Bay 12 Games Forum

Actually, I'm semi-sure those little rooms count as vaults, too. There's lesser vaults that don't have the locked door message. Items should still persist in them.

The locked ones are definite, though.

I sadly expect this to pass in May, because the primary will be heavy on Republican turnout, less so in an uncontested Democratic Presidential race.

I feel your pain. I was absolutely pissed, if not particularly surprised, when amendment 7 passed down here in Florida. The bloody bill actually took more rights away from heterosexual couples than homosexual ones, but damned if it didn't get spun like it was an anti-homosexual marriage law. And passed.

As it bothers Andir, it bothers me. I really, tremendously wish the legal aspect of marriage was completely decoupled from the religious one. It really does sound (perhaps naively) like it would solve so many problems and make the situation infinitely more clear.

There's solid and beneficial reasons for domestic partnership on a legal level, but no good reason at all to call it marriage or restrict it to heterosexual couples -- or even sexually involved individuals at all, really.

The purpose of our justice system is to rehabilitate, not punish, or at least it should be in my eyes.

That's definitely both the ideal, the goal we should be aiming for, and by and large what the US justice system doesn't do and isn't interested in. There's been progress, though, and a certain degree of shift toward that line of thinking. Definitely not there, yet.

The question of the death penalty is (or should be, at least) largely what is to be done with those that can't be rehabilitated, and weren't caught before they managed actual and significant harm. Lifetime incarceration is at least as morally abhorrent as killing the person in question (The choice here is between many years of torture, followed by death, as Aqizzar says, or simply death.), and definitely more expensive. The third choice -- allowing the individual in question to go free and continue to do harm -- isn't something I'd see as anyone allowing for a viable option.

If rehabilitation isn't possible (and the chance has been genuinely exhausted), murdering the individual in question isn't acceptable, and incarceration just as great an evil as execution, what option is left? It's an incredibly troubling place to be when killing someone is the lesser evil and no alternatives are presented.

Most folks (well, me, in my experience) just bull on through the fire damage. They've either got the resists to survive it or the healing to overpower it long enough to murder whatever cast the spell. You can also hit either yourself or the caster (I forget which, but I'm fairly sure it's the caster.) with a ruination staff and dispel the fearscape effect, knocking you back into normal world. Not an option for an AM user, though. Generally, though, the lava floor doesn't do enough damage to kill you before you kill the enemy. Your best bet as an AM user would have been to pull AM shield up (would have reduced the fire damage) and possibly mana clash'd the giant, in the hope it drained its vim enough to break the spell (which has some upkeep to it, iirc).

As for fearscape's regularity, well, it's a corruptor talent. The player has access to it, too. You'll see it as often as you see corruptor class'd random unqiues or classed enemies that happen to have access to it. In my personal experience, though, you're not likely to encounter it more than a few times over a game. There's two guaranteed encounters with it, that I can recall (Grand Corruptor, shoeimp), but the rest comes from enemies with some classes tacked onto 'em.

Okay, probably maybe my last question for a while:
Do quests generally have any kind of time limit? A lot of the Alchemist ones so far have suggested so but I don't know if it's just flavor or actually a mechanic.

Only time time limits are involved in quests you'll actually have a little timer counting down on your status bar. Otherwise, there's no time limit. You can take as long as you want on the alchie quests.

On that note, I went and asked somebody I know who lives there. this is what I got.

Quote

intelligent is a strong word
they are very food oriented and will remember things based on jow it pertains to getting food and they know some tricks and are designed in such a way that unwary creatures become food  but im not sure id place them in the intelligent category

Floridian ho! Actually, we generally don't care about alligators down here, other than the obvious bits of 'don't screw with them, they won't screw with you'.

Never seen much mention about their intelligence, but the area I'm in, despite being gator infested, isn't exactly a breeding ground of people that care about the intelligence of animals. More interest in whether they taste good (alligator does, indeed, taste pretty good, though I haven't had it very often), how to catch them for the purpose of eating them (sharp metal pole into brain, i.e. 'jigging (Gyg-ing)'; alternately, dog hanging from rope with hooks and suchlike. No, I'm not joking, people have done this. Fortunately haven't been witness to it.), and how to avoid getting bits removed by them (re: don't screw with).

