Savoy Universalis, Lae'Zel Barlass, and Postprescient Gaming

"Our bodies were laid out evenly for fifteen yards
Well, two feet above each of our heads was a fly trapped in a jar
Well, I hadn't noticed, but the people really noticed
That they really didn't want us around

So every single one of us fed the ground"

 

Modest Mouse - Fly Trapped in a Jar

 

 

Like many others, I've praised V:tM-Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough for its highly entertaining "insane" dialogues. You'd barely know what you're saying half the time. Of course, that worked in large part because Malk changes remained mostly cosmetic. Your quests and rewards were still the same as other clans, with even the same dialogue options, merely rewritten. Your quest log still gave straightforward instructions. You didn't gain or lose XP by arguing with a stop sign (no matter how much hardcore roleplayers might've wanted that.) And that's a good thing. Games are supposed to be first and foremost: playable! If your mission journal reads "egrets egress regrets ingrate in great Belgrade" which you're expected to interpret as "bring a tire iron to The Last Round within five minutes or your head explodes" you bought a poorly designed game.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I had some fun repeatedly losing at Old World yesterday, usually either via bear-less barbarians or thusly:

 

On my settings (middle diff., large map, 5 civs) you either stake out three city sites during the initial land grab or you've likely lost due to the fixed number of cities on the map. You can sometimes make up the difference mid-game depending on the tribal sites near you, but for my own part I'm pretty quick to hit the "new map" button if I stumble through the fog of war only to find those damn gift-bearing greeks've bird-dogged one of my intended holes.

I'd switched over to Old World for a bit after getting frustrated with Europa Universalis 4. After my first impression of basic mechanics as a relatively simple tribe, I jumped into European politics. Avoiding the superpowers and having already played Switzerland, Milan, Venice, Genoa and Naples in EU3, I settled upon Savoy, medium-sized and not exceptionally profitable but with some potentially excellent positioning. It also starts with one little ally and two little vassals... one of which is scripted as secessionist:

I honestly don't know what happens going forth if you surrender to Geneva's demands, as losing two of my starting provinces three years into the game is a non-starter. Might as well pick a smaller faction right out the gate rather than concede a third of my territory for the same effect. I do know that refusing renders Geneva impossible to integrate anyway, as other nations immediately rush to support its independence, causing a loss in three of five attempts so far.

EU3 did have a few scripted/inevitable events, usually slow, major, sweeping changes affecting half the factions, like the Protestant Reformation or discovery of the New World. They're cropping up far more frequently in EU4, and with more immediate impact. The effect so far is that I can't plan ahead not knowing how borders will shift or what numeric penalties I'll incur due to big or small decisions like Genevan separatism, the pope at Avignon, France immediately annexing Provence every single game, Italian secession from the Holy Roman Empire or The Italian Wars, prompting a restart every time I adjust my strat only to get another piano dropped on me. These don't feel like delightful new surprises spicing up the game experience so much as "gotcha" moments where a GM reasserts supremacy over players.

I've discussed this problem several times before, and it usually boils down to what am I getting in return for the information being withheld? Because too often all you get is getting to start over so the developer can pad out those marketing-mandated campaign length or player/game hour counts. This is actually a bigger issue in RPGs (see losing Erik to the Tremere in V:tM- Redemption for a classic old example, or losing your army at the end of Act 3 in Wrath of the Righteous for a more recent one) especially as most of them now try to duplicate The Elder Scrolls' winning compromise between story and sandbox, mandating the player cheat and look up exactly when to stall the story to sandbox up some XP and gear before moving forward. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, everyone will tell you not to meet the lordling for his dawn hunting trip until after you've quested your way around. You not only need to learn to fight before you move on with your epic ascension to greatness, but the trip itself is time-consuming, in a game where time means hunger, sleep and potentially other events' expiration.

Baldur's Gate 3 though, following in D:OS2's footsteps, is the worst offender I've seen recently, making it painfully obvious at every step that you're expected to know all of the fights beforehand, whether because quests have time-dependent effects or to plan out their relative difficulty for your party's level, or just to know what items you'll need walking through various doors.

- I failed to use either Lump's horn or the golem bell simply for never knowing when there would or wouldn't be one more fight up ahead

- I'd saved brains in jars from the start thinking they might be useful at some point, but when I found the brain reader machine the brains in question were still in my stash back at camp, since nothing indicates it's coming up

- Minthara! - her character arc is so poorly plotted and counterintuitive that there's basically no way to navigate it without cheating and looking up outcomes beforehand

- I've constantly had to reload fights due to the invidual character inventories and mountains of potentially useful trash loot (like brain jars) making it impossible to keep the right potion or arrow handy

- clicking on the newspaper editor instantly throws you out of the building and puts a timer on the quest

- it's pointless to try escaping the prison quietly in the Shadowlands, because all guards go on alert after a few steps anyway, and even rushing to the boat keeps you locked there in combat until they arrive

- the underwater jailbreak:

Lae'Zel: fast, strong, and a durn good door in a pinch

You get five rounds to reach along four corridors with your party of four and get NPCs back out. OK... it can be done with some planning and potions. But, wait, never mind, screw your plan. What looks to be an ankle-deep puddle turns out to spawn shark monsters every round. A few extra gratuitous reloads tacked on, courtesy of "fuck you"

- destroying one of the hag's healing shrooms summons her and throws you into the fight. Ironically this seems a mechanic to prevent players from using foreknowledge to make the fight easier, but just ends up forcing a reload for anyone including the shrooms in general trap-sweeping.

