Since the beginning of the year, I've managed to post every 2.5 days according to my usual schedule, alternating two primary games, every fifth post could be anything. But I've been away for the last two weeks, and while I did manage to get most of those two weeks pre-scheduled, it's all fallen apart here at the end. My flight home from New Orleans was a mess--I ended up having to drive from New York to Bangor--and I've been behind the curve ever since.
I went combing through my drafts to see if there was anything I could whip together. (Spoiler: I didn't find anything, and I ended up writing this entry on drafts.) Here’s what I have, in roughly descending order of recency:
- One paragraph on Syndicate.
- One paragraph on Enchantasy.
- Four paragraphs on Betrayal at Krondor. I stopped when I decided to read the books first.
- About 1,600 words on Wizardry: Curse of the Ancient Emperor for the Game Boy. I began playing it back in April when I wanted a Wizardry fix. I've gotten through three levels, but I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it.
- A few paragraphs on Monster Combat (1980). I can't remember why I stopped writing about that one. Was it ever on my list?
- A paragraph on Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace (1989). It came up on a random roll earlier this year, but I must have gotten distracted by something else.
- Part of an entry titled "The Most Criminal RPG." This was going to be a thought experiment about what game allows the player to commit the highest number of crimes as defined by the FBI's NIBRS offense categorization system. I do want to finish this someday.
Ha. Back in November, I started writing an entry called "The Halfway Point" in which I was going to announce a change to how I approach the master list. I guess I thought better of it. My justification of the title is interesting:
For a while, I've been regarding this year, and the impending 500th game, as the rough "halfway point" of my blog. In my mind, my list has always had about 1000 games; 1993 is about the halfway mark between the first year of CRPGs (1975) and the year I started the blog (2010); and if I keep blogging for exactly as much time as I've already blogged, I will wrap up at just about exactly when I turn 65 years old. There are a lot of holes to poke in this math--RPGs might have technically started in 1975 but weren't widely available until the 1980s; my list has closer to 2,000 entries these days; by the time I reach 2010, there will be another quarter-century of RPGs ahead of me, etc.--but I still can't shake the feeling.
In May 2023, I got pretty far into a post called "character tendencies" in which I wanted to start a discussion about the "default" character that we tend to play. I don't even remember writing this. I had identified eight characteristics that I see in the default character, including:
7. He hates archers. Cowards, hiding in the bushes and sniping away with their little bows instead of facing him man-to-man. If he has the opportunity, he attacks them first.
I almost whipped that one into shape for posting, but I didn't want to publish it with no graphics, and graphics always take the longest part of any entry. Continuing on:
- A December 2022 entry called "Axe" in which I went on about my new wood stove and how much I liked chopping wood for it. I worked most of the material into this Bloodstone entry, more than a year later.
- "Game 470: Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete." That didn't turn out to be Game 470, and I subsequently deleted Minotaur from my list entirely. I think that whatever I was using as a source no longer defined it as an RPG.
- "Game 462: Runestone (1985)." No idea.
- "Game XX: Phantasy Star (1987)." I was apparently prepared at some point to give a certain subset of readers what they wanted. I must have thought better of it.
I got nearly 2,000 words into "Game XX: Lamia (1987)." Most of those 2000 words are taken up by analyzing the game's opening screens and the chronology of UFO sightings that they offer. Representative sample:
1948.1 CAPTAIN THOMAS MONTEL OF THE U.S. AIRFORCE ENCOUNTERED A U.F.O. AND AFTER CHASING IT WITH HIS F51, HE CRASHED AND DIED BY UNKNOWN ORIGIN.It was Captain Thomas F. Mantell, and he was with the Kentucky Air National Guard, and the reason for his crash and death is fairly well known, but otherwise, yeah. Some Kentucky Highway Patrol officers noticed a big round object in the sky and called over to Fort Knox. They already had a squad of F-51D Mustangs in the air, and they were ordered to check it out. They confirmed the object above them, but it was too high to safely approach without oxygen. Mantell insisted on going after it anyway, blacked out, went into a spiral, and crashed. Most skeptics today think they saw a Skyhook weather balloon.
I don't see any sign that I actually started playing the game. I'll have to get back to that one.
- A December 2021 entry in which I tried to analyze games' subtitles. Like, if the subtitle is longer than the main title, does it say anything about the game's quality? Why do we know some games more by their subtitles than their main titles? I probably stopped because it was boring as hell.
- "Shadows of Darkness: So You Don't Want to Be a Hero." This was going to cover the thief character, but I ran out of steam with the game. Hey--perfect example of what I was talking about with subtitles!
- The next entry in my Pool of Radiance replay that I abandoned. Honestly, when I started that series, I thought there would be more fun crossover facts between the CRPG and the module. There really weren't.
- "A CRPG Addict Goes Tabletop, Part 1: The Origins." Oh, I had an epic series planned back in 2021. I obtained all the original D&D books (including Chainmail) and was going to write about them in Part 1, then write about an actual tabletop session that I had lined up with a professional dungeon master. But the professional DM decided he didn't like me for political reasons and canceled the session. I've always meant to try again with someone saner.
- "Make Me Another." I didn't recognize that one. It wasn't about alcohol--it was about remakes. I was going to set down some Rules (e.g., "Improved graphics and sound are never a good reason to remake a game"). I must have lost interest.
- Two separate entries, four years apart and apparently completely ignorant of each other, about different magic systems in CRPGs.
- "America's Second-Greatest Gift: Character Development in RPGs, Part 1." My notes don't indicate what Part 2 was going to consist of, why I chose that master title, or what I thought America's first-greatest gift was. Oh--probably jazz.
- "Legends of Valour: Won!" No, it's not this entry; it's an earlier draft with different text. This actually happens a lot: I begin writing about a game and then later forget that I've already started an entry.
