As we all know, one of the missions of this blog is to share excellent or not so excellent fashion statements on television shows. In that vein, I feel that I would be remiss if I did not share the following with you:
The first bit of this is also quite informative for other such fashion statements, as well as amusing ass kicking moments and dialogue.
This blog, which offers up various iconic photographs with commentary. Super cool.
In which Sarah and I, driving down Dixwell, get whomped by a car behind us stopping just a little too late at a red light. Humans are fine, no worries. Cars, maybe not so much, as you can see. Offhand, I’d say I need a new bumper.
Teal’c says, remember to drive and dress safely, kids.
In homage to my original post on the subject, and because I just got Astarius about where I want him to be, let’s do a little more show and tell, and bring that last post up to date. Really new stuff at the end, some scattered updates throughout.
Valerius: Male Dunmer Custom Class, Level 29, Sign of the Lady
Playing Time: 70h, 2m (144 game days)
Skills: Blade 125, Alteration 47, Destruction 75, Mysticism 59, Restoration 56, Light Armor 100, Sneak 72
Factions: Champion of Cyrodiil, Mage’s Guild (Arch-Mage), Fighter’s Guild (Master), Blades (Knight-Brother), Knights of the White Stallion (Knight-Errant)
My first character, who also beat the main quest, explored a LOT, and did two factions worth of quests (Fighter’s Guild? It sucks. Trust me here.). As you can see, primarily a light armor blade fighter, with a bit of magical versatility (only since you have to really devote to magic, not really). He worked, as far as he went, but light armor, blade-wielding, non-stealth characters are pretty rough going, so my first game was pretty challenging, until I reached high levels and custom enchanting, and then…well, not so much, really.
Twitch: Male Khajiit Custom Class, Level 25, Sign of the Warrior
Playing Time: 54h, 22m (172 game days)
Skills: Blade 68, Acrobatics 60, Light Armor 68, Marksman 115, Mercantile 53, Security 104, Sneak 111
Factions: Champion of Cyrodiil, Arena (Grand Champion), Dark Brotherhood (Listener), Thieves’ Guild (Gray Fox), Order of the Virtuous Blood (Brother), Knights of the Thorn (Honorary Knight)
Twitch is a result of Samson and Whir going “You don’t have a Dark Brotherhood character? It’s the best faction in the game! What’s WRONG with you!?” Since I wanted to try a stealth character anyway, I went for it. Allow me to inform you that, not only is the Dark Brotherhood easily the best faction in the game, followed by the Thieves’ Guild (note the factions), stealth archers are, once you get over that initial phase of running away because you suck, pretty much a God class. Twitch, via night eye, is able to traverse dungeons as if in daylight, quickly gunning down even the most powerful of enemies in one or two bow shots, almost always without ever having been seen. If it weren’t so fun, it would be disturbing.
Alera: Female Altmer Custom Class, Level 40, Sign of the Apprentice
Playing Time: 82h, 17m (258 game days)
Skills: Alchemy 101, Alteration 100, Conjuration 110, Destruction 110, Illusion 100, Mysticism 57, Restoration 67
Factions: Champion of Cyrodiil, Madgod, Countess of Kvatch, Mages’ Guild (Arch-Mage), Arena (Grand Champion), Kvatch Arena (Grand Ranger of Cyrodiil), Blades (Knight-Sister), Knights of the Thorn (Honorary Knight), Knights of the White Stallion (Knight-Errant), Order of the Virtuous Blood (Sister)
In which I attempt playing a mage character, devoting body and soul to it as I know you need to. And it works, mind you, after a fashion. Against many enemies, Alera is a Goddess of Destruction, laying fiery burnination upon the masses, or summoning daedra lords to do it for her. Due to the way magic leveling works, it took forever to get there, but what the hell. Suffice it to say that I feel like Oblivion PC magic got nerfed hard from previous games, and it’s now more annoying that fun. In addition, Alera has yet to complete the main quest line, as she is stuck in Kvatch. At level 32. You know that tip where you should do Kvatch before level 5? They mean it.
