Gromnir

we always found she-hulk... wrong. "Jennifer Walters, the meek and mousy lawyer cousin of Bruce Banner, was..." is not our words. is marvel's. so then she gets the hulk gamma blood transfusion and becomes she-hulk. unlike bruce, she doesn't become an imbecile when transformed. she can, starting relative early in the original series, transform at-will. the thing is, she don't wanna be jennifer walters. she wants to be she-hulk, so she stays big and green 24/7 as a matter of choice. that always bothered us. not that jennifer would wanna be she hulk all the time, but that she transformed physical and emotional after getting a green job. a successful female attorney needs to look like a 7' tall version o' star trek's orion slave girl to gets confidence? now, am guessing each writer has done something different with her, so saying "she hulk is..." is a waste o' time. she has been, we expect, a dozen different characters, and perhaps more. the thing is, we never could get over the feeling that there were something wrong with her initial development, so we has never paid much attention to her. that being said, we only pay small attention to comics with an indefinite run, so she hulk wouldn't be on our reading list anyway. without a fixed story arc, all superhero comics become, at best, erratic. HA! Good Fun!

*sigh* again, this ain't gonna be an unknown. if you got governments prohibiting, and if you got stated means o' undead creation being synthetic, then the likelihood that the rich/nobles is somehow gonna be complete ignorant is stretching credulity. governments is prohibiting on a whim? please. so now you suggest another quality. before we were talking rich/noble and desperate. well, lephys wants us to add "ignorant." ok, fine. nobles being hoodwinked and turned into undead is rich/noble and very ignorant. thanks for making more rare. and no, we don't require that everybody know exact process o' undead creation, but imperfect knowledge actually makes volunteering for sketchy experiments less likely. sudden appearance of undead is gonna cause very little panic amongst imaginary adventurers as we has seen literal undead thousands o' times. can you imagine the hysteria that sudden appearance of Real undead would create? before governments had a chance to investigate, prohibit and inform, people would come up with theories, and many o' those theories would survive even after truth were known. folks burned witches in spite o' fact that there never were any such thing as black magic. nevertheless, some animancers somewheres actual did create undead in poe world. you think ignorance results in less suspicion of animancers? sure am suspecting that in addition to animancers folks such as midwifes and foreigners and lord knows who else is feeling increased bad will, but animancers is gonna be on that list. and yes, am not doubting that nobles has had people surreptitiously murdered... but am doubting it is anywhere near as common as you would have us believe. killing people is one thing, but doing it so that folks don't know that bob were murdered and not seem to care what happens to his corpse is making more problematic... and we ain't talking 'bout a single murder either, is we? with each additional "disappearance" the chance o' keeping it secret is all the more difficult. as a noob undead you can probable makes a single person disappear if you is careful enough. as a matter of fact, you can get away with many crimes if you plan well enough and only do once. sadly for our ghoul, eternity is a long time. again, we is making this whole scenario less and less common, which am suspecting were not what you intended. HA! Good Fun!

why? because undead exist and there is a causal link to animacy... based on the info from developers. there is all kinda real world myths and folklore regarding undead. many people believed even w/o concrete or verifiable evidence. poe is different. you actual know that undead is real. you know animancy causes. is different. am not saying that future acts o' animacy carry absolute certainty o' monsterdoom, but this ain't a myth or folklore kinda thing. animacy results in undead. we got prohibitions 'gainst animacy. we got actual undead walking around. if you know undead is real and that animancy causes, you is gonna be extreme suspect o' animancy claims that don't include eventual monsterdom. in such a worlds as poe, desperate rich folks won't account for numerous undead. is not even remote similar to snake oil salesman or other schemes and scams. HA! Good Fun!

am gonna avoid some of your examples for obvious reasons. nevertheless, if it were known with certainty that viagra turned a person into an undead monster, am doubting folks would use it... regardless o' desperation. have some random guy try and sell you New & Improved viagra on some street corner somewheres is gonna be successful or not? without proof that your New & Improved viagra doesn't end in monsterdom, who would buy or use... save as worst party prank ever. cures for aids back in the early 90s? yeah, there has been some strange ones, but failure o' the miracle cure, at worst, results in death... which is exactly the eventuality the aids sufferer were looking at w/o the cure. drink a mixture o' shark pi$$ and coffee grounds is disgusting and probably a waste o' money, but you is dying anyway. heck, if the cure kills you what has you genuine lost by trying? turn you into undead monster is clear different, especially in poe world where souls is not abstract. knowledge that animacy results in undeath is making your examples not analogous. HA! Good Fun!