- "Revisiting: The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight." I had plans going all the way back to 2020, apparently.
- "Game 384: Phalsberg (1986)." There's another one. I started that entry on 7 October 2020 but later published a different first entry in February 2022. Curse the duplication of effort!
- "Enchantasy: Quest for the Eternal Grimoire (1993)." Son of a bitch. I got 1,000 words into this back in 2017.
- "An Avatar talks politics." Oh, yeah. That would have been a good idea.
- A long tribute to Roger Ebert and how he had influenced my own reviews and writing. I started it just after he died in 2013 but failed to finish it while the moment was ripe.
- Entries started and abandoned for Destiny (1985), The Koshan Conspiracy (1992), Quest for Power (1981), Shadowkeep 1: The Search (1993), Super Tritorn (1986), Dragons Shard (1992), Sea Rogue (1992), Fountain of the Gods (1988), Enchantasy (1993), The Dark Wars (1991), Journey into Darkness (1986), Bronze Dragon (1985), and others. For some of these, I later posted real entries. Some I decided weren't RPGs and deleted them from the list. Some I was under no obligation to play in the first place. Some--who knows.
- "Bottoms Up!" A very old draft going all the way back to 2011 in which I waxed about the qualities of a gimlet and the difficulties involved in choosing your "default drink." Oh, and it looks like I also re-started an entry on the subject in 2015, titled, "My Limey, Limey Love" (bonus points to anyone who knows what song I was riffing on there). I have to level with you: there was a time in which I may have had a slight alcohol problem. Getting off the road all the time really helped with that.
- "Today's Graphics." This April 2014 draft was apparently inspired by a Reddit post in which someone asked what games should be remade with "today's graphics." The top-voted responses were from only a few years prior, which of course led me on a rant about how there was nothing wrong with the graphics of Morrowind (2002) in 2014. Of course, if someone posted the same question today, the top responses would probably be games like Skyrim and Fallout 4.
- "Andrew and Me." Ah, the article I was planning to write about Andrew Schultz, King of the Walkthrough. That was all the way back in 2013. He responded to a bunch of interview questions, too. I feel like a dick for never publishing anything.
There are more, but--as you may remember--the whole reason I'm writing this ridiculous entry is that I'm pressed for time. So I'll leave you with a quote from a 2018 draft that is titled simply "Screw." I think I make a good point here even though I no longer remember why I was trying to make it:
A friend comes up to you and does the old spot-on-the-tie trick. You both get a chuckle. A stranger does it on the street, and you want to punch him. This is because you know what everyone instinctively knows: you have to earn the right to screw with people. You don't get to do it right at the outset. Andy Kaufman had to pay his dues on the circuit, and Saturday Night Live, and Taxi, before he could expect people to pay him for just being crazy. Joaquin Phoenix had to get successful at regular acting before he could make I'm Still Here. Whether he should have or not, John Romero could advertise an upcoming game by saying, "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." Imagine if a brand new developer tried that. And yet many of them, completely ignorant of the concept of "sweat equity," try to do exactly this. They want the world to reward their cleverness for composing "4'33"" without having to compose six regular albums first.
When I wrote that, I was in the middle of Sandor (1989) and Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. It's a probable 12-to-7 that I was ranting about David Bradley in some way, but I don't remember the specifics.
My sincerest apologies for this half-assed entry. I promise to return to the normal schedule on Friday with more on Enchantasy.
This was actually an interesting look at your process - it feels much more linear and methodical from this end of the screen so it’s eye-opening to see how it plays out on yours.
ReplyDeleteFWIW I know Andrew Schultz a bit from the interactive fiction scene; he’s a very nice guy so doubt he thinks you’re a jerk!
Thank you for this entry. Please, do not delete it later.
ReplyDeleteThis is a rare opportunity to get an insight on how your brain works or what kind of person you are, flaws and all.
I only respect you more after having read your stream of consciousness. Maybe, because I can see myself in those drafts, incomplete statements, articles and letters that I, like you, sometimes start, rarely finish and even more seldom actually send to their interned addressee (if that's even a word) or audience.
I sincerely am looking forward to your tribute to Ebert, as I can see the parallels that you draw. I also don't mind reading your Ode to Gimlet though that's a more personal matter.
I'll stop this entry here and leave it unfinished to echo yours.
I just wanted you to know that these detours outside of the main scope of your blog ARE interesting to some of your readers and allow tthem us to look behind the curtain into the kitchen of your mind and your life. It makes you human and relatable to us who also arguably are.
You should just call this "Cleaning House" and toss all that accumulated nonsense. Looking forward to more about Enchantasy - it's been a hidden gem.
ReplyDeleteThere are professional dungeon masters? I assume we're not talking about S&M here. Are they unionized?
When D&D 5 became big, and tons of new people wanted to try out the hobby, there was a lack of DMs compared to the players' numbers, so some people tried to make a carrier, or at last some money out of it, and became for-hire DMs. Covid brought the rise of online play which made it easier and more popular.
DeleteIt's entirely anecdotal, but I only heard bad things about professional DMs. But of course people tend to post their grievances online.
I’m not saying that he makes a full-time living doing it, but yes, he was going to charge me. It seemed a quicker way just to get it done.
DeleteSurely some of your regular readers are also DMs who run "old school" games? Maybe someone can slot you into an ongoing, online campaign for at least a few sessions.
DeleteI haven't played tabletop since the late 80s, but I remember it fondly and I follow an excellent blog called Grognardia that's firmly in the OSR sphere. Now that I think of it, yours and his are the only blogs I follow these days. I gave up on the idea of actually playing pen and paper around the time I also gave up trying to play online games with friends - I just don't have the time any more. I have toyed with the idea of running a game for my daughter and some of her friends. Since a good bit of my free time is devoted to the kids anyway, it'd be like killing two kobolds with one sling stone.
