Edgwyn

Stereotype much? I realize that it has not been extensively publicized, but South Carolina has indicted three Caucasian police officers this year for shooting African Americans. I do not know of the details of the three cases (one of which was after a multi-year investigation, one of which was after the video that I mentioned in a previous post), what percentage they are of the total, etc, but it appears that at least some prosecutors will prosecute police.

If you do enough research and subscribe to enough social theories, you can find a reason not to buy anything from just about anyone. Everyone needs to pick the level of battle that they are comfortable with. I avoid Walmart because after Sam Walton died, the buy American kick that they were on died as well. As Randomizer said, there are a lot of people who can only afford Walmart, though I question if a 50" TV is a "want" as opposed to a "need". Being occasionally cynical I enjoy watching certain politically outspoken groups having to either cancel their boycotts, amend their boycotts or find them ignored. One of my favorites was many years ago, the town that my University was in had a boycott against companies that had anything to do with the Nuclear Weapons R&D and industrial complex (this was as the cold war was ending). This boycott had already been twisted into a pretzel since my University managed key aspects of that same R&D complex. It finally became completed ridiculous when the police needed new radios and the town had to pass an exception to their boycott to allow for the purchase of a product from an "evil" company with all of the debate and gnashing of teeth that this entailed.

I remember 143K floppies on my Apple II+, and cutting an extra notch in them with a hole punch so that I could manually flip them over and use the second side. I played Wizardry 1-3, Bard's Tale 1-3 and Ultima 1-4 on those floppies. Upgrading to the 800K 3.5" floppy disks was huge. The IBM PC had the higher capacity 160K format. I never had to do any real programing on punch cards although the capability was there in our computer lab. As to paper tapes, I used a certain system in the late 1990s that still took certain information on a paper tape. I was a late purchaser of a modem, so my first modem was a blazing fast 2400 bps. I still find my 128 MB thumb drive adequate for 99% of what I do.

As I said, I support cameras. I do believe that there needs to be some education for those viewing the footage. While there is certainly the possibility of the footage disappearing, that is risky to do, because a bunch more people loose if they get caught. The officer in the Levar Jones shooting reacted to a potential threat (subject reached back into his car). In my opinion, based on the lead up in the tape he over reacted and he was in a situation to overreact because he had not properly asserted control over the situation which was his responsibility to do. Fortunately, the officer did not fire his pistol particularly accurately so Mr. Jones survived. Also fortunately, the officer has been fired and is facing charges. The training Slartibus mentions needs to go both ways. The officer in the Levar Jones shooting should not have fired his weapon. As I was taught by a police officer in traffic school 20 something years ago, when stopped by a police officer I should always leave my hands visible and never move quickly. Again, the officer in the Jones case was totally at fault and should have instructed Mr. Jones differently (in my opinion) during the stop.

I definitely do not want to start a Ferguson thread here, unfortunately that was the best example I could come up with for how the US justice system is perceived. My point was not to state an opinion of either Officer Wilson is a murderer who escaped conviction or Officer Wilson did what he needed to do. My point is that the perception of what happened in the case was locked in everyone's mind and no amount of evidence is likely to change the perception that the US justice system failed, whether it did or not. I do support the idea of having cameras on police officers. The dash cam video was very important in the case of the shooting of Levar Jones a couple of months ago in South Carolina. A combination of dash cams and body cams would certainly have been useful in the Ferguson case, but the trick is to get the video out early without interfering with the judicial process. It took around three weeks to release the video in the South Carolina case. In the case of Michael Brown, releasing the video to the public after three weeks would have been too late if the video had shown that Officer Wilson acted appropriately, and would have seemed like a deliberate delay if the video had shown Officer Wilson acting inappropriately. While cameras on officers will help a lot, they will not capture everything that is going on in the area. I am not, nor have I ever been, a cop, but I have done some training in urban shoot and no-shoot scenarios and they are very difficult with a lot of split second judgement in an extremely high stress environment.

I do not think that we could solve the product defect problem with regulations. While people manufacture products as cheaply as possible, they generally do not manufacture them to harm the customer as that is bad for repeat business. While I would love to have a common sense test that could prevent certain lawsuits from going forward, that would be difficult to create. I think that limitations on damage awards and especially limitations on punitive damages would be more effective, with for example limits on lawyers fees and the punitive damages going to the consumer products safety commission to pay for their activities as opposed to going to the injured parties and their lawyers.

