Kelandon

I feel obliged to point out that, for the JD or the MBA, it depends a lot on the school you go to and what you do while you're there. At my school, if you want to get rich from the JD or MBA (or the JD/MBA!), you can do that, if you make an effort from the beginning to make the right connections and apply to the right things. At most law schools, though, that is not true; you have to get really good first-year grades, and even then it's kind of a crapshoot at a lot of them. It's unfortunate for a lot of reasons that law schools are so expensive and isolated from the other disciplines, but one reason is that, in some senses, a legal education could be like an undergrad degree in English or Political Science or something that's personally enriching, even if it doesn't directly lead to a job in that field. (That being said, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of law students don't feel that way about it.)

They're all loading for me. Perhaps it is your browser that is weak.

Maybe, but your words are both pejorative and fuzzy, so you're both insulting people on the other side of the discussion and confusing people at the same time. That seems like a pretty strong argument for using different words than the ones you're using. It seems to me that you're brushing up against understanding the purpose of education solely in economic terms. That is, if it doesn't get you paid, it's not worth learning. That's an awful way to understand education. I can go with you in part on that point for a professional degree (an MD, a JD, to some extent a Ph.D.), but not for a general degree (a B.A., a high school diploma). And, again, I have no idea why you'd single out English as a discipline for this particular discussion.

It's a little hard to know what to recommend. Have you played the Alcritas scenarios? Stareye? Drizzt? Brett Bixler? TM? Creator? Similarly, what are you looking for? When you say "the original campaign," I assume you mean Exile? Something large-sized an plot-heavy is probably right, but there are a bunch of scenarios that fit the bill.

I assume that you do it in the same way as you would with Avadon 1, though I haven't tried it.

Just to fill out the point that I was suggesting above... One of the big problems with Ph.D.'s in anything, but in the humanities in particular, is that they're basically professional degrees, like a JD or an MD, in that they're supposed to feed into a particular type of job (being a professor), but there's a huge supply/demand mismatch. There are a ton more Ph.D.'s graduating each year than there are jobs in academia for Ph.D.'s each year. I'm not sure what job a Ph.D. in English prepares you for other than to be an English professor (or maybe a high school English teacher), whereas a Ph.D. in Physics probably can land you a job in industry somewhere if academia doesn't work out. The glut of people with heavy-duty literary training — and few options — drives down bargaining power for English Ph.D.'s, so you end up with the awful labor market that SoT describes. This creates an existential crisis for English departments. As I said, I don't think it's obvious what a Ph.D. in English prepares you to do other than become a professor, but because there are so many people who can't become professors, it's pretty urgent for many English departments to come up with the answer to that, or to close their doors. This problem is not very applicable to a bachelor's degree in English, because pretty much no bachelor's degree outside of maybe engineering is a professional degree. You get a bachelor's degree to become more educated; you're not buying a diploma to get a job, at least not in your field, most of the time. Ph.D.'s are professional degrees in a way that bachelor's degrees just aren't, so it's a problem if Ph.D. graduates are unemployed. This problem isn't unique to English departments, though. It's true through most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, too. It's true in my own field (law), for that matter. There has been a lot of hand-wringing — and some class size reductions — in American law schools, because the legal market just doesn't have any use for as many JDs as we're producing, and JDs tend to incur far too much debt to justify getting a JD for any other purpose than to get a high-paying job, generally as a lawyer. (There's kind of a lot more to it than that, but it's too much to go into in this post.) So yes, there is an existential crisis for English departments, but it's not unique to English, and it has little or nothing to do with characterizing the academic study of English as "consumption" or "production" or "fiction appreciation" or whatever. It has to do with the skills demanded in the workforce right now, which is in some sense external to the discipline: it's not that the discipline itself is flawed. Looking at it another way, getting a B.A. in English to train your reading, writing, and thinking skills (among other things, amply described above) is clearly sensible. An undergrad degree in Physics just isn't going to do that in the same way, nor most other subjects outside of the humanities. Getting a Ph.D. in English for the same reason is much more of a stretch; there's a ton of reading, writing, and critical thinking in any Ph.D. (that's the point of a Ph.D.). So there must be something about the subject matter of graduate-level English itself that's valuable. Probably there is, though I'm not very well qualified to say what it is, but whether it's economically valuable in the labor market is another matter, and that's the crisis.

