Well...

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(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.

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.

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?

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?

"Do you think nephilim do that thing where they stick one leg up in the air while they lick their genitals? [Y/N]"

"How often does Jeff Vogel respond to your e-mails? [1-10] (Gotta say, I'm not impressed on this front.)"

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...

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,

 

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.)

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.

You are a: Communist Pro-Government Non-Interventionist Humanist Liberal

Collectivism score: 83%
Authoritarianism score: 17%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: -67%
Liberalism score: 33%

 

If my initial reaction to a question was "well, that's tricky, innit?", then I put down "Maybe".

 

There were a lot of "Maybe"s.

3 hours ago, Kelandon said:

Call it what you want, but when you're told to go somewhere, you go everywhere other than the place you're told to go.

 

Not only is that also the way I play CRPGs, but it's the way that we've all been trained to play CRPGs. If you advance the main quest line, you risk losing access to side quests (for a SW example, think moving from one chapter to the next in Avernum 2). So if you're a completionist who wants to see every aspect of a scenario, you paradoxically have to ignore the advice the scenario is giving you.

What if I pronounce the 'ch' in 'archmage' like the 'ch' in 'Bach'?

http://dintiradan.ermarian.net/static/misc/timeline.txt should have everything up to late 2012. I suppose I should update at some point. Also, if anyone has any corrections, please let me know.

All this is messing with my headcanon of Vahnatai sounding like Cockney English and Archaic Slith sounding like Jamaican Patois.

Wait, there's another way to play?

Hi Iffy! Long time no see!

Unfortunately I don't really know much about the Exodus, so I won't be able to draw as many parallels.

What disappoints me the most about Exodus is that at no point does Legare's wife circumcise their son with a flint knife and drop the foreskin at Legare's feet in order to stave off the wrath of the Goddess. 0/10, worst scenario ever.

And Kelandon has not left me ANY arrows ANYWHERE in this game. ONLY the occasional 4 or 5 razordisks. That is NOT sufficient for a ranged-focused character.

Heh, I think I know the reason for this. Bahs was released early on, and there was only a small handful of scenarios that came out before it. One of those was Canopy, which level-wise came between Diplomacy with the Dead and Bahs. Canopy had a collection of (in my opinion, overpowered) magic items, one of which was a very strong bow that did not require ammunition. Since most people played Canopy before Bahs, it's entirely possible that testing was done with parties that had gone through Canopy first.

 

In fact, one of my first interactions with this community was complaining how difficult Bahs was compared to Vogel scenarios, especially for my archer, and being chastised for not playing Canopy first for the bow.

Good things come to those who wait six and a half years.

 

I do actually need beta test reports, if only to illustrate what a beta test report looks like. Specifically, I need someone to find a bug (can you finish the scenario if you leave the hideout without killing the chest goblin?), and someone to make an unreasonable request that I'll turn down.

Hello!

 

I am a new scenario designer and I would appreciate it if people could beta test my first scenario: Pesky Goblins. You can download the latest beta version of the scenario here. If you're able to test, post in the thread, and please PM me your feedback when you're done.

 

Thank you!

"Whoa! Okay! I did not expect that to happen!"

 

I'm really looking forward to the altar fight.

it's been ten years, with only a single new scenario made in that time, "Pilgrimage to Thrakos" by Sylae

"The Crusaders" by Bain-Ihrno was also released in that time period (I don't know exactly when, but it was an entry in the 10th Design Contest). Just pointing it out in case it's missing on your master list.

Blades Invaders is a hastily made port(ish) of Space Invaders I made, mostly to test out a pathfinding trick. There's no plot or anything; invaders (reskinned goblins) keep spawning on one side of the map and you lose if one reaches the other side. I believe I tested with a melee singleton strong enough to kill goblins with one blow, but whatever works.

Hey, don't sell yourself short. You don't write Tumblr-level poetry. You write Wordpress-level poetry.

 

(I had the benefit of reading We before I had read or even heard of 1984 and the like. Literally just picked it off the shelf because it had an intriguing title and cover art. Was not at all what preteen me was expecting but I still enjoyed it. Probably should do a reread at some point.)

The only one I can remember you should really skip is Kill Prize, Win Ogre. That is just a super short, stupid in-joke about a BoE joke.

I agree. Make sure you catch Dallerdin's Scenario, though.