"Keeping time time time in a sort of runic rhyme"

"Will you, won't you want me to make you?
I'm coming down fast, but don't let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer"

 

The Beatles - Helter Skelter

 

 

Fear tha space wolf, fer he gots apsides on the brain, Mundust in's nostrils an' a non-relativistic clock in's belleh, AaawooOOOO!!

 

On a completely unrelated topic I decided to catch up on my Wadjet Eye backlog with Technobabylon. Barely started before groaning at a tired old gimmick:

I've played enough adventure games to parse "a few hours" as "until the next scene featuring this backdrop" but every time I see a character reference an actual timespan I can't help recalling my thirteen year old self wondering "wait, so can I just leave the game running overnight to get another item?" No. No, young werwolfe, you cannot. Time is not time. Time is scene transitions. Also, don't let that old CRT monitor overheat, even if it does have a snazzy star field screensaver. And ffs wipe down your mouse and keyboard with rubbing alcohol once in a while!

Anyway, just to state this rant's thesis clearly like your high school teacher told you to do:

game designers, be consistent on whether time does or does not matter. When is time time?

 

Granted, in many or even most genres the question doesn't apply. FPS/RTS tend to be solidly real-time by the minute and second and millisecond and dick-measure their actions-per-minute, while turn-based strategy sticks to its turns whether we're talking cards or chess or Civilization. cRPGs though, for emphasizing immersiveness through everything from armor frills to pettable pets to the slant of light on a winter afternoon, routinely end up tripping over themselves when conveying critical or non-critical timeframes. Especially after Morrowind raised the bar on portraying a living, breathing world.

Games dumbed down from better formulae for mass appeal frequently feature the passage of time as shallowly as everything else.

Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, despite emphatically warning you vamps don't tan, featured a grand total of what, one(?) mission where you sidestepped some windows? Otherwise nights never ended. At least Bloodlines was a bit more honest about everything happening at night and just flatly ignored the issue.*

Greedfall would occasionally tell you to wait for night. So you did exactly that. Hit the "wait for night" button at your hideout, and that's all there is to it. They didn't even bother with an in-game clock.

Mechwarrior 5, as I already complained, has a timeline you just fast-forward until the next event.

Such one-to-one relationships are meant for imbeciles incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads at a time.

Time as mechanic needs many more factors feeding into it, with some of the best examples being suvival-themed games where bonuses rapidly decay, monsters patrol or everything revolves around day/night cycles. I may have trashed Don't Starve for forcing mindless restarts (and stand by that) but I did enjoy it making you fear the dark and stock up on protective light. Frostpunk and its meal/hunt larder management and outpost deliveries, Miasmata's pitch-black nights making you depend on your paltry lighter, Banished, Dawn of Man or Northgard staving off winter starvation, such adventures greatly benefit from their cycles.

My favorites let you set the cycle.

Mount&Blade made a name for itself as a hack'n'slash physics simulation, but as that market filled up became more noteworthy for its tactical or managerial sides. Even when your army is standing still during a siege it's doing many things at once. It takes time to build siege engines, time to knock down walls, time for other bands to trickle in as reinforcements, during which both attackers and defenders are eating into their supply of food, wounds are healing, morale drops, etc. Though I was disappointed at Bannerlord dropping food spoilage as a management concern, on the flip-side it enlarged the map allowing for longer and more diverse trade runs, buying low and selling high from desert to tundra and shore to steppe as territories shift ownership around you. Caravan management in fact makes an excellent premise for a game based on scheduling.

 

Vagrus: the Riven Realms is turn-based, with your actions per in-game day limited by action points as you shift goods across the desolate postmagipocalyptic landscape, but there's quite a bit of fine-tuning involved in keeping your comitatus' mood above threshold while occasionally driving them to exhaustion rushing to the next town by day's end, buying as little food as possible (to leave more room for saleable goods) while avoiding starvation, chopping the odd horse up for burgers, weighing the amount of food passengers might eat versus how quickly you can cash them in at their destinations, foraging chances along your route, food prices at your future stops, and so on and on. What a bother, and what a joy to be bothered!

But here we're already getting into some issues. While Vagrus's design remains consistent for basic managerial mechanics, its questing side is a bit hit-or-miss in that regard. Most quests have no limits. Some give you fairly clear deadlines but might drop them on you unexpectedly (Finndurarth) while others just get huffy if you passed some limit you were never informed of (the Ashkulites with the stolen corpse) and still others blatantly lie (wind shamans tell you to wait a week but according to forums it's just a couple of days) and for a more manageable but frequent nuisance the companion attitude minigame places cooldown timers on gifts but doesn't auto-track when you gave the last one.

 

Those copying The Elder Scrolls' formula tend to be both best and worst at this. KCD for instance puts a great deal of detail into NPCs' daily routines, whether it's Father Godwin preferring to eat breakfast outside before he takes a bit of time to mend his fence

or, since the 1400s are a benighted superstitious times, pausing for prayer by those great

 and small

or managing to fill your 24hrs despite most characters being uninteractable at night

 

I arrived at a camp in the woods some hours too early to question the locals about bandits. I could "wait until morning" but since this is a better game I instead filled my time with a bit of honest robbery (lots of low-level sound sleepers with no guards around) then read a book until they woke up. You can also fill that supposed dead time at night with travel or poaching or alchemy or bounty-hunting. Quests involving hunting/poaching for instance tend to be some of the most challenging/frustrating as you must both luck out finding game and get the meat back before it spoils - during daytime! Night has its own activities, making it feel - imagine this - different from day!

 

Unfortunately once again many quests don't warn you they'll be timed or don't tell you the timer, or don't tell you they'll keep you involved for some period of time. One of the most important pieces of information: you can put off the main quest indefinitely at the step requiring you to meet Lordy FuckFace for a hunting trip, even if it says in the "morning" while other times "morning" does indeed mean next morning, like Johanka getting pissy if you don't escort her to preach in the woods.

When is time time?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And those are hardly the only examples

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's barony management became rather infamous for blindsiding you with timed events you couldn't schedule properly.

That piece of crap GameDec had its third act "action" timer, where little indicated what counts or does not count as an action.

In Tides of Numenera it was crumbling houses and serial killings.

In BG3 Lae'Zel rushes you to meet her people in Act 1 but it doesn't seem to care when you do it. But later, merely talking to the newspaper owner automatically kicks off a timed quest. The prison break round timer doesn't care how fast you reach the boats, because you're expected to just abandon the prison breakers and rush out the door. Some events are set off by the number of rests you take... but moving between maps also counts as a full rest. Does that eat into my timers? Does it eat into my food supply? Best head for the wiki and forums, 'cause nothing actually tells you when time is really time.

Even the original Fallout rather infamously had to drop its campaign time limit for running against the game's main charm of exploring all the settlements.

 

In fact, while adventure games or city sims will occasionally run into this issue, you can look at most any cRPG over the past thirty years and find players infuriated by being forced to reload old saves upon discovering they've been on some invisible timer or weren't informed they'd be setting off a timer just by walking into a room. And that's all it does: force reloads, unless you know the campaign beforehand.

 

It's always been a running gag that what sounds urgent in video games (like the world about to explode) moves only at the speed of the plot, so take your time. Introducing more deadlines can be generously interpreted as an attempt to cure that lassitude or the well-worn cRPG pattern of sweeping all side-quests in order of challenge rating between main quest steps. I'm especially fond of "per day" or "per rest" advancement mechanics and encouraged such when discussing daily rests and inns/taverns. Yes, as long as you properly notify me what I'm getting into. Being surprised with a timed quest when I have ten others on my plate doesn't make me reschedule the ten to prioritize that one. It just makes me reload to avoid the starter pistol. Discovering that exactly two of my fifteen "do it by tomorrow" quests actually fail if not done by tomorrow... when it's already tomorrow... tests neither my priorities nor my time management skills, but only my willingness to cheat and read about every quest before talking to NPCs. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Gratuitously forced wiki binging OR DIE is not a feature I've ever been interested in buying. It's a bug.

