Obscurities of Arcanum

Discussion in 'Arcanum Discussion' started by Anonymous, Dec 17, 2008.

Remove all ads!
Support Terra-Arcanum:

GOG.com

PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!
  1. Anonymous

    Anonymous Guest

    Arcanum is a very rich game with lots of content, and I'm sure that everyone constantly finds something in the game that surprises him/her. Let's share the most rare stuff in this thread. Post anything that you believe most people don't know about. I'll start:

    - The Phantasmal Fiend spell indeed creates an illusion. There's a chance to kill the monster in one hit, especially if the attacker has high PE.

    - Pressing Enter and typing "#Fuck You" will have an interesting effect on your followers. (A # directs a command to all your followers, while you can address one specifically by typing their name, e.g. "Virgil Fuck You")

    - There are other broadcast commands not widely known, e.g. "Move" command makes your followers regroup, while "Leave" makes them disband.

    - Click on the logbook button while holding Ctrl + Alt to see the list of quotes uttered during the making of Arcanum. (I posted this before, but it's worth mentioning again, since it's such a well hidden Easter Egg.)

    - If you persuade Donn Throgg to riot, orcish bandits will never appear in random encounters again.
     
  2. FrostyMixi

    FrostyMixi Member

    Messages:
    150
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Nov 7, 2008
    that logbook thing is cool...hmm...i think of something and maybe edit this note later :p
     
  3. DokEnkephalin

    DokEnkephalin Member

    Messages:
    102
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Dec 5, 2008
    'Leave' doesn't just make them disband, it resets them completely. The next time you speak with any of them, they'll repeat their introductory dialog, and those who require script conditions to activate won't even do that.
     
  4. Anonymous

    Anonymous Guest

    Yes, I know. It happens with *most* of followers, because the required flags aren't set. When you disband a follower via a dialog option it sets a flag (usually local flag 31), but this command doesn't set any flags.

    It's also interesting to note that almost all followers say unique lines when the "leave" command is used.
     
  5. Ring lord

    Ring lord Member

    Messages:
    748
    Likes Received:
    4
    Joined:
    Nov 4, 2001
    I have a couple, might think of a few more though.

    1) The baneleful gloves (or something like that... some Hexed item) are a great assasination tool, even though many might have known that already.

    2) In Dernholm, under certain conditions (which i'm not sure of), if you stand infront of the entrance to the castle, the guard will patrole himself over fires, and eventualy will die - this might provide the player with a Basic platemail for free, and quite early in the game. (as early as right after shrouded hills).
     
  6. Xiao_Caity

    Xiao_Caity New Member

    Messages:
    3,691
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 11, 2005
    Okay, I give, it's sodding late and my Arcanum disc is currently being enjoyed by friends... What's the 'Fuck You' command, and should I use it on Virgil if I'm trying to keep him friendly? :hippy:
     
  7. TheLucksta

    TheLucksta New Member

    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Sep 10, 2008
    People may already know this... but if you use master prowling and the invisibilty spell at the same time you can attack people and they wont attack you back.
     
  8. OiNutter

    OiNutter New Member

    Messages:
    13
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    I've only just started reading this forum, so I have no clue what tantalizing tidbits are old news to the community, but here are a few items of note off the top of my head that I haven't seen in any guide or resource that I've found.

    1) Playing as a relatively good character, but also enjoying some thievery, I was somewhat disheartened when I found that my alignment was dropping when I pick-pocketed people. However, when I took the first Divination spell, Sense Alignment (to get See Contents), I found that you could pickpocket anyone with an alignment less than 5 (which isn't necessarily evil) without any alignment repercussions whatsoever. For everyone else, you lose 1 point of alignment for every 10 times you pickpocket, and it is a global counter, so switching marks ain't gonna get let you get intimate with their personal items 9 more times for free.

    I thought Sense Alignment would be a useless spell, but now it's a vital part of my thieving gear; there are surprisingly many NPCs with ripe pockets and borderline alignments. For example, human a lot of human guards in Dernholm have evil alignments. Of course, they don't have much in the way of valuables, but they sleep in an unlocked barracks and if you need a quick minor healing potion, they're easy to steal, even with no pickpocket skill. The same goes for DockWorkers, although you'll have to make your own entry to their bunker or steal their key while they are walking if you want to have easy access.

