Aristes

Wow, I was stationed in Taegu. Small world. I was stationed in Taegu and at Yongsan. During the Olympics no less! Keep up the photos, my Aussie friend!

I like to listen to new music and I often come here to find out what other folks have to offer. I do listen to the same music and read the same books and look at the same pictures over and over again. I'll probably do that for the rest of my life. I also listen to new music and read new books and look at new pictures. I hope I'll always do that as well. When I look at something old, I hope to see something new. When I look at something new, I hope I find something familiar in it. Whoa! It's almost like I've been on the ganga. Who needs drugs when you think thoughts like these? haha Christmas is the Time -- Lou Rawls

Good Lord, that was funny. whew. Brings a tear to the eye.

I think "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" probably applies best If you're no Shakespeare, I'm no Donne. Take the compliment, you yutz!

I can't say that I agree with every inference from your post, DR, but it was damned good. Actually entertaining as a read in and of itself. Great op ed. as for you, Tigranes, I'd say that you're right about quest lines. Not a lot of actual lines, but there is some drama that they managed to convey some story by use of the environment pretty well. For example, the minefield area where you search the houses and see the charred remains of a couple lying in each others' arms. ...Or saving some poor bastard who's strapped with explosives. I think there's a lot of story there for you to discover, even if you don't perform quests do uncover it.

Yeah, I guess you've got it there, DR. In a PnP game, you can use your more cereberal personal advantages. It's not like better reflexes gives you better dice rolls. haha In a CRPG, the player can use his reflexes to give him an advantage as well. What do you mean exactly, mkreku? We're here to discuss gaming stuff. If this discussion doesn't have merit, then probably nothing else we discuss here does either. Anyhow, you're a Swede. Whatever you mean, I could proabably placate you with a beer or a couple of shots of vodka or something.

In PnP, a guy playing a Rogue doesn't fare better than another guy playing a Rogue because he's physically nimbler than the other player. In PnP, an intelligent gamer more conversant with the rules will fare better than a less intelligent ignorant player of the same class. Years have DMing have shown this to be the case. The character doesn't play itself. For that reason, the player's personal abitlities and insights will always impact character success, even in PnP.

Hangul uses an alphabet. It's been about 20 years since I've read it, so I don't know what it says exactly, but it starts with Han G*ok chang ee something. Yes, it is phonetic. Great pics, Tigranes. It brings back memories of cherry blossoms and soju. It is alarmingly sentimental, so I will therefore beat a hasty retreat. Thanks for sharing, man! EDIT: Stupid. G*ook is a language filter item, apparently.

Well, that's part of the problem (VATS easiness). Yes, you can use stimpacks quickly and easily and you can obtain them in huge numbers. If you're careful about scrounging them, you will have a humungous number of them very early even on very hard. I agree on that issue. I don't think VATS is overpowered in and of itself. I think it makes combat a lot easier. I'm with Amentep in that I don't want to look at slowmo closeup shots. I imagine VATS is much more of a game breaker with a few of the perks, which I have not taken as yet. My next run will rely on those perks, but it's stalled at the moment while I wait. None of it is a design flaw in that I found the game entertaining. Now, before you beat on me, wait a sec. You're a game designer. I respect that. You've been involved with a couple of my favorite games. Certainly the original IWD is perhaps my second favorite CRPG and IWD 2 is in the top ten. It's your job to look at a game, even a commercially/critically successful game, and find ways to improve it. From an outside view, there's a lot of tweaking that would make VATS/Stimpack better. Stimpacks in FO games have generally been both abundant and overpowered. VATS is an imperfect adaptation of the action points for FO3. ...But making my way through the game was still fun, so I personally don't know what I'd do to fix it. I trust that you would have better ideas in that regard than I ever will.

