Bay 12 Games Forum

Rod of dirt moves dirt. It doesn't make dirt. It's just a toy that lets you move a block of dirt at a distance. Unless one of the more recent patches changed things, anyway.

+1 culinary experimentation get: Toasted hashbrown sandwich with cheese and BBQ sauce. Results: Disturbingly edible.

That's still news? I know people were protesting BP for a while after that but I thought it stopped being news like 3 years ago.

It's still news in the sense it's still fucking up peoples lives and we're still getting notable ecological damage and the occasional tarball washing up on shore, here in the gulf.

You can apparently spawn considerably more than just statue stuff, though. Perhaps not easily, but again, that Red Cloud thing did boss and miniboss summons and whatnot*. Though do guess that had to be somewhat player driven, but... still.

*And no doubt, a switch linked to a platform over some lava holding something like a guide voodoo doll may be workable.

For that one specifically, it would have been fraud, iirc. Second choice. Minors can enter contracts (they just have... something like a right to annulment? Wrong word, but it's along those lines. Contract isn't void, but is voidable.), unconscionablity pretty much always gets laughed out of court, and I'm fairly sure the statute of frauds wouldn't apply to this particular contract.

Coins are like a high score for me, heh. I always hoard gold and platinum, just to see how much I can walk out of the dungeon with. No more than that, though, and in challenge games the gold sometimes gets left behind eventually... when you're toting like 50 stone worth of gold, it's time to offload. Most I actually tend to use the stuff on, beyond the store, is the occasional barter. If you've got enough cha (13 min, iirc), you can get some pretty nice buffs out of that.

Store itself... I pretty regularly nab some early game stuff -- all mages immediately buy leather armor and wear it. Do this, or bonebats will eat your brain (any coverage at all will negate bonebat stat damage -- yes, that means mage armor doesn't do jack against them.). Also small critters will trade in the small backpack for gnomish, if possible. My casters will do that if they're medium, too, since it offers a larger unique item cap and weight load, but smaller max item size (i.e. if you're not toting around weapons in it, you're better off with gnomish). Mages are also likely to buy a book or two -- the store tends to sell place and time and practical divinings, ferex, both of which have some fairly useful spells (call companions, detect secret door, etc.) that you want ASAP.

Beyond that, it's not uncommon to haul back for cure disease/poison, remove curse, or that ID wand if the dungeon isn't being helpful that day or (in the case of disease/poison/curse) I'm sufficiently desperate and full up on cash. Actual cha/diplo critters sometimes heads back up after finding transoil and plenty of gold, to pick up one of those ridiculous +5 doom weapons the shop's carrying or somethin'. Shop actually tends to have some killer kit in it, it's just by the time you've got the gold you've forgotten the shop exists, ha.

As for Knowledge (Magic)... I tend to forget it can do that, ha. Most non-scroll scribers just invest a bit in decipher script instead, coast on squeezing more out of ID scrolls. And the scroll scribers eventually end up able to scribe greater ID scrolls, at which point the identification game becomes rather superfluous, ha.

If there's like 20 items in a chest that's pretty ridiculous. There must be an easier way, right?

F8 by default. There's a loot macro, heh.

And yeah, prices are bloody expensive if you don't have decent cha and some ranks in diplomacy.

That said, especially for high luck characters, you'll be able to buy anything in that store regardless of your charisma or social skills by around the sixth or seventh (maybe eighth or ninth, I'unno. Before the end, anyway.) dungeon level, if you can stand backtracking (and it often is a good idea for that ID wand, if you don't find enough sources of ID elsewhere before then). I've had characters end the game with around a million GP, iirc (if, admittedly, a base 18 -- that is, 22 effective starting off -- luck halfling in challenge mode >_>). Definitely over 500k.

MOBA is just something they made up so they didn't have to say 'LoL is similar to AoS'.

... except it's not that LoL is similar to AoS (though it is), it's that LoL is an AoS map. Which... they're not difficult to describe. Two+ sides, computer controlled smaller critters, player controlled bigger/more important critters, everyone trying to kill everyone else. That's basically it. They're... not hard to identify. At all. Battleships, DotA, the varying AoS-style maps... line wars is arguably a variant, but it's sufficiently differentiated to be its own thing. Mainly by the players controlling spawns more directly -- AoS maps can have that, too (See Tides of Blood, EotA, many others), but it's usually an extra degree off and not tied directly to income.

Really, the problem with moba is they're trying to make a catchall term for something that is a very specific derivative of a very specific style and it's... catching considerably more than that style. Unsurprisingly.

AoS as a term for the style (subgenre, whatever you want to call it) worked for largely the same reason roguelike works, in largely the same way. Fairly descriptive in major strokes of (one of) the defining works within the style. DotA, LoL, HoN -- even awesomenauts -- are AoS-style games because that's exactly what they are, and trying to fit them into some other term starts catching other stuff. Like Arena-style maps (See... what was it, Bloodlines Champions?), which are, again, just a bloody WC3 custom map.

Could alternately just call them WC3 custom maps and be honest about it, too Or RTT (Real-time tactical, which is more or less what most AoS games are -- a smaller, more focused RTS with most of the S automated), which would be fine until someone actually pulls their head from their nethers and makes an AoS that takes advantage of modern computers (well, and code less shitty than WC3's) and actual working brain cells. Which I'm still waiting for *grumble grumble*