Fort

To summarize, no one knows anything definitive, and I would be wary to trust the given resistance percentages. I can only tell you for sure that HER will protect you from effects like slowing, and it likely reduces elemental damage as well. PWR reduces physical damage in general.

This is one exploitation that for some reason was introduced in this latest Avernum game. In the previous ones, NPCs still could not open doors, but at least it was not possible to attack and hide behind a door in a single round because you had to be in town mode in order to close a door. The Exile monsters, which could open doors, made things all the more challenging. However, due to engine differences, the ability for them to open doors was sacrificed for the greater flexibility of scripts instead of nodes. Sadly, it is infeasible to allow them to do that again except in very specific situations.

More people in your party never hurt as long as you can keep up with keeping them all alive. My only irritation with full parties in Exile was that the experience is not distributed evenly, so that the first three characters are twice as powerful as the last three. Then they contribute much less to battles and die more often as well.

I am not completey clear on this, but I do not think that custom abilities can take targets. However, you can make a custom item that has targets and link it to a scenario script state. Use who_is_custom_item_target() to get the ID of the targetted creature.

Who needs 6 PCs in the Avernum games? Each one can deal and take a huge amount of punishment. Since when could you assassinate for 300 in Exile? A 250 hp cap for your PCs? Ridiculous! I agree that the characters have to be much more specialized, but it should not be a problem becuase people can still find enough skill points to pull off singletons or duos. But really, the source of passion for this argument is in that I absolutely love killing monsters in one hit in Avernum.

I am quite sure that memory cells can be negative. I suggest using print_nums() if you want to make sure once and for all.

I would not be surprised if that were true. Remember that in the previous Avernum games, dexterity only gave half as much bonus. I would be annoyed if Jeff let the description slip up like this, though.

It is interesting how everyone at one time or another through the course of playing these games tries out some of these considerably obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The atmosphere simply encourages constant and meticulous detail. If you exploit something to do something that you should not be able to, then you are cheating. In this way using method Zephyr described above would only be justified if, for example, the barrel you searched could be easily pushed into the adjacent room for looting. The practice of buff-one-round-then-wait has to be ubiquitous. It is almost impossible to resist if you really know that a fight is coming that you cannot readily beat. But winning fights without doing this is incredibly rewarding in comparison.

Delete your priests for testing purposes. Remove invulnerability potions from your fighters. Then enter a scenario that would have been only mildly challenging for your full party. You'll probably either find yourself guzzling down plenty of potions or gratuitously using Capture Mind, Simulacrum, and Arcane Summon.

That is an interesting finding, but since this mysterious return type results in an error message makes it is ruinous for gameplay atmosphere. I took a quick look at the wikibook for the calls, and it seems to function perfectly as a quick reference page, which I take to be its original purpose. But since it would almost be trivial for a group of people familiar with scripts to write clear descriptions and provide discerning examples for each, improving it is a matter of "Why not?". Providing references to scripts would be great for very complex or unique scripting procedures, but I think that high quality examples will suffice for most. There are numerous little details about the operation of the scripting engine that could be written out, though. For example, the order in which different scripts, such as the town script, scenario script, creature script, run. Of course, bugs should be pointed out. I am going to look at the discussion on the site now to make sure that I have not just repeated what people have been saying...

So you want them to completely disregard any pummeling and only focus on the magic users? Maybe you already explained this, but I am guessing that your monster will have a nice ranged attack so that it can kill the magic users while they are in the antimagic cloud. But your wording seems to suggest that its only purpose is to create these clouds. If the latter case is true, then it is completely fine to have the monster have separate targets; one for antimagic clouds and one for normal attacking. If the former is true, have you tried setting its strategy to 11?

Locked doors usually do not become relocked when you re-enter a town. I do not remember a single instance where it is absolutely necesary to dispel a barrier a second time, though. Just finish what you need to behind the barrier the first time. If you have not tried Avernum 4, then you might like to know that the barriers stay dispelled in it.

Look in the game documentation.

As you know, there is no steamlined way to make the mage come back to life. I suggest just dabbling with the scripts to make the mage reappear when you enter the area.

Originally written by Garrison: Quote: It should be small dagger with a bluish tint because that is how it is described in the games, though the blusih tint is my conjecture. It should have a very high base damage and the regular bonus damage per level of weapons skill as a dagger because I figure that a knife whose edge is blessed enough to cut through virtually anything does not give its user much of a bonus for having big muscles. It should of course deal damage to undead and demons because I think most people like to see anything holy or related to religions being discriminatory.

It should be small dagger with a bluish tint. It should have a very high base damage and the regular bonus damage per level of weapons skill as a dagger. It should of course deal damage to undead and demons.

No, they can only move in the diagonal directions if it is clear all around. Check by moving down a very narrow river with a few right angle turns in it. This would only work if you could have some blocking terrain, though.

You could use that script and then have the party in a boat. That will automatically limit them to the 4 cardinal directions, and I am sure you will be able to conjure up an explanation for pushing around blocks in a boat.

No, it stacks and does not replace.

I like how Jeff so characteristically used the word "unkillable" in the scripting call instead of "invincible" or "immortal." I only have the demo, but I was thinking about using the priestess to help attack the shade for laughs. But the shade killed her so quickly that I never even knew that she could summon Divine Shades.

It does not fit in the original Avernum world because of the drastic change in the type and use of monsters. The previous Avernum games involved several outdoor sections and a few dungeons for every major monster group that infested a region; for instance, the Sliths had the entire area west of Fort Avernum. Avernum 3 took this concept to the extreme with literal monster plagues, but Avernum 4 has tons of small infestations that seem almost random in their placement. I was surprised to find various "worm" type monsters instead of the usual Avernum critters. Also, some monsters like demons which were commonplace in previous Avernum games have become rare. In short, there were more monsters to fight in the previous Avernums because of wanderinng outdoor encounters etc., and I think this changes the feel very much.

I am afraid you are stuck with the text size. The games are not adaptable enough to run properly on reduced resolution, and I doubt that there exists a magnifier for the game text. In my experience, though, the text size in the game is similar to that of 12pt font, so it should not be ridiculously hard to read.

The numbers are too small in my opinion. In some obscure way perhaps each die used in damage calculations is affected individually by percentages. I don't know, but I think it would useful to do these tests again with much higher damage numbers and something like an iron breastplate.

It is totally possible, but make sure that you buff yourself completely before the encounter and stock up on healing elixirs. In the demo, your party can take a single lightning spray from the demons but your fighters cannot deal with a full bite and claw combo from them. I actually found that summoning distractions helped a lot. Do not forget about the slow spell either. It can be useful.

In the avernum series, I found the spray acid spell to be near useless in any difficult situations where the usual offensive spells are ineffective. Summon beast and shade are of course pathetic. The most boring monster has to be the wizard. He is pretty tough for low level parties, but after a while his constant lackluster Arcane Summoning puts you into an autopilot type of coma.