Lurker > ParanoidObsessive

helIy posted...

smh, i thought they learned with skyrim

They did. They learned how to get away with it better this time.

And next time after that, they'll get away with it even better.

Developers don't get less greedy just because gamers object. They just figure out better ways to cover their tracks.


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The Wave Master posted...

We actually did a "The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth" topic a long, long, t8ne ago.

This is why we need an official Geek topic title wiki or something. You've been the official Keeper of the Names for so long, most of the rest of us have forgotten a lot of our previous suggestions (and which ones have been used).

As for suggestions, though, I'll do my usual topical references:

Episode VIII: The Last Geek
Geekliners
Geek: Ragnarok
Murder on the Geek Express
The Geekest Hour (or The Geekiest Hour)
The Once and Future Geek


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Zeus posted...

I assume that had to be a rights issue considering that Quicksilver is one of the more popular characters in Fox's X-Men movies

It wasn't. The twins were part of a special deal (part of why both Marvel and Fox could use Quicksilver, and why Marvel still has the Scarlet Witch, where they're about the only mutants Marvel can use with impunity.

That being said, Whedon has openly admitted that killing him off was his idea. So much so that they shot a separate alternate ending to the movie where Quicksilver survived in case the studio told him he wasn't allowed to kill the character off. But the studio let him do what he wanted (especially since they were already fighting with him over the Hawkeye scenes), so he offed him.

In fact, Quicksilver being in the Fox movies around the same time it was known he was going to be in The Avengers was mostly a deliberate fuck you from Fox towards Marvel (Fox added the scenes in later on, which is why he kind of disappears afterwards).

At no point was there a corporate mandate or contractual conflict that led to killing him off. It was just Whedon being Whedon.



Metalsonic66 posted...

Killing Coulson didn't bother me. His death was well-done and even though he was a minor character, it did have impact after seeing him in 2-3 other movies beforehand.

I wouldn't say it bothered me, per se. I just pointed it out as yet another example of Whedon's long-running weakness as a writer, which is that he seems to go back to the "need a dramatic moment, kill a major character" well way too often (as you say, offing Quicksilver in the second movie is another prime example). So much so that it's basically become a memetic joke that Whedon = dead main characters.

And while Coulson's was handled about as well as it could be, he's offed plenty of main characters that feel more like he's doing it purely for shock value more than because it's the best possible way to tell a given story.

And arguably, Coulson's death was kind of weak anyway, because Tony never really seemed to LIKE him all that much, and other than Fury and Widow, none of the other characters really had much of a reason to CARE that he was dead. At least not any more so than any of the other nameless mooks on the helicarrier.

It becomes even more of a head-slapper when you realize the underlying implication that the main reason they were having trouble working together in the first place was less clashing egos or actual personal issues and more because the Mind Staff/Stone was fucking with their heads.

The fact that he uses character death as a major crutch isn't necessarily a huge deal (George RR Martin does it too, and everyone loves him for it), but there's also a difference between doing it on your own project that is 100% your own (and even when other writers come on board, they're just there to carry out your creative vision as well), versus working on a collaborative shared universe where dozens of writers and directors are likely going to have to deal with the fallout of any creative decision you make for years (if not decades) to come.

It's the same reason I hate Grant Morrison when he works on non-personal projects.

Or as I used to sum it up, "You shouldn't shit in someone else's sandbox."

Half the reason why character death has become so meaningless in comics is because too many writers are quick on the trigger to kill off any character they don't like, forcing later writers who DO like those characters to come up with ridiculous, soap opera-y excuses to bring them back. Especially when, for every one death that is actually meaningful or impactful, you've got dozens of throw-away deaths that are absolutely meaningless.


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The Wave Master posted...

I think only P.O. and I care about VR Troopers, but I was excited and Scarlett was like WTF is that?

I wouldn't say I CARE about VR Troopers, per se. Though I've always thought Sarah Brown was cute.



Entity13 posted...

On the contrary, I enjoyed that show as a kid and wished Saban had more footage to work with to make even another half of a season more properly.

Footage shouldn't even remotely be the issue, considering how Saban usually handled that sort of thing.

Just like they did with early Power Rangers, it wouldn't be hard for them to just switch to footage from another show entirely when they ran out of the first show, then just have the American cast talk about how they conveniently switched to "new" versions of their powers as an upgrade. Power Rangers did it so they could retain the same American cast from season to season in spite of the Japanese version of the show being different every season (at least up to Lost Galaxy, when they started to follow the Japanese model a bit more accurately), and the Robotech anime was basically spliced together from three separate, unrelated anime shows.

