Dantius

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Gentlemen Scholars Plausible? You actually can't even begin to play A6 without any way of dealing damage. —Alorael, who has heard it bandied about that Geneforge can be played with stealth. Mechanics, and Leadership only. He's never felt impelled to try. I tried playing through G3 without ever attacking, and got...oh, about halfway through the game. Based on what I saw, and what I could foresee for how the rest of the game would play out, it was absolutely possible to complete without ever personally inflicting damage on anything. Leadership, mechanics, and stealth were key. However, not personally inflicting damage means a number instances where one uses leadership or mechanics to get NPCs to inflict damage for you (such as talking Therese into helping you out under the school in the first zone). Other times one could lead a monster through the zone back to a friendly NPC. Of course this meant some zones were truly unclearable, but a surprising number could be cleared with out ever directly inflicting damage (either through one's shaper or any player-controlled creations/Greta and Alwan). I suspect such methods would work most/all of the other Geneforge games, but from what I've seen the Avernum games were never designed to accommodate such tactics. I'm sure that someone's done this in G1. I might try it myself, with the caevet that I'm allowed to attack in the second tutorial zone.

Originally Posted By: Horn of Ammon Fantastic! I originally considered that it was some sort of multiplicative formula, but I didn't consider subtracting each % from 100% to find each of the multipliers (was instead trying to add the products of each each armor value multiplied by the original, which was way off ). It's not something Jeff does. That's called, IIRC, DeMorgan's Law (Or is it deMoivre's Theorem? One is complex exponents, and one is logic. I forget which is which >.>). It would still be possible to find it without using the subtracting from one method, but then you'd need to go through a longer process that's much more complicated in order to get the same result.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur I dislike MMORPGs to begin with. I tried Avernum once but found that I just repeatedly hit things with bad graphics. Hey, this is fun!

Multiple Icy Rains probably just result from Adrenaline Rush or Quicksilver items as opposed to Haste. However, I could have sworn that I'd gotten multiple Icy Rains due to haste in A4 and A5. So if they worked fine off the AP-increase haste there, then why wouldn't they work in the new 35% chance AP increase system here? I suppose it's just a mystery...

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Two quotes is not a post train. Bad VCH. Cut it out so I don't have to invoke Sailor Moon in its original context of locking threads.

Originally Posted By: waterplant Can KoL cook? Only pasta. And meat.

Originally Posted By: ginger8445 There are supposedly two obelisks in the bandit woods and/or a ruined school in Geneforge 2. Can anyone tell me where they are. I'm currently circling the bandit woods trying to find them so any help would be appreciated. Thank you. Northwest most part of the map, outside the laybrinth of the woods themselves but still in the zone to the north of Vakkiri.

Originally Posted By: Gentlemen Scholars If you're communicating technically, "unnatural" isn't a meaningful term. If you're communicating colloquially, you're writing for an audience that can be misled by the term. There's no good reason for it to come up when its varied connotations aren't wanted. It is, however, and excellent term to use for obfuscation purposes. It means nothing and says a lot, which is why I like it very much.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Click to reveal.. AUGH MY EYEZ!!! Why did you feel the need to post that? Why?!?!?!?!?

I found G1 to be the hardest as a Shaper simply because you don't have any sort of HP level. A endgame shaper is lucky to have 100 HP (I believe my G2 endgame shaper had 88). If any sort of powerful creation gets past your creations, you die. Environmental effects and damage can kill you pretty quickly. At least in the later games, you could have Shapers hitting health in the 600's (!) in G5, which made things a lot less stressful.

Originally Posted By: Heindrich1988 [snip] I played Geneforge first, ran out of games, and then wen into withdrawal. The later Avernums were similar enough that they could give me a quick hit, but it's really hard for me to play the earlier ones- I have to be really desperate. The only one I've completed is A3, but I've gotten to the Castle in A1 and Chapter 4 in A2. That said, I do enjoy Blades of Avernum immensely, even though it uses the older engine.

Originally Posted By: Heindrich1988 Related to this, I'm considering eradicating the Cult of Divine Lucre, but I hear they give you a dreadcurse... is there anyone else that can cure it besides the Anama? and just how bad is it? (like can I complete the game whilst cursed?) Wait, where do you do this? I was unaware that they had a headquarters. I made it through my playthrough with our only meeting being me buying stuff from them in (IIRC) Gale.

Originally Posted By: Lilith What I wouldn't like to see is a big list of different weapons with different damage ratings. I like the way things work now because there's no disadvantage in choosing a weapon pretty much purely for flavour reasons. It could be incredibly simple. Three categories: Light, medium, heavy, and if you felt like it ranged. I mean, it's fairly clear that weapons already do differing amounts of damage, so why not? It would be fairly simple and easy to implement, too.

