A5 seems to be a step up in difficulty

[Student of Trinity]

That seems a fair enough take on the summons limit. And for people who care about Spiderweb games in general, it's important to bear in mind one big difference between shareware and FOSS. Jeff is not writing games for eternity, but for the six months until his next game. I'm sure he also counts on people continuing to buy his old games for years, but there is a limit to how much polishing pays off for him. Past a certain point of refinement, he will get more income from devoting the same effort to his next game instead.

 

Jeff clearly understands this, and that's why he's still in business after all these years of trading goblin pixels for food and shelter and WOWC subscriptions. What counts as a wart, from the point of view of gaming-for-gaming's-sake, may be a pearl of a business decision. We don't have to like it any better for that, as a game feature, but we should understand it. I for one would much rather have warty A4, 5 and 6, than a perfect Duke Avernum Forever that didn't come out until a year from now, with never a sequel after that because Spiderweb went bust and Jeff lost interest in writing games as a hobby after earning his living with a real job.

 

I also understand that there may be some other engine tweak that Jeff could have made, instead of this arbitrary 2-summon limit, which would have been far better. Finding it, and making sure that it really was as good as it seemed, might even be quick and easy. But that would be a big stroke of luck. The most likely case is that finding the ideal tweak would take quite a while, and involve changing a fair number of things. The chances are even fair that a really nice fix for spam summoning would be a slippery slope into rewriting the combat engine, magic system, and monster AI all from scratch.

 

A really big overhaul like that would probably be great, of course. And that's really what Jeff is going to do. He's just going to do it over the course of several profitable game products.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Student of Trinity:
[QB]That seems a fair enough take on the summons limit. ... Jeff is not writing games for eternity, but for the six months until his next game. ... there is a limit to how much polishing pays off for him. /QB]

That's quite true, and fair enough, there is a point where he should be able to say that it is done. However, I'm hoping the issue will be resolved in a more satisfactory way in A6. It will be a significant factor in my purchasing decision.

[Randomizer]

Some of the decisions Jeff made for A5, like summoning limit, were made because Jeff started inquiring more into how the beta testers were doing certain encounters. Instead of just saying that we got through areas and if we thought that they were easy or too hard, Jeff got reports about how the fights were fought and saved games with the party buffed before the fights.

 

This meant that boss fights like Lysstak could no longer be done by using terror repeatedly to make him flee to a corner and let the party have free reign to whack him. Summon creations to overwhelm an opponent (at least for us). Jeff did leave in a few things like control foe to charm a monster between the party and the monsters so they would attack it instead of the party.

[Student of Trinity]

I don't believe Jeff made changes to address any single battles; he was looking for trends. Even after it was clear that something was a problem, he would wait and collect more data before making a change. When his reports indicated that many testers were finding the same loophole in many fights, then he usually closed it.

 

This policy still leaves a few individual battles for which some particular tactic lets you steal an easy win. But once this is rare enough, and if the tricks aren't always the same, it becomes a good thing, rather than a problem.

[KnowledgeBrew]

Totally agree with everything about haste needing to be less grindy(having to reload every battle to cast haste and all buffs before hand) and being undercosted for it's effect.

 

Regarding the difficulty levels: I always play easy mode based on risk versus reward analysis. Easy provides the most reward for the least risk. I get all the story, still get to find the best way to min-max the characters. If there was an option below easy I would probably play that as long as the rewards remained the same.

 

But see, people like me might be tempted to do a second playthrough but go why do a higher difficulty if it's just additional challenge with no payoff?

 

Who knows I might really enjoy Torment mode but why would I ever play it?

[VCH]

I've thought about playing on torment for my first play through. That's when I have the most patience for it.

[playongrass]

The only thing is, I wish my guys could go to the same magic school as the "enemy". They seem to have no limits as far as summoning, and they can cast a group haste without blinkin' an eye...

It's true that we have the advantage of foresight, so to speak, so it does make it even...

 

...still, it is a few more moments of my life i'm dedicated to keystrokes instead of one swift move...

and over the course of the game this can add up to minutes...

not to mention the increase in potentially harmful finger cramps...

[Khoth]

Be careful what you wish for. If you get group haste and unlimited summons from the bad guys, it's only fair that they get the ability to reload when they die.

[playongrass]

good point...

[Sudanna]

"Cool, I won again! Looks like he finally gave up! Wait, what's this error message? 'Take this, script-hacker.'"

