PrimeJunta

It is. But there's a different kind of fun in it. I enjoyed IWD and ToEE a lot, and a great part of the fun was the self-created party.

The advantage is that you get to create them. I.e., you can create a party with exactly the composition you want.

Nope. They're still munchkiny non-trade-offs, at least in all (or nearly all?) really existing games. You'd have to have significant numbers of mace-immune and sword-immune critters in the game, and make them also immune to alternative attack methods available for both mace and sword specialists, and, in a party-based game, make it so that the sword-specialist couldn't move to a useful support role when encountering sword-immunes. Otherwise there's very little downside to making half your party mace-specialists and the other half sword-specialists. I.e., you'd be balancing the entire game around that trade-off, it would be both limiting and extremely contrived. Much simpler to just not have that trade-off perk available in the first place. I can only think of one type of game where this would be a genuine trade-off, and to my knowledge nobody's made that game yet. An extremely resource-scarce one, where weapon maintenance is a big gameplay element. Think Fallout with one-tenth the amount of stuff in it, and weapons costing ten times as much. In that kind of situation, being able to competently use whatever happens to be available is a genuine advantage, and trading that off for specialization would bite.

Can't be properly medieval without the hurdy-gurdy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHmML7bu-iM

Actually IMO your swords/maces tradeoff trait is an example of something you shouldn't have, regardless of the number of swords and maces in the game. This is a classic "I don't want to use swords anyway" non-trade-off. Cf. the various weapon specialist builds in D&D. You'd practically have to balance the entire game around that trait to make it non-munchkiny. I can think of ways to do that, of course, but a trait that forces you to reconsider pretty much the entire game is probably not a good example of a balanced trait.

Unfortunately yes. It takes a special effort to craft a setting where that isn't the case. That's one reason I liked Planescape so much; if you're tangling with demigods and archdevils on a daily basis, Meteor Storm seems a whole lot less impressive all of a sudden.

You're not. I think we're going to be disappointed though; one of MCA's companion-writing pillars is that they have to stroke the player's ego. Plus 'adolescent power fantasy' is one of the cornerstones of all the IE games, even PS:T.

@rjshae IMO the problem with tradeoff perks is that quite often they end up being "greatly strengthen this thing I'm going to use all the time and greatly weaken this thing I wasn't going to use at all anyway." I.e., they get munchkiny very quickly. It's very rare to feel you're actually losing something in the exchange.

Well, 1 out of 9 isn't too bad. (Put another way, this is not the game you're looking for.)

@Kveldulf, I'm going to let this drop, mostly because it's more and more off-topic here – and also you're misunderstanding what I'm stating, and I have a feeling it would be a lot of work to work through that misunderstanding, and I don't feel particularly keen to do that work. If you're really interested in this worldview, read the Popper book I recommended earlier.

Essentialist thinking is fundamentally flawed. It is applicable to nothing. Apply it, and you end up counting angels on pinheads. Deductive reasoning is applicable to some things, but because of the inherent limitations of knowledge, it's useless without some independent way to validate the conclusions to which it leads. Without it, they're just cathedrals in the air. I just did. Quantum events are uncaused, or self-caused if you will. Or can you show otherwise? (As Yonjuro pointed out, of course, that link in your chain is already invalidated by your posited causeless First Cause.) I take that as conceding the point: that you believe, on faith, that the Universe has a beginning. Thank you. In a closed system. That does not preclude order arising from disorder locally. We see that happening all the time. It just means that the total entropy in a closed system rises over time. Uh... right. I didn't actually understand a word of that. Me neither. We have a lot to answer for.

I'd back Steampunk 1877.

Since we're still on this tangent, here's an alternative model of the universe for you guys to consider. P1: A universe exists independently of any observers. (Premise I accept on faith.) P2: Consciousness exists as a quality of the Universe. (Premise I accept because I possess it.) 1. Sentient beings impose categories on the universe. A sentient being can draw a line around a part of the universe, associate it with other parts of the universe she has similarly delineated, and designate that part as 'a chair.' 1a. There is nothing inherent in the chair that makes it a chair. It is just a label. The same chunk of the universe could also be designated "trash" or "firewood" or "the watchtower of my pillow fortrtress." 1b. Such categories and signifiers are arbitrary. The choice of particular categories and signifiers is made for convenience only. 2. Knowledge and meaningful communication become possible when various sentient beings come to a rough agreement among themselves about which signifiers are associated with which parts of the Universe. 2a. Categories like "self" or "mind" or "rationality" or "sentient being" are also signifiers associated with chunks of the universe, nothing more. 2b. "The self" or "you" or "I" have no inherent existence, indepent of other categories. 3. The only noumenon is the Universe. 4. I can know it in only two ways: direct experience and categorization. 4a. Direct experience is not communicable. At best, I can direct someone to perform the same actions I did when experiencing something, and hope that she experiences something similar. 4b. Categorized knowledge is communicable, to an extent, using the shared system from (2). 5. Since the categories are largely arbitrary and do not reflect anything inherent in the Universe, any such knowledge I can attain is necessarily flawed: the designator is not the object. 6. Therefore, absolute truths and certain knowledge is unattainable. At best, we can have approximations of it. Sometimes good approximations. 7. Whereof you cannot speak, thereof you must be silent.

