Once you pawn a time, you couldn't pay to get it back.

Present Day; Present Time

"It's about bounty hunters."

"What's she supposed to be, the bait?"

 

So snarked I upon being introduced to Cowboy Bebop via Faye Valentine's cleavage. But Bebop's well-earned fame for raising the bar on not just anime but TV series in general also applies to gradually redeeming an otherwise flat bombshell fanservice extra to a memorable protagonist.

I'd forgotten, until rewatching the series in order, the Faye is initially presented in one-shot episodic fashion riding off into the proverbial sunset at the end... until the Bebop unceremoniously fishes her back up out of space in the next episode. I addressed her character advancement vis-a-vis cyberpunk's crucial "loser" aesthetic, but for my first run through the show in 2001 I didn't think much of her, having seen many other such cartoon characters go absolutely nowhere... until this:

call me, caall meee.....

Along with Jet, Faye's character arc blows into focus mid-series, Speak Like a Child revealing not only that her past is not entirely lost, but that her pre-amnesia peppy teen personality had been drastically, unrecognizably different from her current rough cobble of hair-trigger temper, devil-may-care compulsive gambling, alternating nihilism/vanity/greed and petty vandalism. It's not just a convenient linking mechanism from a series writing perspective, but a neat little twist that in contrast to Jet (the stalwart leader who deals with both of his blasts from the past by slightly passive yet unflinching direct confrontation) Faye dithers and hides away and seems to avoid thinking about her newly recovered information for several episodes, or at least avoid letting on it's affecting her.

 

Another of the series' quirks, if you pay attention, is that it ends before the end. To allow the two-parter Real Folk Blues to focus on resolving Spike's plot, Hard Luck Woman serves as the true dissolution to the main routine of space cowboying. Though Faye appears later, it's solely as messenger and obviously no longer full participant. It's in Hard Luck Woman that the gang breaks up. Ed follows her father, taking Ein with her, and Faye overnights in the past. In a bookend to the first episode and their repeated concern with food expenses, the two men are shown silently drowning their sorrows in albumen, having secured subsistence at the loss of their companions.

That brilliant four-minute montage has stuck in pretty much everyone's memory, not only for its bittersweet tone but for not striking a single tone. Independent individuals instead strike their own courses. The men are grimly resigned, Ein's just happy to be with a now hopeful and more focused Ed, and Faye... stops to think. For the first time since we've seen her. Discovering the past hollow, she finds that hollow no less a part of herself for it. Does all that could have been belie her personal fable as a hot-to-trot damsel of fortune? If it's the future that matters, then what matters when you've been prematurely catapulted into it? Is it even worth having an identity conflict over a barely remembered and now irrevocably ruined past, a virtual life that never was?

As single scenes go, Faye laying to rest in the ruins of her life is a world-class classic, not least because instead of being performed by some personification of either wisdom or innocence, it instead falls to an energetic but uncertain clever fool, a mind caught in the moment of becoming.

Once a pawn a time, you can move two spaces.

Classes & Cogitations: Weapon Afterthoughts

By the time I got into D&D adaptations with NWN (3rd edition) weapons and their associated feats were already an overbuilt mess, and if anything proved that to me, it was going back to play Icewind Dale and finding the weaponry actually made more sense years prior.

Blame it partly on the usual one-upmanship. Every new goblin-pokin' stick gots ta be bigger an' stickier than the last to impress munchkins. Once you give them swords they want greatswords, and then grandswords and great-grandswords and megaswords and gigaswords. Once you give them double axes they want quadruple axes, and how many lightsaber blades are we Darth Mauling and Grievousing nowadays? If you haven't turned Jedis into lightsaber porcupines yet, you're obviously not trying hard enough. So let's make a few points:

 

1) Giving one class access to all weapons and weapon feats made a little sense when strictly delineating each class by one core function: hits shit, disarms traps, heals, nukes. But any more nuanced class system needs more gradations. See post #2 in this series for my case on doing away with the "fighter" class.

