Ceiling Durkheim

Alorael: because you're worth it.

5 AP, in fact. It's still nice on characters who have fewer than 10 AP (in the early-mid game, or because of they've moved around). Still, non-healing consumables are pretty underwhelming. I think Jeff got that aspect of gameplay about right in A6; shame he didn't stick with it.

@Aran: So I hear. They didn't seem so hostile or incendiary during my stint in 2002-3, but I mostly stuck around the Avernum pages and away from general & misc., so I may have a biased sample.

Wow. I leave for a couple of weeks to party and get a bad flu, and the forums catch fire. For what it's worth, I think your reaction to this is both reasonable and understandable. I'm not trans or genderqueer myself (and so can't claim to understand the experience firsthand), but if I'd been around when someone said something like Trenton did to a trans/GQ friend of mine*, I would have to seriously restrain myself from slapping them. Not a playful "cut that crap out" slap, either. Transphobia is an ugly, nasty form of bigotry. *Which, thankfully, I don't have to very often, as I live in one of the most liberal parts of the country and people generally frown on transphobia.

Quote: Sure, the only way to reconcile that is to go with "the keeper is missing!" in that regard, if only to avoid doing what Diablo 3 is doing to the anonymous hero of Diablo 1, but even that might get dicey. Apologies for the digression, but Diablo 3 is doing what now? The heroes in D1 weren't exactly anonymous. In fact, the lore makes it pretty clear that they're all boss fights in D2: Blood Raven, the Summoner, and the Wanderer/Diablo himself. It's kind of a grim series.

Quote: Was it? I thought only the Exile series got subtitles, and the Avernum series just got numbers. Pretty sure Alorael is right about this. Exile 1-3, Geneforge 4-5, Avadon, and the new Avernum remakes have subtitles, according to SW's website, and the others just have names and numbers.

@Beer and Motor Oil and Avadon: FF Tactics was a fun game with an interesting story, but it lost points for the abysmal translation. Tip for budding writers: if at any time you feel compelled to write the phrase "he fights for the justice of others," consider instead injecting lidocaine into your fingers to render them too numb to write, and then taking a short nap until the urge subsides.

@Aran: I, for one, would love a strategy game based on Geneforge. GeneCraft? Shape and Slaughter? Supreme Commander (of the Ornk horde)? I would be so down with that.

Quote: Quote: Speaking of... There's a reason you don't see Jeff post on here much. I was hoping to mention that too, but couldn't find the link. Thought it was on another article somewhere, not his blog. Ah well. Eh, I'm not that sympathetic. Man has a right to read and not read what he chooses, but I think this forum is one of the most respectful and civil ones I've ever been on (gaming or otherwise). Lukematt's critique isn't very nice, but there are dozens of things worse than that said every day on the forums of major game companies. The history posts on general suggest that it wasn't always this tame, but at this point I can't see much of anything that could reasonably upset someone.

@Slarty: I prefer my suck turn-based, personally.

You know, we can get into a lengthy discussion over how adventurers preserve the dust of their fallen comrades intact, and the mechanical difficulties of rendering something as nuanced as the way in which a fireball scatters the ashes of the recently deceased, and how magic that can restore human life to something that no longer bears even the vaguest resemblance to a human corpse (let alone a living body) can't just work on one mote of dust or a few and instead takes a good hefty dice bag's worth of the stuff (herein defined as the amount preserved from a standard dusted adventurer, which is also more than was left of Erika, Solberg, Hawthorne, et al)...Or we can just recite the MST3k mantra, as Jeff* himself seems to be inclined to in this case, and acknowledge that resurrection in the older Exile/Avernum games doesn't make sense, and maybe doesn't need to. *He has not addressed this particular question as far as I know, but his commentary on similar questions tends to be "it's magic. Why do you expect it to make sense?"

@Triumph: I'm with you on FF6 and Chrono Trigger. I preferred the story in the former, but the latter was a lot more fun. I also didn't get into console RPGs until the Playstation era, so I never really developed the fond early life associations that many seemed to with SNES Squaresoft games.

Ooh, yeah, the Escape Velocity series deserves a place in my top 10 as well. Shame they haven't made any games in that vein since Nova.

In no particular order: -Xenogears -Mass Effect 3 -Starcraft (Warcraft 3 is also up there) -Final Fantasy 10 -Geneforge 4 -Civilization (series) -Knights of the Old Republic -Planescape: Torment -Shadow Hearts: Covenant -Silent Hill 2 -Escape Velocity (series) -Dragon Age

It's kind of a hand-wave, but we should note that there are differing levels of difficulty involved in removing various ailments. For instance, a dose of common poison or disease is easy enough for a PC priest to cure, but you have to go to a specialist to remove dread curse.

The return life spell can revive a dusted character, though, if it's relatively high level (3, I think?). I'd call this much more a matter of gameplay and story segregation.