using current real world, eskimos would be tundra, yes? so, taiga is... kanadian? maybe have 'em wear funny toques and mispronounce words such as "about"-- sound like "a boot." HA! Good Fun! ps, yes we do know canada stretches into tundra

our favorite song changes from time to time. this one has been #1 more than once.

hawke wasn't an exile from lothering... hawke family were refugees. big difference. rest is equal silly... though we find your characterization of kreia woefully insufficient. her role is also complete different from flemeth's thus far. HA! Good Fun!

our mother passed away a couple years ago. we were never close. for various reasons, Gromnir were raised by paternal grandparents til we were thirteen. anywho, sitting there in a sterile hospital room watching this almost stranger die were a curious and disturbing experience. our mother had cancer, but her death came surprising quick. people don't die quick from cancer, or so we believed. was third time she had been diagnosed with cancer and the previous two times resulted in her having maxed-out on chemo. location and shape of the "tumor" made radiation impossible. hormone treatments? yeah, those were tried, but statistically such options were only little more efficacious than prayer or voodoo. in spite o' being "estranged," Gromnir were called 'pon to help with what were expected to be the agonizing months ahead for our mother. we leased a special hospital bed and had it delivered to our mothers home. bought a couple boxes o' these special plastic mattress covers for when she inevitable lost control o' various bodily functions-- fifty count apiece. might need to order more. called a friend to have him look over our mother's trust. we considered contacting her church to see what we would need to do 'bout funeral arrangements, but there were no real rush. we weren't even at hospice stage yet. so it is late august o' 20__ and we live under the same roof as our mother for first time since we went away to college back in mid 80s. we didn't talk much back then, so why would it be any different now? took less than a month. shouldn't have been a surprise, but perhaps we had too much experience with stage iii cancer patients. one morning we is getting mom breakfast and we observe that she is obsessing 'bout her med sheet. Gromnir made this printout so we could keep track of the correct times and dosages for our mother's various medications. am recalling in a moment o' black humor that for a person with virtual no chance of making it to her next birthday in february, she was taking a ridiculous amount of medications. regardless, mom is obsessing, mumbling and general acting strange. we stupidly ask her questions she can't answer and then, perhaps 'cause we didn't know what else to do, we took her temperature. 102.5 degrees. that is high for folks not familiar with fahrenheit. her doctor suggests bringing her to the hospital. is a thursday when we get her into a room at _____ med. am not gonna give you details, but her passing was not easy or pleasant or peaceful. took a couple of days to die. we spent virtual the entirety of those two days in the hospital. why? it weren't guilt or pity. regardless, we wanted to make sure that somebody were there, with her. some o' her friends came to visit. priest gave last rights. they came and left. we stayed. saturday morning were lovely-- pleasantly cool but sunny and only a few clouds. how egocentric could we be to see blue skies as inappropriate 'cause our own emotions were more gray? yeah, we regret that we never took the chance to make peace with her before she died. being estranged were, at the time, a good excuse. in retrospect it were a wasted opportunity. is no guarantee that we coulda' fixed things, but we didn't try. ps we ain't offering advice. we ain't judging that is for damn sure. that being said, we does have experience with estranged mother. and the absolute knowledge that we were in the right has never made us feel better. just sharing. take for whatever you think it is worth.

What do you mean by 'limiting undead by widespread cremation' - we're not talking about reviving corpses necromancy style (not sure if that also exists in PoE world) - the animancy process begins while they're still alive (AFAIK). Or did you mean going on a crusade against undead with fire? undead eat human flesh. we didnt see anything that said that the human flesh need to be from one killed contemporaneous with eating, but that the eating need occur while essence were still in flesh. am not sure what sorta time frame that is. in any event, murdering living folks would attract loads of attention. eating the flesh of the recently natural deceased would be less dangerous for those wishing to keep their undead status hidden. however, as we noted already, there would be difficulties in acquiring fresh corpses. regardless, short o' our plague example or some other remarkable but limited event, am just not envisioning a Reasonable way to explain undead in numbers... particularly in numbers that would legitimize a crpg monster staple. a boss or two? sure. maybe a single locale wherein the twisted dr. of evil type is using "volunteers" in large numbers to fuel his nefarious experiments... muahaha. *shrug* dunno. just doesnt seem well thought out. am doubting loads o' development effort were expended on a monster that is gonna get extreme limited game time. couple more points 'fore we forget. souls in poe is different than real world, yes? we haven't read too close, but soul is less abstract in poe. potentially bind your flesh to your corpse for eternity would be seeming have more o' a concrete cost for folks. also, gap 'tween fampyr and dargul is implied to not be great... not take much to slip. the kinda lifestyle needed to maintain fampyr would seeming require great discipline. personal experience suggests to Gromnir that great discipline is a rather rare quality. "Undead abound in Heritage Hill." need a very compelling explanation to rationalize. HA! Good Fun!

