Boots

Tarl\'s passwords.

I'm presuming TM counts cursed items as a "workaround," since he and I discussed the idea awhile back. What effect are you trying to reproduce, TM? The absolute inability to wield a weapon -- as in my attempt to reproduce the effects of amputation -- or simply the illegality of walking around with openly brandished choppers?

All right, that is more attention than this thoroughly mediocre, tiresome scenario EVER deserved. Any RPG plot, in so far as it is structured around the quest to defeat a social problem that has been abstracted, externalized and exemplified by some enemy other, is fundamentally ethical in design: we are good because we are us; you are bad because you aren't. Die. Whether or not that mechanism then dispenses a "message" is an academic question. At some point in the most "entertaining," least "preachy" scenario, somebody's gonna commit some suppposed atrocity or do something else that asks a player -- no matter how perfunctory the asking -- to feel the righteous rising of the gorge and, on the strength of that, direct a remorselessly vindicating blade against the inhuman cause, blah blah blah. VoDT is only conspicuous because it tries to use that ethical logic to solve a problem which exceeds the explanatory power of ethical externalization. Thus the clearest, smartest thing said in all this mess: Quote: What irritated me slightly was that this "evil mage-woman" theme repeated itself again in yet another J. Vogel's game. Take a structural problem inextricable from everything valued as human progress and happiness -- and therefore, a problem insoluable without sacrficing or otherwise relinquishing something of value to that happiness. Then lose your nerve in the face of writing a plot adequate to that choice (it would require making players play differently as a result of their decisions). Upon which failure, find the nearest scapegoat: there's one recently escaped from the kitchen -- she can't have gotten far. Those vale-dwellers, let alone the PCs, never gained anything from the cause of the pollution, so as a representation of the question, VoDT is mealy-mouthed, if not basically dishonest (likewise the Geneforges, though that's another story). No matter how well-represented or explained the "sides" of a moral choice are in an RPG, if that choice does not require a player to change the way he or she plays -- not just to kill different arrangements of sprites, but to engage in different forms of action -- it is at best an abstract choice of taste (which flavor do you like best, "individual" or "society"? biotech or nature? guys with blue uniforms or guys with red uniforms? on whose behalf would you like to slaughter, Coke or Pepsi?). At which point, the most complexity you can hope for is ASR-style nihilism, which -- since all sides reduce to the same denominator -- readily converts into a complacent affirmation of whatever prejudices a player brings to the story. How about not scrapping the article but changing its focus? More nuts and bolts: how to make the mechanics of gameplay change as a result of the "moral" decisions you ask a player to make. This might, among other things, involve coming up with plots other than the quest plot.

Comments before beginscendatascript work fine for me and are in the prepackaged scenarios' scripts. Nor could I reproduce the error by pasting the entire snippet into a new file -- which might then be the solution, if no help for an explanation (what app are you using to write your scripts?).

Already have, doesn't do much. The problem seems pretty clearly the result of operator negligence.

. . . . and a good place to find custom item scripts: look at the scenario data scripts for the prepackaged scenarios (i.e. valleydydata.txt). EDIT: By the way, spyderbytes, since you use the editor far more than I do: I've been assuming that I get the "out of memory" error because I'm doing sloppy and stupid swapping back and forth between BoA and the Editor (since quitting either usually eliminates the error), and not because there's an actual bug in the Editor. Have you run into the error? (If it happens, it does so the first time the Editor tries to load a new graphic.)

To begin with, you probably need some quotation marks around the item's names. Beyond that, what exact error message do you mean by "won't recognize"? Some, such as that odd "out of memory" message, are easily fixed by quitting and restarting the Editor.

x_icon_adjust = color shift (with the prefix x = "fl," "cr," "it," etc.). See pp. 48-49 of the Editor Manual for the available color shift options you can employ. x_which_icon and x_ed_which_icon define an icon's location on the sheet defined by which_sheet or ed_which_sheet. See p. 48 for this as well.