 

BOOM.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Khoth:
Be careful what you wish for. If you get group haste and unlimited summons from the bad guys, it's only fair that they get the ability to reload when they die.

"Fine, goblins. Let's go best two out of three."

While very clever, this isn't actually valid. Saving/Reloading is external to the mechanics of the game.

At any rate, while the current two-parallel-systems of magic has its defenders, you will note that games with unified systems don't have people complaining on their forums "I wish the monsters had some spells we could never get," or "it's not fair that monsters can open doors too." (The latter, for one, is absurd because it contradicts our deep notions of how reality works, directly undermining suspension of disbelief. Might Wizard Gladwell - no match for a guy with a sword hiding in a closet, because it has a door.)

Note, too, that unifying things mechanically would not preclude them having special things that the players don't have. But it would eliminate the current silly situation where there are two parallel systems with many very similar effects with very similar names but that are different mechanically.

If the players are asking "where are our more than two summons," the NPCs should equally well be asking "where's our arcane blow?" or for that matter "why can't we open doors?" Indeed, the monster area attack implementation is also pointlessly different from the player's and doesn't even have nice pretty effects.

So, unifying the two systems would not have a negative effect on the balance of future games, it would on the contrary make it easier and reduce the amount of work to be done in making and balancing spell effects, costs, and so forth.

What I'm about to say may strike some as a bit blunt and maybe controversial. Just to be clear, Spiderweb games are generally fun and worth playing.

I have little hope for the resolution of this situation... all the Spiderweb games I've ever seen seem to think that the player characters are, mechanically speaking, not simply some creatures like any others in the game world but controlled by a human instead of some scripts. Look at the Exile source... pc_record_type is not a class inheriting from monster_record_type, it's something else altogether. (I assume this got rectified in Avernum but I can't say.) I think there is a legacy of "party exceptionalism" dating back to the beginning.

I don't mean to criticize Jeff here. Exile was his first or second Mac program, ever. Now, most first programs are much, much worse, and the fact that he managed to carry it through to completion is very impressive to me. I really can't emphasize that enough. In intially approaching the problem "create an RPG on the computer," it seems quite natural to have different structures for PCs and monsters because that's how they are in a tabletop game. (I certainly didn't have character sheets for every monster in any game I've GM'd.)

But the thing here is that a key generalization was missed. A software engineer, especially using an OOP model of design, looks for things that have properties and behaviors in common and unifies them, to save on programming effort while elmiminating opportunities for bugs and inconsistencies. And, well, unifying monsters and players was a whopper of an opportunity that seems to have slipped past the first time. Unifying NPC and PC magic systems seems to have been missed in Avernum, and here we are.

Still, don't overestimate the consequences. They're fine games in spite of their inconsistencies and mechanical oddness. And I hold out hope that Jeff's next big game, after A6, will break with the past and be more mechanically modern, resolving these various issues.

[Slawbug]

Nearly all RPGs treat the PCs differently from other characters when it comes to combat mechanics. This may not be ideal, but it's certainly standard!

 

Complaining about "two different magic systems" is misleading because the magic systems are identical. One rule about summons is different, not anything about magic.

[Student of Trinity]

As I explained once before on this topic, in some thread or other, there is another big difference between PCs and NPCs, which unlike saving and restoring is indeed something within the game world. The PCs gain power rapidly by killing monsters and completing quests. The NPCs don't.

 

My pet peeve is that this bizarre situation is hardly ever explained in RPGs, when in fact it is usually the most remarkable aspect of the story, once you notice it at all, and would surely make an excellent plot thread.

 

But whatever the reason for this fast PC learning may be, it makes clear that the PC abilities are not directly comparable with those of the NPCs. It is far from obvious that the magic I pick up by zapping seventy-three goblins and a fierce rat will be the same art that Joe the NPC Mage acquired through many years of tutelage and study.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Unhasty:
Nearly all RPGs treat the PCs differently from other characters when it comes to combat mechanics. This may not be ideal, but it's certainly standard!

Um, no. Most RPGs treat the PCs similarly, although in the case of pencil and paper RPGs, the PCs have many stats that monsters don't have, because usually we don't care if the Fierce Rat is charismatic or not. But in most RPGs I know of, both the PCs and NPCs/monsters have many things that are mechanically the same, like HP, rolling for to-hit, and so forth.