 

I'm sorry, I must've lost track of time and got sidetracked... what was I talking about?

Oh, right, Kerbal Space Program!

Do you notice how in that first screenshot I have alarms set up for when my launches hit critical points, and precise to-the-second estimates for my vessels' orbital positions and target intercepts?

Why is that so hard for cRPGs to do?

When is time time?

Either your game's timed or it's not. If yes, notify me when a task is indefinite. If not, notify me of any exceptions before I undertake them and track the timer through the interface. But I should not have to play a constant guessing game over whether the pill you labelled "morning after" actually works the morning after!

And, yes, yes, I hear you scream that interface record-keeping breaks that devil-may-care adventuring spirit of immersion, sure, sure. But you know what else breaks immersion? Gratuitous reloads so companies can pad their "hours played" marketing fad.

_____________________________________________________

 

* I wonder whether Bloodlines 2 will... no, I will not seek hype, I will not seek hype...

A(dventuring) Body at Rest

"In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon"

Sting - Something The Boy Said


In the past couple of months I finished up one final playthrough of both Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera, in preparation of moving on to new RPGs. It's a wonder we have any new cRPGs these days, especially good ones, after a fifteen year dry spell punctuated mainly by the overall mediocrity of the Neverwinter Nights series and one quickly betrayed glimmer of hope in the form of Dragon Age: Origins, both lost in a sea of "action" titles and MMO gear farming.

Resource management, abandoned by computer game developers somewhere around the time of Morrowind as too complex for their new cretinous mass-market audience, was grudgingly reintegrated into these new strategic, party-based RPGs. This included resting at specific safe locations instead of just plopping your ass down wherever you want to recover all your daily spells, a mechanic which utterly invalidated the Neverwinter Nights series' feigned difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series was little better; most players probably only rested once in a blue moon to trigger specific quest steps. Dragon Age: Origins at least gave resting some functionality in curing wounds.... then immediately invalidated it by filling the player's inventory with cheap, plentiful wound cures. Tyranny went one better by instead tying wound curing to resting and tying resting to a few specific locations which required travel

... though unfortunately travel time had too little effect to lend resting its due relevance. TToN took the more usual route, charging you cold, hard cash for restoring your action pools

 

... though it, in turn, undermined its relevance by providing entirely too many action point restoring consumables and infinite free lodging as quest rewards. Plus, while the cost is greater than the mere token amount it would be in most such games, it still falls an order of magnitude or two below your accumulated wealth by the last act.

A couple of centuries ago by the time of Alexandre Dumas, rented rooms, inns and taverns were accepted intrigue-riddled set pieces in tales of swashbuckling adventure; later wild west saloon scenes followed suit and the "you all meet in a tavern" stage of role-playing campaigns was again cemented by Tolkien's Prancing Pony. While the motif is slavishly copied into every cRPG, finding a place to rest has rarely achieved its due impact on gameplay. Pillars of Eternity threw a nice wrench in the works by offering specific bonuses for sleeping in some locations, but these were still trivialized by their low cost and on-demand availability. For rest to truly become relevant to gameplay, the time spent resting must somehow affect your campaign. TToN copied the original Torment's scarcity of safe havens but still compromised on this point much like The Elder Scrolls by treating rest as a trigger for a select few quests (the most blatant being a murder spree in the first act which continues every time you rest.) The mechanic only comes into its own in games where everything functions according to a calendar / clock.

The old Dune game from '92, with its odd mix of linear adventure and light RTS (before RTS was even a genre) provides an early example. Everything took time, from your own travel to your Fremen armies' travel and battles to spice mining or the spread of vegetation or smugglers replenishing their stockpiles. While resting was not a mechanic per se, you could decide (or be forced by your script) to wait in some sietch or another while the world shifted around you.

More recently, Mount&Blade or Dead State or Pathfinder: Kingmaker all made a better show of it.

Dead State enforced a strict daily cycle, in which you had to return to your home base to rest every night or risk a hefty morale penalty. Each day you had to both ensure a profitable loot haul from your travels and allot competent workers to care for the shelter's own maintenance and production in your absence.

M&B didn't rely much on you yourself resting, but your injured troops required time to heal. Early on you might pay for their rest & recuperation at an inn. Later you might pass by one of your forts now and then to swap fresh soldiers in and your wounded out of your army. All the while, food was consumed, populations grew, taxes and expenses accumulated, bandit bands, armies and caravans traveled across the map in fitting indifference or malice as to your squandered hours.

Kingmaker being split between traditional adventuring and kingdom management emphasized getting your adventuring done in a timely manner so as to arrive back at your capital in time to deal with the various events plaguing your realm. While the initial implementation was quite aggravating, with too little control and too many triggers rewarding the player's foreknowledge and not foresight, it also added up to the most multifaceted. Not only did you need to recover spells but even the muscleheads in your party would need to clear the hefty penalty to their physical attributes through fatigue / exhaustion.

All three of these most satisfying examples share an integration of the resting mechanic with other facets of gameplay. You or your companions' skills might affect others' healing / recovery times. Kingmaker's camping especially rewarded you for bringing along multiple characters competent as lookouts, hunters, cooks, etc. and if I had to be honest, Jaethal the undead inquisitor's most pervasively useful ability was simply her immunity from fatigue letting her dive into all too frequent ambushes fresh as a rotting daisy. And, in each case such roleplaying and strategic choices mitigate the entropic drag of the game world on your own schemes and plots, the resources automatically decaying or consumed, the inexorably encroaching enemy forces.

Conclusion: a resting mechanic is nearly guaranteed a pointless waste of both developers' and players' time for a traditional plot-driven Adventure game or RPG in which the player actively moves the plot forward by his actions. In order for rest to have a meaningful impact, there must be a world outside your adventuring party which progresses while you are inactive. There must be events not_at_rest. As a prelude to death, sleep carries no threat unless the universe keeps swirling in the darkness outside our feeble fires, hounding us with every unconscious breath.

Brain Damage

"I'll keep you by my side
With my superhuman mind"

3 Doors Down - Kryptonite


Reason #57 to play Torment: Tides of Numenera :: you get to use a tasp.

Given that I tend toward squishy, back-row support caster roles anyway, I'm halfway to roleplaying a Pierson's Puppeteer already. May as well own my Hindmost aspirations.

Reason #23 not to play T:ToN :: it places Intelligence on the same level as physical attributes.

One of my earliest actions upon starting this blog was to state my disgust with Gardner's "theory" of multiple intelligences, a mercenary, meaningless pablum marketed to parents who find themselves stuck caring for degenerate, moronic offspring and whose egos demand re-labelling "intelligence" as any subhuman aptitude those offspring might possess. Thus you hear of instinctive emoting being promoted as intelligence or of musical pitch-matching intelligence, athletic match-pitching intelligence and other aberrations. Intelligence is the aptitude for abstract thought. It is the defining aptitude of existence itself (you are your thoughts) and responsible for every advancement ever made past the state of flea-bitten apes grubbing about the forest underbrush for food one handful at a time. No amount of strength or manual dexterity or flawless painter's eyesight would have built the computer you're reading this on without intelligence.

Role-playing games are all to some degree or another descended from Dungeons and Dragons, and though most slavishly copycat its set pieces the better ones will attempt with some regularity to move past the stylistic apex of 1974. T:ToN is one example of trying to avoid the good / evil dichotomous character alignments even as the Numenera setting continues using other DnD staples like the twenty-level fighter / thief / wizard archetypes. Other games might try to do away with character levels or use skill-based progression instead of preset classes, etc.

