5e Is Crap; Is DnD?

"On the phone, you and me

'Til dawn, 'til three"

 

Michael Jackson - Remember the Time

 

 

It took me very little time while playing Solasta to begin hating what I was seeing of the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. While I'm sure the tabletop arguments are old news after a decade, it's taken a while for adaptations to filter into dekstop gaming. When I said I'll complain about it "another time" that can indeed mean three and a half years later -- which is now, having also played Baldur's Gate 3 for comparison. My conclusion? 5e is relative shit. Not complete shit, which from what I've heard of 4e is the best I could've said, had anyone bothered adapting it... but still, relative to 3.5e, shit.

 

I do like some additions like expanded combat style / path / subclass kits or short rests or even inspiration points though they could do with a bit of tweaking (preferred Tides of Numenera's system) but most everything else is oversimplified or otherwise more idiot-friendly. Reduced spell lists, trivialized familiars and completely deleted animal companions, magic creep into nonmagical classes (e.g. fighter self-healing) buffs fixed instead of additive, positive and negative energy no longer seem to matter (e.g. undead) no deliberately investing in "use magic device" for versatility, "legendary actions" are a bad joke letting any creature deemed speshul play calvinball with turns and initiative, arcane / divine casting increasingly indistinct... and that's just scratching the surface of superficiality.

 

Limiting spellcasters to only one "concentration" spell at a time is a stupid means of strangling them due to decades of bitching about quadratic wizards, especially if you insist on tossing the vast majority of spells into that category, including simple buffs/debuffs like barkskin or hunter's mark. It just moves magic closer to idiotic "nuking" identical to hitting shit with sticks since instant, direct damage falls outside that category. Casters could at the very least increase their concentration slots as they level. Not necessarily a bad mechanic at its core, but is obviously being used as a cudgel.

 

Alignments are ignored or outright abandoned. At first I thought this a problem with Solasta's barely-there campaign writing, or BG3's adolescent rebellion monomania obviating further moral considerations, but 4th edition had previously gutted alignments and I've seen comments that removing such restrictions from paladins and the like is apparently in keeping with tabletop 5e, so this monumental idiocy is apparently working as intended. The intersecting alignments and their associated multiversal cosmology are, bar none, D&D's most interesting, most central and most enduring contribution to storytelling. Making players consciously decide on a personal ethos and forcing them to rationally evaluate actions on keeping with such principles is just about the only thing elevating D&D over Saturday-morning cartoon tripe. I doubt it's any accident that the best-written computer adaptation by far to this point, Planescape: Torment, dealt extensively with this precept even if it failed to incorporate it into gameplay. That a character may occasionally find himself in a position to also break his alignment is not a bug; it's a feature. The arguments are part of the product. They represent psychological growth from formal to postformal thought.

 

Just as bad however is the apparent phobia of arithmetic the system picked up by contagion with modern schooling. The "proficiency" system replaces numeric skill point investment with a fire-and-forget "like" button. Replacing derived saves (will/reflex/fort) with ability checks muddles defensive/offensive distinctions. By the time I noticed advantage/disadvantage had replaced almost all buffs/debuffs and homogenized all numeric effects into merely rolling an extra die, I finally realized the underlying pattern:

5e has outlawed arithmetic.

Don't worry your pretty little hollow gamer head about adding or subtracting stacking buffs, bonuses, skill points, whatever, and figuring out what can best benefit your character. The dice will tell you all you need to know in what is increasingly a high/low game. No frontal lobe required. Jus' a-keep rollin' dem bones!

 

In a sense the same trend has played out all across the game industry, on and offline, with one-shot kills replacing gradual advantages, infinitely powerful creatures killed by "murder" cards and so forth. Action-action-action! (Don't sweat the details.) So at this point we need to backtrack to that celebrated third edition to which die-hard dungeoneers affix their nostalgic eyes. How have its adaptations fared? Pathfinder is based on that era, but quite recently Wrath of the Righteous was as guilty as any of inflating enemy stats until they became meaningless, with not only players but the monsters themselves unable to land a hit on each other. Or let's try one of the classics applauded specifically for its adherence to the ruleset, Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil.

The kicker? Zoms're standing immobile after being turned.

The "roll to miss" bullshit starts right from the tutorial, with even my barbarian struggling to resolve the "stick x zom head" equation. Is it not dice still ruling the interaction instead of the player? The fact that my wizard, with the lowest attack bonus, is the one who scored a hit there, I should think illustrates the insanity quite aptly. But beyond that, I held a reasonable expectation that my wizard/ranger/druid/cleric/barbie party could adapt to various situations. Flexible for range and melee with lots of summons to soak up some front line damage, mix of arcane and divine spells, the usual concerns. Even a bit of diplomacy on the cleric, uncharacteristically. Except the game's tutorial is split by alignment. My usual Chaotic Neutral party was suddenly barred from exiting.

