Kelandon

*revive* Well, I'm going to make a 24-hour scenario the weekend after this coming weekend (probably on July 1st). If anyone else would like to join me, I propose that we make it more of a compact than a contest: let's all agree to play each other's scenarios and comment on them. I don't want to go through judging and that garbage. I just want to get a few people to play my scenario and say what they liked and what they didn't (and not give it a damn rating, because that just gets people going in the wrong direction). I propose the deadline be the following weekend (say, July 8), and you can split your 24 hours into a maximum of 2 blocks, ideally. The point is to finish and make something worthwhile, though, so if you take more time or something, it's not as though I care.

My first thought was that I never wanted to revisit the Shark contest. My second thought was that two of my favorite BoE scenarios of the later era, Hunted! and SPS, were good Shark scenarios that probably never would've been made without the contest. Eh.

Let's do this with a week including the last weekend of this month.

As far as I know, there is no reason that BoA asks to change screen resolution. I stopped having it do that a long time ago and have suffered no ill effects. I'll second that people (not me) have made some really nice-looking BoA scenarios, considerably more so than VoDT (the demo).

I'm now at the (long) entrance to Dorikas's fortress. It seems like there are unnecessary respawns coming from ahead of me, and this entrance is taking for-freaking-ever. I finally ran back to the pylon to recharge before I go at it again. I like this attack, but I don't like the spawns.

Sidequests are a distraction in a primarily linear plot-oriented game. Avernum is generally exploration-oriented and sidequest-heavy. To me, at least, it seems like excessive sidequests would be annoying in Avadon. (Though there were a number of shorter — and sometimes very hard — ones.)

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No, I found the third boat. I got it. I'm now in Melanchion's area, not totally finished with the vahnatai. I just wanted to escape through the underground passages in that middle area and see what happened. My getting smacked around a fair bit is what happened, but I made it. I have to say, and I imagine I'm not the first to think this, that the Cienna betrayal was almost exactly the same as the Miranda betrayal in Avadon. It was also somewhat less interesting, because it was phrased as a kind of duress rather than something personal, and because it was kind of telegraphed (given her weird responses somewhat before that). I ended up killing her, though I was glad that I got a chance to forgive her at the end. Melanchion is cool. I'd rather that nothing awful happen to him, but everything around the area is suggesting that something will. Also, the GIFTS. Oh, the GIFTS. And the one GIFTC. I've always found the GIFTS strange distractions before, but I really liked them this time. They had a little more character and personality (the one who wanted to be an aranea, the one who was a shopkeeper).

Found a boat at Shankar's Tower. Not sure what happened, but I got it. Wandering around vahnatai lands now. I'm kind of underwhelmed, but maybe I'm just tired and need to stop playing for the day.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer There should have been 3 boats back where you start at Harston Docks and there is another at Shankar's Tower that is borrowable. You may have left a boat somewhere and forgotten it when you used a pylon like at Gladwell's Tower or on the far side of Shankar's Tower. Before I went on a crazy wild goose chase, I just wanted to confirm this. All right, I'll go searching around. Originally Posted By: Randomizer I really hated Morbo and found the easiest way to wear him down is to charm its creations against him. Nothing seem to do more than 10 damage. As of right now, I don't appear to have any charming spells. I guess I'll remedy that and then come back for Morbo.

Almost done with the Azure Gallery. The giants were easier than I expected; I used the Submission Bow on their queen, and she stopped having turns to attack me. I gather we were supposed to have some sort of dialogue or something after she first charged me, but that never happened, because she just stopped being able to move. The only fight that I'm still having trouble with is Morbo; he's just immune to any kind of damage that I can throw at him, as far as I can tell. I tried tossing area of effect spell after area of effect spell to kill his summons, but I ran out of spell points before he ran out of health. I then tried to conserve spell points and fight a very long attrition battle, but after about half an hour, a misplaced spellcaster or two led me to lose again. I think I'll come back after doing some other stuff. Oh, and I didn't do Lark's quest in this area yet. In general, I'm enjoying exploration a little more. The Muck-Highground rivalry was interesting to watch (I ended up siding with Muck). I'm looking forward to meeting vahnatai, which I gather is next. I tried to go back to complete some of the old Shanker's Tower quests and such, but I had one fewer boat than I thought. Weren't there supposed to be three boats available to me at the first docks? I took one down the rapids on the first trip, then I went down the rapids again to do a follow-up quest, and now I don't seem to have any boats left upstream.

I was kind of into the Sheryl Crow baby spam. That's why I didn't delete the thread altogether.

That said, we do also frown upon you. Vigorously.

Is the point here to fix the lack of line breaks? A word like "scattered" isn't really descriptive enough to explain what you're talking about. This probably isn't an issue on Macs or in most word processing programs because they'll recognize the line breaks properly to begin with. It's just that Notepad has issues.

It's spam. But it's so cute! And is that Sheryl Crow? Oh well.

Originally Posted By: Flowers in Dikimber I kind of lost steam in A5 after this; I really enjoyed the Howling Depths sequence, but (and I'm not entirely sure why) I lost interest in finishing almost immediately after completing it. Wow, I've had almost exactly the opposite reaction. Highground and surroundings are awesome. I really get the feeling that I'm out in the wilds, now, which is what the Northern Frontier was billed as. Maybe it's just my general antipathy towards the Anama and my feeling that Tranquility didn't really do everything that it could have — if you have an entire planned community created and ruled by an extremely powerful but slightly too self-obsessed mage, it should have a little more wild magic than just the occasional construct going nuts — but this is the first time since going through the first rapids that I feel excited to explore a new area.

