Edgwyn

Adventure was one of the first games that I owned and I spent a fair amount of time lost in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. If someone had the money, they could certainly make a RPG with first person shooter type graphics. The problem would be getting it to sell enough to pay for the graphics. The problem is that many do not like the turn based style (just about the only games I choose to play are turn based). I expect that a RPG based on a HALO type engine where you have multiple human players making up your party would be the modern version of the RPGs, and I would never play it.

I think that the Tinker Mage is a very interesting and creative character class. While it is not perfect, it is a departure from the fighter, priest, magic user, thief that has been the basis of every RPG for the last forty years. I am using one as my protagonist and am finding it a interesting option. I am really having to adjust my playing style which has been half the party engages in melee combat, the other half uses ranged attacks ever since I started playing computer RPGs. I currently am using one melee specialist, one tinker mage and one sorcerer. In Avadon 1, I used two melee specialists and one sorcerer, so I have to stop my self from sending my Tinker Mage into close combat all of the time. I am finding it a very different style of play and that he is effective with his razor disks. As to the difficulty of outfitting six characters, I consider six characters the good old days, I prefer six to having just four like in A:EftP and three in the Avadon series.

I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture of his during a summer program while I was in High School. It was very impressive to see such a brilliant man who could communicate so well.

The first two maps are definitely an intro, but I suspect that some of the open and empty is playing style. I walked all through Rockridge looking at everything, opening everything, taking anything that I did not have to steal and delaying my visit to Commander Odil as long as possible so I would not miss anything. Had I gone straight to him, the map would have gone a lot faster. I am very pleased with the A:EftP style secret doors. I missed the first one while distracted, exactly as Randomizer said, but saw the second one. The secret doors were one of my biggest gripes with Avadon 1.

Page 28 in the manual lists the cheat code to change the romance. So far I have not found finding objects on the ground any harder than Avadon 1 (notice I am not saying that it is easy to see them). I am concerned about secret doors, but I have not gotten to one yet.

In the ravaged woods, I was able to pick up an iron broadsword by completing the encounters along the west path and then returning to the area where you run away from the Ogres. I don't know if it was a drop or is always there.

I too picked the Tinker since it was the new class even though summoning is not how I like to play. So far I have only completed the first section (Ravaged Woods), but the graphics are noticeably better from Avadon 1.

The whole idea of a romance is not too surprising since there were comments posted on here a while ago about how Nathalie seemed to be falling for the PC.

When I clicked on the link there was not a user name or password requirement. I was logged into the forums at the time.

The manual mentions meeting a Hand Briand in Fort Foresight to retrain characters, so it looks like it will be available at some point in the game.

Which time? Around 1997 I received a copy of one of the Exile games on a free CD or through AOL (fantastic 56 Kbps internet connection). Played the demo a bit, but I do not think that I bought the game. I was newly married at the time. In 2004 I stumbled across a review for BoA. I had enjoyed the 1980s CRPGs so I bought a copy and played through the included scenarios. I got onto one of the websites that existed at the time and downloaded and played at least one more scenario created by Mike Slack that was based on Wizardry 1. I never was on whatever forums existed at the time In late 2012 I came across my old BoA disk and hint book and typed the URL into my browser. I bought A:EftP and in early 2013 Avadon I. I lurked around the forums for a while before joining six weeks ago.

I suspect that lock picks will still be rare and so careful management will be required with an advantage of having your main character from one of the three classes that can pick locks and defeat mines and turrets more easily. That of course also makes it easier to deal with the quests where you are mandated to have a certain character with you as well. That said, I played Avadon 1 through twice and did not have a lock picker as my main character either time.

Slarty, I just did a play through of the remix and enjoyed it, thank you. It definitely added to the replay-ability of the game by creating a major mod. It also was far more accommodating of my playing style which is two sword and shields up front and spell casters with bows in the back. Of course, I kept wishing that the Bow of Storms was a long bow. The lack of area effect spells for the mage definitely caused me to adjust tactics, but it was quite workable. And you certainly achieved your goal with the equipment, it took me a while of saying that is completely different before deciding which item to equip.