    More profitably, however is the fact that junk dealers seem to be typically evil (no surprise there), if Shrouded Hills, Dernholm, and Black Root are any indication (The Tarant JD is 10, which judging by what a common alignment it is for generic townsfolk, is the REAL neutral, not 0). From what I have seen in this playthrough, they all keep the money you paid with on their person... their easily-gankable-when-sleeping person. Oddly enough, it seems that when you pay for an item at a shopkeeper, they get more coin put into their inventory than what you paid for, so buying everything they have and then stealing all your money back at night is not un-profitable, as long as you have the patience to save after every 5 successful PP's in case they decide to give you what for. I didn't find it that frustrating to fleece their helpless meatsacks, as there are a lot of things you can do to make it quick and painless, but I've read guides telling people it's a waste of time, and I can't argue with that.

    Of course, some more important characters have low alignments like Clarissa Shalmo (the throwing master), who has a whopping -20. If you want that magickal chakram, you can take it without game engine-enforced guilt, but she's has crazy high perception (thievery is a good justification for the divination school) and stands in a crowded room so you have to either dedicate some cp or get creative.

    I actually didn't realize that pickpocket affected alignment for a long time because three out of the four shopkeepers in Shrouded Hills have a borderline alignment, and the fourth, the Herbalist, must make her own amphetamines because she never sleeps and is so incredibly alert that she probably already knew what kind of underwear you wear AND your favourite kind of floss before you walked in her door.

    2) Boomerangs and chakrams are excellent for breaking things. They don't get damaged when they hit solid objects like normal weapons, they don't use ammo, they ALWAYS hit inanimate objects you have line-of-sight to, regardless of lighting or throwing skill, and the sound a boomerang makes busting open a wooden window is just delicious. Speaking of sound, and most importantly, the noise a boomerang makes strangely emanates from the tile YOU'RE standing on, not the tile of the object it hits. Certainly, a chest or safe might send out a noise pulse from its tile but it usually only goes 1 tile, if even that! This means that you can stand in the far corner of a room and break a locked chest that is relatively close to its owner without alerting him. Note, however, that if the owner has a high PE (such as Winno in Madam Lil's back room, and Mr. Fitzgerald, nefarious owner of a certain potion of dark power) that one tile that gets the alert from the object might be enough to get their attention, and it seems that the sound your boomerang makes from your tile is not dampened by walls.

    Finally, while it may seem slow to chip away at a chest with a tiny little boomerang, once you get to Tarant, you can buy a nice boomerang for tech users or a chakram for mages which are both more than adequate at overcoming an object's innate damage resistance and obliterating it within a handful of turns.

    3) While BUY prices are affected by the shopkeeper's reaction to you (and thus, your Beauty, etc), the amount of coin a merchant will offer you for something YOU'RE selling seems to be only affected by haggle and the type of shop it is. This means that spamming Purity of Water isn't going to make that junk dealer any less likely to twirl his mustache and cackle maniacally as he hands you a single piece of gold for the 300 stone relic you carried from sweet, gullible Ristezze's most private container to hawk at the docks of Tarant. Similarly, recall the Lucky Medallion that the Poone Vagrant with Impenetrable Pockets wears (most people don't know that there was going to be another sequel to Speed about this guy, and how he can't walk slower than 20 tiles per minute or he explodes). It gives you a measely +1 Haggle (yay, 1/4 of a rank!), so wearing a Medallion of Beauty lets you pay less at merchants than you would if you wore the Lucky Medallion, but the opposite is true if you're selling stuff.

    Of course, I'm probably the only person who cares about money in this game, but everyone needs their foibles. That is why I have extra foibles so that other people can go foible-less.

    4) When people are sleeping, apparently the game does not consider them to actually be in bed. Okay, you've noticed their circle on the ground beside their bed, obviously, but from what I've seen it goes a bit deeper than that. Even though they are asleep, presumably with their eyes closed, lighting still seems to affect whether they catch you pickpocketing, as does where you stand in relation to which direction they were standing when they got into bed. Note that I have no hard evidence of this, just a lot of nights pickpocketing shopkeepers hundreds of times.
    Did I mention foibles yet?