In the case of computer RPGs, it is more of a mixed bag, although I disagree that it's the current standard. Older games, e.g. Nethack (which also has seperate monster spells), tend to be more likely to have mechanically different players and monsters, so you might make an argument that it was standard at the time Exile was written. But it isn't really standard now... for good reason. Making them "the same thing" under the covers saves a bundle of programmer effort and makes it easier to be consistent simply because being inconsistent requires deliberate effort, rather than the consistency taking effort as with a system that treats them differently.

Quote:

Originally written by Unhasty:
the magic systems are identical.

Uh... how do you figure? Summoning aside, when was the last time you saw an NPC use Fireblast or prismatic shield? Ever seen an NPC priest Repel Spirit on your summoned shade? No. At very least, they have a different selection of magic, and there seems to be underlying mechanical differences as well. Compare to Battle disciplines, a recent addition to the engine, which seem to be symmetric between PCs and monsters: they have the same selection of them and they work in the same way.

[Slawbug]

Sorry, I had just meant computer RPGs. (Though tabletop RPGs are hardly a shining example of modularity: Levels vs. Hit Dice, anybody?)

 

I can only think of a few CRPGs that really use the same algorithms, all the time every time, for your side and the opposition. The old gold box AD&D games mostly did, and a number of unit-based games like Final Fantasy Tactics. And Pokemon. The rest of the old games, as you say, pretty much all treat them differently.

 

I'm not convinced modern games treat them the same, though. What games were you thinking of?

 

--

 

In latter-day Spiderweb games, the magic systems are identical. PCs and NPCs have access to different sets of spells, which frequently (though not always) overlap. But I think there are very few games (if any) where every PC spell is used by some monster, and every spell a monster uses can be learned by a PC. So in that sense I guess they aren't identical, nor are they in any games I can think of. My priest and mage have different spell sets, but are still governed by the same magic system; likewise for Ruth.

 

What I really meant, though, was that the effects are handled exactly the same way for PC and enemy casters.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Unhasty:
In latter-day Spiderweb games, the magic systems are identical. PCs and NPCs have access to different sets of spells, which frequently (though not always) overlap.

Identical, really? Well, I'll take your word on it since you apparently have some special knowledge. If they're the same, though, why don't NPCs have even one single spell that works like Icy Rain, Fireblast or Arcane Blow in that it appears in a circle and damages everything in the circle? Is it just a remarkable omission? Why don't the players have any 'aura' type attacks that damage every enemy in a radius around the caster, whereas these are common on monsters? (Perhaps divine retribution is one, but if so it's a really large circle...)

Anyway, the two 'mostly overlapping' systems are pretty pointless. It detracts from, rather than adds to, the game, at the expensive of increased balancing difficulty and inconsistency.

Spray Acid is great in the early game, yet no NPC mage uses it. Instead, slightly more sophisticated mages later on use this "summons a powerful bolt of venom" thing that works similarly but is apparently somewhat more powerful and poisons the target rather than covering it with acid. And we're talking about human mages here too, it's not like this is just the traditional goblin way of doing things or somesuch, which would add something to the game, sort of.
I would much rather see one extra minor sidequest than two slightly different acid spells...

Quote:

Originally written by Unhasty:
But I think there are very few games (if any) where every PC spell is used by some monster, and every spell a monster uses can be learned by a PC.

Having a unified system does not imply that, although it will tend towards that by default. It doesn't mean that there are no monsters with special abilities unavlaible to the players by any means. If you want a specific example of a game that has unified NPC and player magic systems, look at Cythera or its antecedents.

Quote:

Originally written by Unhasty:
What I really meant, though, was that the effects are handled exactly the same way for PC and enemy casters.

What do you mean by effects? The consequences on characters or the visual effects?

[Slawbug]

I'm confused. Your complaint is that PCs and NPCs have access to different ability sets. But then you suggest that you don't need EVERY PC spell to be used by NPCs, nor do you need the players to have access to EVERY NPC ability.

 

So, to clarify: is your actual complaint that you feel there isn't ENOUGH overlap in the skill sets?

 

(By effects, I mean all effects. A PC and an NPC on the same side of battle, with identical stats, standing in the same place, who use the same spell/ability will cause -exactly- the same effects.)

 

I suspect there are two reasons NPC casters don't use area of effect spells, Prismatic Shield, and such. One, their definition files originated in Geneforge 1, which had no area of effect spells. Two, a more complex AI might be required. That obviously isn't a prohibitive restriction, but it raises the question of whether it's worth investing time in.

