ex post slarto

I keep waiting to see some character (say... Hawkwind) who punishes you for looting his stuff.

That brings up an interesting question. Do any friendly characters have significant item drops? Now I'm gonna have to go murder everyone I can find in the name of science...

I suspect that the job board would seem a lot more welcome if you played A4 without it. A4 seems to have FAR more short quests per area than any previous Ex/Av game, and managing them all might become tedious without the board and the job log.

 

...On the other hand, I wish there were fewer quests, but that they were more complex, particularly the main missions. The quests are mostly formulaic, and dungeons seem watered down compared to previous ones. Where are my Kothtars and my Pyrog Labs, my Abandoned River Forts and Tombs of Dahris-Bok, full of surprises and exciting twists? Even the goblin and nephil maps used to be less repetitive, I feel like.

 

Come to think of it, G3 had the same plot problems, with a very Lufia-esque, undeviating and repetitive sequence of events...

 

-- Slartucker, who still really likes the game, despite all his negativity

PS only claims to give a chance at preventing such freezing. I'd guess it's based on cold resistance.

PS only claims to give a chance at preventing such freezing. I'd guess it's based on cold resistance.

*stifled giggling*

Hmm... he doesn't drop anything?

Hmm... he doesn't drop anything?

AAaaaahAHhhh!

 

Shikeys but this guy is tough. Wow. Even on Easy, he seems a bit much for my singleton to handle. The demon is pretty much irrelevant. I suppose I could just shell out the cash for Heal, and cast that and shoot my bow every turn, and use some very large number of energy potions... but jeez. There's gotta be a better way.

 

Synergy, any thoughts?

 

I think I'm just gonna have to wait for a second +AP item, and come back once I've gotten that significant power boost.

AAaaaahAHhhh!

 

Shikeys but this guy is tough. Wow. Even on Easy, he seems a bit much for my singleton to handle. The demon is pretty much irrelevant. I suppose I could just shell out the cash for Heal, and cast that and shoot my bow every turn, and use some very large number of energy potions... but jeez. There's gotta be a better way.

 

Synergy, any thoughts?

 

I think I'm just gonna have to wait for a second +AP item, and come back once I've gotten that significant power boost.

Clearly, Alorael is a he. But Aloreal is a he/she/it. Alorael, did you know you have an evil twin?

Arcane Shield is, however, the only spell that will give you mental shielding.

Arcane Shield is, however, the only spell that will give you mental shielding.

Enduring Priest Update: I've now completed most of the Eastern Gallery. Well, not the chitrach tunnels. Ugh. I think I'll take those out with Bolt of Fire. Even if I have to go back to town once to restore MP, that's better than sitting through each bug swinging and missing five times in a row.

 

I'm at level 20, and the game has become *laughably* easy, a lot like singleton play in Exile, except slower. It's still fun though, or at least it is in the areas that have more than 1 or 2 types of enemies repeated ad naseum.

 

I have been switching around the difficulty a bit, to see how challenging the higher levels are... they aren't challenging at ALL. Counting item bonuses I have 10 Dex, 10 Luck, 3 Gymnastics, and 6 Defense. Enduring Shield gives me an extra bonus of 40% or so, and rising as I start buying Spellcraft and Magery. On the higher difficulties things will hit sometimes, but still infrequently enough that all my MP (I bought up to 6 Intelligence, for Magery of course) makes them easy enough to take care of.

 

The game does become more tedious on the higher difficulties, though.

 

I haven't missed Tool Use at all. After getting Augmentation, I haven't met a trap that can stump me. (Except that *blasted* town alarm trap in Grindstone, that really pissed me off.) Unlock Doors is fine for doors.

 

I will probably buy some Arcane Lore (4 points of it, to get to 6, or 12 with equipment) but not till I find a good spellbook. Kelner's Dispel Barrier spell only requires 5 arcane lore, by the way, Synergy... not a stretch at all.

