Kelandon

As a legal matter, I can't think of a tenable constitutional claim against a federal law requiring national data reporting of this nature. Congress has the power, if it wants to exercise it.

It's less a stereotype and more a statistic. Grand juries almost always indict anyone but police and almost never indict police. There are exceptions, but they are rare. Saying that the indictment rate is nonzero is entirely beside the point. In this same vein, I find it unconscionable that we don't collect national statistics on police use of force and police misconduct. We have some statistics, but they're not fully national in scope and fundamentally flawed in key respects. Surely if we could track the numbers we would know where bigger problems are and could track down best practices. It's hard to formulate good policy out of ignorance.

If someone asks if I'm into BDS, my first reaction is, "No, I'm not that kinky." Then I realize that they didn't say the fourth letter and mean something completely different. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the acronym is a massive political communication fail.

Exile, Avernum, and the new Avernum are the same basic game, remade several times. (And Nethergate: Resurrection is a remake of Nethergate.) Everything else is an independent series, where chronological order doesn't really matter. If you want to go from least advanced engine to most, in chronological order within each series, it would be: Nethergate: Resurrection Geneforge series Avadon series Newest Avernum series (A:EftP, forthcoming Avernum 2 and 3 remakes, Avernum 4-6) (Or arguably Avernum before Avadon, rather than after.)

You're either trolling or really socially inept. Either way, I'm bowing out, and I encourage others to do the same.

My impression was that Darth Ernie was responding to people who were criticizing Jeff for doing remakes. At a basic level, the point is the same as I made a bit ago: if you don't like it, don't buy it. It appears to me that you've made a snide comment that serves no purpose. The game mechanics are at least substantially different among Exile, Avernum, and A:EftP. Wholly unrelated? No. Completely different? No. Substantially different? Yes. So the people who care about game mechanics — of whom Slarty has made a reputation for himself as being one — will experience the remakes as fairly different games. That was the central point that Slarty was making, and you can snipe at his wording, but is his point wrong? I don't think so. Er, no. Jeff knows he has a good thing going with the writing and style of Exile/Avernum/A:EftP. How does he know? Because people praised the game when it first came out, and they praised it again when it was remade. It's well-liked by people who've played it, but that doesn't mean he's trying to resell it to them, necessarily — it means he knows it's good, so he's trying to sell it to people who weren't even born when Exile came out, or to people who never heard about it last time. That's the point of mentioning that it's well-liked. As for the last sentence, I wonder what metric you're using for that. Avadon hit Steam at exactly the right time, so my suspicion is that it just happened to be a good game in the right place at the right time, but I wouldn't be surprised if A:EftP sold extremely well (and "brought attention," whatever that means) nonetheless. (Also, you seem somewhat fact-impaired. If Avadon was so much better for Spidweb, why wasn't Geneforge also? None of the GFs have been remade.)

We're talking about the Times of London, apparently, and this may be true of the U.K., for all I know. But it's not true in the U.S., and it's not true to a potentially horrifying degree. Start with the Castle doctrine and work your way through the "make my day" laws and the "stand your ground" laws.

Huh? Does this make sense in some way that I'm not getting? Spiderweb is a guy and his wife. The business is literally how they eat. What's objectionable about that? Also, if you don't like it, don't buy it. But clearly there's an audience; if A:EftP didn't sell, Jeff wouldn't be remaking A2.

Yeah, this was pretty seriously obnoxious. Once you got the pattern — people who give you new things give them to you when you come back to the same place on a new iteration of the main quest to that location and finish when you're done going to that place — it was okay, but it was never really clear that this was what was going on until the end of the game.

1. The game difficulty is really bumpy, and the beginning is especially easy. I don't think this is particularly good design, and Avadon 2 does it much better. 4. You really shouldn't have casters in Avadon, except maybe Nathalie. The optimal party has Dexterity-based ranged weapon users doing most of the work. The fact that the game is so unbalanced (i.e., casters are not good but other uses of characters who could be casters are good) is also probably not optimal design, but Avadon 2 again does it better. 5-6. I didn't like the shortness — though I didn't mind it much — but I did like coming back to the same areas and talking to the same people again. I wished they changed a little more over time, so we got more of a sense of progression, but in general I like being able to see things from a different angle as the game goes on. 7. The shaman should use javelins, not magic, for optimal efficiency, largely for the reason you give. I didn't have much of a problem with mental effects in the late game — not sure why.

Similarly, Jeff Carbonized the original Avernum Trilogy when OS X came out and didn't even both to call it a remake. If it's just about tinkering with the internals a bit, it really is just a new version of the same thing, not a remake with new graphics and new mechanics and such (compare Avernum v1.0 -> Avernum v2.0 to Avernum v2.0 -> A:EftP). Thus, to the extent that the early GF games have compatibility problems with newer computers, he doesn't really need to do wholesale remakes as he did with Avernum. GF1 is a little graphically crude, and has a little bit of a crude interface, but I don't see the point of redoing the internal game mechanics or introducing a new interface. In other words, other than porting, I don't see a future for Spiderweb in remakes after Avernum 3. Given a few years (which is what he has), I bet Jeff can come up with enough new ideas to create a new storyline in a new world (or in an old one, maybe). And I bet it will be pretty good.

I just reopened The Magic for the first time in many months, and lo and behold, it's basically done except for alpha testing (and some miscellaneous dialogue). One of these days when I have a weekend to spare, I'll finish it and release it. Depending on the response to that, I may put in the effort to finish Homeland, but I frankly don't know when I'll have the time.

