@Celtic MinstrelNope, my Google Drive scenario repo is basically just mirrored from there; the versions are the same.

At the Gallows - last I checked, the version I have archived has a rather amusing bug where an important item is right on the floor in front of the wizard you're supposed to give it to.

Falling Stars - the archived version doesn't have the completed hall of contributors (in the starting town) or the Denmark quest.

The Shadow of the Stranger - archived version doesn't let you turn off tree climbing, final version did.

Nope. Not possible in original BoE or CBoE. I suppose you could utilize the kill/resurrect bug plus stat boosting nodes to create a "new PC" as long as the original party was small enough, and just provide a note that the player should change the name and graphic manually; but I think that's as good as it gets. It'd be pretty kludgy.

NPCs joining the party has been a thing for a while, but that's done with normal friendly NPCs and special nodes, and the ability to actually command them is... limited at best. The usual thing for making them more effective has been to limit their capabilities to useful things; e.g. I know at least one scenario where "spellcaster" ally NPCs have high AP and powerful breath attacks and abilities, instead of level-whatever spells (and the resulting tendency to clog the battlefield with summons, or try to poison portculli etc).

Now that I'm revisiting BoE because lockdown yay.

IMO...

Sanctuary. And Mass Sanctuary, but especially the level 1 version if you habitually play singletons.
- It's pretty useless against casters, but prevents a lot of melee and archery attacks from hitting at all
- IDK about original BoE, but in CBoE spellcasting only breaks it for attack spells
- With a few levels and a little spending on INT, it can last several turns...
- Allowing your fighters (or singleton) to close the distance to enemy spellcasters more easily
- Also allows singletons a bit of extra time to buff in surprise combat situations

So overall it's actually a really impressive asset, esp. at low levels.

15 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

OpenBoE.com is back up now. I have no idea about the magnet link, though - how does that even work? I do still have it set to seeding in my torrent app.

Yay thank you! I'll update my sig to indicate my link is a backup.

The magnet link: lemme try again.

Edit:
 

% aria2c 'magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d5356f060c104e9fd1dbf7a23fe348c6c26897da'

11/17 12:40:48 [NOTICE] Downloading 1 item(s)

11/17 12:40:48 [NOTICE] IPv4 DHT: listening on UDP port 6952

11/17 12:40:48 [NOTICE] IPv4 BitTorrent: listening on TCP port 6961

11/17 12:40:48 [NOTICE] IPv6 BitTorrent: listening on TCP port 6961
[#5f2fca 0B/0B CN:0 SD:0 DL:0B]       

I think the problem may be on my end. N/M.

@The Almighty Doer of StuffYAY thank you! I will grab all those as soon as I can.

Edit: here we are! Seriously thanks, you're a godsend.

https://tinyurl.com/blades-of-exile

So... openboe.com is down, the zip files are not archived on the Wayback Machine, and the magnet link is also down. Anyone got backups? I figure I might as well just host everything on my Google Drive, since I started paying for it and now have like 100 GB of space.

So kind of belated, but I took a look at the CBoE (legacy Windows) source code recently and the issue seems to be fixed. Throwing weapon hit chance checks throwing weapon skill in CBoE.

Defense skill is probably still a better investment though.

16 hours ago, marnick said:

Im sorry but that kind of american exceptionalism doesnt work on me (or most other non-americans). From where Im sitting, freedom is the one thing americans fear more than anything.

It's a definition thing. "Freedom" to sensible people includes things like freedom from fear (as FDR described, though this country has never lived up to any his Four Freedoms). But "freedom" to a lot of USians also, or sometimes only, means "power" - the ability to do what you want without consequences. When a USian tells you "It's a free country!" they're probably not asserting their right to one of FDR's Four Freedoms, but rather their privilege to bully or endanger you in some way.

Source: my life, constantly on the business end of "It's a free country!" when getting insults, punches, and bigotry thrown at me.

Voted for Biden because he's not a raging fascist. Glad he won. Not so glad to see the Democratic party's center already throwing its left under the bus.

