Edgwyn

Time advances in Avernum 3 and if your do not do the big quest items by certain days on the calendar then bad things happen to some of the towns which makes doing certain side quests more difficult or impossible.  With all of that said, there is plenty of time for exploring.  I found myself completing the big quests much earlier than necessary while still doing most of the side quests.  In fact I found myself about to complete the game with the interesting side quests completed while many days short of the optional event that occurs near the end of the calendar and had to waste a ton of time grinding for gold since I had nothing else to do to pass the time and I didn't want to complete the game without doing the optional event.

The 3-18 range generated by 3 six sided dice in D&D/AD&D worked fairly well to generate a bell shaped curve allowing for scores above and below 10 to be interpreted as standard deviations above or below the human (and demi-human) mean.  Jeff uses a simpler system.  I suppose that we could decide that a score of 0 represents a 50th percentile human and higher scores represent abilities above that 50th percentile.  So a one would be above average.  

An alternate (and I think better) way of interpreting Jeff's system is that the scores represent how skilled you are in using your strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.  After all, a full grown adult is unlikely to increase their strength by a factor of five or ten in a relatively short time and extremely unlikely to increase their intelligence (potential not learning) at all.  But they can increase their skill in using their intelligence which is reflected in the various bonuses that they get for having the higher skill.

I read Footfall by Niven and Pournelle over the last couple of weeks.  I did not understand the amount of negative criticism out there for it.  That said, it is certainly an ego trip by the two authors which was tiring even though I enjoyed the authors who were characters in the book and the time era the book was set in.  

In general terms (you can look up the dates that the plagues take place if you want to), you have a lot more time then you think that you do.  If you do rush and take care of the plagues, you can take a pause before the endgame and do many of the things that you missed, but you can do a lot more side quests waiting for the plagues then you would expect.

No, you do not need to kill Athron.  If your rep is 13 or higher and you are nice to her you can get some good information from her and leave peacefully.  

From what I remember you should be around level 15

Also, if you have been picking everything up, you can afford to fully equip all of the hands and still have plenty of money left over

Comeliness covered good looks, Charisma covers suave voice, and in most of the games money is no problem.  Either Charisma or Comeliness or both could fairly easily become a stat like nature lore where it enables certain things, most of which are non-essential and then we could have multiple posts on how valuable it is or it isn't with completionists (like me) getting the necessary levels to have every option of persuading merchants, officials and members of the desired gender to do what we want while the min/maxers have just enough levels to do what is absolutely necessary and put the rest in hardiness or something else useful.

You may need to reload from an earlier save

The spiderweb software website does not show any games for Android.  Many of the recent releases do work on the iPad.

I do not think that it would be necessary or wise to include that feature unless it advances a lot point (which tends to eliminate a lot of the spontaneity, much is already lost by the pick your dialog system).  The romance in Avadon 2 met that goal and was kept within reasonable bounds, but was not all that interesting other than "hey, Jeff did something different, lets see how it works out, plus I want to get the medal".  I am not sure that pursuing a romance with an NPC to earn a medal is a great thing.  

Adding a romance option to multiple characters would really turn this option from a side line to a main part of the game which I think is not keeping with the reason that most of us play Jeff's games.

While I agree with Minion's statement, the system that he describes seems far removed from the type of RPG that Jeff normally writes.

I believe that only the current mods can embed images

I did use the training crystals, but I also spend a lot of time accumulating and carefully stacking and distributing scrolls, portions and crystals and then I make minimal use of any of them.

The other action point change is that you need to have a certain number of action points left to do something, five to attack or cast a spell, three to use an item.  Get encumbered, take a step or get stunned and all of a sudden you can't do anything useful in a round.

That would just depress me.  I think that i have a fair amount of it cleared, but I know not all of it is.  The pylons help, but there is still a lot of out and back trips from Fort Dunno and the other friendly locations to clear an area.

I am currently trying to do a play through of A4, I tried before and stopped.  I am really tired of exploring the Eastern Gallery one square at a time.

The Save0 - Save 19 refers to the save files position on the save screen.  The location of the saved files varies between each game and which OS (Win or Mac) you are using.  The spiderweb folder that you are looking at should only have saves from one game.  Some of the folders from Save0 - Save19 may be empty

LOTR is too low magic for my gaming tastes (I love the trilogy and the hobbit, could not get into the rest of the books), I want to have wizards and priests, not just a few demigods.

As an immature DM playing AD&D it was a challenge to balance the desire for rewards with the slow build-up.  XP point values for monsters were really low and so most advancement came from XP for gold and for magic items and unless you enforced encumbrance and detect magic/identify mechanics (which were not very fun) there was more than enough loot in the published adventures to advance a party pretty quickly even without going to the Monty Hall extremes.

You cannot keep playing if you do the end game, you need to stop just shy of the end and then hang out to wait for the disaster.  There is a forum topic on trying to make time go faster.

I supposed it can get hard to define (very low magic, medium magic, etc).  Most of the games that I have played I consider towards the low magic end of the spectrum in that the characters are supposed to be special and that your average citizen does not have a magic water heater or magic toaster sitting in their house.  But my cut off for what I consider low magic may be higher than someone else's.  I would consider Avernum, Exile and Avadon all low magic, because while magic is a normal part of the world, most human inhabitants do not practice it and have to rely on a special class of people at a relatively high cost to get benefits from it (healing, etc).

With that said, I prefer a scarce magic setting as well.  I do not particularly want magic to be just a substitute for technology.  Although magic getting replaced by technology can make a good basis for a novel (or an underlying theme in a game such as Nethergate).  For that matter the post apocalyptic setting of technology has become "magic" can be interesting as well, although I the few times that I have gamed it, I found it kind of frustrating.

I still prefer the sword and sorcery motif.  

Swords and/or lances were still useful to calvary troops until horse calvary became obsolete (sometime between 1870 - 1914), A good 250 years after the setting of the three musketeers or 100 years after Zorro.  Early fire arms just were so inaccurate and took so long to reload that it took a long time for them to displace lower tech weapons.  Early fire arms were not that much harder to use than long bows (more steps for the fire arms, but they tried to teach the archers how to aim, something no one really bothered with teaching for military fire arms until fairly late in the 1800s).

I played Top Secret, Gamma World, Star Frontiers and Champions which were essentially a James Bond RPG, a post nuclear war RPG, a SF RPG and a modern superhero RPG respectively and enjoyed all three, but I prefer swords and sorcery.

I prefer no gun powder and no steam power in my RPG worlds.  To me, they are both so foundational to the industrial type technologies that displace magic.  Genetic engineering (as opposed to low tech breeding) would also be a major no-no.  I also never really got into space travel in a fantasy setting (active space travel).

I usually stopped investing in weapons skills once I was eligible for adrenaline rush.  For the main stat (str/int), I never stopped

It will be back to the single tone buzzer for sounds

I would say that the second is best, but if you think that you might end up playing them all, I would play them in order.  While they do each stand alone and you do not have to have played one to play another, the story makes more sense in sequence.