algroth

You can always say you're Chris. Yeah, until they see you spell your name. Than they get all excited, and learn the way they call you is not exactly accurate, and so they try to be accurate and its embarassing for everyone involved;-). I know I struggled a lot with some Polish names when I first wrote them down. "Krzysztof" I've gotten used to for the sheer amount of times I've spoken online about the likes of Penderecki, Zanussi or Kieslowski for example, but I initially had to always double-check as to whether it was writen "sz" or "zs". "Zdzisław" is one name I don't think I'll *ever* be able to write without double-checking it via Google or something, however. I'll get used to writing "Zbigniew" too, in time...

For higher damage? I feel like what Josh trying to say is you don't wear light armor and complain about "not tank enough", because light armor wasn't suppose to be tanky. You get higher DPS but dies more quickly. How does the light armor output more damage exactly? Light armour has a smaller action recovery penalty, which means your attacks will be faster. More attacks means more DPS. Basically that's the gist of it, though it really depends on the kind of damage you want to do too - I've seen a couple of builds in the Deadfire beta that placed a lot of emphasis on an initial, single hit burst of damage, and I would reckon recovery speed wouldn't affect the character much in such a case (could be wrong though). But as for an archer for example, it basically means they'll loose more arrows through the fight.

Bah! There is only one, true live action turtle movie! Seconded. Though I've always been curious about The Secret of the Ooze due to having David Warner in it (not that he hasn't had his fair share of clunkers).

My day so far:

There are larger countries on that map with fewer dots on them than Hungary. What gives? an example? Belarus Few real-world country names make my inner fantasy nerd as giddy as Belarus, and I don't know why.

The UK in particular had historically some pretty harsh censorship as product of the BBFC's classification rules as well as the Video Recordings Act, so I'm not wholly surprised things would have changed there. Things have opened up a fair bit since, but maybe at the time "ninja" could have led to conflict with these same classifications for what is essentially a kids' show and thus changes were required. In the UK films still get occasionally cropped or "censored" in order to pass a different classification - the first Hunger Games had to cut a few seconds off one of its scenes to pass a 12 certificate opposite to a 15, and the same has happened for several other films whose companies wished to lower the ratings for in accordance to what their target audience would be (should be mentioned that the BBFC does *not* cut films themselves nowadays, that is done by the distributors themselves). But opposite to MPAA their reasoning for their respective ratings is often quite thorough and their decisions a lot more reglamented and transparent, and they often directly state that "X scene" is the cause for the classification and so on, almost implicitly saying the classification does not truly reflect on the film's content - such is the case with The Secret in their Eyes for example, which was a 13 in Argentina but an 18 in UK due to a particular shot where a man briefly showed his 'package' to a female character so as to threaten her with rape, which therefore invariably classified the film as such.

In Terminator's defense too, English is not his first language and he's clearly struggling with it, so he could have just meant something along the lines of "I didn't find the African-inspired aesthetic/fashion particularly interesting or appealing" which doesn't sound nearly as damning. All the same I do find the arguments he's given a tad faulty and find a woman's lack of sex appeal to be a pretty silly reason to dislike a film, almost akin to fishing for plot holes in Un chien andalou.

I'll probably be around some. Mostly because I like to comment about our different opinions and experiences with games or films or anything with other people. I'd like to see what others have ran into that I haven't and viceversa, and also how out experiences in a same element or other diverged.

To quote Lord_Mord, this forum is especially hopeless today.

Another vote for never having had any trouble with Pillars' performance. But I'm not sure what warrants this thread getting a necro 14 months after the last post.

Heh... glad I wasn't the first to ask that. I feel like I'm out of the loop on all things Obsidian. Chris Avellone still works at Obsidian, right? Wait, Obsidian? I thought these were the Black Isle forums?

derp

I thought we were already over the whole "I can't be racist, I have a lot of friends of colour" argument? Anyway, thank goodness the filmmakers care about actresses for how they *act* and not for, y'know, how they satisfy the libidinous needs of the side in the male audience that can't keep it in their pants.

