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I don't know about that. Generally, if you want to illicit terror (and I'm assuming that's what we're looking for with CoC) field of vision needs to be restricted. You shouldn't be able to see what's creeping up behind you, you should feel like you're trapped. If an isometric perspective does anything, it's give the player visual room to breathe. I don't think System Shock would be nearly as effective if the PC could see 360 degrees around him. So I'd endorse either a tight over-the-shoulder view ala Resident Evil 4 (a kinda-Lovecraftian game as it is) or a first person view, and that's been done before.

You know, I've always had ideas milling about in my mind, regarding D&D FR RPGs, since that's the kind of game I favor. Here's one of my ideas, and it's a long one. One of my ideas was to take some relatively unimportant region of the FR (ie any region beyond the Sword Coast), one that is usually in a bad way politically / economically. Mulhorand, Unther, The Vilhon Reach, maybe even Thay. Then you set up a 1930s Germany situation, in which an evil and oppressive nationalist regime comes to power, but revitalizes the country and makes it considerable in a way in which it hasn't been before (at least in recent memory). The game would start off during this gov'ts rise to power, during which time the PC is completely removed from the situation, but hears of it, maybe they make it seem inconsequential at first, and over time becomes involved in it somehow. Maybe you use the old RPG standby, and the agents of the fascistic regime (they're everywhere, you know) destroy the PC's home village. Maybe we rip off BG and put someone close to the PC in the malevolent sights of said regime, and they get eliminated. Somehow, the PC becomes aware of this threat. The Harpers or some other agency recruits the PCs to work against the regime. Nobody (the Lords Alliance or whoever) really takes it seriously, but the PCs see it for what it is. The PCs enter the country, get to the heart of it all, see all this power that the regime has accumulated but at the same time sees that the once rundown nation has been elevated to some perverse kind of glory, at terrible human cost, and while some people recognize that the regime's evil, many more can only see the real promise of security and national identity from them. While the PC is in the country, it starts to act on expansionist ambitions, and other complacent nations are spurred to action. It then becomes incumbent upon the PCs to stop the regime while it is focused elsewhere. The PCs are then supposed to kill the leader of this Third Reich-esque gov't. But the thing is that while this guy is power-mad, he's also a "patriot" (obviously, the evil of the regime is supposed to outweigh this consideration) and he's just a savvy politician, not a formidable fighter or wizard. He didn't have any demonic or supernatural backing, just the backing of a battered & desperate populace. Getting to him is the hard part, but killing him is cake. It would end in a kind of pyrrhic victory. The dictator dies, but the invading armies from neighboring countries come in and bring the country to a level of ruin beyond even what it had subject to before. Perhaps even with the threat of genocide and tyranny averted from the country, the PCs are powerless to prevent the massive bloodshed in the wake of their victory. Maybe if they're evil, they partake in or lead it. I always thought something like that would be good for the relatively black & white D&D universe. Maybe that's just a ****ty idea and I don't know it. I'll probably get some people together and play through part of it in pen & paper sometime, though. That's the advantage of things like this. I've also considered, given some of the FR's parrallels to the medieval real world, and given the presence of a "Bedouin" culture in the Anauroch, one that mirrors arab tribal culture pre-Islam, that some kind of Mohammad figure could arise and create a Bedouin empire, and the Byzantine-Islamic struggles of history could be reimagined, but religious history seems to be unemulated in D&D, and that would never be put in a game, ever, as it is. *edit - Added bold emphasis to the word long. Because this post is ****in' long, even by my standards.

I had 24 bags, found randomly so it seems, it looks like its about your luck...I would have liked more magic weapons or armors instead, but no, i only got bags...and we all know what happens if you try to put a bag into an other bag <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> THICK BAGS.

Honestly, I can see why the Bhaalspawn Saga is equated with the Baldur's Gate series. But even if that particular story is told, it seems obvious to me that while the many D&D franchise games share a setting, they don't share a universe, meaning that what happens in one doesn't happen in another, despite that shared setting. Reference is anecdotal at best. I like the Baldur's Gate setting. I like the NPCs, I liked the relatively complex villains (the weakest BG villain was head & shoulders above the mechanical KoS) I liked how it was willing to depart from standard fantasy convention, in many ways. NWN is also D&D, but in all aspects it is stupidly simple next to BG. I have yet to hear a single good argument for the retirement of that setting, since I recognize the dichotomy between the setting and the story that takes place in it. Why can't another story be told from that same setting? If you want, make the other games' stories irrelevant to the sequel, I'm fine with that. I want a game that's made in the spirit of its predecessors, not necessarily in the letter. We're not going to get that kind of depth out of any other D&D franchise. What I'm saying is, BG3 might very well suck, all sequels have the capacity to suck despite their pedigree. But BG is undeniably more fertile soil than IWD or NWN or the ****in' Elder Scrolls. Hell, NWN2, for all its merits, had to be good in spite of a lackluster predecessor. Indeed, it distanced itself as much as possible from its predecessor, it didn't have the advantage of a fleshed out, proven precedent to rely on. It wasn't a great game that came out of a great game. That wouldn't be the case with BG3. We're throwing away potential if we take a conservative, one-story-per-universe approach. There's no reason it can't still be vitalic.