The rise of professional GM's really kicked off with the pandemic and VTT's (variant tabletops). If I didn't already have a job, family, in person campaign, blog, and podcast I would volunteer to run one for free for you.
DeleteI've got an online campaign that's been going for years, but I don't use D&D of any sort anymore.
DeleteProfessional GMs is something that sounds weird at first blush, but if you give it some more thought, it kinda makes sense that you'd have a lot of friend groups where they DON'T want the experience of everybody BUT the GM being a team together and this one guy being forced into an adversarial role and being unable to enjoy the experience in the same way they do.
DeleteGMming can be it's own kind of fun, but it can also be kind of lonely, depending on your group dynamic.
I agree. It makes complete sense to me. Above anything, you want a GM to be neutral, and it's hard to be neutral with your friends.
DeleteI guess it depends on the type of game you play, but I'd feel very uncomfortable with a stranger as GM. I find acting out a character a rather personal thing that I wouldn't do in front of everybody. I once played a round with friends of a friend and that already wasn't the best experience.
DeleteIn my opinion having friends who enjoy the GM role (and are good at it) is the ideal situation. They know what you like and expect from the game and vice versa. I think it would take a while to get to that level with a professional GM.
Well, that makes sense, too. I'm speaking entirely from ignorance in this thread. I just need to give it a try.
DeleteI've been DMing D&D for 30 years. I'd consider it an honour to have you as a player any time.
DeleteI think you could get fans like me to pay you to be a player in a game they DM...
If you're going to read the books for Betrayal at Krondor, then make sure to go all the way back to Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master because those books lay the foundation for the entire series. The books written between 1987 and 1998 are also solid. The Empire trilogy is decent, but then it sort of jumps the shark.
ReplyDeletePretty sure Chet said he was reading the first quartet (the two Magicians, Silverthron, and Darkness at Sethanon), which should be all that's relevant for the game -- I believe there's a cameo that you'd only recognize if you've read the Empire trilogy, but it's hardly plot-relevant.
Deleteare we sure we want to make Cher invest his time on reading four fantasy books, not precisely short, which counts for quite a long time, before he addresses a game that is already almost delayed? given that we are all adults with responsibilities and other hobbies and families and friends and time allocated to sleep?
DeleteChet. SwiftKey is my worst enemy.
DeleteI seriously doubt any of us are "making" Chet invest his time (in books or in anything else, really). He's perfectly capable of doing that himself!
DeleteMagician isn't nearly as horribly bloated as modern day fantasy and reads quickly. I read Magician back in the early 80s (it was published as a single volume and later split for the US paperback market) and enjoyed them. I've not read the last 15 or so books!
DeleteI’m almost done with the four books that precede the game. Having to drive from New York helped in that regard.
DeleteI mean I just reread the entire series (30+ books) in under 30 days, so it isn't the equivalent of reading Tolstoy or Dostoezsky
DeleteIn don't think this post is half-assed, thank you for an interesting insight into the "backstage" of your blog.
ReplyDeleteEchoing the same! Cool to see what you have been up to behind the scenes for the past decade and a half!
DeleteWell, thank you, still! Quite interesting to read. Some of it might could lead to something, maybe it's own series, Tangents, or something like that. After all, it's your blog.
ReplyDeleteI propose you put all the stubs in ChatGPT and ask him to make a coherent article out of it.
ReplyDeleteJoke aside, I don't think as far as cRPGs go, Syndicate [a game I otherwise love] needs more than one paragraph, which you can append at the end of the next article ("this thing is not a RPG so I am moving to the following game").. A while ago, before the BRIEFs, you were more likely to do this.
seems like a good opportunity to introduce the SuperBRIEF, when just Brief BRIEF isn't enough
DeleteI haven't played much Syndicate, but it's at least worth talking a bit about the backstory and "character" that you play.
DeleteInteresting to see "behind the scenes" process!
ReplyDeleteRegarding "today's graphics", I feel the games now age much more gracefully. Witcher 3 from 2015 still looks very good. Fallout 4 still looks... acceptable. They days of a title's graphics becoming "obsolete" within a couple of years are long gone.
I want to agree, but I wonder if that simply isn't a function of being older and thus having more tolerance. Every time a game comes out that to me has jaw-dropping graphics, I read an analysis from some overprivileged aesthete who has 10 arguments for why they "suck."
DeleteHere, perfect example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11m51b3/i_didnt_feel_like_red_dead_redemption_2s_world/
Note that this is a game that came out in 2018 that is being discussed in 2023, and commenters are using terms like "the technology of the time" unironically.
I mean...how much of that phenomenon (analyses talking about how modern games' graphics "suck") is perfectly explainable by them being outrage-bait?
DeleteThere are a *lot* of people who post on the internet—either for money or purely for attention—whose modus operandi is to find something to say that will anger enough people that they will flock to it to disagree.
Fair enough. It's almost easier to believe that than to believe someone looked at Red Dead Redemption 2 and honestly thought something negative about "textures."
DeleteAny game where you're expected to play it for tens or hundreds of hours (which RDR2 falls into easily) runs into an "overly critical" problem, because if you look at the same tree or dirt texture over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again it starts really standing out. So it looks "faker" to you than a game of similar or even worse level of detail that you don't wind up looking at so much.
DeleteThere's also an Uncanny Valley affect in modern graphics that affects some people really bad, where the graphics are so good that you start finding things like "not every bit of wood is unique" excessively jarring. When I turned raytracing (a fancy new lighting system that takes huge amounts of processing power) on in the newer Resident Evil games, I didn't notice much difference. Until, that is, I turned it back off and kept noticing that the shadows were much more artificial.