The point is that an item given it_variety = 9 should NEVER combine with anything of the same type, at least according to the Editor docs, p. 61, so it_variety = 9 does not seem to work as advertised.

Again, my memory is hazy, but I believe you need only make it to the Hall of Judgment and stand at the dock. So don't try to kill off the hordes, just keep moving forward in each combat round and hack a way through them.

This is happening on the battlefield itself? If so, stick to the north or south wall, particularly as you approach the middle (there are little bypasses there). If it's not happening there, you'll have to wait for somebody with a better memory to post.

Amazonian Saga has something along the lines of a villain whose heart you change. Sort of. Not going to try to remember all the twists and turns in that plot.

Got busy spewing another of my endless nothings, but there's no point saying anything besides: Thuryl is, as usual, very very right. Well, that, and also: I'd play a learning-disordered marmot with serious Mommy issues if that's what *i had required for me to witness Emulations change-up everything he did previously as a designer. That's far more interesting than any attachment I might have formed with Tongue or whoever the fighter is who's in the party I use for high level scenarios. It wouldn't be shabby, however, to let designers do more with PC names than dump them into the text area -- or am I missing the calls for dialog boxes, etc.? Not a big deal, I guess.

Does the dialogue action INN (p. 93 of the Editor Docs) not work for your purposes?

From well outside the "designing" community, and well inside the "too stupid to figure out how to download from Alex." community: It might be interesting to recast this question. What "open-ended" and "linear" scenarios have tended to share is a similar motivation for their action. Built after the model of romance quests, their stories are pulled along by some goal. And it is tough to keep the contract of an open-ended, richly-detailed world in a story that otherwise progresses by being pulled. On the other hand, "push" plots -- to take the simplest example, the story of a pursuit -- are somewhat rarer in Blades. Yet set the law after me, and I'll be happy to have a world with as many obscure nooks and crannies as I can find. I don't know that "push" versus "pull" is more useful than "open-ended" versus "linear." It probably isn't. But it does seem to me that we're familiar enough with the terms of the second debate that it's worth mapping the ground shared by its combatants. That might provide a reference from which designers can depart into new territory.

Crazy. VoDT is probably the more reliable test, but I've made a sample scenario with two towns, and I can't combine wands between them. I can however combine a wand with another that I pick up after leaving and re-entering the same town in which I acquired the first. Meanwhile, the inability to combine across scenarios seems pretty hard and fast. That all seems eccentric enough to need repairing in one direction or another.

I've been trying to reproduce this, and I can't. Do you remember where precisely you got those wands? Presumably, you need wands with the same ability_str. Let's hope! Otherwise it's not a harmless bug. EDIT: I take that back. From further tinkering, there seems to be at least one condition in which wands combine. Identical wands picked up in the same town will combine with each other, but not with identical wands from different towns/scenarios (which includes different play-throughs of a single scenario). Once combined, they cannot be split.

Hmm. In the interests of wasting more of my time, I just tried that. Result: NO western entrance anymore. Only north and south.

