AGX-17

A "vampire" is essentially a human parasite; could easily be adapted to the world by having a normal person whose soul is fractured in such a way that they've become a creature who must absorb the energy of other people's soul. This would be seen as a horror in the PE universe from what lore I've read (and a reason for cultures that hate fractured souls to point to why they hate them). Children born this way may be left out to die and perhaps a cult, other vampires or something try to find, rescue and raise them. Or perhaps "vampirism" is a state inflicted on people who perform necromancy (and have it go horribly wrong). Works the same way (absorbing soul energy) but still has a cause rooted in the PE world. A "werewolf" could be a fractured human soul that on rebirth bonded with a wolf soul to try and become whole. Cultures who didn't like fractures souls would hate werewolves, however some cultures could see great favor in this (say barbarians or druids). Low-magic or not, these kind of ideas could play within the lore of the world and the use of souls as a primary force. As I said earlier in the thread the way to make these kind of creatures - IMO - would be to look at the basics of the concept and apply it to the underpinning nature of the PE world, not to drop in Dracula and the Wolfman into PE and run with it. The idea of spiritual parasitism would be sound, but without all the tomfoolery and cliches of vampirism associated. If they're people who have some sort of spiritual affliction they shouldn't run around talking about how they're a seperate, superior race and everyone else is a literal cow like every elder scrolls game.

My point before all the tangents was that books and literacy should be limited to characters of certain classes or backgrounds. That's not to say an educated companion couldn't teach an illiterate/minimally literate player character to read, though. Edit: Touching on what the person talking about "legendary tapestries" said, the reason such things like the Bayeaux Tapestry exist is to communicate stories to the illiterate masses (in the Bayeaux case, a revisionist history of William the Conqueror's, uh... conquest of Britain,) Romaneque and Gothic cathedrals were covered with frescoes, sculptures and stained glass images relating biblical stories for the illiterate masses. Besides that, during the middle ages, the Catholic church restricted sermons and bibles from being any language but Latin and cracked down hard on anyone who translated the bible (a threat to the church's great power,) a stranglehold that ended with, YOU GUESSED IT, that infernal machine.

Cracked had a lengthy article which summarized some very solid scientific reasons why a zombie apocalypse would fail, even if it were possible (which it isn't,) it was quite a fun read. http://www.cracked.c...il-quickly.html Gems include this bit on biting as a method of transmission: "Hey, remember that time when that dog got rabies, and then a day later, every single other dog on the continent had it, except for a small band of survivors huddled in a basement? No? That never happened?" your dragging all the fun out of it. we know they're not real we know it wont happen. Its a game. If you'd read the article you'd know I just injected a lot of fun into it. The article presupposes that a zombie apocalypse is possible and explains why the zombies would lose.

Cracked had a lengthy article which summarized some very solid scientific reasons why a zombie apocalypse would fail, even if it were possible (which it isn't,) it was quite a fun read. http://www.cracked.c...il-quickly.html Gems include this bit on biting as a method of transmission: "Hey, remember that time when that dog got rabies, and then a day later, every single other dog on the continent had it, except for a small band of survivors huddled in a basement? No? That never happened?"

Still addicted to Borderlands 2. Occasional Civ V marathons. Contemplating a 4th cycle in SRWZ2. Need money to buy games but have to spend it all on school.

If you were a rational person you'd know the concept of the undead is physically impossible as it violates both simple Newtonian physics and the laws of Thermodynamics. Even so, it is fun to imagine yourself succeeding when most everyone else fails. A simple life. No work, no boss, no responsibilities beyond evading the swarms of undead. Very idyllic.

With a low-magic world, both concepts are a bit out of place, because such transformations are physically impossible. I realize actual physics are not applicable, but still, it is a ludicrous concept. And that's ignoring the fact that both are media tropes that are overdone. Same goes for zombies (even though I have dreams of some ideal zombie apocalypse game that will never be made, I still have to admit the last 8-odd years of Western media have been over-saturated with zombie everything.)

Huh. All I remember in DA2 are the smartass quips and general grunts.

