Dantius

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES What paths are equal? Was somebody advocating for a Shaper who invests in Endurance at ALL? In Geneforge 2? Bleah! The path of battle magic/INT versus missile weapons/DEX. SpaceCadet asked it in his post: Quote: Another question, would it be very hard to have a shaper who is very effective with Baton's through the entire game as opposed to putting points into offensive magic? And a few points are needed to survive some of the environmental hazards that you encounter. I believe that the crystal cave zone can do 80+ points damage in one go in the inner circles, with armor, which can one shot you even at medium-high levels.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Dexterity does increase your chance to dodge attacks. However, note that this is totally different from armor (reduces damage) and HP (increases ability to take damage) and unlike those attributes, dodge rate is essentially impossible to get a bonus out of against high-level enemies (and medium-level enemies, too, on the higher difficulty settings). Yes, but still. Getting hit 5 times for 40 damage with more armor and getting hit 4 times for 50 damage with more DEX will net you the same total damage. I'm aware I'm simplifying things a little, but there are certainly noticeably fewer hits on the PC in the beginning and middle of the game if you pump DEX, and by the end it's possible to get Reaper and Submission batons, and enemies can't deal any damage at all if they have no AP's left, so like I said, the paths are probably equal in terms of damage taken.

Batons have a higher damage output per skill point invested than battle magic does (d12 for reapers, the highest BM gets is d10 for Kill), but as a Shaper it costs more skill points. However, the governing attribute for Missiles (which you'll also be investing in), Dexterity, makes you a lot harder to hit, so you won't take as much damage and can invest less points in Endurance. It's really your call, the paths are probably equal in terms of damage output in the end, so it's just a matter of flavor.

Originally Posted By: Nikki, but edited a little by me 1. So these "anti-elements" are what we call anti-matter? 2. How do they react with other elements, anti- or not? 3. In what way is/could that beneficial to us? From my understanding: 1. Yes. 2. If they encounter their element, they produce a violently unstable reaction. I believe it's about comparable to a nuclear blast, but with no long-term effects like radiation. 3. In a nutshell, they don't. They're useless for energy or power generation, because they require ridiculous amounts of energy to make and store, they're far too cumbersome for weapons or military uses because of the problem of downsizing the containment unit to a manageable size, and there are no medical applications. I heard someone once propose use in long-range space travel, but since when are we launching manned crafts beyond Earth orbit (also it was probably pop-sci blather given who I heard it from)? Apparently they give insight into what happened in the first few picoseconds of the Big Bang when there were roughly equal potions of matter and ant-matter, but then they annihilated each other and created the universe or something. Ask a astrophysicist about it, or read the Wikipedia article if you're more curious. tldr; cool stuff for learning about the universe but has no practical applications.

Originally Posted By: Dong Do any of you know if a primitive form of anti matter containment exists? Have you been watching Angels and Demons recently? Just curious.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith USE CAPS LOCK; BECOME A GOD Eh, that would be better in an Advice Dog format.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Originally Posted By: meAzuma But it's been done before! Moses had help that Jeff can't count on. I dunno, I would say that Jeff's beard could provide a decent level of competition with Moses'. When you say help, you do mean beards, right?