Note also that half of the stuff in that linked review were deliberate aesthetic choices rather than limitations. RDR2 does in fact have somewhat worse graphics than a lot of AAA games today and even from the time it was produced, because you have to make a tradeoff for huge worlds with large numbers of people and horses onscreen at once, but the effect is relatively minor.
I think it's less common than you'd think since some of the most popular titles are stuff like Fortnite and Among Us, which are hardly pushing graphics cards to the limit.
DeleteThat said, the uncanny valley tends to hit humans more than anything else, it can be weird that every tree is the same, but humans are what we notice most of all. If a human is nearly perfect, it's worse than if it wasn't, since high-res textures and body scans can still leave out a lot on the high end, worse since a lot of developers modify them after the fact in a lot of ways that make things worse.
One aspect of that I've found very interesting recently is the various "idle animations" that modern characters have: they tend to read as quite natural normally, but when I'm watching recordings of them back at 1.5x or 2x speed (which I do sometimes when watching LPs, or recently when I was helping with some research on one), they start to look surprisingly mechanical.
DeleteThis was very interesting actually. And generally, another thank you is in order for providing us with one of the best blogs out there.
ReplyDeleteOne benefit of seeing the drafts, unfinished works or backstage clutter of a creator is that seeing the imperfections can be encouraging to other creators because you get a more realistic benchmark. For example, being able to see how an artist corrected parts of his drawing with white-out. It makes things seem more achievable.
I appreciate the feedback. It got us through a few days, at least.
DeleteI think that for the followers of your blog (including myself, although I have a rule of not reading about games until I have to analyze them myself) this is a very interesting entry (and one that I can read without spoilers).
ReplyDeleteAs for Quest for Power and Monster Combat, I'm pretty sure they can't exactly be classified as RPGs, although I analyzed them anyway.
In the case of the first one, for some reason I felt the need to finish documenting all the Crystalware adventures (it wasn't difficult, since almost all of them use the same mold). I don't know, there is something about the company and its games, given the early period in which they published their multitude of creations, that give them an interesting and mysterious touch. I don't know how to describe it, but they always seem to hide more than what they really offer (although maybe it was just a form of false advertising).
Regarding Monster Combat, it is a game published as a code listing in 1980, of which you end up finding versions on almost every platform imaginable, and although it is not exactly an RPG, it is close enough to it (after all it is written at a time when it was not clear what an RPG should be like, if it had been created a couple of years later, it probably wouldn't have passed the filter) and it is so poorly documented that I decided it was worth doing.
Regarding playing with a professional DM, I hope you weren't planning on playing alone as a player. As a pencil-and-paper roleplayer in my youth, I think you wouldn't really experience what it's like to roleplay without a group to plan, collaborate with, and also discuss or even compete with (although playing solo would be much more like playing a CRPG). A game with a group of bloggers who love CRPGs as players comes to mind (I don't include myself, the lack of fluency with the language would be a problem), and I think it would be a complete success, each one telling their side of the story (another option would be a podcast, but I think the written format would be much more appropriate here).
So it turns out that I wrote about Quest for Power:
Deletehttps://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/03/game-360-quest-for-power-1981.html
I just don't remember it at all. For Monster Combat, I think my thought process was: "Why am I playing this, again? It's not tagged as an RPG in any database. The only reason I'm aware of it is that El Explorador played it, and even he said it really wasn't an RPG."
I wasn't going to play alone. Part of my fee was that the DM would organize a group of four others, two amateurs, two experienced people. He was going to have everyone handle character creation ahead of time so we didn't waste a lot of time with it online. It was a very specific deal, and there's a reason I was willing to pay for it. I'm willing to try again, maybe not with a "professional" this time, but it can't be a lot of screwing around.
In that case, I just hope that you have better luck next time you set up the game session, and that the rest of us can enjoy the results.
DeleteI recommend looking for someone with experience in D&D in your circle of friends, or at least among your acquaintances, it is much more comfortable than playing with strangers.
In my day I was a D&D DM in several different editions, and I even ran online games on a website in Spanish that was quite good for it:
https://www.comunidadumbria.com/
Of course, playing in person with several friends was much faster and more enjoyable, if you had time to meet up.
Now I couldn't dedicate the necessary time to it, and as I said the language would be a problem, but surely you will find someone closer and more experienced who can DM you without resorting to paid strangers.
I think when I first read your writeup of Quest for Power I missed the line "I hope the developer of this game, Marc Benioff, managed to recover." Ha.
DeleteThe thing is, if John Bell screwed him out of $500 when he was 17, that's probably worth, like, $6.4 billion today.
DeleteDid your view of the magic systems change at all between the two entries?
ReplyDeleteThe entries weren't really about my views so much as finding ways to easily categorize magic systems. We use a lot of shorthand for other aspects of CRPGs, like "isometric view" vs. "first-person view" or "turn-based combat" vs. "real-time combat." But magic systems have so many unique variables that they're hard to put into that kind of easy classification.
DeleteWhat's wrong with the usual vancian/mana/reagents triad? Sure, there are lots of hybrids, but it's not like there aren't hybrids in other categories, like the 3 perspectives of Amberstar or the various semi-realtime combat systems.
DeleteGuess I don't need to finish those entries, then.
DeleteThat was an honest question, not an objection.
DeleteI mean there's the magic-as-inventory system of the early Ultima's, for instance, the runic magic of later Ultima's and Legend (although I'd hardly consider them the same system given how much they vary in specifics), the "slot" system used by Wizardry and more recent D&D editions. I think the bigger point is that there are so many other variables that you can't look at two games and say "they both use the mana system" and have any faith that they're even remotely similar.
DeleteI wrote about some of these issues here:
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/06/ultima-iv-and-magic.html
I think my intent was to turn those musings into a longer entry.
Even within "mana-based" magic systems there is huge variance, Dungeon Master's real-time glyph based interface vs. Phantasie's turn-based spell name system feel very different for instance.