Note the issue is not that the chest is locked. It's explicitly coded to be opened solely with the open locks skill and only that skill at a rank only a rogue could reach without tools. A quick browse for answers turned up this old 2006 thread on the forums of some modders who patched the game's Troika-grade buggery and so forth. The original poster rightly pointed out:

 

"I was planning on my casters being able to use open/close lock for simple chests, and Knock when it becomes available. In theory I should be able to replicate most rogue benefits through spells."

Which was largely my plan as well. Or hire a rogue NPC later. Or multiclass my ranger later with a bit of rogue if cross-class skills aren't enough. He was given nothing but the nonsensical: 

"It's simple. If you want at Chaotic Neutral party, you are going to have to start with a rogue. You can get rid of him or her later. I see no reason why we should try to make every possible option available to every possible party configuration."

Eeeeeexcept coding a chest whose lock does not function like other locks also took extra effort. I see no reason why you should try that either, at least as a level 1 gatekeeping mechanism.

 

Then, from an administrator no less: "Well, the Rogue practically embodies the CN philosophy" 

Which just goes to show that learning how to code in no way lends one common sense or anything but the most common taste in entertainment. Leaving aside the question of whether every other of the nine alignments also had to bring a specific class along to be permitted to so much as exit the damn tutorial (did CE need a raging barbarian? was LN barred from casting ray of frost from scrolls/wands without a wizard?) you're talking about CHAOTIC NEUTRAL! What other players would be less likely to follow a likely template?

 

I don't know whether the chest in question was locked by the original developers or the modders, but Troika itself being an amateurish startup at the time, it's a moot point for our purposes here. And sure (if you know it ahead of time) buying my ranger some thief's tools in the modded pre-game shop got me through it without having to redistribute my character classes, but it does illustrate the centrality of simpleminded cookie-cutter builds to the dungeoneering mindset.

 

The old "difficulty" was in essence min-maxing and over-randomization, and it takes no real cogitatin' to scribble an 18 in front of your character's core stat or blame luck. So, at its core, the millstone around D&D's neck is its own audience. Its most fervent adherents crestfallen at the idea of anyone changing the fighter/wizard/thief template, mocking anyone who would dare roleplay in a roleplaying game, fetishizing colored dice and insisting any flaws are just a show of secret brilliance on the part of Wizards of the Coast and you-just-don't-get-it-maaaaaan! It's "working as intended" and you're just rolling the dice wrong.

 

Now, for anyone who remembers beyond Y2K, you can probably point to another nerdy staple with a fanatical base which historically did more to tear down the target of its obsession than support it.

You know the one.

Come on, say it with me:

Trekkies!

To such cultists, the show or the game does not exist to excel in its creative field, but to provide them with personal validation as fanatics thereof. It will not be fixed because they don't want it fixed. Forget the numbers, forget the roleplaying, distill everything down to the core endorphin boost. Hit the goblin, goblin dies. You're awesome, you saved the world. (So is 5e the Voyager of D&D? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

 

So, much as I scoff at The Kids These Days ignoring the numbers and alignments, I'm not seeing that far a drop in mental level from "max" as a number and pigeonholing rogues as chaotic neutral. Always giving the right answer to an eternally unchanging question is not a mark of  creativity or superior intelligence. The problems 5e has worsened were always there in a different form, because the fans wanted them.

 

So where does that leave me as a peripheral audience? Certainly, I assume some numeric simplification has greatly sped up tabletop campaigns, but:

1) For computer adaptations where it only takes a tenth of a second to crunch ten different modifiers for each of thirty different creatures' five attacks every round, that benefit is entirely absent.

2) That in no way excuses everything else they dumbed down (e.g. alignments).

Whether Hasbro's capitalizing on the kiddie market or just the idiot market, they have exhaustively demonstrated they have zero eye for any market but the munchiest kin. So let it die, just as Star Trek should in retrospect have been given another decades-long rest after TNG.

 

I've been holding out more hope for Pathfinder, but if the audience for that is the same crowd insisting "you must be at least this min-maxed to ride this TUTORIAL(!)" from 2006, I ain't seein' it. (And, judging by Wrath of the Righteous, it is.) Doesn't help that Golarion's so haphazard. You need more coherent RPG worlds than Faerun's grab-bag of steam-peasant-fairy-dragon-punk (and maybe some lasers) and mashing cyborgs and anime-worshipping "kineticist" bullshit together with Excalibur doesn't help in the least bit.

 

The simple observation that 5e reduced so logically from 3e's most crowd-pleasing elements (while leaving nothing that would challenge its audience) would seem to indicate it can never get better. Any tabletop system popular enough to get a computer adaptation funded will end up just so. As with entertainment in general, mass appeal is pablum and creative death. But, more than that, dungeoneers will not let their childhood memories grow up.

The Servitude Economy

"Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one's power upon others; that is all one desires in such cases. One hurts those whom one wants to feel one's power, for pain is a much more efficient means to that end than pleasure; pain always raises the question about its origin while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself without looking back. We benefit and show benevolence to those who are already dependent on us in some way (which means that they are used to thinking of us as causes); we want to increase their power because in that way we increase ours, or we want to show them how advantageous it is to be in our power; that way they will become more satisfied with their condition and more hostile to and willing to fight against the enemies of our power."

