Profile for Boots
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Boots |
| Member number | 455 |
| Title | Shock Trooper |
| Postcount | 265 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| Jeff's rep and the Perils of Creating a Scenario Editor in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Tuesday, September 28 2004 20:57
Profile
[Edit: Automotive analogy already stolen by *i. Curses!] This is maybe the seventh time this has been said in this thread alone, but seeing that the aspiring "indie" developer community seems a tad hard of hearing these days: The problem isn't that Jeff Vogel did not provide infinite and eternal support for BoE. The problem isn't that Jeff Vogel didn't change the product in accordance with idiosyncratic customer wishes. The problem isn't that Jeff Vogel is a militantly mediocre scenario designer. The problem is that Jeff Vogel received money in consideration for a product that did not perform as its promotional materials and supporting documents claimed. These flaws are neither esoteric nor cosmetic. They are fundamental and structural. Were you to buy a car whose ignition cut off as soon as you used a half-tank of gas, you would own the automotive equivalent of BoE's 100-town bug. Furthermore, some of the flaws are so obvious and elementary that to have missed them during alpha testing is the handiwork of an heroic act of slapdash indifference. Had even the more trivial problems shown up in the Avernums or Geneforges, you can bet there'd be a line at the whinging counter like it was 1977 and a Vladivostok liquor store all over again ("What do you mean my Alien Blade isn't poisoned? How can I do MAX DAMEDGES!?!?!"). Djur is being charitable: even game developers can't expect to get away with refusing to fix problems that serious and thorough-going. That Vogel did is entirely thanks to a group of "hobbyists" who did his work for him. So Quartex's "game vs. editor" analysis is correct, provided it is flipped on its head: there's no way you can release a product as compromised as BoE unless you're selling it to people who are more creative, careful and imaginative than you are. [ Tuesday, September 28, 2004 20:58: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Why does Jeff have a bad rep? in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, September 25 2004 16:31
Profile
[*i has probably made most of this redundant] Since I'm a Blades player not a designer, I'm content with JV's policy of malign neglect. Not that it's a good thing, but it beats the alternative: him doing his purblind Papa Doc act with more frequency, stamping out not only efforts at technical improvement but also any creative deviance from Vogel Design Doctrine (now with Misogynistic Scapegoat Subroutine!). Still, I'm not gonna cluck at designers for getting "dramatic" about the treatment they've received from him. You put up with a company refusing to provide a product as advertised and then resorting to insult, condescension and indifference rather than admit to the refusal. You may find yourself also inclined towards a bit of winking hyperbole: and let's be clear, that mail fraud thread caps five years of community exasperation, a good deal of which was swallowed or politely crafted into petitions. Was it a seriously-phrased complaint? Of course not: it came from a customer angry precisely because he wasn't being taken seriously. At which point, what can you do but have a spiteful laugh? It is, in that sense, as considered and meaningful a response to JV as he ever offered to BoE's designers. And if that leads to the who-disrespected-whom-first? game, then the party spending the other party's money can afford to climb down. In any event, it's bad for his product: BoA suffers from the salted earth of BoE. Because JV won't trust the experience of other designers and dismisses altogether the way gameplay has evolved over BoE's history, the new engine remains hardwired for the less-imaginative quirks of JV's design tendencies yet offers clumsy support for basic needs that don't fall within those tendencies. And no doubt he went to the time and trouble of programming the port function in order to anticipate and shut up those petty and bitter BoE types; and no doubt some of them might have staged a soap opera had he not allowed them to import their scenarios; but the fact remains, thanks to blighted communication between Spidweb and its designers, he wasted his time programming something nobody will ever seriously use. There is nothing trivial about the bugs in BoE. There is also nothing plausible about JV's "player-oriented" reasons for rejecting out-of-hand community proposals for BoA. On that last score, TM is absolutely right. Two of the best BoE scenarios designed in the last year restrict a player from using most conventional combat strategies, don't permit for standard PC development and otherwise violate the sacred purity of Party Integrity. Not a single CSR review of these scenarios complains about these "unsafe" practices (which is not to say that the scenarios are loved universally: the complaints concern story, pacing, characterization, etc. -- all things that JV assures us none of his eight-year-old patrons care about). If designers start doing things to players that players don't like, the "community" will correct them more effectively than any pre-press censorship from JV will. Larger software companies have larger marketing and distribution costs, larger overhead, larger expenses in general: their margins are just as tight as JV's, and they are just as dependent on constant new product introduction. But more to the point, if his position was that he couldn't afford to take the time to support his product beyond a certain threshhold of diminishing returns, then he should've worked with designers to develop a collaborative support system that met everybody's needs. Instead, a lot of good will and creativity got squandered. [ Saturday, September 25, 2004 16:38: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Perfect Forest in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, September 24 2004 09:56
Profile