I thought that in this fight your spell casters could pretty much camp in the circles and that it was only your fighters that were vulnerable because they need to leave the circles to attack, and then retreat back in (overcoming the slowness of being in contact with a hostile) to get the protective effect before the crystals discharged?

There are four loyalty missions, during each mission, you will have to change your party to include the character whose loyalty quest it is (assuming you choose to do the loyalty missions). There are not hints, unless you consider getting hit in the head with a baseball bat subtle. It is blindingly obvious that you have to include the appropriate NPC in your party. Outside of those four quests, you can easily use your character and the same two NPCs for all of the other quests, there is no minimum number.

I used the hint books for both A:EftP and Avadon and found them helpful. They both contain walkthroughs (Major quests for A:EftP and the whole game for Avadon). That said, there is probably enough information on this forum and the sites linked to it that you could easily save the money. For example, for Avadon, with the Synergizer list and Jerakeen's annotated maps, I do not believe that you would have problems completing the game and all of the side quests. On the other hand, I did like the combination of the "What do I do Next" from strategy central with the hint book for A:EftP.

Unfortunately after the first few CYOAs in the early 80s I got turned off of them, maybe because it seemed every page started with the word suddenly. Of course that did not stop me from buying and reading 15-20 of them.

I believe that the expectations are different. In a book, you simply follow the plot. In a game, you help change the plot. I have read only a few of the novelizations of games (and one movie of a first person shooter, but it wasn't my idea to watch it), and in this limited sample, it was necessary to add significant plot points to make a bad movie or meadiocre book. Most books that I have seen made into movies they had to drop a lot of plot. To me, games are often like bad action movies with just enough plot to get you from scene to scene, so very similar to SoT's dungeon master example. While a game could certainly be made with as much plot as a novel, even done with a whole bunch of branches (choose your own adventure on steroids), I am not sure that it would pass a cost-benefit analysis. How important is an elaborate plot to most of us when we are playing games versus when we are reading?

I'm just surprised that a certain segment of the population has not crafted a mod to turn the cave cows into cave ponies.

Fantasy football has outcomes such as winning and losing, but you often do not have to deal with the real life issues of payroll and personalities. I guess that I am more translating the discussion into constraints as opposed to the term that I used "consequences". Your first post in this thread alluded, to me anyway, that if we do not constrain the choices of gamers, they will act like psychopaths. A statement that I agree is fairly accurate for a certain segment of the population. While many characters in novels do face deserved or undeserved consequences of their actions, the characters are typically under far fewer constraints than real people.

Most forms of fantasizing involve eliminating all or most all consequences. It doesn't matter if it is RPGs, Grand Theft Auto, First Person Shooters, Fantasy Football, adult magazines, car magazines, fad diets, most novels, 99% of movies, etc. This is common to almost all people, not just those of us who are gamers.

If I remember correctly, you can also get there by boat. I believe that there is a castle of giants near Bargha where you can get a boat that allows you to the NorthWest part of the map.

I prefer Avernum to Avadon simply because I like the larger party size. I grew up normally having eight characters in a paper RPG and playing six characters on my own in a computer RPG (Wizardry I-III, Bard's Tale I-III). For that matter, Exile allowed six characters. I really don't like being limited to three characters at a time, even if it is out of five. I have not played Geneforge and will be buying Nethergate after Avadon 2, so I cannot compare those two.

Making it a quest is the perfect plan. If you don't put any limit on the number of items that the adventurers can turn in, soon they will have looted the entire countryside of that item and you will have a monopoly so you can sell them all over again to your fellow villagers at an exorbitant price. Then you just change what item you are collecting and they will do it again and again until you have a monopoly over all items while the adventurers did all of the dirty work.

I have played through both ways and did not notice any difference in the final messages or ever saw him again, so there appears to not be any consequences for turning him in or not turning him in. As to Avadon determining that he is innocent, I sometimes think that their motto is "everyone is guilty of something".