There's probably a difference between a Ph.D. in English and a B.A. in English. A really big difference. Enough of a difference to make it a completely different discussion.

I can only repeat, but not exceed, your eloquence.

Avadon difficulty is simply bumpy. Part of it is having the wrong characters for an area (or the wrong scarabs, etc.), but part of it is that some parts are just harder than others unexpectedly. I had the same problem on my first time through the game.

I use the same setup. I gave up on Call of the Frenzy, because I wanted the extra bow damage from the BM, but otherwise did much the same. The full party is described in a little more detail here (in the first couple of paragraphs).

Being a bad writer hasn't stopped a number of other scenario designers. Just create a world with a problem that needs solving and that a small group of four people could, with some beating up of bad guys, solve.

What did the nephilim pirate say? NephARRRRRRRRRR!

Got BOE editor to work. Melora Opal is 2500, Crystal of Purity is 1000, and Malachite Statute is 1000. I don't see any sign that the Scroll of Dragons counted for anything back in BOE.

As far as I can tell, there's no text at the end for any of these things. Someone with a better BoE editor setup than I have can probably answer this sooner than I can. If you remove it and then put it in another place in the town, you can cast a ritual of sanctification that cleans up some of the evil magic around. I could be more specific, but my BoA editor is being a little wonky on this computer.

Cross-posts are discouraged, because generally the people who read the Blades boards read all the Blades boards. I'll lock this and [url="http://spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com/index.php?/topic/20353-za-khazi-run-special-items-with-no-resale-value/#entry269697"link to the original.[/url]

I tend to focus on the more formal aspects of literary analysis as the things that make English classes not the same as, say, history or political science classes, but Nik's post reminds me of the fact that I recently read the first half of Uncle Tom's Cabin — a book of fiction — partly in order to get an account of American slavery from someone contemporary with the practice. An analysis of a book like that need not be formal; it might be historical or political (among other things), even in an English class. Come to think of it, as far as I can tell from reading it, the reason that it's standard in middle school and high school reading lists in American schools is not its literary merit, because the writing is competent but not spectacular. It's in the canon virtually entirely because of its historical/social/political importance. In that sense, I'm not sure that you can say that the humanities are completely distinct from each other, so if you understand the importance of, say, history, you can't just draw a sharp line and say that English classes are different in some deep way.

This is the very distinction that I just called nonsense. Even if I were to concede that this distinction is real and not just a matter of framing — which I'm not sure that I'm ready to do — there's a second problem here. All academic study is in consumption, not in production. Lab courses and applied engineering courses, as well as some creative writing courses and other such things, attempt to be in production, but your basic intro physics classes? In no sense is anyone going to go out and produce more Newtonian mechanics after taking Newtonian mechanics. That discipline is finished. At best, we can say that that person can go out and determine situations in which Newtonian mechanics is applicable and analyze them, but how is that different from someone who deeply understands the structure of (say) certain works of modernist and postmodernist literature, and recognizes such rhetorical techniques when they are used, and analyzes them? Put another way, what students are graded on in an English class is not how much they like Chaucer but how well they can write analyses of Chaucer. How is that not production, if solving physics or chemistry problems for homework and exams is "production" in some sense? (Especially given that what they're writing is not, "OMG that passage was so neat!" but rather some analysis of literary techniques, structure, etc., which may be reused either by the student or by some other author at some later point. Frankly, I think an English major is more prepared to produce works of literature than a physics major is prepared to do any kind of applied physics at the end of an undergrad major.) I'm fairly certain that's not so. A biology class could teach a great deal of writing, I'm sure, but it would no longer be a biology class. It would be a technical writing class. (This would be an "English" class, albeit perhaps taught in a biology department.) Perhaps I'm describing the idea uncharitably and therefore am wrong. Maybe it would be possible to teach a biology class that actually taught biology but also taught some writing skills at the same time. This is not something that I have a lot of experience with. But my sense is that in physics, at least, it's hard to design anything more than paragraph-answer for the kinds of topics covered at the undergraduate level, and that simply doesn't engage the same writing skills as a full-blown essay. I do think that there are serious problems with the way that academic coursework in these disciplines is structured, but I don't think you've identified one here. EDIT: What I've said is not terribly different from what Slarty said, I suppose, but it may help to have it in different words.

