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Hahaha. I almost wrote that exact sentence. I also almost posted a description of the maneuver I typically pull every morning when I roll up to the stoplight where Soldier Field Road eastbound and westbound cross, but I thought better of it.

Spun-off from the other driving poll. It will be interesting to see if we get similar results or not.

That would make a good poll question. Is driving exactly the speed limit driving slow, or driving appropriately? My answer would depend on my location. In parking lots and near crowds of children it's the latter, but anywhere else it's the former. I guess as I see it, driving aggressively is more likely to lead to an accident directly, if you do something stupid or fail to react appropriately to an unexpected condition. On the other hand, driving slowly is more likely to lead to an accident indirectly. It irritates other people, which makes them worse drivers. It keeps your car AND the cars behind you on the road longer, increasing the average number of cars on the road (by a picayune amount for one slow motorist, obviously, but combine the impact of them all and you have a real impact). This increases the chance for an accident simply by expanding the pool of drivers, but it also increases it by increasing congestion, which creates better conditions for accidents as well as irritating drivers, which (again) makes them worse drivers. Additionally, I don't trust other drivers. On highways and other long arteries that are not packed, I prefer to trail packs rather than lead them -- I can pay attention and leave suitable space and avoid crashing into the car ahead of me, but I can't stop the car behind me from crashing into me. As a result I tend to drive very fast when there's open space ahead of me and slow down when there are vehicles ahead. In packed arteries, I will change lanes repeatedly to get out from behind slow drivers. Removing myself from that congested spot makes it less congested for everyone else, too.

SimAnt was great! SimCity and SimCity 2000 are classics, of course.

Dantius is in fact making the same point I was. I wasn't saying chess has poor market share, I was saying its market share is vastly decreased from ages past when the options for serious strategy games were much, much more limited. And we all know the light blue monopoly is the best one. There's actual a statistics paper proving that somewhere on the internet. Monopoly asks if your person has a big nose. Discuss.

Polling on the old UBB was better for a multitude of reasons. The one that frustrates me most is that users now respond to questions one by one rather than all at once. This is a problem (1) for the user, because it involves almost twice as many clicks and a huge amount of wasted time spent waiting for the page to reload and rescroll (2) for the analyst, because you don't get as much out of comparing data for two questions where the respondants overlap but do not match up entirely.

Aaaaaaand new topic title. Don't go there again, please.

I don't think IF is tapped out, but I think works like those are few and far between regardless of medium. I think the things you and I love about them are in abstract not specific to IF, though the way it unfolds in each individual case is medium-specific. It takes a certain kind of artist to create something like that. Andrew Plotkin certainly has created a number of games that have or approach having that kind of elegance. Cliff Johnson, 3 in Three, The Fool's Errand. I can throw out other names too. These games are bound by author and not by medium. The thing is that creative people, like anybody else, are more likely to work with media that are more popular.

I think this is actually quite a straightforward peace prize. If you consider some of the former recipients (hellooooo, Yassar Arafat) total nonviolence obviously isn't a requirement. (Not knocking Arafat btw, just making a comparison.) Shifting the PERCEIVED attitude of the most powerful country in the world more towards peace and further from unilateralism has clearly had world impact. I think there are some concrete actions too, if you really look for them -- clearly not nearly on the level that is typically seen, but the committee acknowledges that. For example, Obama's Cairo speech, or the decision not to intervene in Iran (unsatisfying though that may be). Also, as a lot of news articles point out, Obama's international reputation far exceeds his domestic one, just as George W. Bush was vilified far more consistently in Europe than he was here.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity But actually the all-text interactive fiction community has been thinning out for years now, too. Text hasn't gotten any flashier, so why are these guys dying out now, too? Because everything dies. Seriously. Tell me what game communities haven't thinned out over time? And if you're going to bring up something ancient like chess, let me point out that its market share (so to speak) has clearly declined.

It isn't intended to be a categorical dichotomy. It is intended to be a forced choice.

New pet peeve. Fantasy and science fiction worlds that think you can make a name sound exotic by writing it with an apostrophe instead of a weak vowel, even though that kind of transliteration makes no sense.

Spun-off from the other topic, because I'm curious what people think. There are good arguments to be made that both aggressive driving, and slow driving, can increase the odds of an accident occuring. Certainly, both can be annoying. Which one do you prefer to be around?