Originally Posted By: Lilith The McNugget Layer would be a good name for a film It's a McEnviromental disaster!

I totally want to play that game now.

Originally Posted By: Nioca Okay, now it's time for some thoughts. Let me start off with saying that I really enjoyed running this most of the time. The upkeep was a pain in the place where the sun doesn't shine, but actually running the sessions was great. However, there are a lot of things that, in hindsight, were ill-thought-out, executed poorly, and, given the chance, I likely would have changed. First, on the campaign's denouement. I've got to be honest, I couldn't help but wince. There was way too much explaining there, explaining that really ought to have been avoided, had I handled the plot better. Admittedly, part of this was the players making the rather surprising decision to join with the villain, instead of killing him (though that may have been my fault by making him too sympathetic at the end). But still... the plot should run smoothly, not get dumped on the players in the end text. This is why I am a fan of sitting down and writing out the plot beforehand. Who is the villian, what are the motives, how, when, why, etc. Keeping that crystallized makes things so much easier. Originally Posted By: Nioca Another thing was the whole Orlis thing. Don't get me wrong, I liked injecting Harosh and Orlis a little deeper into the plot. However, I feel I got too enamored with it. The result is that I wound up side-tracking the plot and entire point of the campaign, and also wound up unintentionally showing favoritism to Harosh. This wound up being unfair to everyone (Harosh for hijacking his backstory, and the rest of the party for perpetually thrusting Harosh in the limelight). And while I don't think it actually turned out bad, it still wasn't as good as you guys deserved. Well, in all honesty, (and I'm talking all honesty here), it seemed like this bit was just pandering fanboy service (since I'm being brutally honest here) to Eph. You included his backstory NPC to the point where he was a central ficure in the campaign, you centered the campaign around his character, you marginalized or ignored other character, etc. This was a very bad idea. (NB: I'm guilty of this too, ) Also, I officially hate you for wasting four hours of my time by linking to TVTropes. Originally Posted By: Nioca Speaking of which, allow me to take a moment and say that you all were excellent players. As were the subs, when they had to step in. Thank you. Originally Posted By: Nioca Another thing I probably wouldn't have done is keep derailing myself. Every other session, I'd wind up changing the plot on a whim. Which ultimately meant that when it ended, things were a bit of a mess. Players derailing the campaign is one thing, but when the DM is constantly derailing himself, it sort of defeats the purpose of having a plot in the first place. Again, keep the plot as crystallized as possible. Note that this isn't railroading. There is a big difference between "The party must do this dungeon to get this artifact to give to this NPC" and "A stole B MacGuffin because of C reason, and the party needs to get it back because of D, although E is trying to stop them because of F". Having the plot and the motives of every character change every session is a huge pain. Originally Posted By: Nioca There were also quite a few things that I wanted to do that never got a chance to see the light of day. Visiting Saris Peak and the monastery there, for one, and visiting the religion-torn battlefield called the town of Nikorom. Not to mention various other bits I planned out. Plus a few things I wanted to reveal to you now, but can't now that a sequel hook has been firmly lodged in place. Well if you wanted to get more stuff done, don't spend so much time travelling. We had how many sessions wasted on wandering through he wilderness/sailing again? Four? More? Oh, and there are always sequels. Who says that there isn't some crucial text in the monastery that will allow Reat to further his goals of archipelagaic domination? (I am fairly sure that's not a word, but it is now!) Originally Posted By: Nioca Mechanically, there are probably a few things I would have done differently, but I think it mostly just came down to inexperience. Now, regarding the system, there was one thing I noticed while DMing, that particularly stood out last session: PC Defense. The way defense is handled right now is rather horribly broken. It's pretty transparent when it's Player versus DM-controlled-and-statted monsters, but becomes blatantly obvious when Player-versus-player arises. To put it bluntly, all current PCs have defenses of less than 20, regardless of their level. This means that someone completely untrained in any martial skill could still land a hit on high-dex player character. Fair enough, everyone has their critical hit, right? Thing is, if the creature has so much as a +5 attack, their odds of landing a hit increase to 25-50%, depending on the PC. And if they have a +10, which is about average for most semi-leveled PCs? That increases to 50-80% hit chance. If PCs and Monsters were statted out the same way, 9 out of 10 fights would break down into particularly bloody slaughter-fests where even natural 4s would regularly land hits. If a lot of the PCs thusfar were to turn on each other? The more optimized would be landing hits on natural 1s. The thing is that defenses don't scale like attack power; they're based primarily on stats, which require a lot of skill points to increase. My thought is to maybe make stats count for double when it comes to defense; that way, it'd be possible to invest in a character's defenses efficiently and help keep the system from slanting so far into favoring offense. The system needs work. I'll bet a month's salary that every DM does attack and defense differently. We need some sort of codified damage system for AIMhack. Nothing too complicated, maybe just a multiplier for weapons and then work off you attack roll. Also, it majorly irked me not being able to see my damage roll. I'd roll a critical and then do minimum damage, which really sucked. Originally Posted By: Nioca Okay, I think I've rambled enough for now. Any thoughts, comments, criticisms? Questions? Things you think I should have done differently? Cool campaign, liked the atmosphere, liked the combat, liked the RPing, plot was a bit cliché but workable, despised the ending. Reat was/is not a good villain, and I blame that for the failure to bring closure.

