Ceiling Durkheim

I'm going to have to opt out of "everyone" here, which I'm pretty sure makes it not everyone by definition. While canisters have a tremendous potential for abuse, I also think that if regulated properly, they can do a huge amount of good. A village healer or the like with access to healing magic could save dozens of lives, and so on. And using only one or two canisters doesn't actually seem to alter one's personality much, as evinced by the fact that PCs in the Geneforge series can use around a half dozen over the course of 3-12 months or so, and not encounter any changes in dialogue or endings. They would have to be strictly regulated, of course, and even then there would probably be a black market. Then again, short of a whole lot of execution and book burning, there would probably be a black market in them regardless of their legality.

If he didn't like risk, he wouldn't have started an indie game company. Thanks for the applause, folks, I'm here all night.

The problem being that they remain faceless until G5, thus making them less viable recurring villains than Ghaldring. Alwan might rate a mention, and if we're going for one-off villains, Taygen is about as universally hated as Ghaldring. If anything, the rebels seem to hate Taygen less than the Shapers do, perhaps because they're not as clued in about his "great work."

Seconded. If Lysistrata and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (in which the main character literally kills an enemy army at least two enemy armies by drowning them in his urine) can be serious literature and cultural history, I think lolcats can be serious history too. And I've taken classes that teach the former as serious literature/history.

I basically agree with TxGangsta and Randomizer that there is no primary villain. Were I forced to pick one, it would be Ghaldring. He sounds like a Bond villain in G3's ending, is a cynical, manipulative magnificent bastard in G4, is the final boss of 4 of the 5 plot paths in G5, and gets overthrown and probably killed even in his own side's ending. While the rebels are presented as a viable moral option to the same extent as the Shapers, Ghaldring himself has to die for there to be peace. This makes him the closest thing to a primary antagonist in the latter 3 games of the series, though even so he isn't to nearly the same extent as Rentar-Ihrno, the Slith Triad, Garzahd, etc. There isn't one to even that limited extent in the first two games. Also, I really like the phrase "the overriding bad guy is ethics."

It's a bad thing in that it takes more work on the game-designer's part to program and balance, when said designer could spend time on other features, debugging, or just release the game earlier. Also, do we have any evidence that Nephil and Slith tails are prehensile?

I think underlying *i's point, and some of the others, is a principle that this conversation has mostly overlooked: to be worth including in a game, dual wielding has to bring something new to the table. It could just be flavor, but I'm dubious on the idea of including a new gameplay mechanic purely because it looks/sounds cool, especially since most of us aren't exactly playing Jeff's games for the graphics. If dual wielding is just another way to do more damage, there's no reason besides flavor to include both it and two handed weapons; they have basically the same effect, but with more programming time involved. Best case scenario, you get a case like in D&D 3/3.5 where dual wielding is better against targets with a lot of HP, while two handed weapons are better against targets with a lot of AC and/or damage resistance. Worst case scenario, you get a game like many in the Final Fantasy series where one of the two (usually dual wielding, as the more 'cool' of the two) is thoroughly and obviously better than the other. Avernum 6 doesn't go that far, but forum consensus does rate dual wielding as consistently better than pole weapons. One option is to make dual wielding and two handers interact with skill sets differently, as *i suggests, or use different sets of skills like in Dragon Age. Another is to make weapon special abilities more desirable in themselves: dual wielding might do less overall damage than a two hander, but give more passive bonuses, and have a better chance to activate trigger-on-hit abilities like status abnormalities or special types of damage. I'm sure there are others, but those are what I can think of offhand. Mauve deer: unless dual wielding is both distinct from two handed weapons in gameplay terms, and balanced with it (as well as shields, which we've discussed more), there's little reason to include it. @Alorael: That's true to a degree, but most animals (and presumably big humanoids) can attack a target in front of them, on which they're concentrating, much more effectively than one outside their field of vision and out of range of their jaws. A dragon's legs may be able to kick and trample, but they're not likely to be all that accurate, and I'd certainly rather be hit by those than by a dragon's jaws or fire breath.

It would also depend a lot on the number of people who were fighting the creature at once. If it's one on one, your only chance will likely be a weapon with reach. If a group fights against something (say, an RPG-style party), one person (or a few) could keep the beast's attention while others with weapons that prioritized speed and damage over reach could conduct hit-and-run attacks against its flanks.

That's probably part of it, but even then there are mobile Shapers who can produce more than that. Alwan and Miranda near the end of G4, for instance.

I'll buy that, with the proviso that said Shaper class would be a great deal weaker than Shapers in the Geneforge games. This isn't a problem in the sort of campaign that Beer & Motor Oil discusses above, but it would lead to inconsistencies in a world more directly based on Geneforge. In such a world, I still think a Shaper/lifecrafter class could only really be balanced against other Shaper/lifecrafter classes. Which, of course, is what Jeff did.

Unless one is inhumanly accurate, doing non-lethal damage and only "making it angry" are foregone conclusions. It still depends on the thickness of the creature's hide (as per my point about armor before), but the basic idea is that there are many creatures in fantasy settings that are difficult to kill simply because they have so much body. Trolls/ogres (provided they aren't wearing armor), giant versions of normal animals, even some versions of dragons. If you're going to have to hit something a substantial number of times to kill it, having the ability to hit more often is a clear advantage in a way that it wouldn't be against a human, who would go down after one good hit.

