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Student of Trinity

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  1. If you're an Agent or a solo Guardian, you can collect enough energy and hostile effect resistance boosters to keep the Crystal Mine damage down to just a few points every now and then. Grounded items, spectral items, the Static Band, and the Draykskin Tunic that Wyx bequeathes are all good. This is an obvious point, really, but I mention it because it took me a while to realize that even though any one protective item has little effect, enough of them together do make a dramatic difference. You'll still probably want to be in combat mode most of the time, though, to get the drop on the shades.
  2. You can also lure Sharon's garden creatures into her house, where she and her Stinging Clawbug will help you out. Sharon herself casts a mean blue spell, and is astonishingly tough. Her firepower is effective on everything up to the Experimental Gamma, which it barely tickles; but even the Gamma needs two hits to kill her, so at least she helps distract it. If you try this with the Gamma, try not to let the Vlish outside Sharon's front door get involved! They are utterly useless against it, but I succeeded in slaying the Gamma with Sharon's help once, only to find her two Vlish blocking the doorway afterwards. They would not budge, and attacking them made Sharon hostile, so I had to restore and do the tricky Gamma battle over again. You can also lure them into her storeroom and then run out and shut the door on them. If you then exit the map and come back they will be forever gone. That's fine if you're just trying to get to the Purified Essence, but you won't get experience and your Fanged Bracelet will never improve.
  3. Last year the question was raised here whether you would get a better ending to GF1 for using fewer canisters. One respondent was apparently trying the 'purist' challenge first set in GF2 by Mike Montgomery, of winning the game without using a single canister. But this person never told us what their results were. So, does the Shaper Council like you any better if you destroy the Geneforge without using it, and without having used any (or too many) canisters? I think GF1 would be much harder for a purist than GF2: you can't buy training in creations or spells. A GF1 purist Shaper wouldn't be able to do anything; there'd be no point to being a Shaper at all. A purist Agent could get Firebolt from the Ruined School mind, but good luck Firebolting your way through the Inner Crypt; you'd probably have to avoid it, and rely on trickery instead of violence in the other tough places. A purist Guardian would still have no creations, but might not do too badly, since in GF2 the solo Guardian works great. He might not be as successful in GF1, though, because in GF2 he relies on a high Parry skill for defence. [Edit: misspelled Mike's name]
  4. I don't see the aesthetic appeal in naming creations. You're not their little buddy: you're a Shaper, and if they don't get killed you're just going to reabsorb them when you upgrade your army. (Keeping a Fyora into the endgame means never being nearly as powerful as you could be, and that'll get you voted off Sucia Island.) But there is some actual utility in naming creations, because it can help you keep track of (for example) which of your six Terror Vlish are valuable veterans and which are expendable recent replacements. So I give the senior ones names like 'One' and 'Two', and leave the newer ones generic.
  5. Personally I'm very impressed with the artistry in the Spiderweb products I've tried, but am also very interested in efforts to raise the bar still higher. I just don't understand what I detect as a continuing thread of resentment at Jeff Vogel. Our hobby is his business. He must be honored to have such a discerning core of afficionados, but I doubt that hard core scenario designers number in the thousands, and so I doubt Spiderweb can live on their shareware fees alone. On the original topic, a point from my experience as a pen-and-paper RPG gamemaster, which might perhaps carry over to BoA scenarios: You can sometimes go one better than just making sure that an answer exists for every Why, and revealing the answers in the course of the game. You can reward the players, with power and success in game terms, for assuming that everything really does make sense even when it doesn't seem to. You can make it a winning strategy for players to ask Why, come up with answers, and act upon them. So the Good Wizard does hire the neophyte party to attack Lord Evilmancy, without any good explanation for why he didn't look for more experienced heroes ... but if the players regard this as a mystery and try to investigate it, they will discover great things. If you can pull something like this off, you are doing something which is truly a union of story and game that is more than either alone, in that major plot twists will be driven by player initiative. The hard part is that the extra oomph comes from leaving it up to the players to perceive the inconsistencies as mysteries, rather then poking them in the face with immediate dialogue boxes. And it's never going to seem worthwhile to players to take the trouble to think this way, if their experience indicates that there will be inconsistencies in the scenario due to mere designer incompetence. In a pen-and-paper campaign, I could undertake in advance to improvise remedies for any inadvertent inconsistencies, so players had insurance against giving my world more credit than it deserved. In a self-contained product like a BoA scenario this would obviously be a lot harder. But perhaps if you do well enough in following Drakefyre's rules, you can eventually earn the right to bend them to additional effect.
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