    5) Random chest loot is not quite as random as one would think... Certainly all games with random loot systems make the mappers provide parameters as what can be randomly stuffed into which delicious rectangular pinata, must usually you can't force the same results across different play-throughs. What I'm talking about is that it appears that the pseudo-random number generator for Arcanum is seeded by a hash of the name you give your character.

    If you're not familiar with pseudo-random numbers on computers, you may not know that they are not actually random at all; they perform a static mathematical algorithm to produce a finite series of numbers which would appear to have no definite pattern. Of course, if that's all it was, you would get the exact same series every time you started the generator, so it requires a "seed value" which would ensure a different pattern. This value is simply an integer in most cases (I won't say all cases, because I am mostly only familiar with the two popular computational RNGs: the standard low-quality rand, and the Mersenne Twister), and when put into the RNG, produces the series. Of course, if you put in the same seed twice, you will get the same series twice, so the seed has to be based on something that naturally changes over time, such as the current number of seconds that have passed since January 01, 1970.

    Oddly, it seems Troika chose to use the name you give your character as the seed for random chest loot. It is possible that this allowed them to debug certain aspects of the game by reproducing random occurrences that may have lead to errors, and hoped we did not notice. If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say that the seed is simply some derivation of the sum of the ascii values of the letters in the name, like those websites that ask you to enter your name and it tells you what percent lame you are. Personally, I think that if people want to know how lame they are, they should just ask me; It's far more enjoyable for me, and infinitely more devastating for them. Perfect for people who don't handle compliments well!

    Anyway, I think I got a bit carried away thinking about Arcanum Morsels. I've got more, but I've only got a half hour before I turn into a pumpkin.

    Stay tuned...
     
  9. Xiao_Caity

    Xiao_Caity New Member

    Messages:
    3,691
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 11, 2005
    OiNutter, your foibles amuse me and I await your continuation with popcorn and an evil grin.
     
  10. GarmGarf

    GarmGarf New Member

    Messages:
    380
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Aug 17, 2008
    Yes, that post was deliciously exceptional!
     
  11. OiNutter

    OiNutter New Member

    Messages:
    13
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    I'm glad you both enjoyed it! Hopefully, this post will not disappoint.

    Also, I must apologize for the extended delay between the two halves of the post; I need my beauty sleep, you know, and it is not gentlemanly to catnap throughout the day.

    5 - Addendum) I should probably produce my evidence for Morsel #5 above; You may or may not remember the Magick Chest guarded by the Kite Shaman a whopping 15 tiles southwest from the everlasting corpse of a certain "Preston Radcliffe." HOW his body remains intact, complete with blood pool, while his body lies so close to the den of ravenous wolves that the zeppelin apparently landed on, is a mystery. WHY his body remains intact is not, as it is clearly the work of a secretly sadistic developer who wanted to insure that you either wasted 6000 quid on a Scroll of Resurrect, or put CP towards Conjure Spirit, only to find that the afterlife in the Arcanum universe (strangely unmentioned in the game, to my knowledge), is the great unifier, turning all but perhaps 4 people into glowing spirit-clones that shriek in pain in exactly the same ways, and do nothing else. Take that, dichotomy motifs! I was recently searching for information on Conjure Spirit to see if it was worth my CP, and read an interview/preview on a gaming site (I am strangely having hard time finding it now) where a developer revealed that a "Conjure Spirit" spell existed in the then-unreleased game, and that it was "one of the coolest spells in the game." Thank you, Secretly Sadistic Developer, I greatly enjoyed the three days I subsequently spent conjuring spirits, assuming that if a person was interesting enough in life, they could bear the agony of death long enough to impart a few unique words.

    "OiNutter," you say, "we know this well, good sir. I thought you were going to talk about Obscure Morsels?"
    "You are very impatient," I reply, "maybe you should go read a post by someone less likely to go on rambling tangents due to overwhelming self-involvement."
    "...," you counter.