I am under the impression this may have resulted from Alec eating his mac n' cheese with ketchup. https://twitter.com/kgarsten/status/972210007038029824 I can sympathize, Katrina, who would want to spend another day in a company that accepts this of its members?

Considering that you can very well manage to land a hit or crit five, maybe ten times in a single fight (depending who and how many against of course), the 10% chance is actually pretty damn high. So much so that I recall very few fights in which I didn't fight with a group of vessels on my side thanks to the Grey Sleeper (5% chance to invoke vessels). Landing five hits with your weapon, which is perfectly doable, would lead to the initial 10% chance turning into a 41% chance to land the effect. If my maths is right, here's the odds for landing the effect at least once through multiple hits with a 10% proc chance weapon (rounded to the nearest whole number): 1 - 10% 2 - 19% 3 - 27% 4 - 34% 5 - 41% 6 - 47% 7 - 52% 8 - 57% 9 - 61% 10 - 65% So what seems like a low chance on paper actually becomes a pretty high chance when considering how *many* hits or crits you land through a single fight, or through the game even. On neutral conditions you ought to be able to land as many hits or crits as you do misses or grazes, since to my understanding you only need a 50+ on the attack roll after factoring in accuracy and deflection to land the hit (off of a d100 roll). So if you're not landing enough hits or crits, maybe you ought to consider buffing up your accuracy?

Why? Not all animals equally good. Some are cute, some are tasty. But also there is snakes, frogs, rats, hyenas and possums. And as far I remember, Eder himself not a big fan of orlans. What? He's okay with orlans. He wanted to pet Hiravias! :D

Don't give an English teacher a gun because it's bound to get fired sooner or later.

Edit: nvm, better to leave religious debate elsewhere as it's a tangent that doesn't really belong to this thread.

BG games did have item suppression though. Did they? I don't recall any of the sort. I recall items "of Protection" restricting one another or not being wearable when you had magical armour on, but that's incompatibility, not suppression, and not really the same. Those are restrictions which, whilst not ideal, are not as bad as stat suppression since they only affected a very small number of items and pretty clearly informed you of the incongruence by not making the items wearable - meanwhile the stat suppression system meant that in the later stages of the game I had to check through each item on each character to make sure I found just the right crack where X item might not overlap with any of the others and be at all useful, which, for a revolving door roster as I kept in my playthrough, was most certainly a pain to go through and basically sucked the fun out of itemizing the party. I could well be misremembering another case of actual suppression in the Baldur's Gate games, but I don't recall it working the way it did in Pillars at all myself (and being far less intrusive in turn).

The puppet Katrina has been infused with a piece of Katrina's soul, and will act as a surrogate for her within the company while she's moved on elsewhere. It'll become the Steward of Obsidian HQ. Good luck on your next venture, Katrina!