 

If I really wanted to buy Nature Lore (or more Arcane lore, or Tool Use) it wouldn't be a problem. Not on Easy or Normal, anyway. Having 20 fewer skill points would not make a big deal to me right now, and passing up the next 20 would really not be a problem.

Enduring Priest Update: I've now completed most of the Eastern Gallery. Well, not the chitrach tunnels. Ugh. I think I'll take those out with Bolt of Fire. Even if I have to go back to town once to restore MP, that's better than sitting through each bug swinging and missing five times in a row.

 

I'm at level 20, and the game has become *laughably* easy, a lot like singleton play in Exile, except slower. It's still fun though, or at least it is in the areas that have more than 1 or 2 types of enemies repeated ad naseum.

 

I have been switching around the difficulty a bit, to see how challenging the higher levels are... they aren't challenging at ALL. Counting item bonuses I have 10 Dex, 10 Luck, 3 Gymnastics, and 6 Defense. Enduring Shield gives me an extra bonus of 40% or so, and rising as I start buying Spellcraft and Magery. On the higher difficulties things will hit sometimes, but still infrequently enough that all my MP (I bought up to 6 Intelligence, for Magery of course) makes them easy enough to take care of.

 

The game does become more tedious on the higher difficulties, though.

 

I haven't missed Tool Use at all. After getting Augmentation, I haven't met a trap that can stump me. (Except that *blasted* town alarm trap in Grindstone, that really pissed me off.) Unlock Doors is fine for doors.

 

I will probably buy some Arcane Lore (4 points of it, to get to 6, or 12 with equipment) but not till I find a good spellbook. Kelner's Dispel Barrier spell only requires 5 arcane lore, by the way, Synergy... not a stretch at all.

 

If I really wanted to buy Nature Lore (or more Arcane lore, or Tool Use) it wouldn't be a problem. Not on Easy or Normal, anyway. Having 20 fewer skill points would not make a big deal to me right now, and passing up the next 20 would really not be a problem.

Digression is a natural part of conversation, especially in group conversations. It's something that many people appreciate and there's no reason why you wouldn't expect to find it on a message board.

Friend of mine from Chicago, he's a grad student there now. *shrug* Worth a shot.

 

There have been several attempts made to phoneticize English spelling in this country. They all died out pretty quickly, though we can still see the results of one in the White Sox and Red Sox baseball team names. (YEAH sox!)

 

Personally, I think it would be fun to force all languages to transliterate into IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), but then, I'm crazy.

 

-- [slar'tUkr]

I almost brought up Fahrenheit 451 in my own post. God, what an overly relevant book.

 

I have mixed feelings about that thesis, SoT. I don't know that language constrains thought, per se, but it certainly affects and interacts with it.

 

Kel: Classics, eh? Good man. Say, you don't know David Crane, do you?

*nods*

 

I'm not sure the situation with more specialized words (I'm going to use that rather than "precise" which seems imprecise to me) is as bleak as you suggest. At least not compared to the way it was "previously." The language relics we have from, say, the 1800s, are the things that people wrote down. Who wrote these things down? Writers, poets, newspaper reporters, editors, academics... in short, the most literate segments of the population.

 

The most literate segments of the population today know that "awesome" can have something to do with "awe." They have a rich and a dynamic vocabulary. As a recent refugee from the scholarly life I can assure you that sesquipedalianism is alive and well. But do you really think the vernacular, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, whenever, was any LESS full of slang, or of vague words? Do you really think the vernacular had any more access to specialized vocabulary?

 

I wish people read more, too. But if you take a little historical or geographical perspective, people in our society STILL read WAY more than they did 200 years ago... maybe even 100. And they read way more than people in many parts of the world do. I'm not supporting TV and video games over books, believe me, but I don't think you can blame the vagueness of our vernacular on them.

How exactly do you ride a pylon in a wholesome way?

 

As for riding animals, worgs would seem a better choice. And there are clearly some domesticated worgs around.

Grats on finishing. *cheers*

Grats on finishing. *cheers*

But when you say "originally correct" you are defining "originally" rather arbitrarily. I am guessing "originally" can't mean, say, Middle English, and I don't think you'd hold up 17th century English as a proper model for us either. At what point in time did English magically reach its "originally correct form"?