The "God" vs. "god" distinction is commonly used to distinguish between monotheistic and polytheistic deities. This can get a bit fuzzy, since some polytheistic deities are about as omnipotent and omnipresent as a monotheistic God (e.g. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in many Vedic religions), but in principle it seems reasonable to have a linguistic marker that distinguishes between, say, Allah and Artemis.

Yeah, I think one cardinal rule (at least in any campaign where combat balance matters at all) would be that either all players play Shapers, or none do. Beyond that, the single largest obstacle would be the tendency of large numbers of creations to make combat cumbersome. Larger battles in tabletop RPGs often drag on interminably, and in my experience are rarely fun. I could see a tabletop wargame like Warhammer working well for combat between groups of Shapers. Another option would be to much more strictly limit the number of creations a player could make. This would run up against problems of in-story consistency, since even the 7 creation limit in the Geneforge series is clearly far fewer than an experienced Shaper can create and maintain under direct control.

We weren't, until you reanimated the thread. Oh bitter, delicious irony!

I'm a bit more sympathetic toward dual wielding in works of fiction. One reason is the one you cite here: there are actual martial forms that involve wielding two weapons. In fairness to video games, some have been employing the more realistic medium weapon and small weapon style: both the aforementioned Dragon Age and most D20 systems limit one to small weapons in the off hand, or apply a very steep penalty for using larger ones, until one has a very high level skill. And of course at this point one is very nearly superhuman anyway. The other reason I find it more defensible is that the great majority of enemies people have fought in real life are other people. People are glass cannons. Even a glancing blow in a non-critical area from a gun or sword can incapacitate a person, and a good hit will likely kill us. Armor can help, but it's easier to get through that with a strong single hit than multiple weak ones. Monsters in fiction are often much larger than humans. If one is fighting a bunch of fantasy beasts the size of rhinos, the ability to inflict a single, accurate, decisive strike becomes less important, while the ability to hit more times in ways that at least do damage becomes more so.

To elaborate on this: while Kant is perhaps the prime example, the idea of reciprocal moral obligation between rational beings pervades most of western moral philosophy. It goes at least as far back as Plato, and is visible in the ethical work of most of his successors. Plato himself is especially notable for holding even the gods up to these same moral standards. It's also visible in various Biblical sources, e.g. Matthew 25:40 "whatever you have done for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." Islam in the Qur'an and hadith explicitly bases its ethical and juridical rules on the idea that they convey the most benefit to thinking humans. The idea of sentient beings as tools and nothing more flies in the face of most of the major western philosophical and religious movements of the last 3000 years. This doesn't make it wrong, but I certainly disagree with the notion. Of course, as we've seen, it's also a fairly difficult topic to argue, because for many people it's a matter of arguing axioms. For many people, the idea that promoting the welfare of other sentient beings is an end in itself is the foundation, rather than a consequence, of their moral beliefs. Also, "Manny Kant?" I like it.

And then the rebels rallied again (i.e. created and unleashed the Unbound at the end of G4), and took back what they had lost from that third, with a little extra on the side.

Seconded. If you look at it in terms of number of provinces, rebels only control two of the nine (Illya and Burwood) as of G5, and a small slice of the Storm Plains. On the other hand, Illya and Burwood seem to be (along with the Mera-Tev and Storm Plains) the largest provinces. Of the others, most are mid-sized, but the Whitespires are tiny. When considered carefully, a third seems like a good estimate.

Figures that Jeff would design a combat system so well-suited to his own 'skills.'

You are correct, God help you (and the rest of us). The shades spawn vahnatai Shapers. If any of said entities are named "Redbeard," seppuku will be the only option.

Astoria has merit as well. Then again, I may be parroting what Sage said, since her faction has so much in common with the Awakened. On a related note, I find it an entertaining (and realistic) bit of historical garbling that the residents of Penta, who are basically Awakened 2.0, named their town after an Obeyer community in G1.

The pylons hatch from chitrach eggs, and the black/red/green shades hatch from the pylons. You don't want to know what spawns from the shades.

In re evolutionary competition and medieval rulers: we're really setting the bar high for morality here, eh? I'm not even all that sure it's to the Shapers' advantage to treat creations and outsider humans like crap. The plot of the Geneforge series, after all, is basically about a huge war that started in large part because Shapers treat creations and outside humans like crap. Certainly Shaper law exists for a reason. My point has been that the ends it seeks to accomplish are basically immoral; selfish and power-hungry at best, outright genocidal at worst. The fact (which I can hardly dispute) that many governments throughout history have also been bad doesn't mean that the Shapers aren't bad, merely that they are so in a recognizable and (depressingly) ordinary way. As for trying to make life better for outsider humans, I don't think the Shapers do this substantially more than most human governments have. I'm not convinced that the Shapers are better rulers than, say, the average Roman emperor or Abbasid caliph.

Amnesiac = Goettsch, post Atkins diet-induced stroke.

You're welcome!