I have been feeling a lot of things the last few days, but mostly just very, very, very tired. This year has been hell beyond anything I've experienced before, and we all deserve so much better right now than "returning to the status quo that was already killing hundreds of thousands of people a year" and "apologizing to Republicans for existing because they're not actively trying to kill us anymore".

Edit: also, hi again all. Been a while.

Hi all, it's been a while

Currently I've got

Light entertainment: The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman, which is the first James Bond pastiche I've actually been able to tolerate.

Heavy entertainment: Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan, which reads like an M. John Harrison novel written by Jodie Scott. It's good and weird and I like it a lot so far.

Nonfiction: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction by Annalee Newitz. I loved their SF novel The Future of Another Timeline, so figured why not?

(I very very wholeheartedly recommend said novel by the way, it hits all the right notes for a Joanna Russ fan.)
 

@sylae it's kind of vaguely on my to-read queue, in part because Dreadnaught seems to borrow from it a bit. However, its priority in said queue is going to suffer, because the author appears to dude, and I have a ton of other known good writers ahead in line this year.

(Note that this isn't deliberately political. It's more just that I'm tired of novels that alienate me with in-your-face sexism just after they start to get interesting.)

Edit: wait really? Okay, it's inching up in priority then.

2 hours ago, Beyond the cry lies the meaning said:

Wonder Woman has superhuman powers.  There's no reason the person in the second picture couldn't be agile and (the kind of athletic you are talking about) given superhuman powers.

*cough cough* Hulk *cough*

Or, well... Doomsday. The Incredible Thing. Juggernaut. The Blob. Doc Samson. Abomination. Colossus.

This type of character is almost invariably male. Which usually makes sense IRL, but we're totally not talking IRL here.

(And also, being really strong IRL doesn't entail being physically invulnerable like in comics, or in Hollywood movies for that matter. Random musclebound dudes are not capable of taking bullets, knife wounds, and other serious injury and heavy blood loss without feeling it or caring about it; and I frankly despise how Hollywood has indoctrinated people to assume this is the case. It seems to me at times like 90% of entertainment media are dedicated to teaching the oppressed to not see their own potential strength.)

Edit: I think a lot of this though is also that comic writers/illustrators are really averse to creating major female characters who they perceive as "ugly", because for some reason anything and everything female has to be objectified.

@Edgwyn, re "sex sells". There's no need for a conspiracy, only systematic bias: people in the industry don't think nearly as much about a "sex sells" approach aimed at the giant potential audience of straight women.

That's just for starters though. The pop culture way of doing sex appeal for straight men is IMO brokenly specific, and tailored for guys with some often pretty toxic preferences. (Domineering, savior and/or martyr complex, Nice Guys, that kind of stuff.) Everything down to the camera work, which is usually designed very specifically to emulate male gaze - something I found extremely cringe-inducing even when I was a teenager, before feminism and dysphoria and all that.

Basically it's always seemed, to me, to be all geared towards a fetish for rescuing vulnerable women and then having power over them. Which is damn toxic IRL (trust me, I know that from experience); but also something I've always found incredibly offputting and bizarre. And I know I'm not the only person who feels that way, and strongly doubt that only other queer people and women feel that way. Again going by my own experience, I would bet there are real straight, cisgender men out there who find it completely bizarre and repulsive; and (like me when I was nominally male) cannot fully articulate it, or are embarrassed to say it publicly with their names attached.

IDK, sorry if the above is beyond what's appropriate for this forum.

Anyway yeah, I don't believe in a Giant Hollywood Conspiracy. More just that broken standards of manliness and womanhood are reflected in broken standards of entertainment.

See also, why Wonder Woman has to look

like this person

instead of

like this person

or, heaven forbid,

this person.

@Iffy Yes that's definitely true for me. Most of my friends now either know my girlfriend some way, or are people I met at political protests.

@Wrath, @Randomizer I suppose it might just be that kind of "critical mass" thing. IDK. Neither of the two roguelike forums I'm (sometimes) active on have much trans representation (and the guys there tend to be casually sexist).

Edit: BTW, kosher dill pickles are amazing. Like seriously, AMAZING. I don't remember them tasting like that before I started taking Spiro...

