Student of Trinity

Mother Nature is always around.

That's all true, but the Geneforge series has a sort of thematic arc that works best in the original sequence, in my opinion. You can figure out what's going on from any point, but it's somehow easier to appreciate what's going on in order. Things escalate in a way that makes sense, and feels inevitable. You start out discovering something that's clearly going to upend the world, and you see the world slowly topple over. Nethergate: Resurrection was indeed a really interesting story and an interesting world, and quite realistic in depicting Roman history and Celtic history-plus-myth. If the archaic engine is too much of a turn-off, maybe don't play it first. Once you've been able to appreciate Geneforge 1, say, then you might find yourself more willing to get into N:R.

I'm pretty sure that parry was really only totally wonderful in G2. Solo serviles are quite fun in G4. If you're dedicated to solo, then you want to let shaping be your weakest aspect, so that's down to agent/infiltrator or servile. If you're tired of agents, then servile will let you try something different, in that it does a lot more melee. A well built servile can be like some kind of engineered super-soldier. With magic! Serviles can get good enough in melee, in fact, that you may want to focus all your magic on mental. This is a good idea for playing on higher difficulty levels especially, since monsters don't seem to get particularly hard to charm even on Torment. As Delicious Vlish used to put it, it's not nearly as bad to have your enemies get stronger, if your enemies are also your weapons.

Yeah, Death of the Necromancer was not too bad, but far from Wells's best. For me her best book is still the one of hers I read first, City of Bones. It still has some arbitrary jumps, but it's a book that reads fast and then seems to take a long time to summarize, because there are so many interesting little stories going on in it. I've always suspected that Wells might have worked all that into CoB over many years, and then once she landed a contract, she was unable to maintain that density of invention while keeping up a higher rate of production. I don't actually know how she wrote CoB, though. For all I know she tossed it off between other projects. It does feel rather rushed at the end.

Often I find a day when I'm quite tired is a rather cheerful and relaxed day. I know I'm tired, so I don't expect much of myself.

The problem with hard games, for me, is that my job involves hard puzzles. If I'm going to peer at strange symbols and try to figure out what to do for a few hundred hours, I might as well have a paper to show for it afterwards. So I like puzzles, but only if they're a lot easier than work. Roguelikes have never sounded as though they met that criterion.

I remember exactly twice in my life waking up feeling extremely energetic and alert. The first time was near the end of a military training exercise, when I had finally gotten about six hours of sleep, after several days on between 2 and 4 hours per night, while doing a lot of heavy work. The second time I'm pretty sure I had gone to bed drunk, though maybe not too badly, after popping a couple of Tylenols to help with the hangover I anticipated the next day. I might also just have been sleep-deprived then, too. My guess is that there's a depth of sleep, or something, that I normally never reach. It would be nice to be able to turn it on every night.

Alwan in G3 is annoyingly useless. It's quite hard to keep him alive. Well, he never really dies, but just runs back to some reasonably recent safe point. Still, it means he's more trouble than he's worth, and it makes him seem like a coward. Greta is much more effective, because her ranged attack tends to keep her out of harm's way.

Yeah, these are worthy additions. The lance looks like an effective weapon that's just a bit spooky. The head of the scepter has a subtly sinister look. It's nothing that would be out of place in the throne room of a major power, but yet somehow you know you wouldn't really want to be a citizen of the kingdom with that regalia.

The Trajkov -> Trakov corruption was one of Jeff's clever subtle touches, I thought. I think Brocktree has a point, here. One should think a bit more about whether keeping blood off your own hands personally is really reason enough to support a regime that enslaves millions. I don't think there's an obviously right call either way. I don't think there's really an obvious right call in any of the Geneforge games. The Awakened used to seem like that to a lot of people, in G1 and G2, but I always thought that the closer you looked at what the Awakened were really doing, the less ideal it looked. In my opinion the best way to play these games is what Rent-an-Ihrno said. Imagine a character who would whole-heartedly choose one side or the other, and pretend to be that person for the course of the game. Or imagine a character who would start out on one side and then switch, at one of the possible switching points, and play as them. That lets you get a lot of replay out of the game, but it also helps you see all sides of the issue. I think it's a valuable moral exercise. You might then find that you personally still favored one side over the other, but if so, you'd have a much better understanding of why that was.

