Edgwyn

I assume that JFK would have won in '64, after all most presidents do. The fight to be the democratic nominee in '68 would have been pretty ugly with the Kennedy dynasty versus LBJ's connections to the establishment. Based on JFK's brief time in office and focus on Green Berets, I will assume that he did not escalate the Vietnam war and kept it as a relatively small counter-insurgency focused operation. I do not think that the outcome would have changed, since we never succeeded in making an effective government in South Vietnam. I believe that North Vietnam would have continued to escalate things and as we lost advisors we would have decided that it was not worth it and pulled our forces out, allowing South Vietnam to fall to a conventional invasion, just like in History. I do not think that the "Great Society" would have been pushed nearly as hard, resulting in a slower growth in entitlement programs and federal government power. This combined with a smaller scale Vietnam war would result in us entering the 1980's with a greatly reduced national debt. I do believe that Civil Rights would have followed essentially the same path that it did. Kennedy was probably more interested in civil rights than Johnson (not to hard), but was concerned about congressional support. The democrats would have had a better chance in the election of '68 without the escalation of the Vietnam war. Nixon may still have been able to take advantage of what would have been a very punishing battle between RFK and LBJ for the nomination (assuming no RFK assassination) and win the presidency. A LBJ or RFK presidency in '68 may have delayed the thaw of US relations with the PRC. After all, there is an old Vulcan saying: "only Nixon could go to China." Ultimately I do not know how much effect this would have had on the world as PRC/USSR relations were collapsing on their own. Even without the distraction of a large Vietnam war, I do not think that we would have stopped the crushing of the Prague Spring.

It is actually more realistic and less linear this way. The whole I am loyal to you forever no matter what you do in the future because you rescued my cat from a tree once is kind of crazy.

I would start with the fact that it applies to optimists. The belief that in the future we will be more successful, have good/loyal friends and be happy. Everything is going to get better.

Probably not, which is unfortunate. The replay value of a system like Blades is much higher than they typical CRPG due to the ability to play multiple scenarios, just like in paper RPGs. But the Blades system has to sell enough to make it worth Jeff's time.

I too stay away from MMOs as I already spend too much time on the computer with games that end. I also stay away from games where you have to buy additional content/power-ups, etc. I am not completely consistent in that I do buy scenarios and map expansions, but I look at them as options, and something that I can enjoy the game without. It seems from the comments that it is unlikely that Jeff will do a new Blades game. I wonder if having a business model of a set price for the game and basic scenario and then selling additional scenarios for $2-4 each (half going to SW and half to the scenario developer) would make Blades viable?

I like Triumph's approach of having a link on the Spiderweb store page to the other outlets that are selling the games. I am fortunate enough to be in the position that the difference in price does not matter to me, I just see it as a fairness issue. I am not sure that the Steam and GOG prices would need to be listed, though it is probably better if they are. Like Springacres, I do not like the on-line issues with Steam as I am often places where my internet connection is iffy or expensive, and so I would rather pay the higher price on SW's site versus the Steam price.

I upgraded tool use fairly early on, as a way to help defeat mines. I did not buy any lockpicks until near the very end of the game and had plenty to open things with. There were several opportunities to buy lockpicks that I did not take and ended the game with some lock picks left over.

If I remember correctly, once you have completed the test, you should be able to get into the chest which contains a key that will allow you to open the North part of the level, where the plot will advance.

I am curious how many of the folks who are debating the $20 versus $8 for 40 or so hours of enjoyment pay $4 for 15 minutes of enjoying a (insert five adverbs here) latte or cappuccino at Starbucks. That said, while the MSRP is always higher then the sticker price, this markup does seem a bit extreme.

The blushing was indeed a dead giveaway, and it was certainly not subtle. I just do not think that it was extreme as some of the other posters to this forum have stated. I think that had the exact same dialogue played out in real life, some folks would have missed the fact that Silke/Rainer was interested in them.

The other part of this is that many of the people commenting in this forum were anticipating a romance and so were looking for "coming on" and so were biased to interpret "I would like it if we could patrol together" as "I would like it if we could patrol together because I want to have 2.1 kids with you" without even considering the possibility of "I would like it if we could patrol together because you are more competent than the last five people I had to train." To get a truly fair view of the Silke/Rainer interaction, we would need to hear from people who had no idea that there was going to be a romance option in the game and see how many of them even noticed that she/he was open to the possibility of a relationship/hitting on the PC.

For the first eight to ten years of my kids lives I would have almost all of their Christmas gifts bought by now. Shopping in late November and anytime in December is a pain.

The heavily textured sand is of course the rough ground. The darker color sand is the uneven ground, medium color is the old roads and light color is general areas. The confusing part with the darker color is that when it runs under another color, it still behaves like uneven ground. So for example if you see the road color crossing a band of the darker color, like you have just East of the starting point, the road color sand that crosses the band of uneven ground will behave as uneven ground and ensnare you.