Yeah, I suspect something about SW games attracts closeted trans folks. Not sure what it was for me; I think the escapist worldbuilding/fantasy tourism aspect of BoE, and maybe the freedom to build gender nonconforming characters, something something escaping from reality something something being a dork when I was a kid.

Edit: also almost every trans person I know has some kind of autism diagnosis, and some aspects of SW games seem tuned to that? IDK.

@Didolatry: true, OTOH I've already seen some ridiculous insurance hijinks pre-Chump. One time when I was on COBRA, the provider cut off my insurance without reason or prior notification. Left me completely unmedicated for a week, and I had to switch one of my meds to make things affordable without insurance. It was a REALLY close call, and I still don't know what happened.

@The Almighty Doer of Stuff: Charlie Baker may be relatively liberal but he's still dreadful, even if he did eventually turn against the AHCA.

(And I'm formerly known as Tevildo, and before that as Miramor. Avatar is Lacey, one of my fluffbabies. <3 )

And thanks, Lilith. Yeah, it's been interesting, and disturbing, seeing some of the common threads in how The Closet messes people up, as I've talked with and befriended more trans folks.

(And might as well mention, a certain recent SF novel helped a lot. Though almost as much from a "wow the protagonist's relationship with her dad is just like mine" validation standpoint, as from "yay the protagonist is trans and feels a lot like I do".)

Thanks all (and anyone else who comments). Mmm, pickles sound good, I may have to go and get some. When the thunderstorm here peters out...

And yeah I'm also very glad I'm doing better, though it would be nice if my country didn't despise my guts oo many different counts. I resent that so much of my life got buried by dysphoria, and hope I can survive long enough to make up for it, but am not greatly optimistic.

Oh, re hormones. From what I've seen, even old off-patent drugs tend to be unreasonably expensive without insurance. I suspect some heavy duty price fixing going on. Ordering overseas is something I've considered if for some reason my clinic decides to dump me. But I worry A LOT about quality control, and how to tell who is legit vs who is selling filler if not actual poison. Also, ordering prescription drugs overseas is still go-to-jail illegal IIRC, and I expect more enforcement of such stuff coming down the pipes...

Today I am two months into HRT. Also I came out to both my parents during the week. My dad took it well, which I would consider a minor miracle if I were religious.

No way am  I ever going back if I can help it. *shudder* I have no idea how I survived up until now, and I've had it (and continue to have it) pretty easy vs. most of my current friends. Hope insurance keeps paying for hormones so I can be functional, ha ha. I beseech thee oh Demons of Capitalism, please don't take away my lifeline...

And, uh, to everyone else here traveling this path. Thank you for existing, and being visible, and talking honestly about things the mainstream doesn't want to believe in. It helps.

... Okay. That's all. Back to reading books, tampering with software, and failing to actually play Spiderweb games.

Recently finished: Company Town by Madeline Ashby. I loved it... up until the end, whereupon it started getting incredibly preachy with magical Free Will stuff and a heaping side of normative sexism. It almost completely lost me on the latter, because the whole "women need to personally rely on men" thing usually makes me too furious to keep reading.

I did like the protagonist a lot though. Also, it's now clear to me that cyberpunk is the most stereotypically Canadian SF genre ever.

TBH I don't really like this test due to severe lack of nuance. e.g. I had to answer "no" on taxation because I don't believe governments have the right to punitively tax people who can't afford it. IMO one of the central purposes of taxation is to redistribute wealth.

Quote

You are a: Socialist Pro-Government World-Federalist Bleeding-Heart Libertine

Collectivism score: 67%
Authoritarianism score: 33%
Internationalism score: 83%
Tribalism score: -100%
Liberalism score: 83%

Oooh this new board software is pretty!

Hiya! I haven't been around much lately, everything kind of exploded.

Hmm. I've kind of given up on scenario design by now, writing prose is much easier. However, I would be willing to offer ideas/suggestions and do some programming. I'm lousy at C++ (never mind the functional C++11/14 stuff) but should be able to manage something useful.

Might be better writing documentation though. (Am familiar with that from my time in sysadmin jobs.)

Just finished The Power by Naomi Alderman.

I love this book, and wish it had existed when I was 16.