And if memory serves, VR Troopers was already cobbled together from multiple left-over Japanese shows in the first place. One of which was from Space Sheriff Shaider (which was a series that had at least two other seasons they never used). So again, more than enough footage to go around if they'd wanted to continue it.


Ironically enough, the only reason I know that VR Troopers used footage from Space Sheriff Shaider is because, when I was like 10 years old or so (give or take), my mother bought a cheap foreign import toy at a local five-and-dime store that basically looked like some weird robot dude. I had like zero idea what it was supposed to be at the time, and didn't even realize it was a licensed product from a show until like 20 years later, when I was looking at random stuff on the Interwebs and I happened across a picture from that show and I was like "Holy fuck, I recognize that!"

http://tokusatsunetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/spacesheriff.jpg

(The blue guy is from Shaider, and that's the one I had.)

I actually still have it (and I let my niece and nephew play with it when they were younger and they visited). Its chest and eyes used to light up and it would make a sort of beeping sound if you pushed a button on its back, but the battery to make that happen died long, long ago, and the tech probably doesn't work anymore even if I put a new battery in it.

(It's also possible I've told this story before, which is why you seem to remember me having an interest in VR Troopers.)


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At a certain point, the demand for Half-Life stopped being real anyway, and started being memetic. At this point, people mostly just say they want it because they've been trained to believe that they should want it, and that it's more or less Internet video-game discussion etiquette to bring it up. It's become a meme to get brought up in the proper context, and it's a popular topic because the Internet thrives on fake outrage.

Keep in mind, it's been almost a decade since the last Half-Life game. Also keep in mind, something like half (or more) the people on this site alone haven't even played it, and we're the older, crustier gamers. Most younger gamers don't give a single shit about the franchise other than what they've heard from the memes.


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Sahuagin posted...

I was more referring to your tendency to play the 'lol atheist' card, rather than anything to do with this 'golden compass' thing

Then you were doing an incredibly shitty job of it.

And I'd probably play the 'lol atheist' card less if so many vocal Internet atheists weren't so lol-worthy.



Sahuagin posted...

you're just a troll anyway so who cares

You could always go hit the ignore button. Neither of us would lose anything of value and we'd probably both have a much better PotD experience for it.

Go ahead, I won't judge you for it.


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"Game-breaking'' in that context means bugs that break the way the game was meant to be played.

Yes, using an infinite money glitch to build massive houses in The Sims, buy tons of appliances, and let your Sims wander around without ever having to work (so you have more chances to trap them in your olympic-size swimming pool and remove the ladder behind them) might be fun, but it isn't even remotely what the developer intended. Nor is using console commands to build yourself multiple cities and max out all your tech trees in the first year of a game of Civilization, so you've got tanks and nukes while all of your rivals are still inventing the wheel.

And using item-dupe glitches in a game like Minecraft is a great time and effort saver if you want to build massive projects with limited resources in Survival Mode, but all you're really doing at that point is getting all of the benefits of Creative Mode while deliberately avoiding the only real drawback it has (not being able to get Achievements). So again, you're actively doing something the developers didn't really plan for or want you to do as a player.

If what you're doing is radically altering game balance in ways that were never intended by the developer, and generally changing the entire feel of the game you're playing, then yes, you're breaking the game as intended and basically turning into your own game, that operates on your own rules.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that it's WRONG to play that way. But it's absolutely game-breaking.


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Sahuagin posted...

it's so easy to say things like this, but you're seemingly ignorant to the fact that people have to literally escape from that kind of life. the damage to my family from hyper-religious thinking is on-going.

And you're seemingly ignorant of the fact that writing bad fiction about how grr, bad! religion is doesn't actually do anything to change, address, or fix any legitimate problems in organized religion, while simultaneously shitting on the people who DO find value or personal meaning in religion and who consider it a positive experience pretty much instantly turning them against you and encouraging them to close ranks against what might otherwise be valid criticism.

It also doesn't help if you come across like a pretentious douche-nozzle in interviews, talking about how "important" your work is while dismissing the entire fantasy genre (while simultaneously attempting to exploit it), and telling people you don't consider your work to BE fantasy because it's too important for that, and that you don't actually read other fantasy novels because you don't consider them worthwhile (which kind of helps explain why your own work is so terrible).