There could be a witch hunt game based on a message board. Sheriffs are mods. The witches use sock puppet accounts to post spam. Every night there is a spam post. The next day, everyone else decides whom to ban. Something like that, anyway. You could try to make it just like regular mafia, with players getting eliminated because their accounts are hacked or something. But you could also invent some variants. Perhaps the spammers aren't actually trying to eliminate anyone, but just flood the boards with spam, because they're allowed to add a new sock account every day. Or perhaps a spammer-hacker could actually take over the account of a previously honest forum member. Perhaps mods could un-ban members if it were concluded that they weren't bad after all. One feature that I sort of like is that the spam posts might in principle contain information that could reveal who had posted them — or suggest a false culprit.

You're obviously a witch!

Why not try an Avadon theme this time?

This thread may not be in free fall yet, but it's beginning to go downhill. Jeff's boards are not the place for this.

If we are talking about a situation in which someone is in serious danger of being killed by somebody's bare hands, then fine, in principle I'll accept this as justification for shooting to kill. In practice, though, the principle will lead far more often than not to people who are just drunk or scared killing people, for no good reason whatever, except that they could easily get their hands on a gun. I almost hate to take advantage of a tone-deafness that hints alarmingly at sociopathy. You really might want to get that looked at. As a strictly academic discussion point, though, I have to point the argument out. What you've demonstrated is that if some people get frightened, they will kill if they can, and not give a damn about any innocent bystanders, either. That's a strong case for strict gun control, put in a nutshell. Good job.

Oh, you can aim at somebody's legs. Your chances of hitting them there are just low. If you do hit them somewhere in a leg, there are some big arteries in the legs. They may well bleed to death in a few seconds. If somebody is unarmed you have no business shooting at them! If you shoot at them and kill them either on purpose or by accident, why the hell did you just kill an unarmed person? You'll be doing time, and they're dead. Try to apologize to their kids. It probably won't comfort them much to know that your actions were motivated by delusions about handgun accuracy and human anatomy. I'm sorry if I seem unduly harsh, here, but this is very serious. People are killed accidentally every year by young family members or friends who had no idea how dangerous handguns are. I grew up surrounded by firearms, literally. They hung on all the walls of our rec-room. As soon as I was old enough to be curious about them, my father explained to me very gravely: never point a firearm at anything you do not intend to kill — whether the weapon is loaded or not. That's the only rule. When I grew up and ran shooting exercises for infantry recruits, I was definitely pretty keen that the twenty kids with assault rifles ahead of me kept their muzzles pointing straight downrange at all times. Guns aren't scary. Muzzles are really scary. That's where bullets come out. Used with the principle I learned from my dad in mind, firearms are useful tools. They can put food on the table, keep vermin from eating your crops, and if necessary defend your life. They are dangerous tools, like chainsaws, but they can be used safely — to the user. Unlike other tools, the very purpose of any firearm is to kill things. Not realizing this is the most dangerous ignorance about them.

I'd sing you a stanza iambic For nectary lambic, But alas they keep coming dactylic. Perhaps I can still lick Obstreperous rhymes with trochee: To a lambic bouquet!

North Vietnam had a pretty darn regular army.

I'm suddenly curious now just what the US laws are that prohibit private artillery. I presume they exist. What exactly do they say? How old are they? And if cannon and machine guns can be prohibited, why not other things? Hasn't the Second Amendment always had a built-in slippery slope to nullification?