The Perfect Spirit doesn't start draining you until it has been defeated in Haunted Nephil form several (five?) times. During beta testing, I sometimes had to wait well over 100 turns between Haunted Nephil attacks, during which time the PS was nowhere to be seen (though I don't recall witnessing the PS vanish in front of me, so it still may be the case that you've hit a bug). As for destroying the machine: provided your party isn't a singleton, using separate PCs to accomplish independently and simultaneously the various tasks (looking at machine, pushing each mirror) renders the drain trivial. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Philosophical Implementation in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, September 19 2004 17:13
Profile
Kel (re: ponter to the other thread): Quoting Nabokov to establish "plot first, philosophy later" doesn't get us much beyond "plot first, smug Liberal pieties later": he's not abstracting literary form from all social consequence just to pass the time of day. TM: Sure, it's pointless for people to slurp up the wizz-bangs in your scenarios as if they could eat their caramel without touching their "philosophical" apple. So why are you buying the same distinction and resorting to that "philistine masses" nonsense? Tolkien hardly cloaked his Little England propaganda in dark conceits. Readers don't ignore it: they just find it so complaisant and affirming that it goes without saying in their consumption of the text. If there is a consistent limit which your scenarios encounter — and which the "philistine" response to them symptomatically evidences — it arises because you tend to use a didactic-allegorical mode of quest narrative to grapple with concerns that, by definition, renounce the basic premises of allegorical representation, instruction, individual heroic action, etc. So many of your conceptual "needs" then cannot be registered by your chosen plot structure that the actual action of the resulting scenarios can do little but stage the brittle negation of their narrative form by their "philosophical" content. And that's why players find it inviting to take the one and leave the other. What other means of cognition does a story offer besides narrative? It isn't just packaging or sugar-coating; it's a mode of thought: in particular, a mode of thought for reflecting upon problems that strict deracination cannot render intelligible. So if a scenario's action can't "think" what you want it to think, then Thuryl is right (in the other thread): instead of cursing eleven-year-olds in the darkness, find a form of narrative that better answers your purposes. That kind of experimentation is bound to be well-received. [ Sunday, September 19, 2004 17:21: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Towns vs Dungeons in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, August 30 2004 22:37
Profile
Why add filler for the sake of filler? But more to the point, this is a question your beta testers should answer. There's no way to say in the abstract whether a scenario's story feels "thin" -- and even should your testers think that it is, the best thickener is rarely combat stuffing. Having actually played the scenario, they may suggest further development of characters, more elegant plot twists or other devices that would be both more effective and better tailored to the story you're telling. So if you're satisfied that the scenario does what you want it to do, and you've ironed out all the bugs and typos you can find, get that puppy into the hands of the people! -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Poll: Password protected scenarios: what do you think? in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, August 28 2004 15:46
Profile
A designer who promises to stick around and field bug reports for the next decade or so could reasonably claim the prerogative of slapping passwords on scenarios, along with whatever narcissistic payoff that provides. If BoE's history is any example, few will last that long. But what the hey, go for it: bestow the key to your sacred mysteries only upon the intiated. Then enjoy as those passwords get collected and disseminated. . . . The only thing perpetuating this thread is its own weightless irrelevance. [ Saturday, August 28, 2004 17:46: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Michael Moore - Unfairenheit 9/11 in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, June 28 2004 13:36
Profile
You gotta give the Right this much: they let their populists muckrake undisturbed, content to enjoy the electoral proceeds without abusing them out of whatever muddle of envy, middle-brow snobbery and preening, muscular Fabianism drives Hitchens and the like to go after Moore. Farenheit 9/11 is no more distorted and contradictory than the political culture industry from which it is trying to get a hearing, an industry which reduces all questions of justice, resource distribution and social relations to registers of ethical complicity, "character" and personality. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Article - The Moral of the Story in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, May 31 2004 12:45
Profile
All right, that is more attention than this thoroughly mediocre, tiresome scenario EVER deserved. Any RPG plot, in so far as it is structured around the quest to defeat a social problem that has been abstracted, externalized and exemplified by some enemy other, is fundamentally ethical in design: we are good because we are us; you are bad because you aren't. Die. Whether or not that mechanism then dispenses a "message" is an academic question. At some point in the most "entertaining," least "preachy" scenario, somebody's gonna commit some suppposed atrocity or do something else that asks a player -- no matter how perfunctory the asking -- to feel the righteous rising of the gorge and, on the strength of that, direct a remorselessly vindicating blade against the inhuman cause, blah blah blah. VoDT is only conspicuous because it tries to use that ethical logic to solve a problem which exceeds the explanatory power of ethical externalization. Thus the clearest, smartest thing said in all this mess: quote:Take a structural problem inextricable from everything valued as human progress and happiness -- and therefore, a problem insoluable without sacrficing or otherwise relinquishing something of value to that happiness. Then lose your nerve in the face of writing a plot