    Well, as you wish, back to the Kite Shaman's Magick Chest at the Crash Site (yes, those all needed to be capitalized. Would anyone care for a delicious foible? I got quite the deal on them, because I get them wholesale). It was only recently that I noticed that this chest was actually quite good for the level you encounter it, as I had only received a few potions and coin from it previously. This makes sense, as a magick user like a shaman would need those potions, and kites need money so that they can partake of the services at Madam Lil's. This time through, however, I received a suit of Charmed Plate Mail. Not only am I at a loss to explain what a kite shaman would need with such an item, or how it fits in that little flat chest (NOTE: not a stab at dwarven women), but how did the kites even get it here? Even though it appears that this convenient square clearing in the mountains is completely at ground level, everyone knows that kites have a predisposition towards limp-wrist, and scientists have proven that items larger than 30 stone cause their tiny arms to snap like dry twigs.

    I'm really beating around the bush, but the point is that there are some nice magickal items in that chest, and you can easily see the effects of your character's name on random chest loot by starting new games and opening that chest for fun and profit. I'm not sure if there are the exact same loot results across different platforms and versions (they might have included entropic elements such as taking the internal version number or a hardware ID into consideration when producing the seed, but that would most likely defeat the purpose of recreating random conditions, if such a purpose actually existed).

    A name which I was quite pleased with, despite the misspelling of the last name is Quentin Phillipes, who always got the Charmed Plate Mail, a Mage's Staff (which now has unique inventory graphics due to the noble efforts of this forum's own Drog Black Tooth, if I remember correctly), two minor magickal rings, and some other petty items. I do not think I need to tell you how many time I restarted the game with a different name that fine Saturday, as the invocation of the word "foibles" probably already causes you to make an accurate estimation.

    I was going to recommend that you utilize the lucrative name at least once to verify that it is not unique to my copy of the game, but the real reason why this post is so grievously late is that when I attempted to confirm which treasures he had borrowed from our dear kite friend (who is just sleeping.... That blood could be anyone's...) I encountered only some Charmed Leather Armour and a few miscellaneous items no matter what I did, and let me tell you, there were quite the "dids" I did. Do not think of my previous explanation of this posts tardiness as a lie; I am sure that if you had studied the concept of Fluid Truth you would indubitably (sorry, there is no "undoubtably," so I have to) understand that they are both true. Thus, having proven that I was not lying, you have no reason to doubt me now and look up "Fluid Truth" on Wikipedia.

    I must conclude that seed value is in some way modified by the current day or week, a strange revelation when pondered, as the developers could have done less work and made the results more random by simply taking seconds into consideration. So I am sorry if that destroys your (my) dreams of an army of Quentin Phillipeses, I should have not gone off half-cocked in the last post (why such a phrase came into use is baffling, but since I can blame genetics I do not feel overly ashamed to continue it).

    6) OK now that I am thoroughly depressed, it is time to talk about something exhilerating: pixel-hunting! You must have thought that the art of running your cursor over every pixel on the screen in order to find the one that is secretly beneficial (but otherwise identical to the rest) died with the exodus of "Photo-Realistic 3D" adventure games to the deepest corners of Tartarus (the one with an uncrossable river Styx and a ferocious Cerberus standing guard, not the one with visitor passes and "get out of jail free" cards given to anyone who "seems like an OK guy" that so many Hellenic heroes were sent to). Arcanum, however, brings back everyone's favourite pass-time with a vengeance! Tell me if you have noticed any of the following.

    - We'll start easy: The open-lidded metal box at the Crash Site just west of your starting location, partially covered by vegetation sprites and surrounded by technological background art that shares the exact same style.

    - A little harder: A ginka root at the Crash Site under a tree just north of the Kite Shaman's Magick Chest and completely covered with overgrown grass so that you would have had to accidentally put your cursor on its location to find it.

    - OK you found the metal box at the Crash Site on your first playthrough? What about the piece of steel that is UNDER it?

    - That was too easy? How about the bottles of wine which sometimes appear UNDER the chests in guard barracks and other miscellaneous bunkhouses?

    - OK, you already had your mouse there for the chest, so it's natural you would find those, but how about Black Root? Yes the entire town. Whoever made that map loved to put things on the ground, on tiles which are already occupied by something. For example, the CK Sugar and similar items on the ground in the lower right corner of the General Store, with solid garbage scenery on top of them.

