quiet dusk coming early
Dec. 7th, 2018 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaRealmz is pretty much an unlicensed D&D game with all the serial numbers filed off. Clerics may be called priests but they're still spellcasters who can wear most types of armor but can only use blunt weapons, much like 17th century French war priests.
In later versions, there are the core classes and alternatives to those, like fencers, who are fighters who can only used edged weapons, or cabalists, who are sorcerers who are even worse physical fighters.
It’s funny because a lot of D&D stuff was basically Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off. Here’s a Realmz thing: Halflings are hobbits with the serial numbers filed off. Realmz took the new serial numbers that TSR scrawled on with crayons, filed those off, and called them furfoots.
Kobolds, despite being from German folklore, hence "cobalt," are now called Krise.
Bugbears (boogeyman, not hemiptera) are folkloric creatures as well. Older editions depicted a bear with a jack-o-lantern for a head and it was replaced in later editions of D&D with hairier bigger goblins, which we already have in orcs and ogres and hobgoblins.
Gnolls are from a Lord Dunsany story. They started out as gnome-trolls. Michael described third and future edition gnolls as humanoid hyenas without any of the interesting aspects of hyena society, like their matriarchal structure and their high rate of stillbirths.
Even drow are from Shetlandic folklore, although they're ugly and love music (I'm not sure if they're ugly-cute or just ugly like cutelildrow), while the elves that live in an underground dystopia are either TSR or svartálfar.
Fire giants and ice giants show up but really, they're just jötunn and eldjötnar.
Let me tell you a story about Realmz. So, in the scenario Destroy the Necronomicon (I think you could pull it off in Griloch’s Revenge), you could bypass the registration gates at a specific time in the scenario, however, the game would know that you somehow bypassed the registration process and would occasionally kick you out, and I got through the three bastions by quick-saving every step I took. For whatever reason, he put a second registration checkpoint when you get to the Abyss.
As a middle-schooler, I had a lot more patience.
During my replay of Destroy the Necronomicon, I came to the conclusion that these scenarios were not playtested enough and they were playtested by people who know what an optimal party and optimal spell selection is. Barring something ridiculous like an all-bard party. So the "optimal levels" for the scenarios are way too low and if your levels are above the optimal levels, you take a hit to your experience.
The aging mechanic is terrible but so far, no scenario has taken more than 250 days to complete (I'm about to start White Dagron). Enemies that age you shouldn't exist.
I can't complain too much about the battles with the exploding Hellions because there's a bug that allows me to enter the other mini-bastions without the Deadstones. The fight with the obsidian statues is clever, or would be
I swear all the scenarios have a a really terrible mandatory fight. AoGM had that fight with the anti'ids in which you start out in "helpless" (read: paralyzed and also one hit will KO you) and they get to move first. I hope you saved that annihilate scroll you got in City of Bywater. Everyone talks about the 12 Skeletal Knights in Castle in the Clouds but that fight isn't that bad if everyone has decent agility. Cosmic Blast early on to knock out their spellcasting and then Cloud of Cleavers because it hits every time someone walks into it and the AI, when it can't reach you, likes to move back and forth. It's unfair, really.
I remember Griloch's Revenge being a lot emptier.
I know Sword Dream had alignment but I’m not sure what it affected. I checked Realmz 2.0 (I know I have an earlier version around with character portraits from Dragonlance covers but can’t find the disc its on. I also have version 3.x but I don’t know what MacAddict CD it was on and the only reason I care about that one is because the scenario listed five unreleased scenarios: Griloch’s Revenge, White Dragon, Mythril Vault, and two others and I'm not sure if one of those is Half Truth. I read something about Siege at Natari) and alignment is a thing and I guess paladins can only be orderly. And order is described as “puts the needs of the many above the needs of the few” and chaos is putting themselves as the deciding factor and good is justice and morality and neutral is acting according to circumstances and evil is acting without regard to consequences. Karma was a thing. It’s basically charisma. Michael said he likes the idea of charisma being used for resisting mental effects.
Also, in the older version of Realmz, there was a spell called traverse plane. I believed that using it would open up entirely new areas to me. I think it was supposed to be used in that one part of Destroy the Necronomicon. It also had a bunch of skills that I can only assume were meant to be used in future scenarios and then removed. I'm not sure if hold portal still exists.