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science, #13

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"[France's rich] employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring."

 

Thomas Jefferson - letter to James Madison, 1785

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"don’t worry. I’ve been a junior yacht designer three times in two lifetimes. It’s my destiny! Surely it can’t end here!"

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc.

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"For this the armies drilled, for this the Law was administered and the prisons did their duty, for this the millions toiled and perished in suffering, in order that a few of us should build palaces we never finished, make billiard-rooms under ponds, run imbecile walls round irrational estates, scorch about the world in motor-cars, devise flying-machines, play golf and a dozen such foolish games of ball, crowd into chattering dinner parties, gamble and make our lives one vast, dismal spectacle of witless waste!"

 

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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"in our society, there seems to be a general rule that the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. [...] Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.) -- and particularly its financial avatars"

 

David Graeber - August 2013 Article in Strike, later the basis for Bullshit Jobs

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I once leafed through an old almanac which included, in even older reminiscences about the interbellum, a story about shoeshine boys in a busy city. Shoe-shining (much like its younger cousin windshield-wiping) being one of those minor unofficial income sources, it didn't exactly come with an officially posted and enforced price tag. Nevertheless, as such things do, it had a mysteriously agreed-upon going rate which all were expected to somehow... *know* by default, without being either warned or corrected. Those customers giving less than the *known* amount were called "stingy" behind their backs by all the rag-armed gaggle of toerags in the business. For those who gave more than the going rate, the not-quite-beggars had a harsher epithet:

"Sucker."

 

Human nature recognizes no benevolence. Only servility and predation.

 

I once worked under a brown-noser I've always mentally named "the caddy" who played out, to the point of caricature, an '80s managerial pamphlet brought to life. He'd find little pretexts to assert his authority enforcing arbitrary rules, kept his hair carefully clipped and his shirts carefully bleached, took credit for good ideas and shifted blame for even potential mishaps in advance, kept his office chair elevated so guests had to look up at him from a small stool -

- and while speaking rested his elbows widely on his desk arranging his fingers in the "triangle of power" and was in fact a go-between for our actual boss who only bothered setting foot in our department about once a month. But the real reason I remember him as "the caddy" is that on my first day on the job I walked into the office for the first time to meet him regaling his lowly underlings with tales of how he'd caddied for such-and-such billionaire at such-and-such exclusive golf club, as they all went "oh, hmm, yess, oh wow, uh-huh" nodding along or half-turning away from him toward their desks hoping he'd take a hint and fuck off.

 

I don't doubt that schmuck has usurped three of his bosses and been gifted his first ten million by now, and burned it on alimony payments and a yacht he never sails. He knew his place, and how to abuse it. While getting nothing done. One of that immortal caste of flappers carrying the plantation master's whip all throughout history.

 

I remember a professor complaining about his ideas being dismissed without consideration by his collaborators on a project. I pointed out that as he was providing field data to more informational/computational/permutational researchers, he was by default filling the lower social stratum of hired help to those who need not get their hands dirty. He was a faulty, over-active Caddy. He was their Sucker. Giving too much, doing too much, being too useful to be respected. He should've stuck to complaining about his students instead.

 

I've cited Jefferson's letter above in my last post of last month as well, for its willingness to criticize without kneejerk contrarianism, for its apt timing four years before the French Revolution would prove the instability of the system he so concisely described, yet here more specifically for the observation that the servant caste is "not labouring" which is to say not producing anything of value no matter how thoroughly they shine the fifteenth set of redundant silverware. The proliferation of such caddies presages societal collapse in every case, be it provincial bureaucracies in China, Roman military bloat, Ottoman slave dependence, "let them eat cake" or Soviet-era overstaffing to claim zero unemployment. It is not driven by economics but by the innate plains-ape need for status and servility. The industrial and information ages have not changed that because they have not changed the human ape, only its circumstance.

 

Sewing machines, assembly lines, inkjet printers, chatbots copy-pasting sitcom scripts, in the end labor-saving devices matter far less than they should. Those who think a lack of need for labor will improve equality do not understand the nature of slavery. The work a slave performs is useful, sure, but that is not his primary function. The purpose of a slave is to suffer that his master may feel superior. He must be starved so that he will beg and debase himself for his daily bread. His work must infuriate, exhaust, efface and utterly crush his will, so that the perceived value his master extracts from that toil may taste the sweeter.

 

Now tell me again how annoyed you are at your Starbucks barista mis-spelling your name on your drink cup. A modern service economy operates on the same principle. The work you do exists to feed the self-importance of others. You shuffle papers so that your manager can claim one more worker in her department than the bitch sitting next to her in the meeting her boss called to call one more meeting this week than the bitch across the hall. And, ultimately, after fifty degrees of Kevin Bacon, you will inevitably discover that your existence's only meaning is enabling Jeff Bezos to build himself five more palaces. Or Pope Francis. Or Andrew Carnegie. Or Sultan Suleiman. Or Emperor Nero. Even with a fully robotic workforce, the centralization of wealth will see you spending your every workday marching and singing hymns to The Dear Leader, not because it's necessary but because it's empowering. To someone. But hey, at least you in turn get to take your rage out at the 17-year-old manning the drive-through window, for not serving you well enough.

