Bay 12 Games Forum

So you checked what armor she had, so was she wearing any armor? Also what 'spirit' attributes did she have? Like spatial sense and ability to heal and the like?

Sorry, didn't check any of that.

Any ideas what would make a dwarf child seemingly impervious to damage?

I took a long break from DF, but recently went back. I thought I was having a good run: hadn't quite set up the military yet and the fortress defenses were perhaps not as good as they should be, but I had an above-ground walled in area for foreign crops, fortifications on top of the wall, a spiral runway descending to a depot, a well fed by an aquifer, and plenty of underground pastures, so the dwarves could at least hunker down and survive an invasion. First vile force of darkness lost their leader to serrated glass disks, which put an end to that siege very quickly. And the minotaur walked right into a cage trap.

Then the second siege happened, right as the dwarf caravan showed up. I tried to keep the gates open a while for the wagons to make it inside, but when I saw the wagons were already being slaughtered, I shut the fortress up. Glass disks did some damage to goblins, but didn't break the siege this time. Goblins slaughtered every animal they could find and then just hung around... so I came up with a plan to lure part of them into a trap, but this required opening the main gate temporarily and then closing it.

It got jammed. Goblins and trolls swarmed the fort and started slaughtering every last dwarf, including the babies.

... Except two. The mayor was badly wounded and had crept away somewhere to rest, and the goblins didn't know where he was yet. The other was a child; I watched her creep out of hiding, trying to make it to a food stockpile, then running away as a goblin pursued her a short ways. This happened several times, then at one point she made it all the way out to the main fortress and fled down some stairs. Goblins surrounded her and attacked her, but... her health status was "stunned", "hungry", "thirsty", "drowsy" and "unhappy".

She was only a year old and born in the fort, so I don't think she was a vampire. Combat reports were showing goblins armed with silver maces and scimitars swinging and missing, repeatedly.

So were the goblins just incompetent, or is there some other way a kid could be invincible?

Quote from: talysman on June 02, 2012, 11:00:01 pm

Haven't played D&D for... three months. Group broke up.

What? Why did that happen?

One guy's life interfered. Another guy moved to another state. I was actually spending too much money/time travelling to and from the game, so when the group shrank, I didin't feel it was worth it. If it weren't for the expense and distance, I would have happily ran drop-in games for months until we scored enough replacement players for a regular campaign.

I know you *really* only replied because you wanted to suggest OD&D was the problem, but actually everyone loved that. Everything was loose, quick and fun. The players involved were all refugees from ... less quick and fun editions, let's say.

It was a business decision for Blizzard to take an entirely offline game like D2 and turn it into an online game. I understand their reasons, it's just that the reasons are all excellent for them and inconvenient for me.

I've got no dog in this particular fight, since I dislike Diablo's play style in general and the issue of offline vs. online is thus not important, but this attitude you describe -- making business decisions based on convenience for the company instead of desirability in a customer's eyes -- seems to be more common in the business world these days and usually doesn't result in better sales.

Remember about 12 years ago, when the big internet buzzword was "push"? And tech magazines like Wired and Byte were talking about how push technologies were going to change the way we experienced the internet, because people weren't going to go to websites when they felt like it any more, but would get products "pushed" to them when businesses felt like it?

What, you never heard of that? Maybe that's because it was something that customers didn't give a crap about and didn't want. Like that new degradable CD technology from about 15 years ago, where you could pay two bucks for a CD single that would play 10 to 20 times and then stop playing, making you buy another copy if you wanted to hear the song again. That technology changed the way we listen to music today!

Edit: I guess I should say that push technology still exists; it's just that the only push applications that succeeded were things like RSS subscriptions or weather apps, or other situations where the customer decides what they want and how often, as opposed to what the marketing buzz of the late '90s - early 2000s was claiming as the next big thing: targeted advertising applets.

I'd be happy as a clam if I could get a couple forts I'm playing down to one or even two dwarves, severed limbs or no severed limbs. I kind of want to abandon the forts and make them lairs for adventure mode, but I feel I should wait until they've suffered some catastrophe that isn't outright murder on my part (no deliberate flooding, for example, which would defeat the purpose, anyways.)

But dammit, my fort that was limping along is now back to population 67, and the other fort that I thought would be slaughtered by the legendary dragon or the three or four sieges is back in the 90s. IDJUTS JUST WON'T DIE!!!

Huh. Is that really differnt from D&D I am wondering? I mean. In a D&D in a setting you need at least four books. PH, DMG, MM and then the setting book. And that is core only. There is at least half a dozen other books that are considered by many to be normal to use (the complete series) then the dozens of other books which are nice to at least have on hand to pull a monster or spell out of once in a while since they all mesh thematically.

Which edition?

You can get by with just the first three in 1st edition. Technically, since there's a monster list in the back of the DMG, you can get by with just two. If you don't have a copy, there's an all-in-one-volume clone, OSRIC, which will work just fine.

With OD&D, I use only Men & Magic and Monsters & Treasure, most of the time. They are very small books... and I have them in PDF on my e-reader, anyways. There's only a couple mechanics to learn from U&WA, anyways, and I have the mechanics memorized, plus there are tricks to building monsters or improvising prices, so I actually mostly just refer to my notes, rather than to a book. I have a copy of Swords & Wizardry Complete at the table for the players, if they want to look up spells or prices. The experience is roughly the same with other clones (Labyrinth Lord is one book, for example.)

Just broke a third siege, which had shown up inconveniently when I was making modifications to my entrances and couldn't seal the fort conveniently. Some losses. For some reason, though, the goblins always get disheartened when I pour magma on their heads.

Because my old computer gets bogged down this late in the game. I keep *hoping* for large die-offs of dwarves, but don't want to do anything deliberately suicidal. Current plan is to make some candy armor/weapons and use goblin and troll prisoners to train some legendary potential migrants before I abandon. Maybe also make a spare suit for an adventurer to find?

I have two possible deaths planned for the fort:
(1) train that legendary dragon I captured. I figure it's impossible, or will go wild quickly, slaying many. Use DFhack and mark the place as the dragon's lair before abandoning.
(2) dig down through this candy to reach the circus, which I've never done before.

Which is going to be more fun?