It's true that any high-powered rifle bullet is likely to be fatal almost wherever it hits a person, but have you ever fired a handgun? It's almost impossible to control exactly where you hit anything, if the target is moving, or if your adrenaline is running high. Under either of those circumstances alone, let alone both at once, it's astonishingly hard to hit a person at all, even at very close range. It's just as hard to ensure that, if you do hit, you hit a "non-fatal" part instead of something vital. If you are not in mortal danger, you should not shoot even to injure. If you are in mortal danger, you cannot afford to try anything fancy. So if you shoot, you are shooting to kill. Your target might survive, but it would be no thanks to you. All firearms are extremely dangerous tools. Self-defense with firearms does mean killing.

Yeah, that's a big question. I wonder, though. Some things have successfully been banned. You don't see private citizens driving around in tanks, or mounting artillery pieces on their lawns. You can't take a pair of scissors onto a plane. There don't seem to be many pirate radio stations any more. Firearms are big-ticket items. A good handgun costs several hundred dollars. You can't just cook one up in your bathtub, and you normally can't sell one a piece at a time to desperate gun-junkies. Normally you can't keep on selling them to the same people, either, so the repeat business that makes it worthwhile to establish a tricky distribution network is probably not there. The business model for selling illegal firearms may well just not be as compelling as for selling illegal drugs or alcohol. It might take a long time, but I can kind of imagine a slow disarming of the American public. Violent crime levels have been steadily falling for quite some time. People may begin to lose their preoccupation with self-defense, and social attitudes to owning firearms may have a generational change. Some kind of buy-back program might slowly become more and more attractive, as people inherit Uncle Billy's collection and decide that they would really rather have the cash from Uncle Sam. People who really want firearms, and know what they're doing, and have a lot of money, are always going to be able to get guns. The things are old technology. If necessary they can always be made by hand. But crimes of opportunity, where some whacko takes his parent's legally owned weapons, could perhaps be dramatically reduced.

I don't want to get into gory details here, but I think there's a certain amount of confusion over what 'assault rifles' are. The physical differences between what a semi-automatic M16 clone can in principle do, for example, and what an old-fashioned bolt-action hunting rifle can in principle do, are just not that great. To me the main differences are psychological. I was in the first generation of Canadian reservists to be issued the Canadian M16 variant, after starting my training with the old FN FAL, which was also semi-automatic, but much longer and heavier. We all agreed that the new rifle felt like a toy. It made us feel weird. For a number of reasons I just think that a lot more violent kooks are going to feel they can live out their gruesome fantasy with a so-called assault rifle, than would actually go through with it if they had to use something that felt less like a magic wand. Supporting assault rifle bans on purely physical grounds can be a difficult argument to sustain. The psychological case may seem weaker at first, but I think it's the real issue at stake. I'm also pretty antsy about handguns, actually. I do not like being around those things. It's much harder to hit what you're aiming at with a handgun than the movies suggest, and they're also much less reliably effective than one would wish at stopping bad guys. Against that, the chances of accidentally hurting or killing some bystander are alarmingly high. For self-defense, I think Joe Biden has the right idea. If you absolutely have to use a firearm, a shotgun is the most practical option from a number of points of view.

I think the notion that an armed citizenry can oppose a tyrannical government by force is probably an outdated myth. Even if there were lots of military-grade weaponry in private hands, the actual military and police forces will have training and organization on their side. For past examples, it's very hard to imagine any bunch of German or Russian gun enthusiasts offering even a speedbump to the Gestapo or the Cheka. More recently, the Libyan revolution and the Syrian civil war will be important to study. My impression is that defecting military units and foreign intervention have been most significant, but perhaps there's some kind of case to be made that the resistance got under way in the first place using civilian weapons. Or did it? I have no idea. In any case, though, it seems to me that any force in the US that was both heavily enough armed and well enough organized to resist the American government would itself be a serious threat to American civil liberties.

Good luck stopping this. There are millions of skeletons in America. Many of them are cunningly hidden under layers of all-too-convincing human skin. Better to just give up now, really.

The dagger of hate seems to me to need a slightly larger guard, or something, as a hint to scale. It's hard for me to tell that it's not a greatsword. Otherwise, it's great. Nasty-looking, but all too practical. The radiant soulblade is clearly a radiant soulblade. Yikes.