 

So am I supposed to feel sorry for you? You keep voting to give them more money, more power over you. Hordes of mindless reactionaries refuse to tax wealth and bristle at the mention of a universal basic income or even universal subsistence or health care, because they want charity not assured and impersonal, but handed out in exchange for supplication before icons religious or social. They want to beg and be debased. A slave doesn't want to be free; he wants slaves of his own. Let me remind you those bootblacks' sneering at largesse illustrates what you already know, that this mentality springs from the bottom up. It permeates everything. You can go into any online game and take a bullet for another player who will immediately turn around and call you a loser for having more deaths than him. Designers have even been officially enforcing the "sucker" mentality, as in League of Legends grading you down if your allies score higher than you, actively punishing you for helping them.

 

Do you imagine the old wage-slave mentality has not been adapted to the internet's attention economy? How many YouTubers will betimes drop a pointed or obtuse hint that 'I can't discuss topic X or this video will get demonetized' or they can't even say a word like 'porn' for fear the megacorporation will deplatform them, as I discovered when I abruptly stopped showing up on Google searches for a couple years. So they play the game. They talk about what the rich want them to talk about. They spit-shine whatever golf balls they're told to. Leaving aside the rest of this blog's topics, my game commentary is both more honest and more articulate than that of most professional game reviewers, and I have no trouble saying that because I've seen their junior high term paper level of buzz-wording. But you're willing to pay them money and attention precisely because you know they are in publishers' pocket. Because they're caddies. They are aligned with a monkey higher in the relevant tribal ranks, thus register as worthier of your supplication. Contact with power makes you feel empowered, even if the contact is a boot grinding your face into the pavement, unto eternity.

 

Does it matter to you whether before writing this I respectfully greeted a suited superior behind an oaken office desk so that she will permit me to scribe these words for your perusal? Can you honestly say no? That is why there is nothing left to do but find enough games to play until the caddy breed burn the world down. Because you really do salivate at their stories about serving the rich.

Inkulinati

"Liber scriptus proferetur

In quo totum continetur"

- one of the world's most endlessly sampled tunes

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It's a meandering monastic menagerie mêlée! 

How the hell has Daedalic Entertainment stayed in business so long? Well, I guess their development studio actually hasn't, and my various complaints about Blackguards 2 might points to reasons why. Even as publishers though, they seem to work with tiny start-ups with big dreams but little expertise or inspiration. To be fair, I haven't outright hated the likes of Iratus or, say, Valhalla Hills, but they've tended to desperately imitate bigwigs' industry standards and end up cluttering their gameplay with pointless "features" until it all washes out to mediocre offerings. (Lending the skeleton's catchphrase from Iratus a bit of meta-humour.)

 

So Inkulinati proved a pleasant surprise. (And I could do with a couple of those after Bloodlines 2's shit-show.) Budget TBS. The basic mechanics are nothing new: squad management with individual combats placed on a lattice of possible encounters inspired by roguelikes and the like-like. It relies on its artwork for most of its appeal, imitating medieval illustrations. Though resigned to cheap two-dimensional, 2FPS animations, it manages to own their goofy, awkward, primitive yet expressive (dare one say "iconic") antics. So if besting St. Frankie in a scribble contest with the power of bean gas and bunny butts is one of your life's dreams, well, have at it. The basic pretext is that you're medieval scribes battling it out on paper using the resource of "living ink" to summon armies of beasties. I do think they took it one step too far by having a human hand interpose to do the actual drawing.

I am so gonna knock Hilda's holy pussy!

Nothing so human should taint my alternate reality. But maybe that's just my lingering FMV trauma talking. It also falls prey to so many designers' impulse to stick some twitch-gaming element into everything (cf. Gemini Rue's gunfights or the old Oregon Trail rapids sequence) by making you click to time your attacks as the pointer oscillates among damage numbers.

Thankfully it's not too overwhelmingly twitchy, but still interferes nonsensically into an otherwise completely turn-based system. The writing, ironically for a game played on manuscripts, is barely there, just a bit of random nonsense. And it's not like FTL didn't demonstrate such a game can benefit from flavor text. 

 

Aside from that though, Inkulinati takes some of its best cues from the previous decade's good surprises like Darkest Dungeon or Into the Breach. Combat is linear with extra levels thrown in connected by ladders, and force-moving units offers both collision damage and one-shot kills if tossed off the page. Hazards are plentiful and varied, status effects deceptively difficult to work around (I just lost a match against monkeys because the headaches they caused prevented my melee-heavy team from moving and attacking in the same round) and resource scarcity weighted just enough to make you value an extra drop here and there. A fatigue mechanic encourages you to switch things up without completely blocking you from favoring your favorites. Minor differences between the various beast squads combine into new experiences.

 

Look, I'm not praising this thing just because they made the wolf a support caster! It's basically what Iratus or Darkest Dungeon 2 could've been without the tacked-on timesinks and other filler. Though limited in scope, this brand of thoughtfully interweaving mechanics and honest charm are exactly why we keep holding out hope for indie gaming.

