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G3 was deliberately an "every option sucks" game, and opinion about it tends to be polarized as a result. Some people enjoyed that, others hated it.

Why the heck would Jeff reveal a "secret" (more of a deliberate mystery, I'd say) about Geneforge 5... in an announcement about Geneforge 1? Unless the G5 protagonistis actually someone who was on Sucia during G1, that makes no sense whatsoever. It doesn't even make sense then -- and it would take some real plot twists for it to be such a person.

Hi, @lucabar, please pick 1 topic to post in about a particular problem. If you post in multiple places, everyone else ends up reading the same thing twice, which is annoying. Thanks! --your friendly neighborhood mod

Scrying (and teleportation, and any form of magic involving long distances) is also shown to be extremely difficult in A1-3, far moreso than in mainstream fantasy of the last two decades. How would he get a message to the Castle (or wherever) magically? If there are magical communication devices set up, or spells available, we sure never see them. And given the number of tell-this-person quests, those mages must enjoy laughing at adventurers. No, the closest thing we see to this is astral travel. Admittedly, Patrick is one of the two people we know can do this (the other, conveniently, being the other "mage-sage") but none of what little is said about it suggests it is expeditious. I'm not really sure about the logic and extrapolation part. This is pure invention, and it relies on a large number of technically possible but very unlikely conditions. Not to rehash our previous argument, but this isn't simply one interpretation of many, this is a construction which is incredibly, incredibly unlikely based on the evidence we have.

Yeah, I think "plot hole" describes a lot of this. Really nothing about Seletine and the wands makes any sense -- cue old griping about how the Tower would rather have the wands be lost or destroyed, rather than have their couriers use a few charges in order to ensure their delivery. Fortunately, however, we can be more specific about how far north of Fort Goodling Fort Cavalier is: about 250 miles. (This is in the text somewhere; I'm reading off the Blazing Blade, which is somehow still up, and which I trust to have quoted accurately.) Although the relationship between "miles" and squares on the overworld map is a little bit elastic (which I think is fine; it's a 2d grid, it can't possibly correspond 1:1 to the topography of a 3d cave system), we can look at relative distances. There's a sign between Silvar and Mertis that says the Castle is 230 miles west and 40 miles south of that point. That's roughly 4 or so outdoor sections. ZKR has far more than 4 sections, but that just tells us the scale is a little different. It's probably reasonable to assume that the full length of the ZKR, accounting for whatever twisty tunnels may connect it with Exile proper, spans roughly 3-5 outdoor sections. This squares with the distance estimates above, too, if we assume NW of Dharmon and S or SW (or even a bit SE) of Fort Remote. While I agree that Dharmon's relevance to all of this is weird, if that's Fort Cavalier's location, it might well be the most obvious target for the Sliths to attack if they breached Cavalier. Dharmon would make a better outpost than Blosk, as its terrain is far more defendable; it has a water source (important for the Sliths); and controlling Dharmon means cutting off Avernum's primary source of iron and steel. That would have meaningful long-term strategic impact. It would also allow the Sliths to press Avernum on three fronts -- Dharmon, Emerald, and Dranlon/Draco -- the latter also becoming more crucial with Dharmon's steel out of the picture. (The other nearby options -- Patrick's tower, Fort Remote, and Fort Saffron -- seem like they'd be far more trouble than they'd be worth to the Sliths.) Not attacking Almaria is a little weird, but maybe there is some of that as well -- Sliths clearly attacked it prior to X1. It just doesn't seem like a valuable position for the Sliths to hold, particularly as it would be very easy for Avernum to strike at from the Castle. As a side note, I'm not really sure what Patrick could do. Although it's true that he led the original assault on Grah-Hoth (along with Erika and Rone), that was approximately 60-70 years before ZKR, and in the interim he very clearly ends up more of a "mage-sage," as Erika puts it, than anything else.

