Blarghagh

Eh, I like Edér because he's just so gosh darn pleasant it's hard not to like him. He's not a regular guy, he's an honest to god nice guy.

Xoti and Pallegina are masculine?

I can't say I'm not worried. But if it's up to me, it's high bar or none at all, since I don't want BioWare style. They may be good at what they do but what they do is make bad things, IMO.

Ydwin's pretty popular, apparently. I feel like she's speaking to people's imagination moreso than any of the other characters. I wonder that if we don't make it to 5 million, Obs will end up making her a full companion anyway, and the long stretch goal is just to drive last minute pledge hype.

Some companion relationships will be romantic in nature, but that doesn't mean they'll be "romances" in the current RPG vernacular sense. They're not being coy, they specifically distanced themselves from that term for a reason.

Talking gun who yells at you when you miss. You shouldn't explode his mouth if you're not going to make it count.

If you need a different character for all those roles it's only a sign of rigid character customization options. Thank god you have to actually get tactically creative with your characters now instead of having to get one dude per role every time. It made it incredibly dull. :D

Is the moral that being openly racist will get you a nice job? How do I get in on this on the ground floor? Hook me up, man!

Time for the Punisher, isn't it? One batch, two batch.

Ydwin, no contest whatsoever.

Man makes some extremely loved games > Man makes handful of decisions unpopular among a couple of people super passionate about games that man made > Man is bad game maker. I love it!

I have two large moving boxes filled with cheap discount DVDs in storage. Not sure why I keep them. Haven't touched 'em in 5 years.

Sagani.

I wrote a review that got published in a local magazine once. Am I the media now? Do I believe in slavery? ... actually, I do believe in slavery. Not that it's good or anything, mind you, but that it existed. I'm no slavery denier.

Yeah, one of Pillars' strengths IMO was that half the time I couldn't decide what the best course of action was.

Well, one of the things you can do is ignore the xp or rewards. I've forgone rewards in many games because I didn't like what I had to do for them. You could turn on the dispositions showing in conversations and consistently pick, for example, the benevolent options if you're a benevolent character. I believe that also has an impact if you're a Paladin or a Priest, if you're looking for gameplay implications in roleplaying.

Skaen? Is that you?

Yeah, I think the point is that "elective" is a misnomer. If I understand correctly, in medical terms elective is simply every surgery that is planned in advance rather than surgery required due to emergency situation. Most country's departments of health consider any surgery that can wait for more than 24 hours to be elective, not sure about the US though. Scheduling a hernia or cataracts surgery, or an angioplasty is life-changing health-related surgery that should be covered. It's also "elective", as in it can be scheduled around the patient's and surgeon's convenience. EDIT: This was in response to numbers up there, got ninja'd. Shady: That's what I understood from his argument, that state subsidies for insurance coverage should not extend to this specific case - gender reassignment surgery - because the taxpayer shouldn't have to pay for elective surgery. His later statement that elective surgery is "surgery you don't need" shed a different light on it for me, namely that his definition of elective in medical terms is simply incorrect, which seems to be the crux of the misunderstanding. Still not sure how that's alum's fault, though.

The sidekicks are definitely going to be in at this rate, so we've got that at least.

The other thread on this topic "Poll on preferred party size" was started on the 29th of January, less than a week after the Fig campaign began. I knew of the decision to reduce party size from 6 to 5 before that thread was started. From this I can conclude that the information was out there and hardly hard to find. I quote myself: Not everyone hanging around here in the forum, like an unemployed. It's not their fault you failed to inform yourself before making a purchase.

...Which is exactly why the procedure is heavily restricted and only proscribed as a last resort when everything else fails. Compare and contrast with nose jobs and boob jobs (an equivalence you have drawn yourself). The equivalence is they are elective. You don't need to have them. Again, not the case.

Don't a lot of succesful crowdfunding projects make about as much money the last few days as they do the first few? Grabbing extra publicity and excitement from large stretch goals might actually be a sound financial strategy rather than hating money. Plus, backer portal pledges are likely going to count towards the stretch goals. On the other hand, I'm not sure how any of the other new stretch goals are interesting at all in the face of another full companion.

Mastectomy surgery for breast cancer is "elective". So is a live donor transplant surgery. The only thing elective means in surgical terms is not acutely life threatening at this very moment. While the blanket term "elective" does include optional surgery for non-medical reasons, it is not the definition of the term in a medical context. By contrast, you're the one who picked specifically picked only non-medical surgery, such as nose jobs and boob jobs to compare it to - the nasty implications of that may have been unintentional on your part but that doesn't make them alum's fault. Yes, there are other treatment options for trans-people. Again, I don't suffer from it so I can't say how effective they are, but let's assume that this surgery exists and is used (heavily regulated as alum points out) for a reason. Because I can't say from experience how effective those are, I can only draw upon my own experience, which is this: There are also many treatment options for clinical depression. I tried them all and none of them worked, the brain is too complicated for mental health at this point to be an exact science and not every approach works for everyone. Therefore, I ended up opting for elective "electroconvulsive therapy", essentially brain surgery by way of electricity. Without said "elective" surgery, I'd be dead at this point since the other treatment options left me still suicidal (or in the case of some prescribed medications, more suicidal). I'd say more people getting hung up on it being elective because the therapy cost them 0.3% of a penny more in health insurance (a number I pulled out of my ass, but let's be fair, it's nothing) to make sure medical insurance wouldn't cover it would have meant my death, since there was no way I could have afforded said treatment at 18. I'm sure you can understand how I take it a little personally when others try to decide how important mental health related medical care is.

I'm with alum on this. I take it personally sometimes when people think they know better than trained researchers and mental health professionals. I don't know what gender dysporia feels like, but I know that I ended up almost killing myself several times failing to follow futile advices of 'it's all in your head, you just need to think positively and be happy' when the chemical effects of long term depression on my brain had long rendered me completely incapable of doing either. People with healthy brain chemistry usually can't imagine what it's like when there is a massive disconnect between your mental and physical logic and reality (just look at Bruce's futile attempt to describe it). And when they decide they know better than medical professionals when someone's just being weird and need to 'act normal' and don't need to 'choose' specialized treatment, they don't get how harmful that can be.

Deliberate concealment?