 

 

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P.S.: Why the infernus did it take me four tries to find even a half-decent English translation of Dies Irae of all things, one of history's most famous pieces of music? Can't you just hum along if you don't know the Latin? Why do "conservative" segments of society feel the need to reinvent their own supposedly sacred culture until its texts are unrecognizable? I may be an atheist but it's my cultural heritage too; quit fuckethin' with it, William Josiah Irons!

 

P.P.S.: And if you think the fart jokes are a bit much, no, they are perfectly apt, you've obviously just never run across that wagon wheel thing in The Canterbury Tales.

Your Own Personal Larry

"Out comes the sun

Never had no chance

Nowhere to run"

 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Spitting Off the Edge of the World

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"Ahem. Happy Christmas, Yuletide, Chanaka, Ramadan, Kwanza, winter solstice, ho ho ho and have a merry Y2K. Did I forget anyone?"

"What about the atheists?"

"Oh? Have a nice day."

 

a '99 iteration of a popular holiday joke

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"When things are loved, they become more than just an object."

"Right, like anyone is going to be emotionally attached to a pair of socks."

Immaterial page 67

(oooh, so, so close to a "things are loved" page number pun) 

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I spent a rather contemplative winter solstice. Maybe I should've installed a new RPG and made myself a druid character as symbol of rebirth, make that into a yearly tradition. Instead, as I've done increasingly often the past years, I woke while it was still dark this Sun-day, Ishtar gleaming bravely opposite a hint of dawn as I walked to my car, and drove out to a small nearby forest for a walk among nature at a time of renewal in the cycle. And if the calories I burned tromping about and scaring Bambi and Thumper at -8 centigrade aren't a good enough offering for old Cernunnos, well, he can go suck a wagon wheel or whatever. That's as much winter ritual as I'm willing to observe. I suppose I could also dangle some glass balls off this thing:

This dragon plant, though it may not look it, has been with me for most of my life, about thirty years now. It was originally bought when my parents moved us across the ocean, along with a pothos and dieffenbachia as standard low-maintenance urban greenery. When we moved after a couple of years, it did not fit among the rest of the cargo, so while throwing it out we snipped off its top. Maybe if we replant it, it'll live. It did. Then a couple years after that we moved again. Repeat. Then again. Then... I forget how many times total. Some years ago when my mother was about to throw it out for good, I took the traditional cutting for myself. But I made the mistake of letting it get too tall as a single stem, so now it'll be getting bonsaied again... maybe from about a third of the way up if it can still split that low? And the tip will take over my cactus' old pot.

 

Is this a tradition? A personal or a family tradition? Should I build it a little shrine? Maybe I could have one of these made out of glass.

I snapped a few shots of this at Herculaneum. You can find it referenced easily enough as one of two such shrines in the skeleton's house. Lararia were apparently expected in respectable Roman houses, shrines to the family's ancestors as guardian spirit(s)(?), though I'm not sure how seriously you can take a "lar" as supernatural benefactor. "Larry" sounds like a wacky '80s sitcom character, ALF's uncle with a bad hip or the Great Gazoo's pot-smoking cousin that's somehow even more annoying. I liked the mosaics on this one in particular for some reason.

The sea theme with waves, swells, foam gets complemented with actual seashells.

Most of these would appear to have fallen prey to octopus or snail drilling? Never mind, beside the point. It would've made a nice, cozy abode for the family's lares. 

These would've been represented by statuettes sitting in that niche. The custom was ubiquitous, but the individual lares and lararia each look slightly different to me around the central themes of bounty, offerings, luck, etc. More figurative, more geometric, carrying slightly different symbols, bigger spaces, bigger statues, more paint, more mosaic, whatever. Of course the Orient has always had its own multitudinous versions of house shrines, whether it's to kami or some variation on Shiva or everything in between. Even Catholic/Orthodox home altars and icons, albeit far more sparse and stilted, will often display some feature of the owner's taste.

 

So can I stick my dragon plant on one of those altars? It means a lot to me. It's been with me through ages of family life and solitude, failure and recovery. If I claim to be an animist can I pass off a few dead Dracaena leaves as holy relics? Me and mine have rebirthed the damn thing enough times to make Osiris jealous. Is this a spiritual connection? If you tore it to splinters in front of me, would I be at pains to maintain my stoic composure like that chick from Dogville? And what would I claim of yours in retribution for your sacrilege? Where exactly is the all-important dividing line between scripture and script, between sermons and life lessons, cult and culture?

