Fantasy Revolved

(Loreena McKennitt - Kecharitomene)

 

Well, it's only been two years. I might as well write the third part of this rant, finally. Magical fantasy worlds should better integrate natural adaptation, sure, but the bigger issue is recursive: how does magic in turn affect the world, and vice-versa?

 

Slight aside: once upon a winter I volunteered to write mission dialogue for a startup (and now long vaporwared) game. I was tentatively accepted based on a writing sample and then kicked out a few months later for failing to actually write any missions. Yes, I am one of those rarely gifted individuals who can get fired from volunteer work. Stop pointing and laughing. But though my own failings chiefly caused my failure (my old depression cycle hits hardest in spring) it also confirmed what I'd always suspected: that this is not, strictly speaking, creative work. You're handed down edicts from project leads whose greatest concept of compelling storytelling runs no further than lining up carets and parentheses in program code, or worse indirectly from investors interested only in reinforcing the mass market lowest common denominator, imitating their rich peers' moneymaking scams. And you're told to make all those "boy meets girl" stories or wouldn't-it-be-cool-if notions into flavor text that somehow draws customers and pays off.

 

At one point we were mailed a concept render for a brand new race the bosses thought would look great in their SciFi project. It was, quite literally, a little green man. Space-goblins, yeah that'll make you stand out in the internet age's most crowded field. Sure, I can write some background text for that. See, it involves a magic ring out in space that a little guy with fuzzy feet in space has to go throw into the sun in space. Another bright idea was literally bright: a fire elemental. For a SciFi game. Now, granted, you can write riveting SciFi for creature made of <plasma> as Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated in Out of the Sun, but you have to stretch your concept of environments a bit. A humanoid fire elemental you just pop with your Smith&Wesson laser six-shooter out in the woods behind your log cabin on planet It's-Just-Like-Earth? No. Just. Fucking. No. You don't need me to string words along to that particular effect. Hire some random sixth-grader. (And that, btw, is all you'll get from maximum-likelihood text elongation too.)

 

The bar is set considerably lower for the more childish genre of fantasy, motivating its much wider representation in pop culture. Even most SF is science fantasy with psychic space wizards frowning and grunting and shooting finger-lightning at each other. "It's magic" explains so much... and yet nothing at all. Relevantly here, note magic never changes anything. Oh, sure, you blow up a mountain now and again, but somehow the world about still consists of coyotes chasing rabbits and farmers pitchforking hay and cozy monkey clan social life with mommies and cousins. Magic means nothing until the plot requires it. Bow before status quo!

 

But here's the thing: life adapts. Lucky Lae'zel was wearing her stompin' boots when I hit BG3's gremishka-infested attic, but it got me thinking animals adapted to magic are actually far more likely than we usually see; they need not cast spells but just exploit magical effects. With magic as universal catalyst, you can actually have those impossibly exo/endothermic reactions otherwise making human torches impossible. Except catalysts are by definition applicable to the same reaction wherever available, and most fantasy explicitly describes magic as a universal force pervading all matter or at least all life. If a druid can make a field of barley grow, then the principle of natural selection would still apply: some stalks of barley would absorb that magic better than others and benefit more, seed faster or more plentifully and be better represented in the next generation, especially if the farmer wants faster-growing barley and selects for that trait. After a few dozen generations (and fantasy worlds tend toward deep, deep timelines (if not plots)) you'd get magic-infused barley which is just as hopelessly dependent and maladapted for life without magic as most of our domesticated species are without their irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and flea collars.

 

And then what? How does that evolution feed back into the world's magic?

 

If your magic barley gets better at eating magic than its competitors, and magic is by necessity generally treated as a finite or limited flow resource, then the better species get at eating it, the less they leave available for others, a continued war of attrition like for any other microelement.

Conversely, if magic is a destructive force, those better adapted to avoid it would fare better, and competition would favor those better able to identify and stake out magic-free habitats. No action without reaction.

Can you write a fantasy story about rabbits running rampant because wolves switched to eating magic? Maybe an RPG quest to use your own spellcasting to drain an area's magic before it poisons the food chain?

And does it bio-accumulate? If every rpg is full of dire wolves, dire bears, dire badgers, how does this affect the ecological niche of wolves, bears and badgers? Would there be any normal ones left? Are the dires all eating dire rabbits and dire blackberries? Is that how dire Popeye gets his dire spinach? Conversely, would destructive magic cause worse and worse mutations farther up the food chain? Will you grow a third eye by eating dire wolf meat?

Need trophic chains even remain contiguous with a source of infinite energy flying about? If magic can sustain gigantic dragons, why not a forest devoid of herbivores, where the wolf shall lieth down with the chestnut in harmony? Do magic doggies poop?

Either way, the effect of magic on life would feed back into magic itself, and so on, generation by generation. That in turn would impact social structures. Just as with real-world agricultural revolutions, less labor requirement per caloric unit would shift more workers away from farming... and toward what? Plains-ape social structures are built around hunter-gathering and the need to manage breeding rights. Divination for paternity tests, evocation for population control (an 'acid splash' up the cooch oughta blast the parasite right out of her uterus; 5gp at your nearest midwife (10gp extra for the cure light wounds)) enchantment to impose obedience on children and decrease the monstrous cost of caregiving (no need to spend half an hour re-reading pokey little puppies for every kid; 6 seconds for a sleep spell can take care of an entire creche, assuming you bunk the beds right) and who'd pick up dog shit raising the beasts when you can just summon them from hell?

 

An infinite supply of social engineering would create something more novel than a medieval anytown!

 

But even if that's not your cuppa, then admit at least most fantasy world gimmicks would make no sense. Every RPG is full of the "tomb of suchensuch" - who the hell buries instead of cremating when zombies are real? And would maggots evolve to preserve zombie muscle and tendons intact so they can run their corpsey carriage around dispersing the insects as they pupate? You could implement zombies literally farting butterflies in your game, with all the justification you'll never have for a SciFi fire elemental!

