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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 "Drug laws should be repealed" was your conclusion.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

Excerrent. But for a second there I thought Aldanon made it into the game Some odd camera angles in there too. The examples of the dialogue are pretty impressive. I liked the law guy's speech.

I remember level drain being a problem in BG2 because it would erase spell memorizations, such that if you didn't protect your spellcasters, you'd have to re-list your spells after every fight. I'm not sure if that's the case in NWN2. It would also reduce the abilites of your fighters right quick, if they got rushed. The NWN system doesn't make it nearly as debilitating. Greater undead are comparitively easy to handle. In the crypts prior to getting Elanee, poison and disease are an annoyance, as no one has spells that can counter them (expensive potions are the only recourse). But the rest / death system being what it is, they're of absolutely no consequence for the rest of the game. They don't even complicate combat all that much. It makes one nostalgic for the days when a mutated spider's venom could actually kill a party member. Hell, it makes one nostalgic for untrivial RPG death. The worst poison or disease does is reduce strength such that they become encumbered.

Yet the point of my argument was that the efficacy of a law is not related to its justification for existing. Perfectly valid reasons (such as infringement on personal freedom) for revoking the law are made without having ever referenced the irrelevant issue of whether or not the law works. That issue is brought to the fore when we consider whether or not we want to adapt or optimize a law, not whether or not we want that law to exist. If the government intends to reduce drug consumption, but its law fails to that effect, that is indicative of failed policy; the intent can still be innoculated against the argument. In other words, the legitimacy of a law and its implementation are seperate, and efficacy arguments speak against the latter, not the former. Which, again, is irrelevant. That individuals defy a law does not make it illegitimate. If drug law is illegitimate because some individuals defy it, rape and murder laws are also illegitimate (if we want to be reasonably consistent) for the same reason. If drug laws are illegitimate and rape / murder laws are legitimate, then our criterion for legitimacy must come originally from something other than efficacy. If we don't want drug laws because they don't work, than we don't want laws against murder if they don't work. This line of reasoning is absurdity, but it is consistent with this line of argument. We want murder laws and we don't want drug laws, but neither of those things have anything to do with whether or not the policy is failsafe and effective. They have to do with whether or not those policies are fair and just. Your other arguments and your conclusion may be sound, but that particular argument is not. On the contrary, there is not a "vast majority" of people who take murder to be wrong all the time everywhere. Most people would agree that certain people deserve death (but most would take exception to things like capital punishment because they kill people who don't deserve it), and more still would make exceptions for self-defense or defense of others. I didn't see anything prima facae wrong with tarna's post. If he wanted to kill his landlord, that would be wrong, but he'd be reasonable in wanting your Slobodan Milosevichs or Pol Pots dead.

(w00t) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I WOULD KILL FOR BG3. But if Atari is in such dire straits (I don't know if they are) they could sell the property to Obs

Welcome Mr. Veran. I myself used to write fanfic (I was 12, and man did Prince of Persia knock my socks off) but it sucked. Gonna have to take some creative writing courses or something. VELCOME!

Your argument was about the legitimacy of drug laws in reference to their efficacy. That drug laws were wrong wasn't the issue, it was that they were ineffective. That drug laws harm the innocent is irrelevant to the argument that they fail as a deterrent, and that the laws fail as a deterrent is insufficient argument to conclude that those laws should not be in place, as evidenced by the murder analogy.

Is that really the case? Consider Glaucon's "Gyges ring" dilemma. We might assume that most people wouldn't do the wrong thing if no consequences would ever befall them, but it's not unreasonable to believe that most people, if they were never held accountable for their actions, would err in many situations. In this example, if there was indeed a God that judged him by his actions after his life, and this was readily accepted, the rogue would not rape or kill even if he could get away with it. He couldn't get away with it. Humanism creates no such imperative, it has no such teeth. Kant had to include a God in his moral calculus to make it workable. When one refuses or is incapable of comprehending a metaphysical justification for the permissibility or prohibition of an action, and no physical prohibition is implemented (ie an action is wrong but there are no definite negative personal consequences) imperatives can't reasonably exist. A consequence must be present to deter those would act in spite of our moral judgements. We can say that killing is wrong, but saying it isn't enough, and there are examples of people getting away with murder just as there are examples of people reaping the consequences of their actions.

Terrible argument. There's a mandate out against murder, but a determined person will still commit it. By your logic, that imprisonment or capital punishment are not effective deterrents against murder (people still kill each other with full knowledge of the consequences of their actions) means that those punishments should be suspended until we find some punishment that precludes murder all the time everywhere. But that's unreasonable, so we implement those punishments because we can be confident that it will deter some.

Jung was also at least a bit insane, especially going into the end of his professional relationship with Freud. The Seven Sermons to the Dead were indicative of this descent. He reffered to it as a "creative illness", which some believe is indicative of paranoid schizophrenia that was probably mild in its severity, but Jung apparently was visited by some hallucinations and delusions (he professed to having been visited by angels) during that time, so he meets the diagnostic criteria. He also has the same problem that Aquinas had. If you do not hold the premise that a Platonic spiritual world exists to be true, the entire foundation of Jung's theory becomes nonsensical. As for good / evil being defined by the existence of a God, humanists generally disagree. Most at least paid lip-service to the concept of a deity, because if one is not judged for his actions after he dies, it is entirely possible to commit evil actions without consequence, and thus moral consideration becomes arbitrary. That's why Nietzche was a nihilist and not a humanist.

I ran into this as well. My party turned into slack-jawed idiots as soon as we stepped into the Moonstone Mask. Try using the "follow me" or "defend me" scripts by right-clicking on the screen (not on any particular party member) and selecting the "broadcast command" option. That gave my AI the kick in the ass it needed and fixed the bug when it came up.

Yeah, but they make even less RP difference than the traits in NWN2. They're mildly interesting, but Bloodlines has two strengths, the narrative and the roleplaying. Every other aspect of the game is rough or unbalanced. The traits slightly change the way characters are created, but beyond that they're mostly useless.

Not really, from what I can tell. He wasn't particularly NG when he was introduced into the game, and he doesn't become more lawful when he becomes a monk, by my measure. Seems like his transformation into a monk was the end of his progression as a character, but he hadn't transformed much. Made a speech about justice and fairness, but it's not as if a NG character can't value those things.

You weep easy.