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
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| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| Calls that we wish existed in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Wednesday, April 7 2004 10:29
Profile
I've been trying to reproduce this, and I can't. Do you remember where precisely you got those wands? Presumably, you need wands with the same ability_str. Let's hope! Otherwise it's not a harmless bug. EDIT: I take that back. From further tinkering, there seems to be at least one condition in which wands combine. Identical wands picked up in the same town will combine with each other, but not with identical wands from different towns/scenarios (which includes different play-throughs of a single scenario). Once combined, they cannot be split. [ Wednesday, April 07, 2004 11:28: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| VoDT: L25 Door in Spider caves... in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Tuesday, April 6 2004 20:15
Profile
Don't believe there's anything beyond. You could always open the town in the Editor and take a peek. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Archery in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Tuesday, April 6 2004 13:10
Profile
Archery equipment still has an odd weight. One of my PCs has been strolling around with something like 350 missiles stowed about his person -- try that without needing a tetanus booster -- as well as both a crossbow and a longbow. Plus, add an archer NPC to your party, and you'll never need to buy another arrow for your PCs (though I think JV has said he will rejigger the survivability of missiles). -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Town Entrance in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 5 2004 20:47
Profile
Hmm. In the interests of wasting more of my time, I just tried that. Result: NO western entrance anymore. Only north and south. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Town Entrance in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 5 2004 20:47
Profile
Hmm. In the interests of wasting more of my time, I just tried that. Result: NO western entrance anymore. Only north and south. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Article - Why? in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 5 2004 19:35
Profile
I'm a low-brow player. Although I'm not eight, I was considerably more refined when I was. And I've said about twelve times my peace on this subject lately, but . . . . 1) The problem with what JV calls "irrational" stories is that they aren't irrational. There's no more thoroughly and self-consciously explained plot than Z-K Run; nor is there any more thoroughly calculated, unsurprising and homogenous world than the one imagined in Z-K Run. The problem with it isn't that it doesn't make sense. The problem is that it does nothing but make sense: during the scenario's duration, nothing actually happens. No action plays out -- only exposition. Everybody you run into takes pains to convince you why it is entirely plausible for them to be where they are, doing what they're doing. They're so busy with these explanations that they never ultimately do anything, with the result that the story of the scenario is nothing more than an unfolding rationalization of why the scenario exists. That's not the error of choosing action over story or combat over plot. That's the error of trying to write a plot in which no consequential action occurs. To see something truly "irrational" -- that is to say, something against all the rules of Blades "reality" -- happen, you'd have to play, say, An Apology: a scenario that is, at the same time and not by coincidence, quite heavy on story. 2) The reason, then, that the "combat vs. plot" debate is age-old is that it isn't a debate at all. Rather than one or the other of them doing the driving, the friction caused by their clash is what drives any decent RPG. If you resolve that misfit in favor either of gameplay or of story, you lose a player's attention. On the one hand, combat will become busywork; on the other, story will wither into Senecan speechifying with NPCs declaiming their various ethical allegiances and tedious traumas or endless dialogue boxes slapping you in the face with Meaning. Good design does not, however, consist in balancing the two terms; it sets them at odds -- sparking action from their conflict. In fact, the worst BoE scenarios aren't those in which there is only busywork or yammering NPCs/self-important meaning. The worst BoE scenarios have both (there's a reason VoDT ticks me off worse than Z-K; and I would enjoy the Geneforges were they actually as they are cynically misrepresented above -- in practice, there's a good deal more stale All-State Forensics Meet ponderousness in them than is good for anybody . . . .). Nephil's Gambit likely enjoys the reputation of a good "plot" scenario. It certainly has an overbearing storyline. That's not why it was the first thing that made me happy to have spent money on BoE. That scenario is brilliant because individual fights themselves have little narratives of suspense and surprise to them: you have to, as it were, struggle just to get to the overarching story -- there's no easy fit between the local "action" and the larger "plot." [ Monday, April 05, 2004 20:29: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Article - Why? in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
|
written Monday, April 5 2004 19:35
Profile
I'm a low-brow player. Although I'm not eight, I was considerably more refined when I was. And I've said about twelve times my peace on this subject lately, but . . . . 1) The problem with what JV calls "irrational" stories is that they aren't irrational. There's no more thoroughly and self-consciously explained plot than Z-K Run; nor is there any more thoroughly calculated, unsurprising and homogenous world than the one imagined in Z-K Run. The problem with it isn't that it doesn't make sense. The problem is that it does nothing but make sense: during the scenario's duration, nothing actually happens. No action plays out -- only exposition. Everybody you run into takes pains to convince you why it is entirely plausible for them to be where they are, doing what they're doing. They're so busy with these explanations that they never ultimately do anything, with the result that the story of the scenario is nothing more than an unfolding rationalization of why the scenario exists. That's not the error of choosing action over story or combat over plot. That's the error of trying to write a plot in which no consequential action occurs. To see something truly "irrational" -- that is to say, something against all the rules of Blades "reality" -- happen, you'd have to play, say, An Apology: a scenario that is, at the same time and not by coincidence, quite heavy on story. 2) The reason, then, that the "combat vs. plot" debate is age-old is that it isn't a debate at all. Rather than one or the other of them doing the driving, the friction caused by their clash is what drives any decent RPG. If you resolve that misfit in favor either of gameplay or of story, you lose a player's attention. On the one hand, combat will become busywork; on the other, story will wither into Senecan speechifying with NPCs declaiming their various ethical allegiances and tedious traumas or endless dialogue boxes slapping you in the face with Meaning. Good design does not, however, consist in balancing the two terms; it sets them at odds -- sparking action from their conflict. In fact, the worst BoE scenarios aren't those in which there is only busywork or yammering NPCs/self-important meaning. The worst BoE scenarios have both (there's a reason VoDT ticks me off worse than Z-K; and I would enjoy the Geneforges were they actually as they are cynically misrepresented above -- in practice, there's a good deal more stale All-State Forensics Meet ponderousness in them than is good for anybody . . . .). Nephil's Gambit likely enjoys the reputation of a good "plot" scenario. It certainly has an overbearing storyline. That's not why it was the first thing that made me happy to have spent money on BoE. That scenario is brilliant because individual fights themselves have little narratives of suspense and surprise to them: you have to, as it were, struggle just to get to the overarching story -- there's no easy fit between the local "action" and the larger "plot." [ Monday, April 05, 2004 20:29: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| ZaKhazi Run: Abandoned Crypt in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 5 2004 12:24
Profile
In the room with the locked doors, a secret door in northeastern wall reveals a lever. Pull for enjoyment. [ Monday, April 05, 2004 12:26: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| scenario criticism in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Monday, April 5 2004 12:11
Profile
Uh, Alorael, edit that sig quick afore more imaginative minds than mine see it. Oh yeah -- and your plan, outlined elsewhere, of playing the E3 demo to get a taste for BoE is right smart. (Though if people have now played VoDT in BoA, they can hardly be disappointed by the plot, etc., when they try the BoE one.) [ Monday, April 05, 2004 12:13: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Caught in the Khoth-fire in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 4 2004 20:12
Profile
Fourteen days in BoA. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Town Entrance in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 4 2004 16:35
Profile
As the manual ambiguously says, 1x1 town entrances behave in "tricky" ways when assigning a direction to the party. (And in my experience, 2x2 proves equally as tricky.) If the manual's example is to be trusted, the game's four step system for arriving at that direction is adapted a little too well to a 3x3+ square. In your case -- at least if my tinkering is anything to go on -- the difficulty may not lie along the east-west axis; rather, it may lie in the game's criteria for differentiating between west and south (and south = east on your town map). South is the first direction the game checks; thus, in the case of a 1x1 entrance, it is more likely than west to be awarded entrance honors (even on a 2x2 entrance, south tends to trump west and east). I could easily be wrong, because I don't really grasp what the game tries to do with a 1x1. Try putting N-S-W together in one place and E together in another, and see whether that doesn't appear to make west its old self. [ Sunday, April 04, 2004 16:48: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Town Entrance in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 4 2004 16:35
Profile
As the manual ambiguously says, 1x1 town entrances behave in "tricky" ways when assigning a direction to the party. (And in my experience, 2x2 proves equally as tricky.) If the manual's example is to be trusted, the game's four step system for arriving at that direction is adapted a little too well to a 3x3+ square. In your case -- at least if my tinkering is anything to go on -- the difficulty may not lie along the east-west axis; rather, it may lie in the game's criteria for differentiating between west and south (and south = east on your town map). South is the first direction the game checks; thus, in the case of a 1x1 entrance, it is more likely than west to be awarded entrance honors (even on a 2x2 entrance, south tends to trump west and east). I could easily be wrong, because I don't really grasp what the game tries to do with a 1x1. Try putting N-S-W together in one place and E together in another, and see whether that doesn't appear to make west its old self. [ Sunday, April 04, 2004 16:48: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Beta-Call for Roses of Reckoning in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 4 2004 16:04
Profile
I didn't receive. Probably because I failed to put the dot blah on that email addres -- blah blah blah dot blah. [ Monday, April 05, 2004 11:48: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Beta-Call for Roses of Reckoning in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Sunday, April 4 2004 13:18
Profile
blah blah blah dot blah [ Monday, April 05, 2004 11:48: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Post yer monster scripts here in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, April 3 2004 23:29
Profile
Thank you again for your patience with us code-clumsy types: these things are marvels of clarity. And thanks further for starting the get_energy() campaign. I'd been trying and failing to fake it without fully realising that that was what I was trying to fake. It would be very, very good. Am I right that, were it possible to call deduct_ap from scripts other than creature scripts, the absence of AP cost for ability 219 wouldn't be as serious? Not that I'd know whether such a change would be less invasive for JV to make than adding a fixed AP cost to the ability, but presumably certain designers might prefer to have the freedom to vary the cost. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Post yer monster scripts here in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, April 3 2004 23:29
Profile
Thank you again for your patience with us code-clumsy types: these things are marvels of clarity. And thanks further for starting the get_energy() campaign. I'd been trying and failing to fake it without fully realising that that was what I was trying to fake. It would be very, very good. Am I right that, were it possible to call deduct_ap from scripts other than creature scripts, the absence of AP cost for ability 219 wouldn't be as serious? Not that I'd know whether such a change would be less invasive for JV to make than adding a fixed AP cost to the ability, but presumably certain designers might prefer to have the freedom to vary the cost. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Need information on the Strategic Defense Initiative in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Saturday, April 3 2004 13:10
Profile
That depends, as always, on how one defines "program." SDI proper is a creature of the mid-80s (Reagan announced it in 1983). In the late-60s, the US did, however, claim to be working on a ground-based program called (I think) first "Sentinel" (by Johnson) and then "Safeguard" (by Nixon: I cannot remember the exact relationship between the two). This was after the Soviet Union had rejected the US call for sharp restrictions on anti-ballistic missile systems; and in this respect, "Sentinel"/"Safeguard" seems to have been advanced largely as a bargaining move. In which case, it "worked." In 1972, the Soviet Union and US signed the ABM treaty, by whose terms each nation could build only one localized missle defense system (or something like that; again, my memory is not to be trusted), thus furthering what had been US policy throughout the Cold War: at all costs, do nothing to reduce or dilute the offensive deterrent provided by nuclear weapons. By 1983, US strategic goals had begun to shift, although even then, in its initial phases, SDI was announced as a policy intended to cohere (how was unclear) with the ABM Treaty, and Reagan tended to justify it on the grounds that the Soviets violated the agreement first. It wasn't until Bush's National Missile Defense program announcement in 2001 that the US formally broke the terms of the ABM Treaty. At that point, US hegemony could no longer plausibly present itself as the effect of mutually assured destruction (there being no balancing threat with which to spook other countries into a US-controlled bloc), so a purely offensive missile policy had outlived its shelf-life. [ Saturday, April 03, 2004 13:11: 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 |
| BoA and Realmz what link?? in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 19:16
Profile
Yeah, dawg, but Realmz has mad, thuggity name skillz. -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| scenario criticism in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 15:35
Profile
For what I've been driveling, the articles already exist, or will soon -- the Honorable Member from Tokyo willing -- exist again. In fact, halfway through that paragraph about randomness I recalled that Alcritas had written a much more thoughtful consideration of the same which now (I think) can be found here, and which makes a more subtle point than I did: randomness can be an effective way to control when something happens, but is less interesting when used to control if something will happen. EDIT: What do they drink? Gremlin wine! [ Friday, April 02, 2004 15:37: Message edited by: Boots ] -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| scenario criticism in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 13:50
Profile
Even though anything I post in this thread will earn me further abuse from The Crheator over in The Lyceum . . . . Measle, for one, wrote a very good scenario -- The Nature of Evil -- which makes no pretense to coherence. Its story is linear, certainly, but only because it hurtles through one unrelated event and scene after another. If you had nothing more than the announced justification for this -- the ol' "alternate dimension" gambit -- to go on as a player, the experience wouldn't be satisfying, even though, in this respect, everything would be "wired to a main plot." The Nature of Evil does nevertheless satisfy because, having announced its intent to be "random," it sets about being truly and spectacularly random -- random in a way that an ogre town popping up in the middle of the Empire doesn't remotely approach. At a given moment in the story, you're won't be doing or feeling the thing you would expect to be doing or feeling; each reality you pass through has its own unique and strange logic, and each jump between them comes at a cost, at the very least, of disorienting surprise. One difference: in an RPG, the physics behind your "normal life" as a player derives from random number generation, so nothing surprising ever results at the level of gameplay from random numbers or a related combinatorics. That's the problem with wandering monsters: they're the most predictable event you can script into a Blades story. Alcritas notoriously discovered the general statement of this problem in Kallagoshisiswhatchamacallit, an experiment in generating a plot almost entirely from random numbers, which ultimately produces little variation or surprise (except the most minimal and predictable sort of variation: the story either works or it doesn't). So, again, in addition to Thurl's excellent point, the shortcoming in Exile-influenced scenarios is not that they're too loosely constructed, it's that their structure comes from that sort of combinatoric logic: there's no "price," no significance in the world of the game, for the fact that there's an ogre town in the middle of Morrow Isle or nephils hanging out with goblins in VoDT. It doesn't have to be a significance welded to the main plot. Nethergate -- one of JV's better efforts -- has so many "random" side quests that he's forgotten how one of them is supposed to work. Only a few have connections to the larger story; but several "know" about each other, and through their inter-relationships, they weave the texture for a world. That's a more compelling background than one filled in with monsters, dungeons and cameos placed as discrete "details." (Though as for cameos: they're all over the best Blades scenarios.) -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Need information on the Strategic Defense Initiative in General | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 11:48
Profile
Another problem often cited with satellite lasers, at least back in the '80s: a trillion dollar weapons system will have difficulty surving an impact at orbital velocity with a few dollars worth of gravel. Granted, this was only a meaningful objection when SDI's "mission" was against the Soviet Union, which had the capacity to put gravel, or anything else it wanted, into space. Now that SDI is meant to protect against the phantom rogue states of the future, well, it's bound to be the most successful defense system in history, as well as an extremely effective mechanism for the upward redistribution of wealth. [ Friday, April 02, 2004 12:05: 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 |
| Calls that we wish existed in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 08:58
Profile
What's wrong with void turn_off_training(0)? (That's not a rhetorical question.) -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Calls that we wish existed in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Friday, April 2 2004 08:58
Profile
What's wrong with void turn_off_training(0)? (That's not a rhetorical question.) -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Slith Graphics Request in Blades of Avernum Editor | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
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written Thursday, April 1 2004 21:11
Profile
The gentleman seems to mean cr_icon_adjust. See pp. 48-49 of the Editor manual (and I suppose 59, as well, though it's a passing ref.). -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |
| Slith Graphics Request in Blades of Avernum | |
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Shock Trooper
Member # 455
|
written Thursday, April 1 2004 21:11
Profile
The gentleman seems to mean cr_icon_adjust. See pp. 48-49 of the Editor manual (and I suppose 59, as well, though it's a passing ref.). -------------------- Forgive them, for they are young and rich and white. Posts: 265 | Registered: Saturday, December 29 2001 08:00 |