Or take wizardly creations released into the wild. A lab-grown monstrousity might look impressive, but it could easily lack the adaptations and instincts to actually function out in nature. Imagine tracking the mighty owlbear to the forest it invaded... only to find it cowering in fear of windblown pines' motion, starving to death because it doesn't know what acorns and blackberries are and being bled dry by ticks like a ghost moose, especially if clerics have been casting spells of eternal summer and fomenting climate change!

Or take a spell of eternal night. Even if you hand-wave the photosynthesis angle, the lack of light would favor invasion by nocturnal or cave-dwelling species. Your lush mountain streambank, shrouded in dim starlight for a lifetime, would look even more memorable with bleached, blind cave fish replacing the trout and bats out-competing eagles.

 

In only one respect, the pitfalls of a genie's wish, does such storytelling ever acknowledge repercussions.

 

Think it through!

This whole rant can be summed up as that very old, very exhausted, centennially-repeated plea to purveyors of "speculative" fiction: do try to actually speculate instead of rehashing primitive power fantasies. When magazines like Astounding and Galaxy revived the genre of Science Fiction in the mid-20th century, it was by doing exactly that: thinking it through. First by realizing that new technologies worked differently than medieval jousting and something like beta radiation cannot be substituted for simply hitting things with a stick, then by addressing how such differences would affect the human condition. Can't you do that for fantasy?

 

Umm... well, no, I don't think you can. Improve fantasy's coherence and causality and eventually it simply becomes SF with old-timey period-piece trappings. As I've said so many times, SF is a bottom-up build-up of causality whereas Fantasy mimicks the top-down law-giving of religious infantilism, where things work simply because some omnipotent mommy and daddy up in the clouds (or a mean big brother bully down below) want them to work a certain way. Substitute "fate" or "cosmic balance" or some nebulous "will of magic" or "the force" for a more watered-down version. The genre's fans like it that way. It carries a primal, visceral (or primitive and scatological, depending on your viewpoint) appeal. And I doubt you've got enough time before civilization wholly collapses to grace myth with hard F however that may look.

 

But where overlap occurs, I'm sick of seeing it skew eternally in favor of the lower brow. I once said "Magitek can work for elevating primitive supernatural thinking via at least a veneer of rationality. Its reverse, science fantasy, wears thin much faster for degrading a presumably rational setting to primitive, infantile thought patterns." Even if Fantasy as a genre cannot be improved, at least on a small scale can you not occasionally improve one or ten particular fantasies by thinking them through?

"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.

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

Classes & Cogitations: Weapon Afterthoughts

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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P.S.:

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

Classes & Cogitations, 7: Wizzin'

Like other core classes, the wizard suffers from undue overlap with later additions to the D&D-inspired RPG roster, but additionally must contend with the proper division of magic in whatever setting he happens to inhabit. D&D at least established the basic arcane / divine split early on (even if that line often lacks clear definition) but in other game universes like for example The Elder Scrolls where everyone's an all-purpose greatsword-swingin' battlemage, discerning schools of magic inevitably ends up as inconsequential fluff.

Let's reiterate that magic should not be demeaned by using it to punch stuff. Punchin' stuff is what actual punching is for. Also maces, axes and a dagger up your strap. Magic missiles water down both magic and missiles. By extension, the distinction between elemental magic (fire bolt, frost bolt, lightning bolt... rock... bolt? Rock.) used by so many games should really be done away with, as should basing magic around elemental resistances. It's been done to death, separating ice from fire never made much physics sense to begin with, and calling different colored magic missiles different spells shows about as much roleplaying depth as food coloring on a saltine would culinary depth. I'm not saying a big flashy nuke every once in a while doesn't have its place, but wizards should not be primary damage dealers. Move from "fireball" more toward "heat metal" - but then how should the various magic schools look?

 

Sure, in 1975 the wizard definition could be "all of the magicses" but now not only many spell but core class features overlap with later additions.

If you have witches, they're the ones who should be conjuring familiars.

If you have warlocks, they're the ones who should be conjuring demons.

If you have druids/shamans, they're the ones who should be conjuring animals.

If wizards are the nerds, shift them more toward animated suits of armour, alchemy, magical inscriptions, tomes and scrolls and general Saruman craftiness. "Fireball" should be a barrel of black powder, a flask of greek fire or a dragon's tonsils, and subject to ingredient availability.

 

So downplay or maybe conflate Evocation, Conjuration, and to a lesser extent Enchantment/Transmutation since they're witch/warlock/shaman fable staples.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is a pretty classic mad scientist field, though of course it depends on the setting's interpretation of life/death divine magic. Golems, homunculi, Frankensteiny creations in general remain sorely underexplored as playable gimmicks at least in video games so far. 

Illusion so obviously links real-world "magic" stage acts to fantasy for-realsies magic that it should remain a wizardly staple (see Gandalf throwing his voice in The Hobbit) but for the love of crap, downplay the mind control! If it were up to me I wouldn't keep sorcerers in the game at all, but if you do, then the charisma-based spellcasting class should more heavily emphasize hypnosis. For wizards, think smoke and mirrors, holograms and ventriloquism instead!

 

Abjuration's an interesting case, and suits my support caster preference, but the more defensive a wizard's spellcasting gets, the more he starts looking like a cheap knock-off unarmored cleric who can't heal and thinks "mace" is a can of pepper spray. Specific effects like protection from arrows or stone to flesh fall within the precept of wizardly erudition, but the more generic AC/HP boosts should mostly be left to more combat-oriented casters. Planar binding and its like see very little use in cRPGs, but largely for poor campaign writing. As a basic observation, letting wizards buff up their base stats and equipment with magic (as exemplified by Dragon Age: Origins' arcane warrior) is every bit as fraught a proposition as a fighter with dragon breath.

Divination though takes the cake for potentially amazing yet unused effects. Why not put various spins on predicting enemy moves, whether it's spells, called shots, AoE locations, dodges, incoming adds, terrain changes, really, anything? For a bonus, pair this with some limited form of quickened or reactive spells for any specifically interacting effect: if you divine a fireball, you get a reaction on protection from energy; if you divine an incoming crit, get a reactive flare or displacement. Why not tie divination to seeing enemy stats? Why not divine quest objectives via chicken entrails? Why not a spell to hear conversations in other rooms (clairaudience, they have that in tabletop) or magical radar (claivoyance, auspex, anyone?) with dialogue bonuses from that information going forward, or a substitute spell for barbarian/ranger tracking (which is also ignored in cRPGs, see #5 in this series) or discovering extra crafting ingredients, or sharing divining power with an ally to alter one dice roll a round at will, or predicting which way enemies will walk or turn to help a thief while sneaking, or fuck it, anything at all beyond Deckard Cain the Elder identifyin' geegaws!