Kjaamor says all other classes are utterly pointless by the end of the game. That means, Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, etc are utterly pointless. I don't know how someone could come to that conclusion when those classes are quite powerful by the end of the game. eg. Sarevok, Minsc, Keldorn, etc we weren't intending to be specific critical of your pov. we were simply making 2 contributions: 1) there were at least a couple classes in bg2 that we did find useless 2) community opinions regarding balance are suspect am thinking point 2 is particular noteworthy for poe. we observed josh's reaction to community notions o' balance. am doubting he is less dismissive nowadays. ... is additional funny about the kits, 'cause midway through development, black isle decided to use a kinda/sorta 3e d&d rules for iwd2, which made kits a non-factor. in any event, am suspecting that many developers don't take community opinions regarding balance all that serious. HA! Good Fun! ps as for some obvious, non-useless classes from bg2, ones that approach over-the-top powerful, we would actual choose ranger/cleric dual class and inquisitor paladins before most mage and mage combos. am not saying is necessarily more powerful (though equipped correct, that may be true too,) but for pure bada$$ery, we thinks those two is silly powerful.

for us, the most useless bg2 character were probable a vanilla thief. mage/thief. fighter/thief... anything/thief or thief/anything coulds be useful, but a single class thief were pointless. could max useful thief skills before leaving irenicus start dungeon, and then you is stuck leveling as a third-tier melee or ranged combat character. what fun. bards also sucked. play as a f/m/t gets you more attacks, a better thac0, potential exceptional str 'bove 18, and backstab. cost of a couple mage spells and lore ability... and near useless bard music. 'course is not much call to play f/m/t neither when you gots a whole party o' superheroes... unless you is soloing. f/t or f/m or t/m is all gonna be useful AND powerful and whatever bit you don't have covered, somebody else in your party will. bards is slight more useful than a vanilla thief... but not by much. too bad too, 'cause bards get best stronghold quest. the feralan were a planned bg2 ranger kit... got killed quick by community outrage. sure. playing as tarzan sounds intriguing, but no armour and limited to primitive weapons were too much for folks. conversely, josh made some recommendations of very balanced kits for iwd2... and those also got slammed too. folks wanted drow deathknights who could dual-wield halberds and cast fireballs. so josh makes up a ridiculous kit that were silly overpowered and posted. people didn't get the joke. he gots far more approval for his joke kit than for his serious offerings. is probable best not to leave up to the community to decide balance. HA! Good Fun!

Actually KotOR 2 is not KotOR, these two are totally different. The characters except few are not Bioware standard character types. The only thing from Bioware in KotOR 2 are Canderous/Mandalore, HK 47 and T3-M4, the rest are not Bioware character archetype. Even those three characters are different from their original in KotOR. Other characters but not the main characters from KotOR are Carth and Bastila. KoTOR 2 is not Bioware game, have different feeling when playing it, not the same with all Bioware games. So i say Bioware did steal KotOR 2 much in their recent games. The premise of KotOR 2 is not the same with KoTOR, but the premise of Dragon Age is much similar with KotOR 2... you mentioned mandalorians being analogous to quinari. if they were, they were so in kotor. you mention sith as tevinterish and or blood mage.. no different in kotor. you mention suspicion of mages similar to suspicion of jedi. as you recognized, hk-47 were bioware. etc. hawke as exile... well, that is just silly. if hawke had created a wound in the fade... was a wound in the fade, and he went in search of the warden commander at the end of da2 after killing his mentor... nah. just kinda falls apart, doesn't it? most others parrallels you draw is even more tenuous. sorry, but it just don't work. HA! Good Fun!