Attributes are their own can of worms. Charisma, Agility and so forth all have their various decades-running arguments over their respective validity, both within DnD and its copycats. If intelligence is ever debated, it's as a balance issue within the context of linear warriors, quadratic wizards with many gamers complaining that it's unfair for wizards to become so much more powerful (and especially, versatile) than their swashbuckling fellow adventurers late in campaigns.

Fair? Unfair? By what definition? It's fitting, therefore fair.
The fruits of intellect should not be equated to pre-sentient physical activity. An understanding of the world really should count for more than swinging a damn stick. And, there are plenty of ways in which this could be accomplished. Characters' mental and physical attributes can be placed in separate categories with their own pools of attribute points to be distributed, making all characters de facto battlemages. Physical attributes could be raised by combat while mental ones are raised by role-playing choices. The best option is best exemplified by Heroes of Might and Magic's core concept, with spellcasters acting as leaders for armies of brawling grunts - although it bears mentioning even HoMM routinely watered down this idea by instituting Barbarian or other heroes based on inflicting damage directly.

T:ToN makes an interesting example because being heavily based on skill checks and roleplaying choices instead of combat, it could not avoid the primacy of Intellect. About half your skill checks seem based on INT, with the other half split between strength and speed. Yet still it toed the usual RPG line in demeaning intellect to just another stat and implementing weapons and attacks derived from it, magic missiles, which work just like hitting things with a stick.

Why not go full anti-retard?

Forget balancing them; thought and physicality should not even occupy the same playing field in the first place. Give thought its due dignity as a realm above brawn or fee-fees, the pinnacle and self-definition of existence. Let Intelligence govern those abilities which alter the playing field altogether, and leave crass damage-dealing or emotive play-acting to less worthy animal attributes. Crafting a tasp should be a mental task. Using it to paralyze an opponent can still be a matter of base physicality, of reflexes and practice, and can be carried out by dumb grunts while the more intelligent Puppeteer handles the decision-making.

It's been fifty years. Isn't it past time to stop demonizing Lex Luthor and move beyond the Stockholm Syndrome of role-playing geeks idealizing Conan the Barbarian as an equal to Elrond Halfelven?

Smoulder in Peace; Tides Cannot Reach You

"Fall deeply into the mundane
Don't let the screaming that riots within have a voice"

Faith and the Muse - The Red Crown


I'm giving Torment: Tides of Numenera a third go before uninstalling it in favor of... hopefully Cybepunk 2077 or V:tM-B2... soon... soon, I'm sure. I've talked quite a bit about TToN here before (it has a tag, people; uuuuse, the, tags, Luuuke!,) It was in many ways an excellent roleplaying game with lots of skills checks, resource management, a heavily interwoven main plot which attempted to bring roleplaying back into line as consistent characterization and meaningful decision-making, with very few quests requiring a combat solution. Unfortunately, if you did want to fight, its combat side was rudimentary at best, awkwardly imprecise and frequently buggy. Still, its "crisis mode" interspersing combat with dialogues makes it a hopeful vision of cRPG player interaction for the future.

Unfortunatelier, Tides sacrificed its own stated goal as a spiritual successor of the classic Planescape:Torment. Not from lack of skill but obviously a conscious choice on the developers' part to pull the usual "bait-and-switch" of sequels: they wanted to be bankrolled by fans of an 18-year-old title while at the same time appealing to 18-year-old gamers. This unfortunately meant trying to adapt what was once a fatalistic, depressive, grim, bleak, morbid and gruesome tale of futile aborted redemption, a tale of bitter regret, hope lost before it ever breathed, and inescapable mazes... to the tail-end of the millennial generation... to snowflakes... to a generation of preening facetious self-righteous narcissists incapable of either admitting the inherent darkness of human nature and the universe's futility or of objective ethical evaluation. Perhaps inevitably, Tides came across as a watered down version of Torment's themes, where your moral choices rarely connected. For a fairly concise example (and one of Tides' worst-written chapters) you can take a look at the obligatory RPG tavern in the first act.

Dominating its corner of Sigil's expansive slums, The Smoldering Corpse Bar provided exposition, ambience and a couple of recruitable companions, as well as a variety of exotic drinks to help carry the point of Planescape's vast, otherworldly setting. Its counterpart location from Tides, the Fifth Eye... also serves drinks.

You meet O from the original Torment once again, just to cement the two locales' reiteration, and he pulls the same inscrutable cosmic consciousness routine.
The expository Candrian and Creakknees are replaced with Arthour, but where Ebb Creakknees' dialogue had a wistful, bittersweet air and Candrian served as object lesson as to the planes' dangers, Arthour is just devoid of personality. Ysg, overtly suffering the same affliction as Candrian, is even more pointless.
Where the Corpse's patrons bristled a bit at your approach, the Eye's supplicate themselves for your assistance. Instead of demons in disguise growling at you about the Blood War you get a gratingly upbeat recruiter telling you about the Endless Battle.
In the Corpse you were tasked with getting rid of the deadbeat barfly Mochai by either paying off her considerable debt (for that point in the game) or poisoning her to death, which netted you some cash in addition to free drinks. This was a valid roleplaying choice: stroking your own ego by playing the hero should cost you. Mochai's counterpart in the Fifth Eye (female, alone in an alcove in the same relative position) turns out to be a damsel in distress, part of a quest which can only be completed by playing the knight in shining armor.

The worst of the worst are the five without original Torment counterparts, lifted from any number of Young Adult Fiction stories in which utterly unsympathetic boogeymen are defeated by a plucky five-man band simply by passing some mental purity tests, proving themselves pure of heart, by being mentally "special" while bypassing intelligence. Granted, my distaste for these "psychic veterans" stems largely from the focus on telepathy/telekinesis, a dead end crutch for lazy writing which has little place in SF in the first place and which Tides' writers abused to an immoderate extent even by the standards of pulp video game fiction.

But even ignoring their science fantasy brain wizardry, it's their infantile moralism that grates. Planescape: Torment ran you ragged through a world of bad and worse choices, with many of your best options being merely to minimize the suffering - inflicted as often as not by you yourself. Tides' Erritis, brainchild of Chris Avellone who headed Torment's scripts, unsurprisingly remains a rare example of this principle. The Fifth Eye's "psychic veterans" on the other hand stumble cliché after cliché into adolescent incompetence.
Their quest has nothing to do with the rest of the game but is utterly overblown in its world-destroying scope, especially for the first act.
Their antagonist is referred to as "The Adversary" and even Tolkien barely pulled off such stentorian grandiloquence. These days you'd have to play it tongue-in-cheek as Neil Stephenson did with Hiro Protagonist, a level of genre awareness utterly lacking here.
Their dialogues' unabashed self-aggrandizement would sound more appropriate in the mouth of Conan the Barbarian: "We keep the minds of Sagus Cliffs safe from threats they don't even imagine."
Token heroic sacrifice included, natch.
Worst of all, their enemy is worst of all and juxtaposed with cozy plains-ape normalcy: "Inhuman, with no negotiation." Hilariously, Tides itself presented a much better version of the same idea just one act later, in a quest chain written by a fanboy of the old Torment. The Endless Gate cult culminates in an encounter with Lovecraftian monstrosities on the same malice and power level as Malaise the Adversary - but those horrors from beyond were illustrated largely by their human followers. They were shown to exploit all-too-human despair, human bloodlust, human viciousness, human sadism, human cowardice, human servility, human hatred and self-hatred. In contrast, Malaise's defeat is a cheap fairytale dichotomy with unambiguous heroes standing for the plains-ape status quo, to be reinstated by defeating the unknown.