1. What sound do fish make? c. Flippity-Flop. Obviously. 2. A Hungarian sand crab has gotten inside of your favorite sweater. What tool can remove it? c. a tuning fork Hungarian sand crabs, due to an ancestry involving Franz Liszt, would be highly sensitive to high-pitched vibrations. If the tuning fork is not resonating at a high enough frequency, simply cut off more of the tip to shorten the total length and increase the frequency 3. Gerald refuses to paint his house blue, but the sky is maroon. What time is it? c. the end of the world Nuclear radiation green goes well with apocalypse maroon, or so I hear. 4. Given that Albert is traveling from Chicago to New York at 99 miles per hour, Hubert is throwing couches off of the eleventh floor of the tower, and Norbert will get a 17 on his law examination, is the city safe? d. Yes, the lizards have the situation under control. This is a tricky one. It is clearly not A, as Albert's position relative to the two cities is not given, and it is not B, as it in not specified as to whether or not the 17 is a 17% or a 17/x, and if it is the latter case, x could be a small number and Norbert could be quite a competent lawyer. Obviously, a barbarian horde could not cause any devastation to Chicago, as it is too far from Canada, and any devastation of New York by Canadians would arguably be an aesthetic improvement to the city. That leaves D and E, but since we cannot ascertain whether or not the couches have a floral pattern, we must conclude D, because the existence of lizard overlords is necessarily presupposed in all frames of reference. 5. Flogbar the Chromanian is attacking in his spaceship. You have only seconds before he is upon you, leaving you only enough time to try using one of your devices to escape or defend yourself. Which one should you use? b. The hyperspatial burrow, to run away. Again, a tricky one. It's clearly not E, as reprocessed protein bars taste horrible, and it isn't A, because his ship could be insulated against the frequencies. It's probably not C, as there is a good chance he's shielded or armored. That leaves B and D, but since it's not specified whether we have a Somebody Else's Problem field to hide us when we use the Wedge, the simplest course of action is to escape using the burrow. 6. You must disguise yourself in order not to be recognized while swimming covertly into Spain. What type of headgear is required? c. an invisible bishop's miter Simple. Everyone knows that bishops derive their powers from their mitres, so if the bishop is invisible, it must be because of his mitre. Ergo, wearing it will make you invisible, prefect for covertly slipping into Spain. 7. You are suffering from withdrawal due to your dental floss addiction. What type of food can alleviate the symptoms? e. No food can save you While the answer itself is true, the correct path to alleviating the withdrawal depends on whether the floss is flavored or unflavored. If unflavored, hair may work. If flavored, nothing can help you at this stage. 8. Carl Orf has escaped! What do you do to recapture him? e. Do nothing; the world deserves what it will get. If Carl Orff gave the world the most overused movie trailer music in the history world, think what horrific divine wrath his evil twin will give us in payment for humanities sins! 9. Describe the major points of Eleanor Roosevelt's kinetic theory of hats. This theory can be reduced to three main laws: 9-1. A lady rising in high society will tend to continue to rise in high society. However, she can be acted upon by retarding forces, such as scandal, poverty, and most importantly, her hat. If the total forces acting to increase her position are balanced, she will continue to rise. However, the total relationship is given by Rise=Fup-η*Position, where η is the hat-ness coefficient. This equation implies that a lady must constantly increase the hat-ness of her hat in order to continue rising unimpeded. It is, however, worth noting that η can be reduced to 0 by adding grapes or oranges to the hat, thus allowing continuous rise. 9-2. The mathematical relationship between the lady's position in high society (P), the weight of her hat (h), and her manners (M) is given by P = h x M As such, a lady with poor manners could rise through society by having an immensely large hat. It is worth noting that in Elizabethan england, h must by replaced with r, where r is the weight of the ruffled collar. 9-3. For every rise in society, another woman mus experience an equal decline in society. This established the "zero-sum" approach of high society. Some regard its definition of the zero-sum payoff function as important in the early creation of game theory, and may even go on to state that Roosevelt was the eminence gris behind Von Neumann. 10. Achmed waves his cutlass menacingly. The philistines begin to wake up. You are facing a mutiny on board your airship, high above the camp of the philistine hoard. The engines are overloaded and will explode in just 13 seconds. Using only your trusty radio-swordcane-umbrella, your silly hat, and your toaster oven, how can you get to safety? The first action necessary would, of course, be a dramatic villainous monologue. Since Talking is a Free Action, it's clear that my giving of a speech (and possibly twirling my mustachios) would create a loop in space-time, allowing me to extend the next few second into a time string that repeated ad infinitum(until I stop twirling said mustachio, of course). This will give me time to use the sword to dissect the toaster and string the nichromium filaments together to create a crude heating implement. Since silly hats are no doubt cheap, they would be made of cotton or polyester, both highly flammable. I would then heat the hat until it burst into flame, and then toss the flaming hat towards the volatile hydrogen over structure of the blimp, causing it to burst into flame. Since by the RuleOfCool, explosions push air outwards instead of sucking it inward, I would be jump away from the exploding airship, and the explosion would exert sufficient force to propel me away from the philistine camp. I could then open my umbrella and float to saftey, and escape to my hidden volcano lair to fight another day Bonus: Determine the centroid of thought and calculate the distance from it to the edge of madness. Show all work, with diagrams. Infinity Let the set of all thoughts be represented by tau. Let the set of all things madness be represented by mu. Since "madness" could be defined as abnormality, set mu contains all abnormal things or permutations of abnormal things. Since, on a universal scale, intelligent life is extremely improbable and thus an abnormality, mu ⊆ tau. Now, seeing as all the combinations of thoughts must be finite, all the possible combinations of abnormalities would be infinite. Therefore, the distance from the centroid (regardless of its position) to the edge of infinity would be, necessarily, infinity. A diagram is provided below courtesy Matlab MS Paint. Click to reveal..