adequate to that choice (it would require making players play differently as a result of their decisions). Upon which failure, find the nearest scapegoat: there's one recently escaped from the kitchen -- she can't have gotten far. Those vale-dwellers, let alone the PCs, never gained anything from the cause of the pollution, so as a representation of the question, VoDT is mealy-mouthed, if not basically dishonest (likewise the Geneforges, though that's another story). No matter how well-represented or explained the "sides" of a moral choice are in an RPG, if that choice does not require a player to change the way he or she plays -- not just to kill different arrangements of sprites, but to engage in different forms of action -- it is at best an abstract choice of taste (which flavor do you like best, "individual" or "society"? biotech or nature? guys with blue uniforms or guys with red uniforms? on whose behalf would you like to slaughter, Coke or Pepsi?). At which point, the most complexity you can hope for is ASR-style nihilism, which -- since all sides reduce to the same denominator -- readily converts into a complacent affirmation of whatever prejudices a player brings to the story. How about not scrapping the article but changing its focus? More nuts and bolts: how to make the mechanics of gameplay change as a result of the "moral" decisions you ask a player to make. This might, among other things, involve coming up with plots other than the quest plot. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Article - The Moral of the Story in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, May 31 2004 12:45
Profile
All right, that is more attention than this thoroughly mediocre, tiresome scenario EVER deserved. Any RPG plot, in so far as it is structured around the quest to defeat a social problem that has been abstracted, externalized and exemplified by some enemy other, is fundamentally ethical in design: we are good because we are us; you are bad because you aren't. Die. Whether or not that mechanism then dispenses a "message" is an academic question. At some point in the most "entertaining," least "preachy" scenario, somebody's gonna commit some suppposed atrocity or do something else that asks a player -- no matter how perfunctory the asking -- to feel the righteous rising of the gorge and, on the strength of that, direct a remorselessly vindicating blade against the inhuman cause, blah blah blah. VoDT is only conspicuous because it tries to use that ethical logic to solve a problem which exceeds the explanatory power of ethical externalization. Thus the clearest, smartest thing said in all this mess: quote:Take a structural problem inextricable from everything valued as human progress and happiness -- and therefore, a problem insoluable without sacrficing or otherwise relinquishing something of value to that happiness. Then lose your nerve in the face of writing a plot adequate to that choice (it would require making players play differently as a result of their decisions). Upon which failure, find the nearest scapegoat: there's one recently escaped from the kitchen -- she can't have gotten far. Those vale-dwellers, let alone the PCs, never gained anything from the cause of the pollution, so as a representation of the question, VoDT is mealy-mouthed, if not basically dishonest (likewise the Geneforges, though that's another story). No matter how well-represented or explained the "sides" of a moral choice are in an RPG, if that choice does not require a player to change the way he or she plays -- not just to kill different arrangements of sprites, but to engage in different forms of action -- it is at best an abstract choice of taste (which flavor do you like best, "individual" or "society"? biotech or nature? guys with blue uniforms or guys with red uniforms? on whose behalf would you like to slaughter, Coke or Pepsi?). At which point, the most complexity you can hope for is ASR-style nihilism, which -- since all sides reduce to the same denominator -- readily converts into a complacent affirmation of whatever prejudices a player brings to the story. How about not scrapping the article but changing its focus? More nuts and bolts: how to make the mechanics of gameplay change as a result of the "moral" decisions you ask a player to make. This might, among other things, involve coming up with plots other than the quest plot. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| US Conflict Avatars! in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, May 30 2004 18:37
Profile
Thuryl's dead-on: central Asia is a breeding ground for good old fashioned American values, particularly Uzbekistan. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| General Forum Archive / News on Chance in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Thursday, May 27 2004 12:05
Profile
Using Safari, Option-Click on the .rar link seems to do the trick for me -- though I don't have the time to try downloading the entire archive. Or are you having trouble getting OSX to recognize the file type after downloading is complete? -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| General Forum Archive / News on Chance in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Thursday, May 27 2004 09:22
Profile
Also for the Mac: UnRarX and MacPAR deLuxe. Both work marvelously and both are basically freeware (MacPAR would like you to "upgrade" to the shareware version every so often). Pretty sure there's an OS 9 version of UnRar, not sure about the latter. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Happy Beltane! in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, May 15 2004 11:13
Profile
I wasn't trying to do FBM's work, I was trying to get that spelling business cleaned up afore things got truly tedious. Please edit your last post such that it contains the considered and nuanced reflection which you intended to offer upon the mode of revolutionary action pertinent to the present historical conjuncture, and I'll go back and remove all dictionary references. [ Saturday, May 15, 2004 11:30: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Happy Beltane! in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, May 15 2004 09:27
Profile
