Kelandon

Makes me wonder if this project is still going anywhere.

I entirely agree with your sense that it's a different kind of game than Jeff usually makes. So does Jeff, really; he said somewhere (maybe somebody else will bother to track it down) that he made it different partly because he wanted to tell a different type of story. The relatively straightforward heroic fantasy of Avernum 1 lends itself to a general exploratory approach, but the dark fantasy that he was trying to capture in Avadon really requires a more plot-heavy (and therefore more linear) approach. He could've done Geneforge-style factions, I suppose, but it wouldn't have worked terribly well with the plot that he had. He'd have had to change the plot at least some in order to make it play out properly, and I think he wanted to get the game out faster and tell the story that he was trying to tell. Besides, I don't really like factions, because I rarely play the games more than once, so I feel like I'm missing out when I know there are other paths. It seems as though he's taking his sweet time with Avadon 2, which I'm hoping means that we're in for something really good, one way or another.

Well, now that you know, read a Strategy Central topic or two and then go wild with one of the earlier games. There really are crazy exploits in these games, and you can find out what they are on Strategy Central. My "Avadon on Torment solely pumping Dexterity" experience taught me that.

(Moved to the Editor forum...) Yeah, you'll want to look at the upgraded editors for Mac and Windows, which already have a few of the features you described. There are also a number of stand-alone utilities that edit dialogue, check Avernumscript documents, etc. The main feature that I want that they don't yet have is the ability to have more than one town/outdoor section open at once. Good luck with this project. It's ambitious, and ambitious projects in Blades rarely get finished.

I think a "clastrophobe" would be afraid of destruction/breaking things, so one would want quite the opposite of that.

Hopefully that means that Avadon 2 will be large. I'm hoping for, like, Avernum 3 large. That was pretty cool.

That article is not very accurate, or at least phrases literally accurate statements in a misleading way. For example, "Most mass murderers do not have criminal records or a history of psychiatric hospitalization." This is true, I guess, but the Columbine shooters had criminal records. The Virginia Tech shooter had a long, documented history of mental illness. The Aurora shooter appears to have had at least some history of mental illness. A significant part of the profile of a mass shooter is some prior run-in with the law or at least some prior history of mental illness. So while the statement is literally true (they tend not to have a history of psychiatric hospitalization per se), if you take it to mean that they have no criminal or mental health history, it's false. This particular shooter in Newtown is exceptional in a number of ways (he used his mother's guns, he didn't have much of a documented history of, well, anything, etc.), but the typical profile stands (as typical if not universal). Moreover, it is possible that he had something that was undiagnosed; you can have, say, the flu even if no doctor tells you that you have the flu, so it's possible that he had some mental illness even though no psychiatrist ever examined him. We can't say that he wasn't mentally ill; the most that we could say is that we don't know. (He did have some sort of problem impairing his day-to-day functioning, and not just because he shot a bunch of first-graders; he had difficulty speaking to anyone but his mother, according to those who knew them. Whether that rose to the level of mental illness, I don't know.) And certainly there are problems going the other way: given that mass shooters tend to have certain characteristics, it's not easy to say that people who have these characteristics are in danger of becoming mass shooters. I don't know if the description is really that specific. That's where preventative policy becomes difficult.

I don't think he was ever diagnosed with anything. On the other hand, you don't do what he did if you're completely right in the head.

You may be unimpressed, but the risk of dying by gunshot has fallen 50% (source: http://abcnews.go.co...55#.UNazDKX7pNw). That's a lot of lives saved. Forgive me if I believe that we're better than that. We in America can reform our laws to make ourselves safer. We passed an assault weapons ban before, and our country didn't collapse. We can do it again. I'm glad that you've taken to openly making light of the murder of "a few" children, because it casts your position in clearer relief. Yes, any child's chance of getting shot is relatively low. However, about one child or teen is shot and killed per typical day, by Slate's count: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html. That's still too many; it's estimated that there is the equivalent of about six Newtown shootings per year (source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/child-gun-deaths-newtown_n_2347920.html). The fact remains that our gun-related death rate per capita is ridiculously high (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate). It's more than double the next highest rate in the developed world (Canada) and many times the rate in Europe. That is in fact a lot of deaths. And how many people does it take, really? How many people have to die before it matters? We do have laws restricting freedom of speech in cases where it is likely to cause imminent harm to others. Likewise, we can have laws restricting gun possession when it not only is likely to but in fact does cause serious harm and death to people every day. When your entire position boils down to not caring when kids die, there's something wrong with your position. Like, say, to Connecticut? I would venture to say that that didn't help as much as the parents in Newtown hoped it would. What are you even talking about right now? Are you saying that in a hypothetical situation in which citizens are totally unarmed, the police shouldn't need guns, either? That hardly seems relevant to reality. Yes, but when you say it, it's actually nonsense, instead of facts that you call nonsense because you don't like them. These "multitudes" are virtually nonexistent. If you buy a gun for self-defense, it is many, many times more likely to be used to hurt someone in your household than to defend someone in your household.

