Mea Tulpa

The characters in Fort Remote really cared...

I assume you mean "story" instead of "characters" in the last instance above.

Be quiet Thuryl, we're trying to listen to ourselves talk here

I don't think this is so inexplicable. The magi barely had the power to contain Grah-Hoth 30 years earlier (or was it 40? I forget). Since then they have aged while Grah-Hoth has been gathering his power and his forces from within his prison. If they could barely contain him before, how can they do it now? As for helping, summoning allies, etc. -- remember that teleportation, and far-reaching magic, was much, much more limited in the early games. Exile had no ability whatsoever to create portals to distant places. The strongest mage in all of Exile needed four powerful magical artifacts just to do a simple long-range teleportation spell. Long-range scrying was immensely difficult, to the point that it was practiced only by said most powerful incantatrix, the dragon Athron, and two specialist mages (Aimee and Aydin). I think you get the idea.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that it just automatically diseases the party or something when you leave the Caverns -- not really a big deal.

He went to Almaria and met up with Trajkov. Duh

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Back in the day of BoE, there were a lot of complaints about "Bob" questmasters, where you report to one person (i.e. Anaximander) who tells you to do this, then do that, then do that, etc. But the original trilogy's Bobs, whether Anaximander, Micah, Mahdavi, Solberg, or whoever, never gave you all the details or all the necessary targets. You had to put pieces together from a lot of different places to really figure out what was going on and what to do. In the second trilogy, it literally is a case of Bob gives you one quest, which displays in special colors and on the quest log, and when you finish it he gives you another, repeat ad naseum.

I partially agree with *i's statement of what Jeff has done in the games, but I don't agree with the attached value judgement. Jeff has done something different in A5 and A6, but it isn't necessarily better -- to my taste, it's worse. I enjoyed A5 and A6, and the story and atmosphere was good enough not to be any kind of impediment. But I didn't really enjoy the stories. They didn't draw me in. E1 and E2 did. I challenge, however, the assertion that the later games have more character development than the earlier games do. Character development takes place in a different fashion in A5 and A6. Yes, people actually do things. On the other hand, there is less backstory. Most of the characters who span the second trilogy are throwaways. Characters like Lark and Correlea have no character development whatsoever. The two biggest characters who appear in both A5 and A6, Gladwell and Melanchion, get some development, but less I think than the first trilogy offered. Gladwell's a great example. Yes, we see him do a few things, but his inner motivation and his life story are total mysteries. We don't really know what kind of person he is... active plot, actions, can be a window to somebody's soul, but in A6 they really aren't. I certainly feel like Erika got more develpment in E1 and E2 alone (we'll exclude E3, where she does something). Certainly the first trilogy has its share of important characters with little development. Like Micah, about whose person we know almost as little as Starrus. But the first trilogy has characters with no plot action, characters who are essentially throwaways, who seem to me much more like real people. Characters like Aydin and Josie, the self-exiled mages who lived in the Northern Waters, or Silverio, or heck, even Anastasia. Or let's compare the Vahnatai. For all the flak their depiction received, E2's one-off Vahnatai plot points of Prossis, Glantris, and Elohi were far more humanly sketched out than the recurring tasteless entity of the second trilogy, Ghall-Ihrno. Perhaps I'm just old and bitter and full of nostalgia for the games I played when I was 13 and 14. But I think the difference is not so one-sided as *i suggests.

It's worth pointing out that X1-2 did have some non-coercive linearity to them. That is to say, there are some pieces of the main quests that you could theoretically do right at the start of the game, but which you normally wouldn't know how to do until after talking to person A who refers you to person B, etc. This is especially true of X2, where there are very long branching chains of conversation and action required, mostly with different mages, to figure out what to do for the numerous components of all 3 major quests.

Either way, he isn't Moses. Part of this argument, I think, revolves around the value we place on atmosphere and history versus active plot. Both are components of storytelling. That I find the stories of Exile 1 and 2 more compelling, whereas *i prefers Avernum 5 and 6, suggests that I am more interested in atmosphere and he is more interested in active plot.

*facepalm*

The more I think about this, the more unsure I am that I agree. Saying that Exile 1 was poorly written because none of the good guy NPCs do anything is like saying that Chrono Trigger was poorly written because Crono never talks. Exile and hence Avernum drew heavily from two sources: (1) Ultima and Wizardry, and (2) the AD&D Gold Box games and their imitators. In all of those, the relative lack of NPC action and lack of character development was a given, a sort of stylistic constraint of the genre. Exile/Avernum certainly didn't break any new ground for CRPGs; however, that should not however be confused with poor writing, plotting, planning, or anything else.

I believe that most quest XP does depend on your level, though not as heavily as monster XP tends to.

I actually wonder if that's unintentional. He's done that before, as with Beast Ceremony in Nethergate.

