Ceiling Durkheim

Quote: Also, as to the gender thing: Those robes are pretty baggy. We really can't be sure whats underneath. o.O Yeah, all I really mean is that the narration uses male pronouns to describe Monarch.

Quote: The hardest part of fighting Grah-Hoth's summons are the ones that slow. You use speed potions and have to alternate between healing even with invulnerability and killing them to get back to the wimp, Grah-Hoth. That and the stunning imps later on in the fight. Those are straight obnoxious. Like I said to Jeff, I found Grah-Hoth substantially harder than Hawthorne. Anyone with sense is going to use invulnerability potions in both fights, so the debuff-spamming in the former fight is harder than the latter, which is almost all about damage. Quote: I had been concentrating on just surviving until Grah-Hoth was gone, and then dealing with the mess, reasoning that there's no way I could thin them out significantly anyway. Perhaps I'll go back and take a more pro-active approach to the summoned beasties. It'd take less of a toll on the recovery scrolls, as well. I tried killing Grah-Hoth ASAP, and got several body parts whose names don't qualify as profanity handed to me. While he can summon demons every turn, by far his nastiest and most plentiful summons are the ones that he summons when he's lost certain amounts of health. Having him summon multiple waves in one turn (yes, he does this if you damage him quickly enough) is pretty much a death sentence on hard. So yeah, taking it slow with him and prioritizing the killing of everything he summons is the way to go. Also, apropos of nothing in particular, is anyone else disappointed by Grah-Hoth's in-game graphic? His picture in the cutscene artwork is impressively horrific with its giant mouth and many glowing eyes, but in the fight against him he just looks like a normal (albeit very large) demon. While in most respects I prefer Jeff's newer games to his old ones by a significant margin, there are far fewer neat boss graphics. Here's hoping Garzahd gets a modified graphic, unlike his or Hawthorne's graphics in AEftP.

@Waladil: This all seems plausible. I'd differ on a few details, but that's more personal preference than anything that can be backed with evidence. For instance, it's possible that some or all of the G3/G5 characters (Greta, Alwan, Litalia...) honestly don't recognize you. In particular, as you say, it's hard to believe that Alwan would ever trust a rebel-friendly G3 PC. Also, if we're talking about Shaper Monarch, it's pretty much certain that he's male...the possibility exists, though faint, that he was so radically reshaped that he changed in appearance from female to male (there is some precedent for this, e.g. implications regarding sexual reassignment from Rawal's guardian), but at the time he was clearly identified as male. All in all, the G3 PC -> Monarch -> G5 PC theory is my favorite.

@Soul of Wit: If memory serves, that one's called "Death Curse," unless the name has changed since A5-6, in which it was also a status effect. Different effects and duration, as Randomizer says. I got dread curse twice in my last playthrough, so I can confirm that you aren't immunized after the first time.

Quote: (due to all G3 artwork, we can assume the canon story involves playing agent) No, we can't. The only indication that the artwork reflects series canon is, well, the artwork. I agree that a G3 Agent becoming a G5 sorceress is nice and parsimonious, but none of that is really a strong argument in its favor. Quote: The reason Jeff never included Strong magic average shaping before was because it would be too powerful. Now let's look at that character: You started out as an Agent in canon G3, got heavily modified (more powerful). The sorceress is intended to be a more powerful version of the agent class. So it all fits. This is confusing gameplay with story. There is no indication in story that any class is better than any other. One could probably come up with a convoluted, tortuous, and entirely speculative explanation for why the relative power of various classes shifts between games (e.g. the guardian being a powerhouse in G2 because of parry, and one of the worst classes in 3 and 5), but why bother? It's clear that these are problems with play balance, not elements of the plot. Anyway, what evidence do you have that "the sorceress is intended to be a more powerful version of the agent class?" Aside from being more a variant on the infiltrator than the agent (since the sorceress is a rebel class), nothing Jeff has said indicates to me that the classes are intended to be anything but balanced with one another. The fact that they aren't, and he knows this now, doesn't mean that he intended them to be unbalanced: it's more likely that he simply couldn't rebalance them effectively without seriously altering the game system. That said, I agree with the point about Drypeak: while it's redolent of G2, there's no reason another character couldn't have gone there, either to investigate the ruins (which would clearly interest many a rebel), or simply wander into that area while already crazy.