The problem isn't that Pullman wrote a book (or books) that was anti-religion, per se. The problem is that he wrote shitty books that were anti-religion while also being an incredibly shitty person about it.


(Hell, I'll even bring up Michael Moorcock at this point, who's written similarly unsubtle political or atheistic subtext in novels, who tends to be similarly pretentious about his own self-importance, and who generally comes across a bit abrasive and shitty in interviews or when writing personal thoughts versus novels, but who tends to get more of a pass with me because he's at least a much better writer.)



Sahuagin posted...

I haven't seen 'the golden compass' but that describes Narnia pretty well.

I never said Narnia was a paragon of fantasy literature, either.

Though Narnia still manages to keep the allegory at least somewhat subtle a fair amount of the time, except for a few "HEY, DO YOU GET IT?! DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF SOMETHING, HINT HINT?!" moments. Lewis just used Aslan as a metaphor for God/Jesus. By the end Pullman is writing about angels and killing god and generally hammering his point over and over again.

His Dark Materials basically feels like the entire narrative arc is built around the idea of "Religion sucks, how can I shit on the Church today?" And the end result is ironic as hell, because his complaint about Narnia is that it's basically brainwashing for kids, so he deliberately went on to write a book that was meant to brainwash kids.

And you said you "haven't seen" The Golden Compass. Don't judge the work by the movie. Judge it by the actual books. The movie was sanitized as hell, and the books are way, way worse about it.


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keyblader1985 posted...

Foppe posted...

Why is Jesus Christ always the good guy?
He would be so much cooler if he used his power for evil and fought his father.

Or, Jesus is good.. but God is evil.

A battle against a tyrannical all-creator seems a little less hopeless with the second most powerful being on your side.

Not exactly what you're describing, but here's a relatively famous book that's existed for decades where God is basically an asshole, Satan is basically the hero of the piece, and Jesus is pretty much the closest thing you have to a villain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Reign_in_Hell



slacker03150 posted...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SatanIsGood

Was thinking about posting something along those lines.



wolfy42 posted...

I never could get through the golden compass (book or movie). I have tried multiple times. Sounds like it might get better, if only I could make it that far.

I could never get into it, because it always felt like the author was trying so hard to write an "anti-Narnia" that could basically be anti-religious atheist fantasy that it makes him come across like kind of a bitter asshole, and it kind of soils it for me.

It basically leaves me going "I get it, emo teen. You don't like Christianity. You're sooooo edgy!"

And I say that as someone who isn't actually religious, and who has had no problem with other stories in the past that were arguably coming from a similar point-of-view. I feel like I could have enjoyed it more if Pullman was actually a better writer, or even remotely capable of subtlety. Metaphor and satire loses its effectiveness if the author is constantly hitting you with it like a massive hammer to the face.


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The Wave Master posted...

Makes you wonder what tiny, cutesy, innocent, naive, nerd girl, redhead he is going to cast as Batgirl?

To be fair, whoever it is, BTB and I will likely approve.

And if nothing else, presenting "strong female leads who don't need no man" and then "emasculating" (efeminating? disempowering? ehh, whatever, you know what I mean) them while still pretending they've got all the power is sort of one of his things, so if nothing else his influence might eventually lead to a Batgirl/Killing Joke/Oracle sort of storyline, where she's crippled yet shows that she's still a badass and in control of her life (girl power, rah rah!). And Oracle is by far the superior Barbara Gordon interpretation, so I'm 110% in favor.


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Kyuubi4269 posted...

The argument is typically that when the minimum wage rises, the cost of milk and bread will rise too because reasons.

Or if you're not being deliberately manipulative in your choice of words, the argument is that when you raise minimum wage, companies have to pay their employees more, and thus will raise the prices of their goods and services rather than being forced to eat that new extra cost themselves.

And when people follow that by suggesting "That's why we need laws to prevent companies from raising their prices, force them eat the cost, fuck big business!", the argument usually points out that a) smaller businesses can't necessarily eat the excess costs and are driven out of business, thus eliminating jobs entirely and raising unemployment, and b) larger businesses will either seek loopholes to bypass legislation (basically screwing over the general public/taxpayers in some way), or will relocate entirely to less developed nations with more lax business laws that they can exploit (thus eliminating domestic jobs and raising unemployment).