[ADDENDUM]
So, completing Kvatch at level 32 may have been one of the hardest things ever done by mage. It goes without saying that the Kvatch guards and Imperial legion guys got ripped to shreds by epic armies of daedroths, xivilavis, and spider daedra, but the truly insane part was how they kept ripping ME apart. At one point I was hiding in the upper story of a house, taking potshots for something like two full game days at the assembled hordes. Definitely under the banner of “I’m proud I did that, and never want to do it again.” Ultimately, Alera survived her last few levels by creating a spell that dealt a vast amount of elemental damage over 30 seconds, while making her invisible for the same length of time. I called it Assassinate, for the obvious reasons.
In addition to completing both main questlines, Alera also completed the
Hrolf the Ganger: Male Nord Custom Class, Level 26, Sign of the Lady
Playing Time: 33h, 19m (57 game days)
Skills: Armorer 91, Blade 60, Block 51, Blunt 100, Heavy Armor 100, Restoration 77, Security 42
Factions: Madgod, Divine Crusader, Blades (Knight-Brother), Nine Divines (Pilgrim)
“Hey, Knights of the Nine! I should make a crusader character to go through it!”
It turns out that, when played correctly, heavy armor fighters are highly effective, both at killing and leveling. By simply getting in fights, then repairing your gear, you level quickly and easily, and at later levels the game helps you by making the fights longer. Restoration helps you heal up after the carnage.
After doing the atmospheric Knights of the Nine, Hrolf was also my first (and so far only) character through Shivering Isles, which was…something. I remain highly ambivilent about my SI experience, not in the least because a paladin was not meant for SI storywise, and because there’s not many things more annoying than having to spend literally 2-5 minutes fighting every time you see a Grummite. Those aside, I had fun with SI, but my favorite DLC is still Knights of the Nine.
[ADDENDUM]
You see that 57 game days thing? You see how he’s level 26 with maxed blunt and heavy armor and almost maxed armorer? I think that tells you what you need to know about how well this all played.
Rankin: Male Redguard Custom Class, Level 19, Sign of the Thief
Playing Time: 20h (47 game days)
Skills: Armorer 47, Athletics 48, Blade 75, Acrobatics 51, Light Armor 75, Security 49, Sneak 62
Factions: Arena (Myrmidon), Thieves’ Guild (Shadowfoot), Blades (Knight-Brother), Order of the Virtuous Blood (Brother)
My current character, such as he is, assuming I decide to ever play him again, which should give you some idea what I think of his playing style. The problem is the same thing that makes fighters easy to play – he levels quickly, and can rapidly outpace his equipment (he still has a Kvatch guard helmet at level 19). Too, it’s that same thing as Valerius. Light armor is really bad to take to a fight, and he gets in a lot of fights. It seems clear that when I go to play through Weye for real, I’ll be doing it with a new character.
[ADDENDUM]
Yeah, I didn’t play him again. What the hell was I thinking?
Thag gra-Grumbah: Male Orc Custom Class, Level 22, Sign of the Steed
Playing Time: 32h, 27m (71 game days)
Skills: Armorer 75, Athletics 63, Block 55, Blunt 84, Heavy Armor 87, Alchemy 41, Security 54
Factions: Blackwood Company (Pakseech), Black Bow Bandits (Shortbow), Archeology Guild (Disciple), Order of the Virtuous Blood (Brother)
In which I saw the C&C Blackwood Company mod and said “I should play this!” Boy was that a mistake. The character played just as you might expect, but the mod sucked. Fantastic ideas with terrible implementation. No quest markers, which would be ok if it didn’t go out of its way to hide things randomly, a touch of WTF ideas (chair in the middle of nowhere, I mean you), and the bugs. Did I mention the bugs? There were a lot of them. Which is a shame, because it really was a good idea. Just not worth the frustration.
