Mea Tulpa

You may as well go get the Orb first, especially if you already cleared most of Kothtar. Caffren's quest is intended to be the easier Crystal Soul quest, I believe, so you might do that first; but first get the evidence from the Vahnatai Fort in the chasm-filled area north of Avit, and show it to the Council. The Teleporter quest is involved, so I usually rescue all three Crystal Souls before doing much of it. Assassinating Garzahd, of course, can and should be saved for last. IIRC, Sulfras has the Onyx Scepter (you gave it to him in Exile 1) and you can retrieve it after you free him.

After a pleasant chat with the princesses. —Alorael, who can only say that it has been concession enough to give up the pseudomonikered pseudosignature.

Originally Posted By: Statistically Significant PDN Slarty's been pretty close to daily as well for a while. Everyone steals my gimmicks. —Alorael, who suppose it can't be helped. If you're going to have four gimmicks you're going to have to learn to share. I resent that accusation! At the time I began changing my name, there were a number of members who shuffled theirs regularly. I remember trying to decide whether "Butt Paladin" or "Fulgorous Ziggurat" was more inspired. You also weren't the first member to change your name regularly, though you may have been the first to change it on an approximately daily basis. So I didn't steal the gimmick from you, and it isn't your original gimmick, anyway.

*facepalm* Well, since it turns out this question didn't need to be answered in the first place, and we have moved on to more colorful commentary, I guess we're done here.

You know what's kind of funny? When two people in the same room have a conversation over email or chat. You know what's even funnier? When one person has a conversation with himself over email or chat.

No. Go work on the other wiki (the main one). Sucia Archives never got off the ground. But then, I'm rather surprised Ackrovan didn't fill you in on this, given how much he's contributed to multiple GF wikis.

Stanyl!

THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd? SEPTIMUS: No. THOMASINA: Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

I believe the Sholai explicitly state in one of the later games that they are waiting and watching and intentionally not taking sides.

I believe G3 is the same way, as well.

I dunno. Given Jeff's reasons for taking demon-summoning spells out of his games, I have a hard time believing he'd intentionally put a Hitler comparison in there.

Originally Posted By: Azuma Velius Sure it's not an actual "RPG" but the essence is still there. What does this even mean?

Well, he seems crazier and less hateful than that.

I'm pretty sure it's command-click. On macs, right click typically substitutes for control-click, which is why it doesn't work on items.

Originally Posted By: Hasted Sloth "Sacraments"... Granted, there are only three characters total... the Lufia series does this, or at least I and II do. This isn't what I'm talking about. Lufia 1 has 4 characters, and they never leave, they only join (well, except for GIANT SPOILER). Lufia 2 does have 7 characters, but three of them join early and (almost) never leave, so it's basically just 3 characters plus 1 rotating slot. FF4 has 12 characters, all of whom come and go at numerous points in the game. The main character never leaves, but he does undergo a complete class change a third of the way through that turns him into a different character as far as gameplay goes. The party you control presents a dramatically different play experience from quest to quest. That's what I'm getting at. Phantasy Star 3 does this as well. You play over multiple generations, where the characters who appear differ depending on who gets hitched in preceeding generations.

It still affects to-hit and dodge chances at 2%/pt. I don't remember whether or not the 10-cap applies to that anymore, probably not in G5 as it was removed almost everywhere.

Jeff did make essence investment slightly cheaper in G5. It's still rarely worthwhile. The one exception is if you are using a very cheap creation at very high levels. The essence cost to buy a few levels of strength for a cryoa, in particular, can be worthwhile at very high levels only. This is less useful for clawbugs since the damage doesn't scale up as quickly.

Yes, that first mention is a reasonable system too. What I really prefer is a system in which your abilities change in response to story events, but I don't see the need for your abilities to only grow. Losing character abilities doesn't make much sense, of course, but losing characters makes sense, as much as gaining them does. This allows the game to maintain a high level of variety and interesting battles without having to constantly scale upwards. There are plenty of JRPGs that use the "start with 1 character and lots more can join along the quest" theory. There aren't a lot that have people come and go, though. FF4 is the only one I can think of that employs this mechanic exclusively. (As a result it's also one of the few JRPGs I've ever seen that whose continuity is not completely undone by the question, "Why can't all of us fight at the same time? Then killing the evil demon king would be really easy!")

Discipline Wands do *not* do unblockable damage. They do damage of a special damage type that no creatures have inherent resistance to. However, the damage can still be reduced by magical shields. Also, it's possible that creatures with a Luck stat (like gazers) have some resistance to it as well -- I'm not sure about that though. (And of course, they only work on creations.)

I dunno about that. If you charm everyone with one casting, you can then firebolt enemies one by one and have the rest gang up on them, one at a time. That sounds pretty effective to me, and much better than a 50% success rate.

You're missing the point. It's not that Mental Magic is less effective on Easy, it's that Easy does not require the most effective tactics, and therefore the simplest and easiest tactics may be more optimal than the most effective ones.

You'll have to work hard to find a time that works for 16 people. As Ephesos discovered, schedules and time zones are not always aligned well; also, some people may sign up and then not be able to come, or may come late, despite their best intentions to show up on time. Anyway, I think 16 may be overly ambitious. In the heyday of SW chats we rarely got more than 15 or 16, but that was drawing from a much larger crowd of potential chatters, probably 40+ users, and they didn't have to commit 3+ hours to the chats.

I believe Pyrog's caves / Pyrog Labs appeared in A4, as a series of caves that had been retaken by giants. I might be mixing caves up though.

Yes, I hated the Exile XP system too. The quest rewards were randomly generated on-the-fly, but those were actually good because they mildly balanced out the gross imbalances of earned XP that would inevitably accumulate. Things got especially bad once you discovered that the easiest fighting strategy was often "hit fight, attack with lead character, hit end fight, repeat until enemies are dead." I think this is the major reason that singletons became so popular in Exile and BoE. Certainly it was the reason I switched over and never went back. But I really loathe experience. In my opinion, it takes away more from the playing experience than it adds to it. In the ideal RPG that I will never end up making, there will be no experience, at least not experience as it has been used for the last 30 years.

Incidentally, it's really stupid that you get less experience for a monster killed by your summon. If PC 1 stands back and watches PC 2 kill a bunch of things, he gets full experience; why is it different if your summon does the work?