Prince of Kitties

[bolding mine]

Umm. I hate to go there, but what would you call the Third Reich?



Disagree, disagree, and disagree.

- In what passes for my field (CS/IT) there are enormously more men than women. And I've seen some pretty ugly attitudes towards women from other men in the field. No, I can't provide empirical data, but it doesn't take a genius to think that these might be connected.

- I've never seen "men are bad at language/social concepts" pushed to the same degree as "women are bad at math/logic/spacial reasoning." Not by my peers, and certainly not by the media, which for a while was latching onto every damn chance to glorify the supposed cognitive differences between men and women.*

- Not sure about law, medicine, or business, but good gods, have you seen the treatment women in politics get around here? Even wingnuts like Sarah Palin have to put up with misogynist halfwits. Also, dare I remind you of former president Bush's treating your Chancellor Merkel to an impromptu backrub?

*NB: not to say that there are no cognitive differences on average between men and women. I just think it's absurd the way pop psychology amplifies them into "OMG men are vastly superior logical thinkers."

I'm afraid you probably can't help, but thank you very much anyway. Don't worry, I'm (slowly) clawing my way back into normalcy.

 

BTW, please don't let me sidetrack this discussion with personal issues. I may have them (in spades) but that wasn't my point; I was basically using myself as an example of where educators can unwittingly go wrong.

 

Edit: seriously though, thanks. Your compassion has been noted.

Thank you. I kind of expected to be told off for siding with the oppressor.



I think high school level might be the right place. From what I've seen that's where a lot of the tensions really start brewing; IMO, requiring schools to counteract that macho rubbish at the time it starts taking hold would be a really good idea. Also, high school kids are
- probably more malleable, and less likely to throw up mental barriers
- less likely to crash and burn under the guilt, since they'll have less of it (and see also malleability)
- maybe more likely to understand the whole deal with oppression, since it dovetails so neatly with the High School Experience

The main problem with making Women's Studies stuff a required part of high school education, I think, would be (grossly ignorant) public opposition.

I don't usually get involved in this kind of discussion, but for some reason I feel like giving my 2 cents...

 

I think a lot of the inertia in acknowledging gender (and racial) oppression in first-world countries is about guilt. For a huge number of people - particularly white men - acknowledging this oppression means acknowledging that they have acted, and may still be acting, in the role of the oppressor. I think most people engaged in these oppressive behaviors do have consciences; they don't oppress because they're sociopaths, they oppress because they've gotten good at rationalizing, and justifying their behavior to themselves. Strip away that bogus justification and they will feel guilty.

 

Some people will find ways of dealing that that guilt. But a lot of them will just say, "I don't want to deal with this." They'll rationalize it away and stick their heads back in the sand. And others will just crack under it.

 

See... A while ago, I decided that I might be more comfortable in a gender role other than the one I was raised in. I might have been right, I might have been wrong. It doesn't really matter; not that long after that, I took a Women's Studies class at my university, and gave up on the idea entirely. Since then I've dropped out of college, and mostly dropped out of life.

 

It is not a lie to say that that class all but broke me as a person. That is how heavy that guilt trip was. And granted that some of the material presented in the class struck me as uncomfortably close to a kind of religion - "we can't prove this, but you should believe it anyway" - I still think that most of it was factually correct. So my feeling is that, if you want to introduce people to the idea that they too might be oppressors, the Guilt Trip is the first barrier you need to overcome. If you want to educate people about gender and racial oppression in modern society - and I think that's what all sane and practical methods for dealing with those problems boil down to - you have to find some way of not either a) crushing them with their new awareness, or triggering their Mental Firewall and making them stop listening.

 

... Yeah. My 2 cents. That turned out a lot longer and wordier than I wanted, and I'm not sure posting it on a public forum was a good idea, but whatever. With luck I won't cause too much offense.

 

/steps off podium

 

Edit: BTW, speaking of causing offense... I want to make it clear that I am in no way saying that "being made to feel guilty" is anywhere near as awful a thing as being the target of gender or racial oppression.