Actually, I think that's a rather elegant handwave. Originally Posted By: Dantius That said, being the inventor of Quickfire does say something about your powers. A minor point, but one that has come up before. Rentar-Ihrno did not invent quickfire. Nobody says she did, and lots of people talk about her and about quickfire without making any such connection. I think the real answer here is that Exile/Avernum was originally depicted as a magic-poor world. Sure, it had a bunch of demons and stuff, but magical resources available to humanoids were very limited. Only a small handful of mages could use the magics so common to upper-level casters in D&D. The ToM makes clear that most people are not suited to magic. Adventurers are in a position to uncover magical powers more easily than most, but they are also much more likely than most to die. Most adventurers die, and your band has an incredible and unending stroke of luck, or divine favour, as you prefer. I kind of agree with all of this, but I don't think it's so hard to explain. This group of mages, that imprisoned Grah-Hoth, probably did so through purely magical means. The army of minor mages, Silverio et al., distracted him, while Erika, Patrick and Rone (the only three mentioned by name with regards to the imprisoning spell) cast the spell. Solberg is never mentioned in this context, and he surely would be given his other experiences with demons (and his E2 to A2 retconning as a demonological expert, which greatly irritated me). Remember that it has always been easy to toss fireballs in E/A; the real trick has been more delicate magics -- enchanting and scrying valued, teleportation revered, and transformations most difficult of all. Also remember that if we actually imagine this as a fantasy-world rather than a computer game, 'power' is not just about having higher stats and being able to do extra powerful sword slashes or magic bursts or whatever -- mastering the delicate subtleties of magic would probably be far more useful against ultrapowered foes like haakai or dragons anyway.

"The Five" are now "The Five to Seven" -- A4 sort of halfway retconned Linda in and A6 has now retconned X in. And in the straight-up fight, it should be noted, Erika had the upper hand against Rentar. It should also be noted that Rentar was not even originally described as the strongest mage of the Olgai tribe -- she was described, quite specifically, as the strongest ihrno "currently awake," which implies she was not the strongest if you count the Resting ones.

I think we can put this in the wide category of "unfortunate side effects of free interchange between discrete walkabout and combat modes on the same map" -- something that is relatively unique to SW games. Just about every other RPG either uses different maps for combat, or has only one mode used for both combat and walkabout.

The displaying thing isn't an oversight, it's a reflection of the fact that they are totally different effects. The elements ward is bound by the 90% caps, the thought ward has nothing to do with them.

I think the idea is that it's a long, complicated process to resurrect somebody. That makes sense to me -- frankly I'm always put off by the near-instantaneous resurrections that have become the standard in CRPGs.

Ward of Thoughts might also work differently. I suspect this is the case because in previous games, neither Prismatic Shield nor the mental resistance spell actually raised displayed resistances. So Ward of Elements is actually a new spell, but Ward of Thoughts is probably just the old spell with a new name.

Is Gladwell actually on par with Erika? Erika and Garzahd seem to have been leagues more powerful than everybody else, with the possible exception of Rentar-Ihrno. I haven't finished A6 yet, but from his roles in A4 and A5 it doesn't really seem plausible that he could rise to that level so quickly.

That isn't quite true. I assume this is true of Avernum as well, but in Exile and Exile 2, you only got the final victory message after completing ALL three victory conditions. The initial victory message said something like "Congratulations! You have completed one of the conditions for winning Exile..." while the final victory message was glowing, well-written, and the clear endpoint for the game. While you could certainly choose not to complete one of those main quests, you would never see the final victory dialogue -- and unlike in Geneforge or A5, there was no alternate victory condition to pursue. Moreover, unlike Geneforge, the sequels leave no ambiguity as to whether or not the victory conditions were completed as described. In each case, they definitely were.

Exception: the handful of cheap points you can get in Hardiness and Luck are useful. Also, Endurance is definitely good in A6, if that counts as a defensive trait.

If my math holds, it should be about 800 gp per level, for a singleton. My full party at the same point has more than 20,000 coins and spent more than 10,000 already, so there should be more than enough if you save and don't buy skills right away. Worthwhile I think, as the levels are worth a lot more, with traits. I'm starting a singleton armed with this info. Slith DT EW. That last part took some thought, but after carefully comparing some items, really the only argument for needing NM is the Mercuric Plate, and there are two ways around it -- one is to use the Mercuric Chain instead, and the other is to just equip elemental blades or rat items. The saved SP for EW and NM are similar. EW however gives the encumbrance bonus as well, which effectively saves points of Strength. I want to see if I can get by on 2 Strength, to mitigate the penalty from the Q Sandals + M Armor.

Originally Posted By: Jeff Vogel all significant item drops are fixed anyway. Also note this part. Unlike in A5, no more random Eyestalks to worry about! You can confirm this by looking in the defs file -- no enemy is set to drop item 438 randomly.