Considering Obsidian's dedication to writing, it wouldn't be a great feat to simply have branching paths depending on your actions. It doesn't have to be a dead-end leaving you with just a bunch of boring dungeons to crawl through for loot that's worse than anything you can craft like a Bethesda game. That's just the same as getting stuck by a glitch and having to restart, and this isn't going to be a sandbox game. That's some ba-a-ad game design. I thought that "B" would be followed by "ethesda." They're great at making landscapes to explore (dungeons no so much,) but after Morrowind, quest & game design and writing basically became casual Xbox garbage.

For the record, Natural No, siege weapons were not the result of Natural Philosophy. Natural Philosophy was the precursor to modern science and emerged in/gave rise to the Enlightenment era, after the Renaissance, and it was centered on the study of the natural world. The siege weapons you describe were invented milennia before the concept of Natural Philosophy existed. They were using siege towers and various forms of ballistae and catapults in the ancient world. A natural philosopher was essentially the research scientist of the Renaissance era. Mathematics and engineering existed for thousands of years prior to the renaissance, and most of what you describe was accomplished by people who were not Natural Philosophers. http://en.wikipedia....ural_philosophy Sir Isaac Newton was a Natural Philosopher. This was a man who spent his time inventing calculus and laying the groundwork for modern physics, not a man who ever went near a battlefield. PE is a few centuries out from the atom bomb.

You cited an example of an institution in the city of Herculaneum in the ancient Roman Empire, not some unique culture of super literates where everyone was given a free education. It even says in the article (which you apparently failed to read at all,) that it was owned by Julius Caesar's Father in-law. A powerful man in Rome who had served as Consul. This is not an egalitarian school for the poor and orphans we're talking about, it's an upper class repository of texts for upper class people who posses the ability to read and write. i.e. The personal library of an elite noble. Which was the same as a library in medieval times. The ancient world was full of scholars, writing and libraries, and surprise surprise, so was medieval Europe. Even then they needed scribes to copy everything and you had to be literate to write something down in the first place. The majority was still either illiterate or barely/functionally literate. Yes, it's a work of fiction, but they've been saying from the start that the setting is based around Renaissance Europe. The idea of bookstores implies a high rate of literacy, widespread literacy is impossible without the mass-media provided by the printing press. ...The written word is not a form of magic. They were keeping meticulously detailed census records in Britain during the time of William the Conqueror and even before. This is not magic. It's simple administration for the purposes of taxation and the levying of soldiery. The written word is as mundane and un-magical as you can get.

What a strange foreign land...

Dragon Age 2 is overrated.

There's no reasonable expectation that PE will be similar to Oblivion or Skyrim.

Literacy was rare in the world prior to the existence of the printing press. Unless you were noblility or clergy your chances of being literate were slim. There would be some limited use of writing among certain laymen (written language initially developed for basic economic reasons: the keeping of accounts, inventories, sales and such,) but given the masses were serfs tied to the land and the manor, the vast majority of people had no literacy and no means of acquiring books or literacy beyond joining the clergy or somehow catching the eye of a shrewd noble. Incidentially, the movable type printing press was invented at the tail end of the medieval period (1450,) which honestly puts PE's claims of a late Renaissance-equivalent setting in some pretty hot water. Worse still, there would be no place for bookstores because there weren't market economies at the time. There's no consumer base and there's no mass-production method. Medieval (and that's frankly what the level of literacy is going to be in PE) books were limited to the libraries of the church and the nobility where they were hand-copied by scribes and monks. It gets tougher still if you want to have characters find ancient texts from an ancient civilization whose language is dead. In the West, few secular works of Greece and Rome were preserved, it took the Byzantines and Arabs in the Near East to preserve those writings. So, obviously, if your character is going to be literate then they have to come from an upper-class or ecclesiastical background.

I'm just sticking to what's current. Game of Thrones Boardwalk Empire The Daily Show The Colbert Report Key & Peele (watch the volume, starts too loud) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUEanGEiJYc Mythbusters The Walking Dead

That's not the point of the discussion at hand. Regardless of how stats are determined, this is about whether they can change once set. Fallout 2, for example, gave you multiple methods of increasing SPECIAL attributes after character creation outside of taking perks on level up. The idea of things like that is what is at issue here, not the method of acquisition of those points.