That settles it, I think -- if you're maneuvering your way through neutral territory, it almost has to connect to some area north of the Great Cave, and not to the Great Cave itself. It's worth pointing out that there are really two points to locate here: Fort Goodling as well as Fort Cavalier. Fort Goodling is presumably more easily accessed, at least from the Tower of Magi, since one of the Triad goes there personally to deliver the wands, but doesn't just bring them to Fort Cavalier. (It does also seem much less distressed than Fort Cavalier, so it seems unlikely it's harder to reinforce.) It's also explicitly far to the south of Fort Cavalier. If Fort Cavalier were west of the Great Cave, this would place Fort Goodling very far from Avernum proper. But if the whole run is a bit lower than Avernum proper -- this makes sense given all the denizens and I think might even be specified somewhere -- it's easy to place. Fort Goodling could be reached, potentially, via one of those smaller waterways at the south end of the Great Cave (or through some other excavated passage we never see: who knows). And Fort Cavalier connects to the north of the Great Cave, possibly not that far north, but with a fair bit of that "neutral territory" being below the maps we're used to. It's worth pointing out that Fort Cavalier isn't actually directly on water in the scenario, and neither is the passage you take to get away from it. There's a river kind of nearby, but not close enough that we'd need one where the passageway comes out.

I don't think the other games were designed to be more modifiable -- I suspect that was just Jeff gradually making things more modular as he put more and more games out using similar data structures. Aha, I think what I've forgotten is just that Geneforge doesn't have those tooltips. They became so ubitquitous in later games, I completely missed that!

I agree that the western river makes a heck of a lot more sense. The "last defense" comment could simply mean that it was the last place the Sliths could reasonably be blocked prior to reaching and reinforcing the old Slith waters just north of the Castle -- whose Slith population, and combat capacity, must have dwindled greatly in the aftermath of not just Sss-Thsss's defeat, but also the occupation by the Empire, but whose hostility to humans could hardly have been diminished by those events. The text might say "nearest city" (does it, or does it just say "nearest settlement"? I noticed you only put quotes around "nearest"), but even so. If Patrick's Tower was closer to it, the sentence might technically be true, but it would also be a very strange thing to say. I think that's enough to rule that out. Furthermore, if Patrick's Tower really was on the edge of seriously hostile enemy territory, we would expect some reflection of that fact in A4 or A6. Particularly A6, given what happens with the Sliths there.

Huh, I stand corrected! Avadon, the Avernum Remakes and on definitely do make it possible to edit those in the scripts, but I guess Geneforge doesn't. Doesn't changing the name of the ability also affect the tooltip for the spell (and for any items that use that ability)? That's really what I'm remembering (not the spell selection dialogue box) so if I'm wrong about that then I really gotta question my recollection.

Class names would be a herculean effort to change, even with raw data editing. Spell names (and item descriptions, IIRC -- but this has changed in different SW games) can easily be edited in the defs files. For spells in particular, note that the spell name and the corresponding spell-knowledge name (i.e., you have 2 levels in Firebolt, and you cast Firebolt in battle) are in 2 different places. Definitely agree with you about consumables. Torment players are more likely to be serious optimizers and that definitely correlates with avoiding the use of consumables on anything that's not the hardest battle in the game. It seems to me that consumables are typically used a lot more by casual players, who are less dedicated to optimizing. But consumables are useful to those players precisely because they have a completely different curve of useful vs. useless than more balanced game elements. So I think the question is, who's the target audience for your mod? You can always leave some consumables in the game, and turn others into stuff you like more.

Mods in the form of patches are not illegal, but they also aren't categorically legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_patch#Law e.g. Square Enix famously managed to shut down an ambitious fan mod of Chrono Trigger about a decade ago. Spiderweb might be perfectly happy with these projects (and I can't imagine them turning to lawyers over them), but I would definitely recommend seeking their blessing, if nothing else, before posting them here.

Be forewarned -- some versions of the games have checksums implemented, so you may or may not be able to run the executable after making that modification. Also, for a few reasons, distributing a modified version of the Geneforge executable itself would be very different from distributing modified text or image files that people can drop into the scripts folder as they prefer (or a completely independent program like TheKian created). I'm not sure how much that would or wouldn't impede sharing your mod publicly, but it's somewhere between "extra hurdle" and "brick wall", inclusive.

That's a fairly safe bet, yeah.

This may simply be an issue of receiving lower-level spells for free when you create characters, if they have enough skill to use them, versus needing to purchase (or find) those spells if you train characters after creating them.

I think both ways are quite common, both for resistances and for armor. First off, almost any game that doesn't have a dedicated resistance stat is going to handle it multiplicatively -- resistance is simply going to be implemented as an individual check for each thing that could provide it. There are also games that don't handle resistance percentages directly at all. Diablo II had sort of a hybrid system, where resistance "points" were added together, and then converted to a single percentage with diminishing returns. In practice, this ends up working a lot like Spiderweb's. And of course, there are games where resistance simply doesn't stack at all, such as D&D these days, and most games based on its systems. This is common, too. Actually, in the oldest games -- the Exiles -- resistance percentage effects were so rare that they weren't displayed, but if you managed to get multiple sets equipped (from rings typically), the impact was indeed multiplicative. Nethergate and A1-3 did things differently. However, the shift back to multiplicative calculation actually happened prior to A4 -- but the display wasn't updated until A4. In particular, G1-3 showed additive numbers on the character sheet but operated via multiplication when applied.