 

Also, I'm aware that "making the oppressors feel guilty" might strike victims of oppression as quite justified. Didn't the oppressors do much worse to them? Well, I'm not saying it isn't justified; just that it may be (dangerously) counterproductive.

 

Again, just my 2 cents.

No prob... From what I've heard the codebase is a mess, and anyway the whole thing's a volunteer effort.

 

(Sorry, BTW, if I've come across as a jerk about certain bugfixes and stuff in the past. Suffice to say I was ignorant about the amount of work involved in maintaining a game engine.)

Changes list says no WxWidgets related commits since June 2011.

 

... I wish I had the C/C++ know-how to help out.

Have any of you guys played the old Exile games? Because those had dual-wielding, and it worked like that. Actually it was probably even more broken, if anything.

Spears (also from Stareye) is probably a pretty good scenario for a beginning party. Much easier overall than AtG, though, both in terms of easier monsters and better equipment proliferating.

 

(BTW, how'd AtG go? I've never made it through to the final fight, always got stuck in the stupid portculli in Gallows Keep.)

Roughly...

 

1. Redemption

2. Falling Stars

3. Of Good and Evil

4. An Apology

5. Tomorrow

6. On A Ship to Algiers

7. Lamentations

8. Staff of Kayolith

 

I would rank Falling Stars higher than Redemption in terms of replay value, but lower in terms of atmosphere.

 

(Never played Kalloskagathos, Heirs to Theseus.)

What does this option do in Classic BoE? And why is it only applied per savegame, not in the INI file like most other options?

IIRC that may not work, as a 100% chance of dropping an item is actually 95% in BoE.

Tip A: If you have trouble getting a singleton off the ground, try making him/her a Slith. The extra 2 points of strength help more than you would think.

 

(Not sure if this might have unfavorable effects in the Trilogy; but IIRC Blades of Exile doesn't let scenarios check for PC race... yet.)

 

Tip B: Boost your PCs' Defense skill at low levels. It helps keep them from getting hit, and not getting hit helps keep them alive.

D'oh! I hadn't even noticed the center indicator. Go me.

 

IMO it would be better if it showed the coords that the cursor was currently over (or last coords the cursor was over, if it was off the editable area). Though "clicking the map and have the coords filled in on the node" would be even better.

 

But of course, the fundamental problem is really the point-and-clickness of BoE nodework... I think I've only just started appreciating the absurd amount of work that's gone into scenarios, especially big ones like "Falling Stars" or "At the Gallows." I can't imagine the work involved; it seems like a truly Herculean effort - like writing a game in object oriented Perl while wearing a blindfold and mittens.

 

Truth be told, I've attempted several times to start on a scenario (I already have a good idea of the plot and characters), and every time I've run into a brick wall of "I don't have time for this." I know how things should work, but translating that into special nodes is very, very time-consuming.

 

Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and purchase a copy of Blades of Avernum, which is backed by scripting instead of this dodgy nodework... umm... stuff. I just can't seem to get used to the whole isometric movement thing.

 

... Wow, that was longer than I intended. Sorry for derailing the thread.

 

Edit: OTOH, Harehunter, your editor looks awesome.

I found my first Spidweb game on a Macintosh game demo CD, when I was maybe 11 or 12 - a copy of Exile: Escape from the Pit. (The old old version with no action points). I found it quite engrossing, despite the infernal mouse-only movement system.

 

Yep... fullscreen 2D gameplay at 800x600 resolution and 8-bit color, with the fear of a full MacOS crash hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles... Good times.

Wow. The things you miss when you're asleep...

 

Thanks for posting the details about this, Polaran - it was something of a learning experience for me.

 

(Mostly learning how ignorant I am about code ubfuscation and other techniques used by blackhats, mind...)

No, I don't. I meant getting the coordinates for any space in a scenario that's opened in the Scenario Editor. You need the X,Y coordinates of the affected space for certain special nodes.

