Cantousent

I don't mind violence in games, but I do hate having to slog through endless and frequent respawns. It ruins the gaming experience for me. If nothing else, respawns should lessen over time as you kill off the enemy population. I'm still slowly going through Planescap with the wife. We're at the Brothel. "That was your first wish."

I was just thinking about the stuff in this thread and it occurs to me that good ol' paganism was still a chief rival to Christianity in well into the middle ages. If you call the period between, say 410 and 1250AD the middle ages, then you have a lot of conflict there and there was also the rift between eastern and western Christianity. ...And still, once Roman Catholicism took hold in essentially uncontested places, the real conflict came from within the religion, not from outside unless contested by force of arms. I'm sure the same is true of Eastern Orthodox and Islam. That's kind of what I was talking about with pmp. Once a particular faith (I'll avoid using 'religion' as a nod to grey) become part of the culture, it's harder to take it out without something a little stronger than words to back up the argument. Today it's probably easier because culture is probably a lot less static in a society with ready access to a wealth of ideas and information.

You've got me there, Ice. I was probably being a bit too northern and western European centric. Still, while there was conflict between Islam and Catholicism in various places in Europe to the south and east, my understanding is that Christianity was essentially unchallenged as the primary religion in those places that did not fall under political rule of Islamic forces. You've also got me, grey. It's one of my wife's pet peeves that we call different Christian churches religions in and of themselves. What I always tell her is that it's just kind of the way we talk about it these days. Probably we should do what a couple of you guys have done which is to define the terms so we're all talking about the same things as much as possible. With that in mind, to Ice's point, there's a difference between the turks fighting Christians in the Mediteranean and a signficant threat to Christians in those same lands by popular upswelling of Islamic sentiment in the populations. Those popular risings might have happened. I don't have a particularly strong background in the time period. ...But don't give one off examples and claim a rule. In the world today we have kind of a buffet style attitude towards faith a lot of the time as it seems to me and still I think most folks nominally claim the same religion and church as their parents. That's just gut instinct though.

A War Like No Other about the Peloponnesian war. The author, Hanson, differentiates his book by breaking it down by categories rather than a chronological narrative. It's informative, and has some insights, but it's not particularly ground breaking. I've done some of my own translations of Thucydides, an extremely difficult author and the main source of information about the war. He definitely brings out some of the gritty details but Hanson uses a variety of sources, including people like Diodorus and Plutarch. Overall, I've enjoyed it greatly. It's a good break from the standard histories that delve into ever increasing minutia, but it's still very much a general ed text. It doesn't go into sufficient detail to make it required reading for post-graduate work, but it does give a lot of breadth on a variety of topics to make it good reading for college majors.

Being a conspicuous Catholic, I don't have a big stake in DnD pantheons or gods or the like, but I kind of thought that Calax was talking about specific computer games rather than larger campaign settings. ...But, to Gorth's point: My take is that pmp and grey have a point in that people of a same religion follow that religion, but religion itself can be pretty broad. For example, dwarves and elves seem to belong to the same religion because both accept the existence of both dwarvish and elvish gods. They merely worship different pantheons of gods within that larger framework. Since the Elvish God Correlon (or whatever his name is) is putatively responsible for blinding one of the orc dude's eyes, they cannot, logically speaking, not believe the orc god doesn't exist. Even within the elvish pantheon, the other elves don't deny the other elvish gods, even if they primarily or even exclusively worship other gods. Some one off examples might exist, but more or less elves believe in the other elvish gods. In that respect, if I take what grey said earlier right, DnD does in fact have one large religion in that they all believe in all the gods even if they only worship one particular set of them. In fact, that would pretty much mean that is only one pantheon. Pan theon is, quite literally, 'every god.' To the denizens, believing their favored, ancestral, or race specific gods battle other gods of other like grouped people, every god would be all inclusive of everyone who does not deny the existence of other gods. Keep in mind I'm talkin' semantics here, vol. I don't want you to go gonzo. I'm just saying that grey and pmp have a point. ...At least if I understand correctly, which is in no way established. EDIT: Calax beat me to the point, but made the point I was making in one sentence, proving that I worship the god of pointless rambling.