This is true, but in order for it to be logically relevant, you need to point out an important difference. You have not. The point was that the gun control measures in Australia gave a real sense of security, not a false one. And real security, while we're at it, which is more important: gun crime in fact plummeted. Huh? It looks as though you're saying that people in the U.S. who don't like guns should move to a place where there are no guns, but you're also saying that no place in the U.S. should be allowed to ban guns (and therefore be sure that there are no guns). I think what you're saying is, "We got guns! If you don't like it, get out!" That could be described (if one were being charitable in one's descriptions) as a position but not an argument. Nobody's talking about "feeling a little bit safer." We're talking about kids getting shot at school. If someone's free speech got a lot of people killed, I might start thinking a bit about curtailing that free speech. (Oh wait! That's what the "clear and present danger" and "imminent lawless action" business in First Amendment law is all about!) So maybe we're talking about asking people to accept modest limits on their constitutional rights in order to save kids' lives, but that's not tyranny. That's basic human decency. It appears that you're saying that ordinary citizens should be allowed to have guns because police and military personnel have guns. This is obviously ridiculous on its face. Should ordinary citizens be allowed to have nuclear weapons? Or biological weapons? Our military (or "government enforcers," as you call them) has those. In short, your post fails to make any sort of logical argument or even express much of a coherent thought. On the bright side, though, your post was not nearly as much of a fail as the NRA's press conference yesterday.

Huh. You have a point. Torment is probably not for me, but the Zephyrine fight on, say, Normal might be more interesting than the same fight on Casual, because it would be just challenging enough to keep entertained throughout without getting monotonous/absurdly hard.

Completed Avadon on Torment, and yeah, it was pretty much the same all the way through. I was struck by how Viscount Varoche, who was the bane of my existence on my last playthrough, turned into a fairly tame encounter because, well, like everyone else, he couldn't hit me. I didn't try to kill Zephyrine (well, I tried, once, and gave up because it was absurd) or Redbeard on Torment, so I went back and killed Zephyrine on Casual, saw that I didn't get a medal for it, and killed Redbeard (for the first time on any playthrough) on Normal. Not only is the game balance pretty ragged, but also the two hardest fights are kind of terrible. I don't mean that they're hard (though they are), but that they're really unrewarding and boring. On Casual, I sat there for maybe 20 or 30 minutes clicking on Zephyrine's guardians, one after another, and occasionally healing as Zephyrine wore me down. But nothing ever substantially changed... I just kept clicking. Redbeard was similar, although not quite as bad, because I had to figure out how to get enough characters over by the soul jars to kill them while still having enough out by Redbeard to do damage to him, and at least that was interesting. So... Avadon. Great game. Really great game. I think only A1 and A2 were compelling enough for me to play them three times, and Avadon now joins that club. But what the hell, man. Why is the game balance is all over the place?