Have you not seen / used the magic bags? There aren't that many of them (going through 2/3 of the game I have 2 bags, a -40% and a -60%) but with the 1.03 patch they can hold something like 143 items each, and stacked items will count as single items. I give Sand the -40% one and he stock all scrolls, gems and reagents he needs in it. I think he's saying that he's aware of that, but general responsiveness is an issue. And he's right. Personally I'd really, really like to see some big changes to the AI, spellcasting and pathfinding and whatnot. I wouldn't be averse to IE-style scripts instead of Fallout-style universal AI settings that don't seem to have a huge impact one way or the other. I'm not holding out a hell of a lot of hope, though.

nah, being "ethical" means that we'd be in a soup kitchen helping the homeless or something. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Tell that to Ayn Rand Ethical does not necessarily equal altruistic, at least not all the time. Being "ethical" only means that you do what you think ought be done. But you're right in that this seems to be an exercise without much point. Supposing that we come up with a definitive answer to the question posed, we haven't really gotten anywhere. I'm assuming that there's some intent behind the question that isn't being stated, and I'll roll the dice and say that it has something to do with the Bush administration. The fact that this thread is pointless is because it's not applied ethics. "Can a government grant me liberty" is theoretical thics. "Can we execute prisoners of war" is applied ethics. If you want to foster debate, use the latter and not the former.

Uh, well, it depends on where you're coming from. The idea of liberty is one that originates in Social Contract theory. But the conception of liberty is different from Hobbes to Locke, the two ethicists who thought up the theory. According to Hobbes, everyone has a natural right to do whatever they want, but a government's responsibility is to revoke some rights (like the right to murder, or the right to lie) in order to create greater security for everyone under the contract of citizenship. Locke subscribes to the opposite view, that a government's responsibility is to ensure that its citizens have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, in those words which the American founding fathers poached. It's not that simple, of course, the accounts are wildly different when it comes to their view of basic human nature and the ideal form a government should take, it just so happens that they both subscribe to a "contract" by which multiple people can coexist without compromising their basic rights. But Lockean theory is the preeminent of the two, it's the theory from which Western political ideology flows, as it is concieved in the "representative democracy", and it's the the theory from which this idea of "liberty" and rights comes from. Locke would argue that a government can't take liberty from you, that a government only has power over you if you agree to let it (in other words, if you sign the social contract) If a government restricts your freedom in a way that does not suit you, then it is your obligation to rebel against it. Some might say there are no natural rights that people have by default, or that no one's rights should not trump another's right not to be harmed (the two inevitably come into conflict at some point). I don't know if that answers the question.

eh? If you're using Firefox (I have no idea why you wouldn't) and you have a mousewheel, pressing control and rolling the mousewheel back increases the text size of a site. Might screw with site format, though. As for 2.X, I used to be a believer. It was more archaic, less balanced, had more cred, was more "tru". But 3.X just makes more sense from the standpoint of game mechanics. The edition of a game doesn't obviously inform the quality of the storytelling, it just so happens that the 3.X games have paled in comparison to the better 2.X games. 2.X really works better in IE games, though. THAC0 fit the engine like a glove. I found IWD2 to be awkward in comparison to even something inferior like NWN.

How to not get your ass kicked by the police.

I was pretty interested on the setting they first mentioned, an abandoned complex used by Nazis during World War II. While the setting isn't new to shooters or shooteresque games, the thought of all the Nazi horrors being given new life had me more on edge than sci-fi or even System Shock 3. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> So you... don't like the setting now? The plot still seems to have plenty of nazi-licious potential. All that eugenics....

Jefferson was scrapped, along with Van Buren (Fallout 3) when Interplay dissolved Black Isle. The Jefferson incarnation of BG3 is dead dead dead dead dead. Van Buren lives on in my PnP games. Kind of. Neither of the franchises are necessarily dead, though. It took 8 years for Metal Gear to become Metal Gear Solid. Feargus might be overly optimistic with his hope-fostering for a BG3, but he might not be. I doubt he'd clarify for us. Fallout 3 is now a Bethesda property in pre-production. But to most fans, both franchises are effectively dead. Disagreement arises over whether they would be worth resurrection. I say yes, others say no. Be prepared to hear all kinds of "BG has run its course" statements, if the board decides to respond to you in numbers.

I'm with Gorth on this one. Bloodboil took 1/10 to 1/5 of boss life in my games. It was more cost effective to use a gun. That's saying something about how effective the powers are. The best way to take bosses seemed to be buff powers and a good melee weapon.

No, I agree with your conclusions, and your arguments from liberty. But your argument from efficacy is ****. I've tried my best to outline this, but your unwillingness to renege on faulty arguments because you've got other, better ones speaks ill of either my ability to communicate the problem (and I've tried to remedy that many times over in different posts) or your ability to understand / handle it.

How many lives is a nation worth? How much does honor weigh? What can change the nature of a man? These are the eternal questions.

It's always humorous when someone makes a thread from a purely rhetorical question.