@Cesium and Dicetrain: Yeah, this is one of those stories in which there aren't many people to really like. Redbeard may make the trains run on time (usually), but he's also corrupt, as violent as most of the people who oppose him, and at times surprisingly inept. For instance, Click to reveal.. while Shima was probably the companion I liked least, his sidequest actually made the most sense from a 'greater good' standpoint. Yeah, he was mostly in it for revenge, but the fact stands that Harua was building a fortress inside the Beraza woods. A war could easily have started over less. It's not clear whether Redbeard knew about this and allowed it (which shows terrible judgment), or didn't know (which shows he was out of touch). In either case, it doesn't reflect well on Avadon's leadership. My conclusion, with all said and done, was that Avadon and the Pact were necessary institutions, but Redbeard was seeming more and more like a bad choice to lead them. I didn't see many good alternatives, though.

@Randomizer: Sorry, my attention drifted and I just read all that as "you kids get off my lawn." As Slarty and Actaeon said, sex in literature is about as old as literature is. As for books getting shorter and snappier, have you read Infinite Jest lately? It's moderately popular, and so long as to nearly merit its name. Seriously though, I think the actual reason that there are more relatively simple books is because rates of literacy have increased tremendously in the last few centuries. There's almost always been some sort of intellectual class who consume a lot of highbrow written material, but for most of human history they were among the few who could read at all. 99% of the US population can read and write. 50% is on the low to average range for a developing country; it's also a threshold France (certainly one of the more wealthy and 'civilized' countries of the epoch) crossed a little before its revolution. Since the substantial majority of people who can read these days are not highbrow academic types, we should probably not expect them to desire primarily highbrow academic literature. @Actaeon: That's true. I haven't encountered much in the way of cannibalism in G.R.R. Martin's work. Yet.

@Dicetrain: I don't see why this is such a problem. A lot of people have strong opinions on which side is right in various Spiderweb games. For instance, I loathe the Shapers, and pretty much always played 'rebel' sides in the Geneforge series. It's impossible to design a scenario that everyone will see as an even-handed and difficult moral quandary, and frankly I'm not sure why one would want to anyway. The measure of choice in a story like this should be at least as much its ability to divide its players as a whole as to divide any individual's mind. Geneforge seems to do this quite well; whether Avadon does, I'm not so sure. I've seen pretty much the gamut of opinions regarding Avadon/the Pact on these forums, but my observation hasn't been nearly rigorous enough to discern whether some are more common than others.

@Gon: The mage is what now? I think you are literally the first person I've seen on the forum in the months that AEftP has been out who thinks that magi are underpowered. Also: healer? Do you mean with items, or are you confusing magi with priests?

@Slarty: I don't think I was clear on what I meant here. I didn't mean that dual wielding was as good at dealing damage as offensive magic, but rather that the builds overall are both useful and highly viable. Dual wielders can't match casters for raw damage or versatility, but they're substantially stronger when it comes to defense and tanking: they get better access to armor (especially in the early game and relative to magi), more and better defensive skills, and have to jump through far fewer hoops to get adrenaline rush and bladeshield. In either case, even if dual wielding were woefully underpowered overall, that would only reinforce the thrust of my argument: increasing the strength of other weapon styles to balance them with DW makes much more sense because weakening DW would just make weapons in general seriously underpowered. I don't get the impression we disagree on that, though.

@Kinsume: I think the issue with weakening dual wielding instead of strengthening the other weapon types/styles is that it would make casters the dominant character type. The forum consensus is that casters and dual wielders in the original game are pretty close to equal; weaken dual wielding, and there's very little reason to play a fighter at all if you're going for build optimization. @Slarty: That seems very well balanced overall. The one thing that puzzles me is changing icy rain to a cone spell; can you tell me a bit more about your rationale for that?

I think if there's any salvageable idea in here, it's a sticky that describes various series' attributes. Not recommendations, not pros and cons (since as a couple people have mentioned, one man's meat is another's poison), but a list of the ways in which the games differ from one another on core gameplay and story mechanics. Things like the updates to the inventory systems, the type of skill system employed, even something as simple as party size/whether you have a party or not. That last one, especially, could stand a little elucidation, since I don't think the Geneforge pages on SW's site ever make explicit the fact that you don't have a traditional RPG party.

@Kreador: It's worth keeping in mind, though, that some of the items on strategy central have pretty major spoilers in them. Especially the Synergizer item list, which also happens to be one of the better sources on AL/CL/TU values for various points in the game.

The max cave lore is I think 13, but that doesn't give you all that much in the way of benefits. A lot of people suggest skipping cave lore, while others recommend going for a couple points on each character but not exceeding 10 total. Max tool use is 14, but that's only to get some nice consumable items in the final dungeon. 12 is all you really want, and you can get 1 point from equipment. It mostly doesn't matter which order you train spells in. It's notable that there is a spellbook midway through the game that will give you 2 free levels of the first half or so of the mage/priest spells if you have 8 arcane lore, but won't raise any spell to level 3 unless you've found the book specific to that spell. The latter condition is the only requirement for getting level 3 of a spell if you have access to a trainer or the aforementioned tome. As for subsequent games: it's less a question of graphics and more one of user interface. The old games feel pretty clunky and user-unfriendly to many people. The games that use roughly the current system of graphics and inventory are Geneforge 4-5, Avernum 5-6, and Avadon. If you don't mind a more primitive interface, the suggestion is generally to go with the earliest game that will work on your computer. They all have pretty good stories. As for the remake schedule: they're alternating with the Avadon sequels, so you can expect another 1.5-2 years for Avernum: Crystal Souls, and another couple years after that for Avernum: Ruined World.