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What paths are equal? Was somebody advocating for a Shaper who invests in Endurance at ALL? In Geneforge 2? Bleah!

Dexterity does increase your chance to dodge attacks. However, note that this is totally different from armor (reduces damage) and HP (increases ability to take damage) and unlike those attributes, dodge rate is essentially impossible to get a bonus out of against high-level enemies (and medium-level enemies, too, on the higher difficulty settings).

Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg I am a vapid History and Science channel fanatic. Do you mean avid?

Let's face it, this thread lasted longer than any of us thought it would. Ah well.

Originally Posted By: MandatorySuicide wait wait, maybe it wasnt that i was speaking against live action role players, you guys arent upset because of the subtle reference to queers are you? lol probably not, either way if fruity means anything else besides homosexual than I stick by applying the term to larpers..... If we've already reached a national consensus that fruity specifically refers to homosexual. Then maybe, maybe i'll take it back. (in which case we arent role players of the frivolous variety) *facepalm* I don't think anyone was horribly upset by the original "fruity" comment, but the paragraph above is a bit much. Whatever you think the word means, it's clearly a derogatory comment about SOME type of person... and yeah, saying that you are laughing out loud while talking about hate language is definitely going to piss people off. For comparison, the N-word would not magically become OK to use if I use it to describe CCG players instead of black people. Look at your paragraph above, replace "fruity" with the N-word, "queers" with "blacks", "homosexual" with "negro", and tell me if it still sounds reasonable. Targetted comments like that are not welcome here. Please consider this a warning. Anyway, this thread is over. If you want to start a new one, please do so without the little side comments dumping on people.

That is true about webs. Ahbleza, have you definitely noticed this behavior with actual short term statuses (curse, slow, etc)?

missing the forest for the facepalms...

tlol;dr (just kidding. I don't believe in tl;dr, and I agree that you are entitled to your opinion, and entitled to express it. But you do come off as having a bit of an arrogant attitude. If you're okay with that, then hey, great.)

I thought it was wait 40 in Exile and wait 100 in Exile 2 and beyond? It's 80?

Although I disagree with some of the specific things Dantdring said, he makes an important point: things that are far away from each other are intricately connected, and it isn't as simple as saying "no one's invading Kansas, so Kansas's freedoms aren't at risk." That said, it is true that we are pretty well insulated from foreign military action in the U.S. Standing armies and standing military power is necessary to insulate a country from aggression, but it isn't sufficient. The other ingredient you need is decency and respect for others. Armies and technology will protected you from other armies, but they can't protect effectively and consistently against serious terrorism -- nor against nuclear warfare. Originally Posted By: Aizoan National Front The other interesting change is that wars used to be, if not good, then necessary. Revolutions are the beginnings of national narratives. Sometimes, but just as often they are the end of national narratives. I like how Tom Stoppard put it: "Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering." Originally Posted By: Aizoan National Front ...since then we've been fighting others' battles. To some extent, that's an international duty, but our political leadership hasn't managed its military strength well. For the most part, "international duty" has been a pretty face painted on the cold (and not necessarily ugly, just not warm and fuzzy) reality of strategic and economic maneuvering. If we were at all serious about this so-called duty, we would be intervening in places like Burma -- or intervening more even-handedly in Israel -- rather than fabricating evidence to justify two Iraq Wars. (I'm not saying the wars had no justication, just that some evidence was fabricated, which it was.)

Military service is rarer and rarer in the U.S. The draft was abolished 37 years ago, and conflicts have involved small numbers of servicepeople compared to the total population. Consider some numbers on U.S. military personnel in wars (official and unofficial) from the web: Iraq: about 400,000 (-2010) Afghanistan: about 130,000 (-2010) Gulf: about 500,000 to 600,000 (-1991) Vietnam: several million, but about 60,000 dead/MIA (-1975) Korean: several million, but about 40,000 dead/MIA (-1953) WW2: about 13-16 million, but about 400,000 deaths (-1945) WW1: about 4 million, but about 100,000 deaths (-1918) There's 1 surviving U.S. veteran from WW1, and about 2 million from WW2. There are less than 1 million from Vietnam and fewer from the Korean War. Assuming most veterans from more recent military conflicts are still alive, that means there's on the order of 5 million U.S. veterans. The VA says there are almost 25 million, but that number includes noncombat personnel who never left the country, and so on. The current U.S. population is about 307 million, so that means veterans make up somewhere between 1 and 8 percent of the population. But when you start to think about demographic realities, mainly age, it's not surprising that many people our age, and many people here, don't have any veteran connections.