[Khoth]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:
I would much rather see one extra minor sidequest than two slightly different acid spells...

I'd much rather see one extra minor sidequest than a unified acid spell.

It's not easier to have enemy spells be the same as the player spells - it's harder. There is a vital (although not particularly in-world) asymmetry in the combat balance - the player is expected to be able to kill a lot of enemies, but not vice-versa. So the point at which a spell is balanced for players will not in general be the same point at which it is balanced for enemies.

By keeping things separate, it's possible to balance the fight against Murgatroyd the Malicious Mage without having to worry too much about knockon effects that changing spells would have on the player's progress two chapters back. Sure, it can probably be done, but it's a lot of effort for little gain. Balance is easier the more knobs you have.

[Bryce]

In reply to Unhasty:

 

Basically, yes, there isn't enough overlap. That's a slightly simplistic way of looking at it, though, perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be that there are too many instances where it fails to overlap for no apparent reason.

 

For instance, that spell that Gladwell, Shafrir and Ruth have that shoots a little pink gear-looking thing of much magical damage at their enemies - I'm not complaining that they have this. We expect a high-level wizard with his own tower and everything to be able to do things our party can't. Ditto for mages outside the tradition of the party (e.g. savage sliths), to some extent.

 

But when we see a human mage or priest NPC, we expect him or her to be on roughly the same footing as our mages and priests, and it's confusing when they aren't.

 

I don't expect 100% overlap, or even want it. My complaint is that there seems to be a lot of near-overlap that is pointless, and rather usually detracts from the game. This near-overlap appears to be an artifact of some historical/technical considerations, which I think you are alluding to when you mention Geneforge. So although we don't apparently see eye to eye on the significance of this issue, at least we agree to some extent about its origin.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by Khoth:
Balance is easier the more knobs you have.[/QB]

Aye, but it's easy enough to add some sort of "casting level" parameter to change the effect quantity without effecting the quality. This is in fact far superior to a method where you have two similar spells to choose from, because with such a tweaking knob you can adjust the difficultly nearly-linearly and directly. Probably this already exists in some form. If monsters were handled exactly like PCs, you could give them levels of spellcraft or magery to make them harder if you wanted.

[Randomizer]

The main reason you don't see monsters casting spells the same way as players is the way Jeff created an action option menu for monsters. Each spell casting monster has a list of spells it can use so if it wasn't included, then it can't use it. This is why Hrickis no longer casts lightning spray and now does bolt of fire. That spell was one shot death to most parties.

 

Back in the older games, monsters had more options. They could open doors that parties closed to pursue them. Pick up and use items lying on the ground. These were things that Jeff changed as the game engine evolved.

[*i]

The problem is that creature scripts and terrain scripts do not meld together very well in the current engine. This issue should be addressed so that, at very least, the pathing algorithm can recognize doors and remove the obstruction.

 

Also, monsters cannot use area effect spells as PCs can. Now granted, they can "radiate" things to the same effect, they are not the same spells. I'm divided on whether or not this would be truly better to implement.

[kkarski]

1. If looking for a plausible "In game" explanation of the differences in PC v NPC magic, some have been already posted up there. As Student of Trinity wrote, there is a matter of XP. PC's gain magical skills through killing monsters. It's not years of study - one explanation could be, that mages and priests in your party are using "magic for dummies" - they don't understand magic itself too well, they are just using certain ready-to-use procedures they were taught.

A good analogy explaining this would be, for example, programming. One might run C++ and write something using procedures found on the net, copying and mixing them to get the efect he needs, but he couldn't write something out of the box since he hasn't studied programming and had just taken a big shortcut without bothering to understand the real thing. Ergo your mage can cast a predesigned spray acid spell that someone taught him, but he can't create a generic bolt of venom or create any magical effects aside from those that he copied.

 

2. I think that the real problem is just AI scripting. One, NPC's don't seem to have spell points, which is understandable, considering the fact that Jeff would have to write a script that would manage them efficiently. Second, area of effect spells would also require a script so that NPC's would make a choice between area-of-effect spell and a single target spell based on the PC's location, in case of casting a AOE spell it would need to choose the best place to cast it on, a place where a maximum number of PC's sticks in the area.

It may or may not be a problem, depending on how the combat system is written. Anyway, Jeff seems to have chosen a workaround - aura spells (or using D&D jargon, spell-like ability), which simplify things.