Astarius: Male Imperial Custom Class, Level 31, Sign of the Apprentice
Playing Time: 68h, 19m (159 game days)
Skills: Blade 128, Block 62, Heavy Armor 100, Alteration 57, Conjuration 57, Restoration 59, Mercantile 85
Factions: Champion of Cyrodiil, Archeology Guild (Headmaster), Arena (Grand Champion), Fighter’s Guild (Apprentice), Blades (Knight-Brother), Knights of the Thorn (Honorary Knight), Order of the Virtuous Blood (Brother)
That’s Astarius up there in his Imperial Dragon armor with a new Imperial Dragon cape that I retextured, because if you’re going to have capes you may as well make sure that you look as totally awesome as you possibly can.
My latest character came about pretty much because I wanted an Imperial Blades concept character, and because I wanted to actually finish Lost Spires. Thag got partway in but ran like a little girl after being eaten by bears. Astarius finished it. It was quite good for the most part – big dungeons, cool loot, voice acting, reasonably interesting quests. On the downside, the balance was terrible. Not so much that the loot was overpowered, though some of it sort of was, but the fights were ridiculous. The two big boss fights, and especially the last one, just weren’t my cup of tea. If you played a lot of sidescroll shooters on the NES in the 1980s, your milage probably varies.
As to the character himself, I liked it, despite some fatal character building mistakes, such as thinking you can build a fighter/mage. Alteration is no substitution for Security, and given the need for Agility Security would have been a better choice anyway. Magicka was too low to really make use of Restoration, and I should have replaced Conjuration with Mysticism to feed my Soul Trap habit. Mercantile was about as useless as it ever was, but I knew that going in.
Despite all that, Astarius is pretty much death incarnate – Eustacheon of Chorrol + Ring of the Iron Fist + Necklace of Swords gives him 99% damage reflection, and with a bit of switching he can get up in the 70s on spell reflection. This pretty much means he can just stand there and win, which is no joke how I won all but 3 or so of the Arena fights. Just stood there and let them die, taking no damage because of the insane armor. If that fails, he has a daedric longsword with a 35 absorb health on strike enchantment. Incredibly voracious on the soul gems, but effective. It’s pretty unlikely I’ll take Astarius through SI, since there’s precisely zero challenge left to him now.
…I clearly am not ready for interstellar conquest, as I do not possess the proper levels of totally crazy metal snake armor, nor do I possess the proper amounts of laser staves.
This is all the fault of John Scalzi, who linked us all to the pilot for Stargate: Universe on Hulu. It was good. I liked it. I apparently have a whole lot of backstory to catch up on. On that note, let us hear it for Hulu.
Let us take a brief moment and discuss module handling in Fantasy Grounds II, if for no other reason than the time is going to come when I’m going to want to remember the fix I just did.
So, it’s possible to import data into an FG2 game using modules, which are basically archives with a big XML file and some random images and things. When FG fires itself up, it loads up all these individual XML files, categorizes them, and displays the parsed results. Which is good. Very useful for writing adventures and the like.
However, there’s a problem. See, in a module XML file, each individual entity, let’s say an encounter, has a unique name, expressed as a number – say id-00001, id-00002, and so on. Sort of like this:
Problem is, it works that way for each module, so if you load up a second module, you’ll have a second id-00001, like so:
If you’re thinking “Oh, I bet that leads to annoying problems, where the stuff from one module gets mixed up with the stuff from another module, and it breaks really bad!” you would be correct. In this case, loading up that first encounter doesn’t just get you the three iron defenders, it gets you all but the first three of the hobgoblins, too, which is a less than optimal outcome, unless you wanted your players dead.
Fortunately, there’s a way around this, only it requires hand editing every single id-0000x tag in each module’s XML file to something like, say, id-00101 instead of id-00001, where the first 1 is an arbitrary number. Sort of like this:
So Module A starts at id-00101 and goes up, Module B starts at id-00201 and goes up, etc. ids below 00101 are left to the base campaign, just because.
Yes, I was up far too late working that out. Thanks guys!