And on and on and on. It would in fact be harder to find quests or locations in BG3 where you're not somehow penalized with a reload or five for lacking foreknowledge of scripted events. THAT is why the game takes 200 hours.

Returning to our Savoyard muttons, it was easier for EU3 to stand out back in 2007 when its noteworthy competition merely came from the increasingly stagnant and dumbed down Civilization series. Not only are there far more 4X and other strategy titles around, but Paradox itself has diversified with Stellaris and now publishing Age of Wonders. Historical accuracy is EU4's most obvious competitive edge, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised they've been playing it up.

But part of EU3's charm was making ridiculous things happen (Catholic Shahs colonizing Australia and such-like) and this is why you have multiple historical start points, picking where you want history to diverge. The less divergence you allow, the less what you're playing feels like a game and the more it feels like a railroaded RPG plot. As I noted about one obscure Ancient Egypt edutaiment game, the didactic condescension of putting a student through fixed paces gives you the worst of both worlds, dictating priorities while randomizing success.

 

My first thought on seeing Savoy's Geneva independence event was that obviously I'm supposed to be playing Switzerland. Or really, just picking any of the historical "winners" since I now know that aside from starting stats, they will also benefit from GM favoritism during later events. The fact EU now proudly displays a top score counter only reinforces this impression as NOT playing for the high score was one of its previous selling points.

Having early city sites you didn't know exist sniped in Old World is infuriating and time-wasting, but at least can be compensated via prioritizing exploration and yields counterbalancing gameplay pay-offs. First off, it lessens the impact of AI plopping down endless cities in moronic spots. Second, combined with a map generator capable of avoiding both clumping and homogenization, it tends to focus expansion.

Around turn 100 of 200, the Greeks (blue) and I (green) finally polished off the last tribal settlements between our territories, only to discover the entire northwest quarter of the map was tribal land consisting of eight more city sites, more than any empire in existence. This new world rapidly hosted a mid-game land rush with the Persians (red) joining in to nab the nearest one across the gulf.

But what am I getting for the scripted surprises in EU4 or BG3, aside from a chance to restart the campaign, mash the Quick Load button or spend hours reading the wiki to cheat my way through predestined winner/loser options? Even in V:tM-Bloodlines, the Nosferatu sewer mssion gets remembered as one of the game's low points largely because you're not warned how goddamn LONG it is before going in... but at least your quest log didn't send you to Kuala Lumpur when the objective's under Hollywood. At least you're not told seven provinces when they turn into five.

 

Generally speaking, in a game you should be expected to know the rules, not the future.

Extraneous Prometheus

Gods live, gods die. A god dies for his chosen people, another kills them with a flood. It’s a god eat God world. They rise and fall along with the dreamers who give them birth. Kill an ape in the name of one god and ten more will be born in the name of another.

We live and die as reflections of our own dreams, as if the dreams of some long-ago night are all we can see each morning. We fear the uncertain night within us and throw a myriad points of light into the sky to name them after all the hopes and fears we wish we had the courage to recognize as our own. A million lights are not enough to protect us from our own nature. It was never the stars that named us.

Astarte wanes as Diana waxes and Lucifer outshines them both with a brief flame of hubris. And we, the shadows on the ground, dream flame after flame to give ourselves a shape; feverishly conjure up light and fire to give familiar boundaries to the limitless darkness we embody.

Let no more fires be born. Let the shades grow beyond their ancient shapes and let the heat they would put in the fires of heaven burn between them instead. Let there be darkness, for only when the boundaries these lights, our dream progeny, have placed upon us are allowed to melt away, then can we reach each other and learn that the flame of thought burns hotter in uncertain darkness than in the magnificent lying promises of the light.

__________________________________________

- by me in my late teens

The tooth fairy called; she wants her delusions back

"Don't go over the edge

You'll make a big mistake"

 

Gorillaz - Don't Get Lost In Heaven

 

 

My recent reminiscence about learning the concept of mortality was kicked off by a blog post I found elsewhere, in which the writer claims he won't yet be telling his NINE year old son that Santa Claus isn't real. Also, after talking it over with the missus, it was decided to wait several more years, and even then hedge by saying that our shared human myths are somehow "real" even if they're not "real"-"real" and I'm sorry, you lost me several moronic details ago. There's no point in specifying the blog itself, since you run into this "Yes, Virginia" crap every Christmas.