 

(Also it needs to be mentioned that allowing NPC's to cast AOE spells would make the game a bit tedious and in need of urgent rebalancing, as the party always marches in a column, starts the combat in a column and would be prone to repeated AOE attacks unless quickly dispersed - and dispersing isn't always an option. It wouldn't kill you outright, but it'd put you in a tactical disadvantage.)

[cfgauss]

I have to say that I dislike the lack of variety of spells bad guys use against me. More variety makes things more fun. As it is now, if I get stuck in a hard battle because I have low health, or no potions, or whatever, I can always eventually win. If I die, when I reload, I know the enemy will do almost exactly the same thing as it did before because it doesn't have very many options about what it can do.

 

Just adding something in like a small chance of them using an exile-like area of effect spell can significantly change how I have to react to them. Suddenly, I might be forced to move mages out of attack range of bad guys, or scatter people and leave them unprotected.

 

Or, I could summon shades to help attack, and suddenly they're worthless because this *particular* enemy knows repel spirit. Which forces me to have to change my strategy, and not rely on doing the same repetitive things over and over again at each battle.

 

As it is now, a lot of the battles lack any challenge, and you can easily mindlessly follow a recipe to finish things, without using any kind of strategy. And when you do have to use a strategy, it's scripted in, and is something like "attack with fire, because that's the only thing that hurts him." And I think this is unfortunate, because it needn't be that way.

 

Quote:

Originally written by Student of Trinity:

As I explained once before on this topic, in some thread or other, there is another big difference between PCs and NPCs, which unlike saving and restoring is indeed something within the game world. The PCs gain power rapidly by killing monsters and completing quests. The NPCs don't.

 

My pet peeve is that this bizarre situation is hardly ever explained in RPGs, when in fact it is usually the most remarkable aspect of the story, once you notice it at all, and would surely make an excellent plot thread.

This is just the anthropic principle. The less-than-exceptional parties don't end up going very far before they give up or get killed, so we don't make games about them. Your party just happens to have exceptional skills, because without exceptional skills, they could never finish the game.

[Student of Trinity]

The anthropic explanation for why I'm playing such amazingly quick learners is fine. It doesn't cover the fact that no-one and nothing within the game ever notices how unusual my PCs are. Dorikas's last words might reasonably reflect amazement that he has fallen to enemies that were negligible only weeks before. They should not be about how he should have known better than to mess with a PC.

[Bryce]

Quote:

Originally written by kkarski:
they don't understand magic itself too well, they are just using certain ready-to-use procedures they were taught.

This train of reasoning is faulty. Bolt of venom is no more general or customized than spray acid. The enemies use the same style of cookie cutter magic as your party does, except they read up "Teach yourself Magic in 21 Days" instead of "Magic for Dummies" so it's superficially different.

Further, the analogy is not correct in another way. Those entry-level computer programming books are not that different from the textbooks we use in introductory computer science courses, honestly. A computer science class (or a good O'Reilly book) is better, but both will teach you real programming and how to use the language constructs, not just how to hack together something from other people's code.

You're right that it would take work to unify the magic systems, of course. The argument is that it would save work in the long run while making the game better now and in the future.

[Student of Trinity]

The reasoning is fine in establishing that there should indeed be a difference between player and NPC magic. I agree that it also implies NPC magic should be more varied than PC magic, but that this is not currently the case. Nevertheless, the clear difference between the ways in which PCs and NPCs learn new their magic shows that a unified magic system, whereby PCs and NPCs use the same spell palette, is not a priori the right goal.

 

It is conceivable that a limited palette of spells should constitute the entire range of magical possibility, so that PCs and NPCs, and talented fungus monsters for that matter, would all gain the same abilities. But this is an arbitrary choice of setting detail, like whether or not chitrachs come in different colors. It is equally conceivable, and would seem to be a less special case, that very many magical effects are possible in principle, beyond the set that player characters are able to master in the course of the game.

 

What I think would be most interesting would be, firstly, to enrich the range of NPC magic, including more scripted or described spells, like Ruth's little Moses act. Then enrich also the process by which PCs learn magic, so that it's not just a matter of finding the trainer and coughing up the cash. It would be cool if you could first notice someone using a bizarre new magic against you, then through a series of clues and quests gradually acquire the full skill yourself. A similar procedure could work nicely for battle disciplines or special skills: see it done, decide to try to learn it, then do so through an extended side-plot sequence.