 

Being a '90s teen myself I was thoroughly amused by Shaenon Garrity's comedic summaries of X-Files episodes, Monster of the Week, and am quite disappointed to see she's already taken them offline. The one for Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, unusually philosophical for an X-File, stood out for dropping much of the humor in favor of Garrity's admiration for the episode's writer, Darin Morgan. In fact, though she sold original MotW prints, the listing below this merely read "Unless you’re Darin Morgan, this strip is not for sale." I don't mind admitting it warmed my heart to see a second line appended when I re-read the strips a year or two later, reading merely "Sold." The anecdote made it into a conversation with my family last year. Though not fans of either The X-Files or webcomics, my parents had booked a trip to Belgium, including the museum where hangs the painting by (maybe) Pieter Bruegel the Elder referenced in the poem by W.H. Auden which I had read in passing in one of my high school literature textbooks, referenced by Garrity in satirizing a TV series about alien abductions and also the occasional vampire.

 

Anyway, ho, ho, ho, merrrrry something.

 

Here in the States, one of our fondest Christmas traditions is listening to hicks complain about a "war on Christmas" to the great confusion of everyone hearing the word shouted at us from every corner of both media and society, having to wade through tinsel knee-deep everywhere we go and hearing nothing but the same idiotic jingles piped through every single speaker in existence to the point even Big Brother would be jealous. Every single year since Y2K, for a quarter century now, they've foamed at the mouth playing the martyr for somehow being prevented from celebrating. Christmas is dead, it's been murdered, it's been violated, Santa's been sodomized with reindeer horns! And everyone else shrugs and asks "wutchoo talkin' 'bout Clevon" as every TV network fills with movies and very special episodes about Christmas like they've always done and the superstitious then all go on to have all their church services just as they always have and even online games shoehorn in Santa's village as a playable location and the U.S. government ignores its own separation of church and state to massage their egos with tax-funded religious babble, until next year when all the fundies yet again and again rave and rant about how Christmas is dead-dead-DEAD!!!1 repeating the whole insane dog-and-pony show over and over and over again.

 

Admittedly, I'm little more fond of those nouveau-Bolsheviks who try to force the issue by artificially policing language, rattling off the whole litany of winter holidays in every office memo on the off-chance there may be a Zoroastrian hiding behind the geraniums, and who force terms like "before current era" instead of "before Christ" in measuring history. I don't think I'm fighting a war on them either by insisting on calling this Nivose a December*. Trying to unmoor society from its historical ontogeny is itself a form of brainwashing, if not quite on the scale of religion. Like it or not unless you can change the calendar to commemorate some other event or figure, you are counting your years from the (supposed) birth of Rabbi Yeshua he of the vertical lounge chair, and the reason you have these specific days off work is because of Christians' clout in demanding celebrations for their particular deity, so frikkin' admit it, deal with it and shut up already. I bothered myself for a symbolic communion with nature on the solstice for its more universal meaning, which was indeed at the core of most of these winter celebrations including the invented birth-date of Jesus which was just stapled onto those older traditions. I'll be raising a glass with my family tomorrow evening over vid chat and telling them "Merry Christmas" even though they know very well I don't believe a word of those two words, especially the merriness. I won't do it for you but I'll do it for them. And I ain't doin' jack shit today for Festivus.

 

Historical reality is one thing. Superstitious pretense is another. All of the above discussions can be carried out in the real world. There can be reverence in the appreciation of a painting, of a poem, of an unusually good TV script, of an apt homage; the symbolism thus invoked can memetically link a cartoonist, a lycanthrope and his retiree parents. One's ancestors may be acknowledged whether sitting in a shell-encrusted alcove in Herculaneum or invoked by the same carols they used to sing a century ago. Maybe Santa Claus really will be abandoned someday, as have innumerable other lars and other spirits of good fortune inhabiting mantels or chimneys. Not outlawed. Abandoned, willingly, by a population which has outgrown them. One can only hope against all evidence.

 

The real point of course is that traditions reflect in-group cohesion, and every holier-than-thou caveman desperately needs to make a display of fervor in complacency to outdo one's neighbours, must be more like the herd than the rest of the herd. We are told that society would fall apart without such obeisance, that our psychology absolutely requires the sense of continuity and community it provides. No different altars for every family's ancestors, just a single mass-produced Jesus by decree. But does it really have to be the same continuity for everyone? I've killed a lot fewer people with W.H. Auden and a dragon plant than your average Abrahamic fanboy has with his prayer mats and funny caps or whatever. Conformity is not religion's benefit to society; religion is just one tool of conformity beneath tyrants. We could rehash historical examples, but one need only look to the current Christian Nationalist takeover of the U.S. government.

 

After a year of sending masked thugs to toss children into the backs of vans, imprisoning its own citizens without trial on suspicion of owning a foreign electrical adapter, refusing the foreign aid which had once bought them so much goodwill so cheap, the Republican Party has dropped deeper and deeper into farce with the pettiness of its gratuitous impositions, like bitching out fat generals or renaming the Gulf of Mexico. More recently, and who could've seen this absurdity coming, a war on fonts, not for causing harm but merely for fear it may cause good. This is the same crowd wailing about a war on Christmas, not because they are prevented from celebrating but merely for the existence of others who do not bend knee to their psychoses. It's always petty, and cruel, and pointless, and meant only to inflate their own self-importance. They're not opposed to political correctness. The church ladies have just been at the same game longer. The real tradition they're defending is tyranny, and any Santa, any personal Jesus, any font and any market fad will do as pretext.