 

2) There's a difference between choice and redundancy. Characterizing my "dire mace" as a quarterstaff with better stats when replaying NWN's expansions a few years ago spoke to transparent redundancy in more than one dimension. In addition to power bloat you're needlessly duplicating functionality between different types of bladed weapons and so forth, which overwhelmingly invalidates weapon specialization feats for just one type of falchion/scimitar/gladiolus/whatever... and then they went and duplicated the whole mess yet again for weeaboo appeal with kamas and katanas. So let's hit that last point first. Claymores, Zweihanders, Daikatanas, unless you're specifically banking on historical accuracy to the level of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, such distinctions are cosmetic and should be treated as such. Trying to implement separate specializations in each of fifty different flavors of "yew call that a knoife" in a single campaign just invites itemization woes.

3) Homogenization is even worse. In Baldur's Gate 3 my only character who did not use a crossbow was the party's rogue, but despite abandoning most old class/race weapon proficiencies, many items still came with bonuses accessible or tailored to rogues, gith or whatever, demonstrating that complete freedom of choice wouldn't be very fun in a genre where you're expected to establish personal identity.

So where's that sweet spot between too much or too little choice? Well, the old precept of basic / martial / exotic weapons was solid, if only it hadn't been watered down. Much like the law / goodness intersection, the several axes of combative prowess (magic / range / defense / offense) go a long way toward establishing characters on a continuum in relation to each other. (A duelist for example: give it light armor with exotic weaponry; a cleric the reverse.) Problem: if completely synonymous with class choice, it's not an opportunity to roleplay. If cleric=mace and thief=dagger and wizard=staff then you may as well upgrade the weapon slot automatically as you level instead of pretending to let players distribute new cutlery among the party. Otherwise, MMOs demonstrate the logical extreme for endless, class-specific, linear gear upgrades: a mindless incremental grind for predetermined outcomes.

 

4) Weapons should be usable, even for spellcasters. Icewind Dale intrigued me not least by my casters outputting much of their damage not from limited-use fireballs but from their piddlin' little 1D4 slings. (Granted, that was largely because IWD featured a Diablo-esque quantity of trash mobs to clear, but still...) Keep Half-Life's crowbar in mind as object lesson: it wouldn't have become nearly as emblematic if you hadn't been encouraged to use it. Eliminate damage cantrips and the all-purpose magic missile. Institute spell reagents and ammunition (another good experience was rationing +l33t ammo in IWD2; black arrow, you were passed down from my father and his father, etc.) but don't fall into the trap of making everyone into a greatsword-swingin' battlemage as Larian or Bethesda do. Spellcasters should be limited to simple weapons, and also constantly falling back on those simplest of weapons for damage dealing, both to economize on precious mana or spells per day and because magic should not be a primary damage source to begin with.

 

Note much of this only really applies to party-based cRPGs or other squad management. An author or tabletop GM can tailor loot to his party's needs if he wants (see Roy, Belkar and Durkon from OOTS all getting ranged melee attacks so they're not standing around waiting for flight spells to expire) and single-character campaigns default to the player character snatching up the biggest baddest available pokin'-stick at every turn. It's when deliberately balancing a roster with frontliners, flankers and support that weapon differentiation feels most rewarding and the gamut must be best defined. Everything from whip-chains, tridents and Excalibur through simple but trusty off-the-rack spears, crossbows and shortswords all the way down to blacksmith's hammers, slings, blowguns and good old-fashioned tree branches should come with their own advantages and disadvantages, never pigeonholed to one class and never available to all.

