Dantius

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES You're really choosing PCP as the abbreviation for Perception? You have a better three-letter abbreviation for Perception? If so, please come forward with it, and I will replace it straightaway.

And my character now no longer sucks at combat. Yippee! As a question, what exactly does the laser sight I've constructed do? +HIT? +Damage? +Badass? Quote: Name: Dr. Clyve Fourier Age: 48 Occupation: Ex-researcher Alignment: Hobbesian STR: 1 DEX: 2 PER: 2 INT: 6 (+1) Gun Knowledge: 6 (+2) Speechcraft: 6 (+2) Engineering: 5 First Aid: 3 Tactics: 1 FEAT: Well-Read (+4 INT 1/Day) FEAT: Armed Academic: Semi-automatic pistols (Negates -4 HIT penalty AND gives +2 HIT bonus) Click to reveal.. (Inventory) Equipped: Lab coat (AC 1) Shirt & tie (White & Black) Slacks (Black) Cheap aviators Kitchen knife (1 DMG) Pistol w/ laser sight(3 DMG, 10 R) Carry-on bag: First-Aid kit (1 bandages, 1 suture) Solar-powered calculator Calibrated pipette Microbiology textbook Lab manual Lab notebook (empty) Pens/pencils Short-sleeved dress shirt (Blue) Slacks (Tan) Sugar (10 pounds) Teriyaki beef jerkey (4 bags) Cigarettes (200) Lighter

I'm starting Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons (sometimes translated as The Possessed). Like all of his other books, it's about a dude/dudes who kills another dude for various reasons and the fallout of said dude-killing, everybody has a long Russian name like Semyon Yegorovich Karmazinov or Mavriky Nikolaevich Drozdov, and there are approximately eighty zillion characters. It's quite good notwithstanding, though.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith ...the turn that Avernum 5 did and lump me into quest blocks. What you mean? I'm presuming he mans that it segmented you into (8? 10?) individual "areas", that required a quest chain for each, plus sidequests, to be able to proceed to the next, as opposed to the open-world of G1 or A3.

So, uh, do we level this time? Because you didn't say after the session itself...

Originally Posted By: AethirWeb Oh so there are actual bonuses to the characters? Not just stats? I'd like to pick the most combat ready in certain situations, so can someone give me a list of the bonuses? Shaper classes get massive, unlisted bonuses to elemental resistances. Quote: Shapers: 40% physical, 50% fire, cold and energy Guardians: 60% physical, 30% fire and cold Agents: 40% physical, 30% fire and cold, 60% energy

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Yeah, that's unlikely. The 2007 Nethergate remake did not add any barriers or linearity beyond the fairly tiny amount that existed in the original game. Isn't the only barrier in Nethergate forbidding you access to the central zone, anyways?

Witches do tend to surprise people.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Games following Cordelia's birth: A3, BoA, G3, A4 I don't think it is a coincidence that the games immediately following the first child's birth are the ones that receive the most flack on these boards. I mean, cmon guys, Poo Bomb. I'd hardly say that A3 and BoA "receive the most flak" on these boards- BoA might not have sold very well, but it's still well-regarded and has a semi-active community a decade after it's release. And A3 manages to do quite well in "What was your favorite Avernum" polls- usually coming in second to 2. Two bad games at that time were outliers, nothing more.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan (Side effect of the board upgrade?) Perhaps the original Spidweb account was originally named something else, like say Admin, and then he changed his PDN to Spidweb, whereas the account number 20000-ish is actually called Spidweb and doesn't have a separate PDN?

This should probably be moved to the Avadon forum. Any mods here care to do so?

I can judge if you'd like, e-mail's emperordantius at gmail dot com. I need to get into BoA again now...

Originally Posted By: Yahtzee There are two kinds of games in this putrid world of ours: those that are made mainly because the developers thought it would be a lovely thing for everyone to play, and those that are made because the developers thought it would be lovely to add another ballroom to their golden money palace Of course, in Jeff's case it would be less of a "golden money palace" and more of a "silver money duplex". And he's maybe adding a rec room instead of a second ballroom. But still, it was definitely a game made primarily with the intent of making money- they were, essentially, the 7th, 8th, and 9th installment of the series, and even Star Wars managed to stop with the blatant cash-ins after four movies and one animated movie of blatant consumerism...

Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie according to the board stats we are at exactly 8000 registered users congratulations! Bah. We're still 1,001 users away from the only milestone that counts- let's not break out the Dom Perignon just yet.

Originally Posted By: Lazarus. I have a chat log ready, but no place to upload. So.... *hint hint* And how does this Saturday at 6pm EST sound for session 2? Saturday's fine, but Friday at that time would be even better for me.

Originally Posted By: The Judgement of Bears —Alorael, who now wants to hear arena rock versions of classical standbys. Or metal! The William Tell Overture would be perfect, because nothing says metal like 16 artillery pieces firing at random into the crowd. That's the 1812 Overture that you're thinking of. The William Tell overture requires no artillery pieces to play, but 1812 requires 16. You might have gotten them confused because the final movement of the WTO is called "Cavalry Charge", but there's noting special or unique involved.

Oh, he's referring to . That makes much more sense.

Originally Posted By: Micawber Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, rebel servile. That made me seriously fall out of my chair and land on my plug and unplugged the computer Luckily, in today's litigious society, you can probably sue whoever had that signature. I'd like to sue the makers of the plug for constructing it well enough that he was able to plug it in again...