    If I were to guess (and if you were to guess, you would guess correctly that I have actually already guessed) I would say that whoever is responsible for this wonderful revival of ancient suffering is the same developer as the one who decided to put a ton of items on the ground in Fallout. While you at least had a chance of seeing them in Fallout, when the walls actually turned semitransparent enough to see a few pixels of them, I can only say that he was honing his art. I can only assume that today he puts important hidden items in games which are not only invisible, but do not give any graphical indication that your cursor is on top of them - you must act on faith that your cursor is on the right pixel and if you are wrong, a randomly selected save is corrupted. It is probably unfair to even voice such an allegation, but I can't shake the feeling that this might also be our Secret Sadist Developer.

    In any case, many of the "ground items" have objects on top of them. This is probably not only to prevent NPCs from picking them up (thus ruining the pixel hunt, and starting the "where the hell did that come from?" hunt), but also, due to the presence of the Air school of magick, it can get very windy in Arcanum and paperweights are a necessity. To pick up these delicious hidden bits of trash, can of course teleport them to under your feet just like a corpse by standing on the tile next to them and ALT-clicking them.

    Although it's a bit unrelated, I'd just like to mention that I find ALT-clicking to be incredibly handy. Got a lot of bodies to search and a memory like a goldfish? Pull those deaders off their bloodpool! Want to move permanent corpses like the two dead Shrouded Hill assassins into embarrassing positions? OK that's kind of twisted. Forget I said anything. If you are quick enough, however, ALT-click can save you some frustration if you see an NPC making a beeline towards something on the ground and you want to crush their spirits. It takes them several seconds to pick up each item, it seems, so ALT-clicking the pile rapidly puts all those items where they can't reach them - under you. And who wouldn't want to stand on a pile of trash? King of the hill, bitches!

    And since I'm on the point, I'd just like to throw Vollinger under the bus by pointing out that he must have quite a serious opium addiction. Li'l Feller will walk an entire screen width in the wilderness to stand on poppies. Trust me, he doesn't need any more; he is already in such a stupor just thinking about them that you will have already picked the item up minutes ago when he reaches its location and stands there confused.

    7) I'm only on number SEVEN? Reading these must be like sitting through a graduation ceremony... No, Jeff, that wasn't fun watching your cousin John Smith graduate 3337th in his class; I don't even know him, and I'm starting to think that you don't either...

    OK #7 is a lame one because I forgot what I was planning the real number seven to be: Destroying sources of illumination is not nearly as dangerous as you would think. Although guards usually care, it would seem that they are just not important enough to be assigned owners all the time. Even Amped-Up Herbalist doesn't care if you smash her lanterns into lantern-bits (she can probably see as well in the dark as in the light anyway). I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I think that saying "Amped-Up Herbalist" out loud is a pleasure well worth the social and mental problems associated with talking to your computer (NOTE: OiNutter does not take any responsibility for any counseling your children will have to undergo as a result of this post).

    Destroying lights is pretty useful if you're prone to illicit tomfoolery, but certain parts of the manual imply that picking a lock is made more difficult if it is not properly illuminated. I can't deny or confirm this, as the Pick Lock skill requires a large sacrifice of Magick Power to be effective, and the only NPC I know of who has the skill, Virgil, totally sucks a goat beard at it. He says that he grew up on the streets, but it must have literally been "on the streets" and definitely not inside any building which could theoretically be locked, or be made more difficult to open in any way, shape, or form.

    Also, be warned that destroying a fire that is not in a fireplace (such as the fires used by the Wise Women) often results in it coming back the next night but no longer animating. It is very likely that by somehow destroying a raging fire by throwing a boomerang at it, you have demolished the poor woman's belief in the power of the elements and she now makes due with a spell of Illuminate cast on a cardboard cutout of a fire.

    Ah well, I have rambled enough. If I remember anything else to yammer about I'll post some more. Or perhaps I might get over my obsession with finding the perfect XP formula for levels above 50 and actually start playing again! Ha ha, sometimes I think the craziest things...
     