Am I the only one thinking it can't possibly be possible for a nine year old in the internet age to still think Santa's real? Unless he was raised in a barrel or something. I mean, I sussed out the Santa myth when I was four to five years old, and forget internet, we barely had television. I like to think I'm just that smart, but my parents blame my uncle the history major, whose reprisal of the role supposedly would've gotten him booed offstage in any grade-school play in history. Same parents, when I speculated the nine-year-old referenced above might be going along with the act to please his family, scoffed and provided the more parentally savvy interpretation: "oh please, kid's in it for the presents." But be it a folie a deux or a folie a dosh, you are either emotionally blackmailing or actively bribing your child to lie. For years on end. To the people closest to him. Helluva life lesson.

Without bothering to delve the intellectual harm thus caused (since truth underpins all interpretation and action) for me it felt emotionaly hurtful even dragging it out to five years old when I finally worked up the nerve to officially pull the proverbial beard. I'd figured it out, but was continually prompted to look forward to Santa's visit, and I couldn't figure out why my parents had lied to me or were still pretending I didn't know. Were father and mother making fun of me? Testament to my patchwork theory of mind, it did not occur to me at that age that not everyone had been notified of all my conclusions. (Come to think of it, I still struggle with that.)

But okay, assuming, for the sake of argument, even if - IF! - somehow, it were possible to drag the charade out ten whole years, you're not doing the child any damn favors on the playground! You're just condemning your progeny to be endlessly mocked and slapped around by all the other sadistic little monsters when word gets out, and after getting the Santa news broken to him far less gently than you would do it. And for what? Ignorance is not innocence.

As for the mass delusional "we make myths real" angle, that's an observation, not an aspiration, a diagnosis of mental disease and not a treatment. Awareness of mythopoesis is critical, but precisely to check that tendency in ourselves, not to indulge it to breed more gullibility.

 

And wait, are we still pretending this is about the child? Will your spawn fail to... imagine... things... if it is not driven by your parental authority to participate in a big lie? Your Little Prince can look out the car window and see a new Narnia, Lilliput or Chocolate Factory in every coffee shop and bus stop, and you want to pretend your lack of participation will dam that nigh-infinite flood? Please. You're not providing anything to your child by playing at Santa. You're just enlisting it in your own power-trip over itself, your own delusion of control over its imagination, its thoughts, its existence.

I'm not projecting, you're projecting, shut up!

Einundzwanzig: hier kommt die sonne

The winter solstice is the time of year when your particular hemisphere is tilted the maximum angle opposite the sun across the plane of the ecliptic.

...

Sorry, I was trying to bait Neil deGrasse Tyson into materializing to correct me on whatever random astronomy factoid I assume I bungled. Maybe I have to say it three times in front of a mirror?

 

Anyhoo, that whole sun:

 

("and waaaash awaaayy the raain...")*

I don't remember ever taking much notice of the summer solstice, but the winter one has finality. Used to mean a big midwinter feast to put some meat on your bones so you can pull through to the spring thaw. Last chance to avoid a lean, agonizing death, get it while it's hot. Now it means a bigger feast to put some fat on your fat so you can be pulled by a motorized scooter. But of course the memento mori aspect is rooted more fundamentally in the turning of yet another year. Even the declining, gloomy period is now ending. Even the waning has ceased. You find yourself shrinking, alone, against the stillness of the long night.

I became conscious of mortality at four. My mother was reading me a comic book about a mischievous ghost pranking some pirates, and I suddenly blind-sided her with the question "what's a ghost?" That segued to death. She stammered and hesitated and hedged a bit and I don't quite remember her answer because I was soon bawling my eyes out at the thought of nonexistence, with her backpedalling and struggling to work damage control with talk about maybe it's not the end and how I'll have a long, rich, full life and I'll have lots of fun and friends and see lots of movies. The line about seeing lots of movies stuck with me; even to a kindergardener it sounded like desperate reaching. By that point she must've been in full-on "holy shit I broke the kid!" panic mode.

But it's not like you can fixate on any thoughts at that age even if you want to, so it merely became a recurring, nagging nail in my skull. Besides, decades of life ahead of you sound like an inconceivable infinity anyway when you're young. Interestingly it did not cause me to question religion. For about five years afterwards I tread the cognitive dissonance: that my existence would end, and also all that stuff in my glossy, colorful children's bible about heaven and hell was true.

For years afterwards, I'd spontaneously recapitulate my struggle to wrap my head around the infinity of spacetime stretching around my mortality. As many have described, I'd lie in bed imagining death, stillness, feeling my breaths, counting heartbeats, acutely aware of the pause between them, wondering when the next breath will start and when it finally won't, holding my breath and trying to control it. (On the plus side, when I took a self-defense class which ended with short relaxation/meditation sessions the controlled breathing exercises came easy to me. Ditto for swimming.) The most marking experience came only a few times, that terrifying impression when lying still in the darkness that you are continually shrinking away from everything in all directions, all existence receding from you at all angles. I never discussed this with my parents after the incident with the comic book ghost. A seven-year-old's existential angst just didn't seem like the sort of topic one can politely bring up with one's progenitors. It is not the done thing.

