Kelandon

42 minutes ago, Smoo said:

MoC uses the "INN" dialog action which appears to advance the time forward 800 ticks.

Oh, huh, I think I remember that now. Is this effect of the INN action documented somewhere? I can't find it in the docs.

Yeah, TM's scenarios are pretty incoherent. Fun, once you get past that. But incoherent.

I — and at least a couple others who weighed in when this question came up in the Let's Play thread — would suggest chronological order. Many, many scenarios are related in some way to scenarios that came before them, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not.

EDIT: Also, lol at the comment on a TM scenario: "I'm beginning to think that this author is insane."

Chessrook44 has been rather evasive when it comes to debugging questions, but I was able to verify that deduct_ap() doesn't work on his version of BoA but does on everyone else's. I'm not surprised that something else is screwed up.

I tried to track down what is broken in MoC, but I wasn't immediately able to figure it out. I see sleeping in the inn. I see the START_STATE in the scenario script, which tracks the day and time of day. But is sleeping in the inn supposed to move time forward?

21 hours ago, Smoo said:

 

Right. It wasn't Curing, but since I remembered that there was something that removed Webbed status, I had to go and check. Divine Restoration removes it.

Ah, there we go. Divine Restoration removes all negative effects, according to the documentation. It occurs to me that I've never actually verified which ones these are — most are obvious, but you never know with BoA.

1 hour ago, Smoo said:

I think a high level of Curing clears webbing. Also, waiting does clean webbing in combat too but I think it's only about half as effective. 

I didn't think this was right, so I tested it. Curing does not clear the Webbed status. As far as I can tell, nothing but defending in combat or waiting outside of combat reduces Webbed levels.

6 hours ago, Zaego said:

I'm tempted to start a new party fresh from the Valley of the Dying Things to boost them up to the required level and play through both the Exodus and Bahssikava, probably just in time for Homeland to be ready.

Glad you're excited! But unless it's going to take you over a year to finish that process, Homeland probably won't be ready by then. I'm still only about a third of the way done.

Mixed work on Chapters 1-3 over the past few weeks. Chapter 1 is basically done, save part of one side quest, a little dialogue, and some testing. I'm filling in some side quests in Chapter 2 as I create the main quest line in Chapter 3, which makes progress sort of slow. (Also, work has picked up, which also makes progress a bit slow.) But it's coming along. 

Chapter 3 has three major quests with several subparts, and the first major quest is about halfway designed. The high-level conceptual work is largely done; now it's just a lot of implementation of the plan that I now have in my head. The second major quest is still a bit of a blank. I have a general sense of what's supposed to happen, but I have to figure out how exactly to get from Point A to Point B. Once I get to that point, I'm going to have to stop and think things through again — how exactly will this piece work out? But once that's done, the third major quest is going to be fun. This is one of the key moments in the scenario, one of the moments that I've been building to since... gosh, since Bahssikava.

9 hours ago, Triumph said:

History relies heavily on the written word. It's not that no one cares about the Americas before 1492, it's just much, much easier to speak with some degree of confidence once you get to an era with more written records to analyze.

That's true, but only within limits. For the pre-contact era, there's still evidence from archeology, art, epigraphy, genetics, linguistics, and so on. It's not the same as having, say, photographs (as we do for the Civil War), but people do research on eras with minimal traditional written records all the time.

But yeah, we know a lot more about the post-contact era than the pre-contact era.

3 hours ago, Bender89 said:

May I ask if US history includes native american history or post European contact/invasion?

As a general point about the field, U.S. History courses usually are supposed to cover at least some Native American history, although often most of it is post-contact. (AP US History, a common advanced high school class, starts its history at 1491.)

Clearly, the solution is self-driving doctors!

I would think, as a matter of policy design, it's probably easier to design better handoff systems than to design more sleep-deprivation–resistant humans. So if we're looking to reduce medical errors (and improve working conditions as an ancillary benefit), we'd probably want to reduce hours and improve communication. You mentioned that there's some work being done in that direction, which I'd expect to be a good thing.

"Base" is your base value of the skill before any levels that you've "bought" (i.e., expended skill points to get) are taken into account. If I remember correctly, skill point cost is entirely dependent on bought values, not base values. The value on your skill sheet is the total of the base and bought values.

If that's right, then the way that it works is as follows. Suppose you have skill X, which has a base value of skill Y / 2. Suppose you have never trained in skill X, and it costs 3 skill points to raise skill X. Your skill Y is 6, so your skill X is 3. If you raise skill Y to 8, your skill X will go to 4, but it will still cost 3 skill points to raise skill X. The base of skill X went up, but that doesn't affect costs in any way; it's just a free point in skill X. So no, in no way does having a high base value for a skill hurt you.

