Monte Carlo

Obviously my sabbatical from these forums meant that I was unaware that people who actually liked NWN had arrived. TANSTAAFL lets the cat out of the bag though: he's a builder. Builder's love NWN. It lets them create stuff and tinker with a coded version of Lego to their heart's content. Great. I'm a player. There's a difference, and trust me from a player's perspective, NWN is a huge, steaming, festering, overrated terrine of horse merde. So, if you like making mods you'll enjoy NWN. Perversely, if you like playing CRPGs, chances are you won't. Lastly, what the buggery has Blizzard's record as a developer got to do with whether Diablo was fun or not? Cheers MC

I lived in San Diego for a while, on Emerald Beach. TBH, it was rather dull. The weather's great, but that's about it. I much prefer San Francisco. Full of Volvo-driving communists, of course, but hey. Cheers MC

:: Spits coffee all over keyboard :: Hey, put down that crack pipe! NWN is a blocky 3D version of Diablo but not half as much fun. Challenging? My arse. Now I know you're trolling, or alternatively you are also freebasing on crystal meth. My six year old nephew could write a less hackneyed and predictable plot. The second expansion. And it isn't a masterpiece but it is a tremedous improvement on the dreck that went before it. Cheers MC

If the Infinity Engine does search for optimal party stats regarding dialogue choices then it's broken. EXAMPLE: Talk to the Spectator Beholder in the undersea city. High Wisdom characters can persuade him to give up the plot item he guards and lower ones cannot. I tried it with my average INT & WIS player character and failed. I tried it with Jaheira (with only a slightly above average 14 Wisdom) and succeeded. It's fairly consistent, seeing as I've played through that area with a variety of different party builds about a dozen times. As for stores, well you will definitely get completely different prices if you don't put your highest charisma-boosted character up as initiating dialogue. Cheers MC

For optimum stability, patch it and then Baldurdash it. Both can be found courtesy of Pocket Plane Group, along with lots of pretty cool mods. Click here. Cheers MC

I played KotOR on my X-Box. I gave up after about four hours out of sheer boredom. I'd bought Full Spectrum Warrior the same day, and had much more fun with it. A top ten? Sure, I'll bite. However, my top ten are in no particular order.... from time to time I've probably been equally addicted to the following games: Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 2/ Throne of Bhaal Medieval: Total War/ Viking Invasion Rome: Total War (current addiction Numero Uno) Jagged Alliance 2 X-Com 2 Icewind Dale Command & Conquer (the original) Doom 2 (only FPS I've ever really gotten into) Warriors of the Eternal Sun (D&D on the Sega Megadrive) --- Cheers MC

I liked IWD2, a decent B+ in my book. IWD was great, but Heart of Winter? Horrible. Cheers MC

Yeah. Jagged Alliance 2. The graphics are very dated but the gameplay is excellent. In a similar vein (I'll get chewed up for saying this) Fallout: Tactics is actually a blast, although it isn't a RPG. Personally, I'd go for BG2 and the expansion but I'd also go for the not very easy but very rewarding option of modding the heck out of it for your very first run through. If you ever decide this route I will suggest which mods to instal, how, why and where to get them. As for Planescape..... meh. As somebody else pointed out it's an interactive novel about quasi-spiritual navel-gazing. Cheers MC

I'm intrigued. If you were attacked by wondering monsters, presumably you'd get a distraction bonus. Depending, of course, what they were wondering about. For example, an orc wondering about what he was having for lunch might only attract a -1 distraction penalty on his attack roll. OTOH, let us imagine an evil fighter henchman seriously wondering about why that ugly barbarian has been promoted above him by his evil wizard boss might get a whopping -4. The possibilities are endless. If I were Evil Dungeon Overlord I'd put up notices to warn monsters not to wonder whilst on patrol. Lastly, gelatinous cubes and rust monsters aren't smart enough to wonder about anything much and do not attract a distraction penalty. Cheers MC

A quick addendum: 1. It's the US Marines, not the army helping the developers. My bad. Mind you, it puts Full Metal Jacket into perspective: Joker....you're posted to the 125th Combat Gaming Simulation Battalion. 2. Having viewed the links all I can say is that this is disgraceful. I'm a huge fan of the original Close Combat games, and raping the name like this is..... just wrong. I won't be touchnig the game with the proverbial bargepole. Cheers MC

I think the US Army Games Liaison Unit needs to go and get some in-country time in the Middle East. If I were a grunt dodging RPG fire in some godforsaken third world hellhole I'd be wondering how I'd qualify to become an army games advisor, sat in a software suite in CA drinking pepsi and putting in some serious time on the GI issue mouse. Saying that, FSW was fun, so it isn't a complete waste of US taxpayer's money. Cheers MC

I'll have to drag up the topic of RuneQuest again. Used a quasi-mana system based on a character stat called Power (POW). You lost a POW point every time you cast a spell....but you could boost the power of a spell. Say your character knows Healing 3. That sucka costs 3 POW points. Your maximum power score is 18, by the way so you really have to think about what spells to cast and when. POW regenerated slowly. Also, as your POW dropped, your skill bonuses associated with high POW dropped too. It was basically a combined mana/ endurance system but actually really easy to use (RQ worked on a d100 percentile system). As your character gets groovier he can use different totems and crystals to store a bit more POW to charge up different spells. He could also boost his base POW stat. Nonetheless, in a higher-level battle your character could very easily use up a good 75% of his stored magic. Of course, RQ was classless, level-less and every character had access to some magic. It was, however, an interesting take on the mana system and worked well, giving the player real choices about how he best deployed his magical resources and when. Cheers MC

