You didn’t know either, Exactly as me you are just speculating. There were exactly same rite in ancient oriental cultures to exile family members wiping nobility for them. So melodramatic or not he is my pater familias holder of the title. Besides that my rebellion is screwed without the training people and Zvad. Now I had stupid helot priests I don’t care. No soldiers and a pissed Alastor with a army. No way… I split the helot group maybe they could do something like reclut. But due I am pacific and they are brutes …
Maybe you could… not let Zvad die? By choosing another route?
No idea Like I role-playing I didn’t thought in trying. Anyway, That’s what evil Gandhi chose, so that’s the ending she would get. I will have to plan another one when she ends dead .
That, and his ‘rite’ is not in fact aimed at you specifically, though his emnity certainly is. He is “perform[ing] the customary memorial for the death of a once great House” which has two surviving members. I guarantee you, to the maximum extent I can without actually being the author of the story, that a noble character is still a noble after his little snit.
Really, I thought the conflict there for a helot character was far more cutting. It had an implication that your own mother prostituted herself to Alestors for leniency…though I’m not certain if we’re to take away that it actually happened or not.
Why didn’t they bloody Harrow her – did you think of that? Was she so righteous? For all her pretending that she’d never stoop to being ‘useful’ to Them? If it were my seed that was weak, you might have had a dozen little sisters and brothers, all looking like some Alastor or other.
"But no – she couldn’t even protect us that way. She left it all to me.
The first part implies that she did - that only her own reproductive difficulties prevented you from having a host of half-siblings. But then he immediately says she couldn’t protect the family that way. Not sure what I should take away from it.
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Yay update! 
I was just looking for a reason to keep on procrastinating. Xthonos has answered my prayers.
Kudos on making me hate the father, both so horrible in their own way although helot daddy is winning.
I always thought it was on purpose to underline the fact that Breden is not originally from these parts. But then again I think Radmar says that they’ve been around for 6 months so maybe it’s a typo?
Holy. Helot dad doesn’t pull any punches.
Welp, that makes things pretty clear as to where we stand with dad.
Glad I got to finally bitch slap the old coot, though.
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I was rather hoping to convince the guy with our success that there’s a future in this, patch up the relationship a bit. But he’s certainly trying to burn those bridges…
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If you could replace the skills with a percentage based guide, I think that would be a lot better. It gives us more to see about how our character improves, not just the very general “1, 2, 3”. Also i would like more ways to improve your characters skills. That would really open up a lot of options. Maybe something like “Sabres of Infinity” where the skills can be improved, just not so much that you become over powered.
That would require a rewrite of the whole game. A starting Intelligence 2 in particular means something very special in this game beyond the stat.
Furthermore, (and this will probably become more apparent in later games) stat levels in Intelligence, and likely in Combat as well, feed into a Hegemony classification system. For example, you can tell that Simon/Suzanne has a Combat of around 3, at least in personal combat, because they’re a Blademaster of the First Kyklos.
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Just a minor bug in this playthrough. I will put it in spoiler tags so someone doesn’t accidentally read it. There is a spot where it didn’t tag Kala/Kalt’s gender right:
[spoiler]
I stare at her in horror. “Bleeding Angels, {kalt}. The man was willing to scrape off half his face to get back on this side of a Ward.”
If you notice the brackets with Kalt after Angels; in my playthrough it was Kala. [/spoiler]
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Yeah, I greatly disagree with Sampl. Discrete levels (preferably described with words) create and allow for much more substantive differences than fine-grained, percentile levels.
Ok thanks for the clarification. I guess I’m just not really used to the whole number based skills. And do you know if you get a chance to improve your skills? Or are they permanent.
They will be improvable. Word from Havenstone is that he’s planning a rate of about one point of improvement per game, and information in the game files indicates that they will go up at least to 5.
I hope more than one point of improvement per game, really. Maybe 1.5 on average or something. Because if you’re developing your ‘main’ attribute, as most will probably do, that would leave the other two permanently floundering at “pretty lousy” levels.