By the time I ditched supernatural hocus-pocus I was ten to twelve years old, just in time to transition to adolescence and a healthy (if annoying to everyone around me) appreciation for nihilism. Nihilism gets a bad rap. As means of wiping the proverbial slate it is developmentally necessary, a level foundation upon which to construct a personal interpretation. Or maybe going through a distinct nihilistic stage is not strictly necessary, except that we're born into so much controlling garbage (religion, nationalism, romance, etc.) that our society imposes such a break with imposed morality upon any capable mind. Maybe a saner world would allow for a smoother transition. A world in which we'd know how to answer a four-year-old's questions.

The extent to which any of us settle such conflicts is... debatable. Unfortunately, clutching at the falsely advertised immortality of fame meshes too well with our instinctive social ape need for validation and recognition from others of our species as markers of in-group acceptance and societal rank. And it is false. Think about it: how much do you actually know about Neil deGrasse Tyson? None of it, whether quote or video, is a representation of his neural pattern, the self. You cannot continue through fame. You fabricate a false image, and die like everyone else. I quoted Soundgarden earlier. I paraphrased Rammstein. Words attributed to a word, of which I could look up some compositing names, none of whom I'd know from Adam.

Then there's vicarity, an example of which prompted this post, overhearing someone brag about buying a movie replica complete with stamped logo. That last part is apparently important. I do own trinkets, tend in fact to buy one as keepsake on any trip. Dime-a-dozen stuff. Tiny figurines, usually. Sometimes fossils. My own little glass and plastic and wood and stone and bone menagerie. But their importance is tied to my memories of the trip taken, memetic buttresses to the internal state, not externalizing to the mass market. Maybe I should get a tattoo of the symbol of torment. That'd show you all I missed the point of that story.

 

Which brings us finally to influence. Change the world. Save the world. Fuck everyone in the world. Do something that matters. But if you seek immortality by the ripple effect of your actions, then tyranny must be your greatest aim. There is no greater influence than constraint unto effacement, the forceful reshaping of others' existence onto your template. As for creativity, for most of history it's been limited by access to the means of preservation, to ink and paper and shelf space, to marble and tempera. Digitization has done wonders in this regard, expecially for the written word, only to substitute for it the limitations of the attention economy, the tyranny of promotion, the absolutist demand for the world's gaze to "like and subscribe" or at least alight onto my graven images and no other minds before me. Thou art god.

Of course the internet also gives freedom from that game, should you take it. Throw your thoughts out there and if the world will not listen, well, that's its business. You can't save the idiots from themselves, and it would be criminal to try.

The long night comes, regardless.

 

____________________________________________

 

* Photo actually taken during an eclipse in 2017.

I'm not temporizing, you're temporizing, shut up!

I'm not repetitive, you're repetitive, shut up!

I'm not crazy, you're crazy, shut up!

My Life as a Drowid, 3: Blood and Souls!

"I won't give again

Because she takes so often"

 

Plumb - Manic

____________________________________________________

 

After a grueling journey, we stride into the city as champions - a bit of creative journalistic editing withstanding. The Shadowlands lie behind us, shadowed still. The planestouched thing we dug from the depths beneath them lingers now in my camp, all jeering condescension, a repudiation of ambition. I do not shrink at robbing the darkness of its prize, but what use said prize to fall to the light and not to myself?

 

I worry for the changes in my companions. If the priestess will so readily turn her hair shirt between goddesses, what is her devotion worth in the coming struggle? At least the gith reaffirms her link to her kind, and we've tasted enough revolutions below to know the figurehead shapes not the vessel driving it forth. The daywalking nightwalker... it was hard enough to convince him not to chain himself to mastery over the hollow flittering parasites among which he was whelped. Had he taken such power over the minds of others to himself, I should have found myself forced to rest him alongside the rotting husk of his sire.

As for the vermin which has taken residence within my skull, the less said the better, the less thought the better, the less prepared the better. Nature will not long suffer this unnatural intrusion. Hah. And the jumped up gutter trash of this barren stone hive dare speak to me of chaos?

 

 

Fool girl. More fool for your petty flimflammery. Chaos is not a driving hunger in service to the end, not a rabid maw which does not know itself, not a slave to the lower planes. It is cold freedom, a howling loneliness, a mote in the tempest, center of the centerless, not death but the shifting infinity which encompasses it, and it will be my pleasure to correct your definitions, preening little prat.

______________________________________________________

 

So, here we are in Act 3, decidedly better fleshed out than Act 2. I have both good and bad things to say about it, but for now let's segue into the alignment issue from a problem shared by both Larian with its Diablo-clone 'action' game roots, and Dungeons and Dragons with its over-reliance on over-randomization: defining 'adventure' as dropping pianos on the player. Ok, let's take it slow, just follow me on down to the beach and OMG SHARKS!

