PrimeJunta

To go off on a tangent... well, a little. I minmax, like, a lot, in RPG's. It makes it difficult for me to get into them actually because as soon as I realize I've made a mistake, I have to start over, and I make a lot of mistakes, so by the time I manage to come up with a build I really like, I'm already bored. This is worse if the game mechanics are in conflict with the game story or content. The famous 'ludo-narrative dissonance.' I just started a replay of KOTOR 2 with the restored content mod (hadn't played it with the mod before), and it's hitting me big-time. The mechanics give extremely strong incentives to light-side or dark-side from the get-go, but the narrative is all about challenging the whole light/dark split and perhaps even the Force itself. I.e., I'm torn between wanting to explore the story -- role-playing -- and wanting to beat the game mechanically. This dissonance is significantly reducing my enjoyment. I would have found it much more enjoyable if a "gray" alignment would not have been unambiguously less powerful than a light-side or dark-side one, but would instead have had different but unique advantages of its own. Ultimately my solution was to roll up a bruiser Guardian with low WIS and CHA who doesn't even use Force powers much at all. With him, I can gray away as much as I like, and STR and CON 18 (D-packages FTW!) gives enough advantages in combat that that's fun too. I'm finding that much more enjoyable, and am actually playing in-character, which is very nice. It's just a shame I had to more or less ditch the distinguishing core mechanic of the game to get there. A 'gray' Consular would be seriously gimped! I'm fairly certain that Obs would have designed the mechanics differently had they had that option, but they had to work within the franchise. I love the writing in KOTOR2, but perhaps it would have been a better game had they not written against the grain of the mechanics, if changing the mechanics was not possible. P:E doesn't have this problem obviously, which is one more reason to look forward to it.

Gfted1, question. Are you being intentionally obtuse or just genuinely blockheaded? People have explained to you numerous times what degenerate tactics mean, yet even now, after all this time, you can't even get the word right, let alone the concept. What gives?

Getting pretty speculative, but... I would expect that it'd be easier to build characters that don't have glaring weak spots in P:E than in the D&D based games. A fighter's Will is extremely weak, for example, and it's quite hard to get around this limitation -- even impossible, depending on what magic items are available. This kind of thing can make soloing much harder if there are situations where that weak point gets hammered (as there should be IMO). P:E's "no dump stats" approach should let players create characters that emphasize strengthening their class's weak points over specialization, which would help. On the other hand we don't know how hard the game is going to be overall; if the toughest challenges need a character that's optimized to play to his strengths, then the "generalist" soloer will be at a serious disadvantage. (BTW, for the record, just so you can say it happened once -- I've changed my mind on the topic due to this thread. I no longer think soloing would necessarily be six times harder than playing with a full party. Thinking it might be something like three times harder, which should certainly be doable for a hardcore player, even if the base difficulty is hard enough not to be a cakewalk.)

Well, his avatar is the late-to-the-party hippo, so I suppose it's understandable. Still, get on it Lephys! If you haven't played these, (1) you really have no clue what P:E is about, and (2) you are in for some seriously awesome gaming experiences... if you manage to get over the steep initial learning curve. All of 'em are pretty punishing if you've never played one before. At least I died... a lot... until I figured them out. They're much tougher to get into than the NWN's IMO, although also more rewarding (except MotB, which is IMO the only worthy IE game successor in that series.)

Seconded. BG2 is a great game. If P:E can manage half the quest and world diversity and character development options, it's going to be a worthy successor. If it manages to improve on it in some concrete ways, it's going to be a classic.

If people without the fetish would see the appeal, it wouldn't be a fetish anymore. That's the defining characteristic of a fetish.

Reason being that the maps require several rendering passes and are hand-painted. Making them is way more complicated than just blocking out tiles and dropping in models like in NWN.

Wel-l-l... I see what you mean, but I think a lot of the time quality can even be quantified, or at least expressed in terms unambiguous-enough to be workable. Bug count and severity per median gaming hour is a fairly basic and simple metric. The more "creative" qualities of a game can sometimes be fairly unambiguously assessed as well, at least at a basic level. If writing, voice acting, art direction, or animation is just plain bad, for example, most observes will agree that it's bad, occasional outliers aside. Things do get more subjective once things rise above that minimal level of course, which is what you were talking about. Thing is, with computer games they rarely do. Most computer game writing is at best romance-novel quality, art direction straight-to-DVD movie quality, voice acting daytime TV quality, and so on. Which is why the ones that do go past this level stand out. This is why I am such an unabashed Obsidian fanboy actually. Their creative work does generally rise above that minimal level, if not in every area at least in some. Now that they've managed to not screw up the basic level, things are looking mighty fine.

