Expert of classic dungeon crawlers here.

Download cheat.
Proceed to get ezed

Obviously you know what good dungeon crawler is.

Fables picked a hell of a time to take a vacation. :P

Nope and nope.

1. Incline / decline is community slang, not Cleve's invention. Cleve and the speaker using the same slang only means both are probably associated or want to be associated with the same community. (For example, it is not unusual for brand to adopt the language of specific subcultures for marketing purposes, but it does not mean the subculture should just take the ball and go home). Furthermore, being from the same community doesn't mean fanboyism and immunity to criticism. I guarantee that anyone who writes a shitty game and uses our language is going to have an even worse time than an outside creator.

2. One of the reasons why art exists at all is to express things for other people, so they could point at it and say, "That's how I feel". Some people are good at it, others not so much. If someone made a great argument, it's fine to say "this!" rather than dilute it by adding an ineptly phrased one of your own.

Heh. That's the area where the game tells you it's a nice spot for an ambush, isn't it? I got caught, too, but I took my party down that starter's dungeon to grab a couple of levels. Managed to squeak by the ratmen with the aid of my alchemist and bard. Though I did make the mistake later of grabbing for the wand in New City, forgetting that one party member got diseased as a result. Lost some nice cash in getting Father Rulae's cure disease fountain active.

I lucked into a good roll on a felpurr ninja after (admittedly) about 15 tries. Damn, I hate that system. And arbitrary stat improvements (from 1 to 4, I think) with every new level doesn't make my top five list of greats in the game, either. Oh, well. Fun, and not buggy.

Concerning 1: The trope about the Decline and Fall of the RPG Empire is an old one and common, as you point out. But Grimlorn isn't simply using that argument and the word "decline" in reference to it. He instead said it directly in review (however brief) of a game whose developer is pushing both through heavy PR. It's difficult for me to arrive at any other conclusion than that he took both trope and word from Cleve. Had some fresh modulation of the Decline and Fall been meant, presumably it wouldn't have been phrased as a Cleve catchphrase, but formulated differently. -Eh, I could be wrong--which of us isn't, aside from Cleve?--but that's how I see it.

Concerning 2: Since I didn't dliute qwixter's comment by expanding it with a brief foray into the mind-sucking effects of PR, I'll assume you meant someone else who said "This."

Incline / decline is slang widely used on the rather influential website RPGCodex. Before the Sir-Tech archives were discovered, Cleve had been a laughingstock there for ages, and, because people are very unlikely to go back and examine their attitudes, they haven't exactly turned into fanboys overnight when he was found to have been telling the truth. So if someone from the Codex praises the game, the praise is genuine, not sycophantic.

Two points. First, I never implied, much less stated, that anybody who quotes a developer in support of their game was a fanboy, and I never would. That's a demeaning personal attack, a reduction of a human being to a flat caricature. I don't do that under any circumstances, about games or anything else in life. (Pointing out the problems in an action or thought is not the same as the obscene slamming of the person themselves.) So I never questioned whether his praise was genuine or sycophantic--or some mix of the two, since the latter almost always includes some of the former at its base. I'd suggest that all of us, at some time, in some place, have been greatly influenced by advertising that works its way into ourselves, and affects our self-images and the way we perceive the world. Just because my wife got sucked in by a slick car dealer a few years back and started crying to me that we *had* to have a certain car, repeating back the dealer's own verbiage, doesn't mean she's a fangirl of it, or mindless--far from it. She's in several important respects brighter than I am, though I understand communications as a tool of manipulation better.

Second, there's context. Grimlorn didn't mentioned the trope or the word in isolation. He mentioned them in reference to a game whose developer has been slinging around both of these with forceful, well-expressed mini-blogs on Steam's forums. I find it hard to believe the two being so alike--Cleve's, Grimlorn's--is a matter of chance.

We'll just have to agree to disagree about this. -By the way, have you gotten Grimoire yourself? If so, what are your impressions?

Of course you don't. No personal attacks whatsoever.

Ah, sarcasm, as fresh as the morning dew...! But the line you quote isn't an attack on anything about Grimlorn, much less a personal attack on him--it's an attack in context on the way some people's thought processes are hijacked for great length's of time under some conditions. And I specified religion and politics as entry points for this attack--which leaves Grimlorn completely out. You'll also notice I'm sure that I didn't name any religion, political viewpoint, politician or religious figure. I feel like giving people in general a bit of a break. We all suffer from humanitis, and we all eventually die from it. I think that's cause to go a bit easy on our very erring species in which I include myself as a pretty decent example of an errorer...er.

Should I take it you haven't purchased and played Grimoire, yet? All kidding aside, you strike me as someone who is both knowledgeable about RPGs over the years, and capable of framing analytical discussion. This isn't flattery or irony. I'm just interested in well conceived opinions of the game that give me extra vantage points to consider if I check it out again under my grand niece's Steam account.

It was! I realized later that I did not bring my ninja, and I did not bring a bard. I always bring a bard because of my fondness for the class. Nice job on the ninja. I went well over 15 tries. The highest roll I ever got was in the mid teens. I had the dosbox window open, and was watching netflix while trying to roll. I figured if I was going to start the game before senility hit, I had better use the "patch" for the ninja and lord.

I will never understand why you need to work for a good character roll. I know SirTech was hardly the first to do this, but it's a time waster when all a person wants to do is get their character, and start playing. There's nothing macho about demonstrating the patience of a Buddha as we roll into eternity. I actually spread my party rolling out over a couple of days, because I didn't want to deal with all the hassle in a relatively short time.

The patch sounds like a good idea. Where did you get it, if you don't mind me asking? I hope enough people complaining about the rolling system in Grimoire that causes Cleve to do something about it, but I can't help thinking he might regard it as one of the "superior" aspects of CRPGs in the 90s.

I agree completely.

http://mad-god.webs.com/cosmicforge.htm

It has wiz 6 - 8 patches and editors. I only applied the increase chance of better rolls to create a lord and a ninja.

The worst part about the rolling in wiz 6 and 7 is that you start over completely and not a simple press of a reroll button.

Fortunately, in the Wizardry series, your initial roll doesn't govern your character for all eternity. You can gain stats at level up, and can then change into the class you really want to be. In other words, if you start with a bad roll, your character is not stuck with horrible stats forever. This is much better than in D&D based games, where your initial stats are also, for the most part, your final stats. (This is one of the things I don't like about D&D.)

With that said, Wizardry 6 and 7 do have some mechanics I find distasteful, like the way your magic regeneration depends on your initial class (should have been based on your current class and level), and the way base miss chance works (level up as a mage and change to a fighter, and you will never be as good at fighting than if you started out as a fighter).

By the way, how does Grimoire compare in these respects? (In particular, I'm wondering if there's a hidden stat that acts like base miss chance.)

Thats why i liked the goldbox games :)

The stats in Grimoire aren't fully understood by anybody yet, because Cleve still keeps delaying and making excuses for the release of the manual. I've read speculation that some of them don't actually do anything at all.