Originally Posted By: Micawber Originally Posted By: People "Mass appeal" is very far from "popular genre". Explain? I don't get it either. Popular music is simply the music that is the most popular in that time period. Modern popular music, by definition, has the widest mass appeal. Otherwise it would't be popular. Whether it's good or not is up for debate, though.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus [snip] That picture has never really enticed me to buy that game, since I know that inside of a second later, the Roman is going to impale the Celt, and he'll soon proceed to burn down his village, salt his fields, and possibly kill his family. Not really much suspense there.

Originally Posted By: All our alephs come to naught -Alorael, who disagrees somewhat about classical music. Nico conflates several separate problems, and one of the major ones is simply that there have been decades of high-quality recordings by amazing musicians. Because people tend to be classical pieces in similar, if not identical, styles, very good musicians are simply outclassed by the masters. If people truly played covers in their own style, and not just with tiny adjustments to tempo and expression, the purists would revolt and maybe more people would enjoy a genre of music no longer locked into stasis. As an ardent defender of classical music, I feel compelled to respond to your points. One of the main reasons that there are very few new classical recordings and new classical pieces for the same reason that, say, there are no more Rembrandts painted- by and large, the popular culture has moved on to a new large art style, and there are then fewer talented people to draw upon to play in that style. For instance, had she been born in, say, the 1930's, we might all have been hailing the virtuoso Dame Germanotta (sp?), famed operatic soprano, instead of Lady Gaga, because there would have been enough money in opera to entice talented people to sing there. Likewise, there's no longer any money in composing serious classical symphonies and operas, because it's no longer the mass media of the day like it was in the 1800's in Italy- Verdi was as rich in his time as a Hollywood producer or director would be today, and Liszt was the certainly the first touring rock star- in it for the $$$ and the ladies (he got lots of both, incidentally), but there's nobody in opera or piano with the possible exception of Lang Lang making anywhere near that much money today (indeed, it's now a medium mainly sustained by charitable donations from the wealthy). So with a declining fandom (if I may use the word), and a lack of new talent or works, it's not really surprising that the medium is, as you say, static. But the real problem is not that the purists would revolt and stop listening, but that even if people did radically alter the style, it still wouldn't suddenly cause a massive move towards classical music by young people- a metal cover of Verdi's Requiem (I actually think these have been done before, I know it was done for Mozart's) isn't metal, it's Verdi's Requiem, and the people who listen to metal are not going to start listening to Verdi. It's the same reason that Jeff doesn't make a plot-heavy FPS- he'd risk alienating the people he knows will buy his RPG's in order to entice a slice of the larger market that wouldn't want it anyways. tl;dr: Everything in classical music has been done before by better people than we have today, and changing the formula will just kill the medium off, which would be very, very bad.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer The Wall Street Journal had a literary review on the latest author to be given the official task of writing sequels to Ian Fleming's James Bond series. The chief complaint against most of the authors was that their books were based upon the movies instead of the original book versions. Gadgets instead of ability. Well, the original book versions were more or less "Bond kills people with tons of guns", so it's not exactly a far cry from the modern version of "Bond kills people with tons of gadgets". Besides, the purpose of a Bond book is to entertain people, and watching evil people die gruesome deaths seems to be such a popular entertainment media that I don't think it will matter much at all whether they're killed with a wristwatch laser or a Walther PPK.

A level! I will use it to increase my ability to steal people's cars and/or fire trucks! Also, my new campaign objective is to hotwire and steal a tank at some point, so be warned . Quote: Name: Dr. Clyve Fourier Age: 48 Occupation: Ex-researcher Alignment: Hobbesian STR: 1 DEX: 2 PER: 2 INT: 5 (+1) Engineering: 5 (+2) Gun Knowledge: 4 (+2) Speechcraft: 4 First Aid: 3 Tactics: 1 FEAT: Well-Read (+4 INT 1/Day) Click to reveal.. (Inventory) Equipped: Lab coat (AC 1) Shirt & tie (White & Black) Slacks (Black) Kitchen knife (1 DMG) Pistol (3 DMG, 20 R) Carry-on bag: First-Aid kit (2 bandages, 1 suture) Solar-powered calculator Calibrated pipette Microbiology textbook Lab manual Lab notebook (empty) Pens/pencils Short-sleeved dress shirt (Blue) Slacks (Tan) Sugar (10 pounds) Teriyaki beef jerkey (4 bags) Cigarettes (216) Lighter

Originally Posted By: Triumph I wonder if anyone produced similar reports back when writing was invented. "We'll lose our capacity to memorize things! Oral transmission of information will decline because of this new-fangled writing! People will think they can write stuff and then they won't have to remember it! Writing rots your brain!!!! Oral traditions for the win." Yeah, I think Socrates said something to that effect. Let me google it... aha, here it is: Originally Posted By: Socrates [Writing] destroys memory and weakens the mind, relieving it of work that makes it strong. It is an inhuman thing.

Keep in mind that these are, at least theoretically, children's books. I'd be willing to bet a decent amount of money that Rowling, at least in initial drafts, killed off Harry for good, but the publishers made her fix it, which then required the insertion of the deus ex machina that was the Hallows. For all the criticism that the books drew, they actually were't that badly written- sure, the plots were derivative, stale, and uninspiring, and she may have lacked any sort of powerful and descriptive vistas, but damn if she didn't know how to write good characters and interactions. I mean, look at how powerful the ending of the sixth book was- the only reason it was s shocking as it was was because the character was so capable of resonating with the audience. EDIT: Dinti, get out.