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Dintiradan

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Posts posted by Dintiradan

  1. oh hey it's been five months since I posted my public beta, I should write a readme file and do an actual release

     

    You can download Pesky Goblins here, but more importantly, you can access my now complete Blades of Avernum Design Tutorial here. The tutorial covers every feature that a beginner designer needs to make a basic scenario, and describes the process one goes through in creating a scenario, step by (excruciatingly detailed) step.

     

    This has been yet another Things Dintiradan Should Have Finished Half A Dozen Years Ago Production.

  2. One way to avoid getting thrashed in low-level BoA, especially for outdoor fights, is to use the Enduring Barrier spell. I don't think a default priest character is able to cast it, but a custom level one character is able to know it automatically if you focus heavily on the priest skill. Enduring Barrier lets you 'overheal' a character, and this bonus HP doesn't dissipate over time. So cast it on everyone while you're outdoors, wait a bit, and boom -- your characters have a significant amount of bonus HP as no cost.

     

    It doesn't help you for those long dungeon crawls, and you can get pretty cheesy by popping out of a dungeon after every encounter to re-cast Enduring Barrier -- but then, you can do the same with spell energy.

  3. For what it's worth, Settlers was designed to be a tutorial scenario of sorts. TM designed it to be a demonstration of what any novice would be capable of creating. You can find his design notes in DESIGN_PROCESS.txt in the scenario folder (I recommending skipping the DXM step). If you want to learn more, check out this thread on Shadow Vale. Doubly relevant because Lazarus got the idea for 24 Hour scenarios from Settlers, and you'll be seeing a few of those as you do your LP.

     

    And all this reminds me that I still need to actually release the 99% complete Pesky Goblins, which is basically "Settlers but with more hand-holding".

     

    (What bothers me most about the opening essay for RoR is that Tetragrammaton isn't a name for God. It is, strictly speaking, the name of the name of God.)

  4. Well...

    Quote

    (02:41:12 PM) username: That entire post was made so I could make the A:R joke.


    For what it's worth, had I been Chessrook, and following his method, I wouldn't have included NH as part of the Bahs/Ex/Magic playthrough. But I still think that the tiny but explicit connection in NH is bigger than the connections in TM's scenarios. For instance, the only connection you state for Settler is "you're working for the Empire" -- presumably the same unnamed Empire that exists not only in the "extended universe" canon of Echoes but also in Vogel's (and most other BoA scenarios') canon. If you played Settlers without knowing who the author was, you would never link it with Echoes.

  5. 45 minutes ago, Beyond the cry lies the meaning said:

    We aren't talking about somebody who just wants to play a shorter, light-hearted scenario though.  We're talking about somebody who's going to play all of them and just wants to choose the order that makes the most sense.

    Yeah, and if I was doing it, I'd just do them all in release order. But Chessrook wants to do the ones that form a series first, and then the stand-alone ones, so here we are. It's not really a SW thread until we're quibbling about something.

  6. Why would Bonus Army be part of the Echoes series? It's about the Bonus Army march on Washington, right?

     

    A few references do not a sequel make. Exodus is definitely a sequel of Bahs, and you definitely need to play Bahs before Exodus. But that's not true of Nobody's Heroes, even though Machrone makes a cameo appearance (after all, I'd say none of the Vogel scenarios have a required playing order other than that imposed by level, and Machrone appears in all of them). In fact, if someone was drawn to NH because it was a shorter, light-hearted scenario, I wouldn't want them to feel obliged to play through all of Bahs and Exodus first, which is a very different experience. Sure, you might miss out on what Macky's talking about, but if you're a Full House fan, it shouldn't be required for you to sit through all of Family Matters just so you fully appreciate the Steve Urkel cameo.

     

    As far as I can tell, the only thing that links TM's BoA works together are just that -- subtle hints and references, nods to the enfranchised player. I'm told the links are more explicit in the BoE scenarios, but as someone who hasn't played those... Could someone tell me (spoiler tags if you want) what actually, concretely, links together his post-BoE works like Canopy, Mad Ambition, Echoes: Renegade, and Avernum: Reloaded?

  7. 1 hour ago, Edgwyn said:

    in comparison to the Marvel movies (which talked about a Black Widow movie but never did so)

    My Google-fu is failing me, but I remember reading a Gail Simone blog post where she discussed the viability of superhero movies with women in the title role. She had been hired as a consultant for Disney soon after they had acquired Marvel. The Disney people told her that they viewed the acquisition as a way to reach out to the young male demographic, the way they used to with live-action adventure films and shows in the fifties. It was fine if girls watched, but they targeted those demographics with most of their other products. Other stuff I've read talks about how individual directors and scriptwriters might want more female characters, and more of them, but the main character and overall direction of the film is passed down from above. So you get Black Widow as the deuteragonist of Captain America 2, but not a Black Widow film.