Aha, I see you have answered my question already.

Don't believe everything your teachers tell you. It's a romantic notion, and I daresay a wonderful one, to hold up a language at one particular moment and say "This is good. This I love. I want to use this as a standard." I think that's great. But it's still totally arbitrary, and if you expect all men to do the same thing, you're deluding yourself. And if you are going to nitpick language you certainly can't say "originally" to refer to such standards!

Yes, English is being "dumbed down." It is also being built up. All languages are constantly being dumbed down and built up as words cycle in and out of the lexicon and as their meanings change in subtle ways.

English still has a truly enormous vocabulary. I think awe-inspiring works for "truly awesome" although awesome itself still works, given proper context. As for something "so laden with fantasy elements as to make it unbelievable," what about chimerical? Phantasmagorical? There are other words with related meanings to both of those -- numinous, say.

Defining words is difficult, particularly words that don't refer to concrete objects. You can often triangulate on a meaning by asking yourself "would I describe this as __? what about that?" for many things... at first this is easy, but when you get to a very precise level of definition, you may start to be iffy about some answers; and you will eventually start to get different answers from different people, even from native speakers from the same area. And these fuzzy meanings will change over time in very subtle ways, even for a single speaker. For a language which is spoken by millions of people around the world, you can imagine all the changes it goes through. Many of these balance each other out, like myriad ripples on the world's oceans. But beneath the seas, there is always some tectonic activity, and eventually we see continental drift.

What makes you say that? I'm interested, but looking back on the various texts I've read from Chaucer's day to ours, I can't say I've ever gotten that impression. Certainly Shakespeare is rich language, but that has as much to do with the author as the language, and I daresay he succeeds more at creating poetic multiplicity of meaning rather than at being "precise."

Sigh.

I spent the past two years studying linguistics, and this kind of prescriptivist attitude really irks me. Language is a dynamic entity, constantly changing, and you can only pin it down in a certain form so long as you freeze time at a certain moment. The correct form IS the form that is typically used.

The fact is that language is essentially arbitrary, and it isn't any better or any more "correct" to use one word or another, or one syntactic structure or another, to communicate something. The only time you could really make such an argument would be in a certain word or structure is confusing or hard to use to communicate -- but in such a case, its use would never become widespread anyway.

As for "It is I" versus "It's me" -- English is what syntacticians call an analytic language. Speakers of English rely heavily on word position to figure out how a word is being used. "I" and "me" and the rest of our personal pronouns are left over from the influence of other languages where inflection is used rather than word order. While "I" and "me" carry different syntactic information and are not exactly the same words, in the context of "It's __" they are pretty much identical in meaning. Therefore, it's not surprising that they have become somewhat interchangeable in that context.

Syntactically, the role taken on by the pronoun in "it's __" is not exactly the same as the roles taken by subjective (I) or objective (me) pronouns. You can see this looking at other languages. In French, for example, you do not see "C'est je" (It's I) or "C'est me" (It's me) but "C'est moi" where "moi" is the disjunctive pronoun, a modified form of "me" (me).

And I don't agree about this at all. When you say "which is better?" you're basically saying "which is better (than the others)?" And when you say 'which is best?" you're basically saying "which is (the) best (one)?" Both make sense, and there's absolutely no reason you can't use a superlative with a set of two. It communicates just as clearly as the comparative and it doesn't hurt the use of the superlative in any other situation. They are different logical structures, but there is no good reason (or, AFIAK, any historical justification) to restrict the use of one in a situation where they both fit.

You don't have to open the prefs window. It's happened to me at least twice on fresh starts of the application, going straight to loading the quicksave. Playing under Easy gives you a substantial bonus to your dodge score (actually, I think the enemy levels may just all be reduced, so they all have lower to-hit scores), and as a singleton with high dodge, it's extremely noticeable when this bonus goes away.

 

As I said, though, I can't recreate it, so I don't know what caused it.