Kelandon

Socialism is beside the point. This poll isn't asking whether you're left or right of center. But the fact that there's no option for representative democracy (unless that is what is meant by "republic," which isn't really accurate) is a pretty glaring flaw.

A3 is also much larger than A2 (like, twice as large), so I wouldn't be surprised if it takes longer.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a system of government that ended well.

Specifically, Otto Halm?n.

As far as I can tell, this poll seems to be about who you think should be in charge, or how they should be chosen (i.e., republic: people chosen by an aristocracy, monarchy: people who inherited power from ancestors who held power, theocracy: religious leaders, direct democracy: all the people themselves). If so, I'm not altogether sure that you can separate communism, fascism, and dictatorship. Every real-world large-scale communist government has been a dictatorship. So with every fascist government. Communist and fascist governments often formally have a single political party (the Communist Party, the NSDAP, etc.), whereas military dictatorships tend to dispense with the "party" concept altogether, but at the end of the day, the person who controls the government and military apparatus is still a single person responsible to no one. Nor am I particularly clear on what "Federation" has to do with anything here. It seems quite clear that today's complex world requires both technical expertise and popular legitimacy. The US manages this with elections for the legislative and executive branches but appointments based on technical expertise to the judicial and administrative functions, with even more technocratic experts working under the political appointees (and, to a large degree, under the electeds). Whether that's the right way to do it, I don't know, but it seems as though it's hard to find a government that works well without meeting those two requirements for the people in power.

KPPP is back up. Apparently I hadn't logged into Freewebs in an excessively long time.

There's no official information about it yet. Spiderweb was intending to have an official announcement with screenshots and the like "before summer," but that didn't happen. Regardless, it'll be a few months yet before release, presumably. Tide yourself over with Avadon, or Geneforge, or Nethergate: Resurrection in the meantime!

Just for clarity: topic necromancy (posting in a long-dormant topic) is frowned upon, unless you have something genuinely new and useful to add. ("I responded to the poll" does not qualify.) Mistah Q, that was all that we (the moderators) were trying to convey to you. It's not that you're "not welcome," it's just that you're supposed to follow basic etiquette like everyone else. Frankly, if you weren't welcome, we'd ban you. Since we haven't done that, you can conclude that you're fine. Consider this a gentle reminder, not a reason to leave the boards. As far as this topic, I think it deserves to be laid to its final rest.

I'm reasonably sure that one of the two print_big_str calls doesn't work, but I forget which one. You should just create a quick experiment scenario and try it to find out. I also vaguely recall set_sdf() not working, but, again, you should just try it, because I may be remembering something else.

Oh yeah! I remember that. I opened some of those things in ResEdit back in the day and found a lot of the in-game text. That's why I think the specials are there (unencrypted).

I think you're right that the specials are in the main program. I also think that they're not encrypted. They're probably just hard to identify.

I got an email from him yesterday mentioning that he'd been away for the weekend, so I'm going to go with "having some time off" as part of the reason for the delay. But my theory is that summer hasn't really started, because Nate Silver is also late.

In the end, Jeff always wins.

I would definitely not do the Second Trilogy before BoA. I think chronological order (A1-3, BoA, A4-6) makes most sense, but you can do BoA before A1-3.

Yeah, I can't find any reference to Amena Blade anywhere in GF5, either.

I'm pretty sure you still are using the word "encrypted" wrong. If it were encrypted, it wouldn't just be hard to find; it would be that you can find it but you need a cipher to decrypt it (a cipher that, presumably, you don't possess). What you mean is that it's hard-coded and you're not sure where. No one is challenging that it's hard-coded in a difficult-to-find place. You're just using the wrong word. No one would care, except that you consistently use the word "encrypted" to mean something that it doesn't mean, which is confusing and mildly annoying.

Given the way Geneforge progressed, I wouldn't be surprised if there are changes in the character classes for Avadon 3. But 5 different types is already a lot — Geneforge peaked at 6 — so we might see one added or we might see the whole set switched up. I'd expect the latter more in a Geneforge 4 or Avernum 5 situation (you start on the opposite side as usual, in this case the Farlanders or Tawon).