     

    I remember hearing this joke, when Wonder Woman was still in development hell, about how DC was unwilling to take the risks that Marvel took. "Look at DC, they can't even make Wonder Woman, meanwhile Marvel is going, 'Let's throw in Rocket Raccoon!'" Thing is, Marvel hasn't done a female-lead movie either. What does it say when a raccoon is more marketable than a woman?

     

    (really, i'm just glad that the benchmark for female superhero movies is no longer Catwoman)

     

    Also, still think that Thor is really weird as a legacy character. Is everyone in Asgard the same way? He goes by Odinson these days, but what if Odin gets replaced too?

  8. 4 hours ago, Lilith said:

     

    Interestingly, I've heard from a number of people who were into D&D in the very early days, back in the 70s, that there were quite a lot of women playing D&D back then and their numbers gradually declined throughout the 80s and 90s. There are some specific events you can point to as contributing factors, like the rise of V:tM (which tended to attract a higher proportion of women), but I think it's also an example of a more general cultural pattern where a new hobby or industry can resolve into a boys' club. (You can see similar statistics in the number of women studying computer science in universities, for example: initial numbers on par with the number of men, followed a sharp decline that's only now beginning to reverse.)

    It's a definite pattern, yes. If you read scans of Golden Age comics, you'll see ads targeting men and women both (or boys and girls, at least). But that changed over time, and the switch from newsstands to the much more insular comic book stores certainly didn't help. The rise of digital comics has come with a surge in female readership.

     

    And now I'm wondering if the rise of arcades had a similar effect on video gamer demographics -- how would the split for Magnavox or early Atari or other pre-arcade consoles compare with the split for post-arcade consoles like Nintendo or Sega?

     

    Re: CompSci: not only is that the trend over the decades, it's also the trend as the degree progresses. Female enrollment is high (relatively speaking) in the early year, but drops steadily in years two, three, and four. In graduate programs, female enrollment jumps up again for year one, but then drops over time.


    As for the general trend, there's been no lack of speculation why this is the case, and agonizing over how we should try to reverse it. One major cause (in my mind) is that the focus of the field has shifted. In its infancy, it was a lot more mathematics-based, and female enrollment matched what you'd see in other math departments. Over time, it's become more and more like engineering (certainly when it comes to public perception), and female enrollment has dropped to what you usually see in engineering. The other major factor is that while there was no "computer culture" among the general population in the fifties and sixties, that stopped being the case with the advent of consoles, arcades, and personal computers. CompSci began to draw from people who grew up using those things, and since they were predominantly boys...

  9. Something I've noticed (and this is all anecdotal; no hard evidence) is that the segments of geek subculture based around older, more niche things have a higher rate of transwomen. While geek culture is slowly becoming more welcoming to women (trans or cis), this certainly wasn't always the case, and that acted as a filter against ciswomen... but not necessarily transwomen who had yet to identify as such, or come out. So while women picking up D&D 5E today will have a trans-cis ratio similar to the general population, I've noticed that the women who've been playing since the eighties are a little more likely to be trans.

     

    Spiderweb Software? Not only does it make non-mainstream CRPGs, it makes games that are homages to the CRPGs of the early to mid eighties.

     

    Again, just my speculation, and I agree with the points others have made. Also,

    Spoiler

    champagne.jpg for everyone!

     

  10. For what it's worth, most content creators use the same tactic as Chessrook: get a whole bunch of gameplay footage in one go, then edit and release portions of it over the course of a week. It's not even just an LP thing, or even an online video thing -- a lot of sitcoms used to work this way, and a lot of game shows still do.

     

    (The advent of streaming has changed this a bit though: a lot of LPers are moving towards that, and the interactivity it brings.)

  11. 33 minutes ago, Callie said:

    I'd imagine that this score would be a bit different if the statements were worded differently. For example, I responded "no" to "The government always has the right to impose taxes on people" because a government should not have a "right" to impose taxes on people who are not adequately represented, but I would otherwise favor higher taxes in general.

    Yeah, I responded "yes" to that question because my mind immediately went to stuff like sovereign citizens. The percentages are a rough estimate; I could see someone's numbers varying by a dozen or two percentage points based on interpretation, but someone who has +50% in a category is definitely different from someone who has -50% in the same category.

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