More importantly they should play off each other: spears holding off enemies for archers to shoot, crossbows staggering enemy advance for slow-swinging halberds to wind up reach attacks, disorienting slung pebbles allowing daggers to crit, staff trip moves giving heavy warhammers an elevation damage bonus on prone targets, whatever ways you can think of weapons INTERACTING among a well-balanced party would greatly help legitimize what has in most cases boiled down to meaningless cosmetic fluff. When did roleplaying strategists forget the notion of combined arms? Blunt/slash/pierce is a nice start, but how often do you see campaigns putting to use even that basic distinction from fight to fight and zone to zone?

And if your weapons really don't work differently with different requirements and interactions, then stop claiming your game has fifty "different" flavors of sharp stick.

_______________________________________________

 

P.S.:

Weirdly, you'll see single-character games like The Age of Decadence implementing basic yet impactful weapon properties (like spears blocking enemy advance) but that may have more to do with the low fantasy setting. It wasn't afraid special weapon moves would cut into the specialness of fireballs and blizzards. On the other hand, we do need to skew fantasy more toward the low end...

My-i-cide

"You would know wouldn't you?

You extend your hand to those who suffer

To those who know what it really feels like

To those who've had a taste, like that means something"

 

NIN - I Do Not Want This

 

 

How has this haphazard, awkward little journal changed over the years? Slightly improved phrasing, vastly improved typing, more pictures, wordier salads, MMOs died out so I'm not talking much about them anymore... oh yeah and over the last 4-5 years I stopped making plans to kill myself.

This is weird.

Among blogging's unexpected benefits (aside from, in a general sense, howling into the void) has been the catharsis of being able to speak of my obsession with ending it all, if oft obliquely and to no-one in particular. Such outbursts became rather a fixture here in early years. Eventually I even lost two or three steady visitors who'd been checking back for my final note and finally got bored. Too bad. Guess I'm just not that dedicated to the noble craft of bloggery.

 

The morbidity though vastly predates the blog. I'd say to my teens but weirdly enough despite my violent self-hatred, occasional thoughts of snuffin' it didn't rise to prominence until my early twenties. Until then I'd somehow been convinced I'd die at 23 (and something important would happen to me at 26, and yes I did hold both those convictions in my head, with zero context, for several years.*) For various reasons and in tandem with a cycle of anxiety and depression, the fixation then grew, and faded for months at a time but always returned, and recurred on and off for over a decade. Suicidal ideation, they call it.

 

I've been putting off this discussion because I lack the skill the describe it, that mercilessly needling, shaming, self-flagellating mix of insistent impressions, catastrophism, depression, tics and twitches and reflexively reinterpreting everything around, every day, every train, every lake, every high-rise, every bottle of bleach by its pain and efficacy quotients. Once rooted in my interpretation of the world it colored every event.

A family member acts pissy? Must be angry at you. You're too much of a burden, kill yourself.

Failed a quiz? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Broke a plate? You're a waste of resources, kill yourself.

A boss, professor or clerk brushes you off? You're not worth anyone's time, kill yourself.

Locked yourself out of your car? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Wrote a story and it's shit? Further proof you should kill yourself.

Joint pain? You're such a worthless, feeble specimen, kill yourself.

Tooth pain? You deserve it for being so worthless, kill yourself.

Boss tells you you're too slow at work? You're worthless, kill yourself.

Someone compliments you? You're being mocked for being so worthless, kill yourself.

I dreamt about it, both figurately and literally, for years. It grew to where I'd find myself involuntarily mumbling to myself about killing myself when something bad happened. Which is to say when something happened.

Never could cobble together a satisfactory suicide note, either. If I were a better writer maybe I'd be dead by now. Nor did some "off" switch get flipped to remove the underlying thought pattern altogether, but for my own part I've discovered a world of difference between knowing dispassionately that I don't deserve to live and actively wanting to die. Not a distinction I ever thought I'd be making, but, well, here we are.

 

As I realized, belatedly, that such thoughts had not reappeared, that suicidal depression had gone off and hanged itself, I assumed fifteen years' worth of Hamlettish vacillation must needs have garnered me some insight into the matter. Insight should have occurred. Surely I would awaken one morn having braved realms beyond and return like a fairytale hero bearing the secret to life not-offin'-yerself everlasting.

