Lilith

I don't think anyone's said there isn't a link between VoDT and real pollution; the link is obvious. What we've been saying is that the link is an illogical one; Jeff forced a political ideology into a place where it doesn't really fit.

Quote: There are plenty good reasons to explain a goverment refused to sign a wordwide treaty despite it is the first pollution maker and all other industrialized country had sign. Yeah, but in this case all that the researchers at the school had to do was push a freaking button and the waste would be all gone. My problem with VoDT is that it tries to make an external point about society that simply doesn't make sense within the internal logic of the scenario.

Can't you fake this by implementing charges via SDF?

I don't think it's explicitly mentioned, but I don't think we ever see her again after the fire either. Come to think of it, that's probably why Pinochet's so ticked off at that point.

My theory was actually that the experiments were continuing on their own while the School was officially sealed. One of the wisps mentions that the experiments conducted at the School had to do with artificial life, after all. The experiments were presumably conducted in secrecy in the sealed School because they were highly dangerous; the murders were probably an attempt to silence opposition to them.

In my opinion, there are also a few scenarios that need a moral message and don't have one. I'm thinking specifically of Changing Faces here; you can't have a player work up that much moral outrage without doing something with it. That scenario was crying out for a better resolution than "wait centuries for the land to be rebuilt to the state of orderly, crystal-imposed bliss it once knew". Regarding Bandits, I sided with Pinochet and I lean very much to the left side of politics. Marx never does anything bad? What about having most of the population of the lumber camp murdered, not to mention burning down Pinochet's home? Perhaps TM didn't emphasise these events as much as he ought to have, and perhaps he made Pinochet try less hard to present a convincing case than he should have, but Marx is hardly portrayed as a saint. Taken literally, siding with Marx in Bandits is tantamount to saying that adultery is a justification for murder. Regarding VoDT, I have ideas about why the waste disposal mechanisms weren't used when the school was sealed, but they involve more thought than the plot really deserves. One other point I'd make is that if you let a player make a moral choice, make the choice mean something: having both paths lead to the same result in The Nature of Evil was a convenient way for Measle to get his message across, but it's just plain inconsiderate to the player.

Are you using a party newly brought into the scenario or one that was saved in the scenario before you made the change? Try using a new party.

Sounds like your saved games and some of the scripts were deleted or misplaced somehow. Not sure how it could have happened, unless someone else uses your computer and decided to mess with it.

If I read him correctly, I don't think he needs Relocate Outdoors for what he's trying to do. He just needs to use Set Outdoor Starting Location to determine where the party ends up the first time they leave the starting town. To see visually where the party will end up, look for the little START icon that appears on one terrain space when editing the starting outdoor section.

I'd say that if someone knows how to make a scenario well enough that they don't need warnings, they know well enough to ignore them. After all, plenty of people liked Doom Moon II.

Don't get your hopes up -- it was a known bug in Avernum 3, so presumably it's something that'd take a lot of work to fix.

I'm almost certain that save files will be incompatible.

Well, unless the party is saved inside the boundaries of the new rectangle but outside the old one, in which case they'd have to leave and re-enter the rectangle to activate it, or vice versa, in which case stepping into the new rectangle could activate it a second time when it really shouldn't. Doesn't seem a serious enough problem to prevent it from being done at all, though -- just something to keep in mind when testing.

I don't think the item thing could be done without significant reworking of the engine. After all, how is it supposed to tell the difference between an item that's not on the floor in the savefile because it's already been picked up by the party and one that's not on the floor in the savefile because it didn't exist in the version of the scenario in which the file was saved?

He's saying Avernumscript is going to be significantly updated for Windows 1.0 and Mac 1.0.1, and the PC betatesters will be the first to see the changes.

Line one, he said. Maybe it doesn't like having a comment before the beginning of the script.

As I understand it, PDFs are a publication-only format; once a PDF's been finished, it can't easily be changed. I like RTFs, but most people don't.

If you're going to take items away at the end of the scenario, be sure to replace them with items that are at least moderately respectable. Leaving the party to enter their next scenario without any weapons at all is just cruel. (Falling Stars in BoE had a bad case of this; several of the best weapons in the scenario were stripped away and not replaced upon finishing the scenario.)

Alec, the final boss in one of the plot branches of TNoE is a priest.

I don't remember finding that, but it sounds obscene.

Editing the source won't do it; remember, BoA itself isn't open source, so there's no point letting the editor make things that the game can't recognise. You might be able to fake a new means of transportation in interesting ways using scripting, but there's no easy way to do it.

I suspect the engine doesn't differentiate between a dead character and a nonexistent character as well as it should. BoE's didn't, which made the Kill Party node display some interesting behaviour.

I think it's pretty balanced as is, although it'd be nice if Bolt of Fire and Ice Lances improved a little more at higher levels; once one has Lightning Spray and Fireblast, the lesser attack spells aren't very useful.

BoE scenarios generally ignore the question of the PCs' race, since in BoE there's no way to check for it. Where it comes up, most tacitly assume an all-human party. BoA can check for race, but it would be very bad form to kick parties with non-humans out of your scenario. As for explaining their presence in the party, Nephilim, while rare, are found on the surface, and some Sliths came up with the exiles at the end of Avernum 3 and a few may have migrated around the world. A Nephil in an Empire city would be unusual but not unheard-of, and a Slith would be exceptional but not impossible.

You make some good points, but I'd argue that allowing you to keep using your PC's old name only encourages you to keep identifying with the PC that you've always used, whereas a large part of the impact of these scenarios relies on taking you out of your comfort zone and making you see the events of the scenario through a completely different character. Of course, the fact that this is a character of the scenario designer's choosing is pretty much the essence of the problem you seem to have with scenarios of this type. Many designers and players do in fact see scenarios as stories with puzzles in them more than they see them as true RPGs (after all, there isn't any direct interaction between designer and player, and there are fairly restrictive practical limits to how well scenario-mediated interaction can be done, even with the best of intentions.) Others do share your opinion to an extent; many of the criticisms of Quintessence revolve around the scenario repeatedly telling the player how they're supposed to be feeling, and Emulations only avoids such criticism by providing an in-scenario justification (mind control) for the PC's actions. There are other scenarios which come with a suggested premade party, but they generally don't make such a big deal of who the PC is, and so you are less likely to find them objectionable. However, I still see premade-party scenarios as a legitimate subgenre, with plots that often can't be done (or can't be done as well) by any other means.