RtCW?

The wife and I finally got Ignus into the party. I hated him. The first conversation we had I got tired of his threatening to kill me so we bum rushed him and stomped on him for a while. Then I irritated my wife by reloading so we could have him in the party for when we go the Brothel. Then I'll dismiss him.

I'm also off to Sunday worship and then out for lunch with the wife. Festive. I'll pay you to come down south and put up my X-mas decoractions, Hurlshot, but I refuse to do it before the end of November and I sure as hell won't do it until after Halloween.

I think DA:O pretty much fixated on this idea to some extent. At any rate, it's often difficult to separate multiple causalities in these sorts of struggles. They're very rarely purely religious and instead become a mixed bag of cultural, political, class, and economic warfare with faith mixed into the bunch. Don't get me wrong, I know folks are willing and sometimes eager to kill for religion, but it's rare that true massacres occur for purely religious reasons. I have long said that both religion and alignment in games gets short shrift. The problem, as it seems to me, is that one of the primary functions of religion, namely as the basis for explaining things that cannot otherwise be explained, is thrown out the window. It

The Catholic Church didn't just have competition from the Muslims in medieval times. In fact, I would say that Islam wasn't particularly potent of an adversary in Catholic lands in the first place. There was plenty of resistance to and within Roman Catholicism in Europe during the so-called middle ages. You don't think Lutherans sprang up from a vacuum did you? As for games, I think a lot of them try to be diversified in how they treat religion. In Morrowind, for example, Bethsoft makes a real attempt to show the conflict in not only different religions, but different origins of religion, which is an entirely different matter. After all, Christianity and Islam have a lot of shared heritage, despite the conflict over the past thousand years. I can think of some other games that try to take a broader view of religion also, such as Arcanum and even Dragon Age. I don't think it's always as monolithic as you claim, Calax, you ol' dog.

That's okay, GD, I was in the navy a few years before Desert Storm. I was stationed several places stateside and for about a year and a half in South Korea. Some of the brighter children know we fought a war there but lack a firm perspective of time ask if I killed anyone during the war. "Kid, that war ended almost forty years before I got there." Today, I moved rocks from one pile to another. Tomorrow, I'll move them back again. In the middle of that, as if I had time to deal with it, I found out I need to go in for a 'cardiolite stress test.' haha Wonderful. Nothing like losing six to eight hours one day in the upcoming month.

I never got DA 2. I imagine I will eventually though. I have to admit, which I will deny to my wife, that I find the slutty maid in American Horror Story hawt. Then again, she's like a predatory animal and she's clearly meant to catch your interest. Now, keep in mind that even the maid is one of the shows over the top gimmicks. The maid looks like an old... well... maid to the wife whereas she looks like a stereotypical porno French maid to the husband. The husband, surprise surprise, has had an affair and that hangs hard and heavy between the married couple. hard and heavy, I say. I will own to the fact that the show is really creepy and would probably provide a lot of scares for folks, but it's just too tawdry for my tastes. I prefer shows like Carnivale. I also enjoyed Happy Town before ABC ditched it. ABC, by the way, stands for Already Been Cancelled. Anyhow, if you like the hot maid, just youtube the parts with her and forget the show. Forget what I did today. What I'm going to do now is kill off some more of my brain and liver by starting my evening drink a thon. Cheers :beer:

When the wife and I get the chance we're playing Planescape: Torment together. That amounts to one or two hours a week, but we've had a lot of fun. We've gone through the sensate stones. She wanted to become a sensate. ugh. I've cancelled my World of Warcraft account. I was about halfway through the Firelands content and I just got to thinking it was just too much like work. I had so little time and I was heaving a huge sigh of relief when I was done playing each week. When you're relieved when you don't have to play a game until the next week, you know it's time to head to something different. That was a couple months ago and I haven't regretted it at all.