I'm a low-brow player. Although I'm not eight, I was considerably more refined when I was. And I've said about twelve times my peace on this subject lately, but . . . . 1) The problem with what JV calls "irrational" stories is that they aren't irrational. There's no more thoroughly and self-consciously explained plot than Z-K Run; nor is there any more thoroughly calculated, unsurprising and homogenous world than the one imagined in Z-K Run. The problem with it isn't that it doesn't make sense. The problem is that it does nothing but make sense: during the scenario's duration, nothing actually happens. No action plays out -- only exposition. Everybody you run into takes pains to convince you why it is entirely plausible for them to be where they are, doing what they're doing. They're so busy with these explanations that they never ultimately do anything, with the result that the story of the scenario is nothing more than an unfolding rationalization of why the scenario exists. That's not the error of choosing action over story or combat over plot. That's the error of trying to write a plot in which no consequential action occurs. To see something truly "irrational" -- that is to say, something against all the rules of Blades "reality" -- happen, you'd have to play, say, An Apology: a scenario that is, at the same time and not by coincidence, quite heavy on story. 2) The reason, then, that the "combat vs. plot" debate is age-old is that it isn't a debate at all. Rather than one or the other of them doing the driving, the friction caused by their clash is what drives any decent RPG. If you resolve that misfit in favor either of gameplay or of story, you lose a player's attention. On the one hand, combat will become busywork; on the other, story will wither into Senecan speechifying with NPCs declaiming their various ethical allegiances and tedious traumas or endless dialogue boxes slapping you in the face with Meaning. Good design does not, however, consist in balancing the two terms; it sets them at odds -- sparking action from their conflict. In fact, the worst BoE scenarios aren't those in which there is only busywork or yammering NPCs/self-important meaning. The worst BoE scenarios have both (there's a reason VoDT ticks me off worse than Z-K; and I would enjoy the Geneforges were they actually as they are cynically misrepresented above -- in practice, there's a good deal more stale All-State Forensics Meet ponderousness in them than is good for anybody . . . .). Nephil's Gambit likely enjoys the reputation of a good "plot" scenario. It certainly has an overbearing storyline. That's not why it was the first thing that made me happy to have spent money on BoE. That scenario is brilliant because individual fights themselves have little narratives of suspense and surprise to them: you have to, as it were, struggle just to get to the overarching story -- there's no easy fit between the local "action" and the larger "plot."

As the manual ambiguously says, 1x1 town entrances behave in "tricky" ways when assigning a direction to the party. (And in my experience, 2x2 proves equally as tricky.) If the manual's example is to be trusted, the game's four step system for arriving at that direction is adapted a little too well to a 3x3+ square. In your case -- at least if my tinkering is anything to go on -- the difficulty may not lie along the east-west axis; rather, it may lie in the game's criteria for differentiating between west and south (and south = east on your town map). South is the first direction the game checks; thus, in the case of a 1x1 entrance, it is more likely than west to be awarded entrance honors (even on a 2x2 entrance, south tends to trump west and east). I could easily be wrong, because I don't really grasp what the game tries to do with a 1x1. Try putting N-S-W together in one place and E together in another, and see whether that doesn't appear to make west its old self.

Thank you again for your patience with us code-clumsy types: these things are marvels of clarity. And thanks further for starting the get_energy() campaign. I'd been trying and failing to fake it without fully realising that that was what I was trying to fake. It would be very, very good. Am I right that, were it possible to call deduct_ap from scripts other than creature scripts, the absence of AP cost for ability 219 wouldn't be as serious? Not that I'd know whether such a change would be less invasive for JV to make than adding a fixed AP cost to the ability, but presumably certain designers might prefer to have the freedom to vary the cost.

What's wrong with void turn_off_training(0)? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

The gentleman seems to mean cr_icon_adjust. See pp. 48-49 of the Editor manual (and I suppose 59, as well, though it's a passing ref.).

Small or large template? And which rows do you want for attack, etc. (i.e. armored or not? which weapon? and such). EDIT: Ah, heck, I just emailed a version of each. I'll be around for another half hour or so should you wish different poses, or should something have gone wrong.

To control for problems with size and format, I copied one of the provided 64x64 scenario icons from the Scen Icon Graphics file into a resource in the .cmg file. When referenced in the Set Label Icon editor dialog by its resource number in the Scen Icon Graphics file, the icon appears without problem in the list of scenarios accessed from the Main Menu's "Enter Scenario" option. When referenced by the resource number I gave it in the .cmg file, it does not appear in the list of scenarios; in its place, the default icon (1944) appears. When you say that "it worked out fine" for you, do you mean in this specific application? (There are other uses for scen icons; they've worked fine for me in those.)