Looking at Rudolpho the Twittering Mule again today, I noticed this: Now, on the surface, that's just a funny sentence. But then, since it was Dorian Hart posting it, I remembered the credits to Thief, where lots of people were described as doing "juggling." And I presumed it didn't just mean tossing a number of physical objects in the air in greater numbers than the appendages used to catch them. But what did it mean then? What does it mean now? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? (Ahem.)
If its not the circus act, then it could be ... maybe... with a tingling at the nape of my neck... the latest Spiderman movie to hit the big screens! Keeping in mind that the last movie featured lizardman warrior trapeze. We should be in for a treat !
Does it not mean more or less flanking? Repeatedly getting back-attacks in? That's how I understood it, but now that I think about it I might be wrong .
I believe you are a few logical steps away. That is, you are referring to the gaming phenomenon of "juggling an enemy": implemented in a number of ways, but most fundamentally derived from knocking a foe in the air and keeping it there by repeated blows, thus preventing counterattack. In this context, it probably just means "I was managing some tricky details about lizardman cleric design" and not so much "hey, I just spent a few hours repeatedly pummeling/being pummeled by lizardman clerics ." It could still mean the pummeling, though, I'll grant you. But in the context of the original Thief, it sure as anything didn't meant that.
I know this is likely to be a disappointing answer, but "juggling" back at LG meant "juggling." As in normal circus-type juggling. For whatever reason, we had an unusual number of people at the company who could juggle, myself among them. There's no deeper mystery. As for the lizardman cleric: I'm currently doing some battle and monster-deck tuning, and it's the case that the "lizardman cleric" appears in two different adventures somewhat far apart in levels. I had noted to myself after a play-through that in the higher-level adventure, the lizardman cleric needed to be more dangerous, but found in practice that I couldn't make him strong enough for the harder adventure without making him *too* hard in the easier adventure. After some adjustments and experimentation, my solution was to beef up the cleric for the harder battles, and create a less-potent "lizardman underpriest" monster for the easier one, that's more like the original cleric.
Disappointing? Disappointing?! I've spent the last ten-plus years hoping against hope that "juggling" meant "juggling," and you imply I could be disappointed to learn the dextrous truth?! Okay, that part's almost disappointing. I was hoping that either the designer, or the lizardman cleric, was deftly maintaining aerial patterns of flying apparatus. But the Looking Glass thing is great to know. I suspected "juggling"-juggling given that somebody was actually juggling in a credits photograph. The fact that these big grown-up-type people with a games company would put such an activity into their credits listing was inspiring to me. Also, I juggle.
I feel like this is a games industry thing or something: fully 1/5th or so of my current company can juggle. One used to be able to do so while riding a unicycle. I definitely don't condone that, however.
On first read, I was seeing "lizardman underpants" ... Without going too much into dnd lizardfolk genealogy, perhaps a better naming suggestion as lizardman cleric for the lower lvl mob and lizardman templar for the higher one ? I'm not sure how much tabletop dnd to bring in here but there is a whole hierarchy in the priest/cleric class and variants (off my head: cleric, bishop, paladin, monk, mystic, shaman, templar, avenger, oracle, servant, warpriest etc).
I don't pretend to know the answer to this but here is my guess: "Juggling" can be used in reference to a person "juggling" multiple tasks. So the people in the credits of Thief could have been labeled as "juggling" because they tackled multiple tasks (possibly some outside their job description?). As for the quoted bit "lizardman cleric juggling" he could have meant multiple things. Perhaps he was fighting multiple lizardman clerics and juggling between them, maybe he was juggling the task of designing lizardmen and clerics, or he could have been juggling actual lizards with tiny Pope-hats. Note: I don't know anything regarding this issue. This post is merely the result of a drunken man posting at 6:45am on a Monday.
And for not the first time in my life, I respond: I'll just wait for you to wake up later and read again. Good ol' Dorian, answering questions like that.
It's design comments like this that remind me of designing D&D modules in high school and how tricky it was to balance everything properly, and of how excited I am about this game and everything it stands for.