All this adds up to a noticeable absence of Ignus. For all the Fifth Eye tries to evoke the Smoldering Corpse, it lacks said smouldering corpse, or any attempted facsimile of Torment's unforgettable sadomasochistic mono-pyro-maniacal loose cannon of an underling. (If anything, that glowbug Erritis again comes closest.) To me it's an admission of both defeat and guilt, an admitted break in the spiritual succession. For those of you who've played Torment, think back to Ignus' very first action upon being reawakened... yeah, the very first thing he does... yeah, THAT. Try selling THAT as a companion to snowflakes. Try getting them to admit they want that companion.

The worrllld will end they say
So why not watch it buurrrn?

Saint Paul of Splendid and Tybir of the Red Cheek

Mich interessiert kein Gleichgewicht

Rammstein - Mann Gegen Mann

________________________________________
Spoilers: Torment: Tides of Numenera (Tybir) ... and I guess a minor one for Dead State if that even counts.
________________________________________

Back when the webcomic Something Positive still had some personality, its "heroes" set out to write a very special theater play, the very antithesis of modern sappy, politically correct tripe. You know, those fictional portrayals of, among other things, "gays as flawless superhumans who resemble a new incarnation of the noble savage more than real people."

I held off playing the zombie survival / base building / RPG / thingamajig Dead State on its release because of the bad press it received (standard release bugs mostly) and while I'll get into the game as a whole at some later date, I will say the patched-up and expanded Reanimated release (while still suffering from some minor bugs and strange design decisions) is quite stable, enjoyable and an interesting take on the old freedom / story trade-off in gaming. It resembles the first Baldur's Gate game in one respect, providing a wide array of possible companions without expanding much on their dialogue trees. Most of these companions play up the "ragged band of misfits" routine: a computer nerd with no social skills, a veterinary student trying to patch up humans as best she can, a couple of semi-competent cops, a trucker, a petty crook, etc. The females naturally tend to be portrayed as more sympathetic than the males.

And then there's Paul Rainier.

Paul is a former Army ranger turned engineer. His combat skills are among the best in the game, possibly the best all-around. He never panics. His jack-of-all-trades noncombat skills lend themselves to supporting any base improvement project. He's clean-cut, clean-shaven, clean-spoken, clean-conscienced. He never takes a day off. He's so stunningly smart and competent that he's always on both the logical and moral side of arguments. He's also, inexplicably, a sub-commander in place of the more fitting Bud. In fact the fucker's so gosh-dog-gonned angelic as to routinely reassure you that even when you contradict him he will gladly support your decisions.

He's also the only openly gay character and as per modern precepts, Paul is a gay martyr. A homo-martyr. A Homartyr. His heroic and benevolent military career was cut short by homophobia. Hell, for extra pathos, your first meeting with him occurs as he's piously burying his dead lover. Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck every apostle. Could you not just have slapped a rainbow-colored halo on this schmuck? Paul's actually so endlessly useful and so painfully personable that even I like him despite my distaste for military murderers and PC babble both. Dead State's basic concept follows the standard post-apocalyptic setting where other survivors are a bigger threat than the zombies themselves. Your would-be companions are usually useless or unlikeable or both... unless they're a nominal minority, and Paul is the... second most ludicrous of the bunch.

Dead State's developer, Double Bear Productions, was founded by Brian Mitsoda, who earned his fame by writing one of the true classic cRPGs, Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines. Though Dead State shows some of that depth, its shameful pandering to political correctness makes me wonder if Bloodlines wasn't a one-off. It also makes me curious about his exact work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, a project sharing a smaller amount of the same weakness for facetious niceness. I haven't played the patch including Mitsoda's personal creation, Oom, but TToN featured its own token ding-a-lingulator, Tybir, and Tybir is... rather less angelic.

He's still very sympathetic. He's a charmer, and even as his dark past is revealed, the player is encouraged to accept and nurture Tybir's mere contrition as character growth and appropriate penance. As I complained in my main commentary on the game, none of TToN's companions approach the edginess of Ignus or Vhailor from the original Torment, or even Dak'kon or Morte. Yet, Tybir's dishonest, self-serving and everything else we expect from a rogue and don't expect to see portrayed as part of the personality of a protected species, a champion of victimology poker. Compare the two gay love interests in Dragon Age: Origins, Leliana and Zevran (both of them rogues to boot) and you'll find nothing is ever their fault and their tales of personal tragedy are outright Dickensian.

Tybir, in contrast, owns his faults (at least eventually) and his entire life history seems as much a matter of his poor personal choices as the winds of fate. Overall a much more believable character than Saint Paul Rainier or most any other nominally homosexual character in modern media. And they still managed to ruin it by the finale.

Auvigne, Tybir's former boyfriend... hit him!
Le *gasp* !!!
Domestic violence! Oh noes! Oh the horror! Oh the humanity!
Oh, brother.
That's right, when he caught Tybir possibly ruining the reputation of the mercenary company they'd painstakingly built up by burning an entire village to the ground, betraying their employers, Auvigne popped him one. These are trained murderers we're talking about, mind you, backstabbing cut-throats. Yet this is the climax of Tybir's story, a smack, every bit as amateurish and whiny and anticlimactic as the same politically correct pandering idiocy I've been railing against in webcomics. That's the quality of writing we Kickstarted with a five million dollar boot.

Do yourselves a favor. If you're all excited about turning your product's plot or characters into an emblem of the latest hot-button issue... don't. If you know what attitude to take before you've even considered the problem, you're probably not capable of making it interesting. You may as well play the provocateur and write a deliberate parody of such cliches instead.
Make him kick a lot of puppies.

Can't ride the red tide

"Jump in my car, we'll go one hundred around the bends
 And we'll pretend feeling rage is feeling real"

Missy Higgins - 100 Round the Bends


A few second impressions of Torment: Tides of Numenera, after completing my second playthrough.

First off, though still annoyed at dignity being considered a gendered concept, I did enjoy the company of the male half of the game's cast well enough. Aligern could've definitely used more fleshing out (pun intended) but then again he and Callistege both were more about their superpowers than about personal growth. Said power seems much less super than Callistege's (especially with the rings of entanglement) but still has potential. Tybir's writing was surprisingly level-headed given his inclinations and current politics. Erritis... suffice it to say I'll be playing Original Sin 2 soon and whatever else Chris Avellone is working on next. Like Durance and Grieving Mother in PoE, Erritis manages to twist a trite archetype into the most interesting character in the game.

Second off, while my party's gender mix was not originally meant as the opposite of my first playthrough, my actual playstyle was. Instead of glorying in the various non-combat options, I glaived myself up to explore TToN's more bellicose side. Smashy-smashy!
I was sorely disappointed. Not in the lack of combat as such - TToN offers about as many pugilistic possibilities as its plot dictates, give or take a victim here and there, and the [Smash] dialogue option is satisfyingly frequent. However, it's clear the combat side of the game was hardly tested. Not only are most combat options simplistic and  redundant but quite a few major fights have bugged out on me. The Endless Gate, the crystalvores, several fights in the Bloom, even the very last, climactic showdown have frozen on some character's turn or another, forcing several reloads or even skipping the encounter altogether via dialogue. Even if not completely, strictly gamebreaking, this being a year and at least one major patch after release it seems pretty unforgivable.

Last off, cast-off, smashy-smashy reads as "red" to me, so I did my best to play as a hotheaded fanatic as per official boilerplate. However, it seems my initial assessment was correct: Tides makes it much too easy to acquire blue alignment bumps and downplays the logically (or rather illogically) red mindless aggression. Shooting first and asking questions later, bullheadedly chasing down a single goal, should fairly reliably redden you. Instead, dialogues constantly reward you blue for merely advancing the plot, qualifying the player's aimless fumbling as "expanding the mind and spirit" even when you're purposely ignoring all the information around you and refusing to investigate context. Take this mission for example:

I'm scavenging a macguffin from a transdimensional vehicle's onboard computer. As I begin, ghostly simulacra of the vehicle's passengers materialize around me, attempting to communicate... and I choose to completely ignore them. For ignoring their motivations, ignoring the technologically fascinating means by which they manifest, the information they might have to impart, ignoring their very nature no less and thoughtlessly ripping out the gizmo I need then leaving, for mindlessly blowing past that uncanny event I'm rewarded with the maximum possible alignment shift in the direction of "wisdom, enlightenment and mysticism" a.k.a... willful ignorance apparently?
Never mind that this is a side quest and "Huge" alignment boosts are in fact so rare that the few red equivalents are handed out only for irreparably sanguine actions like permanently dooming one of your companions as an increasingly suicidal whirlwind of destruction. All the times I yell "Attack!" before my opponents have even launched into their pre-match banter don't seem to count for much either.