At this point I was convinced that you are so willfully misunderstanding what I'm saying that I was prepared to call you trolling and be done with it, but then... If that's how you want to describe it, fine! Yes! Great! But there's a difference, and it appears that you agree that there's a difference. That's the point that I'm making. (Well, and that the difference may be problematic, but you don't have to agree with me on that.) Whew! It looks like we've achieved clarity. That's sort of gratifying.

No, no, for god's sake, no! I don't know how to say it any clearer than this. I don't care how big the main quest line of Nethergate is compared to some other metric of how big Nethergate is (number of towns, number of outdoor sections). That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about size of the main quest line relative to the size of the main quest line in Avernum. There are six quests with no sub-parts in Nethergate. There are three quests with a million sub-parts each in Avernum. Avernum's main quest line is longer. If you don't see a difference between "some NPC, somewhere else" and "the guy you literally can't leave the first town without talking to because the special nodes block you," I don't know how to explain it to you. I'm not saying that in Nethergate you'll be fully unaware that there are sidequests and other towns that you're not going to. I'm saying that if you're progressing in the game and don't seek out sidequests, you'll blow past a lot of them, and that progressing in the game without seeking out sidequests is an easy and natural thing to do. Not everyone will do it, but a lot of people will. Sure, you can't miss the Rose Hills when you're heading to Castle Aethdoc... unless you're heading to Castle Aethdoc and see the Rose Hills as something else that you're not doing right now, so you don't go there and head to where you're heading instead.

In Avernum 2, Garzahd is vulnerable to about 1-2 points of damage per hit with a regular weapon or spell. Demonslayer adds 20-40 points of additional damage per hit. So it's theoretically possible to kill Garzahd without Demonslayer, but it would be very hard and very tedious, and I doubt very many people do it. (I quickly checked a walkthrough — which you could have done! — and there may be some other loophole in Garzahd's immunities, but I couldn't immediately track down whether there was.) So when I say that it's "more or less" required, that means it's not absolutely required, but it's basically required. But what the heck does this have to do with anything? I've already said it's not a good example for the point I was making above, because in A1, it's a sidequest, and in A2, it's not a multi-part quest. It's easy enough to cite multi-part main quests in A1 or A2 (again, the brooches). Also, we've already agreed that the quests in Nethergate are more "self-contained" than in Avernum. So I think we're past this point. I don't know what you mean by saying that the main line of quests in Nethergate is not short (compared to that of the first trilogy? That's how you put it before), because the main line of quests in Nethergate is shorter than the main line of quests in each of the games in the first trilogy. Saying "See my post above" doesn't help. I don't know what you're talking about. I am also pretty sure it's not relevant to the main points here. Sure, but Micah and Erika aren't in the first town. The fact that you're pointing to Micah and Erika as the main Bobs in E1/A1 is exactly what I mean: you have to wander around and explore before you get set on the path to the game-winning quests. The fact that Micah and Erika aren't in Fort Avernum telling you where to go from the beginning makes for a different flavor of game. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. It wasn't that I wasn't subjectively engaged with exploring the world in Nethergate, nor that there wasn't lots of exploration in Nethergate (crucial to my point is that there is). It was that exploring the world in Nethergate isn't necessary to completing the game. In Nethergate, you get a quest right at the beginning that tells you exactly where to go, followed by more quests that tell you exactly where to go. In A1/E1 (and in A2/E2, at least after the first trip to the vahnatai and arguably before, and to a large degree in E3/A3), you have to explore to figure out anything at all. In E1/A1, you start in the East Cave. You need to get to the Great Cave (or Erika) before you have any real idea what's going on. That's a heck of a long way without any real idea what you're doing. That would be like starting in Shadow Valley Fort (or the town of Nethergate) and being told to wander, and not starting on main quests until you wander to Vanarium. My point is that aimless exploration is required in order to progress in E1/A1 (and E3/A3, and for most of the game in E2/A2, as well), but it's not in Nethergate. At no point in Nethergate do you not have a main-quest task to complete. Rarely in Nethergate do you not know exactly where to go to complete that main-quest task. Neither of those two things are true in the first trilogy. That's what I mean by saying that exploration is the main quest in Avernum. Aimless exploration is what you do to progress in Avernum. It's not what you do to progress in Nethergate. If you'd like it in the Rollick article's terms, Avernum is rollick through and through, but Nethergate is grit on the main quests and rollick on the sidequests. How this relates to my original post is that this may have been a bad decision on Jeff's part (heck, the article even points out that it's bad to mix them). Most of the community loves Nethergate because of the richness of the world that you can explore, because of the sidequests and such, but my point is that players who are most engaged by progressing in the game (which I think is most players, though not all) can blow right past that richness and most of the sidequests, because you wander to find them, and wandering is not necessary to progress in the game. So if you want to read "Nethergate is a game of sidequests" and the following paragraph as saying that the main-to-sidequest ratio is large (again, on its own terms, not in comparison to the first trilogy) and that it's another example of what the article used Falling Stars to say, you're not far off from what I was trying to express. EDIT: Nalyd nailed it on the main point.