Better to be abused than ignored, eh? heh heh Anyhow, Gromnir is being extremely confrontational, sure. ...But I understand his argument perfectly. It's important to establish the priorities of the game design. Namely, that CRPGs rely exclusively or almost exclusively on the character rather than the player skill. I agree with this idea in principle. For someone who adheres to this view, even one small word like "legit" can mean quite a lot when it seems to favor player rather than character ability. The idea behind the word is more important than the literal meaning of the word itself. However, I will say that every game, even tabletop RPGs, rely on player ability. Your character might have an intelligence of 5 but you will devise complex plans that require a much higher intelligence to form and implement. Your characater has a charisma of 3 but you give a long speech to the other party members regarding an upcoming battle and convince them to follow your advice. In CRPGs, your character might have a low dexterity, but you manage to contrive a way to shoot an enemy and quickly hop onto some rocks in order to shoot the mirelurk at will. All of these are part and parcel of games where there is an unavoidable overlap between player and character abilities. Where Gromnir is entirely right is that player abilities are never more legit than character abilities in a CRPG. I don't think J.E. meant it that way, but that's something only he can say. The way I took it is that rather than legitimate, he meant that the only way to use the scope is outside of vats. It's not that a scoped shot is more legitimate outside of vats. It's that, if I'm not mistaken, it's impossible to use your scope in vats. So, if you use a scoped shot, and wait for the target to stop and remain stationary long enough, you'll have a higher crit chance than if you use VATS. Of course, I'm always trying to reconcile disparate views, so who knows? :shrug:

hahaha I bet the mods don't cut out a big chunk of this thread because you guys are fighting. Personally, I rarely used VATS. Not because it was "too easy" or some other nonsense, but because I'm too impatient to watch the chunks spew. In fact, I think the best combat builds will inevitably rely on VATS. I agree with J.E. about the efficacy of headshots outside of VATS. My experience was that I was far more devastating if I was patient enough (ugh) to wait for a scoped head shot against a stationary opponent. I disagree in that I think this was true of non-scoped ranged weapons such as Lincoln's repeater and the hunting rifles. I agree with Gromnir that VATS is perfectly legit. I didn't see a problem with it. Even if it were a design flaw, which it isn't, VATS is part and parcel of the game. Anything the design team puts in a game is certainly legit to use. Oh, and before I read in detail all of the arguments, I will say that I didn't need manual dexterity to set off traps. No shooting the mines with my sniper rifle. I used grenades for that.

I think Blair came across much better to posterity than Bush. It's not just that Blair is more articulate and eloquent. It's that he really did put a face on it that most folks could understand. I remember a reporter asking Blair if he felt silly that they hadn't found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to which he responded that he would have felt far more silly if they had detonated a nuclear weapon in London. Now that I understand your comment properly, it doesn't sound like fightin' words. In the way I took it at first read, though, it did. As far as war crime trials... it just seems like a can of worms. Putting folks on trial after the fact for policy decisions will make cowards out of every politician on earth. ...And cowardice leads to war just as much as any other failing. If you would have told Hitler he would face a trial if he failed in his bid for world domination, do you think he would have stopped? EDIT: Hahahaha Okay, maybe Prosterity could cause some confusion.

I don't resent your feelings toward Bush, Steve. It's the stance on war crimes that gets me. Every nation will pursue what it perceives as actions necessary for its interest. Bush is wrong or right? Who knows. You think history will judge Bush harshly, but it might be that we judge him harshly now but a real democracy takes hold in Iraq and history views him warmly. I'm tepid on Bush. I think he's done some good thing with a boatload of stupid mistakes, but a true and enduring democracy in Iraq will be a good thing. Sure, that's very little comfort to the people suffering now, but history has a way of sweeping those details under the rug. The real secret is that history is always more about the present state of affairs than it is about the past. We cannot, for all such protest and declarations contrary, escape the lens through which the historian peers at long gone events. Folks will write about these things, but how the war itself will be remembered will undoubtedly depend on an outcome that is still, as yet, uncertain.

