna is: Kelandon: I guess Chessrook44 would rather yell at the screen than take my tactical suggestions. I didn't realize that, but that's cool, I guess. I'll stop making tactical suggestions. Sudanna: People don't like being told what to do! Stop making tactical suggestions! Kelandon: Uh... that's what I just said?

Have you watched these episodes? There are times when Chessrook44 addresses me by name and sometimes even asks questions. I think you don't know what you're talking about.

Huh. The more you know.

Players constantly say "it's bad" when they mean "I don't like it," which is why at this point I'm sort of agnostic as to the use of terms. I attached a picture of what we're talking about. You lose control of one member of your party at the blue rectangle in the middle of the bottom of the screen. You're basically just told, "It's dark magic; enter combat mode." You're not really told where to go because there aren't many ways to go; you just came from the south, so you have to head north. I guess you have a choice between east and west, and west is more direct, but both get you there. You kill the dragon ("Drake Lord," technically) and then are told that the magic is concentrated at the altar. You're supposed to use Ritual of Sanctification to sanctify the altar to end the curse; Chessrook44 complained that you were never told that you were given Ritual of Sanctification at the beginning of the scenario, and I suppose that's a fair complaint, but as Tarsus put it earlier, "as someone who played the other Avernum games, when you see an evil altar you should automatically think of the ritual." So... what exactly is the problem? I guess I should've put in a note at the beginning that you have Ritual of Sanctification, but that's really the only thing I'd change. As for "Several paths lead to dead ends," as Chessrook44 put it, you can see that that's not really true; there's a little dead end in the northeast, but it's only about three or four paces out of your way, and there's a dead end in the northwest, but to get to it, you have to waltz right past Scary Floor To The South. (I guess you could also go through the secret passage in the middle to a dead end, but who's checking walls for secret passages during this combat?) I suppose this is neither here nor there, but nonetheless I feel like pointing out that back in 2005, the community was almost completely unanimous that this was the best fight in the whole scenario. No one has to like it now because some people liked it then — like or dislike whatever you want — but they did like it back then. If you don't believe me, check CSR; a bunch of the reviews from the early days still say this.

it's been ages since I've done a point-by-point response like this, but what the heck, why not. Sure, whatever. I take no issue with that. Do what you prefer. As I noted above, I simply didn't realize that Chessrook44 would prefer to yell at the screen than change his approach. I thought he didn't know what to do to change his approach. That's the whole reason I've been making combat strategy suggestions. I'm not doing that anymore. Moreover, if Chessrook44 (or you, or whoever) doesn't like my scenarios, no skin off my back. I've long since stopped caring about that. If you say things that are wrong or silly, though, I might point out that you're wrong or silly. No, this is both wrong and silly. Players should not expect BoA scenarios to have the same game balance and strategies across scenarios; BoA allows for far too much customization for that. It's entirely possible within BoA to replace the combat system entirely, or have no combat, or do all kinds of other things, and it's entirely unreasonable to expect designers not to make use of those features (since many do make use of those features). Now, whether you like a scenario making use of those features is up to you. That's a separate issue. But any expectation that designers won't make use of the full power of the scripting engine is an unreasonable expectation. Of all the complaints I've gotten about my scenarios over the years — and there have been a lot, and I tend to pay attention to them — "unreasonably difficult" is not usually one of them. This leads me to believe that "many" is not quite as many as you would have it. (That's not to say it's never been said. It's just pretty infrequent compared to other complaints.) This is a bizarre comment. It sure didn't seem like Chessrook44 was enjoying himself when he was growling and screaming. The reason I've been making suggestions about combat strategy is not that I thought he was playing the scenarios "wrong" (wtf does that even mean? if you win, you win); it's that he seemed as though he was having an awful time at certain points because he didn't know how to get through the combats more smoothly, and I thought my suggestions would help him have a more enjoyable experience. Turns out I was wrong, but I hope my error was understandable. That is, what I found surprising was not that Chessrook44 enjoyed different kinds of combat than I expected. What I found surprising is that Chessrook44 prefers yelling at the screen to changing his tactics. But apparently he does, so that's fine, whatever floats your boat — I just didn't anticipate that. (When he rode a bug exploit through the entire second half of Exodus, I may have gotten a little snarky — I think I called it "cheap" once and "boring" once — but I hope not overly so. I was trying to be measured/cheerful.) That's all well and good, but as I said above, the likelihood of dying in LP is relatively low. Even in the hardest encounters, a first-turn kill is about a one-in-five chance, more or less. And, as noted, if you make use of all the tools available to you, you can get through the rest without dying even once. That, incidentally, is the reason for the scaling up of difficulty in those first three outdoor encounters! They're meant to introduce the combat system and, as noted above, they worked, even here!