Quote: Could someone explain the argument against the G4 PC not being possible due to timeline issues? As I recall there was a few years between G4 and G5. There were a few years. Roughly three: G4 narration mentions that it takes place seven years into the rebellion, and G5 says it's been ten years. Vener in Stormhold saw Rawal's people bringing the PC with them three years prior. Specifically, he says: "When I saw you. It was about ... three years ago. I was patrolling a road in the Mera-Tev. South of Mera. It was night. At a camp. And a Shaper and three outsiders and four big creations came to our camp." Now, at this point the PC was already insane. Rawal's journal mentions that his agents found the PC near Drypeak. Drypeak is relatively near to Gazaki-Uss. This means that they already traveled some distance (debated how much: could be anything from a few dozen miles to hundreds). Even if we assume relatively little travel time, and that "about three years" means a bit less, rather than equal or more, that still means that the PC was at Drypeak at the time, or very soon after, the ending of G4. Note that this is the more favorable interpretation: if Vener's "about three" means equal or more, then the G4 PC would literally have to be in two places at once. This means that the G4 character would have to have gone insane and gotten to the Drypeak area from Northforge in the few weeks following the ending of G4, at most a few months. This strikes me as extremely unlikely. Both Rawal and Vener's descriptions make it sound like the PC alternated between catatonia and acting like a rabid animal. While the G4 PC (who is pretty much canonically rebel) was likely a canister junkie, it is unlikely that they could have done anywhere near as much as they did to help the rebels while anywhere near this level of crazy. Even if the G4 PC went crazy only after the ending of G4, either because of accumulated canister abuse or some other cause, it strains plausibility pretty far to think that they could have made a journey halfway across the known world in a period of a few weeks to a few months. While a normal person could probably have done so, most normal people aren't alternatingly catatonic and violently psychotic. In short, many factors conspire to make the timelines just not add up if the G4 and G5 PCs are the same person. The best argument I've heard against this is not a refutation, but the simple fact that Jeff doesn't do timetables very well in his games, and thus date-crunching is a questionable method for determining things about them. I don't have much to say against this point: the G4 PC is highly unlikely if one cares about dates and times matching up, but when the writer of the story doesn't, it's hard to call that truly damning.

Quote: I also hope to find active whips, it's too bad whips are not weapons in Spiderweb Games... I know, maybe they would be too much Indiana Jones taste for a Fantasy game but, it might be thrilling to slash a Slith chief or an Ogre mage Whips are rarely weapons in RPGs not because of the Jones association, but because they're not actually useful as weapons. The point of a whip isn't to kill or maim an enemy, but to cause pain, usually to a person or animal that isn't all that likely to kill you anyway. One can attach small blades or metal spikes to the ends of whips, but this mostly just makes them into cut-rate rope darts or flails. Of course, this is fantasy, so we can in theory have any number of physics-defying whip-things (e.g. Ivy from Soul Calibur), but Jeff's games tend to be pretty down to earth about weapon selection.

This update is pretty much full of victory. Thanks, Jeff!

Quote: Very much so. I'm a mere hundred miles north from one Portland. Take a guess. Cool! Near the wormhole east of Seattle that connects to Portland, Maine?

Quote: Bards have also gotten the short end of the stick in editions between, what, first and fourth? Third wasn't exactly a shining moment for them. 1E bards were also bad, but for a different reason: the rules surrounding them were intensely bizarre and arcane, even for 1E. Bards needed 15+ in four attributes, and lesser requirements for the other two. They also required five levels of fighter and five levels of thief, then they multiclassed to druid, only druid magically became bard. They were like a really complicated, inane prestige class. I'm not sure what Gygax et al were on when they created the 1E bard class, but I want some. Quote: As a spellcasting class in 3rd edition, they're still going to be more effective than a non-optimised build of just about any non-spellcasting class. Granted, but there really weren't many non-spellcasting classes in 3E. If memory serves: fighter, rogue, monk, and barbarian, vs. paladin, bard, ranger, sorcerer, cleric, mage, and druid. Under the rubric you mention, primary spellcasters are better than partial spellcasters are better than non-spellcasters. So yes, bards are on a higher tier than the four non-casters, but they're also on a lower tier than the pure casters (cleric, druid, mage, sorcerer). They're a mid-tier class, but as I've heard they're considered worse than the other two hybrid classes (paladin and ranger). So, mediocre overall.