Not really. The US was part of the problem with the post WWII crimes against humanity trials which were essentially military tribunals and the military tribunals in places like Iraq or Gitmo have not done enough or been publicized enough or been transparent enough to generate a positive impression. In modern times, cases like Travyn Martin and Michael Brown have damaged the perception of the US civilian judicial system, irrespective of the possibility that the judicial system might have made the right call in either case. The riots in Ferguson generated extensive world wide publicity around the perception that an innocent bystander was unnecessarily shot, either in the back or while he had his hands up by a racist cop who was acquitted. Many elements of that perception differ from what the grand jury determined to be the facts of the case, but the perception is what the world "knows". Of course I would rather be tried by a US court than a court composed of members of the UN Human Rights Council where 1/3 or more of the members seem to have little to no respect for things that I consider to be basic human rights. Since we get almost no international news in the US and since I have not studied it on my own, I do not have much of an opinion on EU courts, with the exception of Italian ones.

While you have all beaten me up about the McDonald's coffee incident before, there are still a lot of things that I will not stick between my legs (high voltage electric cables, hot liquids, radioisotopes, sharp objects, etc) but maybe I am just over protective. That said, there are plenty of other law suits that can go in place of the McDonald's coffee one.

I favor the death penalty and would add the crime of rape to the list. Speaking only for the US military, while the death penalty is on the books for all of those crimes listed, since 1866 we have executed one person for desertion. We have won lots of battles (the number of wars we have won is of course debatable) despite the fact that we have not executed deserters. The USSR and various German and French governments did make heavy use of the death penalty to deal with their desertion problems, in some cases applying it without any sort of judicial process. With the death penalty being the ultimate sanction, I prefer as rigourous (though not necessarily lengthy) a judicial process as possible. The problems with International Courts deciding crimes against humanity is that there is not really any credibility there. The WWII allies (led by the US) tried numerous Japanese and German personnel after WWII, and while something close to all of the people executed needed killing as far as I am concerned, the decisions of who to try and for what was heavily influenced by issues that had nothing to do with justice. Since the establishment of the UN, the system has gotten even worse with countries with awful human rights records controlling committees on human rights.

So true and so depressing

I agree with Nalyd's explanation, and from what I remember from 30 years ago, that has been pretty much the traditional explanation of hit points. As characters advance, they end up with more hit points than an elephant or giant, yet obviously they cannot take more physical damage than an elephant or giant. Higher hit points represent your better luck, conditioning and ability to dodge, not just your ability to take physical damage.

Hyena, while several of the female character icons that Jeff has used forever are throwbacks to the 70s/80s paper RPG graphics, the only romance that has appeared as a character action in his game is a single kiss in Avadon 2, that you have to fairly deliberately role play to get to. I would not equate the fact that a character runs around in a chainmail bikini to any other behavior.

Rapid healing has been part of the RPG trope for at least 30 years, and to most players it is not a case of lazy design, but a way of making the game enjoyable. Is auto-healing really any less rational than healing spells, fire breathing dragons, etc? I enjoyed both Avadon games. They have multiple design differences from Jeff's other games. I enjoy the differences, other do not.

I would go ahead and post it. It appeared that you put a lot of time into it, and it was very playable, and in my opinion enjoyable. Of course posting will generate a lot of feedback of things to change and calling it a Beta will cause people to suggest even more changes.

I find it extremely unlikely that the Tinker Mage will disappear from Avadon 3. When Jeff added the Tinker Mage to Avadon 2, he increased the number of hands by one. If he creates a new class for Avadon 3, he will probably just do the same thing. I suspect that there will be some balancing of the Tinker Mage in Avadon 3, just like there was of the shadow walker in Avadon 2, since a lot of us perceive the tinker mage as being overpowered.

Also, the remakes are not necessarily about satisfying the people who have played every game that Jeff has ever written, but about getting new customers with a game that while it still has old school graphics and an old school feel is easily played (no emulation modes, etc) and user friendly.

