Gromnir

jazz makes us... gassy? dunno. had a similar problem at university. as much as Gromnir were a fan o' james joyce, we always hated Ulysses. going through the effort to understand Ulysses did not result in us eventually appreciating joyce's great work. in fact, not only did our excruciating effort to understand Ulysses make us dislike the novel more, but we kinda liked our Ulysses worshiping colleagues and professors a bit less too. flaw in our character... one of many. ... is nothing wrong with jazz. intellectually we can appreciate it just as we could appreciate joyce's craft. we get that we is 'posed to like jazz. nevertheless, jazz makes us gassy. HA! Good Fun!

money would be an obvious means o' overcoming natural aversion to one who traffics in animacy. we could see any number o' complete fantastic, but reasonable in context, applications o' animacy. real world runs on electricity. poe would appear to run on magic/soul energy. a dynamo converts mechanical energy into electrical. an animancer who learns to convert mechanical energy into soul energy would, based on historical analogues, die forgotten and/or impoverished. nevertheless, somebody would come along after that guy and figure out a way to make the soul dyanmo (or whatever) useful. an animancer would manage to demystify animacy and come up with a way to make bags o' money for everybody... would change world view. is just a complete random kinda hypothetical though. and even then, the whole soul thing makes us wonder if money is enough. if our hypothetical soul dynamo actual harmed or destroyed souls in the process, rather than replacing with mechanical energy, how much money would it take to makes people ignore the downside? is there enough money that would make cultures ignore the downside? HA! Good Fun!

ah, that explain things. we thought somebody with a camera filmed a bunch o' Firefly nerds at a convention in fresno... and called it a game intro as a joke. HA! Good Fun! ps and what is with the edmund burke quote?

Excellent points, Gromnir. I kinda hope that the designers will resist the urge to jump on the nowadays oh-so-popular grimdark bandwagon, and make it possible to do actual research without having to do the metaphysical equivalent of roasting newborn babies alive. I, for example, would totally have my character throw significant funds at people who are working on methods to restore fragmented souls, or something like that. Hopefully researching seemingly-beneficient things will also be possible. we got no aversion to introducing the concept o' animacy to poe. in point o' fact, we believe much interesting fodder could come from animancy. in judeo-christian traditions, adam and eve got kicked out of eden for eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. parallels is gonna be obvious if you got knowledge that involves manipulation of souls and leads to creation of undead. am doubting obsidian developers wanna get too overt into religious territory, but is hard to imagine animancers with otherwise good intentions not suffering persecution. a bitter animancer wants revenge for what were done to his family or friends. a complete amoral animancer doing god-forsaken experiments. a cunning/greedy/mad noble forcing an animancer to experiment on kidnapped gypsies... or whatever is poe equivalent. etc. most o' the above is cliche, but you get the idea. regardless, we can't genuine see animancy being viewed w/o widespread fear. most new sciences is embraced only after a period o' suspicion and none we can think of has got such obvious and real dangers to body AND soul of peoples. HA! Good Fun!

either obsidian hopes folks won't ask too many questions, or they gots lots of explaining to do. "merely taking one more step," seems woefully insufficient to describe the manipulation of the souls of people other than the animancer himself. being able to bind the soul of another person to their slowly/quickly rotting corpse is one example we has been given... oh, and the undead thus created will eventual go all psychotic and cannibalistic. and again, lest folks wanna skip over this point, we is talking 'bout the animancer manipulating souls that is not his own, and in poe, souls is real. have some magician in real world 2014 doing experiments on the soul is gonna be very different than such experimentation in poe. at minimum we would expect extreme suspicion of animancers, and that is an optimistic perspective. to have animancers practice their art open and notoriously, you either gots an extreme blasé populace, or perhaps a Nietzschian nightmare wherein virtual everybody is some kinda moral nihilist. aside: just now occurred to us that there were philip pullman books that actual dealt with this topic. in golden compass/northern lights, people's daemons is their souls and those daemons existed separate of a person's own body. obviously poe peoples need not view animancy in same way as pullman had folks view experimentation on souls in his books, but one wonders if the obsidians has read pullman. HA! Good Fun!

people have. perhaps a thousand times on this board alone. *shrug* HA! Good Fun! is gauche to quote our self, but is far too late to edit our own post, and we don't want our next contribution to feel like a non sequitur. black isle made half o' the infinity engine games, so as you might expect, or perhaps not, the obsidian folks has seen many references to their ie games as they made kotor 2 and their nwn2 offerings. "don't do like ________, " and "do more like _________," threads where blanks is filled with bg, ps:t, totsc, iwd, how, trials of the luremaster, bg2, tob, and or tob is some o' the most common fodder 'pon these boards. somebody says why bg were so fantastic and that storm of zehir should be more like bg. five people agree. five people disagree. five people thinks storm o' zehir should be more like ps:t. another ten says it should be like bg2. unwinnable debates 'bout the merits o' various ie games is fleas on the dog that is these obsidian boards. additionally, virtual every obsidian/black isle development since the turn o' the century has had folks suggesting, pleading, arguing that the current game should be more like bg2. their newish tank game may turn out to be the lone exception to the rule. so, after more than a decade of seeing threads and posts demanding for the next bg2, and following their own failed attempt to make bg3, obsidian/black isle folks is gonna finally give folks what they has been clamoring for since before this board existed. perhaps obsidian is making just to make us all shut the hell up 'bout bg2. just saying. HA! Good Fun! ps am doubtful the obsidians would ever admit, but can you imagine what a coup it would be for them if a significant portion o' those unavoidable, "do it more like bg2," demands became, "do it like poe" from 2015 onward?

yet another limit on how common undead would be: religion. if there is religious reasons to find animacy deplorable, then am guessing we has yet other reason to shrink our pool o' potential willing victims. some folks is trying to have cake and it it too. you want undead creation mysterious enough so that otherwise reasonable rich people would be hoodwinked into making themselves a guinea pig for an animancer. at the same time, you want undead widespread enough to be a crpg staple monster. if you make mysterious and obscure, then you is reinforcing Gromnir's criticism that undead necessarily is gonna be rare. HA! Good Fun! See, I personally don't care if undead are "widespread enough to be a crpg staple monster." Given the lore description of them it seems unlikely, and I don't see why that's a problem. it's a problem 'cause Gromnir said that based on descriptions given to us thus far, corporeal undead would be rare. folks disagreed. that is how we has got to this point. HA! Good Fun!

people have. perhaps a thousand times on this board alone. *shrug* HA! Good Fun!

according to more than one developer, the two most common complaints regarding the infinity engine games: it was too hard. it was too easy. ... am not the most sympathetic crpg fan-- we don't exactly tear up over the sisyphean task(s) the developers face. nevertheless, adjusting game difficulty in an attempt to make the mostest people happy strikes us as a near hopeless endeavor. HA! Good Fun!

yet another limit on how common undead would be: religion. if there is religious reasons to find animacy deplorable, then am guessing we has yet other reason to shrink our pool o' potential willing victims. some folks is trying to have cake and it it too. you want undead creation mysterious enough so that otherwise reasonable rich people would be hoodwinked into making themselves a guinea pig for an animancer. at the same time, you want undead widespread enough to be a crpg staple monster. if you make mysterious and obscure, then you is reinforcing Gromnir's criticism that undead necessarily is gonna be rare. HA! Good Fun!

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!