 

No.

 

My reasons both for the obsession and its passing will not be your own. Moreover, the larger result defies analysis for its absurd concatenation of factors.

- My metabolism shifted abrubtly when I hit 30, complete with mood changes.

- I bought a bottle of melatonin (if you're that depressed, your sleep cycle's probably shot to hell and back and back again and back again again) and the first four or five pills hit heavily... then effected a permanent change so that now they're worse than useless to me for side-effects (incidentally, anyone know the going eBay rate for ~90 long-expired melatonin tablets?)

- On a related note, I also started popping the occasional multivitamin. A diet of frozen pizza and mountain dew probably wasn't helping matters. (My current can whispers it probably still isn't.)

- Shrinks/counselors can help, not because they necessarily have any great words of wisdom to offer, but just because they're paid not to gossip. Careful bringing up the S-word though; their profession has a habit of locking you away for that. As fates worse than death go, the cuckoo's nest qualifies.

- Patching up family relations. That was a big one. Takes years too.

- Giving up the lingering insane hope for a mate. Being an evolutionary dead end (whether for incompetence or unwillingness to play the game and submit to the status of draft animal) hurts, sure. Far worse though to play pretend.

- Venting via blogging also helped me organize my thoughts, even if it may not look thus on the page.

- Being openly weird around others instead of trying to mimic normal human behavior. Being regarded as a worthless, disgusting freak is still less stress than pretending not to be one. I don't fit in. Hell, I don't even fit out. Oh well, that's that. Hand me the pelt from under that rock.

- Being less invested in the zeitgeist. Relatively easy for me, being naturally introverted, but in the internet age flame wars still tend to worm their way into your skull.

- Arguably the biggest help came from COVID. Terrible as it may sound, those couple of pandemic years were the best of my life, being given license to do what I always needed: stay indoors and avoid human contact. Only then was I finally able to identify and gradually break the anxiety>depression cycle I'd lived with most of my life.

By no means an instant break. At least a year passed between realizing I'd gone months without fantasizing how the knife would feel finally digging through my forearms and later realizing I'd gone months without falling into weeks-long bouts of depressive funk. Maybe it wouldn't have taken me a decade if the topic were less of a taboo, if even dedicated forums didn't censor honest expression. Back when I was twenty, Trent Reznor and Christopher Baldwin helped more than anyone claiming professional expertise in such matters. A decade later, being able to ramble about it myself did the same. For another year or two afterward I trudged under a lingering fear of relapse to the old obsession, and the thought of turning suicidal again makes me want to kill myself. But that hasn't happened.

 

So.

Then it was and now it isn't. And to be honest, aside from proportionally less misery, I don't feel particularly different. The world's still shit. I'm still shit. Life's still pointless. Only the impetus to add one more pointless action to all the shit around has dissipated. And hey, maybe I'll live to see this entire idiotic species kill itself soon anyway.

_______________________________________________________

* Hey, grave-robbers exist, so not as illogical as it sounds!

Look Di, if ya weren't such a dim bulb, we wouldn't need this ugly thing

 

 

Teut Teut Universalis

"Listen, it's time I let you in on a little secret, Marge. The right house is the house that's for sale. The right person is anyone."

The Simpsons S09E09 Reality Bites

 

 

Well, having abandoned my previous playthrough when Freakin' Pomerania kicked off the Thirty Years' War early, I chanced a few more attempts with the Teutons and finally lived the tell the tale.

 

Normally I'd bumrush the Livonian Order right out the gate for early territorial gains (look, if I don't do it, the Danes or Muscovites will) which stands a good chance of also netting me the profitable Riga, and also befriend Lithuania to forestall a Polish-Lithuanian offensive. Problem with that being I'm not quite adept enough at gaming the politics for war declarations that don't set the whole HRE against me, so it didn't leave much room for expansion.