It would be ideal if a game was designed in such a way that you couldn't find your way to a bad build (i.e. there are no "bad builds,") but forcing players to restart the entire game is too unfair a penalty for being unfamiliar with a game and its systems. If you were playing with your friends on a table it would be a different story, but when you're spending dozens of hours on a PC game you shouldn't have to restart it unless you want to. Personally, I think that a limited number of respecs should be available, (not like completely rebuilding the character from the start,) with additional significant costs. But like I said, punishing players by forcing them to waste time doing everything over as a chore rather than as a willing choice of what to do with their time does not strike me as good game design.

That's just the JRPG "silent protaganist" model. Besides, how is a mute going to effectively issue commands in the heat of battle? Not all (if any,) of your characters are going to understand what your characters' arm flailing is supposed to mean. They're not also always going to be able to see it, either. Mute protagonists have been overdone in video games simply for mechanical reasons already, it's not a thrilling new horizon in narrative design as a result.

I think attributes should be flexible to some degree. Variation in both directions from your base character stats should be possible, but not to an extreme extent. After all, a scholar who reads a lot of books gains a lot of wisdom, just as a fighter who wears and wields heavy gear becomes stronger as a result (over time.) On the other side of the scale, something that goes unused typically suffers. Lack of exercise typically leads to a loss in strength and stamina and an increase in fatty fat fatness. Henry VIII's strength and dexterity took some serious hits later in life.

Ol' Willie the conqueror didn't need +2s. If a lord or noble ordered a suit of plate armor, it had to fit right, like a tailored suit. It's not a matter of "one size fits all." Range of movement is severely restricted by plate armor, and chafing is also a problem.

Star Wars will be appearing in Square-Enix's Kingdom Hearts games. That is reason enough to hold a funeral for Star Wars.

There's no evidence whatsoever that "Martians" ever existed. When Mars did have surface water, a viable atmosphere and a magnetic field it couldn't have had more than single-celled life, if it had life at all. There's no legitimate, evidence-based reason to assume that a planet further from the sun, with less mass, less water and less internal heat could miraculously generate life faster than the Earth or that evolution would take place at an accelerated rate. You could not be more wrong. Life on Earth and the Earth itself are fated to be vaporized by the sun as it grows ever larger. The planet's surface will be scorched clean of life long before it's finally engulfed by the sun as it grows into a red giant. The pressing long-term issue is not how we treat the planet, but how we escape from it. Humanity has to be an interstellar species if it wants to survive indefinitely. The risks of trying to escape the prison that is Earth are well worth taking if the species is to survive beyond the life of our sun. It would be far worse for the Earth, humanity and all its accomplishments to be vaporized and forgotten by the universe. You really prefer that tragic an end for humankind?

If you've played Dishonored, then you know that rats are a terrifying force capable of stripping the flesh from an armored man's bones in a matter of seconds. So... you want PE to be a parade of well-executed cliches. You want PE to be Dragon Age Origins? And using all your resources for war is not adaptability. Developing a way to make a house out of ice in the arctic is adaptability. Humans are adaptable. Orcs, as you describe them, are not adaptable. Humans spread accross the globe thanks to adaptability. The Romans conquered the Mediterranean because they adapted to use new ideas and abandoned the old ones that failed. If Orcs were adaptable, they wouldn't have a cozy cliche niche as evil, bloodthirsty, barbarian monsters, they'd be just as varied as humanity.

The definition of stamina you provided seems to fit PE's concept of stamina more closely than vitality. Vitality is derived from the latin vita, which literally means "life." Vitality would be more appropriate for the "health" stat whose loss results in permanent death. e.g. Vita is the root of the word "vital," as in "vital organs." It's life itself. It's the difference between you and I typing on our machines and the corpses buried in the ground. To call the non-mortal variety of wounding (whose worst-case scenario is unconsciousness,) "vitality" would be misleading, because even a nick or scratch would then be a "vital wound."