That said, my father did illegally keep one as a pet for a few years, a very young one. I was too young to be able to really pay attention to it, but it wasn't a particularly stupid animal. More intelligent than snakes, less intelligent than dogs tend to appear to be. Kinda' cute and likes to be petted, when they're young. Similar to snakes in that regard, actually.

I mean, hell, the current worth of people has already been diminished by things like animal intelligence studies (tool creation, occasional innovation, etc.).

The question that arises to me fairly often, especially re: human worth: Is it really that bad of a thing for human worth to be diminished a bit? Take this in the least offensive way possible (if possible, heh) -- it's just that the sheer arrogance of our species tends to be offputting to me fairly often. We're not very special creatures, from what I've seen (though we've got some very nice tricks), we just seem to tend to think we are. Just seems like, if the worth of people wasn't so bloody inflated, we wouldn't quite so willing to go screw with things not-us.

I'd wager that many American meat-lovers would be too squeamish to actually slaughter and butcher an animal.

American meat-lover here, and this is completely true. I actually have trouble eating meat when there's still bones in it and tend to get a bit squeamish when I actually think about what the meat is and where it came from Why eat meat then, you ask? Because it tastes good and I love the texture of certain kinds of meat, prepared in the proper way. If there was actually a non-meat alternative to this that didn't cost out the (and taste like) ass, I'd be all over it.

I've also got a terribly sneaking suspicion that, if we weren't exploiting food animals for, well, food, we would have killed them off somehow long ago. That tends to be what happens to animals we're not using somehow Not a good thing, but it seems to be the pattern.

That said, there's a lot of meat eaters in the more rural areas that actually do hunt, kill, clean, and prepare their own meat at least occasionally. Not terribly uncommon for city folk of certain inclinations to do the same thing, actually. It's definitely a minority of the meat eating population, though.

None that that tends to improve their opinion of animals above the normal cultural one (exploitexploitexploit), though, at least not in an statistically significant sense. At best, it'll encourage a bit more of a conservationist (hold off exploiting fully now, so can exploit more over the long term) slant in folks.

Side question here, but let's say that someone finds a way to "turn off" the desire for animals to kill each other turning them all into herbivores... would you think that would impact future generations?

Utterly horrific violation of personal something-or-other (word forgotten!) that would be if extended to humans aside, I'm terribly certain, as RedKing stated, that would be be an utter ecological trainwreck that would cause a tremendous amount of mass extinction -- it would probably match or surpass humanity's current tally of other-species-killed-largely-or-entirely-by-us in one fell swoop. This would be an awe inspiring achievement, in the classic sense of awe.

It would also cause an incredible economic crisis if applied to humanity in one go.

Any case, herbivores kill each other for reasons not involving food, so there's no telling how much of a genuine difference that would make. What would you be trying to accomplish with such an action?

Recent discussion leads me to an odd question re: gender in media. Has anyone seen, read, or played, something where the gender for one or more of the characters is literally not mentioned, at all? Hopefully the question isn't a derail, heh.

The only thing I've came close to seeing that, personally, was in an odd bit of fairly lengthy fanfiction, where the main character's gender in something like 2-400 thousand words worth of text was mentioned precisely twice -- I missed it the first time, and spent probably 150k+ words thinking the character was female (though I don't quite remember why, at this point -- it's been a few months since I read it, when he wasn't. It was a good thing, anyway.). This particular piece of fiction also managed to not mention the main character's name, at all, up to the point in it I had read. Was interesting, and well enough done overall for a piece of fanfic...

Generally, vault walls are undiggable, though some vaults may have certain tiles within or around them that can be dug out. There's some issues in certain zones (Daikara, possibly one of the orc pirdes) with some tiles being diggable, and some tiles not, and certain actions occasionally causing tiles to switch between the two states.

As a general rule, however, a tile either can be dug out or it can't. If you finish a dig attempt completely (i.e. aren't interrupted by a monster), then if the wall can be dug, it will be dug. If it's not dug, then the wall cannot be dug out, period.

(Complete newb here)
I keep seeing people saying you can buy extra rune/infusion slots using category points... How?

Use a infusion while you've got a spare cat point and your inscription slots are filled up. It'll give you an option to buy a new slot with the cat point.

More than that, the place the crystal clear waters mod (which is pretty much exactly what I want, bleeeh) is hosted has apparently voluntarily shut itself down while trying to figure out why it's got that warning up. So there's no way to actually get the mod right now, apparently.

Which I guess means wait until it comes back up... unless someone has a different link for the mod, hmm...