@Yuna Corne: If I may ask, does the PNW on your profile stand for "Pacific Northwest?" As one in a strange state of being known to experts as "Oregon" (related to but distinct from "Holy Matrimony" and "The Union Address"), I am curious.

Quote: Im not the biggest fan of the new ones but 2nd edition for me was anyone who isnt a mage or fighter gets the shaft. Clerics also tend to be pretty overpowered in...well, everything. They're only marginally worse at tanking than fighters, and have spellcasting abilities only marginally worse than magi. I've suspected for a while that clerics are deliberately overpowered to get people to play them, since most would rather play the He-Man hero on the front lines or the person who nukes all the enemies than the medic. As someone who actually likes playing support characters in pen and paper games, I have no problem with the present state of things. Rogues do tend to be consistently underpowered, though.

I've encountered a surprising amount of hate for 4E among my circle of friends. I think both 3E and 4E have merits: the latter is a much better game, and sorts out most of the really egregious balance issues in 3E. The former allows for a lot more creativity and has a lot of neat elements that 4E lacks, in part precisely because it's so broken. There are a lot of cool things (especially spells, but some items and monsters as well) that just don't and can't work in a well-balanced game. Polymorph spells are the classic example: they're a cool thing for casters to do, and a staple of fairy tales and fantasy novels, but they're a rampaging, never-balanced nightmare from a rules perspective.

Quote: I should totally change my pdn to Droknarr. Too bad he gets greased right at the start. I know. Total ensemble darkhorse right there. Much cooler than Lagran.

Quote: Never finished the game because of this fight. I can say, without hyperbole, it's the least fun and most tedious thing I've ever done in a videogame. Spoken like someone who has never played the chocobo racing and lightning dodging minigames in Final Fantasy 10. That said, Redbeard is possibly the most tedious video game thing that is actually a major plot point, and not really optional. (i.e. you don't have to fight him, but that's a plot decision that gets you a different ending, not a minigame you can choose to ignore.)

Also, on the G5 map the top 5-7% of the south map and the bottom 5-7% of the north map depict the same area, due to the copy pasting. I think there either has to be a lot of area between the two, or the G4 map is on a somewhat smaller scale than the G5 map (maybe 0.75-0.8 to 1). There's no strong evidence for the latter point, but it would make the maps fit; also I don't think we've had any strong evidence that the eastern part of Terrestia is actually the same size as the west, we've just assumed so on the forums because they're both two screens of world map and look similarly sized.

Also, said creations (Ur-Drakons and Eyebeasts) are only available if you raid the quest reward areas in Gazaki-Uss but don't side with Ghaldring's faction. This means having a lot of mechanics skill and living tools, or just ignoring most machines and locked doors you come across. There's only a smidgen of difference between this and simply being unable to make said creations at all.

@TGF and SoT: I agree that using Ayn Rand as an example of why ideologically motivated fiction is bad fails because Ayn Rand is a bad example of ideologically motivated fiction. I kind of hate her (work and personal life), but even most people I know who genuinely like her ideals and work will acknowledge that books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are worth reading because they communicate those ideals, not because they're great literature. My problem with Grasshopper's argument, in short, is this: s/he takes a set of premises so reasonable as to essentially be truisms (all fiction contains elements of escapism, and escapism is a valuable and enjoyable element in some fiction), and argues from these to a much less obvious point (escapism is the only valuable element in fiction, and works of fiction with real world commentary and ideology are worse for their inclusion). All well and good, but none of Grasshopper's arguments convince me of the logical connection between premises and conclusion. The example of Ayn Rand is a clear straw man, because Ayn Rand is considered by everyone but her Objectivist fans (and even some of them) to be a bad writer; using her as the spokesperson for ideological fiction is like using Bernie Madoff as a spokesman for capitalism, or Pol Pot as a spokesman for communism. I doubt anyone here will dispute that some ideological fiction is bad, but that's a much less all-encompassing argument than we see elsewhere in this thread. Moreover, most of the criticism you, Grasshopper, level at Rand is based on her writing, not the presence of ideology. You posit a necessary connection between the two, "So an -ism orientated novel is unreadable for me because the focus is on the -ism and not on the words..." but this is not an obvious connection to me. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the case for all ideological fiction, or just a general trend. If the former, all I need is one counterexample to disprove the argument, and I can think of several. Both Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy have explicitly political agendas, and are rightly considered among the greatest poetic works ever written: the former seeks to create a Roman origin story to put them on the same cultural tier as the Greeks, and to promote the rule of Augustus, while the latter has notorious passages in which Dante meets various of his political enemies after they've been condemned to hell. Rabelais' Pantagruel spends many pages mocking and insulting the intellectuals of its time, and is hilarious in so doing. China Mieville's fantasy novels are absolutely saturated with his politics, but still have believable characters, entertaining prose, and bloody horrifying monsters. So we can pretty much rule out the notion that all ideological writers are bad writers. Even if you just mean to argue for ideological fiction being worse writing on average, one work, or even one author, is far from sufficient evidence to demonstrate this. Yes, Ayn Rand writes boring, anvilicious prose, but so do many purely escapist authors. There are entire bookshelves full of forgettable fantasies and space operas that can attest to this.