Focusing improvement in one stat would effectively make your MC a genius in their field. Realistically, their other skills would suffer for it.
Remember that the average in each stat is 1. 2 is highly talented, and 3 or higher gets into advanced education in your field of choice.
Combat 2 is enough to defeat noble guards and Alastors. Charisma 2 is enough to start a new religion. Intelligence 2 is enough to use minor theurgy without formal training. So you can get by on Charisma 1 and Combat 0 for a few games if you want to specialize in reaching the Third Kyklos of Theurgy.
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Yes, yes, that’s the theory, but in game terms, it doesn’t translate well. If, by that logic, virtually all stat checks remain in the 0-2 region, then the higher level stats become vestigal, and people are best served by simply taking all three of their characteristics to 2. To counter this, a designer will put in important checks that try to test for whether someone is “very good” at something, which tends to translate into “fully invested.” I.e., as charismatic/intelligent/combative as a character can be at this point in the story. The problem with this, then, is that it renders the advancement system kind of unnecessary in the first place, as characters then reduce to “the stat you’re good at,” and then the other two.
Such systems, in my experience, tend to feel more satisfying and give more options even as a designer when you have a little bit to play with even after the advancement that your ‘build’ makes obligatory. It’s also the natural way to preserve the same kind of choice one had at the beginning, between high, medium, and low skills; a character will put their first point of advancement into their high skill, and then a leftover to further specialize.
Alternately (and this may sound a bit contradictory with what I’ve already said, but) I’m not really sure the game particularly needs skill advancement. Or at least, it might not mesh well with what we’ve already seen. For charisma in particular, the starting high of 2 is already quite good - continuing the degree of progression from 0 to 2 onward seems like it would have to lead to implausible or supernatural levels very quickly. This is true to a lesser extent with combat skill, and not really true of intelligence at all, since that’s bound up with magic anyway. It might honestly be good to leave the magical advancement as just part of “what a high-int character does,” and not have the basic skills change.
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[quote=“Dominic, post:3402, topic:1601”]
Yes, yes, that’s the theory, but in game terms, it doesn’t translate well. If, by that logic, virtually all stat checks remain in the 0-2 region, then the higher level stats become vestigal, and people are best served by simply taking all three of their characteristics to 2. To counter this, a designer will put in important checks that try to test for whether someone is “very good” at something, which tends to translate into “fully invested.” I.e., as charismatic/intelligent/combative as a character can be at this point in the story. The problem with this, then, is that it renders the advancement system kind of unnecessary in the first place, as characters then reduce to “the stat you’re good at,” and then the other two.[/quote]
And therefore, a good system of this sort will have multiple kinds of problems to solve and multiple possible solutions. Most solutions won’t require full investment (though it might help with getting top results), but some rare occasions might. Other situations will not have a solution for the stat that you favored, or might require low-but-nonzero stats in multiple areas.
In short, you’re describing the usual challenges that a Choicescript game always has to grapple with.
I really don’t think that I am - choicescript games generally have fairly granular skill systems with fairly arbitrary rates of development; there is no well-defined maximum value at any one point. Still, some others do struggle with failing to balance their challenges against the rate of progression that the game allows, resulting in extremely tight gameplay where you have to extremely narrowly focus on your core skills in order to avoid failure. This isn’t a very desirable situation.
You actually hint at the problem in your description there - will optimal results require full investment a high proportion of the time? If they do, then failing to fully invest in your skill of choice means you’re locking yourself out of optimal results, and is therefore unwise, and the game may as well leave off the skill development system entirely, as it still essentially reduces to high, medium, low.
Or, do optimal results not require full investment? In this case, maxing your skill becomes essentially a trap, counterintuitively restricting you by your failure to diversify. This can be frustrating, and also results in characters being less distinct, as they spread points around to cover up for shortfalls instead.