@Kveldulf, yes, Plato and Aristotle are outdated, and Aquinas was a complete dead end. For a good critique, I recommend volume I of Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies. It's too long to go into in a forum post. Essentialism is dead. 1. I am pointing out a counterexample. You state as your premise that every event has an effective cause. I am pointing out an event which has no effective cause, which demonstrates that your premise is invalid. 2a and 2b: I am proposing two alternatives for your presupposition. How do you determine that yours is the correct one, as opposed to these two others? (N.b.: I do not need to demonstrate that either one of these -- or some other alternative -- is true. You, however, do need to demonstrate that your cosmic model of time with a beginning is, or your chain of logic will fail. Please do so or concede the point.) 3-5 What does thermodynamics have to do with this? 5b. I have not agreed that an origin exists, but let's, for the sake of the argument. Why can something rational not arise from something irrational? We can certainly observe order arising from chaos, such as a snowflake crystallizing out of water vapor. Seriously, Kvedulf -- the Middle Ages are over. Catch up. I recommend a heavy course of reading, starting with Schopenhauer, Husserl, and Popper. Essentialist metaphysics are dead; phenomenology and nominalism are where it's at. Edit: Bluntly put, Kvedulf: you're rationalizing an irrational belief here. It's not pretty. I have a great deal more respect for credo quia absurdum. It's intellectually honest.

I voted Call of Duty only to annoy people who get annoyed at that sort of thing, 'cuz they totes deserve it. What is it anyway, some kind of army game?

Science is an immense body of knowledge about the universe. That's far more than a "practice" or a "methodology." Methods and practices are a part -- but only a part, and not the most interesting part IMO -- of that body of knowledge.

It's a hell of a lot more than just a methodology, Walsingham.

It's rather sad if science has become something you choose to believe in rather than something you try to understand IMO. I agree. And both are rather far off this thread's.

Valuing (and assessing) information always climbs back to something more absolute - more unmoving: you have to have an understanding (that derives from an absolute) of why to value something in order to really value it..... The Argument from Efficient Cause: There is an efficient cause for everything; nothing can be the efficient cause of itself. It is not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes. To take away the cause is to take away the effect. If there be no first cause then there will be no others. Therefore, a First Cause exists (and this is God). So in other words, even in business school, a perspective of faith (premise), dare I say morality, is critical to learning and teaching. Oh, jeebus. That's a broken chain of logic if I ever saw one. Philosophy has advanced a bit since Plato and Aristotle, y'know. (1) Consider a lump of uranium ore. Observe a nucleus decay. What is the efficient cause of that particular nucleus, rather than some other nucleus, decaying? (2) Why is it not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes? For example, what if the Universe (in some sense) is infinitely old (in some sense?) (2b) How about a circular chain of causes. What if time is circular rather than linear, and the Universe's ending is the cause of its beginning? How do you rule this out? (3), (4), and (5) follow from your flawed premises; therefore they are necessarily flawed. (5b) Why is the First Cause necessarily God? Edit: your first statement is also incorrect. You do not need to have an absolute point of reference to be able to value or assess information, or anything else. You can always value or assess it relative to other, relative points of reference. Which is what we all do, even Platonists like you -- the only difference is that you mistakenly believe your relative points of reference are absolutes.

"All truths are relative, including this one" is not self-contradictory, nor is at an absolute statement. It is a useful premise, however. I believe the hunt for absolute truths is a huge waste of effort, so it's simpler to assume that they don't even exist. For most practical terms, highly certain, highly unambiguous relative truths behave similarly as absolute truths (should they exist) anyway. We can base our lives around them just as easily, without getting mired with counting angels dancing on a pinhead. Also, even if you don't accept the premise, it's a looong stretch from "Some truths are absolute" to "proposition P is absolutely true," for most propositions, at least most propositions that you can teach at school. I.e., I do not believe that it is the business of school to teach absolute truths, because on closer examination they would almost certainly prove not to be absolute, and probably not to be true.

Truth is a highly problematic proposition. If you believe there is such a thing in a final, absolute sense, you're already mistaken. It's worse if you get that at school.

In a perfect world, maybe. With some really good teachers, certainly. In the world we live in, though, the purpose of school is indoctrination: to turn kids into good obedient little citizens consumers. In particular, with regards to teaching history, to turn them into good obedient patriotic unthinking cannon fodder laborers.

Macs and Linux boxes running a graphical shell are also personal computers. Been a whiles since "PC" has been synonymous with "Wintel."

@Sensuki IMO that's kind of the worst of both worlds. You lose the role-playing/character-concept-support aspect of attributes, but keep the way they bork up the mechanics. So a strong NO on that one.

@Bryy. Once more. Multi-platform designs are inherently compromised. One of the points of the PoE Kickstarter was that unlike most games today, PoE would not have to be designed as multi-platform, and therefore PC gamers would get a game designed from the ground up to be playable on a PC. This is why I and many others get irritated about calls for a console port. It's disingenuous to argue that it doesn't matter if the PC one is done anyway. It certainly does matter. For one thing, if PoE is a success, there will be sequels, and if there is a console version, and the console version is a success, then the sequel will almost certainly be written as multi-platform to start with, and we're right back where we started. No. Console. Ports.