Mea Tulpa

It wasn't nice, but how was it hypocritical?

It's also worth adding that it is a philosophical allegory in scenario form, which is certainly unusual.

Morrow's Isle is in ASR, Drakey, not E3. Dark Waters was put together quite well.

Harston is pretty interesting as far as the story goes.

This is what I have to say about most reviews of anything: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/pitchfork_gives_music_6_8

This is a constant conundrum in RPG development. Ultimate equipment, spells, etc. always seems like it arrives with too little time left to play with it. But if it arrives too early, there is not enough left to look ahead to, and the game becomes less interesting.

IIRC -- it's been a long time -- you have to lob some kind of explosive potion at a wall to find the gemstone. Somebody hints at this, but it requires thorough conversations with all the relevant characters. Start with the mayor, his son, and a certain femme fatale. I was being a bit subjective. Objectively, you can't pick one "best scenario," but if you were going to it would have to be something more universally adored than Nephil's Gambit, such as one of Alcritas's scenarios. Nephil's Gambit does get high ratings in general, but it is more notable as a cult favourite than as a blockbuster; there are a handful of people here who swear by it.

The problem with shockwave is that it also damages, and alienates, friendly characters. There are very few dungeons in E2 that do not have at least one friendly character in them somewhere.

Divine Thud is however significantly weaker than Bovine Thud.

The short answer is no. Another level on which this issue needs to be addressed, is the cultural and psychological level. So long as we continue to kill each other over petty things, and so long as we have a culture which rewards those people who don't take responsibility for their actions, people will continue to trash the environment, too.

I've tended to pronounce Rotdhizon rote-dee-zone.

Pumping a ton of points into Parry made you nearly untouchable in G2, *and* gave you free riposte. Sure, you still needed enough HP to take a hit once in a while, but QA was better and melee dice were still 1-8 so it wasn't as hard to keep damage up to par. I forget how high I pumped Parry, but definitely to at least 20. In G2 it's really worth it.

The links to PPP won't break. Links to the board have, thus far, been easily converted to links to PPP. If that changes, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The History of the Boards I've been working on is almost ready to go public. It has a "noteworthy threads" column containing links to stuff like this. Once it is released, I will be thrilled if people point me to threads they think should be included.

Um, is this even a question? G2 was the best time for melee, several orders of magnitude better than the runner-up.

Do you mean Anatomy? Guardians were fun to play in G1 and did loads of damage, I don't question that. Getting to 30 Anatomy and 30 Quick Action by level 10, was FUN! But they had a much harder time surviving than in later games. Reliance on non-ranged attacks was also much more of a problem under the old AP system.

Stop listening to DV. Clawbugs aren't broken in G5. They are good, for the first in the series, and possibly better than other creations when you get them, but they aren't head-and-shoulders better than anything else. In G1, freshly made creations got one point in each basic stat PER LEVEL, instead of per two levels as in all the subsequent games. There were also fewer differences between creation types, so a shaper could pump magic shaping and make a killer artila with loads of HP and an attack as strong as anything, etc. Also consider that there were FAR fewer spells in G1, and no Parry.

P.S. Nephil's Gambit is the best scenario ever written for BoX. The charms of the fair priestess Karolynna FTW!

Motrax's Eye is a gem. It is in Myldres. One character there wants you to steal it from another character there. It isn't required that you do so, but it doesn't require going out of your way at all.

A few comments. Battle creations did not suck horribly until G3, because in G1 and G2 all melee did 1-8 damage per level instead of 1-4, and particularly in G2, damage from magic and breath attacks used lower dice. G3, however, was hardly the nadir of shaping -- it was, along with G1, the peak! The stat-bonus rule wasn't broken like in G1, but Vlish -- due to not being rebalanced while most everything else in the game was weakened -- were completely broken. A shaper could steamroll the entire game on Torment.

Most of the negative comments about Parry refer to the fact that it is much weaker than in all previous Spiderweb games. This is true, period.

The conditions listed in the scripts mostly seem to rely on reputation/leadership (and not much reputation is required if you have moderate leadership skill, so this is not a relevant factor) and on the status of certain quests. I know there are a few like the shredbugs that can be an obstacle for certain faction switches, but in most cases faction switches should be possible, even if it is possible to mess up your chances.

A fairly consistent trend emerges from the ten entries so far that rank all five games: Average rank (#1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th) 1) G1: 1.6 (7, 0, 3, 0 ,0) 2) G5: 2.4 (2, 5, 0, 3, 0) 3) G2: 2.7 (1, 2, 6, 1, 0) 4) G4: 3.7 (0, 2, 1, 5, 2) 5) G3: 4.6 (0, 1, 0, 1, 8) Additionally, people tended to cite the same favourite things about each game: G1 - the atmosphere, story, characters, and freedom G5 - the game engine G2 - the factions and freedom G4 - the game engine; the "grittier" plot received both positive and negative comments G3 - people disliked the island/boat system and the story What's interesting about this is that the results are WAY more uniform than when people have been asked to compare all the Avernums, or even just the three Exile games.

I'm fairly sure that's not the case. I'm fairly sure you can, for example, join Astoria, then leave her to join Alwan. Somebody who's played through the whole game can confirm his.

Exile (and other applications of its era) will not run on more recent OS X releases. I guess you have an old copy of Stuffit it tried to open, which had the same problem? Your best bet is probably to download BasiliskII and get it working, which takes a bit of effort.