Now starting Douglas MacArthur: American Caesar. It's a book about how Douglas MacArthur is totally awesome and the best military commander the US has ever had, but how he was vain, arrogant, and insubordinate, much like Caesar was. Highly recommended, if you're into that sort of thing.

Originally Posted By: Arch-Mage Solberg I misspelled the title for emphasis. I was just wondering, how good are some of y'all at keeping to good grammar on the forums? Post #483 Chrome for the win, mainly due to the spellchecker (just a s a refernce, I'm publishing this post as I actually typed it See if you can find the errors!). I'm really horrible at spelling because of my bad habit of typing too fast and not proofreading. THat's why my spelling takes a noticable dip on chats and such, because I lack the checker. My grammer is pretty good, though.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Just a friendly note: I've already scheduled the next City of Hope session for that day, and don't we both have Nalyd in our respective campaigns? I mean, I guess he can play in two campaigns at once if there's really no other good day, but... I really should check these things . However, there are no good days besides today and next Friday. Is another calendar called for? Because I hope not...

I'm not dead! Just very busy! But the next session can be scheduled for FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22 at the usual time without it interfering with my life, or anyone else's schedule. Be there!

Originally Posted By: Nikki. you know, everybody should just get drunk and make out. that always makes me feel better, and cracked.com said it worked for the USSR and Bulgaria too. Yugoslavia. Tito was the dictator of Yugoslavia, not Bulgaria.

Originally Posted By: MandatorySuicide Recently played some d&d with some friends but we are all total amateurs and as you can imagine some of the rules are a little confusing... we are playing out of the 3.0-3.5 books and Im wondering if anyone is knowledgeable enough to answer some questions... Yes, lots of people on these boards (20+ by now probably) play a modified version called AIMhack that can be played across the Internet on an Instant Messenger client. There's probably like three or four threads in the first page of General, it shouldn't be that hard to find some exampled. Regarding the rules, there's about four or five complete copies of the 3.5 SRD online, and even a legal on on the Wizards website. I'd recommend checking there first.

Originally Posted By: Mringasa Maybe a few "escort" type quests. Keeping an NPC alive, please give it an intelligent AI, would be pretty interesting even though it's been done to death in the mainstream. Ugh, the reason Jeff doesn't include these is because the AI is always so frustratingly stupid that even if you make the dude to be escorted super powerful (then why would we need to escort him?), he's STILL a liability, because they will invariably run out and get themselves killed. And then you'll have to reload. Escort missions are way more trouble than they're worth.