As always, your point is well-taken. My hopes for apt description rode on the plural: one gerbil would indeed pay a compliment; multiple, desperately crying and roiling gerbils driven into cannibalistic panic while fruitlessly scratching at the walls of the brainpan in question -- it was as close as I could come to an objective correlative. What about asking not whether anarchism or other utopian formations are possible, but how? Much of the anarchist idiom for historical agency that has been used for the last generation or so is difficult to distinguish from the idiom by which the commodity form has advertised its radical pleasures. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Happy Beltane! in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, May 15 2004 07:19
Profile
Kel: attend to "mispelled" and its friends. Also: your taxonomy of modes of address might suit the question better were it expanded to encompass "tedious prat with gerbils for brains." [ Saturday, May 15, 2004 11:28: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| New Draft in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, May 7 2004 13:01
Profile
Non-Spanish enlistment in Franco's Foreign Legion was at most 25% (as far as any book near me says -- perhaps they are wrong), and the officer class was notably and notoriously Spanish. Humiliated, disgruntled and underfunded militaries are, of course, never the predominant element in the bloc of interests driving the establishment of authoritarian states, but they are the primary instrument -- as Roosevelt understood when he shipped MacArthur back to the Philippines in '35 (worked better than sending Franco to the Canary Islands). Obviously, BtI's point about the massive difference between 1930s Spain and the present U.S. is correct ("I'd be more concerned" did not mean "I'm very concerned"): provided, that is, the economy remains merely emiserating. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| New Draft in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, May 7 2004 11:54
Profile
It'll take a Democrat in the White House: Republicans will do anything to avoid wars requiring mass-mobilization, since conscripts have had the awkward tendency to ask for things like civil rights and economic redistribution once the fighting is over. I'd be more concerned about what happens when under-paid and over-deployed mercenaries return from the colonies (see Spain, 1930s). -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Happy Beltane! in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Tuesday, May 4 2004 20:30
Profile
quote:Rumsfeld isn't Jewish. But thanks for playing Find the Jewish Conspiracy! Better luck next week. [ Tuesday, May 04, 2004 20:44: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| L'Internationale (1 Mai) in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, May 3 2004 10:17
Profile
What the heck do you think the Paris Commune was? Though if you think "peasants" were behind the Russian Revolution, all of this must, understandably, be vexing and confusing. -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Babysitting released in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 30 2004 10:13
Profile
After the kidnapping, I could trade once with the weapons dealer, but never with Megan. The problem seems to lie in Megan's dialogue nodes: "t2valday2dlg Error: State not properly ended in line 1" appears after you speak to her. [ Friday, April 30, 2004 10:19: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Age in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Tuesday, April 27 2004 16:57
Profile
You know, Warren Zevon: Brownsville, Texas' favorite son, Hallmark Hall of Fame leading man, Gypsy Queen of White Blues and the '70s Second-Best Drug Overdose. Apparently. But not the guy who wrote: Down along the railroad track, I ran into my old friend Jack. He was dressed in his Sunday best, But his face was red and his eyes was red. He said, "I've lost Marina, And the last place that I seen her, She was making off with my best friend." I took him to the water, And spent fifty dollars On something that would take him to the moon. Well he must have gone to heaven, Because just before I left him, I tried to wake him up and he would not move. So come on Carmelita, You've dreamt too much, and I can see that Soon you're gonna need a breath of air. We'll dance across the wheat fields, There's a place I know just east of here. It wouldn't take to long to drive out there. We'll sleep out on the ground, and in the morning when we wake up we'll leave town. EDIT: And I was aware that you were aware, as evidenced by the fact that WZ is none of the above but . . . . ah, screw it. [ Tuesday, April 27, 2004 17:07: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Winter comes: game over -- he's in the driveway removing snow with a flame-thrower. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| VoDT: Unobtainable things for beginners? in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 26 2004 19:28
Profile
. . . and you can always take a look at such things in the Editor. [ Monday, April 26, 2004 19:29: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Jeebus I hate dealing with custom items. in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 26 2004 01:20
Profile
Comments before beginscendatascript work fine for me and are in the prepackaged scenarios' scripts. Nor could I reproduce the error by pasting the entire snippet into a new file -- which might then be the solution, if no help for an explanation (what app are you using to write your scripts?). -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Jeebus I hate dealing with custom items. in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 26 2004 01:20
Profile
Comments before beginscendatascript work fine for me and are in the prepackaged scenarios' scripts. Nor could I reproduce the error by pasting the entire snippet into a new file -- which might then be the solution, if no help for an explanation (what app are you using to write your scripts?). -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Jeebus I hate dealing with custom items. in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 25 2004 15:18
Profile
Already have, doesn't do much. The problem seems pretty clearly the result of operator negligence. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |