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Tools, anyone? in Geneforge Series
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Member # 878
Profile #18
In Avernum 3 I found a rope enchanted with +1 pathfinder.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Specific, beginner questions. Av 1. in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #2
1. Does the experience you recieve for a particular enemy decrease as your level increases, as in Geneforge?

Yes it does, but its far less noticeable as you don't get experience readouts for each enemy. Note that because of this characters with exp penalties from traits will not be behind as many levels as you'd expect.

2a. Should Cave Lore be concentrated in one character, or is it just effective when spread throughout the entire group?

What matters is how much total you have I believe.

2b. Besides helping to avoid encounters, what else is Cave Lore useful for?

There are several encounters spread throughout each Avernum game where it mentions some benefit you recieve is due to cave lore. Don't have the slightest clue how much is needed to get all of those though.

3a. Is the Barter skill worthwhile, and if so does it's effectiveness vary with the person/shop you are dealing with? I notice that shops seem to have unlimited gold, and that it would therefore be possible to amass a fortune simply by killing enemies and selling the loot.

It is best to as earlier as possible buy 5 points for each character but don't put in skill points. Different shopkeepers give different prices and that is sufficient to get the best price (around 60%) from most, though not quite all of them.

3b. Can Barter be purchased anywhere else above level 5 in order to conserve precious skill points?

No skill you can buy can be bought above level 5. Note I think there exists trainers for some normal skills including cave lore (in fort draco I think, some guy in a building with cows) so you can save skill points and archery (think in silvar not sure, but you need a high reputation to get it, its from the guy in the store selling missle weapons). And as I indicated buying above 5 levels of barter for each character will not produce any effect except in a few rare shops that give horrible prices.

4. At what point are you wasting skill points on Tool skill? What is the maximum necessary level?

Not sure, but there exist doors you will unlikely ever pick without using the character editor, but for those there's unlock doors level 3, so its only really needed for traps. Not sure what the most difficult traps are though.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Anyone else notice the jokes here? in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #11
The lesbian refrences is mainly two characters found in all 3 games (Nance and Elspeth), and is very strongly implied though not explicitly stated, but is by no means hidden. By the way, what do you have to say to anaximander to get that?

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
How did you first see or hear about spiderweb games? in General
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Member # 878
Profile #24
I don't know, but I wonder how many of the disks left out spiderweb games due to large file size (they really seemed to like stuffing as many games as possible onto them to brag about the number), despite the fact that 99% of the programs are just awful, and the few that are decent probably seldom made money either due to not using the clever strategy of the shareware demon blocking your progress a good way through the game.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Anyone else notice the jokes here? in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #6
You're right, didn't expect that.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
How did you first see or hear about spiderweb games? in General
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Member # 878
Profile #0
I was wondering how the audience for spiderweb software grows by how most people are first introduced to his games. For my part, I first saw one of his games on a cd with a few hundred (says over 300) shareware games I got off the discount rack of a store (the cd was made in 1997, might have been a year later when I bought it but not sure) called Romtech Galaxy of Games 2, which had Exile I on it. It really stood out as being far, far better than any of the other crap on that cd, as this was back when tons of people were making low quality shareware games hoping to make money by saying things like "If you enjoy this game please send me some money" or "If you play this game more than 30 days you need to send me $15 dollars or delete it", despite the fact almost anyone would get very quickly sick of it. By contrast Jeff's idea of letting you play through a large portion of the game normally but needing to register to finish it was quite smart but very uncommon (not that it would work if the game was really bad as most of them were).

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Anyone else notice the jokes here? in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #4
quote:
Originally written by Soul Proprietor:

there are rumors that all provinces in A3 are named after women who have been involved in Jeff's life.

What about footracer province? I doubt he knows a woman named footracer.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Anyone else notice the jokes here? in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #0
I just found in Avernum 2 behind the shrine of crystals a vahnatai mage named mentos, and in the text when you talk to him it says his friendliness is a "fresh" experience, and he offers you candy that it says makes your mouth tingle. Anyone know of any other odd jokes like that in these games?

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Really constitutional U.S. government rights? in General
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Member # 878
Profile #10
I have little against the principle of eminent domain, what I have the problem with is how in practice they rarely pay what the property is truely worth (cost of buying a similar building), due to using tricks like how I mentioned of drastically lowering the property tax evaluation the year before.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Two envelopes paradox in General
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Member # 878
Profile #71
Well assume the machine is useable for any intelligent species, they got the money selling thier advanced technology, they showed up on earth a while ago, and they are trying to test thier machine to improve it (do the test many times and see if its wrong ever, and when it is analyze the scan in detail to figure out why).