You can agree with the logic or not, but it's often quite well thought out in terms of complexities and consequences regardless. And while you can certainly accuse some people of parroting back the "party line" without actually understanding how economics, business, law, or politics work, the same is generally true of both sides of this argument - and pretty much every other political argument besides, and especially so online where 99.44% of the people you see discussing any issue don't actually understand anything about it.


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PyroBlade1985 posted...

Careful now everyone. Say communists are no different than anarchists, and people will call you a moron.

To be fair, you can be both:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-communism


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green dragon posted...

That's odd. I've never had any glitches like that. What's your setup (just curious )

helIy posted...

as much as the game sucks, i can say that i've never ran into any glitches

I was going to say more or less the same thing, but then again I also played on console, so I'm just going to reflexively file any and all complaints into my pile of bias about how/why PC gaming in general sucks sour frog ass.


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Lobomoon posted...

If you were an unquestionable leader of super rich super powerful country that didn't yet have any people in it (except you) - would you allow anyone who wanted to enter it would you pick specific types of people?

In POtopia, you're a slave of the God-Emperor or you're a target.


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wolfy42 posted...

Why are demons always bad?

For the same reasons "unicorns" always have a single horn on their head. Because it's basically the primary defining characteristic of the thing in question.

Though in the case of demons what you're saying isn't even true, considering there are tons of stories that present demons as either being sympathetic, misunderstood, or more or less framed for being evil. Or have demons be evil, but then immediately present a counter-example (like Planescape: Torment having a succubus who's sworn a vow of chastity). If anything, modern day stories are FAR more likely to present demons as being "good" or at least protagonists than they are to play them as one-dimensional boogah-boogah monsters.

Hell, in a lot of modern stories, humans are always the real monsters.



DocDelicious posted...

Ummm...no? Only in Christian cultures are demons explicitly evil.

Also the Judaic cultures where the entire concept of demons originated, and the Islamic cultures that sprang from both.

But there's also the added problem that the word "demon" really only applies to Judaeo-Christian demons in the first place (the word was invented to describe them specifically, not as a generic term for any evil spirit or entity), so if you're talking about stuff like Hindu asuras or Japanese onis, those technically aren't demons anyway (and even if they were, most of them are explicitly evil - or at least malicious - regardless).


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After I drank heavy, I always used to drink soda (for the caffeine) and Gatorade or water (for the rehydration) shortly before going to bed. I never got hangovers.


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Muffinz0rz posted...

Difference is, Zeus wasn't trolling.

Zeus is always trolling.



Muffinz0rz posted...

As for the Dark Souls example - even if you lost health/items/etc., you still won the fight. It's not at all a draw.

If you were distracted from your original objective, wasted valuable time and resources, and didn't even get the satisfaction of killing the person screwing with you, you absolutely lost.


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Boobsicle posted...

No votes unless you form a federally recognized family.

I was with you until you until this point.

The current system fucks single people badly enough without needing to further marginalize them.


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helIy posted...

po fits the bill almost to a t for a hufflepuff

I know enough about Hufflepuff to know I don't even remotely fit there. I have pretty much none of the personality traits they look for.


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Based on what Wikipedia tells me, probably Thunderbird.


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darkknight109 posted...

It's uncanny, because every gamer I've ever seen in person does it when things get intense.

I definitely do it.

I have a recliner, and I tend to pop it up and sit with my legs up and my body tilted back when I'm casual gaming, but drop into the lean forward/wrists-on-knees position when I need to focus on a harder game.

Why? No idea, but it likely has to do with the position being more conducive to intense mental focus. Body posture in general can definitely effect moods and mental states.


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Nasada19 posted...

Where is the option "I don't care, I don't think Half-life is that great"

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MICHALECOLE posted...

What was the last episode?

As far as I'm concerned, it's still "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings".


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I'd run out of pages in about 20 minutes.


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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Perhaps it's Tarantino you're thinking of?

Nah, I already definitely know Tarantino has a blatant foot fetish. It's hard not to.



The Wave Master posted...

No P.O you are right about Joss Whedon having a foot fetish.

Boo-yah!

There's life in me old brain yet!



Zeus posted...

Biggest scandal since Jim Duggan and the Iron Sheik were caught smoking reefer together, I know.

Hah, I remember that when it happened. It was on the Garden State Parkway not that far up the road from where I lived as a kid.

In retrospect, it's kind of odd that they were in the car together in the first place, considering kayfabe being what it was at the time, wrestlers from opposite sides of the heel/face divide weren't even supposed to share the same locker room in areas to help facilitate the idea that they didn't get along. You'd think someone would have discouraged them from riding together.



Zeus posted...

The more I learn about Joss Whedon, the less I like him.

How did you feel about how he "quits" Twitter every time he throws a little tantrum, then winds up coming back and keeps saying offensive things until the next time he gets chased off?

Personally, the thing I find most annoying about him was killing Coulson off in The Avengers, because killing off characters is the only way he knows how to ramp up tension. Then deliberately helping to bring him back on the TV show that he produces and his brother and sister-in-law are in charge of, while simultaneously badmouthing the idea of bringing Coulson back even though it was his idea in the first place.

But here's some more ammo for you if you need it:

http://uk.style.yahoo.com/five-times-joss-whedon-self-164609262.html


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Never been a fan of Harry Potter so I never take any of the test, but my assumption is that I would probably wind up in Slytherin based on my moral outlook or Ravenclaw based on my over-intellectualizing and love of knowledge.

My general apathetic malaise might keep me out of Slytherin, though, because while I'm certainly more than willing to see evil wizards take over the world, I'm not really motivated enough to want to do it myself.


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Lightning Bolt posted...

But it feels a little formal to use generally. Something more evocative like "Force" maybe... I think the Force is taken though, especially in nerd culture.

There's always Kinetic versus Potential.

Or blend the two, and go for Kinetic (or Kinesis) versus Static (Stasis).

Or Motion versus Inertia.

Or some fancy, fantasy terms derived from the above but made up on the spot.


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You know, in retrospect, a lot of my favorite games apparently use Order/Chaos as the main fundamental underlying concept. :-P


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Lightning Bolt posted...

Definitely using Dynamicism for one character. It sounds exactly like what the "chessmaster" character would call it. Thanks!

But it feels a little formal to use generally. Something more evocative like "Force" maybe... I think the Force is taken though, especially in nerd culture.

It's literally the core premise of Mage: The Ascension.

Basically, the universe is balanced between Dynamism and Stasis - change versus status quo. It's also reflected in the Triat of Werewolf: The Apocalypse - to them, the entire universe is the byproduct of the tensions between the Wyld (raw, creative energy and uncontrolled chaos), the Weaver (a force for order that seeks to weave permanent meaning and purpose into the Wyld's dynamic potential), and the Wyrm (originally meant as a force for balance which would destroy the Weaver's excess creations and contain the Wyld's constant shifting, later bound and driven insane by the Weaver in an attempt to prevent it from destroying her creations, resulting in a new force of corruption and decay).

So in Mage every mage has an "Essence" that reflects the true nature of your soul, and two of those are "Dynamic" (the Avatar of Dynamism) and "Pattern" (the Avatar of Stasis). Though they also have "Questing" (the Avatar of Balance) and "Primordial" (the Avatar that reflects the deeper, more primal nature of reality). Each major faction of mages tends to correspond to one of those archetypes (and by extension, one of the Triat from Werewolf) - the Technocracy (the "evil" science mages that are generally antagonists for players) represent Stasis, and share the Weaver's desire to "calcify" all of reality into easily defined categories and principles that are unchanging and eternal, the Marauders (insane agents of chaos driven mad by their own power, who blindly seek dynamic change through destruction and represent the mindless Wyld), the Nephandi (utterly evil demon worshippers and nihilists who seek the absolute destruction of reality itself or the corruption of everything that exists, just as the Wyrm does), and the Traditions (the "good guy" mages most players play as, who tend to exist as more of a force for balance between dynamism and stasis, and thus theoretically represent the Wyrm in its original role, before it was imprisoned by the Weaver's webs and driven insane).

The upshot of all of which is that mages are generally seen as dynamic forces fighting against static reality (because the Weaver and the Technocracy are generally winning their wars), imposing their will against "The Consensus", which is basically the combined subconscious beliefs of the greater mass of humanity (ie, gravity works and things "fall down" because most people believe that things SHOULD "fall down". A mage is someone who effectively convinces reality around them that sometimes things can "fall up", and thus make themselves fly).

Depending on how you look at it, the constant struggle between the two opposing forces of change and stasis can be painted as "growth versus stagnation" or "free will versus determinism" (if you're more on the side of dynamism), or as "random chaos versus structured meaning" or "anarchy versus order" if you're falling more on the side of stasis.

The idea being that neither extreme (either constant meaningless change or eternal unchanging paralysis) is all that appealing, and the ideal state is a balance between the two. Change given meaning, structure that can evolve and adapt, and so on.

For the full Order versus Chaos motif you could even go with the terms Apollonian Dionysian, but that's less how Mage treats it (and is more how Amber treats it).


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Zeus posted...

Joss Whedon has always struck me as the kind of guy who would try to pressure women into sex. You can sorta see the hints in the things he produces where his "strong female characters" are always remarkably weak in their relationships, something which some of his feminist critics have pointed out time and time again.

Doesn't he also have something of an acknowledged foot fetish? Or am I thinking of someone else?



Zeus posted...

Plus word from a company trying to hype its product means absolutely dick-all. WWE for instance is infamous for vastly inflating its numbers to look more popular to get people to care.

Are you trying to say that WWE inflates attendance numbers, buyrates, and social media followers in an attempt to seem more successful than they actually are? ~GASP~


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RCtheWSBC posted...

And what's with all these adults obsessed with Star Wars

More importantly, why are so many adults posting on a message board on a video game web site? Everyone knows that video games are for kids.

Preferably male kids. No girls allowed!


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Muffinz0rz posted...

GanonsSpirit posted...

Get a job, welcher.

Also just throwing this out there - since Erik closed his account and just made a new one, you also have the option to get hired, walk in the door as an employed individual, and then quit. Technically, you will have gotten a job.

There's also the possibility of just doing a one-time job. Like, if you hire someone to mow your lawn, that IS a job.

He wouldn't even technically need to be paid in cash - if, say, someone offered to hire him to make a specific topic on PotD once a week, and paid him by gifting him games on Steam, that would also be a job.


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KotOR is the game that springs to mind, if only because most Dark Side choices result in you earning more credits than you would otherwise (and thus being able to buy better gear), and because the Dark Side powers tend to be better than the Light Side ones.

Also, because it's fun to be able to dominate officials into waiving docking fees or fines while Bastila chastises you and Canderous approvingly points out how useful it is.

Plus, technically speaking, if you pursue either of the romance options you're technically skirting the Dark Side, since a pure Light Sider shouldn't be flaunting the Jedi Code that way (and Bastila will explicitly tell you this and try to break it off).



Zeus posted...

And keep in mind that evil is far more heavily rewarded than good in those games. Thievery will generally net you a lot of items that would be a pain to get otherwise. And, honestly, you resort to break-ins and burglary pretty easy in those games.

The funny thing is, in most games, walking directly into people's houses and taking everything that isn't nailed down is basically standard operating practice. Bethesda games are kind of unique in the sense that they actually differentiate between things you're allowed to take and things you're punished for taking.

Though the one problem with games like Skyrim or ESO is how they handle "stolen" tags. It's annoying on the occasions that you enter someone's house on a mission to murder them for being evil, but can't take anything on the way out because it's all "owned". Umm, not any more, game.

(And seriously, how the fuck does every merchant in the entire world KNOW that fruit I'm trying to sell them is stolen? Do they teach some sort of universal "Detect Theft" spell in merchant school?)



DarkKirby2500 posted...

The "problem" with this as a reward is often, since you are playing a game you (likely) paid for, many people want the additional game play, so it's practically a punishment to allow you the easier path unless the hard path is really hard or there is a severe punishment for failing (that you can't just reload your save from), or the requirement for the good moral choice makes you do a lot or boring menial tasks.

This is actually why a lot of people deliberately do the "good" path first and then do the "evil" path in a second playthrough in games like that.

That way, you get the full experience first time, and the second time around you get the bonus of being able to skip some of the more time-consuming quests.

Though honestly, when all you're really skipping is mostly busywork (like, say, when you can skip over a step or two in an ESO quest by using Persuade or Intimidate), you're not really missing out on much anyway. Whether you go out and kill a dozen wolves for their pelts or steal a dozen pelts directly out of a chest, you're still more or less getting the same degree of experience out of it.



Action53 posted...

In Fallout and Kotor I have a really hard time choosing the "bad guy" actions and dialog or just being dickish to the nice npc characters

That says less about the game and more about you as a person, though.

Not that I disapprove. In most games I wind up even when I'm playing an otherwise evilish character, I tend to try to be "nice" to my allies and friends (which is annoying in more simplistic games where being polite or nice nets you "light side" points). It just seems stupid and counterintuitive that I have to treat people close to me like shit just because I'm evil.

If anything, evil characters should be NICER. And get [Lie] dialogue options.


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Lightning Bolt posted...

I basically need a good way to phrase a central theme that is Inaction vs Action. Or Peace vs Conflict. Submission vs Assertion. But a really flowery and loaded term for each, on par with crap like "Hope". Hmm...

The basic gist of the theme is that the world is made of two kinds of people: those who act and those who don't. Or those who... fight and those who don't?

Dynamism vs Stasis.

:-D


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EclairReturns posted...

I've heard nothing but good things

Then you've never read my comments about it.


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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

There is no "draw." There is a winner and a loser. Name one game you've played where the opponent leaves and you aren't given the victory.

Dark Souls. You win when you kill, you lose when you die. If an invader runs then they still wasted your time, damaged your health or wasted your items; that's a very clear draw.

If their goal is just trolling you, that's actually a win for the person running away, because they achieved their goal while preventing you from achieving yours.


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That's odd. I'd say that topic is a pretty good example of why CE < PotD.


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shadowsword87 posted...

I guess the question is how it's done.
Druids already have that spell, it's called Awaken. They can do it as a level 5 spell.

Awake only works on plants and lower-level animals, though.

Granted, one could assume power enough magic users might develop a higher-level/ritual version of the spell that also reshapes the physical and mental traits of sapient beings, but that would still need a new name, so we're right back in the original boat.

My idea was mostly that a powerful heavy-magic race/culture (I was thinking about a Githyanki/Githzerai-esque sort of race) that could replicate most "technological" feats with pure magic would eventually decide that it would sure be swell to breed their own slave races to do all of their work for them (in sort of the same way humans are currently developing robotics). So they'd basically send recovery teams out into the wild, scoop up mostly primitive (or even feral) "lesser races" (in this case, gnomes and halflings), magically tinker with them for a bit, and then breed them over time like dogs, preserving strains they consider useful in some way, sterilizing out ones they view as negative traits.

In this specific case, the idea was that this race bred humans and dwarves out of halflings (with humans being the halflings who were bred for height and versatility while dwarves were bred for hardiness and compact strength), while elves and orcs were bred out of gnomes. Then each servitor race gets assigned its own specialized tasks (ie, you don't send an elf to go dig in the mines, you don't ask dwarves to hand you things off of high shelves).

Eventually, there was either a slave revolt that killed all the masters and destroyed their empire, and the slave races all sort of spread out on their own and started establishing their own cultures and kingdoms (and "Common" is probably a pidgin form of the empire's original language, since it's the one they all have in common to begin with, vis-a-vis Latin in Europe), or you go the "killed by decadence" route where the masters became so reliant on their slaves and so averse to personal effort that they eventually die out (like the Spacers in Asimov's Robot novels).

Either way, most of the surviving races would never admit to their own shameful beginnings, so whenever someone discovers an ancient magitech ruin somewhere they all just assume it was their own ancestors who built it "before the fall" or some other false scenario that cast their origins in a far better light (like, say, being the chosen race of the progenitors specifically blessed with their mandate, and thus inherently better than everyone else).


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shadowsword87 posted...

I could use some help btw for writing and chosing specific word choices.
So I am working on re-writing all of the DnD stats to emotional stats.
Like Strength turns into Fury, Constitution turns into Stuborness, and I'm splitting Wisdom into Faith and some sort of emotional-feeling sort of name.
I'm just struggling to find good names for Dexterity, Intelligence, Charisma, and said half of Wisdom for reading people/animals plus nature stuff.

Your real problem is that most of them don't really equate well to emotions, because half of them are blatantly physical, two of them are mostly mental, and one of them is less about your own state of mind and more about how other people tend to see you. At best, you could potentially find analogous "mental states", but "emotion" is an awkward label for most of them.

Also, I'd probably drop "Stubbornness" and "Faith", since neither really works well for what they actually are (and "Stubbornness" doesn't really sound suitably fancy/impressive).

I'd probably go with something like "Determination" for Constitution, if we're assuming it's more of a mental gritting of your teeth and pushing on rather than actual physical endurance. "Willpower" might also be a good fit, though if you combine that with using anger for Strength, you might start looking like a Green Lantern/War of Light pastiche (unless you want to straight up embrace that, in which case you should refer to Strength as Rage instead). Though Willpower could also work for Charisma, in the sense that most Charisma saving throws are more like pitting your force of personality and will against that of someone else, and at least part of the social presence you project to others is rooted in your own sense of will. On the other hand, Charisma could also be something like Bravado or Charm (though then you risk getting confused with charm-type spells and effects). You could also go look up synonyms for "chutzpah" or "pizzazz" in a thesaurus.