Eh, I was confusing Avernum 1 (where you reassemble Demonslayer and Demonslayer is helpful, but not required, for defeating Grah-Hoth) and Avernum 2 (where you don't reassemble the pieces of Demonslayer but do fetch it, and it is more or less required for Garzahd). The brooches, then, or any of the other quests where you have several different sub-parts and don't know exactly where each one is. Demonslayer was a bad example, but there are plenty of obvious good examples. Huh? You don't think Nethergate is short compared to Avernum? Maybe the key point is more what I got to at the end of my last post. Exploration is the main quest in Avernum 1. When you arrive, you don't have an obvious Bob; you talk to a guy who gives you some equipment, and then you go out and explore. Eventually you stumble on the three main quests, but even then, exploration is the name of the game. For example, you're trying to find an exit to the surface. You wander around talking to people who give you clues, and you follow up on those clues by exploring various spots. No one ever says, "Oh yeah, the exit to the surface! Go down this tunnel and then that tunnel and you're there." You could, in principle, get through a game-winning quest in Avernum 1 without visiting very many towns, but you'd pretty much have to be following a walkthrough to do so, because you just aren't given specific enough directions otherwise. Contrast that with Nethergate, where you start out with an immediate Bob who tells you where to go for pretty much every main quest. Exploration is a sidequest, something that you do because there's stuff out of the corner of your eye that you think looks interesting, not because you're searching for the things you need to progress in the game. Yet there's a huge number of sidequests (whether the sidequest:main quest ratio is larger in Nethergate than in Avernum, I don't know — I haven't counted). I also think it matters that there is more of a ramp-up of difficulty in other Spiderweb games than in Nethergate. It probably is possible (and fairly easy) to beat the game by going through the six main quests and doing nothing else. That's hard-to-impossible in most Spiderweb games.