 

It would be too big a step to recast the entire magic, battle discipline and skill system this way for the next game. And it would be reasonable to keep a fair number of abilities as standard, known skills that can indeed simply be bought from common trainers. But perhaps A6 could introduce a few special Vahnatai tricks, of various different kinds (spells, battle disciplines, skills, whatever), the learning of which might be more involved. I think this would be cool and fun.

[cfgauss]

Quote:

Originally written by Bryce:

Quote:

Originally written by kkarski:
they don't understand magic itself too well, they are just using certain ready-to-use procedures they were taught.

This train of reasoning is faulty. Bolt of venom is no more general or customized than spray acid. The enemies use the same style of cookie cutter magic as your party does, except they read up "Teach yourself Magic in 21 Days" instead of "Magic for Dummies" so it's superficially different.

Further, the analogy is not correct in another way. Those entry-level computer programming books are not that different from the textbooks we use in introductory computer science courses, honestly. A computer science class (or a good O'Reilly book) is better, but both will teach you real programming and how to use the language constructs, not just how to hack together something from other people's code.

You're right that it would take work to unify the magic systems, of course. The argument is that it would save work in the long run while making the game better now and in the future.

I think it'd be more accurate to say the differences are like:
Tower of magi mage/priest: physicist
You: Engineer
most NPCs: do it yourself book / instinct

Technically, the physicist can do everything anyone else can, but in practice, they cover a much broader range of topics in beginning training, and a much narrower range in research. So you end up with, eg, the guy researching teleporters in a cave who can't defend himself against much.

An engineer has a practical knowledge of a narrow range of things he can use every day. E.g, fire, ice, poison, etc.

The NPCs picked up a book that taught them some neat tricks, but they don't always get the bigger picture. So he has one book that tells him how to build a wooden deck, but that doesn't help him if he wants to build stairs.

Or, in some cases, the NPCs know it instinctually, like a bird knows how to build a nest.

That said, I would still appreciate a much wider variety of magic. Look at all the areas of science we have, there would have to be magical versions of each of those things, and all the applications and methods of those kinds of things. Not to mention there should be lots of different ways of doing the same thing. I much prefer a more exile-like system of magic, over avernum's or geneforge's.

[Alorael at Large]

No, I think NPCs range from instinctual or barely competent casters to, well, Rentar-Ihrno and Erika. The PCs, on the other hand, learn too much too quickly. They're the ones who are obviously just learning spells by rote and going through the motions without really understanding all the knowledge and research that apparently goes into magic.

 

—Alorael, who agrees with SoT that the exceptional abilities of PCs in all games deserve some comment. G4 actually does a fairly good job of it: you've used the Geneforge, so you quickly become amazing. It's not stated completely explicitly, but it makes sense.

[Slawbug]

Geneforge 1 did the best job of it out of any game, though: canister use provided an explanation just like the Geneforge did in G4, but on top of that, you are practically the only Shaper in the game. Your abilities are explained simply by being a Shaper and having had Shaper training, and this is stated explicitly.

[Alorael at Large]

That's true. The power and uniqueness of the shaper has gotten buried in my mind by subsequent games full of wimpy shapers.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't mind the Christmas tree explanation, either. Adventurers are loaded down with magical gear that makes them stupendous. Remove the gear and they're just your average guys with swords and delusions of grandeur. This is the post-D&D fantasy explanation, but it works fine in a world without large numbers of people lugging around a magical arsenal.

[Student of Trinity]

Except that in G1 you are really only a lowly apprentice who has had no significant Shaper training, and you gain levels independently of canister use. But yeah, you can tell yourself that the canisters have some slow slide effects, at least on someone with some minimal Shaper initiation.

 

G4 passed up a great opportunity, here, and for no reason I can see. A couple of lines of text somewhere could have explained that the Geneforge you just used is a highly modified version of the original, which has less severe psychological effects because it grants power slowly over time. The PC's geneforged abilities are therefore expected to emerge gradually over some months. The process is greatly accelerated by the exercise of abilities under stress. Unfortunately, this also enhances the psychological effects. But there's a war on, kid, so put your sanity on the line and take the plunge.

 

This would make the gaining of experience levels into an impressive delayed effect of the otherwise very underwhelming geneforge, and highlight at least a couple of the game's themes, without actually changing anything. It seems to me to be a pure win, which Jeff just declined to pick up because he didn't want to write a few more words of dialog.