I didn't say you weren't talking about linear plots, although maybe I could have been clearer. The point is that you could have a linear plot coupled with linear exploration, or a freeform plot coupled with relatively linear exploration, or a linear plot with freeform exploration, or freeform plot with freeform exploration. They are not tied together at the heel, and it is typically linearity of exploration that is discussed as far as Jeff's games go -- because that has varied widely, whereas the plot has consistently been linear with branches. Also, Quote: Say you're exploring an open world in an order of your choosing, without plot guidance there would be no indication for you to not go where you'd certainly die. You need linear plots for balancing games. I believe the first Exile/Avernum game is a pretty good rebuttal of this point. Exploration is as free as in any RPG, but that does not make it unbalanced.

To be clear, linearity is totally distinct from plot. SoT was suggesting a correlation -- but we are definitely not talking about linear plots. The issue is basically whether you have significant freedom to explore the game world in the order of your choosing, if you are channeled from region to region, or if you are really escorted directly from one location to the next.

I don't think that's the case. If it were, surely people would have complained more about the linearity of A4 (whose plot was widely panned) than that of A5 (whose plot received mixed reactions). A4 is nearly as linear as A5 -- I think there may be one or two fewer choke points, but both have "straight line" moments. But I believe there were far more complaints about linearity in A5.

Enemy mages didn't have access to the exact same set of spells as PCs. They had a different list, and some of the spells on both lists had slightly different mechanics depending on who cast it. The lists are not all that different but there were a few unique enemy spells and a handful of unique PC ones. Sleep Cloud may have been one of those -- I can only ever remember enemies with the Sleep Cloud special ability, not spell, using it.

Less strategically deep, no. Less varied and interesting in terms of combat options, yes.

Obligatory assertion that I can't stand the Avernum / Geneforge dialogue system, and I really loved the Exile one, which felt way more natural and less forced to me.

Edward Schieffelin isn't a psycholinguist, he's an anthropologist. (And as far as I can tell, his research has no connection whatsoever to psycholinguistics.)

There were no gates in the original trilogy under discussion, were there?

Walls and gates? What are you talking about? The Mertis cavern connects directly and gatelessly with caverns containing slith cultists, nephil bandits, and undead -- and that's not even taking the Honeycomb into account. On the other hand, the connection to Silvar is a bridge with a gate, and it's close enough to flee to, presumably. Incidentally, the canonical definition of who was exiled, stated over and over, is just "misfits."

And those were good changes -- because they made things more challenging and less exploitable for optimizing players without making things any harder for more typical players.

Well, there are different implications. "Like" implies similarity whereas "as though" implies conditionality -- even though like is used as a conditional marker, the association is there.

It's worth pointing out that there is more than one set of rules used when people speak or write the English language. "Gonna" is a proper word for most native speakers to use in speech, but the same people will usually cringe if they see it in writing, rather than "going to." "Just desserts" is an example of idiom change over time. It isn't really about grammar, it's just about one piece of the lexicon. The problem is that the phrase "just desserts" in the sense of after-dinner pastries makes nearly as much sense as "just deserts" in the sense of what one is served with -- in fact, "desert" in that sense has the same root as "dessert" does. So I think this is an example of lexical drift, but given the domination of common usage of "desserts" I see no reason to call that wrong.

Yeah, the trilogy is FULL of farms near (and sometimes even not so near) cities and forts. Draco, Formello, Duvno, Silvar, Cotra, Mertis (obviously), Almaria, and the Castle were all SURROUNDED by farmland.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Which is probably not as simple as it seems, at least from the programmers' perspective. I've looked at the code (well, the original BoE code) and I don't think it would be very hard at all. All you need is: a simple subtraction routine to check how far an enemy is from a PC, and control flow statements checking that routine, plus a single boolean for the new preference item, stuck in front of any code block involved in displaying an NPC's action. I know it's spaghetti code so that might mean making a function out of the control flow statements and then calling it in many places, but that's fine -- processing power is not an issue for this kind of thing. Yes, and you'd have to modify the preferences dialog, but that's not hard either.