Yes, presumably people who like Avadon are going to go try A:EftP. But are they going to try Exile 1, v1.0? (Will Exile 1, v1.0, even work on their computers?) I'd be inclined to think most will not. So without the remakes, there would be Spiderweb games that a lot of people wouldn't try.

That's not quite right. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were never invoked to protect much of anything even before the revolution in Commerce Clause doctrine in the 1930's. For example, McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819 said: "the 10th amendment to the constitution is merely declaratory" (that is, it doesn't protect any particular rights in any enforceable way). The Ninth Amendment was cited in a grand total of one case before the 20th century, and that case said merely that it did not have any impact on the power of the states — owing to the fact that the Bill of Rights, at the time, did not restrict the states. Also, the expansion in Commerce Clause power largely gave the federal government more ability to regulate things that the states already had power to regulate. That is, the question is which government has the power, not whether government has the power. The connection between that and "individual freedom" is, to say the least, not completely clear.

That's cute, but not even slightly accurate. You've forgotten, among others, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which guarantee your right not to be a slave and your right to equal protection under the law. If you paid any attention to the Bill of Rights, you'd know that the Ninth Amendment protects unenumerated rights, too, which is a good reason for the list to expand. (They tend to expand the list under the Due Process Clauses rather than the Ninth Amendment, but that's more for historical reasons.)

Moving to the BoA Editor forum... If you just want a really powerful party, you may as well use the High Level Party Maker to make a god party.

The remakes are largely to get Spiderweb's flagship franchise able to run on current Apple products (recent Macs, iPads). They also are making the graphics internally consistent across games (everything looks like Geneforge). I bring this up only to say that I think the remakes are limited. I don't think anything else has compatibility problems. Geneforge and Avadon run on modern machines just fine, and I think Nethergate: Resurrection does, too. Geneforge isn't on iPad, and the early games look a little crude by current Spiderweb standards, but are those reasons enough to remake them? Nethergate is still under the old graphics branding, but is that reason enough to remake it? My guess is that after Avernum 3 gets remade, we won't see much in the way of remakes for a while.

This is dangerously close to hate speech, which is banned by the Code of Conduct of these boards. You're also (not badly, but distinctly) violating our request to use readable spelling and grammar. It just makes it easier for those of us who have to monitor the boards to read what you're saying. Let's all take a moment to read the Code of Conduct and remind ourselves how to be friendly and keep the boards clean!

I guess the question is: do you want to get into the D&D ruleset or the tabletop gaming experience? The former can be done with CRPGs that use the D&D ruleset (as mentioned, Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment, among lots of others). The latter can't really be done with CRPGs.

My first thoughts were Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment.

You may believe this, but you're wrong: one scholar writes, "If we had to choose a single, irreducible idea underlying Spanish colonialism in the New World, it would undoubtedly be the propagation of the Catholic faith."

You appear to be saying that Muslims have been perpetrators of violence, and Christians innocent victims of that violence, throughout history. Is that really the point that you're trying to make?

You're pointing to a true historical fact: Muhammad had, by 632 at the end of his life, established an Islamic kingdom of sorts in Arabia, and within a few decades of his life (say, by 661 at the end of the first caliphate, or 678 at the end of the life of his youngest wife), Muslims had conquered the entire Middle East (save the Byzantine Empire) and much of North Africa. Islam began with an empire. In contrast, Christianity didn't have an empire until the 4th century, some 300-plus years after its founding.* But I think you're drawing a wrong inference on the basis of that fact. The nonsense fundamentalism that ISIS spouts has much more to do with recent developments in Islam than with Islam's history, as you can read in the NYT and elsewhere. Living as a minority under Muslim rule has not, historically, always been great, but it has been a hell of a lot better than living — well, being executed — under ISIS the past few months. Consider, for example, Muhammad's famous letter of tolerance to local Christians.

Congratulations! You have written a post so ridiculous that I have taken it upon myself to deal with the inaccuracies! This is enough nonsense mixed with fact that it deserves being called out. First of all, everything was not "alright" prior to U.S. involvement. Clearly, things have been bad post-ISIS. But it'd be hard to say that everything was "alright" prior to the rise of ISIS; Assad was doing fairly horrible things in the Syrian Civil War. I'm not sure that there is any remotely plausible argument that the breaking out of the Syrian Civil War is the U.S.'s fault. The Arab Spring was its most direct cause. As for the first part of the sentence, Obama and the U.S. government did not sponsor Islamic extremists in the Middle East prior to the rise of ISIS. (Since there, there have been some strange bedfellows.) There is some plausibility to the claim that the U.S. very, very indirectly caused this by backing al Qaeda against the Soviets back in the 1980's, and ISIS is a group that broke off from al Qaeda a few years ago, but your phrasing is so grossly misleading that I don't think you could possibly be referring to this. Saudi and Qatari nationals are probably funneling money to ISIS in various ways, and the U.S. is allied with those countries, but at this point, I think the governments of those countries formally are opposed to ISIS. Yes, they speak out of both sides of their mouths a lot, but that's a more complicated issue. This is just wrong. See above. Four Pinocchios to you! Outright lie. This is an incoherent thought. There are rebels, in the sense that there are people who oppose Assad. Not all of the rebels are extremists; parts of the Free Syrian Army are moderate. Yes, there are plenty of extremists among the rebels, too, which is part of why the U.S. didn't jump straight into the fight as it did in Libya. But to tarnish the entire Syrian rebellion as extremists interchangeable with ISIS is to do gross injustice to the actual facts.

Pretty sure this is complete crap. Every reliable source I've looked at says this is very, very unlikely. Ebola is scary because of the very high death rate if you actually catch it, but it doesn't spread very easily, and it's pretty unlikely that that will ever change.