Quote: I suppose this could be a veiled insult, but I'm glad you did try to make it simple and straightforward, as that is always preferable to convoluted and caught up in various ivory tower-isms. Well, it was a criticism directed at someone. I was (and am) legitimately unsure whether that someone is me or you: my points didn't seem to be getting across, and it wasn't clear whether that was incompetent reading on your part, incompetent writing on mine, or some of both. Quote: ...but if you insist: almost all -isms when tackled in games are so badly implemented as to be laughable and immersion breaking. We'll have to disagree there. I think there are many instances in which the issues in question (and other 'hot button' real world issues) are handled ham-handedly in games, but I think there are others that work well. In truth, the majority of video games do handle these sorts of things, especially prejudice, in preachy 'very special episode' ways, but it's not as if that's always the case. I think the Geneforge series deals with interspecies prejudice in a way that's thoughtful and free of sanctimony. Quote: I agree with Nico. That said, if I ever see a dialogue in a scenario that begins "AGATHISM VS. POSTMODERNISM" again... @Slarty: ...and now I'm curious. Quote: Quote: You talk about them all you want, just don't be expecting any groundbreaking spiderweb games that will smite these evil -isms in to the dust with one fell triumphant swishy swoosh. No one (except you) is saying that they expect that, though. What Dikiyoba said.

Quote: Geneforge, a game with a fantasy bent that walks you through the varying vantage points of differing 'isms and 'ismizers in today's world. Is that the one where you thump thahds? Yeah ok, i'll take it. The fact that you aren't interested in an aspect of a game, and choose to ignore it, does not mean it doesn't exist, or that it is unimportant to others. You want to talk "-isms?" Last I checked, that one's called "solipsism." Quote: Nah, Jeff's games are completely escapist. I remember going a couple of months without speaking or reading any english then firing up a spiderweb game. Wow, it was like I was somewhere else: a world where everyone spoke my mother tongue. Pure insanity. And this differs from any work in English how? Including works of nonfiction. By this argument the experience of talking to people in English would be a form of "complete" escapism. At this point your definition of escapism has departed so far from that employed in the preceding conversation or elsewhere that it warrants a different descriptor. I'll make this relatively simple and straightforward, since our points seem to be consistently at cross purposes and largely irrelevant to the thrust of the other's arguments: Some elements of Jeff's stories match the real world (characters with human-like personalities, real world issues like the aforementioned -isms, war, and so on), while others do not (magical creatures, lack of many human needs and weaknesses like excretion of waste, permanent mortality, etc.). A story that was a complete escape from reality as we know it would either be very interesting or not interesting at all, given the lack of a similar frame of reference. A story that has no escapist elements can only be the experience of reality as we know it. All works of fiction created by humans are somewhere in between these two poles. Jeff's games provide an escape from reality in some ways, and not others. My original point, in response to Dikiyoba's, was that ignoring issues of gender and sexism would be a form of escapism atypical of Jeff's style of world-building and storytelling. Like I said before, calling this "complete" escapism is obviously false.