DeleteYou can say something similar about combat though - like, both Wizardry and Fallout have turn-based combat, but literally everything else about their combat systems is different.
DeletePersonally, I would just consider two axes at play in both cases: with combat, you have a turn-based to real-time axis and a blobber to tactical grid axis. And with magic it's the resource you use to cast spells axis and the way you form spells axis (pick from a fixed list, chain runes/gestures/whatever, create your own). So Legend and UUW are similar in the way spells are formed (although Legend is more flexible), but differ in the way they are cast (mana vs. reagents).
"7. He hates archers."
ReplyDeleteThat's mean! My go-to character is always a ranger who pokes those pesky magicians in the back row with his arrows. And he takes from the rich and gives to the poor, you know ;)
"A CRPG Addict Goes Tabletop, Part 1: The Origins."
ReplyDeleteGreat idea, but that's another blog by itself, I'd pay money to read - also, screw that DM.
I hope you're enjoying the Krondor books. The entire series is 30 books but most of them take place after the games. The only novels you need to read to understand the plot of the game are: Magician (sometimes published as two volumes), Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon.
ReplyDeleteWho knows? Maybe we'll have a successful and well loved sequel to Ultima series by the time your blog reaches Ultima 9. Maybe even made by Larian and Swen Vincke, maybe by somebody else. What a great consolation that would be!
ReplyDeleteI hope you're enjoying the Krondor books.
ReplyDeleteJumping on the "no apology needed" bandwagon. This has been a very interesting view of some of your process and thinking. I may not be the only one hoping we'll occasionally see more of it (i.e., game-adjacent posts).
ReplyDelete"But the professional DM decided he didn't like me for political reasons"
ReplyDeleteYou really got to stop defending the Electoral College.
The framers were trying to achieve a balance between the rights of the people and the rights of states. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Liberals need to stop whining just because it hasn’t worked out for us lately. The same people complaining now would be James Madison fanatics if the situation were reversed.
DeleteCertainly, it's doing what it's supposed to do. Though I'd say that whether that what it's supposed to do is desirable or not is a different question, and arguably one separable from one's personal political preferences.
DeleteEh, this isn’t really what was going on with the electoral college as far as the framers were concerned. If you read Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, it’s pretty universally agreed that because the President will be a - in fact *the* - national magistrate, direct election by all the people would be the best way to make the selection. However, because suffrage rules varied quite a lot between the states, this wouldn’t really be viable - especially since, of course, the biggest variation was that the Southern states enslaved significant portions of their population.
DeleteSince they’d already hit on the 3/5 compromise as a way of figuring out how to allocate representatives and taxation, they decided to stick with that for determining electoral power as well. Much like the rules for representation in the Senate, it was a practical compromise that didn’t really reflect any greater principle, and arguments about state rights and federalism and urban vs rural balance are largely attempts to retroactively justify a system in terms that don’t have much in common with what the Framers were actually concerned about.
This doesn’t mean the EC is necessarily bad, of course - though I think it is - but it’s helpful to know the history regardless IMO.
I mean, does it really even address the rights of states? Only a few random tipping points states actually get attention. And do those states really benefit since by definition almost half of that state population is going to not get what they want? It's hard to see why that should be balanced against the will of the majority.
DeleteAnyway, I'm happy to agree to disagree! I meant my comment as a joke. I loved the idea of you and a professional DM yelling at each other over the Electoral College.
The current Electoral College system is very far indeed from what the framers envisioned. In the 1796 election nine of the sixteen states had the legislature choose their electors, and in 1800 that was (like a Spinal Tap amplifier) up to eleven! There was an enormous amount of intrigue after the selection of electors, with 40% of electors in 1796 not following their party's recommendations (though that was almost entirely eliminated in 1800). And there was the whole thing where each elector cast two votes and the second-place vote getter became vice president, which predictably enough in 1800 led to a tie between the two Democratic-Republican candidates which took 35 ballots in the House to break (and led to a hasty patch in the form of the Twelfth Amendment, giving electors separate vote for President and VP).
DeleteOf course though I would never refuse to DM for someone over the Electoral College. It's ranked choice versus approval voting that brings the knives out. (Kidding! I would refuse to DM because I DMed once around 40 years ago.)
I meant my reply to be a joke, too. I'm actually a big supporter of the National Vote Compact. To clarify for everyone's benefit: The DM who refused to work with me did not do so because of opinions about the electoral college.
DeleteNational POPULAR Vote Compact, I meant.
DeleteThe electoral college might not be perfect, but it is better than say what the UK or Australia have. In those countries, the same party keeps winning power for multiple years in a row until the corruption is so bad the citizens have no choice but to vote so strongly the other way as to oust the incumbents. Usually in those countries the centre left has government for far too long. A democracy cannot survive if we expect and want just one party to always take the crown. In fact in general government is fairer when there´s an even split between both major parties--it forces them both to stay in the middle with policy decisions.
DeleteBurdy: I'm not sure how your claims relate to the electoral college. It's no harder to change government in the Westminster system than it is in the US system.
DeleteOn top of that, its the centre-right parties that had recent, sustained stints of government in both UK (14 yrs) and Australia (9 yrs).
And one of the criticisms of the Electoral College in the United States is that it (along with other counter-majoritarian institutions like gerrymandering and unequal Senate representation) has sometimes allowed the parties to be competitive without staying to the middle (discussed here). The first-past-the-post system for Congress and Parliament is an issue here, as it allows the possibility of a party getting a majority without a popular vote majority by ignoring those few districts it can't win--though I'm not sure if this has ever flipped the majority in either the UK or Australia, and it's harder to measure in the UK with all the third parties.