Originally Posted By: Aizoan National Front Our soldiers aren't keeping us safe. Fighting Germany in WWII was probably necessary to avoid fighting Germany and/or Japan later and alone, but since then we've been fighting others' battles. To some extent, that's an international duty, but our political leadership hasn't managed its military strength well. Hahahahahahahaha. No. The US in embroiled in multiple wars thousands of miles from home, with thousands of deaths on our side, and tens of thousands of deaths on the enemy side, in an attempt to stop an enemy that will literally not stop fighting until everyone I have ever known is dead in a smoking pile of rubble, and the thousands of solders abroad are not fighting and dying to keep me safe. And what about the other wars we've been in that weren't Vietnam, which is what I presume you are referring to? Is fighting to protect South Korea, a democratic and peaceful nation, from invasion by two of the largest and most powerful armies in the world who were hostile to us a bad decision? Should we not have done that, and instead let SK fall under the wholly benevolent rule of communist NK, which turned out SO well for them, instead of fighting to defend them? Ooh, or maybe we could have simply abandoned Berlin when Stalin blockaded it. After all, surely those Berliners would get on just fine with the Statsi and all. I'm sure East Germany was a wonderful place to live in, thank you very kindly. And we shouldn't be bound by treaty to defend Japan if China tries to annex them. It would just be so horrible for us to meddle in their business like that. Very uncivilized- we should just let them duke it out, even if China has a billion and a half more people than them. Yeah, maybe the US should stop meddling in other peoples business. Maybe we should stop sticking up for people who can't defend themselves against a superior threat. Maybe we should let our citizens get killed by the thousands by terrorism. Maybe we should let nations who are diametrically opposed to all our values do as they please in the world. I don't really know about everyone else, but I for one think that a world where the US turned back towards isolationism would be a pretty darn poor one to live in, for everybody.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Upon further research, it looks like Memorial Day is the larger holiday in the States. So maybe put your answer for that holiday, I dunno. Memorial day honors those who died Ina war, while Veterans day simply honors those who served. Furthermore, I believe that Memorial day dates back to the US Civil War as opposed to WWI, and the Civil War is probably a lot more significant to the Anerican national consciousness that WWI.

Originally Posted By: Raise your hand —Alorael, who has even less respect for Mass Effect 2's "intro, assemble party, win" model. While it might make sense to just assemble a team and deal with your enemies, that's really not the standard game model. You also usually don't get to shoot the archvillain in the intro as he's killing your parents, either. Maybe there's an untapped market in quick, viscerally satisfying games. You're missing the "punching reportersin the face" aspect. That was pretty integral to the game for me!

Originally Posted By: Lilith was it jeff who wrote approvingly about bioware's "intro, four planets, endgame" formula in the mass effect games or am i thinking of someone else Not Jeff, but I do recall reading a post of that nature somewhere, and I don't follow many gaming sites. Maybe Shamus Young? I know a lot of people here read his comics....

Originally Posted By: Randomizer It's placed in the News section of the Spiderweb Games site and usually someone sees it and posts a message here with a link. Announcements is for new game release notices. Jeff did it for A6, though, so maybe that's how he'll be doing it for Avadon.

Why has no one mentioned this yet? The linearity of later spiderweb games SUUUUUUUCKS! From pretty much G3 onward, you've had to follow a specific route and do specific quests to unlock a plot door to the next tiny area. Contrast this to the wide open "do anything you feel like" feel of G1 and A3 especially, and I find it shocking that people think that A6 is any competition to the earlier games. I really hope the wide open world map and no pointless quests to unlock later areas are brought back in Avadon.

Originally Posted By: Ociporus Just where does this "public tester's request" get posted? It'll probably either be sticked here in the Avadon forum, or possibly put in the Announcements forum.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Considering that the optimal strategy for most fights in the Exile series beyond low levels was "bless your party until enemies literally cannot hit you at all any more", I'm not sure I'd say that the games have become less strategically deep. It's funny, if you substitute "Invis" for "Bless", that's the exact strategy you use in the early Final Fantasy games, too!

Originally Posted By: meAzuma How about the changes he didn't make for the best? You know, like DRM. Obvious trolling is obvious.

Originally Posted By: Nikki. Oh god. How bad is it that I wanted to "like" this? It's not too late to help. Quick, cancel your Internet subscription and move to an Amish farming town. You only have a few weeks left before it's too late!