I haven’t been keeping up with politics because Realmz but here are a few things: Bush the Elder died. Michael says he was 30 years too late. I said that he was the third best president of my lifetime and that’s just sad. Meanwhile, in Europe, part of Spain elected a far-right party for the first time since Franco. And also, the Republicans are corrupt assholes and want to strip incoming governors of power because they aren’t Republican. The Hoydens and Hoyts are becoming increasingly deranged. On the bright side, things aren’t going too well for James Alex Fields.
The things that keep me up at night:
1. would capture soul even work on Ashley?
2. Do golems have souls in folklore? You can capture a golem in a soul crystal.
3. I’m pretty sure the only mythological creature that specifically doesn’t have a soul is a vampire, which is why they don’t have reflections. Liches have souls but (in D&D, lifted wholesale from the legend of King Koshchey the Deathless) they store them elsewhere.
4. I’m going by a FFXIII definition of souls when I say Ashley’s an empty vessel. Although I think we’re talking soul crystals, which can captures vampires. If I did create a simulacrum of Ashley, it would last ten turns and not do anything useful. Going by Avernum logic, she’d just be a generic townsperson and would serve little purpose, not even as a meat shield.
4a. I did like create illusions in vanilla Avernum, because a. it summoned six of them, b. they dealt damage, and c. the enemy AI didn't ignore them or wipe them out with an attack that would also damage you.
5. Firefox spell check doesn't recognize golem?
Michael knew someone who played a lich character in D&D simply because it saved him the trouble of creating a new character whenever he died.
Courtney has a bunny named Benjamin. He has gray splotches.
Primrose had a dream about the dogs talking to her. Daisy had an angry British accent.
Jess was eating curried chicken from Whole Foods.
The night before, I had some really amazing pizza: d.o.p. san marzano tomatoes, spinach, mozzarella, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, mushrooms, red onions, hot cherry peppers, balsamic reduction.
One of the hawks picked a guinea pig's leg bones clean and Dova ate a DOA robin.
I'm not sure why armor rating and magic resist are dodge and take no damage respectively, rather than a damage reduction. Okay, I understand why they are for a tabletop game but in Realmz, the computer does all the math.
burning question: who's better at math than a robot? They're made of math.
In later versions, there are the core classes and alternatives to those, like fencers, who are fighters who can only used edged weapons, or cabalists, who are sorcerers who are even worse physical fighters.
It’s funny because a lot of D&D stuff was basically Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off. Here’s a Realmz thing: Halflings are hobbits with the serial numbers filed off. Realmz took the new serial numbers that TSR scrawled on with crayons, filed those off, and called them furfoots.
Kobolds, despite being from German folklore, hence "cobalt," are now called Krise.
Bugbears (boogeyman, not hemiptera) are folkloric creatures as well. Older editions depicted a bear with a jack-o-lantern for a head and it was replaced in later editions of D&D with hairier bigger goblins, which we already have in orcs and ogres and hobgoblins.
Gnolls are from a Lord Dunsany story. They started out as gnome-trolls. Michael described third and future edition gnolls as humanoid hyenas without any of the interesting aspects of hyena society, like their matriarchal structure and their high rate of stillbirths.
Even drow are from Shetlandic folklore, although they're ugly and love music (I'm not sure if they're ugly-cute or just ugly like cutelildrow), while the elves that live in an underground dystopia are either TSR or svartálfar.
Fire giants and ice giants show up but really, they're just jötunn and eldjötnar.
Let me tell you a story about Realmz. So, in the scenario Destroy the Necronomicon (I think you could pull it off in Griloch’s Revenge), you could bypass the registration gates at a specific time in the scenario, however, the game would know that you somehow bypassed the registration process and would occasionally kick you out, and I got through the three bastions by quick-saving every step I took. For whatever reason, he put a second registration checkpoint when you get to the Abyss.
As a middle-schooler, I had a lot more patience.
During my replay of Destroy the Necronomicon, I came to the conclusion that these scenarios were not playtested enough and they were playtested by people who know what an optimal party and optimal spell selection is. Barring something ridiculous like an all-bard party. So the "optimal levels" for the scenarios are way too low and if your levels are above the optimal levels, you take a hit to your experience.
