Walsingham

I'm trying to convince the Queen she could rally support by having a dinosaur pogrom. The dinosaurs are out to get us! We must engage in a massive rearmament program, and boost economic growth!

I think the deal with bots is often either to just see if they will function at all. Or to test 'scientifically' how accepted a bot can get on a forum. With this in mind I recommend we skew his data by showering him with conflicting personal messages in a range of dead languages.

Hold on a minute there, buddy. Science without a conscience can provoke evil just as surely as religion. Spot of eugenics, anyone? Religion is at least inescapably tied to morality and conscience even if it can be blinkered.

You can use combos of other dice and so forth, but when the dice get rolled you are always effectively talking probability. And probability is in essence always a d100. So I say cut out the middle men. However, when it comes time to choose what the target is for the probability I prefer a personal system. Here you have natural talent, which only the referee knows; experience and training, which both know environmental factors, such as stress injury, fatigue and personality opponent values We did come up with a formal way of combining these, but in general the ref would just consider all these points in their head and choose the target.

I test drive songs before buying albums, and like many people I have bought stuff later from bands I would quite literally never have listened to without piracy. I alo know that while some people download stuff illegally and never buy they are often pretty much skint (poor) and wouldn't be buying if the piracy weren't there. I have a copy of Civ IV in my backpack right now which I intend to use illegally. However I consider this justice for the heap of poop that was Civ III (which I did buy).

Two of my big beefs with consoles and console games have just crystallised. I'm not trying to flame consoles on their many strengths but anyway... 1) Producing a console game is a far higher money enterprise than a PC game. A fact becoming still more pronounced as next gen consoles have minimum budgets in the milions, including distribution and so forth. PC games, on the other hand can be produced by a couple of guys and distributed online for practically no outlay. 2) A console game typically has onlya few buttons, compared with the scads of buttons on my PC keyboard. Surely this means the console will never have as complex games? ~~ Both these things make me worry that console games are going to soon attain a level of stupefying play-it-safe-n-simple-ness. But that, because of the big money involved games houses will chase this market at the expense of the more richly varied potential on teh PC. ~~~ Or maybe I just need to shut the hell up.

I don't know about the Evil Dead 2 commentary, but it occurs to me that having the commentary added much later is good because the cast often seem to forget stuff from the time, or get distracted, rather than just giving you the minute details. Is that what happened with the Aliens commentary? Thought: Would it be cool to have a commentary added to Obsidian games?

I always envisaged these discussions taking place on the hurricane tossed bridge of a pirate ship. Ah well.

Why do I feel like I'm back in class all of a sudden? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sorry. Far too much time spent training people. :">

Er... hello. Thinks: is this a bot or something? I'm going to look really daft if it is.

As far as moderating goes I feel it is excellent that we have challenging discussions here. I've learned a lot from them. But I feel certain viewpoints are beyond the pale; 'contra humanis generis' if you like. Needless cruelty, unreasoning hatred, blind ignorance. These things are bad 'n' wrong. These types of views should be censored for three reasons 1) People should not be made to feel afraid on any forum, least of all one about playing games for fun. Thus even if a view is transparently rubbish, like a pic of Auschwitz death pits with the caption 'haha hah', it should not be on here. 2) The people who hold these views need to be sent as strong a message as possible that their views are repellent. Hopefully this may make them question said views, or at the very least not build on them. If they feel they are speaking to a silent majority who secretly support their views, they will get worse. 3) If someone reads these repellent views and is of insufficient calibre to see through them, they may start to believe in them. You'd be amazed the rubbish kids will believe. Or at least you would be if you'd never been a teacher. ~~~ I should stress that is my view, and is not some reflection of any other mods. ~~~ I feel this really relates back to a number of prior debates we've had on freedom of speech. I argued then and now that free speech is not, and never has been an absolute, any more than freedom of action is. The essential driving objective of an enlightened society must be the creation and maintenance of some state in its members are free from harm and an unnatural fear of harm. In the past we have attacked state censorship because it was frequently a barrier to these things being achieved. We need to be free to criticise the Czar's administration because otherwise it will never get better. We need to be free to criticise the flat Earth theory because until we do our ships can't navigate. But under those conditions we didn't see as bad the useful squashing of views devoted to unrest, hatred, and violence. So we wrote laws championing free speech, not seeing they would lay us open to abuse from our fellow citizens.