As things stand, I couldn't manage to stay red until near the end, when tiding the tongues provides a facile, story-independent red/silver fix. So either I'm incapable of not acting like a nerd (possible) or the game's purposely masking its customers' true nature from themselves, flattering them. Given the choice, most idiots would rather be Narcissus than Damocles so it pays to shift the baseline a bit in favor of barbarity, make them feel less like the sadistic, codependent, self-aggrandizing, anti-intellectual drooling aneuploids they are. We all know that if those purty colors really reflected gamers' commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, most Last Castoffs would never finger-paint their way off the short bus. They just don't want to admit to being brainless petty thugs with the analytical ability of gerbils, to see their actions truly reflected on screen.
 "But then I see my damn reflection in your eyeball"

Overly-Impulsive Cagey Demons

I recently started on my second playthrough of Torment:Tides of Numenera and took stock of which companions I had left to try. During my initial run I'd given a passing thought to the oddity of winding up with an all-girl posse (a pussy posse, if you will*) tanking for Matkina, Callistege and Rhin but hadn't given much consideration to the fact that I'd picked the entire female half of the cast while telling the three male mooks to take a hike without ever looking back. Weird, huh?

See, I hadn't actually set out to do this. I'd simply picked personalities after my own tastes: nerds and loners, savants and dark knights. I picked anyone dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, possessed of a dark, brooding antiheroic backstory or who seemed to have great potential (and Rhin's late-game "cobbler" and "cypher adept" abilities turned out as overpowered as expected.) I chose self-possessed intellect.

I threw out anyone who was hinted to be a fanatic or a comic relief blowhard or standard backstabbing roguish gutter trash. Wouldn't you know it, that turned out to be all the male characters. But hey, no-one minds when writers do this to female characters, right? No-one's ever bitched out Frank Miller for his comics' high whore quotient, right? So it's not like we're working with a double standard or anything. Right? Granted, I've been told Avellone eventually turned Erritis into something memorable against all odds, but the observation stands.

Dignity: now a gendered term.



__________________________________________________
*P.S.
Was going to demand royalties if anyone wants to use the term "pussy posse" as a band name, but apparently Leonardo DiCaprio already beat me to the term. Hollywood stars never sue anyone though, right?

+5 Everything Damage

I've been gushing about Pillars of Eternity and Tides of Numenera's improvements on RPG tropes for the past few months but they both drop the ball when it comes to meaningless proliferation of ability and damage types. I complained about this trend in one of my earliest posts here, and four and a half years later I'm seeing no signs of improvement.

Whatever creative potential the Numenera setting's "esoteries" (magic spells) might have in the pen and paper version is utterly lost on TToN. From level 1, my nano was pigeonholed into shooting a basic magic missile spell, which I could switch, at will, to any damage type I please. Later you of course get the "greater magic missile" or "missile storm" spell which is not just any-purpose but all-purpose.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of trivializing magic by limiting it to moronic pew-pew, there is no point in pretending to include six different damage types in your combat system unless you're actually going to make players choose between them. The same goes for status effects:

While that item from PoE is a rather extreme and unique example (most items protect against a couple of those) that litany of status effects perfectly illustrates the problem. It is not feasible to even attempt to predict which type of effect will be used by enemies, so you end up relying on the "suspend all negative effects" items or priest spell.

Why do game developers so routinely shoot themselves in the foot?

In PvP games featuring different damage types to be defended against by different armor, the number of options is more often than not limited to two: physical and magic, or physical and "energy" if you're in a SF setting, or "soft" and "hard" damage in Planetside, etc. If you get up to four, as in EVE, you already start seeing them routinely combined for offense, and players ignoring specific defenses in favor of all-purpose safety blankets. I'm sure anyone more versed in game theory than myself would readily name various cogitations on the maximum number of choices before not-choosing becomes the best logical choice. The lady or the tiger? Dodgy choice to begin with. When it's "the lady or the tiger or the tiger or the tiger or the other tiger" you end up collapsing in the arena in resignation or trying to jump the wall.

Nevertheless, it is possible to institute a wide array of choices in PvE so long as you give players some means of scouting or planning ahead. The Lord of the Rings Online, before it got dumbed down into insignificance, had quite a few examples of creatures to be countered by specific abilities (minstrel/loremaster undead dazing for example) or weapons made of one of three particular metals. In an MMO, players would know what kind of dungeon they're planning to run and stock up accordingly, a dynamic carried over from tabletop games. If your D&D group's planning to raid the Tomb of the Bloodless Butler on Thursday, you probably know to stock up on holy water and starch-piercing wooden stakes.

In story-based single-player games, however, developers usually opt against letting players scout ahead in favor of suspenseful secrecy and plot twists, which means including any specific damage/ability counters in the game mechanics is either purely cosmetic, or worse, a whole barrel full of red herrings. Do yourselves a favor and stop wasting development time on implementing options which you'll only waste more employee hours homogenizing into irrelevance two patches later when your play-testers throw up their hands in frustration at being blindsided.

Do it right or not at all.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

"Like the diamond that cuts the light
The radiation from a single mind
We have outlived ourselves
For many a ruined year"

Faith and the Muse - Shattered in Aspect


Once upon a timeless inchoate void, there was a computer role-playing game called Planescape: Torment which received widespread, lasting (and well-deserved) praise for its quality writing and reliance on roleplaying to advance the plot instead of mowing down a linear progression of faceless baddies. Unlike most computer games, RPGs included, Torment's texts read like immersive fiction with smoothly flowing dialogue and evocative descriptions.

However, Torment wasn't a choose-your-own text adventure, and there was more to its appeal than meaningful dialogue options or shooting the breeze with NPCs. The "Planescape" portion of the game's title indicated its setting, a spin-off of the most memorable concept to come out of Dungeons and Dragons, the alignment wheel and the multiversal world built on said alignments. Much of the game discussed heavens and hells, purpose and freedom, and penned characters based on these ideas according to their appointed spokes on the great wheel. It maintained coherent themes grim enough to imbue your actions with repercussions. Its music, décor and character models sustained that

In contrast, Planescape: Torment's self-appointed successor features a happy shiny magic door through which orphans can go to find adoptive families. Almost two decades later, to whatever extent Torment: Tides of Numenera might represent its new Numenera setting it offers precious little torment. (As to its content of tides, it kind of goes up and down.) The two games' dissimilarity is not entirely a bad thing, and in fact Tides manages to bridge some very serious cRPG pitfalls from which its predecessor suffered.

For all its roleplaying immersion, Planescape: Torment's combat side was woefully lacking, tacked on in deference to DnD expectations but clumsy and vaguely extraneous. You greatly cleaved and magically missiled waves upon waves of trash mobs on your way to and from quest NPCs, mostly letting your party autoattack until you heard Dak'kon say "the karach sings true!" A bit of a chore. It was and has been the standard leveling grind expected of cRPGs, and T:ToN blessedly does away with it, granting character experience for completing tasks and not for racking up a head count.