It has been explained to you, repeatedly, why your explanations in these topics are less clear than they ought to be: you use the wrong words for what you're trying to express. You have a habit of using language that is vague, pejorative, or simply wrong. This is particularly galling when other language is available, superior for communication, and presented to you clearly, and you simply ignore it. If you're going to ask others to try harder, I'm going to ask you the same thing. I understand that you're struggling to explain things. But when people are telling you that you're being unclear, they also tend to try to explain why. When you're getting a piece ready for publication and an editor or peer reviewer comes back with, "This paragraph doesn't make sense; here are four things about it that are unclear," do you reply, "Explaining is hard. Cut some slack."? Rather, I imagine that you respond appropriately. I ask you to do the same thing here. Try harder. In a previous topic, you made a semi-legitimate point that there's no reason in principle that one couldn't train skills of critical thinking, communication, etc., in a science major in the same way and to the same degree that one does in a humanities major. I have my doubts, but, well, it's not obviously wrong on its face, anyway. Now, though, you've slid to a completely illegitimate assumption that that's currently true in practice: a science major trains skills in the same way and to the same degree that a humanities major does (in reality, right now). That's just wrong. Maybe the logical error you're committing is equating the content of the course with the outcome of the course. That is, the class only exists to impart information to the students, and its value lies entirely in the information that the students acquire. Thus, in a physics class, you might learn about Newtonian mechanics, and in an English class, you might learn about a bunch of Shakespeare. But that's clearly nonsense (which is the relevance of Stareye's post). The content of the course is part of the relevant outcome of the course, but the skills developed in learning and applying that content are probably far more important. At no point after my quantum class have I actually had to know what the Schrodinger Equation was or how it applied to a particle in a box. That information was useless. Nonetheless, the mathematical and quantitative analytical skills that I practiced with various applications of the Schrodinger Equation have come in handy from time to time since then (in jobs, no less!). But the same thing is true of my Classics education. No one has ever paid me to translate Latin, but close reading of a text? I'm in law school, for god's sake. Close reading is what I do, and this summer I've gotten paid a ton of money to do it. By way of further anecdote, I used to teach people how to score well on the LSAT. For all that science classes could, in principle, develop the kind of logical thinking that the LSAT tests (a field called "informal logic"), they generally don't. Philosophy classes do. It was noticeable among my students; the engineers (who wanted to become patent lawyers) struggled a lot more with informal logic than the Philosophy majors. This didn't have anything to do with the content of philosophy courses, which rarely or never comes up on the LSAT; it has to do with the skills that those courses develop, which are applicable outside the narrow content area in the courses. Or consider what I teach now. I teach introductory economics at a fancy university (probably the fanciest in the country). A lot of my students are going to go into finance or consulting. The content of the course that I teach involves things like calculating deadweight loss under externalities, or imperfect competition, or whatever. At no point in their finance/consulting jobs is anyone going to pay these students to calculate deadweight loss under an externality. Yet they get paid a whole bunch of money for having learned what I taught them. But what I taught them involved quantitative (and sometimes communicative) skills that can be applied to financial/business topics, not the narrow content of the course. (Yes, there's also signaling in play here, but, if anything, that supports my point even more. To the extent that doing well in these classes is not developing skills but just signaling the existence of skills, no class in higher ed is actually training you to do something that someone will pay you for. But I don't think that signaling is all that is going on.) So if you describe an English class as "fiction appreciation" (or an astrophysics class as "star appreciation"), you're being a twit, but more importantly, you're wrong. Sure, an undergraduate History major who takes three or four classes on European history in the Early Modern Period is probably not going to get paid anything to know about Early Modern European history, but if you call those classes "history appreciation" classes and presume that the only value derived from them is that the student enjoyed them, then you're devaluing the skills of reading and writing (among other things) that the student invariably practiced in those classes. That's insulting, but more importantly, it's wrong. Now that this has been explained to you, you have two choices for dialogue in good faith: 1) explain why you disagree, or 2) adjust your language and positions accordingly. If you choose 3) continue to use the same terms with no explanation, then you're trolling and will be treated as such.

I'm aware that you think this, but I hope you're aware that a lot of people here think you're wrong. And not just a little wrong. Ludicrously, horribly, outrageously wrong. It's also not clear why you think that you know better about fields that you haven't studied than people who have actually studied these fields.

E3 may have had similar map design. I still take Nethergate as unusual in the general trend of Spiderweb games -- even if it was similar to its immediate predecessor -- if it was different from E1, E2, A1, A2, the entire Genefore series, the entire Avadon series, and probably (though I haven't checked) the entire Second Avernum Trilogy. I'm sure I could futz with numbers as you did, but, frankly, I don't care enough. My point is that the main line of quests is very short (in absolute terms), and it's easy to miss the sidequests, of which there are a lot, because they are quite to the side. I never had the impression that it was easy to miss half the game in Avernum. This could be my idiosyncratic impression of a difference, but I don't think so. It may have to do with knowing exactly where you're going in Nethergate. You don't know exactly where all the Demonslayer pieces are in Avernum 1. If you're looking for Annwn, though, it's pretty clear that you're not there if you're in, say, Vanarium. Also, I really think for the casual player that one complete playthrough (finishing the game-winning quests but not restarting with a new party) is the relevant unit of analysis.

That's also not an undergrad degree in the United States, although it is in most of the rest of the world.