Most are. The least healthy components are lipids which may mess with your LDL/HDL cholesterol balance. If you drink filter coffee most of 'em get caught there. I dislike filter coffee and like to live dangerously so I ignore that and just make the coffee I like. My source is here [ http://www.duodecimlehti.fi/web/guest/arkisto?p_p_id=Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet&p_p_lifecycle=0&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_p_frompage=uusinnumero&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_viewType=viewArticle&_Article_WAR_DL6_Articleportlet_tunnus=duo11080 ]. It's in Finnish, unfortunately, but it does contain an English summary and links to other articles. If you're really interested you can try your luck with Google Translate too, natch. Duodecim is the main medical journal in Finland; it is peer-reviewed and considered relatively high quality academically.

He must've been going to Starbucks. It does that. Not the coffee's fault though, it's the clientele.

Actually, no. Coffee has lots of active things besides caffeine. There are certain lipids, antioxidants, and what have you. Caffeine pills don't have those.

Being addicted to coffee is good for you. Well, most people anyway; there are some conditions which are aggravated by it. But it does have pretty remarkable health benefits if you drink enough of it, like 5-6 cups a day or so. Improves alertness and cognitive function, reduces risk of various cancers including liver and prostate, reduces risk of stroke, reduces risk of heart disease... it's practically a panacea. It may screw up your sleep rhythm if you drink it at the wrong time though. As to the taste, the interesting thing is that there's a genetic component to the propensity to like it. There's a certain gene that predisposes you to like bitter tastes. The more copies you have of it, the higher your tolerance. I understand there's an ethnic group in Africa who has, on average, about six times the usual allowance, and most outsiders find their cooking pretty overpowering. So if you find yourself drawn to a really tight, really dark, really strong espresso, it's likely you're packing a few copies of that gene. Mm... maybe I'll go brew myself one right now.

Reincarnation or rebirth is a fairly meaningless concept without some detail on what, exactly, gets reincarnated or reborn. Psychological continuity is a bit of a hairy proposition to start with. For example, if you don't believe that any of your memories will carry over, then in what sense is the being that is reborn 'you' anymore? What relationship does it bear to 'you?' Where and in what form are 'you' going to be reincarnated? What determines that? Can you affect it in this life? How? I think it's the answers to these questions that would determine how a culture behaves if it 'knows' it reincarnates. There are a quite a few cultures around who believe in rebirth/reincarnation, but differ in the specifics, and I think it's those specifics that make all the difference. Tibetan Buddhists are not like Japanese Buddhists are not like Hindus, and none of these are much like traditional Mesoamericans. I.e., since the specifics of reincarnation are no better known in P:E's world than they are in ours, I don't think that the 'fact' that reincarnation/rebirth exists would make much difference.

tried coffee once in university to try and keep us awake to study before mid-terms... that were ~25 years ago. we still recall the "flavor." tasted like water run through a rusty pipe multiple times. HA! Good Fun! You're clearly not manly enough for coffee.

That... is an interesting insight, @IndiraLightfoot and @Stun. I've mentioned my favorite SoZ game which involved a skill machine who basically sat out the fights and let the wrecking balls take care of them. I certainly did not find that game harder than with the full party. Could be you're on to something here.

Pizza != pie, you philistines. Next you'll be telling me you put flavor in your coffee. Coffee already has flavor. It's coffee-flavored, dammit! :sulk:

I liked Constantine, Lucifer, and Sandman. Swamp Thing not so much. In general I'm more into Franco-Belgian comics though. François Bourgeon, the Arcanes series, Okko and such.

Speaking of canting, the Swedish name of this town translates to "wild man's beach."

:catches up: Wow, this is serious business. Carry on, folks...!

The dragon looks untidy. Not because of your renditions which are brilliant, but because the design itself is untidy. You'd need a much simpler dragon for that counter-changing to work visually IMO. Get on it, Josh!

Grimrock sold 600k copies, although many of those at heavy discounts. P:E has had way more exposure, the developer is way better known, and I don't think an IE-style game is more niche than a blobber-dungeon-crawler. I.e. the OP's guesses are in the same ballpark as mine.

Awesome, @Suburban-Fox! I sketched them on a piece of paper and ended up with something almost identical; my dragon is facing left and my gold stars were both on the top half. But then I don't know jack about heraldry so I'm surprised I got that much right! ... awesomer, @KazikluBey. Does sinister mean facing right? And the falcon was gules (red), no? I put the estoiles like you did too. (Damn, learning!) Edit edit: heraldic right, which I take it is from the POV of whoever is bearing the shield? (Man this is fun!)

I'm sure plenty of people here are. That's nothing to do with the point I'm making though.

Yes, and if 6 times harder than the default difficult isn't nearly unwinnable, then the default difficulty can't be very hard, can it now?

True, but it is quite tricky to do that without creating dump stats for spellcaster/non-spellcaster classes. There was a lot of discussion about it when JES first floated the attribute system and nobody could come up with a satisfactory solution for that. Perhaps we didn't have the benefit of your wisdom.