Delete(In the US Congress, gerrymandering favored the Democrats for an extremely long time, though again I'm not sure if it ever caused the Democrats to win a majority when they didn't get the most votes--the big issue there was the "Solid South" when Southern segregationists were still in the Democratic party.)
'Competing without staying in the middle' is a feature of two-party systems (I'm not implying that two is mandated, merely that its the equilibrium state).
Delete"But the professional DM decided he didn't like me for political reasons and canceled the session. I've always meant to try again with someone saner."
ReplyDeleteDude, I like you but I have to remind you that when Trump entered his first election you stated that "if you support him, you're cut out of my life", so, mote in thy brother's eye and all that...
There's always one...
DeleteOh, you won't DM for me then? :P
DeleteYou’d have a better point if I’d complained about it or said it was unfair or something. I just related what happened. Also, what I actually said all those years ago is that if you’re a Trump supporter, I don’t want to do you any favors, and a free blog is kind of a favor. I was going to pay the DM.
DeleteIronically, in this case, the DM didn’t want to work with me because he perceived me as too conservative.
Well, you called him insane, and my point was that people should treated as people, that is, as individuals, instead of being ascribed to a class that can be dehumanized. So I think that what the DM did was wrong (regardless of mainstream political affiliation) in the same way as I think that your comments back then were wrong.
DeleteTo go back on the topic of RPGs I reckon that pen and paper ought to be more enjoyable with friends, no matter how amateurish or inexperienced, than with some sort of mercenary professional DM that might be more concerned with not upsetting his customers than with wanting to craft a collaborative story.
"Ironically, in this case, the DM didn’t want to work with me because he perceived me as too conservative".
DeleteLOL. Good to hear Left is still paragon of tolerance.
And thanks for this interesting blog entry. It was a blast.
I suspect the population of DMs to the left of Chet is much higher than that of those right of Chet :p
DeleteProbably, Tristan :D It would be nice for Chet to find DM who shares his political/ideological views to avoid such problems... But IMO the best DM would be DM who just wants to play DnD - without politics, without judging his players for their worldviews... But sometimes I think nowadays it would be hard. You can't even read blog about old RPGw without stumbling on story about poor guy who only wants to play DnD and he can't because DM thinks he shouldn't play with anyone who doesn't think exactly as he :D
DeleteAnd BTW - Tristan, thank you for your comment. I laughed when I imagined Chet search for politically-matching DM. :P
I think shared storytelling environments can be quite vulnerable to people with very different worldviews. For groups who just care about monsters and loot, it wouldn't matter too much.
DeleteYeah, you are right. IMO On the other hand situation where ideologically diversed group is playing thought-provoking adventure would not only be interesting, but also educational. I can only talk from my experience, but I'm really lucky to have friends from Left and Right (and Center) and sometimes we have long discusses, but we respect our views. Years ago we were playing DnD, Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu and sometimes there were plots or characters that made some of us... hmmmm... uncomfortable is strong word but I can't find better, so let's call it uncomfortable. You know, sometimes we couldn't agree with character or sometimes there were such plot points we didn't like. Sometimes our views were challenged, sometimes story showed us that maybe we aren't 100% right all the time. But IMO it was very eye-opening and thought-provoking for us all. We played in that group for years and we were just addicted. Some time ago when I first read about such cases like Chet's I talked to my friends about our old games. One of them (who is more on the left side than right) said something like that: "Yeah, sometimes I was angry, sometimes I felt I couldn't change anything, but that's how life is working. You can't have your way all the time, so it was only realistic that my character was sometimes upset".
DeleteSo - from my experience - it is possible.
Sorry for the rant.
Look, this discussion is all my fault. I should have just said that I had lined up a DM and it didn't work out. You're all making assumptions about the situation that aren't true. It isn't so much a left/right thing as a particular issue that was important to him but he misunderstood my connection to it. I probably could have brought him around if I'd taken the time to explain, but I just wasn't interested at the time. It was in the middle of COVID; everyone was acting wacky for their own reasons; and we'd all forgotten how to effectively communicate with each other.
DeleteWell maybe you could have averted this precise discussion, but it was civil and fun.
DeleteYeah, it was fun - this discussion made me laugh, made me think, it was great, no regrets! Nice talking to you, Tristan. All the best!
DeleteAn impressively mostly civil political discussion.
DeleteEven so, probably best you didn't complete that draft political piece after all
I didn't get very far into it, but what I THINK I had in mind was discussing how the virtues of the Avatar would inform responses to political questions, perhaps in some surprising ways that don't really break down into left/right the way we currently conceive of them. Either I decided it was stupid or I figured I'd better avoid politics entirely.
DeleteThat makes me wonder how long a list of explicitly political RPGs might be, as opposed to those which just contain ethical quandaries. I can't come up with that many, but it depends on one's threshold:
DeleteFallout: New Vegas
Disco Elysium
Deus Ex
Roadwarden
Geneforge
Dead State
(Every Cyberpunk game should be on such a list, in some sense, but some of them seem to be more about the cyber, and less about the punk)
Thanks for this 'unplanned' entry of a different type which not only I found interesting, as other comments show.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, some of your thoughts on the "Today's Graphics" subject appear to have influenced your introduction to the 2015 special topic posting about "The bleak world of Fallout" (with some reactions in the comments) and also to show up in this 2019 comment thread discussion following your statement in the corresponding entry "I am often dismissive of calls for remakes, usually considering them to be the products of dull, dilettante gamers who can't handle any graphics more than 5 years old" (which also goes in the direction of what you describe for "Make Me Another" - maybe these two could be merged somehow?).
If you find the time and motivation, it would be great at some point in time to still have some of these articles, e.g. about Andrew Schultz - given your interview and him popping up so often in the history of this blog (up to an entry in the glossary) - and about magic systems in CRPGs, among others. But I know and understand it's difficult to pick up a draft after a while and gets more so the more time has passed and that your focus is on the regular blog entries. So that would just be a nice surprise bonus if it ever happens, besides all you already publish and for which I am grateful.