Hmm, odd, that has nothing to do with your argument Where is it? I see an assertion that the law fails to stop people who want to defy it, not an assertion that people defying the law invalidates it. If you want to innoculate your argument against the refutation, you have to explicitly state that the support of the law is the crux of the argument, rather than the efficacy of the law, and the argument contains no such statements. The way you determine the validity of a logical argument is to break it down into its individual premises, and test those premises against the conclusion. "The law is ineffective" was your premise. "Drug laws should be repealed" was your conclusion. The conclusion does not follow from the premise, and that argument is invalid. You seem to be bringing up arguments irrelevant to the discussion of this particular point, which you have yet to refute the point.

Has anyone summoned Mephasm to the Keep? Looked like the cloak and the silver sword both stayed in FR. They'll probably both show up as touchstones in future games not featuring the shard-bearer, if they make future games. It makes sense to me that if the shard-bearer returns as a character (PC or otherwise) it will be in a planar setting, at least in part. Hell is a nice place to start a game when you're 20th level. But given that NWN2 didn't strike me as the beginning of a multi-part epic, the legacy (KOTOR, KOTOR2, NWN, IWD, PST) seems to indicate that the shard-bearer won't be seen again. It's a pity. It's darkly humorous that NWN2 is effectively being treated as the first in the series. All things NWN will be completely ignored from here on in.

that game looks incredibly boring. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They didn't include a hell of a lot of bystander NPCs. But on the whole, it's a game with a brain. That turns off more than a few people.

I always thought Caine sent the emails. I surmised from the ending (hey, since we're way past spoilers) that Jack was Caine's accomplice / minion before he was an Anarch, and it didn't seem to me as if Caine was necessarily serving the Anarchs by blowing the tower. He was doing his own thing. I don't think Nines would have let you blow yourself up if he had known the sarcophagus was rigged. Also, remember the thin-blood seer. She pretty much gives it away at the outset, especially if you're a malk. But the first time I played I thought she meant that Jack was somehow an antedeluvian and had come from the sarcophagus.

A lot of bots seem to have random letters and numbers in their names (ie KyleA236, etc.) so a word ban would only be partially effective. And what about those legitimate Viagra_Cowboys that want in on our fine forum? Perhaps, instead of requiring admin approval (I've seen it done without complaint on forums with +4 active administrators) they could implement one of those confirmation letter scrambles, where a sequence of letters and numbers is displayed on an irregular background to confuse bots and entering the sequence into a box is required to legitimize the registration. That seems to work a lot of times. Or you could disable the ability to create threads when a poster has 0 posts, but this runs into the same problem that the previously mentioned url-privelege runs into (aside from that solution's ineffectiveness in preventing clutter by the creation of threads, which seems to be the priority issue, as I have not yet seen a bot that has posted in an existing thread) in that this is a game forum, and obviously if a n00b turns to the community here for help, they would be largely prevented from getting the assistance they need (few n00bs seem to read or regard forum rules regarding new threads, as it is)

I understand where you're coming from, but that's the nature of the universe. Vampires are always monsters. A vampire who accumulates a lot of humanity is running from his nature, but he'll never escape it. In the end, their alliances and relationships are all mockeries of the ones they had in life, and no matter how hard they might initially intend otherwise, no matter their allegiances and pacts, vampires always exist in a state of war with one another, competing for limited resources, backstabbing, looking out for themselves first, shaking with their left hands. It's all deliciously, hopelessly Hobbesian, if Hobbes had eliminated altruism altogether from his conception of man's heart. Troika did a dynamite job conveying this, for the most part. Nines was a terribly sympathetic character The game would have been much more true to the setting if he was more like LaCroix, but he was inevitably nobler, and not as self-serving. As good as Troika got it, the Camarilla still came out as "bad" and the Anarchs came out as "good"

Eh, Mercurio was LaCroix's ghoul, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure why some other vampire would loan him out as a lackey. The Elysium thing just seemed to be a way to keep the PC from killing an important character before they play their part in the story. Without that Elysium, DR would have mercy-killed Mercurio at the first bat and derailed the Astrolite quest, and thus broken the game. Elysium is lifted once the game decides you can kill the vampire living there. I think both the Chinatown Temple and Lacroix's tower were Elysiums until the end.

That you're seeing the argument as an actual comparison between drug use and murder means either you're not acquainted with the rules of logic or you're just not bothering to read. The issue is whether or not the inefficacy of a law is a good reason for repealing it. Your argument was: Drug laws don't prevent people from taking drugs, therefore the laws are invalid, therefore they should be repealed. My argument was: If that is true for that law, then all other ineffective laws aimed at deterrence are also invalid, and they should also be repealed. The logical conclusion, since there are laws that are ineffective that we still want in place, such as murder laws, is that we must either remove efficacy from our arguments or consistently repeal all ineffective laws, including those we wish to keep. Bringing up that drug use and murder are different confuses the issue. The issue is the law, not that which the law prohibits.

O Rly? what does he have to say about the state of nature as opposed to hobbes? We just went over Locke today, by accident.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Peter Murphy, singer for Bauhaus -Nitecubbling Tenacious D - Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown) NSFW, btw