 

 

 

 

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* And I damn well will fight them on calling women "people who menstruate" 

AoW4 Factions, 4

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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These guys were unexpectedly fun, though I only played them a couple of times. To get the most out of their culture bonus to adjacency and their support units' AoE, I ended up splitting them into a couple of tercios every fight. Like all the early factions, the bio was written years after, when I was apparently in a parochial mood.

Bloodlines 2.04 - The Game of Your Dreams

"Loving you was like loving the dead

Was like loving the dead

(Was like fucking the dead.)"

 

Type O Negative - Black No. 1

 

 

Not sure if I'll even bother finishing Bloodlines 2 for the moment. Since six years ago I preordered the expanded cowpie with extra plop, I may as well return to it in a year after the ensuing contents trickle out. But I do think it's worth pausing for a bit to address the artistic side of things. I've seen at least one developer trying to turn the blame around on either the publisher's branding or on customers for having over-inflated expectations of a Bloodlines sequel. And sure, some lacks (no moving vehicles, no interactable objects, limited mob models and behaviors) can be blamed on a lack of budget or time budget. Such things do happen.

 

But that's not all we're complaining about by a longshot. It's that the content they did include comes across as cheap and lazy and uninspired and just... lame. It fails to stand on its own merits. Here's one example: snatching guns from across the room with telekinesis. Cool action movie gimmick? Sure, okay. Going a step further and hovering them in mid-air firing them telekinetically... still a cool action movie gimmick?

Well, when Magneto did it with fifty guns at once in the first X-Men movie, hell yeah, badass! Doing it with exactly one gun though, even if it leaves my hands free to climb around, just looks like my character forgot how to use his fingers for some reason, especially since it still replaces your autoattack! And if you think that's as stupid as the over-reach gets: 

For a basic fetch quest, you're sent to click a supposedly important package in a dumpster. Can you "interact" with the dumpster to lift its lid? No. It must be activated telekinetically to dramatically rip the lid off and send it flying across the alley. Wow! What an ostentatious display of supernatural might... this would be, if I weren't still just standing in an grungy back-alley performing magic tricks like a toddler flexing his muscles for an audience of one bum who can't even be bothered to look over at my godlike display of AWESOMAH POWAH because apparently I'm too stupid to operate a lid without magic. Thank Caine I haven't run across any childproof caps!

 

The funniest thing about Bloodlines 2 would have to be its launcher link to a deep dive video series. It's damn near impossible to find any facet whatsoever of this game that anyone would call "deep" even down to basic wording. I'll freely admit I make constant typos and occasionally misuse terms myself, and when I charge people $90+ to read my blog, we can argue about that. But with a hundred pairs of eyes in your writing/production/voice/testing crew looking over your shoulder I should think someone, at some point, would point out your classy Ventrue man about town Fletcher should possess better functioning vocabulary than to send you chasing after "graffitos" - congratulations, you've managed to conclusively demonstrate that two wrongs make a wrongo. And then there's Ysabella, whose voice actress accomplished two even more crass back-to-back mirrored fuck-ups:

Hawt nostril shot, babe.

First she pronounces "craven bow" as in 'bow-and-arrow' which I might've been inclined to chalk up to some weird west-coast dialectic foible inverting the tendencies of those other clahwns frahm Bahws'n except she then immediately flips to pronouncing Lascaux as "lass-cow" or something until you're holding your head and moaning 'owe' and could someone please give this heifer's third-grade teacher a slap across the face? Even more hilarious because Yzzy's a Toreador. Even if she knew nothing else, would anyone in the world be more partick'ler about her French than a supernatural art snob?

 

I'm unwilling to chalk such flubs up to deliberate irony on TCR's part either (some meta-commentary on Seattle's flimsy upper-crustiness?) considering the utter lack of awareness in the text that they should be flubs, and how well they suit a cast filled with nothing but Svengoolie-grade horror* and shoujo-grade characters designed around simplistic emotional cues. Even Redemption, the previous V:tM adaptation before the original Bloodlines, while a far weaker, painfully cheesy script, managed to maintain an overall feel for vampires as inherently monstrous even as they struggle to retain their humanity, beings of dangerous power and even more dangerous appetites.

 

Here though? How many of Bloodlines 2's vamps truly act like creatures of the night? Like raveners beyond the campfire, consumed by ambition and power-lust as much as by bloodlust? Is it the cringing self-help fashion victim at the auto shop? The romance novel audience surrogate shrinking violet incapable of cold reason that's supposed to also somehow qualify as a brilliant scientist? The twink spymaster that spends all his time mincing and lisping instead of providing any useful intel? The imbecile headsman trying to play Superman? Well over half the cast are nothing but needy, whiny, preening pissants swooning at compliments and microaggressions. I suppose at least the wintertime setting is apt enough to be littered with snowflakes. If you want a case-in-point, look at what they did to the Nosferatu.

Hello, kitties.