Then you still must address confusion as to the types of magic in any particular setting. Does your fantasy world have divine and arcane and maybe natural magic? Does a certain type of magic (e.g. raising a zombie) require communion with otherworldly entities or is it merely manipulating inert matter? Is disease microbial or a curse? Does traveling between worlds require a pact with the fairies and a mushroom ring? Is magic inherent in all life or all matter in animist fashion, or is it a force pulled from a source or is it a property of a select few gifted individuals? Can spirits come back from the dead? Do they reincarnate or merely wander the halls of Mandos (or Elysian fields) until the end of time?

Any character might stumble into such quandaries in a fantasy world, but when designing a class centered on deliberately, consciously and quantitatively manipulating the laws of the natural and supernatural, those questions become prerequisites. Questions like "does Melf's acid arrow contain actual, liquid acid I can catch in a pickle jar?" are not mere trivialities to a wizard, but the very essence of his trade.

Classes&Cogitations, 4: What's my motivation?

Paladins and Bards represent D&D's growth from pure dungeon crawl to actual "role"-playing beyond the role of rock, paper or scissors, each leveraging the alignment wheel's law and chaos to make the player think about following a particular ethos. I can't speak for how well it worked in tabletop, but as to the internet age I invite you to tally up the amount of air time bards or especially paladins take up in cRPGs, as well as fan works like DnD-inspired webcomics. However, designating a particular class for heavier roleplaying is at best a crutch. I was pleased to see extra dialogue options for my IWD2 paladin, but if roleplaying really is intrinsic to the game genres named after it, RP choices should pervade any class choice - perhaps not equally, but comparably.

Given that I spent my previous post in the series arguing clerics need tighter links to their deities (shifting divine spellcasting overall toward lawful) paladins should probably just be folded into the greater cleric class, limited and defined by devotion to specific lawful good (or non D&D-equivalent) deities. The other option is to embrace the definition of paladins as knightly orders with a specific mission (combating the saracens, guarding the roads to Jerusalem, etc.) but let's face it, fleshing out such distinctions with sufficient nuance to supply meaningful choices is beyond both the scope and skill of most cRPG campaigns, at least while every game's writers are already devoting most of their time to angel vs. demon lore.

On the bard side, the interpretation of chaotic know-it-alls as jacks of all trades runs into the unnecessary overlap between the ever more prolific playable classes which I decried at the start of this series. The more you implement classes with specific personalities, the more redundant you'll find the one class which can duplicate any (or all!) of their functionality on a whim. See the endless arguments about bards being under/over-powered, from OOTS's Elan to players soloing the original Baldur's Gate campaigns as bardic one-man-bands, to my own defense of their multifaceted support or condemnation of all-purpose scrappers. On the other hand, a class based on musical/recitative performance was always a great idea, as bards/skalds/minstrels/meistersingers/Orpheus/Marsyas/etc. hold an irrefutable place of honor in historic fantasy. They just need to be re-centered on that core (see Pillars of Eternity's chanters) and downplayed in other ability. The harder question is implementing sufficient art or socialization to supply RP choices for social butterflies, without derailing an entire campaign. Does your game actually have anything for a bard to do bardically? No? Then leave it out, and stick with rogues/wizards/clerics.

 

Both classes were party-friendly (to aid their appeal) but their songs and auras' limitless team-wide use, changed at will, was always a bit of a stretch. Personally I'd rather see auras reinterpreted as a single party buff selected after resting, active until next rest. A commitment. Songs should be more unpredictable, reactive to each encounter, novel situations triggering the bard's memory or artistic inspiration, giving him an array of recitations apt to the stimulus at hand, from which he can select one. Bonus points for building up one's repertoire via prior RP choices.

Other classes aren't as hard hit by this roleplaying tie-in.

Campaigns don't usually bother with drudic RP aside from a single-note refrain of "nature good, tech bad" but their neutrality in the D&D alignment wheel gave more leeway. I've never seen the NE/CN/LN eco-terrorist angle truly given its due (especially disappointed by BG3's shallow good/evil choices at the druid grove) but at least it's better than every single bard being a CG Errol Flynn.

Monks and barbarians are better discussed in terms of shallow pop culture fads, but it bears mentioning here that monks' distinction of ki from divine energy was pure 1980s Hollywood exoticism, and has little place in a coherent cosmology. If you want unarmored paladins, fine, but just like paladins and clerics monks need to be more strictly defined by their devotion to The Rule, whatever that may be. A monastic order is more than a self-defense course.

The Houses of Humoring

Thinking on the Houses of Healing, my punny nature suggested one might easily build up a memorable roleplaying location on such a title of bombastic. I imagine they must've had quite a few neighbours, and if the Houses of Healing means hospital, then how about:

The Houses of Hurting   -  (barracks)

The Houses of Hailing   -  (diplomatic corps)

The Houses of Heiling   -  (we don't talk about them)

The Houses of Howling -  (kennels)

The Houses of Holding  -  (jail)

The Houses of Holing    -  (mines)

The Houses of Holing    -  (brothel)

The Houses of Holying  -  (temple)

The Houses of Hilling    -  (construction company)

The Houses of Housing  -  (tenement)

The Houses of Heading  -  (city council)

The Houses of Hedging  -  (casino)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (bank vault)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (bank vault robbers)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (tannery)

The Houses of Hi Ding  -  (where you go to level up)

The Houses of Heiding  -  (an Alpine cabin for little Swiss girls) (in a few years, merges with houses of holing)

 

While this might sound ridiculous at first, it wouldn't take much to implement it in an immersive and fruitful manner. All you need is a city council with a sense of humor. Then, expand upon this first impression and the expectation you've thereby planted in your audience's mind by showing those councillors as bad governors - or! - display them as competent in serious matters but still maintaining a sense of humor.