Quote: Unless you are about to be shipped out to a warzone and are playing a military simulator, and you know that if you frequently die in the game, you could very well die in real life, all games are escapist. Really don't believe me? Go in to your bedroom, raise your arms and summon an eyebeast above your bed. So...you're saying that Jeff's games are fictional, and in the fantasy genre? That's really illuminating. If you're not a college professor and/or spiritual guru already, the world is missing out. To reiterate my original point, which you seem to have ignored: Quote: It would be odd for a setting to be full of realistic problems with xenophobia, racism (and its fantastic equivalents), classism, heterosexism, and the like, yet be all sunshine and puppies on issues of sexism and gender. Stories can be escapist to varying degrees. Yes, works of fiction are by definition escapist to some degree, but that degree varies dramatically between works. Saying all works of fiction are the same amount or kind of 'escapist' is like saying that I'm the sun because we both have temperature and mass. Jeff's games are selectively escapist: they have magic and fantasy weirdness in them, but they also have characters who mostly behave in a manner befitting real humans, and they deal with real world problems like the ones referenced above. Which many works of fiction are, even fantasy and science fiction. Really don't believe me? Read/watch A Game of Thrones, play Dragon Age, or play one of Jeff's recent games if you're looking for something a little closer to home.

@Slarty: Mostly agreed on the substance of the point, disagreed on its relevance to the topic at hand. Even with an exceptionally well or poorly designed party, the difficulty levels of relevant quests could still be consistent relative to one another, and thus useful bases for comparison. If one had a color scale for expected level (e.g. gray for 1-5, green for 6-10, blue for 11-15, yellow for 16-20, orange for 21-30, red for 31+), it would still be easy to compare the quest difficulty levels: if a player has trouble with yellow quests, they can save themselves trouble by concluding that orange quests are generally out of their league. Also, while SW games allow a lot of leeway on build optimization, they're hardly unique among RPGs in this respect. It was possible to seriously screw up one's build in old World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII, and those had useful quest difficulty indicators (and the former was clearly level-linked).

Quote: The problem with sorting the quests by difficulty is that is only feasible for the early game. How you have altered your party will determine the difficulty of the later quests. It's also a matter of opinion. I hate stumbling around in the dark. Another player hates wizards who can summon. You get the idea. There are other issues. If Jeff tweaks the balance by nerfing a boss, then he also has to remember to change the difficulty rating of the related quest. It opens up a huge bag of rat tails. I think by "difficulty," the above posters essentially meant "expected level for a party of 4." This is a common practice in other RPGs, and wouldn't be hard to implement. Of course, this doesn't indicate the actual difficulty for any given party, but it's a useful marker, and wouldn't be hard to keep self-consistent.

Quote: The skill trees are less restrictive than those in Avadon, but many of the skills have upper limits, which seems arbitrary, and means that a singleton can't accomplish certain tasks or receive certain rewards because they can't get a particular skill past 11 or whatever. On the one hand, the skill cap is kind of dumb in light of all this. On the other, it obscures the real issue here: for all that Jeff talks about making the game playable and fun for every (not deliberately handicapped) party type, the 'lore' skills have been balanced for a 4-character party since A4 at least. Even if all the cave lore/tool use/arcane lore checks were capped at 10, investing 10 points in those skills is still crippling for a singleton character. A level 50 character gets 71 skill points: if you can beat the game on torment, or even hard, with a singleton who's invested 10 points each in cave lore, arcane lore, and tool use, as far as I'm concerned you can cheat for the other 2-3, because you are a grand master of this game. If anything, this is better in AEftP: at least this way the skill point costs don't scale up. The most cave lore you need in A6 is 18, which means 92 skill points if put all on one character (compared to a total of a bit over 300 from levels, and 50-100 from knowledge brew/wisdom crystals). 92/400 is more than 10/71. The lore skills have been a problem for singletons for a long time; whether this is fixable without radically altering the skill system, I don't know, but it's evident that the AEftP design is not at fault here. Quote: When I create a character for an RPG, I want the character to start as the character I have in mind. In Avernum 6, just for example, the traits had to do with inherent abilities of the character or with what they had done before the beginning of the game. This character has a special talent for magic; this one was an elite trooper; this one is unusually tough. Is the problem with the name "traits"? I agree that the nomenclature is silly and a holdover from older games. That said, they serve a sensible function in the game, and they're much, much, much less broken and unbalanced than the old trait system. Would it help if they were called "perks" or "specializations"? They're basically a (somewhat less wide-ranging and game-breaking) version of the perks from the Fallout series.

Quote: I think the original Exile was already like this: you could choose to leave when you found the exit, but if you didn't, you could keep doing stuff indefinitely. Yep. It was that way, in E1, it was that way in A1, and it continues in AEftP.