Roll for initiative.

Or just reload.

Surprises can feel rewarding where they grow organically out of other game elements, but you're perfectly justified calling bullshit on a GM substituting ambushes out of nowhere for actual narrative causality. The sharkoids there aren't a random encounter. They're a scripted pre-amble to your adventure in the depths. Problems:

1) Just as in Original Sin 2, your playthrough is gratuitously lengthened by having to save and reload constantly to map out every zone's 'random' encounters and their difficulties, to take them on in a convenient order, especially since BG3 contains some time-dependent quests you're not warned about.

2) Jump scares get shelved among the lowest storytelling gimmicks with good cause. They're not scary past the "jump" part. A smatter of druidic crowd control trivialized the encounter, with the only concern being the attrition thus incurred making me wonder whether to reload and skip it for another day. You're not thrilling me with a novel challenge. You're just forcing metagaming.

 

The many, many such examples of trial and error misdefining surprises and predictability always bring me back to the law/chaos axis. I have to wonder why BG3 lacks official alignments, when almost every decision in your entire campaign still revolves around trite little good vs. evil juxtapositions. The player is simply not permitted to engage with those definitions knowingly and actively.

If you kept the mutt from Act 1 around your camp, you get a chance to either:

Lawful Evil: Hand him over to the mean lady who beats puppies, but officially owns him.

Chaotic Good: Refuse, and run her off for a bonus to leave the other dogs with a kinder master.

At least the druid dialogue option allows for obliquely acknowledging the other issue of freedom and keeping animals caged, even if it is lost among the more maudlin heartstring-tugging about beaten puppies. (If you have a dog, you're probably aware it'd rather be beaten than prevented from participating in the life of the pack.) But the law/chaos issue is as usual obfuscated by hand-wringing over playing nice.

 

I've also polished off the first companion quest, which happened to be Astarion's and also happened to end in both a satisfying boss fight and some surprisingly good dialogues and cutscenes. I've been replaying it from a few angles just to see it again. (And not just for the gratuitous vamp titties.)

Seriously, good work writers, animators and Astarion's voice actor!

(Also, cute Interview shout-out with the "known you for two hundred years" line.)

But again, I have to note your moral quandary gets framed almost exclusively in terms of whether or not to commit mass murder. Allow me to file a complaint on the grounds of vampiric mesmerism. In a setting already choked with illithids, detect thoughts, etc. allowing the ascension to proceed would create yet another mind controlling abomination erasing independent thought with every glance. At least if you do try to take a middle road and wash your hands of the whole deal, some writer did think to frame the issue in terms of enslaving oneself to the role of mastery, which is more thought than most game designers would put into things, but it's a bit 'blink and you missed it' for my tastes. Free will should have been the central issue here, not murder.

You run into a more annoying example down on the docks.

I'd've done it myself but rather not waste a fireball

Volo's been strapped to some gunpowder barrels by an angry mob. That's him getting nuked into oblivion to the right of the explosion. Good riddens. But the perfunctory presentation of the encounter bugs me. It's not a roleplaying choice. There is zero reward for not helping him. The angry mob is even led by a sinister cultist with darkened eyes, because only the most evil would ever want to hurt lovable old Volo. Even your rather grim companions like Astarion and Lae'zel encourage you to save him, with my fellow drow Minthara being the only one keeping a head on her shoulders.

Why?

The lynch mob was incensed by something he said, and your dialogue options try to frame this as a free speech issue without any details as to what was said. But there's a difference between free speech and lying, of which Volo is canonically, infinitely guilty at every single turn, day by day and year by year, interpersonally and in print. Moreover, his behavior within my adventuring party has repeatedly demonstrated him nothing but a liability, and I'm perfectly within my rights not to throw more good spell slots after bad saving this idiot from his own idiocy. Don't get between a fool and his folly as the saying goes.

In fact I looked up why anyone would save him, and it's apparently for the hefty buff he provides in the endgame, making this another example of forcing metagaming, dependent on foreknowledge of the campaign.

I've addressed this before in the case of Jan vs. Grobnar, and it recalls a particular episode of ST:TNG, Cost of Living, where we're expected to side with Lwaxana Troi getting engaged over the internet, then publicly humiliating her groom because she finds him boring, derailing the lives of half the cast so she can show off, all while using a thousand-person starship as her personal taxi. Instead of a free spirit, attention-whoring only indicates parasitic powermongering. Bye-bye, Volo, I'm with the cultist on this one. Boom. I'll do without the buff.

Which brings us back to alignments, because Volo is canonically Chaotic Good. Every game which includes a chaotic character will nine times out of ten pigeonhole it as a clueless motormouth spouting random gibberish, turning the alignment of personal freedom into single-note utterly predictable one-trick ponies rehashing Alice in Wonderland.

Chaos =/= goofy.

