PrimeJunta

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.

@Sarex P:E will have a level cap. Gaining XP faster will just make you hit that cap faster and then plateau. If the endgame is balanced for or near the level cap, you're going to be roughly 1/6 as powerful as a full party at that point. That should be bloody close to unwinnable from where I'm at, or else it will probably be too easy for a competently played full party. (Unless you level scale to total party levels of course. :ducks: )

I rarely play evil. I find it repugnant, and mostly it's just really badly written so not much fun. The one memorable exception is Mask of the Betrayer. The writing was fantastic, and having my character become a devouring storm of betrayal and destruction truly worthy of the curse was... awesome. I also felt really dirty afterwards. There was some really depraved and despicable stuff there. I loved it but would not replay.

That's what missile weapons are for. cRPG's -- where shooting fleeing enemies in the back counts as heroic.

Wasn't there that one samurai who got bored with the lack of challenge and stuck a pair of antlers on his helmet to gimp himself? Grogs. Heh.

I don't like inventory management so I'd rather have someone do it for me. It's a tedious time-sink, like grinding or rote pre-buffing. The bottomless omnipresent stash makes me very happy. If it has auto-sort so I can easily find what I want in it, I'll be even happier.

Good automation for inventory management is high on my wishlist. I hate dragging little pictures back and forth. If the IE games had had an "automanage" button for inventory I would have loved it. What automanage, I hear you ask? This: (1) Sort by type and value. (2) Put all objects into their respective containers (gems in gem bags, scrolls in scroll cases etc). (3) Distribute weight among party so that, if possible, nobody's encumbered. (3b) If not possible, drop any items worth less than 1% of your current GP, starting with the ones with the lowest price/weight ratio. (3c) If inventory is full, drop any items worth less than 1% of your current GP, starting with the cheapest, until ten slots are free. That would have saved much tedium.

At least for my first play-through, I'll pick my companions more for story than for mechanical reasons. For subsequent play-throughs, I'll go with whatever tickled my fancy most during the first one. I am intrigued by the idea of more homogeneous parties, in particular because most of those were quite hard to play in the IE games. I'd like to see what six fighters, or six rangers, or three fighters + three rangers could do, for example. Perhaps that would play a bit like a mini-RTS, with a good deal less player intervention than when dealing with magic-users. There are also interesting role-play type possibilities there. If you've read the Malazan Book of the Fallen, there are the Grey Helms, for example. Could I create a party modeled on them? A Shield Anvil (cleric), Mortal Sword (rogue, perhaps?), and Destriant (paladin, perhaps?) with three fighters, with the cleric, paladin, and rogue heavily martially oriented.

"Genteel butthurt" then, if you prefer.

I find these mechanical twists to combat extremely interesting. I'm imagining what it'd be like to play different kinds of parties. All fighters would play like a Roman legion -- marching forward in unstoppable formation, grinding down everything in its path. All rogues would be like a kung-fu movie, with them dodging and weaving through enemy lines to make daring and lethal stabs at unprotected body parts. Rangers would loose volley after volley of lethal arrows as their war dogs hold the enemy at bay. And barbarians... barbarians would be an explosion of carnage. (Of course I hope it won't be quite as easy as that. But I also hope it will have the variety.)

@Hormalakh I disagree... to an extent, and depending on your definition of 'quality.' For example, Half-Life 2 is extremely high quality. The gameplay is exquisitely balanced, it's virtually bug-free, and even after all this time it looks pretty damn good. Yet there's not a whole lot there, there, after you've played it through once. Conversely, Vampire: Bloodlines (without Wesp's glorious work) is a god-awful mess, yet there's a tremendous amount of replayability there. I played it through as a Malkavian, Nosferatu, Toreador, and Gangrel, and will probably crack it open again one of these years to play as the rest of the clans as well. It's the quantity that makes for the replayability -- the different mechanics, dialog twists, and reactivity. Yet both are Source engine-based first-person games.