Boots

Tarl\'s passwords.

I'm presuming TM counts cursed items as a "workaround," since he and I discussed the idea awhile back. What effect are you trying to reproduce, TM? The absolute inability to wield a weapon -- as in my attempt to reproduce the effects of amputation -- or simply the illegality of walking around with openly brandished choppers?

All right, that is more attention than this thoroughly mediocre, tiresome scenario EVER deserved. Any RPG plot, in so far as it is structured around the quest to defeat a social problem that has been abstracted, externalized and exemplified by some enemy other, is fundamentally ethical in design: we are good because we are us; you are bad because you aren't. Die. Whether or not that mechanism then dispenses a "message" is an academic question. At some point in the most "entertaining," least "preachy" scenario, somebody's gonna commit some suppposed atrocity or do something else that asks a player -- no matter how perfunctory the asking -- to feel the righteous rising of the gorge and, on the strength of that, direct a remorselessly vindicating blade against the inhuman cause, blah blah blah. VoDT is only conspicuous because it tries to use that ethical logic to solve a problem which exceeds the explanatory power of ethical externalization. Thus the clearest, smartest thing said in all this mess: Quote: What irritated me slightly was that this "evil mage-woman" theme repeated itself again in yet another J. Vogel's game. Take a structural problem inextricable from everything valued as human progress and happiness -- and therefore, a problem insoluable without sacrficing or otherwise relinquishing something of value to that happiness. Then lose your nerve in the face of writing a plot adequate to that choice (it would require making players play differently as a result of their decisions). Upon which failure, find the nearest scapegoat: there's one recently escaped from the kitchen -- she can't have gotten far. Those vale-dwellers, let alone the PCs, never gained anything from the cause of the pollution, so as a representation of the question, VoDT is mealy-mouthed, if not basically dishonest (likewise the Geneforges, though that's another story). No matter how well-represented or explained the "sides" of a moral choice are in an RPG, if that choice does not require a player to change the way he or she plays -- not just to kill different arrangements of sprites, but to engage in different forms of action -- it is at best an abstract choice of taste (which flavor do you like best, "individual" or "society"? biotech or nature? guys with blue uniforms or guys with red uniforms? on whose behalf would you like to slaughter, Coke or Pepsi?). At which point, the most complexity you can hope for is ASR-style nihilism, which -- since all sides reduce to the same denominator -- readily converts into a complacent affirmation of whatever prejudices a player brings to the story. How about not scrapping the article but changing its focus? More nuts and bolts: how to make the mechanics of gameplay change as a result of the "moral" decisions you ask a player to make. This might, among other things, involve coming up with plots other than the quest plot.

Comments before beginscendatascript work fine for me and are in the prepackaged scenarios' scripts. Nor could I reproduce the error by pasting the entire snippet into a new file -- which might then be the solution, if no help for an explanation (what app are you using to write your scripts?).

Already have, doesn't do much. The problem seems pretty clearly the result of operator negligence.

. . . . and a good place to find custom item scripts: look at the scenario data scripts for the prepackaged scenarios (i.e. valleydydata.txt). EDIT: By the way, spyderbytes, since you use the editor far more than I do: I've been assuming that I get the "out of memory" error because I'm doing sloppy and stupid swapping back and forth between BoA and the Editor (since quitting either usually eliminates the error), and not because there's an actual bug in the Editor. Have you run into the error? (If it happens, it does so the first time the Editor tries to load a new graphic.)

To begin with, you probably need some quotation marks around the item's names. Beyond that, what exact error message do you mean by "won't recognize"? Some, such as that odd "out of memory" message, are easily fixed by quitting and restarting the Editor.

x_icon_adjust = color shift (with the prefix x = "fl," "cr," "it," etc.). See pp. 48-49 of the Editor Manual for the available color shift options you can employ. x_which_icon and x_ed_which_icon define an icon's location on the sheet defined by which_sheet or ed_which_sheet. See p. 48 for this as well.

The point is that an item given it_variety = 9 should NEVER combine with anything of the same type, at least according to the Editor docs, p. 61, so it_variety = 9 does not seem to work as advertised.

Again, my memory is hazy, but I believe you need only make it to the Hall of Judgment and stand at the dock. So don't try to kill off the hordes, just keep moving forward in each combat round and hack a way through them.

This is happening on the battlefield itself? If so, stick to the north or south wall, particularly as you approach the middle (there are little bypasses there). If it's not happening there, you'll have to wait for somebody with a better memory to post.

Amazonian Saga has something along the lines of a villain whose heart you change. Sort of. Not going to try to remember all the twists and turns in that plot.

Got busy spewing another of my endless nothings, but there's no point saying anything besides: Thuryl is, as usual, very very right. Well, that, and also: I'd play a learning-disordered marmot with serious Mommy issues if that's what *i had required for me to witness Emulations change-up everything he did previously as a designer. That's far more interesting than any attachment I might have formed with Tongue or whoever the fighter is who's in the party I use for high level scenarios. It wouldn't be shabby, however, to let designers do more with PC names than dump them into the text area -- or am I missing the calls for dialog boxes, etc.? Not a big deal, I guess.

Does the dialogue action INN (p. 93 of the Editor Docs) not work for your purposes?

From well outside the "designing" community, and well inside the "too stupid to figure out how to download from Alex." community: It might be interesting to recast this question. What "open-ended" and "linear" scenarios have tended to share is a similar motivation for their action. Built after the model of romance quests, their stories are pulled along by some goal. And it is tough to keep the contract of an open-ended, richly-detailed world in a story that otherwise progresses by being pulled. On the other hand, "push" plots -- to take the simplest example, the story of a pursuit -- are somewhat rarer in Blades. Yet set the law after me, and I'll be happy to have a world with as many obscure nooks and crannies as I can find. I don't know that "push" versus "pull" is more useful than "open-ended" versus "linear." It probably isn't. But it does seem to me that we're familiar enough with the terms of the second debate that it's worth mapping the ground shared by its combatants. That might provide a reference from which designers can depart into new territory.