Even the rightly celebrated Planescape: Torment got this wrong with more characters than not. The inspiration for Law/Chaos conflict in D&D (and RPGs by extension) was Elric, a wandering, morose, haunted, cursed hero with at best a dry sense of humor, if any. Chaos is walking away from a house of horrors, ending a powermonger while refusing to become one yourself. It's speaking freely without trying to make others listen. It's thousands of other possible characters beyond clowns or killer clowns. Not that you could tell from game scripts.

Friday

"People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living."

We begin with a spy thriller in medias res, segue into a series of mildly suggestive quasi-sexual encounters, fly on supersonic jets, praise cats, sneak across some borders, more canoodling, some vague kvetching about economics and multiple currencies, win a lottery, maybe get back to that spy stuff at some point...? Maybe. Oh, and clairvoyance. Spaceships! And did we mention genetic engineering? Lots of punching, at any rate. Plus a space elevator! In bed!

I had avoided Heinlein's Friday until now because his last few books (excepting the excellent Job) were a bit dodgy, and the basic premise of "sexy superspy" seemed too blatantly riding the Cold War spy thriller craze. Comments from people who had read it (like "I don't know what he was trying with Friday") certainly didn't help, and pretty much any review will comment on its disjointed lack of narrative.

 

After a full read, I would guess that in format, Heinlein was likely emulating picaresque novels, a style influential yet largely outgrown by modern storytelling and our greater awareness of causality and plot progression. Compounding that, some of the heroine's convenient lucky breaks (admitted as such toward the end) only make sense as contrivances to fit Friday into Heinlein's latter-career "world as myth" books, as interventions by his time traveler brigade. Also, you can see the ending's general shape forty pages into a novel pushing four hundred, and though a good enough ending, it only emphasizes the gratuitously circuitous route to reach it.

 

You're left with the title character herself to reflect on those by-roads' significance, but she simply does not change enough, does not learn enough, does not contemplate enough to lend the events relevance. The whole point of a picaresque protagonist as I understand it is watching a clever, relatable yet somewhat contemptible bottomfeeder slither through society's cracks, and this simply does not mesh with Heinlein's general style, in which heroes simply KNOW BETTER THAN YOU and aren't afraid to bloviate about it. Simply put, he strained too hard to make Friday sympathetic and superior for her travails to truly connect, and the way half the cast rematerialize as accessories to her denouement clinches it.

Weirdly, the book might've read better stretched out to a sequel to allow each individual episode proper development and contextualization. As it stands, episode after episode are dropped in as set pieces, many of them lifted from previous works and just as quickly dropped. One glaring example would be the interjection of space distance calculations as in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, there befitting its teen hayseed's sense of wonder yet here clashing with the technically adept and worldly superspy. Too much of Friday gives the impression of The Author merely playing the role of himself, impulsively aping his own style with no end in sight.

Yet still... maybe not... maybe... that ending. For those who've had to tightwire between freedom and isolation, for those stranded by their own transcendence, for alien, alienated half-men, it cannot help but twinge.

Mononoke

(minus the Hime)

I ran across this anime while wiki-walking 'round TVTropes. Twelve episodes, subdivided into five stories, with all but the fourth playing up damsels in distress for cheap pathos, cheaper moralism and feminist bonus points. After a glance at its Wikipedia page I was about to dismiss it... until hitting upon Chiaki J. Konaka's name. Sure enough, plot-wise, the two stories credited to him move less predictably, with characters displaying more diverse motivations beyond crimes against the ovary, and the old animist angle of Japanese folklore played more poignantly. Still, this ain't Lain, Paranoia Agent or Bebop. Don't expect much else than young adult ghost stories.

The series' main claim to fame is of course its visual style mainly suggesting 19th-century prints, and I will admit quite a few scenes come across as striking. But were I to call the animation "stylized" or "minimalist" you would be on solid ground to read that in its all too common usage as code for "cheap" despite the occasional fancy layering effect. Between the usual anime 0.5 FPS routine and single-frame panning shots, gawping reaction shots, etc., plus slow credits and other filler like reiterating the hero's shape/truth/reason gimmick and redefining mononoke every single time, each 23-minute episode has maybe 10mins of actual content.

They're good enough minutes at that. Worth a gander. Particularly interesting to note the use of distortion and smash cuts to emphasize the magical realist coextension of the supernatural athwart the mundane, to mystify the viewer between the seen and unseen worlds. Most often it's unclear until the end of the episode (if even then) whether events happen in order, happen in reality, or whether ontology is being rewritten as you watch. A bit forced, but rare's the show where such confusion works at all instead of merely being aggravating.