This seems to be the crux of your argument, but as far as I can tell, it's just nonsense; you're trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist. Having studied physics, I have no idea how it enabled me to do something useful or valuable for other people. I guess if they really, really needed to know the landing spot of a projectile through airless space, given a launch angle and a speed, I could tell them that. But if I had a nickel for every time I'd come across a person who needed me to tell them that, I'd still be flat broke. I also don't know how the equations of projectile motion are in any sense more "objectively real" than the fact that Shakespeare wrote some stuff back in the 1590s or so. One is a fact about history and the other is a general principle, I suppose, but that isn't a difference in how "real" they are. Even if you assume that all disciplines teach some kind of critical thinking and, at least in passing, teach some kind of writing, you have to admit that English teaches writing (and close reading) a lot more than the sciences do. A person who struggles somewhat with writing will have advanced rather differently after an English major than after a Physics major. (I should hasten to add that writing about literature is not always the right vehicle for learning to write; some people would do better trying to learn to write about something else. But we shouldn't begrudge the ones who would rather learn to write by writing about literature.) But perhaps most importantly, I think you are mistaking the purpose of an English class, too. After a good class on Shakespeare, you probably enjoy reading Shakespeare more, but the point isn't your enjoyment; the point is your understanding. You know a lot more about what he was doing, and how his plays were put together, in terms of language and scene structure and character and so on. This probably makes you like them more, but that's basically an unintended (but fortunate) side effect. I liked looking at the sky more after taking a stellar astrophysics classes, but those classes weren't "star appreciation" classes. They were about understanding stars, not about liking stars. A class in Shakespeare is the same.

Yeah, I suppose for clarity I should add that it's not actually an Arthurian legend, since it takes place about 300-400 years before King Arthur. It just feels like one. It also feels a little like the Chronicles of Prydain and anything else that's British/Celtic mythology.

I generally agree that Avernum is the closest to ordinary heroic fantasy, and Avadon is a close second. All Spidweb's games have swords, magic, levels, etc., but these two are in traditional fantasy worlds. Nethergate has the feel of an Arthurian legend and is generally highly regarded around here. Geneforge would be a little less familiar to someone who is thinking primarily of D&D: it revolves around creating monsters and fighting created monsters, and it doesn't feel very medieval, Tolkien-esque. It feels slightly more sci-fi/fantasy than straight fantasy. Other topics with "first game recommendation" questions abound, such as this one.

Sorry, that's all I could think of. Yeah, the junk bag was an improvement, but if you don't carry too much extra junk that you don't need and if you organize things reasonably, you don't have too many problems even without it.

This bothered me a lot in Avadon 1. I spent a lot of time wandering through towns trying to figure who to talk to and who didn't matter, because the towns were enormous. It made the towns less effective for me. It didn't bother me in Avadon 2, though, maybe because Jeff did a better job with the map markings this time.

Sounds like Doom Demon Echoes IV: The Lost Island of the Valley of the Big Quest for the Lair of the Undead Goblins and the Revenge of the Dragon-Killing Moon-Sword! Er, on a more helpful note, I'm reasonably certain that's not one that I've played, so it's more recent than, say, 2007. I'm looking over the scenario lists now, and that doesn't narrow it down all that much, though.

Nah, that'd be too much like the Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy.