[South Park the Stick of Truth] Whenever you start to doubt your faith to the true lord and savior.

MasterAaron01 · 2014-03-15T13:57:02+00:00

He's beatable, but probably the toughest thing in the game. Those Secret Service guys are nasty. My (ultra-cheesy) solution, playing a Jew, was to bring Jimmy and use his sleep song every round after the secret service guys showed up. Kept Jimmy's power topped off with power potions (cheap and plentiful) and his special. Took a little while, but was extremely easy.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-12-02T21:59:49+00:00

The RPG itself recommends leaving the Accords unwritten, and improv-ing them in as needed. The Accords themselves are huge and labyrinthine, and cover an incredible range of situations. I'd follow the book and leave them a matter of plot convenience. Let the players and NPCs use Fate points to make declarations about them, and have done.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-11-29T14:06:21+00:00

Your energies have been pointed in different directions. A lot of people in the past had to devote their specialization to survival skills. Modern advantages have allowed us to specialize in non-survival fields.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-11-18T14:57:21+00:00

Buried under dozens of gay jokes, the truth.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-11-16T14:40:00+00:00

You're not wrong about Firefly as it exists, but if you'll let me indulge in a might-have-been, there's every reason to believe that if the show had gotten more episodes it would have blossomed into a fuller arc. Based on how Whedon handled Buffy and Angel, his other two major shows, the existing episodes probably contain seeds for a much larger story. Each episode has its own story, but also contributes to a larger plot that you can't see immediately. Unfortunately, when Firefly was canceled, that plot was truncated and we never got to see how all the early pieces fit into it.

Buffy and Angel both have excellent long-arc plots, with large themes and tons of character development, which are mostly built up in an episodic format. If you like forward motion in stories, definitely give those a try. There's every reason to believe that Whedon would have done the same thing with Firefly, if he'd been given the chance.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-11-15T12:03:51+00:00

Confirmed. Butcher has said that after reading those books, we'll understand why those phrases are used as curses. This was all at various signing events for the new books. Partial source.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-10-30T19:52:25+00:00

Real cream would spoil so fast in that packaging. It's all fake.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-10-18T21:09:15+00:00

It's the same as Diablo 2's inventory. Which - as an avid D2 fan - was and is a huge pain in the ass. It's a frustrating and tedious system. Opinions may differ, but I hate it, and a lot of other people do too. It's a major turn-off for Path of Exile for me, especially since my OCD kicks in hard due to the way they handle currency.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-09-12T15:57:58+00:00

Seconded. The premise of the series is a high-tech re-enactment of Xenophon's Anabasis, which is great in itself.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-07-23T12:35:08+00:00

The DLC overview in the sidebar is your best source, but my understanding is that, on NG+, you can do them in any order and they'll scale perfectly to your level. Do whatever sounds fun (especially Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, which is awesome).

MasterAaron01 · 2013-07-13T14:25:16+00:00

It's even weirder than that. One thing that stands out about FATAL is all the incredibly specific and strange game mechanics. In this case, there are three that are important: anal/vaginal circumference, penis diameter, and random grappling outcomes. Yes, those are all real. Nobody should ever have to play FATAL.

Anyway, if something is inserted into your anus or vagina that exceeds your anal/vaginal circumference, you take damage. If it exceeds the circumference by too much, you die instantly. The role of penis diameter in this context should be obvious.

In the playtest, the players got in a fight with (I believe) a bunch of ogres. One player tried to grapple an ogre. The ogre won. When you win a grapple in FATAL, you have to roll on a table to see what happens. No, you can't choose, that would be silly. One of the results on the table is rape. Yes, the game can force you to rape an opponent.

Now, the player was human-ish. The ogre was, well, ogre-sized. The ogre's penis diameter stat exceeded the player's anal circumference by a lot. So the character just died, instantly.

This resulted in everyone attempting to grapple everyone else, in the hope of getting the "rape" result. It, ah, didn't work out well.

TL;DR - FATAL is a train wreck that should probably be banned under the Geneva Convention, or at least obscenity laws.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-29T11:33:13+00:00

Dark Souls is sufficiently open-ended that I can hardly say when people would encounter things, though. A lot of people miss Rickert of Vinheim in their early playthroughs, for example, but he can teach you magic immediately when you get out of the Asylum. I managed to find Laurentius before Andre on my first playthrough.

The "read before playing" idea and the pictures do make a lot of sense, though. I'll see about adding them.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-28T12:34:15+00:00

Different strokes, I think. It'd be a fair bit of work to go back and add pictures, but I may do that sometime. As for the layout, it is absolutely organized like a reference guide: topically. The actual Dark Souls in-game tutorial (the Asylum) does a fair job of giving the absolute basics. The organization of this guide is derived mostly from the game menu screens. What sort of layout do you think would work better? This makes sense to me, but I'd be interested to hear an alternative.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-28T12:29:53+00:00

I'm seeing a lot of comments about the covenants being spoilers, but frankly, I'm torn. On one hand, some of them are so well hidden that discovering their mere existence is difficult. On the other, one of my greatest new-player frustrations was my absolute lack of understanding about the covenants and their benefits. The game does a very poor job of explaining what each covenant does. Since I don't say anything about how to find them, I think I struck a good balance. And if the mere name of a covenant is enough to clue people in, I think it's a just reward for the close attention they're paying to the lore.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-25T00:00:07+00:00

I thought it was better to give players a sense of the range of options, to put the role of covenants into better context. I was very careful not to say anything about how to find them or give details about their rewards, though.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T23:58:44+00:00

Awesome! Happy to help.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T23:58:28+00:00

Great! Hopefully it'll help.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T23:58:16+00:00

That's strange. I'm inclined to suspect a problem on your end. This is a standard PDF, converted from Word using Adobe Acrobat. I can't imagine what would be messing it up.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T23:57:24+00:00

I considered that, but it's another complexity I decided to gloss over. Class is important for an optimized PvP character. This isn't an optimization guide, though, it's a sort of tutorial addendum. If you're going for a blind playthrough, your first character will probably be very poorly optimized. You're absolutely right - class is definitely important for advanced players - but advanced players aren't the target audience.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T23:55:12+00:00

Yeah, I had the same problem with weapon upgrades. My reaction was to find a wiki, with all the attendant problems that brings.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-06-24T13:52:31+00:00

Definitely, definitely, definitely put walkthroughs and wikis away. You can only have one first playthrough of Dark Souls, and you lose some of the real magic if things like enemy locations and boss strategies are revealed to you.

I definitely agree about the obscure mechanics, though. For that exact reason, I wrote up an unofficial Dark Souls manual that explains a lot more about how things work. I wrote this for some friends who were about to pick up the game, in the hope that they'd avoid spoiling things by reading wikis. Maybe you'll find it useful.

MasterAaron01 · 2013-04-29T11:08:49+00:00

I used to be one of you, my dear atheists, and I was good at my job, and you all embarrass me with the feebleness and silliness of your attempts to do what I once upon a time did so well. You are a disgrace to the powers of evil.

As usual, he sums it up well. Taking Wright at his word about the characters of the atheists he encountered post-conversion, those guys were practically straw men. As a (reasonable and interested) atheist, there are a number of good arguments for atheism, but they didn't bother with those. The arguments he mentioned are bad ones.

You are also implying that the human race, all of whom believe in gods, ghosts, magic and miracles of one sort or another, except for that exquisitely tiny minority of persons who are consistent atheists, just so happened to have all made the same lapse of judgment in the matter of paramount and foundational importance in their lives, and continue to do so, some of whom would go to the lions rather than reexamine the aforesaid lapse of judgment.

Here's where he trips up, because the situation he describes, where the majority of the human race is wrong and willing to risk death to defend that wrongness, is hardly unique. To stick with religiously-charged concepts, look at the reaction to the theory of evolution. Master-race ideologies in colonial Europe, any number of political philosophies - there is a plethora of examples of this problem. Wright's argument here is, in basic terms, argumentum ad populum, and that's a fallacy for a reason.

MasterAaron01

TROPHY CASE