Does that mean that a bunch of us just got thrown off of a bridge

During this visit (you can come back later to take on the Dragon when you are more powerful) you are scurrying around, trying to find Miranda while avoiding the Dragon. There are two passages that leave the chamber of the infernal to the East. If you take the Southern most of those, you can scurry across the main chamber that the Dragon is in and get into another side chamber (just slightly South of a due East line from the passage that you exit from). You proceed to explore this chamber, find a passage out, scurry across the main chamber into another side chamber, and so on until you find Miranda.

My build on Normal was very similar to Mikus'. My Shaman was INT/END based, middle skill column primary, left skill column secondary (I do not like summoning creatures). Primary attack was Spirit Claw, I only used Javelins when I needed to outrange a turret. Used the area of effect spells for groups of monsters and healing on my party. He was with me at least 2/3 of the time. As a game play/interface suggestion, now that we can change the gender of the PC, how about being able to choose the genders of our companions?

The infernal is an optional fight, you can skip him for now (come back later with full party and additional levels) and just move on like Randomizer said.

I struggled a bit with keeping my characters alive at the start. As a result, I gave my characters more endurance than normal, which has the dual benefit of increasing health and vitality. Since Dexterity is no longer overpowered, I mostly ignored it since I like melee combat instead. With the healing scarab (which can be purchased) for the TinkerMage, their survivability goes up considerably. As to the party that you mention (Blademaster, Tinkermage without turrets and Shadowwalker), it may be doable at a lower difficulty level, but you are giving up all area of effect attacks in exchange for dex based missile attacks which are not as powerful in Avadon 2 as they were in Avadon 1. A dex based Tinkermage without turrets is probably on par with the fact that I played Avadon 1 (twice) with a strength/melee based shadowwalker, doable, but not a good idea. The Tinkermage class is different from the standard character classes and requires some practice to get used to. When I first started playing Avadon 2, I found the concept innovative, but as I do not like summoning, I figured that I would not like it. As I went through the game and started to figure out when to use the different type turrets, saw lots of enemy attacks go against turrets instead of my precious skin, and started killing enemies with turrets, it was easy to see that the Tinkermage with turrets is the exploit of Avadon 2.

The cheat code is "resetboats"

I wouldn't say it is that different, I would keep it in the general category of fiction writing, and I am struggling to think of a non-pejorative word but I think I need to go with it is an incomplete form of fiction writing. That is not a reflection of its literary quality or how engaging it is, but the fact is that the author provided less of the necessary creativeness for the work. Of course the next discussion could be how many original plots are there. Doing the comparison thing, I liken it to acting in live theater versus tv/movies. They are both acting, but in live theater you get only one take (and may have to sing or dance) and so it has been considered a more complete form of acting (despite not paying as well) than acting in tv/movies.

No, you are correct, probably very little corruption. In fact I am hoping for the Svorgald and the mysterious lands across the Ocean, though that would be hard to manage in a land based series.

While I haven't read much fan fiction written in the last 20 or so years, female authors were definitely in the vast majority. I don't know if they were lonely, but they covered all walks of life, but tended towards meeting the societal norm of successful. Of the groups that Lilith mentioned in paragraph 4, "queer" was probably the only over-represented group (other than the fact that almost all of the writers were female). I got the impression that for a lot of the writers it satisfied their need for a creative outlet that they were not getting in their regular lives, and that it was a form of escapism. By escapism, i mean not just the folks who write themselves or who they wish to be into the story, but also what Lilith said about "give them someone they can relate to". There are several very good female SF/Fantasy authors who got their start in fanfic. I am sure that their reasons for starting in fanfic varied, but I believe that lack of confidence, ease of getting published as an unknown female, ease of getting positive feedback (remember, my reading is prior to the web), and respect/enjoyment/desire to see what happened/relating to a respected author's characters were important factors. Now, that the cost of entry into the fanfic world has dropped to nothing (use a computer at the library), it has become easier for marginalized groups to participate, but I suspect (but obviously do not know), that there are just as many non-marginalized writers of fanfic as their used to be. I on the other hand am not part of a marginalized group, and could not write bad fanfic to save my life, much less good fanfic or good fiction.

Don't worry, we could still make that ending really depressing also. For example: You set up your nice little farm with Silke/Rainer, you are happy for three years then one of the rampaging rebel fractions comes through the area and burns your whole farm down and eats your cows. I really prefer happy endings, like in A:EftP, but unfortunately I know better than to expect them from SW. Maybe Jeff will surprise me and Avadon 3 will end with a peaceful and united Lyneaus with a non-corrupt/non-abusive Avadon that focuses on external threats, the corruption and exploring the rest of the world. I can hope, right?

I would think that using the established characters would be more problematic in terms of legal issues, but is certainly very common. The Trek community of the 70s-80s had lots of bad fanfic of Spock falling in love with a poorly disguised Avatar of the author, and so was often better when it stuck to the principal characters. The Darkover fanfic tended to have a lot more OCs in it. Trek was of course a visual media whereas Darkover was exclusively in print adding some data points to Lilith's third paragraph.

Yes, I enjoyed the Thieves World series and its spinoffs a lot, though I did not succeed in getting into Heroes in Hell which was a shared universe by many of the same authors. And now that Lilith mentions Cthulhu, while I never read it, there are some authors that I read who got their start writing cthulhu fanfic well before the 70s.