Dissenters Cohere in Vain

As strategy games grew beyond shuffling chess pawns back and forth, politics and political factions began making more frequent appearances, and modern descendants of Civilization or Master of Orion proudly offer faction-wrangling as a quite involved aspect of their politics systems, interweaving territorial expansion, resource management and military policies. However, diverse political factions are still presented as undesirable stumbling blocks in the player's path, subversives, opposers and accusers, Ahrimans and Satanas causing your loyal populace to stray from your one true path as god-emperor, to be eliminated or pacified into complacency with your commands. I would contend this is another slavish concession to our society's parasitic minority of multibillionaires (and to our parasitic nature as social animals, but leave that for another time) where the true advances which have so immeasurably improved both our individual lives and communal ability to shape the environment (militarily or otherwise) have come from scattered, independent but willingly interacting intellects at the middle levels of society.

Ironically, some games do play with the notion of multiple factions' diverse viewpoints... in the one category where diverse viewpoints are both absurd and meaningless: supernatural belief. Instead of giving players research bonuses for maintaining a diverse array of deluded chanting primitives, why not instead (or at least in addition) apply this reasoning to diverse ranges of practical, scientific or aesthetic pursuits?

 

Trade guilds, colleges of various knowledge, artistic enclaves, let them feed off each other as interactive constituents, with "research" points and other advanced resources being produced by these subunits' interaction, encouraged by the player via resource/space investment, with diminishing returns for any one particular collaboration forcing players to shift priorities to new developments. The new goal would be to maintain balance between them (think of the Europa Universalis sliders between army/navy) instead of promoting one particular faction to win out over the others. In a larger sense this would also tie player actions more intricately into the world they inhabit instead of singlemindedly amassing simoleons, move beyond the simplistic pinball notion of high scores in this case a single "cohesion" score.

 

Better yet, allow these creative factions to grow and dwindle in accordance with their relevance to the natural phenomena as understood by society at large, just as resource exploitation already changes along a campaign's progress. So the spacers' guild would balloon in power after the discovery of warp speeds, continue feeding progress as hyperlanes remain relevant but gradually lessen in both economic and intellectual productivity as hyperlanes are supplanted by stargates; ditto for phlogiston theory feeding academic development and dying out with more modern chemistry and physics. New art forms would take advantage of and promote new developments. Even antiquated factions could benefit from new bursts of activity whenever a new one springs up for their interaction, with occasional chances to feed a massive upheaval - for instance the newly-invented archaeology faction reviving a languishing tradition in sculpture/painting and spiraling into an interest in geometric proportion and astral motion.

Let's admit what I'm asking for here is basically Scanners Live in Vain - The TBS.

While Cordwainer Smith played his plot as a personal/spy drama, the very weirdness of the haberman process, were it an everyday reality, can easily be imagined to spiral out to medical, artistic, humanitarian and labor movements, not by decree of God-Emperor Jeff Bezos, but by the experience of seeing one's neighbour manually crank up his nephrons. Redefine social advancement not as handed down by superior social rank, but built up by unpredictable superior minds scattered among the populace.

 

Now, what grand finale you work into such a campaign is up to you, but the sake of ironic counterpoint I suggest a singularity.

___________________________________________________________________

 

 

P.S.: EU4's politics are involved enough to perhaps address my complaint here, but I have yet to play an involved/extensive enough run of EU4 to confirm it.

Alien Sandscape

I can't help but think there's a SF story in this one.

It's Lake Michigan, if you're wondering

Biomes separated by shade and light exposure? Of course if you want to scale it up to planetary size you'd have to dream up some physics to support those overhangs. Low grav planet probably. Does igneous stone shear off more or less than sedimentary? Maybe a Hadean low-grav planet? But then you'd also have to justify that large-scale erosion. Acid flows? And what should I translate the ice/sand mix into? Guess ice can stay ice. Ice ice babies? Ice babies vs. cave babies at war? At first contact? Might play nicely into the dark/light contrast. Maybe the sheltered zones should be warmer than the icy surface? Oooooh, I like that: hot Archean low-grav planet bleeding heat into space, Hadean flows freshly eroded, sparse ecosystems, fudge the selective pressures a bit for multicellular life (sulfur atmosphere instead of oxygen? may be an unnecessary stretch metabolically) heat comes from below, cold light vs. warm cozy darkness, maybe cold intellectual light vs. warm cozy primitivist darkness, should humans come in? Representing what? Juxtaposed to what? Maybe preternaturally fast invaders due to more efficient oxygen metabolism? And strong due to Earth grav being stronger?

I'm sorry, when did I start brainstorming?

Well, whatever comes of this, it can't turn out worse than Deliver.

Crossroads of Flesh

"Is that squire on the fire?"

"Mercy no, sir, look closer, you'll notice it's grocer"

"Looks thicker, more like vicar"

"No, it has to be grocer - it's green"

 

A Little Priest (Sweeney Todd)

 

(or, alternately, try The Cathedral of Flesh's theme; Redemption, for all its flaws, featured some of the most inspired game music ever recorded)

 

 

I speculated at one point on how a fantasy RPG inkeeper game should play, and marked a few random titles I found on that theme. Two of those, Travellers Rest and Fortune's Tavern, look like RPGMaker fare, and I'd rather not pay good money for freakin' chibis. Tavern Keeper might've vaporized? I eventually caved in and gave Crossroads Inn a try just to see the concept in execution. It's not very executive.

 

Not pictured: lists upon lists of redundant recipes.

Opting for campaign mode first, I quit two minutes into the opening cinematic when the narration headed for some manner of painfully trite chosen one / secret orphaned prince setup. Why? When for once you're working with a theme so apt to show a commoner's rise to greatness in the absence of cosmic favor... WHY?!? why why cling to the same perfunctory star-crossrailroaded specialness as 95% of fantasy fiction?!

Anyway, swapping to the more freeform game mode, I was immediately struck by how unfinished Crossroads Inn looks even four years and a couple of DLCs after release, and even by the standards of my generally low-budget RPG/Strategy collection.

why one box but not the other...?