Following on http://spiderwebforu...ough-reactions/, I've now nearly finished my third playthrough of Avadon, this time on Torment, with a main character Shadowwalker. After reading Strategy Central topics, I decided to pump Dexterity and just keep pumping it. Every single level, on every single character except Nathalie, I increased Dexterity. (For Nathalie, I increased Intelligence.) I also pushed ranged weapon skills (bows for Sevilin, razordisks for Shima) as soon as I could get them and then pushed the middle column for every single level thereafter. For Jennell and Nathalie, I went to the middle column immediately, trying to get critical hit skills as soon as I could for Nathalie and then boosting the rest of the middle column. It turns out, if you do this without exception, that this provides a complete path all the way up to about level 20 (sooner for Nathalie and Jennell, later for Sevilin and Shima, because of the bows/razordisks). It also turns out that this makes the game remarkably easy, even on Torment. The fundamental difference I'm finding between this playthrough and the last two (which were on Normal and Hard) is that nothing can hit me. Sure, two or three hits from bosses would kill my characters, but even bosses only hit every now and then. For the most part, everyone misses pretty much all the time. The extra turns that enemies get on Torment no longer seem like cheating (as they did on my last playthrough on Hard), because they can't do anything useful with them. They just miss again. I've alternated between my main SW, Sevilin, and Nathalie as my three and my main SW, Sevilin and Shima as my three, and I seem to be doing slightly better with the latter (mostly because Nathalie, having pumped Int, can still be hit, so I have to be careful about where I put her). I'm also doing just fine when my main SW has to venture off alone, because, again, he rarely gets hit. My combat tactics basically involve falling back as much as possible (attack from just far enough away that the enemy can't reach me in the next turn, then fall back 7 steps and attack again). When I can't fall back much, I just place my three characters in an equilateral triangle surrounding whoever I'm attacking (that is, as far apart as possible), and I just fire off ranged attacks until I win. Nathalie has the healing scarab and the teleporting scarab, and if things get really bad, I have her run 7 steps, teleport to as far away as she can get, and then (when everyone else is knocked out) end combat to revive everyone else. A few fights have required this or postponing until later, but for the most part, I'm getting through everything with only one or two reloads at boss battles and almost no reloads anywhere else. I just hit the level cap and am approaching the endgame, and again, everything has been remarkably easier than when I had a bad build but was playing on Normal. My bad build consisted of trying to balance out my traits and get new skills (so I'd keep a balance among Str, Dex, Int, and End, and I'd try to get lots of abilities even if they were only at level 1), and it turns out that this approach is deathly awful. In Avadon, you want to pump one thing over and over and over again. And that one thing is Dex. I think it's not particularly obvious that this is the way to go until you play the game a few times and read the forums, which is sort of annoying. But there are plain, straightforward reasons for it. Dex has the advantage of both helping you attack (missile attacks) and be attacked (avoid getting hit), whereas the other traits mostly help you with one (attack: Str, Int) or the other (be attacked: End). Also, whereas enemies can block or reflect hand-to-hand attacks (Spine Shield, riposte) or magical attacks (immunity to fire or energy, Reflection), ranged physical attacks don't seem to have anything comparable: almost no enemies are immune to physical damage, and there is no status that reflects ranged physical damage back. The other thing that I'm noticing is that the game balance is surprisingly ragged, given how much Jeff works on that sort of thing. I mentioned in my last playthrough that the minions you fight at the beginning of a dungeon give you absolutely no sense as to how hard the boss is going to be, and you find leaps in difficulty all over the game from one moment to the next, both leaping up and down. But then, the difficulty looks different when you have a good build. I was expecting the first fight with Zhossa Mindtaker to mark a great jump up in difficulty, because it did on my last two playthroughs, but it really didn't. It was a little bit of a speedbump, but the game has played at a reasonably bumpy but even keel all the way through. I'll report back again after I've finished.

This is finally the editor that should have been released with the game when it first came out! This is remarkable. Thank you. I am now obligated to finish a scenario over break.

This came up before, but I don't think it was quite answered: is there a legitimate purpose for a civilian to have the kind of gun that was used in this incident? I'm not a gun expert, but it seems as though there's a difference between a gun for hunting/self-defense and a gun for mass murder, and I'm not sure that there's any good reason in this day and age for anybody outside the military to have the latter. The Second Amendment is in a weird legal place, because it most directly butts up against the sharpest divides over interpreting the Constitution. The Second Amendment plainly says that its purpose is to enable state militias. State militias are unambiguously defunct. What do you do with a law that is plainly and unambiguously unable to fulfill its original purpose?

Unless you're eating chocolate coins. Chocolate would make a great currency if it didn't melt on hot days.

HAHA SUCCESS!!

Nobody likes me

Oh no! I am losing my spammy touch!

I am somewhat confused. I don't appear to be on ms's list, but I think I'm on Sylae's.

Welcome back! BoA utilities have been developing slowly in your absence.

Aww, but I'd like a system of exchange based on unsellable trowels, aka Liliths/Thuryls/LRTDeMs. You hand a one-Lilith bill to the cashier and get four Thuryls in exchange. Then you put one into a vending machine and, in addition to your drink, out pops your change: two LRTDeMs. That's how the economy ought to work.

My point is just that you can concoct a story such that most of the game's mechanics are "realistic" within the universe of Avadon, even if they're not realistic here on Earth. I'm not sure what it would be for lockpicks, but appealing to magic usually gets you there on pretty much everything (including the auto-healing that you said that you don't like).

It's already not realistic because it has magic. If you like, assume that the Hands have slow-acting, self-healing magic that requires significant concentration such that it only can be used outside of combat.

If you actually release something before, let's say, December 21 (when my last final is due), I will release a scenario using it over Winter Break. Not promising that it will be created from scratch, but a scenario that used it at some point in the process anyway.