 

This time I started by allying the Livonians, Bohemia, Hungary and Wolgast (the last being an absolute necessity until I can conquer the province of Netz/Nietz/Notec linking me to my two western provinces.) The key to success turned out to be leaving a diplomat continually currying favors to lower Hungary's opinion of Austria as often as I could. Without Hungary as an ally, Austria did not take off as it normally does, which also generally weakened the HRE far down the line - a double edged sword, as the French made more headway in that direction than I did. (For starters: Alsace got Lorrained.)

One important trick in EU4 vs. EU3: you can juggle the new "powers" currency system by investing in development then rapidly playing catch-up technologically and declaring war on the cusp of institution spread, when empires' tech investment stagnates. In this case I barely scrambled for military tech 8 in time not to get Poled to death. The first big war put me on the defensive but managed to snatch all 6 northern Polish provinces, plus split Stettin with my ally Wolgast, quickly followed by more 1530s land gains in Poland-Lithuania, which damn near bankrupted me but also allowed establishment of that large army with a small state attached.

(Also, since the Livonian Order broke our alliance by refusing to join in the war, it predictably got instantly flattened by Denmark.)

 

Baltic trade started picking up a bit, giving me more cash to play with. Kept Bohemia/Hungary/Wolgast as allies and finagled Switzerland and unfortunately Russia - a devil's bargain, but necessary to protect against Denmark, which has absolutely, intractably hated my Teutonic self in every playthrough. When Protestantism caught up with me I decided to convert, but was forced to devote the next few decades to putting down revolts, paying off my gigantic pile of loans and fighting inflation, and the religious split (along with Bohemia as divisive ally) cost me my Hungarian alliance. A series of Austrian wars left central Europe in shambles.

 

The surprise split of Galicia-Wolhynia from Poland-Lithuania gave me a small but valuable little wedge into their territories. Having to decline a war I was in no economic shape to fight lost me the Bohemian/Wolgast alliances and forced an awkward, desperate, unstable Swedish/Russian/Prussian block to deter the Danes or Ottomans. For a few decades I focused on smaller states, vassalizing Lippe and Ruppin, allying Thuringia, all in an infuriatingly gradual effort at dividing and conquering those nigh-infinite German principalities.

 

In the early 1600s I finally accrued enough leverage to invade Brandenburg and take, among other provinces Berlin. Which is how Werwolfe discovered that even if the "infamy" system was nerfed from EU3 to EU4's "aggressive expansion" it still has its breaking point. That and a last partition of Poland resulted in an almost pan-European coalition against me.

C'mon Bohemia, be cool, we split Poland together!

Dear reader, I don't mind admitting at this point I just exited game and went to bed, and very much wanted to be twelve years old again so I could cry myself to sleep.

...

But, when I fired up EU4 again days later, I survived the coalition by retreating into Siberia, dragging the war out for better terms. In the end I lost my vassals, plus the provinces of Mazovia and Stettin, but kept Berlin and Brandenburg, which was my main goal, so a marginal, technical win.

 

Hilariously, the peace terms worked out even more in my favor in the long run, leaving tiny principalities desperate for a strong ally and letting me re-ally Stettin and vassalize/annex Rupin/Lusatia/Mazovia peacefully. Unfortunately (but predictably) Russia forced me to cut relations with Sweden (and at this point I don't dare lose that historically accurate Russian bulwark against the Ottomans) but luckily a new regional power had grown out of the eastern starting Austrian provinces: Styria! And it hates my Bohemian rival!

Another interesting side effect of the Russian devil's bargain was it cockblocking me from invading Lithuania by guaranteeing its independence for a solid century. Until, that is, Lithuania made the mistake of vassalizing Galicia-Volhynia, giving me a backdoor war declaration which didn't prompt the Russians to intervene. (Basically the reverse of Geneva dooming so many of my Savoyard attempts.) Nabbed me the entire western border of Lithuania, plus vassalized Galicia-Volhynia myself.

