rjshae

Moderate pressure tends to increase rather than dampen creativity. This is true. I wish more people understood this. Definitely. Necessity is the mother of invention. Challenging circumstances can bring out new approaches and clever ideas, whereas comfort and surfeit leads to stagnation.

Because D&D alignment has two things, "law/chaos" and "good/evil." Both of which are very abstract and poorly presented. I mean, what are you talking about? The law of the land, a code of conduct, orderly behavior? Moral good, greater good? This one sounds to be more specific ("mercy") and with probably more than just two. Which, again, is just a different categorization. Not that I'm complaining; I just wondered if it was fundamentally different. I think the difference is that D&D's alignment system was meant to say "This is what you are. You are lawful neutral." whereas this is meant to say "This is what people see you as. They think you're a ****." Okay, so more of a dynamic system defined by your interactions rather than a fixed disadvantage system.

1979 Revolution: Black Friday Interesting concept for a game. Kind of an ambitious goal though: $395,000.

Based upon the description, it looks like a form of moral absolutism. Other than perhaps having a different categorization, how does this differ from the alignment system in D&D?

I don't follow how it becomes less time consuming. What every other IE game offered was the ability to perform those actions where you were (rest anywhere) vs. now having to schlep to specific locations to perform the same action. Can you clarify your stance? What about PE makes any of the new mechanics less tedious? I suppose my view is that "rest where you are" would be riskier and less beneficial than "rest at a comfortable camp with warm food and bedding". To my mind, the former would provide a brief respite, but it shouldn't serve to relieve things like wilderness exposure, fix a damaged tendon, reconnect to the magical weave, collect more spell components, sharpen your weapons on a grindstone, repair damage to your armor and shields, and so forth. Thus the camp provides an abstraction of those activities. But the resource management aspect of a role-playing game requires some cost for recovery. In this case the cost is a march to and from camp. I guess that also provides some of the role-playing feel of the PnP version.

It beats the alternative of having each recovery mechanic tied to a different, time-consuming behavior. A bit of an abstraction, I suppose, that makes the restoration aspect less tedious but not so easy that everybody does it all the time.

Interesting. Kind of dry stuff--a little too reminiscent of being at the office, but informative. Thank you for the update.

I hope we see a variety of racial-specific talents, particularly of the spell-casting variety. Seeing significant differences in how the races play the same class adds a sense of distinctiveness.

Bhwa?

I can't say the name is any sillier than Temple of Elemental Evil or Dungeon Siege or Legend of Grimlock or Planescape: Torment.

I definitely like the turn-based combat with the hex maps, and what I've read of the companions sounds pretty interesting. It's a game I'm looking forward to playing, once it reaches patch maturity.

Yeah, about 8 times faster. Firearms in that period had muzzle velocities of about 450-500 meters a second vs arrow speeds of about ~60 m/s. Mass of a bullet is ~5g; mass of an arrow is ~650g. Since KE = 1/2mv^2: 10 times the velocity equals 100 times the energy; 100 times the mass equals 100 times the energy. Thus it seems like they'd be roughly equivalent, energy-wise.

You mean I can have somebody steal your car, change the tires, and then it's okay to give it to me? Heh, sounds like a challenge...

I am so going to rob a bank tomorrow. When they catch me I'll them the reasonable thing would be to ask for the money back "ok, you caught me, here you go" . Jail time? Not gonna happen. Yes, copyright infringement is totally equal to actual robbing and stealing. Totally. Yes. Yes it is. Robbing and stealing is the unlawful act of taking something that doesn't belong to you. Copyright defines a certain form of ownership. Illegally taking something under copyright is robbing and stealing. It doesn't matter if you received it second-hand; you're merely complicit in the act. Deal with it.

The Chanter class seems somewhat Sorcerous/Bardic in nature, at least in terms of not requiring a spell book.

Personally I'm okay with handling multiple level-ups at once. But they could add an option to do random level-ups in Expert mode. Basically, each character receives a random seed between 0% and, say, 25%. When the character reaches that (hidden) percentage of XP toward the next level, then they are able to level up. As an added option, the player could go to some designated location and level up the character right away.

Your basic a$*h0le must belong to the SIlver tide then, I take it?

I'm okay with the mundane details like food being abstracted in a system like this, along with minor repairs, finding water, making camp, and so forth. Such matters are better for use with a single-player game.

If the characters start out with different base XPs, then they are bound to level up at different times... at least at lower levels. Thus the developers could varying the starting XP appropriately to encourage this effect. I.e. level = PC level, plus or minus some fraction of the XP needed. Ed.: oops, I see this has already been suggested.

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A population simulation that doesn't take geography into an account is mostly suitable for microbiology.

If the weaponry is historically correct, then I'd expect that smoothbore firearms won't be very accurate at extended range. They may turn out to be better suited for fighters and rogues.

you know, I've heard and seen this come up a bunch of times, and I don't think it's true When you break up an asteroid into a lot of tiny little pieces, you increase the surface area by such a large amount, that I believe it would burn up a significantly larger portion of the meteorite in the atmosphere, rather than if you can one big chunk with a limited surface area. I'm pretty comfortable leaving this whole scenario in the hands of rocket scientists. It probably should be in a different discussion than "funny things"...

^^^^ I remain skeptical about the reality of that one. You'd need an audio exploit on the remote system to break in, and the audio components would need to support ultrasonic transmission and reception.