As discussed vis-a-vis the issue of stealth, removing at least some of the incentives for indiscriminate killing serves more than a purely aesthetic purpose. It opens up new styles of gameplay.
Meet Tides' crisis mode:

No, not combat mode. Tides has no combat mode. In the place of punchy-time you get crises, which most often include some punchiness or the option of pugnacity, but also punching time-cards or serving punch. While turn-based conflicts and usable items are not uncommon in RPGs, I've never seen one incorporate non-combat aspects of gameplay quite so seamlessly. Use your turns to attack, interact with the environment, complete objectives, attempt to negotiate with NPCs, show the enemy what you've got in your pocketses, whatever your gallbladder desires (and the monkey writing the script remembered to bang into the typewriter.) In the example above, the crisis mode is actually used to handle a conversation with several NPCs. Combat situations grow much more naturally out of advancing through your story than they do in most RPGs.

Combine this with an excellent character stat system using STR/DEX/INT stats as consumable resource pools as well as passive boosts, thereby reviving the laudable concept of resource management so lamentably shunned by the rest of the game industry these days. Pile onto all that goodness a gear system that doesn't just pile on redundant stat-boosting duplicate armor pieces and usable items which cannot simply be endlessly accumulated in your inventory and rotated into your quickslots as fix-all solutions. Tides solves most of the problems cRPGs have created for themselves over the past decades. It's also, overall, a meticulously, minutely and masterfully scripted journey free of bugs, exploits, loose ends or redundancies. It's probably the second game of this type I've played (besides VtM:Bloodlines) in which I didn't wind up with a gigantic pile of useless cash by the end. For some (like myself) the dampened stochasticity grates a bit as I prefer my RPGs to tend toward open-world sandboxes (see Mount&Blade) rather than toward linear adventure games nailed to a specific plot, but one can't deny how impressively tightly woven InXile's product is. In terms of game mechanics and player interaction, this is what third-person cRPGs should be from now on.
Hell, it's what they should've been years and years ago if the game industry didn't refuse to improve its products as a matter of principle.

...

However...

For all its well-deserved accolades, one title I cannot lavish on TToN is a spiritual successor to Planescape:Torment. When I first played Pillars of Eternity I had the distinct feeling its title was no accident, these people are in it for the long haul, that the game was a platform meant to kick off something big, the "RPG revival" as I half-jokingly labelled it. Tides, while using PoE's basic engine, avoids PoE's much edgier setting and writing in favor of selling its gameplay improvements to a wider audience. What this amounts to, unfortunately, is the old routine of abusing an existing niche audience for free publicity to bait and switch your product to appeal to a new, presumably wider audience. When Chris Avellone (who wrote for both games) said they were very different projects, he was likely understating matters a great deal, and it certainly doesn't feel like something geared toward fans of the first Torment.

Before I judge InXile too harshly here, I will admit it's been eighteen freakin' years since everyone learned what can change the nature of a man, so maybe they couldn't entirely count on repeat business from an audience of nameless ones. Unfortunately, adapting to a new market now means marketing to millennials (or as I've called them, Generation Facebook) a sniveling crop of overemotional intellectual cripples who'll duck and cover for their safe spaces at the drop of a head. Planescape:Torment was largely a tale of rebelling against one's own nature. Millennials are an entire generation incapable of producing a counterculture movement, so addicted to constant social reinforcement they couldn't even be bothered to rebel against their parents, much less themselves. So, perhaps inevitably, there's very little torment to be found in the tides of numenera.

Terrible things happen in the game, sure. Y'know, technically. You hear of people getting maimed and killed and eaten alive and occasionally wipe your boots in some innocent's entrails, yet somehow the depictions of death and despair lack that visceral immediacy which brought Torment's torments to unlife. The depictions of poverty lack the due nihilism of a society's punching bags found in Sigil's slums. None of your NPC companions possess the looming menace of Vhailor or the vicious abandon of Ignus. The music never booms the full depth of those pits of despair known as the human condition. Even the Dendra O'Hur seem unnecessarily sanitized. Though Tides sets up ample opportunity for darker plot twists throughout its run, these are constantly muted, truncated, restrained.

It's not like the team lacked talent. Look at this:

Numenera's defined mainly by being a far-future science fantasy setting. The influence of the past would by then litter the entire planet: new ruins atop old ones, houses upon houses, Troys atop Troys. From the perspective of a billion years in the future it really is turtles all the way down, and the graphic artist who designed the background here managed to convey at least a hint of that feeling by sculpting the building's two levels in two different styles. Minor impressions like that grace many of the game's backgrounds, descriptions and items but are constantly held back by the overall design decision to keep things light and airy, sunny and optimistic.

Nothing so delineates this divergence as the utterly different natures of The Nameless One and the Last Castoff. As the Nameless One the dark deeds you unveiled were inescapably your own, regardless of your memory loss. Pillars of Eternity toyed with this idea as well through its soul permanence and awakenings. TToN on the other hand makes it clear that the castoffs are new beings born in the instant the Changing God leaves a body, and you are therefore an innocent ignorant, exculpated a priori of any misdeeds your body perpetrated before your Haibaneish fall from grace. How convenient. You are denied even the dignity of owning your faults.

This postmodernist absolutist moral relativism manifests in the replacement of alignments with tides as well. While the old good/evil dichotomy is certainly simplistic, it at least acknowledged the discernment of right and wrong. The tides on the other hand shy from calling anything evil while labeling you instead in terms of psychological traits like impulsiveness or egocentrism, which would be all well and good if the game's various events didn't then consistently link silver and red to negative outcomes and gold and purple to do-gooding along the predictable old perceptions and delineations of good and evil, except lacking the added nuance of order and chaos. If we're to take such a system seriously, then we'd need a lot more examples of gold-star altruism being used against the perpetrator (parasitism, confidence artists, etc.) or prosaically purple communism beating down the will of individuals, of red-blooded fights against oppression and silver-lined brows reaching for the lofty heights above the hoi-polloi.

What's more, the blue tide being linked to information-gathering probably ensures that every player will wind up defined as blue, especially on a first playthrough. Trust me, there isn't nearly that much intellectualism to be found in human nature. When asking questions opens up so many dialogue options, it becomes meaningless to reward the player for self-servingly advancing the conversation, and it's one of the two noticeable ways in which Tides manages to trip over its own means of interaction. The other is the rather claustrophobic feel of the game's various zones. Though packed with content, they're inescapably cramped by today's standards, making the whole setting feel a bit like a goofy little Whoville rather than the expansive vista of mechanomagical wonders promised by far-future Clarkian fantascience. Once again, this is a departure from the first Torment, which actually allowed for a great deal of exploration through Sigil's nooks and crannies.

Ah, well, I could go on.
(And I probably will, but another day.)

For now, a simple conclusion:
Play it! Tell your loosely-defined Facebook "friends" about it! Spread the (mostly) good word!
Torment: Tides of Numenera is one of the best cRPGs around, and its flaws are for the most part representative of the audience it addresses, which means you won't get much better themes in games until another generation goes by. Hopefully its rather bland artistic side will succeed in selling Tides' gameplay mechanics to a whole new up-and-coming crop of gamers which will then grow up taking them for granted as cRPG staples instead of the current "kill ten rats" industry standard. One can only dream.

Tides of Tentaclera

It feels like I'm doing a lot of complaining about Torment:Tides of Numenera, which may seem unfair given how well it works as an immersive interactive experience. Many of its artistic or thematic elements however, writing, music, character models, backgrounds, while meticulously and expertly laid out, feel just a little bit too restrained, afraid to get too creative for fear of drifting too far from the lowest common denominator.

Those two smaller monsters are minions of two major cosmic forces. At one point in the game you're caught between them, the proverbial rock and hard place, both closing in on you. Conceptually, this would make for a very dramatic titanic juxtaposition... except it mainly serves to illustrate their points of redundancy.

Granted I've only encountered flumphs before as a running gag in The Order of the Stick, but they don't seem that eye-catching to me.