The aging mechanic is terrible but so far, no scenario has taken more than 250 days to complete (I'm about to start White Dagron). Enemies that age you shouldn't exist.
I can't complain too much about the battles with the exploding Hellions because there's a bug that allows me to enter the other mini-bastions without the Deadstones. The fight with the obsidian statues is clever, or would be
I swear all the scenarios have a a really terrible mandatory fight. AoGM had that fight with the anti'ids in which you start out in "helpless" (read: paralyzed and also one hit will KO you) and they get to move first. I hope you saved that annihilate scroll you got in City of Bywater. Everyone talks about the 12 Skeletal Knights in Castle in the Clouds but that fight isn't that bad if everyone has decent agility. Cosmic Blast early on to knock out their spellcasting and then Cloud of Cleavers because it hits every time someone walks into it and the AI, when it can't reach you, likes to move back and forth. It's unfair, really.
I remember Griloch's Revenge being a lot emptier.
I know Sword Dream had alignment but I’m not sure what it affected. I checked Realmz 2.0 (I know I have an earlier version around with character portraits from Dragonlance covers but can’t find the disc its on. I also have version 3.x but I don’t know what MacAddict CD it was on and the only reason I care about that one is because the scenario listed five unreleased scenarios: Griloch’s Revenge, White Dragon, Mythril Vault, and two others and I'm not sure if one of those is Half Truth. I read something about Siege at Natari) and alignment is a thing and I guess paladins can only be orderly. And order is described as “puts the needs of the many above the needs of the few” and chaos is putting themselves as the deciding factor and good is justice and morality and neutral is acting according to circumstances and evil is acting without regard to consequences. Karma was a thing. It’s basically charisma. Michael said he likes the idea of charisma being used for resisting mental effects.
Also, in the older version of Realmz, there was a spell called traverse plane. I believed that using it would open up entirely new areas to me. I think it was supposed to be used in that one part of Destroy the Necronomicon. It also had a bunch of skills that I can only assume were meant to be used in future scenarios and then removed. I'm not sure if hold portal still exists.
I haven’t been keeping up with politics because Realmz but here are a few things: Bush the Elder died. Michael says he was 30 years too late. I said that he was the third best president of my lifetime and that’s just sad. Meanwhile, in Europe, part of Spain elected a far-right party for the first time since Franco. And also, the Republicans are corrupt assholes and want to strip incoming governors of power because they aren’t Republican. The Hoydens and Hoyts are becoming increasingly deranged. On the bright side, things aren’t going too well for James Alex Fields.
The things that keep me up at night:
1. would capture soul even work on Ashley?
2. Do golems have souls in folklore? You can capture a golem in a soul crystal.
3. I’m pretty sure the only mythological creature that specifically doesn’t have a soul is a vampire, which is why they don’t have reflections. Liches have souls but (in D&D, lifted wholesale from the legend of King Koshchey the Deathless) they store them elsewhere.
4. I’m going by a FFXIII definition of souls when I say Ashley’s an empty vessel. Although I think we’re talking soul crystals, which can captures vampires. If I did create a simulacrum of Ashley, it would last ten turns and not do anything useful. Going by Avernum logic, she’d just be a generic townsperson and would serve little purpose, not even as a meat shield.
4a. I did like create illusions in vanilla Avernum, because a. it summoned six of them, b. they dealt damage, and c. the enemy AI didn't ignore them or wipe them out with an attack that would also damage you.
5. Firefox spell check doesn't recognize golem?
Michael knew someone who played a lich character in D&D simply because it saved him the trouble of creating a new character whenever he died.
Courtney has a bunny named Benjamin. He has gray splotches.
Primrose had a dream about the dogs talking to her. Daisy had an angry British accent.
Jess was eating curried chicken from Whole Foods.
The night before, I had some really amazing pizza: d.o.p. san marzano tomatoes, spinach, mozzarella, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, mushrooms, red onions, hot cherry peppers, balsamic reduction.
One of the hawks picked a guinea pig's leg bones clean and Dova ate a DOA robin.
I'm not sure why armor rating and magic resist are dodge and take no damage respectively, rather than a damage reduction. Okay, I understand why they are for a tabletop game but in Realmz, the computer does all the math.
burning question: who's better at math than a robot? They're made of math.
