Kreador

I believe the Steam version has some differences to allow it to share achievements and such on Steam, and to deal with updates via Steam, and so on. You have to install again. You may then be able to move the old save file to the new location, but I'm not sure (that's beyond the amount of technical knowledge I care to have about a video game).

Welcome, Poomermon! Hope you enjoy the games.

A possibly more helpful thing than waiting until November is to keep a notebook handy and just get in the habit of scribbling ideas in it. Then weekly look at what you scribbled in the notepad and start making connections. Your brain will likely start to think of it as a sort of game, and we all love games.


A person skilled at rhetoric can use that skill to convince people of false conclusions, and the only defense against that is understanding rhetoric and how to spot the fallacies in the argument or assumptions.

Absolutely. Every review or mention, even negative ones or ones that we find a bit silly, help to expose people to Spiderweb and the games and therefor have the potential to increase sales.

I'd agree with Alorael that internet forums can be a good place to practice your own writing style to develop your voice, as long as you're careful about who you take seriously on any forum. I'd add to the first point that, if you intend to write fiction, you should read as broadly as possible in all types of writing, not just fiction. Read poetry, read plays, read non-fiction of all types, and read fiction is as many genres as possible. You do run the danger of becoming a grammar troll (as I can be when I'm not watching myself--seriously, lay versus lie is not that difficult to understand).

One find gets your characters a bonus of +1 cave lore each, as I recall, and you can buy more from a trainer, so you don't need to spend actual points there if you don't want to. If you forgo the spell books in the cave in the rapids, you can learn every spell by giving your two casters the Sage Lore trait and putting 6 or 7 points into Arcane Lore (you can even buy some of those if you have the cash). In other words, not all of the points have to come from your limited level-up points.

It was funny seeing just how bad he was at combat tactics, and the fact that he hadn't explored what spells the casters had before starting.

I recall someone else used the rather clever tactic of rushing everyone up and opening the secret passage in the northeast corner, and getting into that other room to create a bottle-neck so you could fight the opponents one at a time.

The first best help for writing well is to read things that are well written. If you spend all of your days reading internet postings by barely literate people, you won't learn much about the proper effective use of language. So some time should always be spent reading good books.

 

It can also be remarkably helpful to find effective passages from books or articles and physically retype them and proofread your work. The act of moving words from your brain through your fingertips and onto a page requires a lot of processing that you don't get from reading alone. Of course, remember to delete anything you've retyped so you don't accidentally call it your own. It's similar to art students learning by trying to copy famous paintings.

 

Also, because of the way English grew as a language, some of the structural elements are hard to recognize (too many exceptions to every rule). Studying a foreign language, particularly something like Latin, really helps in understanding conjugation, noun-verb agreement, and so on.

 

Finally, finding older (pre 1960s) books on rhetorical theory can help in learning how to structure thought and argument. After that era, "rhetoric" became thought of as a dirty word relating to fraud, rather than what it means: the effective use of language to support an argument or conclusion.

The rumor is you have about 8 months to wait. ;-)

Well there is one nice breastplate that mages can wear. ;-)

Really, everything you're asking about playing A:EftP can be found via the links here: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=252841#Post252841

 

Don't forget that it's possible to buy 2 levels (for each character) of a lot of skills from trainers in the game, and the Lores and Tool Use are shared among the party.

You must be missing a path. Have you found the house in the grove with the hunter? Northwest corner of the map. From there you head east through a hedge maze and a bunch of fights and more trap doors and then more fights...

Some armor has even HIGHER penalties, and a few wonderful pieces have none. It's a tradeoff you have to decide on for yourself.

That depends on how you feel about him and the objectives of his settlement. In terms of gameplay, it gets you some benefits in terms of buying training and such in the town, and there's no major negative up to a point. Many of the things he asks of you, you'd be doing anyway. The trickier question is helping at least one of the other people there.

Is the trapdoor that won't open on the north side of the river? After you'd already passed through one tunnel? If so, keep wandering around. You'll meet the beast a couple more times before you get to the final battle. Lots more trap doors up and down.

PS - The AI can't really be bypassed because when you program your choices and release the pause, all actions from every character and monster on the screen start back up at the same time, and the AI has to deal with what changes (did the enemy you were planning to attack move out of range, but you told your fighter not to move forward because you were tired of him running into flaming oil slicks so now he's just standing there like an idiot?).

Yes, you can pause the action in DA and alter orders and so on, but it's a much bigger pain in the rear than a turn-based game. You may not think it's a major distinction, but lots of other people do. It's not just the reflex element of real-time or pseudo real-time combat, either.

 

EDIT for additional commentary:

 

I did enjoy DA:O, but not so much that I would buy the sequel after I read the reviews that they moved it away from the parts I enjoyed and toward the mindless violence. Of course, the problem with any anecdotal review is that we each bring our unstated preferences. I don't care about parties so much as I prefer turn-based play. I generally prefer an isometric view or a moveable camera angle over a hard first-person POV. And while I'm not a total graphics snob, I have a level of graphical immaturity that I won't sink below.

 

Way back when I was in high school, I had a friend who so loved the complex math of physical interaction that he created his own RPG that required players to keep a slide rule handy to figure out the results of any action. Sometimes reading the in-depth analyses of certain regulars on here, I think they'd have loved my friend's game, but it didn't get past two weeks in our gaming group.

 

My point in this is that Jeff's objective is to find a game that is satisfying enough for a large enough group of people to make him a decent income to support his family, while sticking with the kinds of games he seems to enjoy most--turn based RPGs.

Yes, turn based is important to the discussion because (1) some of us don't want the fights of our amazing heroes hampered by our own lack of manual dexterity or reaction time, and (2) AI control that has the heroes smart enough to create barriers and a flaming oil trap to bottle-neck attackers, but stupid enough to stand so far away that you can't even see the enemy until it's past your trap, or that has the mindless undead enemy smart enough to run around the flaming oil, and your brilliant fighters dumb enough to run straight through it to attack them. (Yes, I'm looking at you Dragon Age: Origins.)

Press U.

For the folks new to Spiderweb Games brought in by Avadon, the remakes are fresh. There are also a number of us who came much later to the party and haven't been willing (or able because of changes in computer systems) to run the earlier games with less pleasing visuals. So from that perspective, remakes make sense.

 

Also remember that there are two major elements to creating a game, the content and the coding. It may well be that if he weren't doing the remakes it would not significantly speed up the delivery of the next Avadon because he has to completely create the new content as well as code it all. Jeff may well work better in parallel, coding the Avernum remakes based on largely extant content, while also creating the new content for Avadon 2 which he is likely now coding into the actual game.

They get extra turns even on Normal difficulty, and if you daze them they only lose one of those turns.

You've done the whole main Slith fort on the island, upstairs and down, all the way to the throne room? You'd remember the series of gate openings and groups of slith warriors attacking and the disembodied voice.

Did you pick up the one down the secret passages on the left of the entrance to the Nephar fort? Or run down to the Tower of Magi and grab one there, or lots of other places. I think Fort Duvno has one. You might check the item list.

You need a boat, or you need to take a LONG walk around.