I've been thoroughly enjoying Wrath of the Litch King. It's so much better than BC that I'm glad that everyone prevailed upon me to stick with the game. I put my latest run of FO3 on hold. After all those hours, I was getting a bit bored. Great game, but there is too much of a good thing. I bought my wife an adventure game called Rhiannon which we'll probably play together after Christmas. It will be a good excursion from the MMORPG grind. I've been playing some Deus Ex that I got cheap off of steam (thanks again, Enoch). It's a great game, but really dated. Still, a lot of great design ideas in there, especially for the time.

You'd be surprised what I have the guts for. More importantly, do you think we could conduct this discussion without irrelevant throwaway insults? They don't add anything. My response to your comment brought down the level of discourse? Look, I am with all honesty saying that there is no European government that will try to take Bush by force and subject him to a war crime tribunal. I'm not saying that big ol' you is not willing to beat up (or throw a shoe at) poor little me. It's not a personal comment. My comment is a statement of what I perceive as fact. There is not enough unity in the European Union to project a united front on war crimes. Hell, if we're honest, I doubt there is a single government in the EU that would seriously propose it, even Spain. The French government has actually been working fairly well with Bush for a while now. Now, if I had understood that your "[n]ot long now" did not referrence your previous comment, then I would have responded differently. I hope you can see that your original post might have been a bit confusing. And it was most certainly as bellicose as my own.

You could always let the forumites here run your beta for your mod, J.E. Damn! Too bad there isn't a tongue in cheek smiley!

I personally found the deathclaws were tough. They made it so that you could take them one at a time, which was nice. Hey, I did the Deathclaw caves on very hard without a single reload, but it was time consuming. In that case, not only did I use sneak and snipe, I laid out long trails of mines and all sorts of silly shenanigans. It was really actually quite fun. Overall, on the hardest setting (without mods) the game isn't really all that easy. Sure, you'll run and gun through a lot of stuff, but you can still get yourself killed if you don't watch out. Personally, all difficulty mods would probably do is increase the reload ratio, which I don't find any more of an immersion breaker than being able to plan out and win big battles without a reload. My experience is that mole rats, most humans, and the weakest robots are chumps on the top difficulty. Super Mutants, some robots, and whatnot are easy. Deathclaws and those damned huge radscorpions are a real pain in my backside. However, that was on a non-combat build. I started a new game going combat, but I put it on hold when I heard about some funky game extending xpac or some such. A straight combat build might run roughshod over everything. ...But, hey! Isn't that always the case? In DnD, folks who build for straight combat have a distinct advantage over us clods who add a bit of roleplaying to our rollplaying?

I think the physical assault is unwelcome, but the expression is not. ...And I don't think I'd push the issue past any normal assault, which leads me to think that the person should not be overly punished for a failed attempt to strike the president. However, I disagree whole heartedly with the idea that the president should face a war crime tribunal. The idea that he should owes more to the typical hyperbole of message board rhetoric. War itself is a crime. ...But to charge the soldiers who carry out the ugly grind of war with war crimes requires something more than violence. After all, there is no war without violence. In fact, even unlawful violence should not be sufficient, in and of itself, to require a war crime tribunal. For example, a soldier murders unarmed civilians. That soldier should not be charged with war crimes. He should be charged with murder. Systemic violence against civilian populations carried out by order from somewhere within the chain of command and oustide the accepted conventions for prosecuting a war should be the basis for war crimes. Of course, that definition leaves so much room for interpretation that some moron will undoubtedly post a 20 paragraph reply, comprised almost entirely of links, of course. And that moron is the precise reason why war crime tribunals are always such a mess. Of course, it helps to be the winner. Then you can dictate the terms and the punishment. There is no definition of war crimes that does not require some form of mental gymnastics in order to point the finger at the other guys. It's a lot like pornography though. I'm sure most of us recognize it where we see it. I'm sure a lot of folks around here see it where it doesn't exist. That's the problem. As low as Bush's ratings are right now, Obama would be a fool to permit a foreign body to bring a former president to trial.