If you're going to set up some sort of hammer-and-anvil bad guy dichotomy, or even if you just have two major forces in play, then for the love of all that's dramatic make them thematically distinctive. If one's a writhing mass of tentacles, the other should be a monolithic, angular juggernaut. If one spits fire, the other should condense rainclouds. If one's black and red the other should be white and green. If one's theme music's a funeral march, the other's should be a dissonant carnival calliope.

What you don't need is two different breeds of tentacle monster, or two teleportation / telepathy themed enemies, especially when they're the two main sources of non-human scenery in your story. As far as I can tell this isn't even the usual case of game developers cutting corners by re-skinning the same character model. Both had some work put into them. They just went for the trite-and-true overdone generic black slimy tentacle beast routine... twice, because anything worth overdoing is worth over-overdoing.

Is despising and insulting your audience's intelligence really so crucial to game design?

Ya Feels Ain't Reals

OK, this bullshit has got to stop.

For reference, Endtown is a vaguely sciencey fictiony comic about a post-apocalyptic future where underground formerly human furries are hunted and slaughtered by the last remnants of humanity. At some point some protagonists stumble across a dimension-hopping ship powered by (what else) "emotional energy" because dilithium crystals are, like, sooooo last week.

This sort of babbling pissed me off even more in the recent RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera and its reliance on emotion as some sort of universal force and overuse of telepathy. I was especially disappointed when The Bloom, a glorious city-sized biological monstrosity which humans occupy as internal microparasitic flora, was infantilized as feeding on humans' emotions. It was bad enough when Monsters, Inc. trotted out this sort of idiocy, but at least Disney had the decency to label that a kids' movie. Look, I get why writers might be tempted to take this shortcut, as building up dramatic effect largely hinges on displaying characters' emotional reactions and it helps move things along to shoehorn emotional displays in as a plot device.

Only one problem: there are no emotions. There never will be. Emotion is not a "thing" and cannot be. The very concept is merely a shortcut we use to express certain states of neural excitation which interlink more primitive aversive / attractive stimuli with higher cerebral functions. They're just predictable electrochemical gradients which facilitate learning, memory and habit formation. If you posit a spaceship which runs on "emotional energy" then it would also run just fine on the neural impulses sparked by viewing the color purple or remembering your multiplication tables. Epilepsy would be a feast!

Naturally, the real issue is catering to the lowest common denominator. All of your readers / viewers / players have emotions, no matter how stupid they are. Even the most troglodytic, drooling imbeciles (even Trump voters) can feel, so glorifying feelings allows them to imagine themselves useful, lends them some implicit importance. Fuck that.

There is no such thing as emotion. It's an artifact of our material underpinnings, of flesh and electrons, a shadow on the lens, a discernible pattern within matter but not matter itself, just as we ourselves are patterns dependent on matter and not matter itself. Our brains exist. We do not. Thought does not exist. Emotion even less so, as it's just a minor subset of the myriad patterns of information flow which might be said to constitute a mind. The energy and matter which make up the physical system being organized by and as a mind can be considered a power source, transmitted and fed upon, sure, but not the organization itself, as some nonsensical atomos of feels. You might even suppose a system which requires input delivered in the precise quanta of neural signals, but then you'd still be discussing matter and energy. Electrons would flow, hydrocarbons would be hydrolyzed, synapses would flood, and these tides would need to be intercepted, tapped, siphoned. If The Bloom consumes its victims' fear, then it would need to physically excise the neurons responsible for propagating the reaction pattern we term "fear" within our brains, or tap every efferent pathway from the amygdala until this shrivels and atrophies, or bleed certain circuits of dopamine.

Want to fabricate pretextium crystals for a SF setting, some ludicrous phlebotinum or another to justify your plot? Fine. Wonderful. Emotion ain't it. It's not an unknown force, but a composite of known, low-key forces which divorced from animal muscle wouldn't even power a toaster.

Maybe The Bloom absolutely needs electrons at just the exact specifications of a human brain. However, there'd still be no difference between emotion and composing a symphony. More importantly, this would have to be the stupidest fucking way to get your jolties. As anyone who watched those towers upon towers of comatose human bodies in The Matrix might say, that is a long, long way to go for a 70 millivolt battery!

Sin-Bound Lycanthrope who Gnaws Truths

"You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream"

E.A. Poe - A Dream Within A Dream


Caution: might want to watch Haibane Renmei before reading this, lest mine insights bespoil thine viewing pleasure. Thou'st been warned-ed.

As soon as I cranked up my Torment:Tides of Numenera character, the opening reminded me of Haibane Renmei. After all, there can't be that many stories beginning with an amnesiac falling from the sky, and anime/RPG fanbases share a lot of crossover. Granted, the game's littered with many little outside references, similarities and in-jokes, some more tenuous than others, but this one's reinforced by some NPC commentary partway through your adventures:

Upon visiting the Valley of Dead Heroes, a city-sized mechanized mausoleum, you run across some local cultists who have decided everyone in the world's just a reincarnation or after-image of a corpse memorialized therein, and spend their lives trying to find their true names and their own memorial. This serves on one hand as tongue-in-cheek reference to the mausoleum also listing the names of TToN's wealthier backers.

On the other hand, it gradually becomes apparent as you watch Haibane Renmei that the Haibane are youngsters who died before their time, and the walled microcosm of Glie/Guri some sort of purgatory where they can live a wholesome life until they themselves are ready to move on. This realization lends a deliciously morbid edge to the middle portion of the series, especially given the names these children acquire as Haibane are based on a single solitary past-life memory highly suggestive of different deaths: falling, drowning, coma, falling through ice, even burning alive.

It works a little differently for the two black-winged "sin-bound" heroines of the series, not merely dead before their time but suicides. They cannot move on until they acknowledge and resolve the issue of their self-destructive tendencies, whereupon their true name is revealed to have a hidden meaning relating somehow to their basic personality. So Rakka is not just falling but an "inverted nut" for thinking of herself as alone and Reki's not just a pebble but trampled, having thrown herself in front of a train, thereafter vindicated as a stepping stone for growing into her work helping others. After resolving their internal personality conflict, they're back on track to fly out of Purgatory.

First of all, I have to ask, if it's the Sin-Bound who get True Name reveals, are all of InXile's customers visiting the Valley of Dead Heroes sin-bound?


More importantly, if the Memorialists are right and the Ninth World's basically Glie, how would the core cast of Haibane be classed?

Kuu: Swift Glaive who Flies Before
(plucky little Kuu just seems like a scrapper to me)

Hikari: Charming Jack who Feeds
(the willpower penalty suits her perfectly)

Kana: Mechanical Nano who Swims Against the Current
(she's a tinkerer, and despite her high energy state seems more abrasive than combative)

Nemu: Observant Nano who Waits Patiently
(probably the wisest of the bunch, despite her background role... and the running penalty fits almost too well)

Rakka: Mystical Jack who Translates
(honestly, Rakka doesn't learn much throughout the series; most of her advancement comes as a go-between, her revelations by accident or outside agency)

Reki: Strong-Willed Glaive who Upholds
Look, I freakin' love Reki, especially her thundering declaration that she never had any real interest in helping anyone. Gotta love the grinding, smoldering, tectonic resentment revealed in her character. She's a fighter at heart, but if I were drawing up her character in an RPG, I'd bump up her Intellect before anything else. She represents us half-formed self-defeaters clever enough to outsmart ourselves and stubborn enough to follow through with it. The big tragedy of the series is that her entire universe seems inimical by design to Reki and her ilk.

Ignoring its well-meaning airs, there's actually quite a bit about Haibane Renmei's cosmology and moralizing which could grate. Portraying introversion as sinful and independence as destructive, intellect as irrelevant. The moral of Reki's story seems to be "fake it 'til you make it" or knuckling under until servitude becomes your nature. Not exactly a laudable mindset, though quite in tune with Haibane Renmei's religious fantasy setting.