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan Battle creations were on par with Magic/Fire creations in G1-2. Its only in G3 that they began falling behind. It's true that Battle creations lost most of their zing after G2, when melee damage as a whole was scaled back from d8 to d4. However, they weren't actually on par with the other creations even in G1 and G2. For one thing, magic and fire attacks did more damage in G1 and G2 as well. IIRC, ice breath did 1-8 in G1 just like melee -- but while G1 had creation armor it didn't have much in the way of creation resistances. Plus, ranged attacks were even more advantageous under the old AP system. Oh, and ice breath had a 70% chance (IIRC) to stun! Cryoas and cryodrayks truly put battle creations to shame. Artila did as well, and Vlish even then made incredible support minions. (All damage was scaled back after G1 and again after G2 -- practically the only attack that didn't have its die shrunk was the Vlish's, which is the main reason they were so overpowered in G3.)

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity The basic pay-off for a computer game is not just game or just graphics, but a game whose look-and-feel suits it so well that the whole is more than a simple sum of the elements — like a movie, which needs to have plot and cinematography working together or there's no point in making it. And that means that Crysis-for-dummies kits with prefab graphics packs aren't really going to offer more than ho-hum clones of established games. Anyone with a really new, creative idea for a computer game is also going to need to custom-make a lot of technical stuff, and that lays the amateur designer in the grave for good. RIP. I dunno, SoT. I don't think the point of spin-your-own-scenario/make-your-own-mod games is to customize everything and create exquisite masterworks that new players will look on and go "ooooooh!" The point is to give people a chance to create. The joy is more in the creation than the auditing, honestly. This is particularly true for kids. Even though they are unlikely to complete anything even remotely polished, the very idea that they, yes, THEY can turn their own ideas into an explorable world is mind-blowing. (Why do you think the SW boards were initially so full of 10-15 year olds, a group that is more of a minority these days?) I would also assert that "ho-hum clones of established games" do very well in the RPG industry. To the degree in which CRPG players overlap with gamers-at-large, which is a lot greater now than it was 20 years ago, there is demand for state-of-the-art graphics. And typical game mechanics have certainly evolved over time. But most individual games break very, very, very few conventions. Most individual games have generic plots and similar expectations of what the player needs to do, and repeat the exact same mechanics that players are used to. And let's not even talk about the Japanese CRPG scene, where Dragon Quest clones have been the name of the game for 23 years, yet scenario-creation packages have been more popular (and FAR more commercially successful) than they were here.

I disagree with all of these statements. Vlish were HEAVILY nerfed in G4, but Wingbolts are a little overpowered in that game. In the Mac version though, Drayks were nearly as good a value. Wingbolts were not as overpowered as Vlish were in G3, but in neither game are Magic Creations as a whole overpowered or nerfed. Magic Creations were probably the best option in G2, but they only beat Fire Creations by a little bit. In G1 the Artila and Vlish were superb values, but Drayks and Cryodrayks had advantages as well and there was no comparable Magic Creation. Overall, Magic Shaping was strongest in G3, followed by G4, G2, G1, and G5, in that order. However, in NO game have they been the least advantageous of the three shaping trees -- that honor has belonged to Battle Shaping in the first four games and to Fire Shaping in the last.

Where does it say Ghaldring is "very elderly" or anything remotely similar?

Litalia followed a similar ideological path to the one Khyryk followed, except that her extrema were much more extreme.

Where are you getting a century from, even? G2 is 5-10 years after G1, probably closer to 10, and we know that G5 is no more than a few years after G4. Looking at what Alwan and Greta and Litalia say, there are clearly a few years between G3 and G4 -- but not too many. Maybe 5-10, again. So far we have a range of about 12-25 years, not counting the time between G2 and G3. That is potentially the longest gap, but I can't imagine it's more than 20 or 30 years, and it could certainly be less.

Changing your mind in response to new information or experiences is not the same thing as hypocrisy, not at all.

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

Neossokrass is not eligible for a unique element. He knows why.

12d7? I thought melee attacks were all 1-8 in G1. Am I remembering wrong?

That's a good suggestion. I would actually suggest emailing that to Jeff -- he might appreciate it.

No. Melee skill is only one of several factors in play. My guess is you were using different weapons, or had different Strength stats, or faced enemies with different armor values. Do a test with two PCs with identical Str and Melee stats and the same weapon, and fight enemies with no (or identical) armor. Damage should be the same.