If you've played games with a managerial side you'll be familiar with the resource stockpiling/recombination paired with Sims-inspired customer/employee mood management, but here both sides appear truncated from their design aspirations, with features like employee mood/loyalty or resource decay stripped of their effects to save balancing. I eventually quit due to the time-honored algorithmic foible of pathfinding (and the unrestricted drag-drop tool you're given to move NPCs should tell you just how often they get stuck) but the depths of Crossroads Inn's amateurishness show in rando' crap like lack of feedback on whether your orders are queued, neglecting to word-wrap a text box, or autosave never replacing old saves, accumulating hundreds of daily files.

To compensate for all these lacks, its developers leaned hard on expanding your trade network on the overland map. At some point they seem to have decided to give up on actual gameplay and just copypasta the nearest cookbook, making you gradually unlock dozens, scores and hundreds of recipes for which to stockpile more and more redundant ingredients. Ditto for furniture. While some such breadth in a core feature is expected (see Dwarf Fortress' livestock) even the fifteen types of customers don't justify the sheer repetition of yet another omelette and yet another soup. Even the developers themselves obviously had no idea what to do with them all. "It's a chair, don't know what more to tell you" sounds cute the first time. Not so much the fiftieth.

 

Sinking all their work-hours into a heavily scripted campaign instead of addressing basic functionality makes Crossroads Inn overpriced even at 80% off.

But enough about its failures, let's segue to what was never attempted. Despite a smatter of fantasy gimmicks like griffin eggs and alchemy, the game's creators opted for more of a vaguely Dumas-flavored inn of intrigue, never quite meshing with the managerial simulation precept and casting the choice of setting in doubt. In my original post linked at the start I'd said "Fantasy tavern management shouldn't be about cheerfully serving drinks. Your struggle to stay in business should center on your innkeeper's role as middle-man to the forces out to destroy the world, a conniving tool and accessory, a racketeer, a money-launderer, an accomplice, an enabler to the universe's gutterspawn and all the grandstanding, self-righteous loose cannons who stand in soi-disant opposition to "evil" forces." And while I stand by playing up the destructive nature of adventurers and fantasy inns' role as drama magnets, there might be a useful link here to my declaration that I wanna be a Tzimisce.

Why not pair the fleshcrafting of a villainous lair with a greater context for acquiring more flesh to craft? Fantasy races tend to be carnivorous anyway, and if a poor wing-sore griffin on above the road would pay good money for a haunch of hobbit... and hobbit-hide makes such lovely upholstery... well, who are you to deny it in here? In that context, the inn itself would be... bait.

 

Crossroads Inn's obsession with gathering recipes from the three corners of the world got me thinking I'm also gathering connoisseurs from said corners, and it's a damn shame to let that culinary variety go to waste. By all means advertise horse steaks to lure in all those Dothraki nomads, to lure in those independently wealthy dragons with a taste for Dothraki. And what giant doesn't love a good Jack'n'beans? Maybe stock up on honeydew for a fairy brunch, and some fairy popsicles for the orc table's dessert tray? Why not? You'll keep players' attention more readily by serving cousins than cuisine.

And who better to put the... leftovers... to good use than a tzimisce inkeeper, faultlessly polite and mannered and always on the lookout for more art supplies? As the inn prospers aboveground, so does its hidden counterpart below, sinew by sclera.

Look, not to get too lycanthropic here, but parental watchdog groups are gonna keep bitching about video games' corrupting influence anyway. Give 'em something to cry about. Beats counting the pixelated mugs of lager any day.

Fantasy Evolved

Continuing where I left off, to better account for evolution in fantasy worlds, the most important step is to switch from top-down to bottom-up thinking. Sounds easy until you remember you're thinking of art, lit or marketing majors (or worse, video game designers) none of which are big on logic or have learned any science since tenth grade, and all of which probably have a massive god complex when it comes to finessing their babies into the exact perfect artistic (and profitable) vision that came to them last St. Andrews' day in a dream while on the toilet at a luxury expositional expo. This in fact makes fantasy storytelling particularly recalcitrant, playing god in a setting with actual gods, as "so the prophecy foretold!" melds perfectly with "this half-assed backstory sounded hella dramatic in my plot outline." It's not like the internet isn't peppered with such rants already, but if you're wondering why anyone would even bother with such speculation, I'll get to that at the end.

 

Remember: fantasy is a top-down system where the rules are handed down by magical beings, while SF is a bottom-up construction upon consistent (if imaginary) physical laws. SF is evolution; F creationism.

However...

I would be curious to see more settings (and to me, fantasy mostly means game settings) bucking that trend, or at the very least doing a better job of worldbuilding than slapping random species onto a random landscape like pizza toppings. Besides, I already promised a post on fantasy evolution earlier this year when complaining about Lord of the Rings Online idiotically drafting dwarf women into front line combat in the name of female superiority and in defiance of Tolkien's well-reasoned dwarven hyperprotectiveness toward their minimally fertile 1/3 female population. Given I already touched on dimorphism (that's what she said) back in 2017, I'll shelve sexual selection for some future date and widen the scope to general morphology/behavior.

 

Let's start with some basics:

Evolution, fundamentally, can be expressed tautologically: what lasts, lasts. (The devil's in the details.) Also, since the cell/body/colony does not get copied over via reproduction, it's genomes, genes or whatever gets reproduced generation by generation out-lasting each other by expressing more favorable proteins/cells/bodies/behaviors. Not a huge issue in works of fiction, until writers forget their creations would need to reproduce in order to continue existing as species or societies - see the dwarf example above. It also means that anything which interferes with reproduction is severely, severely, SEVERELY maladaptive, something to think about when you're designing all those noble, monkish space-elves who do nothing but write poetry and practice their katas all millennium long, but somehow manage to coexist with pod-people and sapient fungi. It doesn't take a war to get over-run and starved out by the numerically superior.

 

Also, something doesn't need DNA to evolve. If your robots or nature spirits make copies of themselves and each has minute differences in their programming/soul/WhateverMakesItTick then those which reproduce more successfully will compose more of the next generations, and so on until they replace the original stock. Saberhagen's Berserkers would long have replaced themselves with a version that doesn't expend resources and endanger itself by hunting down all life in the universe.