Originally Posted By: Horn of Ammon For example, my level 9 slith, endurance 6, with Divinely Touched, has 24% armor naked. I then add: iron helmet (4%) plated vambraces (+6%) coated cloak (+4%) iron bracers (+8%) nimble sandals (+2%) blessed belt (+5%) ring shield (+4%) (total = 33%) and reach 48% (not 57% as expected). Then, if I add an iron breastplate (+22%), I hit 62%; with a blessed breastplate (+34%), I only get to 68%. Adding a blessed shield (+12%) only improves it to 71%. So it seems there's a limit that I'm coming to quickly. Multiply armor %'s as decimals- don't add them. To makethe matt easier, just subtract the armor % from 100 and then multiply that instead. So you'd get: base (.76) iron helmet (.96) plated vambraces (.94) coated cloak (.96) iron bracers (.92) nimble sandals (.98) blessed belt (.95) ring shield (.96) Multiplying this out gets about .54, which corresponds to what, about 46%? Attribute the difference to rounding errors or a math mistake on my part. The limit you speak of is mathematical. You're multiplying together numbers that are smaller that 1 and larger than 0. In order for you to reach 0 (100% armor), you'd have to multiply an infinite amount of numbers together, which means that you'd need to be wearing infinite pieces of armor. It's impossible to actually hit 0, but I think you can reach about .1 with all the best armor, corresponding to 90% protection. EDIT: Not counting luck/hardiness/resistance/race bonuses/trait bonuses, the best most protective armor in the game gets you 0.175753, which is about 82% armor. But I think you could get it up higher with Good Constitution and a ton of skill points.

Originally Posted By: Acky Originally Posted By: Kaylee32 I found that lever, but where is the opening it creates? I looked everywhere! There's a couple of possible levers in this thread =P Can you please be more specific of which lever you're asking about? I think he's referring to the one in the pass to the Shaper Citadel.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES No chain mail bikinis for SLC? No, but you might be cool with Leia's from ROTJ...

Originally Posted By: Actaeon Bad science if you're trying to prove something, but not an entirely unreasonable approach to discovering unspoken and subjective trends within a community. That's like, sociology, right? Everybody knows that's not a science!

Originally Posted By: Earth Empires Either way, you buy cheap skribbane from some place and sell it for profit and experience at other place. Why has there not been some huge moral panic about how you get experience and rewards for being drug dealers? I mean, that's like Saint's Row territory here.

Originally Posted By: Eld Replace Illuminati with Jews, and it'll be believable. Lizardmen from space! I knew I was forgetting something!

Originally Posted By: Actaeon The day they have one of those conventions within two or three hundred miles, I'll consider making the trip. Since Denver is not known for such events, I suspect I'll be relying on online forums for quite some time. Edit: Scratch that. Denver's the only large metropolitan area in that range, at around 200. Salt Lake's almost 400, and Santa Fe and Cheyenne hardly count, anyway. So, yeah, Denver. I think that SLC would be a pretty baaaad place to hold one of those conventions. Look at all the fuss Fred Phelps made over ComiCon, and then move it to the center of the most powerful fundamentalist organization in quite possibly the world...

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: boggle Just found this thing, and as you are all much cleverer than me; I was wondering if you could do the decent thing, if you feel so inclined, and demolish this comment! Dikiyoba's best guess is that some of the climate change deniers have gotten bored with having only one evil atmosphere-related conspiracy to talk about. IT'S ALL A COMMIE ILLUMINATI NEW WORLD ORDER PLOT TO TAKE OUT GUNS AND FREEDOM AWAY!!!!@@!~!111!@@!1

Originally Posted By: Triumph As for everyone hating them...well, I guess the NI will hate them for ditching the transmitter and helping their enemies, and the Kathas will hate them for killing the leader...but I'm not sure why the guys they just helped would hate them... Well, why would they hand over the most advanced technology is quite possibly the entire universe as a thank-you gift when they could just kill them and keep it and no one would be the wiser? They had to enter the office so they would disarm themselves without suspicion (they'd done it before), and Rodar needed to keep them occupied so the weapons could be safely removed, plus the shock troops would need time to get to the office. Basically, he needed to distract them and keep their guard down for long enough that everything could get into position.