EnderAndrew

'm not sure why my posts actually talking about Sawyer and the game disappeared. Maybe my telling people to hop on topic is considered being off topic...

Bloodlines is down to $30 here in the US. When it goes down to $20, I'm buying it.

I wish Dave and his projects well, but I've yet to hear anything good about this project, and I've heard plenty of bad things.

There are two different common types of Wireless technogy. 802.11x or Bluetooth. Either will work, though I really prefer 802.11x Find out if your computer has a wireless technology already built into it. You will need a wireless adapter (which your computer may already have) and a router. And for what it is worth, if they have cable modem service where you live, I think it is much better than DSL.

Check the first post! The new log has been posted!

Maybe this has nothing to do with money problems at Midway. Maybe the felt the game didn't have much of a market on the PC.

If you have been told in-character, then you have been told in-character. I'll try to email all the players this week and perhaps clarify given the background how much said characters might know in-character.

I've seen the debate countless times. I can argue for either side with convincing arguements in regards to power or strengths. However, the arguement is off-topic and fairly pointless. My sole point remains that good and bad games exist on both platforms. Blanket statements about the platforms are often silly and wrong. Can we move forward and hop on topic?

I imagine we still will get an Arx 2 with Source.

Nihilistic started on this game, while Blizzard was just going to produce. Then Nihilistic got fired, and this game has been in production hell for some time. The people who have seen the demos say the game has gotten progressively worse with each iteration, and that despite the name, the game will feature no Stealth and is really a generic FPS game crudely set in the Starcraft universe. Still interested? http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2004-06-23&res=l

The whole PC vs Console debate is sad. As it has been said before, there are good and bad games on all platforms. Get over it and move on. http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date=2005-02-05 I would like to point out that I never said anything bad about Sawyer except that he has bad luck. It seems some people have been intrepeting that to mean he is somehow at fault for his projects being canned. I don't think Sawyer is in anyway at fault. What little we've seen of Jefferson and Van Buren lead us to believe they were truly great projects. How else would he get such a great reputation from what little we've actually seen released from him? And while the Gauntlet games really aren't that great, Seven Sorrows did look to be the best of the Gauntlet games. It added story, got rid of the cartoony visuals, etc.

Honestly I think I did find the mushrooms in ten minutes the first time. I was told they were South East of Balmora, and I headed South East. It wasn't that difficult.

I don't care for guns, but I learned about them a bit in the Marine Corps. Certain types of ammunition, and certain types of guns are designed for bullets to ricochet, or explode after initial impact. That is why they can cause such problems. True, Vampires don't have internal organs, and thusly normal bullets do bashing damage, which is immediately halfed. So if you do 6 bashing wounds, you only really did 3 to a Vampire. Thusly, guns without special ammo really aren't that effective against vamps. M16's are military grade weapons though I do believe there is a commercial rip-off called the Bushman's Anniversary Special or something like that. Carrying those around a city is likely to get you MORE attention than carrying a greatsword. As far as Ravnos go, I don't know that anyone in-character knows that we have a Ravnos. Secondly, in the official meta-plot, most of the Ravnos were killed, not all of them. I don't suspect most of you have in-character knowledge of whether or not that event happened in our universe unless you vamp is knowledgeable and been around a while. At the moment I can think of perhaps 2 player characters who might know.

Tesseracts aren't X^4. It is a Wrinkle in Time or Space.

I'm all about the chopsticks. In a Vamp LARP game I ran into a Malkavian who wielded a warded-six-foot-ironwood spork as her weapon. It was labeled "Stupidity should be painful".

The French Woman insists that after going to the Black Rock, people have been changed and got sick. The island seemed to drive people to fight themselves in the past, and now it appears there will be conflct between the two groups of survivors.

Yet the Desert Eagle does a reasonable 7.

The Matrix sequels are like the Star Wars prequels. That have great moments and bad moments. They aren't bad movies, but they are held to a high standard.

There are tons of ways to do massive ammounts of aggravated damage. Tremere have a level 1 or 2 ritual that allows them to turn any weapon into one that does agg for instance. Vampire bites always do agg as well. I firmly believe that Vampires should have the upper hand in straight combat against a mortal or ghoul. There are firearms that do aggravated damage, and guns that do considerable damage. Automatic weapons can empty an entire clip into someone. I've seen guns that do 12 dice of damage, before you add in bonus dice from successes. Combat won't me made longer due to healing on the whole. It is my experience that in a group setting, most combats are still over in 2 rounds. You have ten players that can dish out damage. Let's say the NPC in question can heal 2 lethal in a round. Do agg and it can't be healed, or just do plenty of damage from the 10 of you attacking. If you're worried than an assamite can be quite lethal, then you should be. Characters built for combat will excel at combat. Many of you didn't build for combat. Either stay on the good side of the Assamite, or if you plan to attack him, fight on your terms. This isn't a World of Pleasantness.

In regards to the base difficulty, I thought I had told the players that it was in effect, my one house rule to make the game more challenging. However, given that all the later versions of the rules system also used this rule, I could be in essence just using the most recent version. Abberant, Exalted, and Requiem all use the base 7 difficulty. Str+5 sounds like a lot of damage. It is, but you are missing out on quite a few variables. You have to roll successes to actually inflict wounds. On 12 dice, only 5 wounds were actually rolled, and given that you need a 7 on a d10, on average, you're only going to roll a success 40% of the time. The vampire receiving the damage can spend blood to heal, and has a soak role. If that Vampire has the Fortitude discipline on top of that, you'd never be able to damage them period unless there ways in the game to do copious ammounts of damage. The Prince is a former PC of mine with a Stamina of 5, Fortitude of 5, Obfuscate of 4, and Protean of 5. He can soak most any damage in the world, go to Mist form, and hide to boot. Add Celerity, Potence, and various other Disciplines in the mix and try killing that. The weapons aren't nearly as imbalancing as you think. The Assamite clan book for instance, goes into combat rules a bit more indepth, as do some of the Storyteller books. Yes, the Dark Ages book assumes people might be wearing chain mail, and the modern book assumes that people won't be carrying around Great Swords in a city. It tends to attack attention. If and when a player attempts to carry a Greatsword around a city, there will be repercussions. I was flat-out wrong on what 3rd edition says about healing. But I run LARP games predominantly, and I keep assuming the base mechanics should be the same. In every iteration of the LARP rules it has always clearly said you can heal instantaneously. Why White Wolf would have that rule be different in the pen-and-paper version baffles me. However, for balance reasons I have decided to allow instantaneous healing. You guys should be happy with this, as it will benefit you more. With a playing group this large, you will outnumber many of your foes. You'll be able to do copious ammounts of damage, and the victim can only heal once per round. However, each of you can heal once, so as a group you can heal quite a bit more, and deal out quite a bit more damage. Don't argue rules that will undoubtedly save the lives of a bunch of player characters that weren't built for combat! Just wait until you run into a bunch of NPCs who have Celerity and you stand still for each of their extra actions!

Given Sawyer's luck as of late, NWN2 won't get cancelled until he has spent a full year working on it.

You only need three mushrooms and I found them in less than ten minutes. And that is the very first, basic Mage Guild mission if I recall.

What does everyone think of the game so far?

She is British. Surely she can read.

Rachel Wiez said she cried for a week when she read the script. It won't be happy.