This discussion could have had a bit more repercussion (if at all) if made earlier, but nevermind that, I'm up for playing. So here's a couple that come to mind... 1. More sidequests with long and complex story arcs So, to my mind if there is one aspect where Baldur's Gate II clearly succeeds over any of its peers, Pillars included, is with regards to the quest design from a sheer narrative standpoint. Whether you look at the Cult of the Eyeless, Firkraag's offer, the Planar Sphere, the Deaths in the Umar Hills and several more, all of these have complex stories that could well have been the main plot to a whole other new game instead, with several plot points and twists and conflicts present, and often resulting in interesting repercussions that could very well be a quest or task or adventure all of their own (unlocking strongholds, having to tie loose ends and so on). The sheer depth to these quests is what I feel any game aiming to reach Baldur's Gate II's heights will have to aim for sooner or later, and whilst Pillars was certainly not lacking in content, there's very few quests that came anywhere close to this level of depth or complexity (one could think of Raedric or the Skaenite cult for example, but even these are in my opinion a fair bit more linear and straight-forward than the likes of the Cult of the Eyeless for example - arguably the most complex and intriguing one is DLC content, being that of the murder at the mines) - personally I would like to see a greater focus in quests like these, as well as possible other quests and content that might result from the resolution of the same (for example, having to deal with Raedric a second time in the first game). 2. Beefy hidden content Whilst the first Pillars does seem to try and add some 'secret' content here or there to, say, reward the more attentive and exhaustive players, I still find that most of the content in the game is fairly easy to find. In contrast I find it very interesting how Planescape: Torment would go to such extremes so as to make whole areas and *companions* available only by the most obscure side-content, interactions and associations. So with the Modron Cube, for example, you never actually got a prompt to buy it or what to do with it at all - the player would originally have to buy it out of sheer curiosity, and bring it to the actual modrons only by associating that one looked like the other. This wasn't marked as a quest in any way within the journal. But possibly one of the most interesting interactions too is the means through which you arrive to Xachariah, where you need to have learned about Dak'kon's past, about the "four" that walked your path, but then also having to piece together through intuition that if Dak'kon were to act as an intermediary for Fell's words then he too might react in some fashion to the mention of the "four", thus proving him to be one of the same; then you'd also have to be attentive enough to figure out that you can use your Stories-Bones-Tell ability (if acquired - which one could have easily missed as well) on the undead at the Mortuary as well... And only through getting all these pieces together do you finally get the chance to talk to this former companion of yours and unlock another facet of your history and so on. Whilst I think that maybe a few of these 'secrets' in Torment were more the byproduct of a fairly poorly implemented journal, and perhaps it took these same to a bit of an extreme, I still wouldn't mind seeing more beefy hard to reach content in Deadfire myself, either in the shape of some larger quest or even the likes of a Twisted Rune-type encounter for example. Which, given how the game is promising uncharted islands and a more semi-open-world exploration mechanic through sailing, I suppose could well be the case in this game. 3. DEATH TO SUPPRESSION God, are there few things that irk me in Pillars so much as suppression in items. I get it that this was present in 3/3.5ed D&D games like Icewind Dale II and the Neverwinter Nights saga and maybe it makes for better balance but it feels ****ing *wrong* all over. It turns itemization into a ****ing chore, it makes it so that items can be very easily made obsolete not just by those of their very own type/slot, but those of *any other* type/slot as well, and also makes it so that a normally very good or great item suddenly becomes very disappointing, because they could well not mean a thing since this +3 might bonus is overridden by this *other* +3 might bonus. It just sucks, it feels terrible in every way, and I'm glad that Josh has already "confirmed" that they're removing suppression for this game in one of the Q&As (I'm still not sure if they actually have done so or not). These, I guess, are three points that come to mind. Maybe a few others will later on, and if so I'll look into expanding this list. But here's three things I hope to see addressed with Deadfire. The first particularly, since I really feel that that's where the most relevant progress can be made from the original onto a sequel.

Well, the "opt out" option is always available by merely telling the romantic option that you're not interested - far as I'm aware the games in this line have always made romance a player choice so I don't know why it'd change now. Secondly though, and what I would say genuinely baffles me about your post, is why you consider a game like this, or any other game for that matter, would be more "family-friendly" without romance, as if it's romance that's the crux of the matter and not violence, swearing, themes and so on. Nevermind that the sheer reading level of the game along with complex RPG machanics already make it a pretty inaccessible game for younger audiences. Now, *sex* I can (kind of) understand, but romance =/= sex, and if this game is to approach romance like the IE games did then nothing at all graphic will be shown. But romance has been the core appeal to many a family-friendly story - heck, hard to find examples of Disney films and franchises that don't include one in some fashion or other.

This and Like Cage for me as well. But yeah, same: didn't even bother with The Punisher and not sure I care too much about checking out the new Jessica Jones season either. With regards to Marvel shows it's all about Legion for me at this point.