Mea Tulpa

The Ninjas Doom, I'm afraid you were not the first member here with "Doom" in your name. I can think of at least two others that preceded you.

If we allow the thread to vary from ouranos to ouroboros, Kelandon was not just a climax but also a classicist.

Yeah, guess what. "Atmosphere" is not what "sky" means. Let's look at typical things English speakers might say about the sky. (1) The sky is blue. Is the air I'm breathing blue? No. Rather, the PART of the atmosphere that is considered the sky, looks blue from where we're standing. (2) The sky is cloudy. Is the air I'm breathing cloudy? No. Rather, I can see clouds far above me. (3) It's really foggy here! Here the fog is down where we are. Note that you CAN'T say "The sky is foggy"... because the sky is not where the fog is. (4) Look up at the sky! Can I look up at where I'm breathing? No. The sky is a point of reference that is directionally above us until we reach its limit. (5) The sky's the limit! This expression implies that there is no limit that you can expect to reach... just like for most of human history, nobody ever expected to reach the sky.

I didn't say they imagined the sky to be distant. I said that the sky WAS distant... because it was. Physically. Distant. This is not a difficult point, Dantdring

Thanks for the reminderie -- I need to hop to on that slop.

The 'heavens' (or 'heaven' before Ptolemy came into vogue) can refer to the sky in English too, and it typically did until modern times. It may even be related to German 'himmel'... it's pretty typical for a language to use the same word for both concepts, which makes sense, because the sky was a pretty distant and untouchable thing until very recently in human history.

I guess I shouldn't complain about people saying nice things, but the idea is that it it's useful to look at both how you come off well, and how you come off poorly. Five Johari responses and one Nohari response makes that difficult. Please, dump on me! Now's your chance to anonymously tell it like it is without feeling even slightly jerkish.

It won't let you pick more than six positives either. It's intended to highlight the most prominent traits, not give a % on every trait listed, though that might be interesting too.

This makes me think of the Johari and Nohari windows. In fact, let's just take a crack at that. This ought to be interesting, in this online-acquaintance-only setting. Follow the links here if you want to pick positive adjectives, and negative adjectives, respectively, to attach to me (you can view the whole window after you do so): http://kevan.org/johari?name=Slarty http://kevan.org/nohari?name=Slarty

The only political threads that I can recall getting locked due to political subject matter, rather than due to people resorting to ban-worthy ad hominem attacks (hi, Alec and Infernal! and Ghaldring!), were two about abortion (one locked by Jeff) and one remarkably respectful thread on gay marriage that Jeff locked. But the gay marriage one was from just over 4 years ago, IIRC. I am not including the porn study discussion -- I locked that thread, and I didn't lock it because of the political content. If I'm forgetting something I'm actually interested to hear about it, but I really don't think there has been any clampdown whatsoever.

Hah. Well, I suppose I make as much sense as anyone else. Wasn't me though. It could have been Alec or Djur, too. They were both around at that point and Kel and Desp had long since parted ways. And of course, there's always Marlenny, though it doesn't really sound like her writing style...

I strongly doubt that Kel added that. It's not his style at all... based on the writing style and the date, I'm not sure who to suspect. My best guess would be TM, but I don't think that's a very good guess. ...wait a minute. April 2006. Wasn't that right around the time of the debate about Love in which Kel made that infamous "unzipped his pants and pulled out some new age buzzwords" comment about Synergy? Oh geez, ANYONE might have added the definition after that!

Chances are, that urbandictionary definition is not in reference to Jeff. There are a whole ton of Vogels out there, and Jeff does not usually go by "Vogel"...

He is boosting his ego by putting himself on a list right after Order Mage??? Wow...

No, casting level does not change any RESISTANCES related to them, it changes dodge rate bonus that comes from them.

Actually, I believe that was Thuryl/Lilith. Thurilith definitely completed it without using any spells or creations, which was my challenge. I think he followed that up with something similar to what Dantdring describes.

I have just one question. Is the typo in your PDN on purpose? Anyway, yes, I remember that stuff, no, the board's certainly not any nerdier or RPGish than it was then, and no, I am not particularly interested in watching you regurgitate topics so you can have more attention.

Yeah, you aren't the only one who does that...

Additionally, are you testing on exactly the same enemy, in exactly the same zone, using the exact same weapon/spell?

That's a confusing suggestion. First of all, Rogue isn't the granddaddy of every CRPG ever. Rogue is predated by similar, non-random games like pedit5, orthanc, dnd, oubliette, etc. Rogue's innovation was the random dungeon generation -- something that largely does not exist outside of the roguelike genre (or cross-genre games like Diablo). It's true that Rogue was very widely played, and very influential, but most CRPGs owe far more to Ultima, to Wizardry, to Dungeons of Daggorath and Dungeon Master, to Wolfenstein 3D, to DikuMUD and the Shadow of Yserbius.

That works fine if your party is identical. But if one character doesn't specialize in killing things, they just lose no matter what.

There were at least one or two that didn't work as all, IIRC, and definitely a few others that didn't seem to work as intended or had practically no effect.

No. The ONLY differences between classes are in the cost of skills, starting skill values, base HP/SP/essence and the HP/SP/essence multipliers. And even then the differences are fairly small. That's it. Level, incidentally, has zero impact on anything other than how much XP you gain, and giving you skill points. Presumably something else is different about your two tests.

Yes, but some excuses are better than others, and some dungeon crawls are better than others. For example, ( Akhronath #2 / Angierach ) was a good dungeon crawl with a good excuse.

Originally Posted By: 10d6 "Just because other games don't do it" is a pretty poor excuse. Plus, let's not forget that the mother of all RPGs has it's mechanics all laid out in the open (okay granted that mechanical transparency is a requirement for tabletop RPGs) Yeah, this is a poor comparison. Let's look at different CRPGs that, much as D&D is for tabletop RPGs, could be considered "the mother of all CRPGs." Adventure? dnd? oubliette? Rogue? Mechanics are not transparent. A few generations down... Ultima? Wizardry? Mechanics are not transparent (less opaque, maybe, in Wizardry). Console RPG mamas: Dragon Quest? Final Fantasy? Definitely not transparent. See a pattern? In fact pretty much the ONLY computer RPGs with transparent mechanics are the ones whose mechanics were lifted straight from D&D... and whose mechanics therefore were (1) already known, and (2) already written up! Is this a coincidence? No. Another exception would be Angband... which is open source, and the mechanics spoilers were written by fans, not developers. So that's not really an exception, except that the fan-made explanations became packaged with the software itself. Quote: Some developers if they don't show the numbers are kind enough to work together with the game guide makers. I've read a couple of game guides where you have a staff member from the development team working together with the guide writers. I assume you are talking here about commercially available guides produced by companies that make commercial gaming guides. Well, that's great, but it's not due to being "kind enough," it's due to the company the puts the guide out paying the developer company in some way.