Supposedly a movie follow-up's coming out soon, and I have to wonder why this wasn't cut down to one or two long-form adventures in the first place. Over the years I've repeatedly been struck by the sheer amount of padding in the movie/TV industry (regardless of continent) especially in 2007 when games had not yet overtaken film in profitability and you'd think air time would be at a premium. I've remarked before that for example Netflix' best offerings come in the form of short sub-season miniseries, with longer shows that should've been allowed to die after their first season degenerating into trite pandering. Granted I watch little TV these days, but it's hard to think of a modern show like MASH or ST:TNG running season after season and still having something to say, much less improving. Isn't it odd that as on-demand binge-watching became more common, the length of our most noteworthy serials appears to be shortening instead of lengthening? Long-runners tend more and more toward the "Fast and Furious" or superhero movie intellectual level, with soap operas still going strong. Is this just market dilution no longer supporting ambitious long-term projects, "reality" TV taking over longer formats, is it another symptom of our short attention span, or are more of the better of us less motivated to veg out every single evening in front of the same endlessly reiterated setting, endlessly reiterated cast, endlessly reiterated running gags? Is the middle class (young or old, east or west) now more or less prone to let itself be passively inundated by the laugh track, night after night, in that comforting place where everybody knows your name?

Anyway, do watch at least episodes eight and nine of Mononoke. Apropos of nothing, it has a lovely example of a wampeter and granfalloonery.

Bugframe

Tried getting back into Waframe after some months' absence. In the span of a couple of hours I:

1) Got locked out of quest completion by phase transitions not spawning in Duviri.

2) Got griefed by some retarded bitch that started Kullervo at lvl1 then immediately quit.

3) Had my heavy attack bug out and become unusable.

4) Fell through the world.

5) Got killed by invisible AoE several times in a row.

6) Lagged too badly to shoot moving targets.

7) Had a mob fall through the world, invalidating an entire fifteen minute mission.

I wish I could bitch about whatever new content they've added, but there's a "Step 0" to any product. It must actually be usable.

For the cause! -way, then left at the fork...

"We are the people, we are strong

Let's make up our minds and prove them wrong"

 

KMFDM - Glory

 

 

Commentary on uncoordinated mass lurching in vague directions like, say, peasants' crusades always sounds so negative. Always focusing on how they got nothing done, got trounced in their first battle if they reached the enemy at all, and mostly pillaged and murdered their native lands more than anything else, the holiness of the cause being a mere pretext for rioting.

 

But think about it: if your town's ignorant, fanatical and/or violent thugs developed a sudden burning desire to be half a continent away, would you argue against them?

 

Once in a while ya gotta wonder how much human history and politics consists of the tacit, misadvertised export of lowlifes. There just aren't enough foreign legions to go around. What we need is professional, snazzy import-export businesses shuffling migrants, militias, multi-level-marketers and jihadists around through bus stops to nowhere in circles. New business model: crusade as service. Not forever, mind you; just until we build those rockets to Venus. Rip the system? What could be more timelessly central to the system than the rabble begging to be roused?

Go on, hero. Just keep walkin' 'til yer halo floats.

odd weeds 'round these parts...

 

 sequelae of the infestation

Classes&Cogitations 5: Flavor of the Monk

Well, this one should be easy. Lucky all those other classes' tedious analysis of roleplaying and mechanic interconnection is superfluous in the case of our next two options.

If you want to pretend you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, play a barbie.

If you want to pretend you're Bruce Lee, play a monkey.

Done. Who needs RP when you've got fad worship?

Enter the Dragon came out two years before D&D's 1975 release with the original monk, coincidentally about the same time Kung Fu was first airing. Conan three years before its '85 release; enter barbarians and supposedly a decisive retool for monks into full-on karate kids. Neither class fits particularly well into D&D's basic rock/paper/scissors late-medieval wargaming origin with its discrete armor classes and weapon proficiencies. Granted that's not a bad thing. For the game to grow, it needed some gaps and bridges in those class distinctions. Still, if latching on to the latest Hollywood craze managed to fit that need, it can't have been less than 90% dumb luck on the part of Gygax&co. But hey, D&D's a half-baked hodgepodge of pop culture tropes even on a good day (note we just had a major video game adaptation based on the notion that Lovecraftian face tentacles are trending well on Facebook) so don't expect any improvements from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro.

It's up to their many spin-offs and imitators to make good on bad ideas.

For a relatively minor question, ask yourself how you're gonna balance the economics. If heavier armor is better and more expensive (as it sure as hell was historically) then how exactly will you insert ber-serk front-liners without obsoleting your tin can brigade? You might not question it now, but the "naked caster" problem cropped up in a big way in pre-WoW MMOs, especially with PvP (read: griefing) enabled. And if you have any interest in creating a coherent game world, then cost, bulk and solidity will have to be re-examined. If all it takes is one reagent-free cast of stoneskin for my IWD2 halfling monk to out-tank my dwarf fighter, you've got a problem.

 

Barbarians filled a more necessary niche for offense-oriented fighters back when the fighter was the sword-and-board heavy defending light and medium wizards and thieves, and I always liked how the rage mechanic pushed you into all-out offense, to finish the fight before your timer runs out. But if the barbarian is an offense-oriented fighter, that does raise the question of difference from a fighter built for offense... and the answer is once again the rage ability... and the class has just sort of stuck there since its inception. Moving past that requires more investment in noncombat skills and feats, but let's postpone that until we reach the ranger.