The WotC guidelines were fairly unambiguous re. mature content. So, here we have a situation where WotC has happily ignired it's own guidelines... conclusion? WotC realised their guidelines were bunk. The guy who signed off on them is probably out of the loop now. Will this stop Wizards using their content guidelines as a capricious and wildly inconsistent blunt instrument to bludgeon CRPG developers with? [/] rhetorical question. Happy New Year. Cheers MC

No, our logic doesn't differ. You just don't deploy it in the first place. Conspiracies are do-able but really, really difficult to pull off. Watergate? BUSTED. Iran/ Contra? BUSTED. Whitewater? Well, almost busted. I guess, when you get a job, a real life and a sense of perspective you'll notice the difference between conspiracy and people making bad decisions in tough circumstances. Cheers MC

Random quotes and paranoia does not a cogent argument make. If I were you I'd adjust the antenna on your tin-foil Napoleon hat.

Yeah, a +3 version by the look of it.

It's from Icewind Dale 2. Female drow, apres boob job. Cheers MC

Ergo, my point about the draft is proved in abundance. Some of the best infantry leaders I ever met were quiet, considered men who did not enjoy violence, despite being extremely adept at it. They are also men who would be sickened by the REMFs at abu graib abusing prisoners, FWIW. Cheers MC

No. Your evident lack of self-discipline would obviate you from being an effective infantry soldier.

Grandpa speaks much wisdom. If we can get away from irrelevant age-of-beer-drinking nonsense and back on topic, look at it like this: We live, in the West, in an age of abandon and illusory individualism. Imagine if tomorrow Donald "my hero" Rumsfeld issued a draft. Guess what? Almost every American 18-21 year old not living in the flyover states would burn their draft card and ask to be put in a stockade. You'd need more redneck reservist MP's to lock 'em up than you would to drag Iraqi POWs around on dog leashes. Point the second: conscripts are resource-intensive. They tend to perform well in popular wars of national survival (WW2) but badly in politically sensitive ones (Vietnam). Which category do you put Iraq into? Burdening the middle-management backbone of the regular army (the senior NCOs) with poorly-motivated and trained draftees isn't the way forward here. Seriously. What do most modern armies need with regards to reservists? Civilian specialists in telecommunications, logistics, medicine, intelligence and so on. Infantry work is getting increasingly technological and not fit for conscripted grunts. It really is Point Not Found. If the US army could acceptably draft qualified IT technicians, telecommunications engineers, paramedics, arabic language specialists and so on then maybe I'd see where this argument might be going. This is a Democrat scare story, and a clumsy one at that. The US voters who are most likely to vote Democrat who would be affected (do you honestly imagine that Volvo-driving Vermont Democrats would send their kids?) in the blue-collar rustbelt are also, ironically, the most patriotic and likely to heed the call (the Deerhunter classes, I'd call them). My money is on no draft unless there is some hugely seriously big merde about to hit the fan. Then, hell, they'd probably even be calling the likes of me up. Cheers MC

Soldiers join to serve. You don't get war a la carte. Kids nowadays seem to think that they'll only kill the foreigners that suit their own personal agenda, which ain't the way it's done. You might get a popular war with lots of shiny medals and a clear moral agenda. Chances are you'll get a crappy one where you roundly beat a third world army then get bogged down in a gritty counter-insurgency. Meanwhile, all the other kids your age are earning more for doing less, watching MTV and screwing your girlfriend. Was ever thus. I can imagine Roman Legionaries bitching that they could be sitting pretty in Gaul instead of freezing their arses off on Hadrian's Wall fighting picts. All part of the deal, ladies. Some people fall for the recruiting spiel ("army of one" my arse), some don't. You have the priviledge of not volunteering for regular military service in a Western democracy. In 1991 I was an infantry reservist. We were put on notice for the first Gulf War as battlefield casualty replacements. I, to put it bluntly, near messed myself with worry. But I was going to go because I'd signed the dotted line and I knew the risks. As it turned out, the chances of us going was slim given the duration of the war, but it didn't feel like that at the time. I was preparing myself to put my life on hold for a bit to go to war. At least I learnt that I was prepared to put my money where my mouth was and fulfil my obligation. Most professional soldiers don't want the sympathy of civilians, just a little bit of understanding and perhaps a sliver of respect. Which, by and large, they deserve. --- And, yes, although the movie of Starship Troopers is a clever parody that underlines the authoritarian themes of the novel, as a piece of popular culture the novel blows it out of the water. Cheers MC

Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in the 1950's, Sport Fans. It is required reading for any aging reactionary like myself, and Heinlein was roundly condemned for being a crypto-fascist by pro-Commie fellow travellers/ useful idiots of the day. Cheers MC

Why draft people when the regular army isn't having recruitment problems and the reserves are up to establishment? The US army is withdrawing substantial assets from Western Europe (especially Germany). I see overstretch, sure, but not anything near drafting levels. There has been notice of recall of ex-regulars with reserve obligations, which suggests that the military is feeling the heat. However, volunteer armies usually see a dip in numbers after active service ("been there, done that, got the T-shirt" syndrome). The author of this thread's incessant doom-mongering spamming on a gaming forum is priceless, BTW. Would he like me to link him to some political websites instead?

Could Dakoth please learn to selectively use the quote function? As for Mkreku, meh. No point, is there?