For Wisdom I'd probably go with something like Enlightenment or Awareness, because are the two sort of states that go with its usual functions (and either can sort of straddle both supernatural and physical knowledge of the world around you).

The problem with Intelligence is that it's more or less the opposite of emotion - it's the clarity of thought you get when emotions are stilled and logic becomes your prime mental state. And on that note, "Clarity" might be a good term for it. "Rationality" or "Intellect" might be other words that imply a mental state.

(And I'll be honest at this point, I'm trying really, really hard not to suggest Arete and Gnosis for Int and Wis. :-P )

Dex is hard because it's the most blatantly physical IMO, but I might steal "Focus" from Lightning Bolt and use it for Dex instead, because it could describe that mindset of pure focus and concentration when you're sort of "in the groove" and everything seems to flow, which is the kind of mindset that would definitely apply when dodging things, shooting bows, or just working on really intricate craft projects.


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Muffinz0rz posted...

There is no "draw." There is a winner and a loser. Name one game you've played where the opponent leaves and you aren't given the victory.

To be fair, this assumes you aren't the only one who considers throwing your rhetorical weight around on the Internet a game in the first place.

If you think you're playing chess while the person sitting across from you is just idly fidgeting with the pieces in random fashion, you don't really "win" when they leave.


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My family has said for years that "When all else fails, read the instructions" is our official family motto.

The other favorite (and the one PotD will probably wholeheartedly agree with for me) is "If you can dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."


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Lightning Bolt posted...

Well obviously. Just put his alt on ignore same as you did his main. Easy.

To be fair, I never put Erik on ignore, but I'm putting this account on ignore because I'm about 98% sure it isn't him. And I have my suspicions about which of our resident trolls it actually is.


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wolfy42 posted...

It's a button.

How do you not push a button?

That is what it is for, pushing.

You might hold off for awhile, maybe a week, a month, maybe even a year or two.

But you all know, eventually, you would push that button.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhLFlIuuyMQ&t=1m12s


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Mead posted...

You're both too afraid to make an actual guess

Guessing is for inferior beings. I only make statements of pure fact.


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Quick question apropos of nothing:

Can anyone think of a good fantasy/magical flavor term for the concept of "uplift" (which is generally a science/science fiction premise)?

I've been mulling the idea of a setting in my head in which a superior long-dead progenitor race uses magic to "uplift" multiple primitive races for slave labor (more specifically, I'm pondering the idea that they created humans - and maybe dwarves - by tinkering with halflings, and managed to create elves by experimenting on gnomes), but it feels like the actual term "uplift" is too science-y in a setting which is 100% magic fantasy.



(While I was typing this post it occurred to me that they might refer to the idea as variations on the term "to exalt", but then it also occurred to me that while calling the process "Exaltation" would sound really neat in an ancient occulty magic sense, that would technically make the subjects of the process "Exalted", which leaves a sour taste in my mouth because another system has already called dibs on that name.)


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PK_Spam posted...

It's actually just a mixture of the leftover flavors at the factory. So the taste differs depending on what batch you got.

Came in to say this.


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Solid Sonic posted...

Is it just a necessary part of the human condition?

Regardless of whether or not it's a necessary part of the human condition, the fact remains that it IS a part of the human condition, and attempts to deny or suppress it don't magically make it go away (and may in fact make it worse).


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NightMareBunny posted...

does anyone remember watching goosebumps on foxkids?

No, because I was in college at the time.

I DO remember reading R.L. Stine's Twist-a-Plot books that predated Goosebumps by about 10 years, though. I still own two of those (I used to have three, but one of them apparently disappeared somewhere long, long ago), as well as two of his Wizards, Warriors, & You books, and all of his GI Joe Find Your Fate books.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#Twist-a-plot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Stine#Wizards.2C_Warriors_and_You


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Every now and then I think about the fact that YCDTOT will never be on DVD due to extremely complicated rights issues, and then I feel sad.


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GanonsSpirit posted...

Why are any Christians watching Preacher to begin with? I've only read the comic, but it's a pretty un-Christian story.

It's more of an anti-Christianity story, especially in later arcs.


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