 

Aside from that, the general pattern is:

1) shit happens - random mutations in germ line (remember, if it's not passed down, it doesn't count)

2) shit gets cleaned up - natural selection (less adaptive traits reproduce less successfully and so do their bearers) (this is the part creationists like to ignore when scoffing at the idea of random chance producing complexity.)

Remember that even if a body part is not directly harmful or beneficial, it still imposes an energy (nutritional) cost on the organism growing and maintaining it. So please stop sticking all those redundant crests, spikes, limbs and feathers onto your fantasy races! Art majors, THIS MEANS YOU! ... "Dire" badger my dire ass. Remember that mutations pile on very gradually into recognizable features so if you want something to suddenly sprout wings in a single generation, you'll have to resort to an explicit "it's magic" dodge. (The mariner's gills in Waterworld were a real groaner.) Remember also that selection works in the present. Plants don't randomly start producing gigantic colorful flowers just in case bees might appear in ten million years. Exception: exaptation, where a feature you already have acquires a second use, like insulating feathers also aiding flight.

Selection is anything but random. The environment directly impacts which related organisms reproduce more successfully, and therefore how the overall population will look in a hundred or thousand generations. Which is actually good news for writers, because you get to start with a map! And you love maps, don't you, you Tolkien wannabe ha- aherhm, where was I... maps. You probably have a vague map in mind already. You know you want your heroic band of adventurers to cross some snowy mountains and some rivers, exactly one swamp and definitely an erupting volcano or seven along the way. You're already picturing both the boundless creaking taiga and the chokingly dense multicolored vines overwrapping the rainforest. Cool. Plate tectonics and erosion lie beyond my current scope, except to note it's one aspect Tolkien tended to be weak on, slapping mountain ranges perpendicular to each other and rivers flowing every which direction.

Figure out your landscape first, then start deciding where your heroes will encounter various creatures based on a few general rules of adaptation, starting with temperature gradients. (I won't bother citing them one by one, but I should note Wikipedia features a nice list of biological rules)

- Cold environments favor warm-blooded creatures large enough to conserve heat. (Ice-snakes are weird.) Corollary: compact bodies conserve heat better, so cool it with the stilt-legged, bat-eared icewalkers. Even moose and reindeer are stockier than their tropical cousins.

- Reptiles are good at conserving water and require fewer nutrients, outcompeting mammals in hot deserts. Which is to say, there are other animals than camels in deserts. Look them up.

- "Amphibious" does not mean perfectly adapted to both environments. Keep in mind frog locomotion mainly gets them back in the water as fast as possible. Aquatics would have support and locomotion issues on land (see seals). Please, no prancing mermaids. Also, long flowing hair is NOT hydrodynamic.

- Cave dwellers might see better in dark but more likely favor other senses (see the famous blind cave _____) Goblins probably would not have amazing vision, and even if they're just nocturnal would likely be colorblind to increase light sensitivity (see bats.)

- Islands have a weird effect on body size, with large species getting smaller due to limited resources, and more often small species getting larger due to lack of predators. This would be an excellent way to work that cosmetic re-skin game designers love so much in a logical fashion... and one I never see used.

- Parasites tend to fit their host, both in size and intersecting life cycle. In fact, they closely co-evolve with their hosts over generations, to the point of strictly specializing (especially internal ones) in a few closely related species. Your heroes have nothing to fear from dragon tapeworms. This was one major plot hole in the original Alien movie, addressed in pathetically hamfisted fashion with Prometheus.

- Magnifiy that by orders of magnitude for anything which evolved in complete isolation (e.g. on different planets) and especially do not EVER talk about miraculously compatible alien genetics. DNA is not just a linear code, but produces and depends on a myriad scaffolds, chaperones, cofactors, regulators, markers and processes like tagging or splicing, not to mention the million convoluted signal cascades required for DNA to react to its extracellular environment, all of these developed in tandem between the existing template and iterative selective pressure over literally billions of generations. The odds of something which has never encountered either the same template or the same pressures spontaneously producing hybrid offspring are, statistically, nil! Nil squared! Nil to the tenth! Just... don't! If you want half-alien babies, you'd end up needing to genetically engineer some hopelessly wasteful monstrosity operating on two separate metabolisms at once (and they'd probably be sterile and poisoned by BOTH parents' native environments) to the point any intelligent species would give it up and opt for robots. Golems. Whatever. Sorry, didn't mean to get S all up in your F.

That brings us to the issue of divergent and convergent evolution.

Divergence usually results from separation. Half your elves go over the sea, dark hair randomly predominates in one population, light in the other. One side's taller, one side has longer pianist fingers. Cool, whatever. It can also result from specialization (as Larry Niven so memorably tried to portray in Ringworld) and this is where your handy-dandy map comes in. Do you have populations of elves living in plains/mountains/forests for tens of thousands of years before developing civilization? Give the plainsrunners long loping legs to cover long distances, and the tree-climbers shorter legs with prehensile toes, and the mountain-climbers partially hardened, hooflike foot soles and oversized lung capacity. Chesty elves. Hell, why not? We've tried every other kind.

Convergence generally results from different species adapting to the same necessity, and for fictional purposes largely concerns morphology. Limb shape is a famous example, as each medium strongly favors one or two modes of locomotion, so that even across hundreds of millions of years and distantly related clades, runners, swimmers and soarers will gradually develop legs, fins and wings independently of each other. What does this mean for fantasies set in alien landscapes? Well, if you create an environment of shattered floating islands over a bottomless void, everything from bugs to buffalo would need some way to cross those gaps, be it by flying, gliding, steering the islands, or clinging parasitically to flyers, shooting spores to the wind or ballistic seeds. If you set your adventure among the vertical trunk and branches of a world tree, then climbing adaptations (prehensile tails, low centers of gravity, gripping pads and claws) would predominate as would ways of taking advantage of the world-tree's sap, a world of squirrels, geckos, aphids and orchids.

