Mea Tulpa

I'm skeptical, SoT, simply because the levels gained from the bad traits wouldn't (I expect) be any larger than the ones lost from the good traits, if both are compared to plain humans. By midgame an advantage of 10 or 15 skill points is really only worth a 2-3 points in skills you care about. Most of the penalties sound worse than that, though we don't have hard data on them.

In both A4 and A5, there is a cap to how much healing/restoration First Aid will provide per enemy defeated, scaled by enemy level. In A4 this cap is relatively high and it takes a lot of First Aid skill to get there. In A5, for most (but not all) enemies, the cap is very low and reached by only a little First Aid. The skill is in fact so much less useful in A5, that it actually makes Magical Efficiency slightly less awful. And that's saying something.

I've got it. Cave Cow will be a fourth option for player race!

Even at level 1, you get +3 Blademaster, +2 Pole Weapons, +2 Parry, +1 Magery and +1 Sharpshooter. And 20% armor. At that point it's a plain old bonus over the disadvantaged character. Of course the disadvantaged character will quickly get 1 level up ahead, and probably 2 level ups ahead fairly soon. Of course by that point the bonuses will have started to increase! But that's still trading 10 skill points for 5+ levels of pole damage and to-hit, 2+ free points in battle disciplines, 2+ parry, and the 20% armor. I hate to sound like a broken record on this one, but the mechanics themselves are a little bit broken.

I'm holding you to that "beautiful, beautiful" part Jeff!

It really can be qualified as "questionable choice" given how experience works in Avernum 4 and 5. A Slith, Divinely Touched, Elite Warrior will only end up a handful of levels behind a character with no advantages, despite a seemingly huge experience penalty, because experience is scaled by level very harshly. And he gets truly disgusting bonuses: at level 30, it's +14 to Blademaster, 6 to Pole Weapons, +6 to Parry, +8 to Magery, +8 to Sharpshooter, 20% free armor and fire resistance. All that and he only misses out on 10 or 20 skill points and a fragment of HP and SP. Likewise, taking disadvantages won't actually earn you a noticeable number of levels.

I'd take that over Tess of the flipping D'Urbervilles, which I had to read in high school. Bleah.

Q: How many identity thefts does it take to anger a town?

So, here's the punch line. The "core plot" of Avernum 4 was EXACTLY the same as Avernum 3: powerful Vahnatai sorceress Rentar-Ihrno tries to get revenge on humans by unleashing hordes of monsters on them. That's why your comment about it being more original sounds so strange. And if we're looking at RPG cliches, you really can't beat "powerful evil wizard, allied with demons, bent on destroying all of humanity, unleashes lots of monsters. Kill the monsters and the wizard." I mean, that's the plot of half the CRPGs ever made, if not more than half.

Well, he's been writing books for more than three decades now, and he's always loved gratuitously long, rambling, personal introductions and afterwords. 30 or even 20 years ago I'm sure his financial conditions were quite different. I do think he loves what he does. One of his early books apparently underwent a disastrous transformation at the hands of six different editors before being published; he later had it republished with all of the editors' edits attached as footnotes, along with his own snarky comments directed at the editors. He does collaborations with lesser known authors, spends time researching new settings, etc. He has his own quirks and a lot of really muddy ideas but I very much doubt he's in it for the money.

No, no. You've got it all wrong. Obviously the people of Exile realized the sacred nature of Cave Cows and they now spirit them out of harm's way as soon as Rentar's plagues or Dorikas's assassins rear their heads. This enlightenment began with the birth of a two-headed Cave Cow in 836 IE, in central Chimney, as documented in Nephil's Gambit, thanks to the grace of Him and Her.

I'll second the admonition against Xanth. All of his books have curious sexual elements running through them. So on the one hand you have the Adult Conspiracy, which is kind of funny, but on the other hand you have this really misogynistic element, like the nasty depictions of Chameleon, or Humfrey and his five or six wives (I lost count)... one of the Xanth books is even titled "The Color of Her Panties," though that might be better than his non-Xanth book "If I Pay Thee Not in Gold."

It wasn't implied that the Resting is for the caves to recover; it was explicitly and repeatedly stated. But again, this could be a viewpoint difference of two different tribes.

Also, the bulk of the Vahnatai we've met (in A2-A4) are from the Olgai tribe. The Vahnatai town in A5 is of a different tribe. A2 makes clear that there are big differences among the different tribes.

New post so Aran's bots see it: and I hope you didn't delete SoT's essay entirely!

I can't find any options to set up forums. Actually, I can't find any options to do anything other than edit user preferences; anything else either isn't listed or it says I don't have permission to do, despite being listed as an admin.

What are all of these "nations" everybody is talking about? The Abyss has clearly been subsumed by Avernum, so there's really only one nation in Avernum; the only other "nations" are the Empire (covering the entire surface) and Vahnatai tribes (in the lower caves, never considered part of the caves of Avernum).

Hey Random - care to give an update on your build, some of the relevant stats, and how enjoyable/frustrating it is? I am debating whether or not to pick up my own Torment singleton again.

Bleah. Better to leave it out entirely than to mangle it beyond recognition.

I don't think it's actually more common. Ultima used that system, but most of the games that borrowed from Ultima used the standard D&D system you describe. Exile was one of the few games that did inherit it from Ultima 3.

The other problem is that most of the characters we've mentioned rely heavily on summoning or lifecrafting, which don't really work in a fighting game. Another option would be to *not* include any of those characters and instead include some of the loved but unimportant characters, with more balanced abilities. Cecile Vidican, Anastasia (as human), Cheeseball, Mairwen, Yong-Mi, ooh... Karzoth. Not sure how to work Geneforge in that way since most characters are either lifecrafters of some sort or boring and defenseless. Maybe Rhakkus from G1, or the Battle Alpha Hoge kept around.

Who would be playable in such a game? Most of the good options are mages, which could make for an interesting game, or a bad one. Erika and Rentar-Ihrno are obvious. Garzahd. Solberg. Linda, sure. Grah-Hoth? Litalia, Akhari Blaze... are there ANY warriors in the mix? Alwan, I suppose.

Various things have been said about whether it's the highest level or not. Some of them have turned out to be wrong -- I know I made one or two disproved statements. But I don't know that we ever figured out for sure how it works.

I haven't used it in A5 either, but the data listing looks the same. The halberd adds layers of acid per die of your attack, i.e. every point of Strenth, Pole, Blademaster adds layers of acid, plus you get free layers for the strength of the halberd (12?). I forget if it's one layer per point or a random amount (1-2 or 1-3) but either way, you are adding about as much acid as you would from casting Spray Acid. Acid is an extremely useful damage type... in general I prefer this to the fire sword, which basically gives you a Bolt of Fire, whereas the JH gives you a melee attack plus a Spray Acid.

The attractive thing about the Jade Halberd is not the protections, it's that it automatically puts acid on anyone it hits, which increases the total damage it causes substantially.