I thought that Avadon 1&2 and A:EftP were well balanced on normal. My Avadon 1 party was not optimal and normal was not excessively hard and the quick recovery of the characters, in my mind anyway, reduces the difficulty (or at least frustration) a lot. In Avadon 2, my party was a little closer to more optimum (my PC was a Tinkermage), but still not perfect. The Tinkermage is probably a bit overpowered, just like the dex based shadow walker was in Avadon 1. Slartibus had a mod to Avadon 2 that re-balanced a lot of things, but I believe that he ran out of time to finish it.

The first line probably describes me as this is the third time in the last 18 years that I have played SW games and I have purchased some of the missing games. And I know that Jeff does indeed sell copies of the older games every month, I am just curious as to how much Avadon and the Exile re-remakes serve as a gateway to the rest of the catalog.

4. I used Nathalie in my party as much as possible as I preferred her over the Shaman, and I found her useful. 5. Story wise, I believe the game area is far vaster than N or A. In those games, you explore every part of the world, in Avadon, you are only visiting a tiny fraction of a much larger whole. I just started A4, and while it arguably is bigger/takes more time to explore than the same map did in Exile or A:EftP, I actually prefer the A:EftP and Avadon style with more emphasis on the destinations and less on the journeys. 7. I did not really have that problem, but I tended to make sure that my characters were equipped with equipment that protected against mental attack.

While A4-6 are playable now, they may not be 3-4 years from now which is when he would be able to start a remake. It would also have the benefit of keeping the people who have been purchasing the remakes but who are not hardcore SW fans. An updated GF1 may very well attract new fans to the series and to SW. I wonder how many copies of the old games do they sell in a month? Do the people who have purchased A:EFtP or Avadon 1&2 as their first SW games make very many purchases in the older part of the SW catalog? He definitely could pump out more games if he were to contract out the remakes and the porting, the question there is if there is enough profit in his games for him to do it. This would allow him to create more games, but he may perceive it as riskier financially.

You cannot get in the SE trapdoor, you will exit that way later. Have you talked to Zephyrine? And if so, have you looked SW from here area after you have talked to her?

With his pace slowing down, he definitely faces a business decision. Does he devote the time and energy to creating a new series or does he focus on remakes. Going with the assumption that the Exile 3/A3 remake will follow Avadon 3, that puts him into mid 2017 or so to start his next project with a release date of late 2018. If the Exile remakes have been selling well (he will have a good idea from A:EFtP and A:CS, then it would probably be worth remaking A4-A6 which will be 12+ years old at that time to continue the Avernum story with the new audience that he has acquired. He could alternate the A4-A6 remakes with either a continuance of the Avadon series or by remaking Geneforge (by then 16 years old) for another 10 to 15 years which gets him pretty much to the end of his career. From a business perspective, he has a pretty good idea about the profitability of the Exile/Avernum remakes and Avadon games. He has less data on how profitable a new game would be (he can use Avadon as a basis, but a new series is always risky) and far less data on a Geneforge remake. Without seeing his books, I have no idea what the best path would be, but based on the fact that he is staying in business and not complaining about lack of money despite his slower release schedule, what he is doing now seems to be working.

I am pretty certain that you are right. The topic "Tell us about yourself" received 49 replies in three months, a fair number of which were from people even newer to the forums than I am, which probably makes it likely that they have not played very many of the games. I remember seeing some forum activity graphs that someone did a while ago. How big was the spike after Avadon 2 was released last fall?

While it would certainly be convenient to be able to use some of the Pylons without having to walk to their location in the first place, it is probably best for game balance that you have to discover them the hard way first and then can take advantage of them. From what little I remember (since I never played A2), you are starting with a new group of adventurers in A2:CS who are not initially aware of the pylon system, correct?

I suppose that the ideal transportation solution would be for Word of Recall to give you a menu of known locations that you can teleport to. That would put it several steps above the pylons which give you a menu of only the places that there are pylons, plus the fact that you can use it almost anywhere. You are of course correct that the overworked is fairly small, but the rivers do provide more of an obstacle since they each only have one bridge that crosses them so as a Celt, you end up having to go rather far south to go west or Northwest. The Orb of Thralni would do a huge amount to reduce travel time.