And you think that taking a few seconds to examine the screen — which you could narrate, since you could read out what you're looking at in the text box or describe the actions that you're considering taking — is going to turn off your viewers more than growling and yelling and reloading over and over again? I... suspect you're wrong, but maybe you know your audience better than I do. I mean, it's your LP. Do as you will. Also, as Slarty points out, when you find yourself reloading a bunch, there's no reason you can't cut out the attempts that don't work — I was frankly surprised that you didn't when I first started watching. Why would anyone want to see you lose a combat over and over again? You think I provide fewer hints about how to progress than Myst does? LOOOOOOOOOL!! EDIT: You know what, it's more readable as three separate posts.

This is a turn-based game. You have all the time you want. You just need to stop after each move and observe what happens (e.g., look at the statuses on your PCs, read the text updates, etc.). You don't do that, and you're aware that you don't do that (we talked about it earlier in this thread), but you can hardly complain that you "don't have time" when you don't take the time that you have. You don't have to rush through turns. You choose to rush through turns. And let's be clear: in the most recent episode, you fought five bears (same as the hardest fight in the first episode), and you won easily on the first try. What was the difference? You used four pila and a few potions. So the fights aren't that hard; you're just making them hard by choosing not to employ winning strategies. But hey, the first few outdoor fights are meant to introduce the new combat system, and it looks like it worked! You're resistant to change, but you changed — not quickly enough to avoid shouting at the screen in the first episode, but quickly enough to win the sidequest easily in the third. So what happened was basically what was supposed to happen, albeit a little more gradually than intended. And that's very much the point in LP. It's a horror story, and the forces that you're up against are far beyond your powers. This is kind of a thing in my scenarios; in LP and NH, you're dramatically outmatched. NH plays it for comedy ("I'm SCARED of goblins"), but LP plays it for terror. That's also why there are outdoor wandering monsters (i.e., outdoor encounters that respawn); Ateria is just crawling with dangerous beasts. There's a fairly low chance of first-turn kills in those outdoor combats. I think it's something like one-in-four or one-in-five, which really becomes a bother only when you reload and refight them a dozen times or more. But the reason the chance of a first-turn kill is there is to further the scene-setting, just like the early dialogue.

It seems like you have a really strong preference for always doing the same thing in every combat and getting through on the first try because, as you've said, you don't really like combat, so you just want to breeze through and not really pay attention to it. Most of my scenarios were designed for people who do like combat, for people who think that doing the same thing over and over again is boring. A combat puzzle is designed to force you to change your tactics, so usually the first try involves figuring out the parameters of the combat, the second try involves doing something new, and (if necessary) the third and subsequent tries involve refining your tactics. It's supposed to be more interesting, at least to people who like combat — which you don't, so it's not going to be a good fit for you. Nonetheless, I've been trying to point out things to do differently because even if you don't like combat, you can make the combat easier by making better decisions, and I've interpreted what you've said as indicating that you want the combat to be easier. But I think I've misunderstood you; you don't want the combat to be easier. You want the combat to be beatable by doing the same things as you always do, which is a bit of a different thing. And when you're faced with a situation in which that doesn't work, you try again a few times and then make an incremental change and try again and again. And then make another incremental change and try again and again. In other words, when faced with a situation in which breezing through is not an option, you have clearly expressed a preference for doing the same things over and over again and getting irritated rather than changing your tactics and getting through more easily. Anger is less of a problem for you than change is. And even when you get upset, minimal change is preferable to a more wholesale adjustment. That's... not a preference that I would have anticipated. I can't imagine having this preference. I guess the difference is that, for me, anger is an extraordinarily unpleasant emotion, and I'll go to great lengths to avoid it. But I've watched hours and hours of this, and we've talked at some length, and I can't see how else to interpret your actions at this point: you genuinely would prefer to be angry than to change. You'll often say the thing that you're refusing to do, so it's clearly not that you don't know what to do (which is what I had been assuming to this point). Instead, it's that you prefer to do the things that you're doing, even when they cause you frustration. So... I guess I should stop making suggestions. I mean, you've presumably finished Lord Putidus by this point anyway, but even making general suggestions about how to approach BoA combat isn't helpful, since you would rather not take these suggestions. And you have my apologies. I misunderstood you, and I've been on the wrong track this whole time. I've been trying to be helpful, but I clearly haven't been helpful. I may or may not still point out when you say things that are wrong — e.g., I never thought to use the potions to prepare for outdoor combat and I still got through, even in the (much harder) alpha version, so I'm not assuming that you prepare for those fights — depending on how I feel. But I guess there's no reason for me to point out how to get through the combat more easily, because that isn't really what you want. EDIT: Totally separately — LOL, I'd forgotten that LP takes place in Transylvania! For some reason, maybe because it uses Nethergate graphics, I had remembered it taking place in Britain. But definitely not — it takes place in the Roman province Dacia in about the second century A.D., and it's a vampire story. It's in Transylvania.