Me, I think Reki'd be happier in the Necropolis or the Bloom. At least the Great Devourer's not such a tyrant as to forbid the most fundamental right of all, suicide. Some of us really should have ended it when we were teenagers.

Faith of our Fathers

Although lacking Pillars of Eternity's more daring take on religion, I did enjoy Torment:Tides of Numenera's slight jabs at faith. Reminds me of the Life of Brian. Very sandal-and-gourd.

Basically, wherever you go in this game, whatever the topic of conversation, seems there's always some group or another of nutjobs who've built some primitive cargo cult around it: you, The Changing God, a big graveyard, an all-devouring monstrosity, a... rock... you name it, some delusional loon's out there praying to it. Maybe the credit goes to TToN's writers or maybe this is just an intrinsic feature of the Numenera setting's Clarkian take on sufficiently advanced technology. It's like a corollary to Rule 34: if it exists there is porn of it - and a mumbling cabal of mouthbreathers who think it rules the multiverse.

Where was I going with this?
Oh yeah.
Mosques aren't special.

Telepathetic

"Knowing that myself has gone
To the other side of the mirror
And getting bigger"

Neuroticfish - It's Not Me


I spoil you: if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation novels, Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish books or played Torment: Tides of Numenera, this post does allude to some pretty major plot reveals. Then again, when discussing telepathy, isn't forewarning to be expected? You decide.
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For a long time I saw telepathy as a natural element of science fiction as it is in fantasy worlds (literary or religious) or superhero comics. After all, it just keeps cropping up alongside those other monstrously game-breaking superpowers like time travel, teleportation or invisibility. Charming's just something princes do naturally, a first level wizard spell. Sense motive's a basic divination. Jesus knows your impure thoughts. If Jean Grey can read minds, it's easy to take for granted counselor Troi's presence on the bridge of the Enterprise as well.

The more I've encountered telepathy in SF though, the more it seems a dead end, untenable as a theme for any lengthy plot. In short stories, alright, it can yield some highly memorable tension like George R.R. Martin's A Song for Lya but any more coherent universe telepathy tends to monopolize and monotonize. In something as shallow as Star Trek it's barely noticeable among all the other ludicrous babbling. It's not like they actually use any of their advanced technology logically anyway.

However, take a look at something more respectable like Asimov's Foundation novels. The story starts out as a multifaceted exploration of imperial decline and fall, the preservation of knowledge, human social patterns, technological advancement, economic imperialism, harsh decisions and superior tactics. The unveiling of The Mule serves as an appropriately dramatic climax, a paradigm-shifting superpower rendering all previous tactics and technologies moot. Where do you go from there? The only thing that can beat a telepath is more telepathy. The only thing that sounds impressive after that is even more telepathy, an entire telepathic planet. The scope of the Foundation novels shrinks as they progress.

Or look at Ursula K. Le Guin's SF novels. Rocannon's World is a broad, sweeping science fantasy story with elves and goblins and "magic" reinterpreted via Clarke's third law, a fantastic romanticized anthropological sweep through various "alien" cultures. The hero dodges orbital bombardment and tries to reclaim futuristic technology from deep within the warrens of thieving goblins, lance-duels atop gryphon back, Beowulfs his way through dangerous waters protected by a suit of space-age polymer, escapes bandits and vampires and finally, at the end of the story, reaches the cave of an ancient mystic who teaches him telepathy. Then in the last few pages he takes the fight to his enemies and none can stand before him 'cuz... shit. Whatcha gonna do against a guy who knows everything you're thinking of doing?

It's a revolutionary concept in religion as well, especially obvious in monotheism. The invention of thought-crime lends the most absolutist edge possible to theocracy. Don't even think of stepping out of line, 'cuz Jesus will flay the flesh off your bones in a lake of fire for all eternity if you so much as covet the thought of coveting. With a stick that big, who even needs carrots?

By the time she revisits this superweapon in the third novel of her SF universe, City of Delusion, Le Guin's painted herself into a corner. Given the impossibility of lying to a telepath, betrayal has become obsolete, and so has most conflict. Unfortunately you can't have much of a plot without conflict, so her universe of telepaths gets taken over by anti-telepath telepaths, and these have to be countered by an anti-anti-telepath and can we at least acknowledge that infinite regression's a conceptual dead end? In her later books in the same universe, the author's forced to more or less ignore, pre-date, hand-wave or otherwise avoid the topic.

For the same reason it finds such ready use in religious control, telepathy's too damn near omnipotence to coexist with other plot points. In fantasy stories revolving around the whims of universal authority figures, laws handed down from above, it can find an uneasy truce with the narrative. Invoke the name of Elbereth to shake off that fear spell and of course the once and future King Strider can't have his mind read through the palantir, 'cuz he's speshul that's why so shut up! Science fiction, on the other hand, needs to observe some kind of bottom-up logical framework. It's tech that needs to be worked by tech-heads. No heads, no tech, no story. Think about any sciencey fiction: force fields, teleporation, time travel - all easily undermined by knowing where the time traveler thinks to travel, where the teleporter thinks to teleport, etc. In fantasy, where everything's done by gritting one's teeth, bearing down and squinting real hard, controlling minds is no different from conjuring great balls of fire. When the chain of causality requires independent private thought, invention, the manipulation of physical laws (as it does in the real world) telepathy undercuts all action.

Aside from all that, telepathy also tends to be so damn gratuitous. Take Torment: Tides of Numenera:

The whole point of far-future settings is to declare everything possible - not in dreams, not in visions or illusions but in reality. In a world in which spaceships are already ancient history and you can't take two steps without slipping on a glob of sapient nanogel, where teleportation and dimension-hopping are as mundane as running and walking, in a world in which everything is already possible, creating a "psychic dimension" is redundant and pointless. My character shouldn't need to imagine myself doing amazing things. I can already do amazing things within that high-tech world. The "plane of our minds" links us? What, they ain't got iPhones in the year one billion? You couldn't just drill a hole in my skull and implant a transceiver for our private, encrypted, subspace Changing God Intranet beta version 0.837?

Seems like every other character you meet in TToN is either a mind-reader or a mind-eater or a mind-minder or some other lazy shortcut to effects better achieved through interaction in the physical world. If I'm going to instill fear, awe or gratitude in my enemies, give me metal fangs and multispectral vision to read others' galvanic skin reactions, give me poisonous claws and acidic spit or the ability to secrete plant hormones to make crops grow faster. Let me instill emotion through the things I do, not just instill emotion. Just having your character point a finger at others and saying "ok, now you're scared of me and you trust me and you're in love with me" is cheap and lazy. If a transdimensional invader's going to spew jets of black ooze at me, there's no need for the ooze to be part of some dreamscape orchestrated by invisible psychic warriors. The black ooze is pretty damn impressive by itself. If it's supposed to inflict malaise upon me then let it do so through hormonal reactions on skin contact.

Technobabble is not that hard. Really. Even when you do it badly, it's still better than just saying "it's magic" which is all person-to-person telepathy amounts to.

Even the voyeuristic intimacy offered by telepathy can be rendered in a much more touching fashion through speech patterns, describing the character's reactions in various situations or personal effects. Seeing through the eyes of the dead Lascar's helm and sabotaging the Anchorage (no mind-melding required) was better storytelling than any amount of pointing my fingers at my temples and furrowing my brow.

Not that there isn't some place for mind-reading and mind-control in SF settings, but it must come through means within the physical world, created through scientific knowledge and amenable to rational dissection by characters within that setting: clouds of psychotropic drugs, brainscanning metallic crowns, memetic thought canalization, hell, even video ads. Don't tell me that's not brainwashing.
Just leave that "aura of fear" bullshit to the Nazgul.


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edit 2019/08/13
Changed an erroneous game reference.
(Why didn't you assholes tell me?)