newc0253

sorry, i forgot american newspaper readers were such a rarified and delicate bunch, and apparently unable to follow a link. british papers assume a more robust, less easily offended readership.

yes, clearly it was too much to assume that folk would follow the link and read the details for themselves. silly me. i pity the folk who write the headlines for your local newspaper. the letters they must get.

yes, i made that up about the frost giants.

4e has death giants but not frost giants? lame.

yes, normally i get gromnir to answer the really difficult questions first. but, since you ask, it's a little more straightforward to draw indoor maps with squares than hexes, assuming you have lots of straight lines. but it doesn't take much to draw straight lines with hexes either, and i think the benefits of hexes otherwise outweight squares. D&D grew out of wargames in which hex maps were the norm, and many DMs have always used hexes for combat. i agree that squares have always been the norm for dungeon maps, but i can think of plenty of hex maps in 1e modules too. personally, i think any ease of mapping between squares and hexes is pretty marginal and hexes otherwise win out.

are you asking because you believe hexes are easier?

i agree hexes are best. but i imagine anything with more than four sides is likely to confuse the target audience, especially when it comes to creating indoor maps.

why?

so what's the difference between that person lending their copy to a friend, and allowing their friend to photocopy the book? you got your royalty from the book either way, so where's the harm? were you mugged if they make a photocopy but not if they borrowed a copy? but why shouldn't you get royalties on the resale? morally, i mean? why shouldn't you claim when others profit from your work further down the line? either you think it's morally right that you shouldn't profit from resales, in which case i'd be interested to hear your reasons why. or maybe you think it's morally right because that's just what the law is - something which many people would find a deeply questionable view. did you negotiate the contracts yourself? or were you just signing some boilerplate standard clause? either way, do you think it's fair that some people should read your book for free? do you think writers should be forced to donate free copies to libraries for the public good? or do you just think it's a matter of charity? your legal rights? or your moral rights? if i were working on something that could be infinitely reproduced without cost, i'd give careful thought to my business model before i pored in years of effort. but that's just me. the beauty of the free market is that, if prices go up too high, people will pirate more. so it's probably in the economic self-interest of publishers not to pass on the costs of anti-piracy measures. if they're rational, that is. i get that a lot of people aren't. 30-40% of retail price of any item is to cover shoplifting? you anti-piracy types really swallow some ridiculous figures, don't you. but shoplifting is theft because you're stealing something that's tangible and can't be replaced without cost. it's really quite simple. someone forced radiohead to offer flexible pricing on their last album? who? tell me, i'll buy them a drink. That is the saddest, I daresay sickest, statement of all. Do me a favor. Write to good old Michael, or even to J.E. Sawyer... hell go straight to Fergus... and you tell them that you are stealing their products so that they have to struggle even harder to stay in business, lest they end up like Black Isle, IL, Strategy First, Eon Storm, etc., is "for the greater good"... the "greater good" meaning, of course, your ability to continue to steal their stuff with impugnity. I'm sure they'll send you a letter of profound thanks, which you may then share with the rest of us. me? i pay for all my games, thanks. but while i write Fergus and Sawyer and whoever Michael is, how about you write all those poor folk dying of malaria in third world countries because western pharmaceutical companies insist on enforcing their intellectual property against the manufacters of cheaper, generic anti-malarial drugs. Maybe you'd like to explain to them how piracy can never be for the greater good, even if it means that an anti-malarial drug that could save their kid's life might cost $1 instead of $50. sad and sick, indeed.

ah yes, the good old 'scan a book onto a computer and then download it' scam. i hear all the cool kids who read are doing it... tell me, were you victimised by people who bought copies of your book but then lent theirs to friends? what about second hand sales? did you ever get a share of those? what about libraries? i know technically speaking that libraries ought to be paying royalties but - let's be honest - if 1000 people read your book in a library, you wouldn't get nearly the same amount as you would if they all bought a copy. did you feel mugged then too? yes, comparing loss of sales to theft is pretty silly, but then most arguments against piracy are pretty silly. there are some sensible arguments, but they're rarely the ones you hear because neither side of the debate wants to hear them. piracy is condoned in the way that theft isn't, not because people are hypocrites but because they're smart enough to know that software and music and tv shows aren't like cars and houses. the more industry maintains that they are, the more people scoff, ignore them and carry on their merry way. since piracy is inevitable, you'd think that the industries most affected would be scrambling to find some kind of pricing structure/business model that would appeal to folks' common sense intuitions about intangible property and just compensation for those who create/produce/develop the intangible property in the first place. but instead they band together and waste time with cumbersome copy protection efforts, regional coding, 'piracy funds terrorism' publicity campaigns and other silly nonsense. industry could learn a thing or two from thom yorke et al. offer an album for free and still find people willing to pay for it. maybe where you live. where i live, the legal definition is slightly more complicated. Good God! (a) because 70-90% figures are bogus; and (b) because maybe a certain amount of piracy is legitimate and, indeed, for the greater good.