Did you see the relevant dialogue with Katie? You didn't do it onscreen, so I thought you'd skipped it. In relation to LP: one of the things that the early BoA community tried to do was design combat puzzles. These were combats that were intended to force you to use different tactics than you ordinarily would use. It seems like you try to brute force your way through combat puzzles, which doesn't work (because the combats are designed to make that approach not work), and then you get frustrated. Instead, you're supposed to change your tactics. You'll keep having this problem in BoA scenarios (especially mine and TM's) until you really absorb this lesson. And yes, sometimes changing your tactics means using consumables! LP's total combat rewrite depends heavily on your using consumables, some of which are instantly replenishable (potions) and some of which come with many, many uses (pila, first aid kits) so that you can use them sparingly throughout the entire scenario. Those outdoor fights — which, yes, are much easier than I remember because apparently I remember an alpha version — are meant to introduce you to the total rewrite of the combat system. In this total rewrite, the consumables aren't just there to look at. They're there to be used!

And that's my favorite twist in The Magic! Ethass, Silthokh, and Kass are all on the island, too. (Are they the only ones? Hmmmmmmmm.) And Ethass, at least, can tell you a little of what happened after you died. Love it! I remember Lord Putidus being kind of a beast of a scenario — the combat was pretty hard, I think — but it's been probably at least a decade since I last played it, so I may be remembering an alpha or beta version rather than the release. It'll be interesting to see how it goes now. I pumped the thing out in a month after I finished Bahssikava. (A month is pretty fast, even for a relatively short scenario, at least for me. Or at least it was at the time.)

I mentioned that the fact that Machrone = Richard White comes back, and that Machrone isn't exactly from the Empire... now you see what I meant. I do love a good twist, and there are some big ones in The Magic. But my favorite is yet to come....

LOL! Yes. Like, a bajillion. I missed a Mac version update, so I wouldn't be surprised if others did too.

Best parody scenario name ever!

I looked over the log that I kept while designing Exodus, and I noticed a few things. First, part of the reason for the extended development time (from May 2005 to November 2006) was that I was designing Exodus while in college and I took a two-month break toward the end of a semester when I was just too busy to work on anything but school. That sort of thing may happen again... who knows. But another huge part of the extended development time was that I didn't alpha test anything until after I had basically finished designing the scenario. I actually started alpha testing in May 2006, but the scenario was such a train wreck at that point that it took two months just to get to the point where I had something finishable, and the beta ran for another four months after that because I kept running into bug after bug. That's not going to happen with Homeland; I'm testing everything more or less as I design (at worst, at the end of every chapter). The Prologue is done and finishable. I have to run through it one more time since I made my last set of changes, but I'll be doing that shortly. Chapter 1 is well underway, and once I've designed enough to run a party through it, I will. My hope is that this will make final alpha testing and beta testing much smoother than they were for Exodus. I also spent a while this past week implementing the special spell system, and it's a doozy.

Then I've got nothing. The way you're describing it, it doesn't sound like an Unhandled Exception, which indicates a call using a value out of range and which — by this point — I have some reasonable idea how to fix. It's something else, and I don't know what. Bain might have some ideas, if he shows up. Otherwise, you probably need to contact Spiderweb — if VoDT isn't working well, it's probably something wrong with your copy of BoA, not just one scenario.