"Game XX: Phantasy Star (1987)"
ReplyDeleteAww, man, this would have been one I would have looked forward to! =p
(But to be fair, if you went further down the rabbit hole, you would have ***HATED*** Phantasy Star II. It's my favorite one in the series, but man o man has it its rough spots.)
100% in Agreement with this comment. PSII has a great concept and goes to some horribly dark places (in a good way), but man, both the presentation and certain aspects of the gameplay have aged horribly. Now there's a game that could need a modern remake! (But yeah, as it is Chet would probably hate it, and probably also don't care much for the first one...)
DeleteAs it happens, both PSII and PSI got remakes for the PlayStation 2! Phantasy Star: generation 1 was good, but Phantasy Star: generation 2... ........kinda wasn't?
DeleteThe only things I really remember about PS2 that could be counted as negatives are that you do have to do a bit of grinding and you have to map out some of the dungeons. I don't remember Chet necessarily saying he hated such games, just that it wasn't his favorite aspect.
DeleteHave to map the dungeons, have to level-grind, one of the characters' spells flat-out doesn't work...
DeleteI think you'd enjoy Phantasy Star. It's a lot closer to your tastes than a lot of the console RPGs you've played so far, at least in gameplay - aesthetics might be another story.
ReplyDeleteI played through it for the second time not so long ago and was surprised by well it holds up -- I had very, very few complaints. In certain ways it feels much more like a CRPG than a typical console JRPG of the era. Mapping the dungeons on graph paper is more or less required. And while the protagonist is a teenager, her companions are adults, and the character designs aren't at all "kiddie" (or super-deformed) in nature.
DeleteDoes contain a definite dose of Anime though.
DeleteDefinitely surprised to see that one on the list, as surprised as it it was SMT. I'd like to see a game of it's scope though. I hope the busy times clean up for you soon and you can step into something with more depth!
Does contain a definite dose of Anime though.
DeleteOh, sure, you can't really get around that with any games originating in Japan (rare exceptions aside). I get the impression Chet can tolerate it if the characters are at least toilet-trained.
About 1,600 words on Wizardry: Curse of the Ancient Emperor for the Game Boy. I began playing it back in April when I wanted a Wizardry fix. I've gotten through three levels, but I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit this piques my curiosity, as do all those Japan-exclusive Wizardry offshoots. I'd be pleased to read what you have to say about it.
I played Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land for the Playstation 2, and while it was a pretty cool modernized version of the pre-David Bradley Wizardry games, there was an explicit hentai scene in it that even made me feel uncomfortable
DeleteReally? Because looking it up, the game didn't receive a rating that would indicate that it would have one, which would be odd to begin with since even in Japan they remove such scenes from games on consoles.
DeleteSony would never allow such a thing. The absolute refusal of the console makers to allow any content of that sort, combined with the absolute dominance of consoles in the Japanese gaming market, is the main reason why there were so many H-games for Japanese PCs. It was just about the only niche available, and a good way to make enough money to pay for a console license and then make real money.
DeleteCheck out the Incubus scene then, where the horse demon's tongue is entering the queen, and not in a pg way
DeleteYou're exaggerating. I looked up the scene in question and, while it has some sexual undertones (the nightmare being called an incubus), it's nowhere near as explicit as you're making it out to be.
DeleteI don't know why I watched that, but I did. Maybe it's my color-blindness, but to me it was so poorly drawn that I really couldn't tell WHAT was happening.
DeleteNonetheless, it's no one's business what makes someone else uncomfortable. I've had enough of that in my own reactions to things.
Yes, he has every right to feel uncomfortable about it.
DeleteWhat I was objecting to it's the notion that an official PS2 game would contain pornography.
Although now that I think about it the God of War series is notorious for its sex QTEs, so maybe it wasn't that far fetched...
DeleteThe art in Tale of the Foresaken Land is in a relatively low-resolution watercolor style that makes some details ill-defined, especially in story scenes like this (the character art is crisper). There's a clearer version of the CG in question in this LP:
Deletehttps://lparchive.org/Wizardry-Tale-of-the-Forsaken-Land/Update%2022/
The queen is fully clothed in this image. I agree that it's meant to be suggestive, not explicit. I can also see how the image could seem more explicit than it is due to the art style and low resolution.
It's a pretty good game. Sort of the evolutionary middle step between Wizardry 5-6 and Etrian Odyssey.
You are right in that it is not an explicit x-rated "hentai" game. However, coming out of nowhere, where it did,and also being brought up later again in a flash back, felt completely out of place in a game that had no amount of sexual content before that.
DeleteTotally reasonable for that to make you uncomfortable, Christopher. For our purposes I suppose the typical standard has been "Will it make Chet uncomfortable to play it on a plane?" and I honestly don't think the cutscene reaches that threshold.
DeleteIn any event I expect that Game Boy offshoot is free of such things! It's so interesting how Japan went 100% all-in for Wizardry. Imagine if every RPG series, especially the ones we'd like to have seen more of, were assigned a country that continued to develop their own unique iteration of it, long after the initial franchise was moribund in its country of origin.
I was wondering if you were exaggerating some anime girl in a bikini or something, no, yeah, it's totally reasonable to call a hentai scene, since it's only technically non-explicit. Guess they didn't submit that one to the ESRB, because I can't imagine them giving that a T, considering the problems GTA:SA and Oblivion would get around that time. Heck, it wasn't that long ago when Thrill Kill got a AO.
DeleteTale of the Forsaken Land has a T rating from the ESRB for Mild Language and Violence.
DeleteI'd vote for:
ReplyDelete"A discussion about the "default" character that we tend to play" - Our relationship with the PC seems quite central to the process of 'play'.