No. You are not understanding me even remotely correctly. Please point to where I said anything remotely resembling that. I used narrowing qualifiers, and you chose to replace them with the word "all." Ess... seriously... I love you, but you're in wacko-land here. What I said is: "Reductions from a single instance of an effect are added together and applied as one. Thus if a passive skill grants +4% resistance per level, and you have 5 levels in it, you do not multiply by 0.96 five times -- you multiply by 0.8 once." If you have 5 levels in a skill that gives 4%/level fire resistance, and are wearing a shield that gives 10% fire resistance, your final damage taken will be 80% * 90% = 72%. Not 96% * 96% * 96% * 96% * 96% * 90% = 73.4% You are attempting to extrapolate a contradictory conclusion by starting with the already-rounded game output, which includes already-stacked reduction from a particular skill, then looking at what the new rounded output is after investing an additional point in that skill. Given the small percentages being dealt with, the rounding kind of removes the possibility of concluding anything at all from that. OK, you used "probabilities" plural to refer to one probability plus an additional factor which has no probability attached to it at all. The issue isn't that you were being unclear, you just literally said something different from what you meant. Um, this is done all the time in games? You make one roll. Then you make another roll. Voila, the two probabilities have effectively been combined by multiplication.

Don't want to beat this to death, but Ess, the mathematics isn't the same. Running two percentile factors in sequence results in a single outcome. Running two probabilities in sequence results in multiple outcomes. Depending on what the probabilities are measuring, there may be a mean outcome that is equivalent to multiplying two percentile factors together -- or there may not be. I think you're also not quite right about greater than 100% damage reduction. PC damage reduction is capped at 90%, but Spiderweb games, like many RPGs, store this internally a percentile modifier to damage taken, and use a negative number (the equivalent of over 100%, as you're discussing it) when an entity is healed rather than damaged by a particular type of attack. Additionally, reading through your longer explanation more fully, you're flatly incorrect about how the game handles these reductions. Reductions from a single instance of an effect are added together and applied as one. Thus if a passive skill grants +4% resistance per level, and you have 5 levels in it, you do not multiply by 0.96 five times -- you multiply by 0.8 once.

Those aren't actually probabilities, those are reduction percentages.

I suppose this is like how a Ring of Skill, back in Exile, improved your accuracy in combat, and not anything else.

Ah, gotcha. I guess I'm a little confused as to what you are classifying as skill-based versus not skill-based. You include both "twitch" (real-time action?) games and turn-based games in skill-based... but exclude games from that category if they involve statistics and probability? I don't understand why having stats or including random elements excludes a game from being skill-based. Lots of games without those things involve minimal skill, and lots of games with those things can be remarkably complex.

Now I'm really confused. What do you mean by "twitch"? Waving Hands is 100% turn-based...

Well, it was originally partly reproducible -- there was a strong correlation between using "backtostart" and having that happen in A4. I think Jeff fixed that particular bug sometime, though, and the empty thing persisted, albeit less commonly. The early Geneforge engine had very little in common with the Nethergate/First Trilogy engine, and the similarity that exists between later Geneforge and the Second Trilogy appears to mostly be G3's engine being used as starting material for A4's.

If I'm hearing you right, having a rich enough set of possible actions would also accomplish this -- in particular, this presumably means not just having a generic attack command, but having a variety of situationally relevant attack commands, that interact not just with enemy stats but with enemy actions, affecting how well different options will work (and vice versa, with enemy actions affecting your own). This immediately makes me think of Richard Bartle's abstract, simultaneous-submission game, Waving Hands -- it's not an RPG at all, but has this same sort of dynamic that we see in complex martial arts. Here's an example of play from one incarnation, and a thing I wrote about its dynamics long ago.

Which is more problematic now that they sell them as "a service" rather than a product -- so the user no longer even has the control to keep using a specific version of the software, if they want to.

Actually, the empty containers bug does not affect the original Avernum 1-3. The first game that appeared in, I believe, was A4. So Lucidus probably doesn't need to worry about that.