Above all, remember everything must somehow acquire the energy and chemicals it needs to carry out its metabolic processes. Case-in-point: Herbert's sandworms. Leaving aside the question of whether their burrowing friction would glass the sand around them, no way in hell would they ever filter enough food from desert sand at their size to fuel such an energy-intensive method of travel, in direct contrast to their likely inspiration, baleen whales, which make use of buoyancy and currents. Even if it were possible, they'd get out-competed for food by smaller, more efficient burrowers. If you want a big impressive beast in your story (like dragons) first ask yourself: what does it eat? And does something else eat that better? Moby Dick ate giant squid... did Smaug eat giant flying squid at altitudes other flyers can't reach? This also goes for armies, with the classic question of how exactly the utterly barren Land o' Murder's provisioning all those tens to hundreds of thousands of indigenous orcs. How many Mordors' worth of farmland would it take to supply one Mordor's worth of orcs and trolls?

This brings us to behavior.

Try orcs. They live in close, overpopulated, hypersocial bands but act like Tasmanian devils or other infamously solitary, hyperaggressive beasts. They're basically locusts in a perpetual state of swarming, except swarming behavior is better interpreted as a terminal investment strategy, where an organism responds to drought, overpopulation, other scarcity or morbidity by investing its energy reserves in a massive reproductive / dispersal gamble. Inherently untenable, and functional only as such. Orc-like fantasy/SF races would work better if the author more carefully described a population boom/bust cycle and paid closer attention to the triggers which turn mundane pests into plagues. Note this carries far more plot-driving potential than the basic description of orc-types as "mean and many." To some degree, the idea that they coalesce as armies and pose major threats only under Bolg or Sauron-like leadership approaches this, but how much better would it get by tying it all together with physical and hormonal changes?

In a greater sense, while the r/K distinction is less distinct than once thought, it still pays to think of your fantasy races in terms of their life histories relative to each other. Long-lived, slow-growing, slow-breeding elves which take a thousand years to repopulate would need stable environments, something Tolkien rather elegantly incorporated into those secretive, defensible elvish enclaves like Rivendell. Just randomly scattering around unexplored woods in vulnerable bands would open them up to disaster. Note, great apes are classic K-strategists, and humanoids would not spread easily through that standard-issue dramatic fantasy landscape constantly erupting with volcanoes and getting wiped out by manageddons and genocided by evil wizards at random intervals. You need to give your humanoids some breathing room for them to form believable societies.

Conversely, rapidly reproducing, short-lived, expansive species replenish their populations better after disaster but gradually fall prey to more careful, resilient competitors during stable periods. Klingons would probably live to thirty and have fifteen children each to offset their idiotic hyperaggressiveness.

 

Keep in mind environment shapes both biology and culture. Creatures adapted to constant Under-dark or the deep ocean, even if they can see, would probably not wax poetic about light/dark dichotomies like those of us subjected to circadian cycles; nor would they winter their discontent when they've never seen the passing of the seasons. Burrowing creatures would not have a "high" king like we arboreal descendants.

If you've had the patience to read this far, you might be growing a tad exasperated at my making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it's freakin' fantasy, dude! It's like, magic! Unsure how something works? It's magic! A wizard did it!

Therein lies the problem. Magic is magical by contrast to the mundane. Make it mundane and kill its appeal. Don't gratuitously fabricate unicorn-fart-powered lightbulbs where "a candle" would fit your narrative purpose just as well. Just as you should do your homework for the fields of basic mechanics or sanitation so you don't need to resort to wheelbarrows or outhouses powered by pixie-dust, get some basic nature documentary understanding of biological principles so you don't need to magically explain why your rainforest's full of polar bears.

 

One common surprise expressed by younger audiences when finally getting around to reading Tolkien, the precursor of D&D or WoW, is just how little magic actually plays into his plot twists. The stories which created high fantasy are in fact low fantasy. Yeah, and that's why Middle-Earth is still the champ. Its author did his homework, and didn't resort to gratuitous, amateurish overstatement where a mere understanding of the world would fit more naturally. When Gandalf casts a "light" cantrip or Samwise tells a rope to un-knot itself, it actually comes across as magical!

I leave you with one last question to be addressed in the future: how would magic itself affect evolution?

Gaming Imperfect

"But please, you know you're just like me

Next time, I promise we'll be - perfect"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect

 

 

If you've ever played an MMO (or even some single-player open world games) you've run across the mindless beachcombing vulgarly touted as exploration achievements. In theory "exploration" should mean taking stock of your surroundings, finding paths, shortcuts and secretive nooks and crannies or alternately scenic or significant landmarks.

 

Worse: it's past another marker, so you probably stopped searching the area.

 

In game designer jargon though, "exploration" means tagging indistinguishable patches of dirt with the idea that exactly 3.91km outside of town on the highway counts as exploring that road - but not 3.90 or 3.92! City of Heroes ranked the worst offender for its coin-sized markers you literally had to step on, because finding lost pennies on a sidewalk is the equivalent of discovering Vinland. Compounding the problem, you must usually find absolutely every last marker to complete the achievement. Obviously Marco Polo didn't truly visit China because he never hit madam Wang's noodle steamery on 35th street. Without that, the whole trip's void.

 

We could comb every step of every map just fine when Doom consisted of twenty pharmacy-sized levels of featureless corridors with predetermined demon spawns for your shotgunning pleasure. But in the era of hundred-square-kilometer virtual worlds, asking players to find the exact ten spots where your dog shit last week might as well come with HUD markers, because nobody bothers doing that without cheating off a wiki. The only way to keep such challenges playable without rendering locations too obvious is to stop demanding full completion, which would also address another issue of the absolute faceless lack of player identity in modern games. It might be quaint to compare notes with someone else and find the 10/13 spots I found to complete an achievement aren't the same 10/13 he did, that he likes beaches while I prefer hills, and neither of us thought to crawl up a troll's ass to find the exploration marker it swallowed.

 

But this is just a small manifestation of a larger, older issue. Mammalian play is supposed to be explorative, and as a heavily neotenized species we enjoy that feeling of rifling through grandma's kitchen cabinets for the sheer hell of it. For anyone with more brains than a hamster, it stops being fun when grandma just orders you to take out exactly five forks from the second drawer on the right. Playing games should be an inherently creative endeavor, an intersection of your personal style with novel challenges, not fucking cookie-cutter builds, "meta" team comps, enforced min-maxed optimization and completionism!