As for the prisoner execution problem, think of it this way. If the prisoner is ever convinced a certain day will be the day, he is thus convinced the sentence is not going to be correctly carried out. And it is impossible to logically conclude anything about a situation if you don't have any information about it you can assume is true. Thus you are back to how he doesn't know it, he just guessed correctly. And if you interpret the sentence to include that, then the sentence was simply impossible in the first place as the prisoner could always come to an unfounded conclusion that it would be any given day.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
keygens in General
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Member # 878
Profile #56
As I said, cracks do exisit on some websites for spiderweb games. From what I understand, if Jeff e-mailed whatever company hosts the servers for those websites and makes some reference to some part of the DMCA, depending on what company hosts it they might refuse to host the site anymore, but I could be wrong and not sure if that would be likely to be worth how much time it would take.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Two envelopes paradox in General
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Member # 878
Profile #68
Maybe what makes that contradictory is that the problem postulates that its already predetermined by the makeup of your brain what you'll decide on, but to reason about it you have to include in your thoughts whats probably in the box, so you are partly basing your decision on itself.

[ Saturday, June 25, 2005 21:25: Message edited by: Walter ]

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Differences between countries, cultural and otherwise. in General
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Member # 878
Profile #45
quote:
Originally written by Slp006:

And what does everyone think about people from the United States trying to own a continent (or two, since there is a South America as well)?
Well maybe that originated as it would be aquard to say "United Statesian"

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
keygens in General
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Member # 878
Profile #40
Well I've heard of problems where someone buys Norton Antivirus and try to activate it online, but are told they can't as its already been activated as someone made a program to generate cd keys and used thier code already too many times.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Can anyone figure out this riddle? in General
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Member # 878
Profile #15
Anyway, most people would have trouble figuring out the answer I had in mind to this since you tend to take for granted you aren't being lied to about the conditions of the puzzle.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Differences between countries, cultural and otherwise. in General
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Member # 878
Profile #41
That's not that surprising really. Especially when you consider things like that many of the most common dishes in Chinese restaurants were actually invented in the US. Also I strongly doubt the typical diet in Mexico resembles food at a Taco Bell.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
keygens in General
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Member # 878
Profile #38
As I said, it may be true that many people wouldn't buy the games even if the illegal copies weren't available. However there are also many who would. It is just as unreasonable to conclude that almost everyone who would be willing to pay the purchase price of a game to play it if they could not get it for free do not care about how unethical or morally wrong it is to steal the game more than they care about the cost of the game as it would be to conclude that there is almost no one who would like to try playing that game but don't think it would be worth the purchase price or can't afford it in any case and don't care about the ethics.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Motrax's hoard in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #4
Well if you want to do things that way why not go slaughter everyone to loot things in places like formello, silvar, and fort draco for instance? I try to avoid slaughtering towns in this game as a general rule.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Easter Eggs in Geneforge Series
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Member # 878
Profile #8
Well in avernum you have multiple party members. And excepting being able to enchant pants with 10% resistance to something there are not more magic pants than party members.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Motrax's hoard in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #2
Yes, but then you lose reputation and the mages there are hostile to you, and I think they are of some importance.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
keygens in General
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Member # 878
Profile #36
Not going to say how, but after seeing this thread I checked, and through a method many are likely to use, it is VERY easy to find a crack for spiderweb games, so it is still a serious problem for small games.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Motrax's hoard in The Avernum Trilogy
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Member # 878
Profile #0
Just wondering how many of you ever safely stole Motrax's hoard in Avernum 2 without cheating or the character editor. I did it in my game, but found for my nephilim with nimble fingers and wearing nimble gloves or rogues leather (those 2 items don't stack, no benefit to wearing both), I needed 23 tool use, as its a 30 difficulty trap on the alarm. I was kind of surprised that you can actually take his hoard without being caught, however dificult it was. Same for stealing the castles treasury (though you only get 3k gold and a blessed plate mail). You can also take Almaria's treasury without angering the town but you lose reputation, which is kind of odd.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
A Trip to the Confessional in Richard White Games
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Member # 878
Profile #10
Well if you didn't take into account a board user here wouldn't have played one why did you ask question 1? Also you need a none of these choice on which ones you've registered. And on question 3 you can't answer at all either if you haven't played one.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Easter Eggs in Geneforge Series
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Member # 878
Profile #6
Well Avernum 3 had multiple magic pants. Like the iridium pants (good protecition but 15% encumbrance and high weight), xian slacks (-1 strength, intelligence, and dexterity and +4 luck), and you could always put pants on one of the platforms that give and item an ability.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00
Really constitutional U.S. government rights? in General
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Member # 878
Profile #4
I can understand requiring people to sell thier homes when some large facility is being built so the project isn't derailed by some lone person who doesn't want to move. But thats just one thing. What I don't like is how they try to avoid paying what its worth so these people can't use what they are paid to buy a new home or business. For instance, my mom told me someone she knows noticed thier property tax assesment for a business this year was half the previous year for no apparent reason, and they discovered its the same for some nearby businesses. So its obvious to conclude some developers got the city government to devalue the property so they can buy it for a fraction of its value.

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Posts: 409 | Registered: Sunday, March 31 2002 08:00

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