To be fair, I have been killing every single enemy and collecting everything that they drop through the whole encounter, and I have had to reload a couple of times. If I had just run past that second encounter with the archers raining down arrows instead of insisting on killing all the archers, it would've gone faster. Okay, time to finish it.

Follow-up: I'm in the middle of the Howling Depths. This may be my favorite sequence in any Spidweb game since the assault on the Ornotha Ziggurat in A2 (which I think was my favorite sequence in any Spidweb game ever). It is rather long, though.

[boring backstory: After playing every Spidweb game as it came out, I quit around the release of GF4. I felt that Avernum 4 was a particularly weak release, and while I didn't have the complaints about GF3 that most others did, I chose a totally wrong character build for GF4 that eventually made the game nearly impossible and therefore utterly no fun. As a result, I pretty much quit playing Spidweb games. However, when Avadon came out, I decided to give it a shot, and I liked it enough that I decided to come back and play A5, A6, GF4, and maybe GF5 if I get around to it. Now that the school year is over and I have a moment, I'm starting with A5. I realize that I'm a few years late to the party, but I figured I'd post the occasional thoughts and see what people think, if anyone cares at all.] I'm playing Avernum 5 on Normal, and I just got through Tranquility. Gladwell kind of freaked me out, so I didn't go for the geas, and I've been telling the Darkside Loyalists to screw off when they try to recruit me. My party setup has been first-character melee fighter, second character pole fighter-bow archer, third character priest-mage, fourth character mage-priest. (Each character has a primary focus and some additional skills in something else.) This has not been a particularly good party arrangement, especially since the second character is a slith (by default, I think; should've made him a nephil, but didn't think about it at the time). I probably should've made the third character a priest-bow archer, rather than a priest-mage, but it's a little late for that; I might buy him some bow skills from the guy in Tranquility, though. On Normal, I haven't had serious problems. I can get through pretty much every fight on the first try, except the very hardest, which take two or three tries. Combat balance seems mostly reasonable. But, and here's the point I probably should've started with, the most notable thing about this game is that it seems most like Avernum 3, with some nods to GF. I'm not sure what I expected, maybe something a little more plot-driven, but this isn't what I thought I would find. What I mean is that the game seems almost entirely based on exploration, rather than plot. There aren't really characters or a storyline; there are just locations and largely interchangeable quests. You're wandering around in areas that are sort of hostile but essentially tamed, even if they are overrun with monsters, almost exactly like A3's monster plagues. Indeed, this is is A3 inverted: where A3 was an Avernite going to the surface and meeting with general distrust amid the monster plagues, A5 is an Empire soldier going into Avernum and meeting with general distrust and monster plagues. The sequential exploration of areas also feels very A3; while you didn't have to go strictly in order in A3, the difficulty ramped up in such as way that you probably would anyway. The nods to GF come from the occasional Darkside recruiting efforts, but whereas in GF I usually felt at least a little torn, the Darkside Loyalists are just utterly unappealing to me. Some other things seem sort of Geneforge-y, but I can't quite place them now. Anyway, this A3-ish vibe that I'm getting from A5 isn't bad, just surprising. I came back to Spidweb because of Avadon, so I guess I was expecting something slightly more linear and plot-driven, but hey, I really liked A3 back when I first played it. Maybe there's more plot here than I'm giving Jeff credit for, and I'm just ignoring it because I feel like I'm playing one of my own scenarios. My BoE scenario from circa 2001, NK0P, was supposed to be the prologue to a several-part series taking place in the "Northern Kingdom" of Avernum, i.e. the Northern Frontier of A5. (The acronym stands for Northern Kingdom 0: Prologue.) Apparently, Jeff had the very same idea and made a game out of it. I'd say that the giant river journey reminds me of Exodus, but frankly, I stole the premise from the Za-Khazi Run. Anyway, I'm having fun so far, but I kind of hope that the "hunt for Dorikas" thing actually picks up at some point, because right now it's feeling very ZKR-drawing-focus-ish. I also hope that this party build doesn't end up being completely untenable, even on Normal, in later areas.

Because I don't change my PDN often enough.

This was the reason for the Custom Objects Script Base, which it occurs to me isn't really available anywhere now that the Lyceum is defunct, so I'm putting it on my website. There are a lot of graphics that are in the default files but aren't by default available in the editor.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Khothee and TV Originally Posted By: Actaeon We used to discuss practically every Order of the Stick over at Shadow Vale. I trust that the next big satellite will have a section devoted to webcomics. In fact, I only ever remembered to check OOTS by seeing responses in that thread. I should probably go and read some now, but considering I've about two years to catch up on, I might wait until a less ungodly hour. It's probably only updated like two, three dozen times in the past years. It's super slow now. This is an underestimate by a factor of a few. The average update rate this year has been a little over once a week (29 in 5.5 months).

And you kind of need to read the documentation and look at some example scripts, or you're never going to get this.

Originally Posted By: Sylae I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not I would venture to guess, based on that first paragraph, that "sarcastic" is a fair bet.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity If Barack Obama and Lady Gaga wanted to share an account here and pretend to be an intelligent mutant eggplant, then board member Ogamagaba would have the right to be referred to as a purple vegetable. I disagree. I may not have any idea who anyone here actually is in real life, but if you choose to share a backstory, it should it at least be plausible. If you want to tell me that you're in a barbershop quartet in Skokie, Illinois, or that you like to pick coffee beans in Guatemala, or whatever, then I can't verify that and I'm likely to believe you. If you tell me that you're an eggplant, then I'm going to take your story as a stupid Internet identity and 1) think you're an idiot and 2) not believe you. You don't have the "right" to claim any identity you want; you have the ability to claim any identity that no one will bother to disbelieve. Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Anyone who doesn't want to go along with that has the option of not mentioning that member at all. This has generally been my solution for members who I will continue not to mention.