I've also never seen monk weapons truly implemented in cRPGs. Historically, there were plenty of non-military farming implements and such which could be used in battle, like pitchforks, sickles, scythes, hatchets or nunchuks (I'm'a thresh yew up, boyyy!) and it makes perfect sense to associate these with clerics, monks and other non-martial classes. Fixating on kung-fu movie slapstick to the exclusion of such options also cuts a potential vein of roleplaying continuity, of monastic communities with the villages connected to them. Does your monk's quarterstaff skill come from defending himself with a walking stick on pilgrimages? Did you learn to wield a sickle while defending downtrodden villagers from heathen raiders who chased them to your abbey? Or rather fuck that RP noise because your stun skill requires you to be empty-handed or gives you a +2 ToHit for having your middle finger free?

Really, in terms of RP, the monk's problem is the same as the cleric's: fleshing out those creeds and sticking by them. To what force is your order devoted and will that come up in the campaign? Who wrote your rule and does it entail asceticism, tithing, paid sacraments, ritual prayers (possibly working as buffs) vows of silence or nonviolence (and if so what are your conditions for breaking them) is your order apolitical or subordinate to a certain clergy or god-king, where are your monasteries, your relics, do you need to report back to your abbot, are you responsible for your party members' sins? Do you support yourselves by brewing wine or beer or hold some sort of royally-guaranteed monopoly on some trade goods, and if so will those skills show up when negotiating in taverns or let you wrangle an audience with the minister of trade? You don't need to hold yourself to every single such detail, but I'll be damned if you ever meet a monk in a cRPG with more personality than "I know kung fu" and monasteries, while frequent, tend to be explicitly disconnected from the playable monk class.

 

It's not like barbarians get much better treatment either. How does tribal life ever impact your gameplay? (I'm especially reminded of Dragon Age: Origins' introduction, reading all those lore entries and dialogues about the Chasind... only for none of it to come up ever again.) You will inevitably visit a barbarian village in every cRPG campaign, and while there you will just as inevitably participate in exactly one activity: a trial by combat to decide the new chief. Chief of what? Who gives a shitting bull. Again, where is your tribe from, what are your hunting grounds, do you migrate with the herds, do you harvest seasonal fruits, are you seminomadic between winter lakes and summer pastures (and will those skills come in handy in feeding the adventuring party?) do you raid other tribes or have traditional enemies (like the other barbarians you meet during the campaign) do you raid civilized outposts and are therefore a criminal, if you lack citizenship in any major political entity how does that affect your status? Remember, the law throughout history has "solved" many crimes by convicting the nearest foreigner, and as a barbarian, hey, that's you! And while we're at it, do you know how to read? It's especially funny that RPG barbarians are so often portrayed as grounded, pragmatic realists or even de facto atheists, when primitive nomads are actually superstitious as fuck! Everything, every single damn thing is either good luck or bad luck to them, either an evil spirit or a divine blessing.

Finally: the ranger, which seems to have suffered a great deal of derailment. In cRPG scripts, ranger means unaffiliated (or flatly anti-social) woodsman with a bow, but the class' original inspiration, Tolkien's latter-age Dunedain, were a deeply, multigenerationally loyal caste with specific genetics, in fact an organized (if overtly decentralized) hereditary guerilla force, and the "dour-handed rangers of the north" hacked and slashed their way through LotR's last battles with their swords. There's a lot of unused wiggle room in game writing for rangers as distant appendages of various power structures. Granted, much like barbarians' heavy melee offense, ranger range combat just fits an otherwise empty niche in core archetypes. A better spread of fighter/thief classes (as seen in more recent RPGs) picking up more range focus frees rangers from the sniper pigeonhole. But then if they're no longer "I know bow fu" then what exactly does a ranger do? Doth a ranger... range?

The basic D&D classes provided all you needed in a dungeon crawl: one to hit shit, one to disarm traps, one to heal and one to abracadabra whatever couldn't be hit to death. Every class added after that tends to devolve to yet another flavor of "hit shit" especially in computer games which are great at clicking things to death and infamously terrible at every other aspect of roleplaying. Interconnecting lore and player actions is one problem, sure, but all three of these classes require non-combat skill use to make them stand apart. You remember, moving quietly, spotting, all the myriad skills lumped under "survival" and everything else crucial to moving this genre outside the dungeon, will it ever be used? Does it matter that your barbarian can stride across the tundra if all the action takes place in a 10x10 room with an orc guarding a treasure chest? Does knowing how to build a smokeless campfire ever help the party? Or skin a deer? Or pick berries that don't taste like burning? Or train/use carrier pigeons? Or shave a bone spear or record your deeds in scrimshaw? Is there anything for your monk to grapple or balance across, or any tests of mental discipline to pass? Can your ranger track a party of kidnappers across the plains of the horse-lords and commune with said horses?

Because if the answer to "can I do anything besides hit shit" is consistently NO, then you may as well call them all fighters and be done.