Better yet look first to their clan's namesake. Max Schreck's leathery make-up and gaunt, insidious features with exaggerated ears/nose were imitated in previous V:tM adaptations for their intrinsic monstrous interpretation via our neoteny-focused social instincts. But in keeping with the modern need to champion social causes or make some if you can't find 'em (much like Baldur Gate 3's demonspawn) Bloodlines 2's crew apparently decided nossies must be pitied and cooed over. So they're nothing but helpful**, are given rounded, small-limbed childlike proportions plus diffident, servile speech patterns, and of course their pug faces are rounded out to infant chubbiness. One doesn't even bite. Requisite sob story pining for his human wife included, to legitimize him as servile toward the unfairer sex.

 

It's tempting to point out the usual "man bad, woman good" routine. The badass fitness chick bodyguard sends you to kill man after man and the one-vampire justice brigade's targets are either men who've sinned against women, or, for a bit of oh-so-risque alternative, a couple of women who've sinned against... also other women.

Won't somebody please think of the thinkers of children?

Would you feel less justified in murdering a female car thief as punishment for emotionally inconveniencing a man instead of a woman? Obviously yes, and any writer worth his salt would've made you face that incongruity instead of padding your conceit for extra comfort. Then there's the pregnant damsel in distress for extra pathos. But honestly, I'll admit they did try to include some female villainy. No, it's the triteness of the writing, its flimsy emotional cues and limited congruence with playable content that will annoy you more than any active insults. That unimaginatively conventional morality I foresaw from A Machine for Pigs' plot hits in... whatever the opposite of narrative force is.

 

It's dull.

 

The three varieties of random mobs spawning on rooftops fail to entice. You end up breaking the masquerade repeatedly just to flip off the cops so something happens. Your haven offers nothing to do. Sexualized suckery ends up neither edgy nor enticing. (I'll admit I did let Mrs. Thorne tempt me. Don't judge.)

The scent trails looked promising during the first mission when you're reconstructing Fabien's day before you absorbed him, with his various stops contextualized as plot-relevant actions. After that though, tracking gets relegated to a pretext for cross-town timesink runs. While breadcrumbs are still an improvement over Skyrim HUD-marker chasing, every time I'm simply encouraged to rush ahead I can't stop thinking of the wasted opportunities to tell a story about your various victims and maybe tie it into a thumb-up or thumb-down judgement at the end of the quest. Apparently my target stopped while traversing various back-alleys to climb a shipping container inexplicably parachuted into the middle of Seattle. Okay. So? No matter since you'll just be one-shotting your victim and running away.

 

In between every step of the main quest you're handed a new set of three side-quests as blatant filler. One kill, one stealth kill (which you don't technically need to stealth) and one fetch quest of the dullest variety, where you literally walk over to the marked location, click The Thing and walk back. Among all this, the main quest does stand out as superior storytelling, but I'm betting that's largely for borrowing its central theme from Amnesia: Rebirth which handled it better.

 

I've seen enough to discern the main issue. Paradox wanted to technically fulfill delivery of the "RPG" for which it had cashed in preorders, The Chinese Room probably got a bigger payout from those preorders alone than it would have for whatever small-name project it actually had planned, and the only people who got screwed over were the customers, which is fine, that's how business works, like, duh. But gradually you do begin to see the actual work they'd originally intended under the timesinks and other padding. It was to be a traditional, linear, narrative, light puzzle-solving adventure game about a supernatural detective, much in the spirit of Amnesia. One cannot escape the realization that Fabien's flashback dreams are more carefully plotted and scripted, more detailed and far more relevant to the plot than your own character's adventures which mostly consist of an RP-lite, perfunctory XP-grinding, MMO-inspired runaround to feign the trappings of class-based role-playing. And the sad part is that derailing TCR's effort fruitlessly into all that "kill ten rats" nonsense also left that better adventure game underneath underdeveloped in itself.

 

The worst is that like Wasteland 3, like Baldur's Gate 3, like countless other hacks, they try to cover their world-building and character design inadequacy with pandering. Vamp romance novel self-insert heroines falling in love with dashing ancient lords, vamps who love their sisters, vamps who love their wives, vamps who love vamp mommies who love their vamp babies, vamps who love playing caped crusader and the women who love them, etceteree, etceterah. Catering to the lack of taste of infantile, narcissistic overemotional cripples is not something you get to blame on a lack of funding, and certainly not on high audience expectations. Quite the opposite. Those expectations offered you a far better chance to build a world aiming higher than shallow emotive mutual masturbation with Facebook teens. 

 

Well, we'll see what another year's worth of DLCs brings, but I'm not holding my breath. 

 

 

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* Ohh, couldn't it be lice instead of leeches... thirty years later, yes, apparently it could, in the form of these insignificant bloodsuckers. I normally try to steer clear of in-jokes, but there's one for all you upper-Midwest forty-something local cable fans out there.

** Ironically if you think back to the original Bloodlines, the Nosferatu, while nasty customers in general, actually treat you as an equal more fairly and consistently than other vamps. Is there not more value in that more dignified approach, giving the devil his due, than in infantilism?

I will wear my thermal pants or not, as the mood strikes me, whenever I choose! (I'm very ambi-chausses.)