If there's one thing I can assure you, it is that President Bush will never stand trial. To speak with all candor, you people don't have the guts to try us and would lose if you did. Not long for what?

One of the things that I really like about Greek is that it uses the definite article. In fact, more often than English. It's great because you can discern the number, gender, and case of the various parts of the sentence by the use of the definite article. This gives Greek a decided edge on Latin in that regard.

I'm a classical history man myself. You learn a lot of English grammar from taking classical languages, though. Not necessarily because we have all of the same constructs, but more because you get a certain feel for your own grammar when forced to understand foreign grammar. I think. ...But hell, who knows? Hark, to shower I must attend, O vangabonds!

Yeah, Proudmore ports everyone out of the room. At that point, we were brawling like mad in the middle of the room. Thrall and his hordies are there defending themselves. I went after Sylvanas because I just don't trust the forsaken very much. Of course, I felt somewhat vindicated since Putress did give Fordragon the axe. I tell you what, I actually liked Fordragon. While I'm not much into the story, I have to admit that Blizzard does a great job with studio work. I'm not a huge fan of cut-scenes, but at least we can bypass it if we want. I've gone through it twice now, with the hunter and rogue, and I think it's quite good. I've also thought that Thrall is a pretty decent orc. I don't trust Wrynn worth a damn, but I don't know his backstory so that's mostly based on the fact that he looks and acts like an evil bastard. ...And I've never liked Sylvanas, but that's because there's something sinister about her.

All right (alright) Krezak, you yutz. I'll accept your Oxford Guide. I think these boards are much American as anything else, but I also tend to prefer diversity at any rate. Not in any sort of enforced sense, but more in an organic sort of way. As far as the parentheses are concerned, my understanding is that full sentences within them follow normal rules and, where they fall within a clause, punctuation follows. However, I will defer to grammarians on this point. I probably should have ended the sentence and then included my parenthetical comments afterward. In truth, you really shouldn't rely on a lot of parenthetical information.

Once again, this is an example of my prevailing laziness, since we indeed have grammar in Enlish. The earlier example of 'whom' underscores that point, as it is a... relative pronoun (I think. As I warned earlier, I've forgotten a lot of the terms.). It is not mere window dressing, as it is the objective form. Perhaps I should have said that Greek and Latin rely heavily on grammatical constructs whereas English (and most Romance languages) rely on word order and punctuation. Don't get me wrong. I love English. In fact, I think learning all those oldie moldie languages helps folks learn more about their own languages. However, there are folks in the US who contend that grammar need not be taught in its own right since students will have sufficient understanding of it from common use. Grammar is the red headed step-child of English. And I'll admit that you're probably going to have me if you're an actual linguist, since I'm not one. No hard feelings, though. I'll take my lumps and be glad to hear what you have to say.

I love the discussion. I will say, however, that the optative voice, as a defined grammatical construct doesn't really exist in Latin. Hell, it barely exists in English. It does have a place in a variety of languages, but I don't know those and I'm too lazy to look them up. Most of them would be quite unfamiliar to the majority of Americans, I would think. Could be wrong, either about the languages or the majority of Americans. haha The other thing is that we're talking conventions. That's where my language purity fall prey to pragmatism. There are the formal rules of language and then there are the rules we're forced to follow in formal settings, such as writing papers. If your professor or editor requires that you not split infinitives, then dem's da rulez. Not only do most American schools tend to be picky about these things, but my experience with British folks leads me to believe that, whatever the formal rules are, the evective rules in formal writing is the same. That is to say, you don't split infinitives. On the flip side, and this was what I took J.E.'s point to be in the first post, rules change because people change them. For example, using the first person is not always the kiss of death in college/university. It's generally considered less felicitous, but some professors are more accepting. That's where pragmatism comes into play. Use the rules you're given at the time. Well, I'm getting ready to turn into a pumpkin. So, to sleep I must depart, O vagabonds!