 

(Currently, AFAIK, the only way to do this is to create an item on the space and check the item's coordinates. This is a pain in the neck.)

As far as I know, the "Pacifist" detriment does not exist in BoE or any of the Exile games. That suggestion would be kind of cool though.

 

(Although it might be abusable without some workarounds - you could have a PC damage himself, heal him, and keep going until your pacifist/healer PC had gained several levels.)

Currently, AFAIK, getting the coordinates of a space is rather inconvenient. I think it would be better to have a box somewhere on the screen that displayed the coordinates of whatever space the cursor was over, or had been over before it was dragged out of the editing window.

 

(Not sure how much trouble that would be, though...)

Hmmm. I can think of a number of ways to deal with that, and I don't think any would work in BoE/Exile. They'd require a more complicated system; probably something like what Angband has, where PCs a number of blows per attack.

 

BTW, am I the only one who thinks that stealth-related stuff was underutilized in BoE?

w00t! Especially on the cross-compiling thing. I'll have to try that.

 

Edit: For those of you who don't want to run the installer, FWIW, any archiver that can handle the 7zip format should open it.

That's the thing though, offensive magic in Exile is not overwhelmingly powerful at higher levels. Many creatures resist fire, magic, or both, and poison resistance is pretty common too. Magic is very effective (and ultimately necessary) as an adjunct to melee, but for offense it's really not that powerful except against much weaker monsters. Divine Thud is nice against packs of weak breathers or spellcasters (Ruby Skeletons and Imps come to mind) but that's pretty much it; for most heavy-duty fights, it seems to boil down to bless, haste, and antimagic.

I've been thinking about game balance and character/party diversity in the Exile series and BoE, and I've realized there's a lot of stuff that I would change if I could. I think my changes would look something like this.

 

Magic

I've never found magic to be that useful in combat, aside from as an adjunct to melee. A fighter-mage who blesses and hastes himself is much more effective (in my experience) than a pure mage who slings fireballs around. The player's party is not all that powerful in the Exile universe, so I think this is okay at high levels, but at low levels NPC spells are much more damaging than PC spells. So I would change the damage calculations for PC spells like Fireball to make them more useful at low levels.

 

(Actually NPC spells are more damaging than PC spells at high levels too, but I consider that okay - wizard NPCs may simply be more powerful casters than PCs!)

 

Magical Effects

 

Magic resistant monsters cannot be slowed or cursed. PCs can always be slowed or cursed. My solution would be to make the Magic Resistance spell act as a shield against magical effects: every time the game attempted to apply some evil magic to a PC, there would be a check for Magic Resistance being in effect on them. If the spell was in effect, one level of it would be removed instead of the relevant effect actually being applied; otherwise the effect would be applied as usual. So, the party would get a way of resisting slow/curse, but nothing too too powerful.

 

Gameplay

 

Here comes the most controversial part!

 

Exile and BoE favor the player pretty heavily, with both a "grace hitpoint" at 0 HP and the Luck skill. Having made the party more powerful in some ways, I would remove both of those!

 

I do think I'd keep temporary invulnerability, but I would make it apply only to melee and projectile damage, not spells. Maybe high-level monsters would get that effect from Avatar as well as PCs.

 

 

... Okay, that's it for my list of might-have-beens. What would you guys/gals do, if anything? I'm curious to know...

I'm starting this thread so all the useful BoE tips (particularly for beginning parties) can be agglomerated in one place. Not sure if the mods will consider this a good idea, but here goes.

 

First tip: the mage spell Strength seems to be roughly as effective as the priest spell Bless, and uses 1 SP as opposed to 3, so you get more bang for your buck.

Roots.

A suggestion: if you have the time and the desire, it might be good to also add an archive for new scenarios, on the off chance that someone creates a decent one. (Because the Blades Forge seems to be horribly broken with no chance of being fixed.)

 

Edit: I do realize that might not be worthwhile though, given the lack of new scenarios. Though I suspect it may become a bit more worthwhile once (well, if) your editor's new features get integrated into the WxWidgets scenario editor.