am much in favor of more balanced classes than were existing in d&d... and ad& d, and d&d 2e... and to a lesser degree, 3e, or 4e d&d. am using d&d, 'cause the example o' bg2 were being utilized. clear overpowered classes tends to make other classes, understandably, less appealing. under-powered classes has same problem. we beg folks not to go all argumentum ad abdsurdum on us. the impossibility to be getting perfect balance is Not an excuse to forgo balance. am not claiming that folks is asking for that... yet. nevertheless, is a typical ploy and we might as well head off before we hear it. that being said, different but balanced does not equate sameness.... not by a long shot. it woulda' been much better if all fallout traits, skills and abilities were balanced. not take gifted were voluntarily gimping your own character. take energy weapons at start were a wasted skill for 2/3 of the game. agility ain't That important for a combat focused character, is it? if all skills were genuinely of equal use in fallout, we woulda' been far more likely to build a character based on what sounded fun rather than what we knew were get us the most juice per squeeze. yeah, nothing is stopping us from making a gimped character, and after playing fallout 3 or 4 times, we probable is then looking for a challenge. but guess what, most people will not play a game 3 or 4 times. developers has revealed time and again that play once is typical.. that brings us to a second point and that is that usefulness is not always the same as power. you not need to make sure all skills and abilities is of equal power, but is stoopid to make some far more useful than others. if you feel as if the character you painstakingly crafted and spent tens of hours leveling is nothing more than your party's superfluous appendix, then you will be feeling justifiably disappointed. sure, you may be ultra-powerful for the final run at the boss, wherein you can diplomacy your way through all endgame content and get the Best results, but if you were relegated to gimp status for 75%-80% of the game 'cause you had largely useless skills or abilities, that ain't good neither. *shrug* balance is actual the OPPOSITE of sameness. lack o' balance results in a small handful of potential builds being actual played. balance has complete different result. if you were told that there were no best skill, ability, class whatever, then the typical player would be choosing for fun and style... far more variations would be probable, regardless of possible. HA! Good Fun! ps "Gromnir receives congratulations from Kjaamor. Kjaamor politely points out, however, that for all Gromnir's shoulder movements, Gromnir's assertion that a Quadratic equation results in a Parabolic graph was never in question." untrue. you used quadratic for party, mage and good v. evil. so how you meant quadratic was very much in question. as we stated in our initial post, we know what is difference 'tween linear, exponential and quadratic, and you seemed to be using at cross-purposes. so, in point o' fact, the assertion that quadratic results in a parabolic graph were very much in question... y'know, at the time we level'd the question.

Gromnir has a BS in physics from Cal. and again, we mentioned from the start that you used ubiquitous and perplexing. is no clutching at straws if you used at least three different times and one were clear wrong. another were... queer. quadratic party? quadratic good v. evil? seriously? and keep in mind you used in two Headings... and used different in those two observations. HA! Good Fun! ps freaking board quotes function apparently is more difficult for Gromnir to grasp than is math. *chuckle*

double-post and monstrous edit failure... nothing to see here. HA! Good Fun!

I know we've established that the term "Quadratic Wizard" reflects a popular culture term, but out of interest what is your point? 1) is tech not accurate. graph the following: q(x) = (x - 4)2 + 7 . as is parabola, can be up or down or sideways and depending where you is along the curve, you is gonna get very different results. that being said, the somewhat inaccurate labeled trope were unknown to us. 2) you used for so many different things that nobody could know how you meant to use it. good v. evil? well, you asked. HA! Good Fun!

quadratic actual results in a parabolic graph. *shrug* mages is quadratic and parties is quadratic and somehow, good v. evil is quadratic. the funny thing is that modrons didn't get quadratic mention. would think that it if any aspect from the genesis post coulda' gotten a forced quadratic, it woulda' been modrons. HA! Good Fun!

nobody else is gonna call the genesis poster on the ubiquitous and perplexing use of "quadratic"? HA! Good Fun! ps we does know difference 'tween linear, exponential and quadratic.

you really believe that? well, ok. keep in mind that on top o' everything, the animancy is prohibited, so your access to fresh dead is gonna be problematic. if undead is recognized as a problem, then obvious means o' limiting undead, such as widespread cremation, would also be recognized. the whole setup seems sketchy. got nobles and extreme wealthy who is willing to make themselves guinea pigs in spite o' seeming fact that animancers in past produce monsters? you got a relative scarce food supply... don't fool self about that. got fact that the undead become increasing erratic w/o food supply. undead state requires an animancer to actual do something to an individual, so source o' the problem will be traceable. got government condemnation o' the practice. etc. look, we get that there could be some ghouls in the poe world, but am not seeing how they could be anything other than extreme rare... save for momentary explosions such as our plague scenario. gets a bunch o' animancers to be claiming to have a cure for plague or somesuch when in fact they is creating future ghouls... or better yet, our nefarious animancers engage in widespread poisoning that has similar symptoms as a plague. then our devious animancers can selective hand out the cure/antidote to be proving that they does indeed have a cure. get lots of test subjects that way. am not sure what is the end game there, but we could come up with something. regardless, corporeal undead as presented would be a far more rare encounter than the nobles and extravagant wealthy... which is already gonna be rare. HA! Good Fun!

please note, we observed that tolkien never said elf ears were pointy in lotr. use other sources is not helpful... and makes situation all the more ludicrous. the fact that somebody felt the need to write such an essay is bizarre, and fact that they can't actually answer the question is a bit disturbing. tolkien left the matter ambiguous. well, good for him we s'pose. but again, "do it like tolkien" is Not gonna be helpful advice to developers of a crpg or any other visual media. clearly, don't do like tolkien is better advice... save for b00b armour. would be a big improvement if you couldn't tell if female heavy armour had mammary swell or not. HA! Good Fun!