 

So, in retrospect, that apparently disastrous coalition turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The biggest turning point was spotting the Ottoman Empire weakened by fighting the Timurids (thank you, ledger spying!) which resulted in a gigantic dogpile by myself, Russia, Bohemia, France, Spain, Tuscany, Milan, decisively turning the tables against the Ottomans:

With everyone busy, I also managed to pivot and declare war on Bohemia for slight territorial edge against it (luckily the Turkish gains didn't stack much for "aggressive expansion" purposes; no coalition this time.) Sadly, Hungary also regained much of its territory, but my Styrian allies also made out like bandits.

The elephant in the room (as always) is France, which has increasingly encroached into central Europe and moreover allied the equally powerful Spain through the game's last two centuries. Due to my advance into Lithuania, Russia also breaks its alliance with me. From ~1700 on, East Frisia, Milan, and the Timurids served as surprisingly useful future anvils to my hammer against my actual neighbours, and a follow-up offensive against a weakened Ottoman empire as soon as the truce wore off earned me most of the Balkans and Carpathians.

Then things got boring. Having doubled my territory, for most of the 1700s I struggled to consolidate it. The Age of Revolutions itself seems a pause button, as everyone struggles to violently inhere into the system those bloody peasants! Moreover, Russia allied Portugal and France in addition to Spain allied Scandinavia, leaving things at a decades-long detente. (Though I did wipe out Hungary as an afterthought ~1740.)

 

 

The break came when France turned against Scandinavia, which led the HRE at the time, thereby weakening the empire enough for an incursion against Bohemia and Opole. Then, after another Scandinavian war against the English this time, and empire leadership passing to the far weakened Austria, I again declared war on Bohemia in 1780 as a feint to finally and at long last take the Pomeranian provinces from Lubeck ( FREAKIN' POMERANIA, I SWEAR ! ) The last Austrian provinces in the NW fall to France. Styria automatically gets renamed Austria, yielding the odd situation of finishing a war against Austria by congratulating my ally Austria. Le roi est mort, vive le roi, I guess *shrug*

A large empire's economic strength but military weakness is of course its size, and in 1795, taking advantage of the Chinese kingdoms keeping it busy in the East (plus my Timurid ally) I snagged the entire Russian border, fighting it to a draw until it surrendered the provinces from exhaustion. The last three decades are spent gradually chipping away at Bohemia two or three provinces at a time, plus another advance into Russia. In 1800 East Frisia declares war letting me snatch Riga and another Bohemian province as war ally. Milan declares war on Tuscany. In 1806 the HRE finally disbands. Aaaaand, France and Spain finally declare war on me, which would've ended in disaster had I not managed to run out the clock.

So, class, what have we learned?

First of all, Rostock can kiss my ass.

More importantly, I stand by my statement that ths is a game more about classic 4X opportunistic territorial expansion than a coherent, stable "grand" strategy governing your empire, and alliances shift on a dime. Maybe matters might fall out differently if I try some state less infamously militaristic than Prussia, but I'm not holding my breath.

I love a lot of the smaller mechanics improved in EU4 (too many to even describe) and can certainly appreciate the historically accurate attention to detail. Buuutt... the general direction of the series is still too fixated on world conquest instead of delving each individual state's local adventure. A massive "economic base" penalty to small-medium states vassalizing each other, a weakened infamy system, shorter periods of rebellion after conquest, and AI programmed to give itself massive opinion penalties against you if you "have provinces it wants" plus other changes all add up to forcing the consolidation of large empires if anything even faster than in #3, and aside from the designated winners, most stand little chance of survival.

Look at that last map. Not just the HRE, not just Europe, but Africa and Asia as well spontaneously coalesced into massive blobs, wiping out the vast majority of states. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is one of the last games that should ever have been given a high score counter.