Please forgive me, but this made me laugh out loud. It sucks, I know. I get you, but it's still funny. By the way, today I reflected that American Horror Story is a cheap, cliched show that falls so far behind Carnivale (thanks KQD for the suggestion) that it isn't even funny. I was so pissed off that I canceled my series recording of it. It's not like I have time for it these days anyhow.

I haven't been on in months but someone sent word to me about tarna and I thought I would respond. The problem is that I can't think of what I could say that doesn't cheapen how I feel. Please keep us posted, Fionavar. I don't know what good it does but I want to know. A lot of folks come in and out and leave and return from these boards but we don't usually know why and even less often is there something truly bad behind it. I'd like to think that tarna is just pulling our legs, but I don't think so. I've spent a lot of time in hospitals watching people suffer and it's a damned ugly business, but I've more often seen them recover than die and so I want to believe that tarna can get better. I have to believe that he can get better. I still remember getting that phone call from metadigital in the wee hours of the morning. I didn't recognize the number and so I didn't answer. He left an embittered message and I haven't heard from him in years. I even had a friend in the Las Vegas metro ask a colleague in the FBI but it's no surprise that nothing came of it. I hope he's alright and just decided to start posting under a different name. I do that every now and then myself. ...Or at least I used to a couple of years ago. Be well, everyone. No one else get cancer or into a car crash or disappear or any other terrible thing! God bless you guys. EDIT: Oh, and what I did today was waste my time fretting over you guys like an emo school girl.

I didn't really do much with the Caravan game in my previous runs, but this time I'm playing more often. It's actually pretty simple. So far I've only played against two people. They're easy to beat, but I can see where it could be very tough against a human player, especially one willing to play more defensively. I haven't gotten close to the suggested level for Dead Money. I think I'm only something like level 5 right now, but I'm enjoying the game again.

Thanks for the tips. When I finally had the chance to play the game for a bit, I got the news signal you mentioned right away. I played a little of it off a saved game, but I decided to go ahead and start a new game. Guess I'm giving up sleep for Lent this year.

I have an embarassing noobish question. I bought (and STEAM installed) Dead Money but all my menus look the same and there doesn't seem to be any difference in the game. Is the Dead Money area just some place I need to find throughout the regular game? I tend not to read too much about games for fear I'll spoil a surprise but now I'm worried that I wasted my time and money on the DLC without actually having it.

I haven't been on STEAM for a while and I just noticed that Dead Money is available. I'm going to pay for and download my first DLC ever. :Cant's sheepish grin icon: I'm really looking forward to it and, if I understand some of the banter in this thread, it looks like there will be more DLC in the future. FO:NV has really restored my interest in Obsidian, so I'm hoping for more games. I'm even breaking down and buying Alpha Protocol. I think they're working on Dungeon Seige 3 also, which I'd get anyway. I might not have time to play all of them any time soon, but I'm really looking forward giving them all a whirl. I'm crossing my fingers that Dead Money will be as impressive as FO:NV.

I didn't see any dev comments so far, but do they plan on putting out Dead Money for the PC?

Merry Christmas. Went to the childrens' Christmas pageant to see my neice and then went to mass again for midnight vigil. I have no kids, so Christmas is more about worrying about getting things done, and we never get most of our decorations out and then I know folks who are hostile to the holiday on its face. ...But I love Christmas and it fills me with hope. Whether you celebrate the holiday as religious, or it's just a secular holiday, or even if you treat it like every other day, I hope it was a good day for you. God bless you and keep you. May we keep each other.

I don't know. After 200 hours of play, I have only had one caravan game.

Surprise surpise, I see both Harliequin's and Tig's point. I think graphics matter. All things being equal, I want better graphics and I have *never* said otherwise. On the other hand, I *do* remember text adventures and I have an emulator so I can stiill play them, a bit of an achievement for those of us using vista 64. ...And those of us overindulging in a bottle of port.

I don't see her stabbing herself, MrBrown, but I went back to see and it looks like she's playing pocket pool with her right hand. Maybe it's the hour, but it made me laugh out loud.

Yeah, there was a much more tactical feel to combat in the early Fallout games. I know exactly what you're talking about, Amentep, but I'm just more with Tig on it.