Lilith

There are still things that can't be dealt with so easily as gender, such as the PC's social status, which may be essential to the plot of the scenario. Who's to say what any given player will consider indispensable to their image of their characters? Best not to bother second-guessing audiences at all.

My apologies for my harsh words; they were born of frustration, as your post reflects an attitude ("don't tell me who my PCs are") which I believe would be harmful to the scenario design community if widespread among designers.

Both of the scenarios I mentioned were made by respected designers. Both centre around the development of the player's character. Both are viewed highly by the BoE community in general; Emulations, in fact, won the most recent BoE scenario design contest.

I'd argue that this is evidence enough that such scenarios are not alienating a large section of the community. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of the fact that unless forced to do so, most players do not really put much thought into their characters as people. Certainly there is a case for this outlook; questions asked on these boards about what choices to make in a scenario with a branching plotline inevitably seem to degenerate into debates about which side gives the better rewards.

If you are the exception to this trend, and you have very fixed ideas about who your characters are and what they would do in a given situation, perhaps Quintessence and Emulations are not the sort of scenarios you would enjoy -- but keep in mind that many other people do enjoy these scenarios.

Remember also that there are degrees of player control and degrees of designer control over the party in every scenario, and all scenarios force the party into decisions to some extent.

Is telling the party that they are a group of soldiers who have spent the last few years at a remote Exile fort an unjustifiable intrusion on the player's freedom to use the characters they like? The party is in this situation at the start of Nephil's Gambit, a highly regarded BoE scenario.

What about Redemption, regarded by many as the greatest BoE scenario of all time? In this scenario, the family of your party's leader plays a critical role in the plot, and in fact much of the text in the scenario sounds rather strange if played with anything other than a 1-PC party (even though the scenario was not designed for any particular party, and the scenario's author has in fact expressed a dislike for 1-PC parties). Should scenario designers not tell the player what relatives their PCs have?

Be cautious when telling designers what they should do; for the most part, they know what their audience is, and they know what works.

spyderbytes, if what you want to say is that it's morally wrong for scenarios to make the assumption that a player is using a certain party which has been provided and/or specified by the designer, and that SW shouldn't support scenarios which do this, stop beating around the bush and say it. If you're simply saying that you'd prefer not to play such scenarios, then don't play them.

Many of the BoE scenarios that assume a premade party simply could not be the sort of scenarios they are without doing so: look at Quintessence or Emulations, for example. The stories these scenarios are trying to tell rely on the PC being a specific type of character. If you think that such stories shouldn't be told at all in the Blades medium, then you're free to hold that opinion, and I'm free to hold the opinion that restricting the pool of ideas available to designers is much worse than restricting the kind of party the player is expected to have in some scenarios (scenarios which often could not have been made at all if their designers followed your advice).

If you include a premade party, it's reasonable to assume the player is using it more or less as is; that's what it's there for. If they choose not to, it's their loss.

Ah, of course. The first pack slot is #13, right? So all the script has to do is destroy all equipped items, then repeatedly check if there's an item in slot 13 and destroy it.

Theoretically, you can use scripts to have as many NPCs as you like follow the party around. But they'll still be AI-controlled, and having too many at once will probably slow down the game pretty badly.

NPCs are in, but you can only have 2 of them at a time, and they're controlled by the AI.

It is indeed possible to have too much plot; confronted with screenfuls of text, many players will simply skip over it. This is bad, as it often leaves the player not knowing what to do next. (The "Current Quests" list in BoA is a very, very good thing, and something which was lacking in BoE.)

Your article reads to me as if you're discouraging designers from attempting to create complex characters with multiple motivations, instead suggesting that all of a character's actions in a scenario should be based around a single goal. Was that your intention?

The controls were changed in Av3 to make them less counterintuitive. The behaviour you describe is not a bug. Sorry.

Nothing, but type A and B attack each other. Which is useful if you want to set up a fight involving two groups that are hostile to the party but also to each other.

That's how isometric views work. Have fun getting used to it.

You are aware that SW games were originally available only for Mac, right?

Leave us be. It's not often we Mac users get privileged treatment by a software company.

Checking for an item requires checking for its special class, which doesn't carry between scenarios. Sorry.

Unfortunately, what you describe with carrying insignia between scenarios won't work because scripts will be stripped from items upon leaving a scenario.

Trying to steal from a company on that company's official message board is just not smart.

It means the border between two different terrains will automatically be made into a smooth diagonal instead of a jagged edge. I think.

"Doctor, it hurts when I try to raise my feet above shoulder height!"

"Don't do that, then!"

That's just set in a remote part of Exile, not actually in the Slith lands.

I'm no Windows expert, but I like to think I'm good with ugly workarounds to problems. What happens if you play for 30 minutes, quit and then reopen the game, play for another 30 minutes, quit, etc? Sure, doing that's still a pain, but if it works it'll be less of one than rebooting almost as often would be. And if it doesn't work, well, at least the fact that it doesn't work might give some hint as to what the problem might be.

I'd update your anti-virus software if I were you. It seems as if you've picked up a trojan that allows others to take control of your computer from over a network. Fun, huh?

Oh, and since this is the second time this has happened to you recently, I'd also suggest trying to find out who in your household might be going to sites that give you these things.

That's a yes, by the way.

He hadn't mentioned that at the time I posted.

Anyway, the program you mention doesn't seem like the sort of thing one would run at startup.

I suppose the obvious thing to do is ask everyone in the house if they've deliberately installed any such thing. If they haven't, find the program and try to get rid of it.

I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate programs with that name, but I was working on the assumption that since he didn't know how it got into his startup items, it probably wasn't one of them.

Hmm. My semi-educated guess is that you went to a site (quite possibly a porn site, but that's none of my business) that forcibly downloaded spyware onto your computer, and the spyware had a bug.