  12. DarkFool

    DarkFool Nemesis of the Ancients

    Messages:
    4,006
    Likes Received:
    5
    Joined:
    Jan 28, 2005
    I must say, it's been quite awhile since I've met someone new on this forum who didn't warrant ridicule before providing to be a decent fellow! Now, out of curiousity, does this mean that, if I were to use some name like "zyzbar the zyxyh" you would get distinctively better lewt than if you used a name like "ALLAH IS GREAT" ?"
     
  13. OiNutter

    OiNutter New Member

    Messages:
    13
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    Thank you for your horrendously misplaced confidence that I am a decent fellow! It is always a pleasure to lift one's expectations high into the air before utterly dashing them on the rocks.

    As for your question, I'm afraid that since computational RNGs are designed to give seemingly unpredictable results, a higher seed does not mean a higher starting number being produced or any other result we could predict even though we might know the seed itself. That fact would be somewhat difficult to believe if I had mentioned that during one of my playthroughs I had encountered absolutely no valuable or magickal random chest loot and that I got freaked out and deleted the saves when I found the Magick Chest in the Bessie Toone Mine to be completely empty. It was a freak coincidence, so I am not going to mention that.
     
  14. DarkFool

    DarkFool Nemesis of the Ancients

    Messages:
    4,006
    Likes Received:
    5
    Joined:
    Jan 28, 2005
    This is Terra-Arcanum. Everything is relative. You'll find that people you would normally scoff, and question how they remain in society and not locked away are the people whose company you presently enjoy.

    Theoretically, if one could come up with the seed list, and the 'ranking' system used, you could generate what would be the ideal names for the gathering of magic items, couldn't you? Mind you, this is an assload of work for a very small perk, but then again, we are talking in theoretics.
     
  15. OiNutter

    OiNutter New Member

    Messages:
    13
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2009
    Ah yes, I can see that you are thinking opportunistically. That is indeed the correct response to the information I have provided. Unfortunately (or actually, quite fortunately, for the field of computational science), there are a multitude of entropic elements which confound most methods of predicting the results of this particular system. I say "most methods" because I hear that divination is quite effective, but the few practitioners of this secret art are, of course, quite sequestered in their remote hermitages, and have furthermore taken vows of silence.

    If you are not familiar with the concept of entropy, it is the property of apparent chaos active in a process. Most obviously, the seed itself is the primary entropic element in a Random Number Generator (RNG), providing the algorithm with a computational input value which is usually not relevant to anything relating to the output of the RNG. As well as not knowing the actual format of the seed, or the function used to produce an integer from a character name (the ASCII summation I proposed was simply a guess), such a value is probably intentionally confounded with other variables; I mentioned before that I recently suspected that the current date was involved in the calculations. I tested this theory just seconds ago (however, taking into consideration my insufferable predilection towards monolithic ramblings, it may be "hours ago" when you read this) and I am receiving the same loot from the first chest with the same names I used yesterday. This means that the date is not involved (this does not rule out the week, but what self-respecting programmer queries the week?), and I have no idea why my "Quentin Phillipes" results from a week ago do not match those of the past two days.

    And of course, that is not the only agent of entropy at work here; Although we could probably guess which RNG Arcanum uses, and given the exact algorithm for calculating the seed, we could theoretically produce the same series of numbers, we have no basis whatsoever for finding out how those numbers are used (unless the venerable Mr. Black Tooth or other modder has happened upon a mouth-watering clue whilst merrily hex-editing). To what range is the number bounded? Is the list of possible items for each chest sorted in some way? Perhaps weighted? (And here it becomes painfully obvious that I have regrettably never attempted to mod Arcanum in any way whatsoever) Furthermore, without knowing EVERY item possible for every container, and how many of them are allowed to be given at one time, we would be completely unable to predict what value is needed, and further-FURTHER-more, I suspect (be warned that I am once again half-cocked, as always) that chest contents are not determined until the first time you visit a map, meaning that the order of your play-through would allow for no deviation.

    I hope that I have sufficiently crushed all of your hopes and dreams into a fine powder, and while I cannot say that I do not feel guilty about doing such a thing, it will be nice to have company.