I'm pleased to see this thread still blooming with cultured debate. I've been wondering recently about the depth of issues which can be brought up in a populist medium, like a game. Do you think thsi could be touched on in an Obs release? And if so, how?

If any of you have seen the comedy series Black Books, the DVD commentaries are at least as funny as the show itself.

Not really. No one was seriously hurt, and the pirates got frightened off by an A-Team style loud bang. The crew behaved entirely sensibly. Good story, as far as these things go.

"They were firing the rifle and then fired the rocket launcher twice. One of the rockets certainly hit the ship - it went through the side of the liner into a passenger's suite. The couple were in there at the time so it was a bit of an unpleasant experience." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4410826.stm

No mod hat on, I think nuking the Middle East shouldn't even be joked about. Nuking anywhere other than LV 462 and my sock drawer shouldn't be joked about. Unless, y'know the joke was clever and original. Or had goblins in it. I love jokes about goblins. Thinks: this must be what going mad feels like.

Hang on a minute. Crucified upsdie down? I'll tell you why he's not the hero. He was clearly showboating. "Here, Centurion, I know it's Jesus thang. But he's the boss' son, and the magical miracle kid. If I give you a fiver could you, I dunno, make mine more special?" Sets a terrible example, too. I mean, what's next? Juggling while being crucified upside down, and saying the alphabet backwards? ~~ I should say that I don't think its bad that creationism should be looked at in school. but the only way you can teach that it is of equal validity is to ignore the scientific paradigm. Which, as I say is our greatest knowledge farming tool ever. Or rather, without it we can't get anywhere. I also think Commissar's right, inasmuch as if the US swings any further towards fundamentalism her allies are going to get even more alarmed than they are at present. I know many republican voters believe we don't actually exist, but us foreigners kind of outnumber youse fellers, and support your economy. Going Talibantastic would be ill-advised. Irrespective of my opinion, I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say I thought the Framers wanted a separation of Church and State. What gives?

Lockable Stuff: Members Heroin Smuggling: Us. Don't stop it!!! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sorry, sir. Assumed those 500 individually wrapped white packages were Fionavar's lunch. Takes a lot of marshmallow to feed a dragon. Thinks: Dissertation. Oh yes.

If this was true he wouldn't be able to get out of the moderatorship alive You'll soon learn all about it... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Aiiiieeee! *hides under table*

I suspect he became power-crazed. Or discovered some dread secret about the mods.

You lost me again. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Live action roleplay. Actually, I don't see how it would. It has a space-y feel.

Yup. Read willingly. I have a relative who is actually professionally a witch. So I thought I had best be prepared if she tried anything. :D Getting back to teh topic. Does it really mean a great deal if the US does begin to believe in creationsim wholesale. I think it does, but want to hear youse fellers.

Meh. With so much evil in the world I find it hard to get all that worked up about some skinny peroxide-monkey. I mean thsi thread is about rioting, for feth's sake. destruction, death, doughnuts (possibly). The big three, gentlemen.

Ditto to Commissar. It's fun to roughhouse, but someone always ends up crying. In any event, personal insults are unhelpful. I believe someone said it better than me when they said attack the ideas not the person. ~~ Commissar, you make an interesting point. And without knowing much Inquisitorial history beyond having read the Malleus Maleficarum and played Lionheart I concur. I am willing to bet many Inquisitors pictured themselves as doing god's work. Not defending the status quo. But it can hardly be a coincidence that their investigations rarely went against the heirarchy, even though such persons were far more able to indulge in vices than the peasants. I also think egotism and arrogance may have played their part more than you give credit to. ~~~ I should also like to announce my conversion to the cult of the miniature giant space hamster. There will be a BG3, and Boo will rise again!

Will they last, though? Best of luck and everything to them, but the turnover rate for mods is creeping upwards, it seems to me. Where do they all come from? Where do they go? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I don't know about these other jokers. But i am simply a right-wing pastiche assembled from PG Wodehouse plays, and pages torn from the book of Queen's regulations...