In general, you'll need 17 points in Priest Spells/Mage Spells to get access to the highest-level spells. In very high-level scenarios (e.g., Exodus), you may need to go even higher (as high as 25).

Int is good for casters, and I raise it a fair bit to get spell energy and stronger spells for them, but I've never raised it for non-casters. It does raise Arcane Lore, but it's cheaper just to raise Arcane Lore directly. It also raises whatever resistance, but Luck and Resistance are better for resistances anyway.

But it's not really possible to give a value that you should raise Int to. There's no cap or anything. It just continues to help casters as you keep raising it, so as you gain levels, put some skill points into it regularly.

Instead of vaguely saying "a new scenario," could you give the name of the new scenario? That would start to address Imban's comment earlier.

1 hour ago, Trenton. said:

Also, you'll get to participate in debates on whether it's Geneforge prounced Jean Forge 'cause Genes.... Or the obviously superior and more mystical sounding option, Geneforge like Jeneh-forge, as in Genetics.

... are there debates about that? Pretty sure the official name (i.e., what Jeff says) is the former, with two syllables.

Please deliver your meaningless approbation to this thread.

8 hours ago, Lintwyrm said:

/Edit: I‘m sorry.. are there any tags to hide content like in my first post? I can‘t find the appropriate button when I want to reply.

As far as I can tell, adding tags isn't sufficient in this version of forum software anymore. You either have to go into the source (which is kind of hard, but is on the left of the reply bar, next to the "bold" option), or you have to click the relevant button.

For the most part, you don't have to hide much of anything, though. If it's a scenario that's been released for more than a few months (pretty much all of them), then spoiler tags are probably not necessary.

8 hours ago, Lintwyrm said:

However, I would still have a question.. you mentioned what will happen to the party (of the first two scenarios of your series) so will all the process achieved with it be deleted?

 

And another general question.. if I‘m playing scenarios and gain experience and items, will I be able to use them in the official game also?

As Lilith suggested, the scenarios all function independently, so these questions don't really have answers. You're supposed to use a new party with Homeland, so your party won't have completed Bahs/Exodus, and there's not really any progress to lose. You can technically use any party to enter any scenario, so if you wanted, you could use a party that has completed Homeland to enter, say, Diplomacy With the Dead (a pre-packaged scenario), and you would keep your experience and items from Homeland.

So I guess technically that may be a bug, but I'm not all that worried about it because you're told not to do that. When he reconstitutes, a message says:

That means go somewhere else (to the southern half of the Heart of the Island, which will now open for you).

And killing friendly creatures is supposed to make the whole island angry with you. Committing crimes sets a flag, so this is permanent. (A message prints saying that you have made the island angry with you.) You technically can fix this with the Character Editor if you know what you're doing, but you have to know what you're doing.

When did you kill him? What town were in you in, and what were the circumstances of the combat?

Chapter 2 isn't really completely finished yet — still lots of combats to design, and a couple of towns need a lot of dialogue still — but I went ahead to start on town design and core dialogue for Chapter 3. Man, designing Chapter 3 is a trip. I can't really explain why without giving away a significant twist at the end of Chapter 2, but it's... different.

I'm 46 towns in, and right now I'm pretty sure that the scenario will end up around 90 towns. Because many of the towns are at least partly incomplete, though, I'd say I'm about 30% done with the overall design work, maybe a bit more. Still a long way to go.

6 minutes ago, TJ Hedgescout said:

I will give it a try, but in the mean time i want to know ways of getting it standalone

As Nik said, the only people who can answer that question are Spiderweb employees, and they don't post here. So you have to email them directly.

1 hour ago, lmban said:

Also to pick on Kelandon from much earlier in the thread, it actually stops an average of 14.8 damage because bonus values for armor don't work the way they claim to.

Strengthens my point even more, I suppose.

Uh, how do the bonus values actually work?

44 minutes ago, TJ Hedgescout said:

I see, why did people rumor of a remake for it?

Uh, did anyone? I don't think that actually happened.

Jeff has said pretty emphatically that there will not be another Blades game. BoA took much longer than expected and didn't sell well, and I think there was a serious risk that Spiderweb would go under because of that. So I think he was pretty burned by the experience and wants nothing to do with it again.

At least, that's my recollection from the last time he talked about it, which was years ago.

On 10/6/2017 at 2:46 PM, Ess-Eschas said:

Although all is perhaps not well at the southern gates, from the looks of things ...

Yeah, not at all.

7 hours ago, Celtic Minstrel said:

Whoa cliffs overdose. O_O

Um, yeah, that's Homeland for you. Like I said, I may have gone a little overboard with heights.