i disagree. snatching something intangible is morally different from snatching something tangible. suppose you're a poor third world country and you desperately need malaria drugs that you can only buy at great cost from a pharmaceutical giant. you can (a) steal them from a warehouse or (b) copy the formula and produce them a generic version yourself. if you follow option (a), you've deprived other people who would receive the malaria drug. if you follow option (b), you've arguably only cut into the profit margins of a wealthy western pharmaceutical giant. both involve different moral costs but, you tell me, which is morally worse?

no, but if i can instantaneously make a million copies of the house he builds, what is the builder entitled to? payment for building one house? or a million? because he didn't actually put the labour into building 999,999 houses. he only mixed his labour in with one. and what about the architect, who didn't build any of the houses but designed all of them? does he deserve to be a million times richer than the builder of the original house? i'm not making these points to be flip. i think the builder deserves payment, so does the architect. both deserve not to be ripped off, or see the fruits of their labour exploited by others. the same goes for game developers and publishers. the CRPG market is struggling enough as it is, even without piracy. my future interest in good CRPGs being made for PC is harmed directly. but as long as the various industries hit by piracy (software, film/tv, music) continue to insist that their product has the same characteristics as cars and jewellery, their message is gonna be laughed at. if i get mugged, i should complain about getting mugged. i shouldn't claim i was burgled and raped too.

hmm, except if we're gonna be strict with our analogies here, he's not actually stealing the car is he? he's making an identical copy of the car and driving off. the owner of the car still has it. is that morally the same as stealing it? is it even legally the same as stealing it. no, not by a long shot. piracy ain't like stealing cars. when you steal a car, you take it away from the owner. when you steal software, the owner still has it. what piracy takes away is the opportunity of developers/publishers to sell their game and thereby make a profit. but theft of an individual copy is at best the loss of a single customer, and not even one who might have paid for the game otherwise. so berating the guy who steals the occassional game as a car thief is pretty silly. i get that piracy hurts developers and, in the long run, ultimately consumers as well. but this whole hysterical 'piracy is theft/'piracy funds osama bin laden'/'piracy gives your puppy cancer' schtick is doomed to fail because people aren't idiots. they know the difference between things which can be copied infinitely and things which can't.

pirates may play tons of games but they still only play 1 copy per pirate. whichever way you stack up the numbers, the 90% figure is ludicrous. as a scare figure, it's also unnecessary. even if piracy only accounted for 20% of copies or 20% of lost sales or whatever, the PC market would still have a serious problem. which, i would guess, it in fact does.

can't speak for Asia or America but basic common sense tells you that 90%+ piracy in EU is simply an industry scare figure, something it tells itself when things are going bad. 90% of europeans who play PC games simply aren't smart enuf to find pirated copies of the latest titles. we just aren't that clever.

ha! he's an angry, angry man. i guess anyone in his position would be, if you'd produced a decent action RPG only to see your studio go down the drain. but, angry as he is, i think some of his stuff is waaaay off-base. piracy in the EU at 90%? sorry but that's just crack talk. no doubt there's a hardcore of european gamers who pirate anything and everything they get their hands on (esp those eastern europeans - yeah Ivan and Piotr i'm lookin at you). but the idea that 9 out of every 10 people who play a PC game in Europe is playing a pirated copy is frakking stupid. i'm sorry that his studio went under. i don't normally play action RPGs but Titan Quest kept me entertained for several hours and that's the highest praise i can bestow on a game of that genre. but he's gotta move past the hate and fast, because some of what he says is just really dumb.

it would if they switched on the grammar function.

for dumbing down, that actually still seems fairly complicated. compared to that (1) roll for initiative (2) move (3) roll to hit (4) roll for damage is blindingly straightfoward.

but not, apparently, a spellchecker. it's = contraction of 'it is' its = possessive form of 'it'

i wouldn't rule out subscribing to a game if it was worth my while. but subscriptions mostly make sense for the kind of online multiplayer games that you play on a continuing basis and that really isn't my cup of tea. i prefer games to be like books, with a start, a middle and a finish, that i can pickup whenever. also most online RPGs are full of freaks.

technically speaking, i don't think it's an MMO because it would be purely party-based. more like an MO or a MP session of NWN with a DM. but, yes, subscriptions usually suck ass.

nonsense? i'll have you know that bridge has 76 hits on ebay. the argument wasn't that 1e was less about combat, it was that 4e seems even less than 1e about combat - that even 1e made nods to non-combat aspects of the game in a way that that description of the 4e rogue didn't. one thing about 4e which does look interesting, though, is the 'D&D experience' software: anyone see the lastest screenshots of that?

Bridge for sale Location: Between Tower Bridge and Cannon Street Railway Bridge on the River Thames. Excellent condition, only one previous owner. Technical specifications: Prestressed concrete box girder bridge. Longest span 104 m (340 ft) Total length 262 m (860 ft) Width 32 m (107 ft) Clearance below 8.9 m (29 ft) 5 lanes A3 traffic. Will accept paypal or money order. Sorry, no refunds.

good for you, Sand.

hmm, he described nystul's magic aura as a 'combat spell'. to most reasonable users of the english language, that suggests a spell primarily intended for use in combat - whether directly or indirectly. but if you're buying what Gromnir's selling here, there's also a bridge on the Thames i can give you a good deal on.