I suggest you look for some r/w pen and paper groups or maybe even some play-over-internet games. Seriously. The original IE games were combat-heavy, bar PS:T. Well. PS:T was by far my favourite of the IE games. Followed by BG2 and BG. IWD I wasn't able to become interested in. While the BG games had quite a bit of combat, they had quite a bit of other stuff as well. Interaction, first and foremost. Good dialogue and lots of it. Non combat solutions. (More of those, please.) So, no, I don't have to find a PnP grpup outside of the one I have. I just have to hope for a game along the lines of what I like. somebody already is making the follow-up to ps:t. sooooo... *shrug* nevertheless, am thinking it would be a bit o' a stretch to suggest that bg had "good dialogue." let's be fair and not look back with the rose-hued spectacles. bg slammed you with combats and largely mindless fed-ex quests, with the fed-ex quests being thinly veiled excuses to give you more experience... and more combats. bg, iwd and iwd2 were squad-based tactical combat games though they did have rpg elements. iwd actual had superior writing to bg, but as it were a "linear" dungeon-crawl with no party member jibber-jabber, some folks like to be dismissive of that game... which is also kinda odd. bg2 had more interactions and dialogues than bg or the iwd games, but it also had more complex and varied combats. combat were, again, a very significant part o' the gameplay. all those stats you rolled or kept track of had virtual zero impact on dialogues, but they were significant to combat. this should not be surprising. d&d were, after all, developed from tabletop war-gaming rules... but squad-level 'stead of army. bg2, unlike bg1, did force us to vary our tactics. truth-to-tell, the main difference 'tween bg2 and the aforementioned games were simply the size o' the games. bg2 were much bigger, and the developers pretty much added everything they could think of into the game-- romances and party dialogues, and stronghold quests and component weapons and talking swords and... whatever. iwd were most focused 'cause interplay were needing to release it quick and also 'cause it were developed by a smallish team that included a few folks who had never developed a game previous to iwd. so, gotta ask self if poe development really reminds you o' iwd, and if the other ie games were actual as you recall. that being said, we suspect that as there is no publisher calling the shots, obsidian will make poe the way they thinks an infinity engine game ought to be made. some o' the current developers at obsidian has been open (via interviews, gdc presentations, board feedback, etc.) 'bought what they think is the... proper way to make a crpg. that kinda pretentious nonsense makes us wanna chuckle a bit, but we believe it is good that the developers has a vision. guess what, their vision ain't iwd. even a few minutes listening to chrisA speak of past games, or josh or even timmy, and you is gonna realize that iwd is not the goal. your concern is, we suspect, unfounded. on the other hand, mc should be concerned. "more tunnels" doesn't seem like a goal. sounds more like the bg3 dead project than anything else... albeit with original rules. HA! Good Fun!

... am suspecting james joyce ripped off kotor 2 as well when he penned Ulysses. makes as much sense as bioware stealing kotor2 to make da:o... especially seeing as how bioware made kotor and many o' the things you mention as kotor2 elements is actual from kotor. HA! Good Fun!

the thought o' playing a character that is "godlike" sets our teeth on edge. all others is possible. HA! Good Fun!

... am recalling that obsidian were kinda selling poe as a throw-back/retro game-- bg2 and infinity engine games were mentioned as inspirations. we expected better graphics and a more rational rule-set than d&d 2e, but as far as gameplay, we were expecting something along the lines of iwd2, but 'y'know, better. no d&d nonsense 1e, 2e or even frankenstein iwd2 3e. as such, if Gromnir weren't hearing combat and tactics, we would be as disappointed as you seem to be. that being said, the combat and tactics we hear about from obsidian does make us think of modern mmo more than old-skool rpg/crpg, so we is a bit apprehensive. even so, our concerns is near diametric opposite o' your concerns. curious, no? HA! Good Fun!

am not sure what is the fascination with anime/road warrior armours with shoulder pauldrons that would force a mountain gorilla to his knees. thankfully obsidian has avoided such silliness. HA! Good Fun!