 

I've probably logged hundreds of hours in RimWorld without ever bothering to pursue the supposed win condition of escaping the planet. I'd rather see how cyborg cannibals fare against giant ants. My current gimmick is technophilic primitive nudists in the taiga. One colony some time ago started with Labrador retriever pets. Properly trained they made passable if unimpressive combatants, but the economic angle proved more interesting.

 

Their larger litters give them twice the population growth of mightier beasts like cougars, but their nutritional requirements soon had me considering sterilizing them all to stem the voraciously adorable beige tide. Turns out they sell well though. Lacking any other tradable commodities (sculptures, couture, beer) during the early, dirt-farming years of my colony's development, my colonists' lives began revolving around Labrador breeding to such an extent even when they did get around to sculpting, it was all about the damn mutts. I organized their schedules around properly timing trade caravans to rid myself of each new sackfull of puppies before they eat me out of house and home. Thus planet <whatsitsname> acquired its first dedicated puppy mill.

Am I winning at RimWorld?

Maybe not officially, but anything with that many puppies sure feels like a win.

The stars can wait. Why would I ever abandon puppy-farming?

 

Albeit hardly games' biggest problem at the moment (that would be microtransactions) the fixed idea of "winning" by completing the game is holding back more promising genres, and it's rooted in the industry's beginnings. The early success stories like Space Invaders or Frogger were by necessity limited in their interactivity. Getting the high score was a worthy endeavor in a context which never stretched beyond strafe/shoot/strafe/shoot anyway - but we have more options now.

Take a Stellaris playthrough in which I outlawed robots. Normally, the machine uprising event (if you research sentient AI but don't give them their rights) is a mid-game challenge, with individual fleet strengths on the order of tens of thousands. Mid-game came and went, late game saw me polishing off some of my more threatening or profitable neighbours... one of which had AI-driven ships... which tech I inadvertently acquired from battlefield salvage. I was nonplussed when the unprompted machine uprising warning signs began to pop up here and there, decided it must just be a little glitch... and another one... and OH, SHIIIIIIT !

Turns out the event scales.

When the robot mafia spawned from my galactic frontrunner, late-game empire, it spawned with individual fleets of 1.5 million and more in strength, for a total of ~15mil, when my combined fleet strength, matching the whole rest of the galaxy put together, could barely take on one at a time. And I did take on one at a time, traded for alloys, retreated and regrouped at citadels, and eventually managed to recover thanks to the skirmish/attrition-obsessed AI never massing against me, wasting its superfluous strength on undefended systems.

That should count as a win right there.

A single one of those fleets would trounce the entire Contingency which spawns as the official end-game artificial intelligence crisis faction. Anything after the terminator swarm stretching across whole systems can't but come across as a firecracker echoing a nuke. After surviving the Robot Mafia, telling me I won by outscoring the Lokken Mechanists in energy credits or whatever comes across as an insult... butchoo gotta beat the game, right?

To their credit, Paradox have started experimenting with more nonstandard endgame scenarios like blowing up the galaxy for the win. Such alternate victory conditions (the classic example being Civilization's spaceship launch) are currently lacking in the recent TBS which started this whole train of thought, Old World.

In one recent playthrough, I found myself putting quite a bit of effort into breeding Labrador retrievers... errr, I mean, inter-breeding with the Vandals, securing an alliance and wedding new heirs into the tribe. But, given Old World's emphasis on dynasties as principal selling point over Civilization and its copycats, I'm a bit disappointed at the absence of some kind of victory condition relating to inheritance. Y'know what? Scrap the "victory" part. Winning by completing achievements is decent, but give me more ways to deliberately finish the game without just outscoring everyone, maybe legitimize the Vandals by my imperial authority and parentage, install my mostly-Vandal grandson Abdosir (isn't he cute?) as their god-king, turn them into a divinely sanctioned rampaging horde and set them loose upon an unsuspecting Fertile Crescent, ending civilization as we know it. Cue credits. You don't win. You don't lose. But you played it your way to the bitter end.

This is MY sandstorm.

I criticized plenty about Shadowrun: Dragonfall after my playthrough, but applauded its setting, characters and especially its stellar reinterpretation of a "bad" ending as simply your character's choices taken to their logical conclusions, without beating you over the head with a bunch of shallow moralistic posturing about how you should've played the hero. And, just as city simulators have a lot to teach other genres about decentralizing the action, we should remember grand strategy is just a way of saying roleplaying on a civilization scale. Not every campaign should be measured against an arbitrary perfect win, ticking all checkboxes on the achievement list, chasing down every last monster in every last zone for 100% completion, marrying the prince for a golden ending. Instead of advancing toward ruling the world, merge the ideas of strategy tech/culture/military victories with RPGs' "where are they now" end-game slideshows. A little good. A little bad. So it goes.

On the flip-side, cRPGs themselves almost invariably get easier as you advance, sometimes to the point you can one-shot the final boss. Justified, to a large extent, because a late-game unwinnable state would cheat the player of a lot more invested time than getting eaten by the first giant spider in the prologue. This can be addressed by implementing more "bad" endings without treating them as losses, without propping up a single "golden ending" as the goal of the entire campaign. Yes, building the Civilization spaceship means you'll never rule the Earth. So what? Screw you guys, I'm going home... to Alpha Centauri. Start legitimizing pyrrhic victories, desperate last stands and glorious resistance movements instead of merely ranks on a podium and "second place is another word for loser."

Sure, games have rules and goals, otherwise they disintegrate. If you want complete creative freedom, buy some art supplies and paint your way to victory, compose some music, scribble disjointed short stories and post them to your blog, whatever. You don't need fifty space marines and a gluon gun for that. But there must be a middle ground between everything and nothing allowing for interactivity in an interactive medium instead of just practicing Mario's jumps. Whether it's imposing a victory condition on a sandbox, 100% achievement completion, golden endings, nominal victories dwarfed by preceding gameplay, anticlimactic but mandatory final boss fights, we have got to distance ourselves more from the idea of perfect scores, first place or complete domination as the only goals worth pursuing.

And if you don't see any social commentary in that yet, I'll just leave you to it.