    And just when you thought I was about to shut my filthy trap (you would not believe how dirty a mouth can get when it is open all the time), I have remembered what the REAL Arcanum Obscurity #7 was supposed to be last night (or this morning if you are one of the mythical people who are rumoured to inhabit the other side of the globe).

    7) This may be quite obvious to some of you, but it could be a shocking relation to anyone who understandably did not think to try it, so I'll mention it anyway: For the duration of a beneficial spell, item effect, etc., your modified skills and attributes are apparently treated as your base skills/attributes, quite unlike any other game I've played.

    "What?!" you exclaim, "Does that mean that if I maintain a few Agility of Fire's on myself while I spend character points, I can purchase ranks of dexterity-dependent skills without worrying about the DX requirement??"
    Well, good sirs and siresses, you get an A- for comprehension, an A for extrapolation, and an A+ in underhandedness. Yes, what you have proposed is true. Also true is that quaffing a potion of Intelligence will temporarily allow you to purchase complete tech trees, provided you have the CPs.

    One caveat, however, is that when the potion of Intelligence wears off, your level of proficiency (the numeric value) for your technological disciplines will remain as if you had only purchased as many tiers as your intelligence allows. You DO NOT lose the learned schematics, though! To create items past your intelligence, you simply need to quaff another potion of intelligence (cheap at first, but expensive if you create such items on a regular basis) or keep some technical references handy, as you would for a found schematic (initially expensive, but perhaps more cost-effective if you create and sell your tech items regularly). I do not know if the same caveat applies to purchased skills (whether you keep the bonus after losing your buff), but it's much easier to have Agility of Fire running than to have to go back home to your technical references (or gods forbid, lug them around!) every time you want to create a stun grenade.

    One implication of this rule that may not be apparently, however, is that you can receive training for skills you don't permanently have. Combine this with the fact that you only need 1/4 of a rank for apprentice training and suddenly that measly +1 to Haggle on the Lucky Medallion allows you to spend a few coin to see what kind of markup every shopkeeper is giving you, and Oiled Leather Armour allows you to pay to only get caught pickpocketing when you critically fail. This is pretty nice, but don't let dwarven or gnomish characters know you know... they've been training their skills with innate racial +1's for years, and you wouldn't want to break their little hearts, would you?

    I'll end this towering lexographical heap with a thought-provoking question:
    Am I the only one who was royally miffed to find out that apprentice training for Pick Locks decreases the time it takes to pick a lock, when lock picking is already instant?
     
  16. Xiao_Caity

    Xiao_Caity New Member

    Messages:
    3,691
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 11, 2005
    OiNutter, welcome to the House of Lords. You've proved to be a bit loopy, observant, clever, and very tongue in cheek. I hereby award you with the honour of being a Favoured of Xiao. It entitles you to cookies, chocolate milk, cuddles, and the ability to call upon my wrath when someone shits you off. Use it wisely.
     
  17. magikot

    magikot Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    1,688
    Likes Received:
    4
    Joined:
    Aug 29, 2003
    WTF? Fellow geek here and Lot5R fan and even I never got that honorific!! *grumbles*
     
  18. DarkFool

    DarkFool Nemesis of the Ancients

    Messages:
    4,006
    Likes Received:
    5
    Joined:
    Jan 28, 2005
    No, not really. This, however, has a lot to do with the k.i.s.s philosophy that systems such as this aren't nearly as complex as they should be.
     
  19. papa_dog_1999

    papa_dog_1999 Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    1,511
    Media:
    1
    Likes Received:
    27
    Joined:
    Aug 14, 2008
    I admit to a bit of jealousy.
    However, I still have the run of the house and property and my place on the foot of the bed, so I guess I shouldn’t worry.
    That means he doesn’t have to worry about getting buried in the yard next to the door-to-door sales men. :mean:
     
  20. Xiao_Caity

    Xiao_Caity New Member

    Messages:
    3,691
    Likes Received:
    0
    Joined:
    Oct 11, 2005
    Simply put, you have to amuse me in exactly the right way to become one of my specials. Puppy managed it, and OiNutter managed it. I have very few honourifics to give, so I'm very... conservative.
     
Our Host!