"Andrew and Me." - His output was legendary, and I think he was one of the few figures of relevance to CRPGs who wasn't in the industry.
"A CRPG Addict Goes Tabletop, Part 1: The Origins." A Game 0 entry for classic D&D seems like it belongs in this ouvre. Informs the formative years of CRPGs more than everything else combined.
---
I think the idea for "Today's Graphics." was either inspired by, or resultant in, one of your comment section rants ^_^
"I guess I thought better of it" Pfah (At the risk of starting that conversation, I think the historian aspect of your work is at least as important as the archivist aspect and the current approach limits the former)
This was a great read. One of my top 10 favorite novels ever is La Pulpe by Jerzy Andrzejewski, who worked on it for years, and couldn't finish or put it together in a definitive way. So he ended up publishing the finished fragments, the drafts, the character bios and his personal diary all together in what became the book. You get a draft where a character dies, and then a draft where they don't die, and the diary where the author discusses pros and cons of each. It's like quantum, this whole polyphonic and plural mess IS the novel, the character died AND did not die, both are true. A fascinating exercise, which ends up being a very moving and touching reflection on the fragility of existence, and the act of creation.
ReplyDeleteReading your draft post on drafts reminded me of that.
Embrace drafts, they are beautiful in their imperfect state full of possibilities and promises.
Since you mention your intended tribute to Roger Ebert, did you know he, being from Urbana himself, once (1962) wrote a two-part newspaper article about PLATO?
ReplyDeleteI recently learned that and more from a 2020 piece by Brian Dear (which did not make it into The Friendly Orange Glow) about, among others, a 2011 TED talk by Ebert.
I did *not* know that. Funny how those two things intersect. Next someone will tell me that Johnny Mercer played nonstop D&D for the last two years of his life.
DeleteHe would have been exposed to it too early to have seen any of our games, of course. I wonder if that would have changed his stance on video games as art.
DeleteThe statements by Ebert on that subject still continue to trigger emotions and extended discussions, as could be seen as recently as a few weeks ago in this article (which contains a nice summary of links to several moments in that discussion over the last almost 20 (!) years) and its comment thread.
DeleteTo complete the picture for those who haven't read it (or might want to have another look to refresh their memory, as I did), here is a link to your entry on the matter.
Looking at the reasons Ebert gave for his views, I'm not sure, though, how experiencing PLATO games would or might have changed his position.
For everyone's benefit tempted to click on that link, I have since rescinded the opinion originally expressed there.
DeleteThe experience might not have changed Ebert's opinion, but at least he would have been arguing from a foundation of knowledge. To take such a stance without having any experience of the medium he's criticizing was . . . well, very un-Ebert of him. This was a guy who once walked out of a movie halfway through and wrote a review anyway, then felt so guilty about that that he forced himself to watch the film again and write a new review.
DeleteApropos Ebert it's been interesting, as I age, seeing that I now agree more often with him, and less frequently with Siskel. (When I was younger it was the other way around for sure.) Through the Internet I've come to know what an insightful writer he could be, and on multiple occasions he proved himself to be brave and -- can't think of the right way to put this -- a person whose private life actually seemed to live up to the standards his rhetoric would suggest. And it takes a hell of a lot of character to keep appearing in public after such a disfiguring surgery.
Delete@Chet: Sorry, my bad. I assumed the edit you had added at the end of that 2010 entry (together with your other comments there) covered this.
DeleteHowever, now I see this was only about rescinding your opinion due to the complexity to define 'art' generally while later, in 2019, you revised your stance entirely in the first of your 10 reasons why you were still blogging after 10 years (I hope this link now indeed completes the picture correctly and it's therefore OK to add it).
I agree Ebert would have had a better leg to stand on if he had tried (more) video games himself. In fact he said so himself in his July 01, 2010, post (linked in the article mentioned above) reacting to the avalanche of (mostly critical) comments his earlier piece had triggered: "I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games". However, he was not prepared to remedy that. Already in 2005 (linked there as well) he stated "As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games" and in July 2010 he wrote towards the end of the entry: "I may be wrong. but if 'm not willing to play a video game to find that out, I should say so. I have books to read and movies to see. I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place."
Could it have been all different had he encountered and experienced video games 'naturally' early on, e.g. through PLATO? Might he think differently about it today based on developments in video games since his passing more than ten years ago? Who knows.
"The most criminal RPG" brings to mind a thought experiment a friend of mine did, where he concluded that if you bought small plots of land on opposite sides of the US/Mexico border, installed a port-a-potty on one, and launched pre-1947 pennies at it from the other using a slingshot, one would technically be committing a "victimless war crime". (I don't remember the details, but apparently the salient details were that you were targeting a sanitation facility and that the high copper content of old pennies met the technical definition of armor-piercing rounds)
ReplyDeleteThat's another interesting thought experiment. "What's the most technically serious crime you could commit without actually victimizing anyone?"
DeleteKilling someone who wants to die?
DeleteWouldn't it be `conspiracy to commit (insert major crime here)?' You get the punishment without the action.
DeleteBlasphemous thoughts in a theocratic society which regards it as a worse transgression than murder.
DeleteAhab, you might have to clarify what you're talking about. Are you saying that we punish conspiracy to commit murder more seriously than murder itself?
DeleteAnyway, conspiracy doesn't quite work because in theory, the conspirators have to have been serious about committing the actual crime. So in this case, if they knew at the outset they were just conspiring, never to commit, then legally they haven't conspired, either. If they do intend to commit, then in answering this thought experiment, they're not just planning to conspire, they're planning to commit murder, in which case their answer is "murder."
My own answer would probably be some form of aggravated assault. Any assault with a dangerous weapon, whether it results in injury or not, is an aggravated assault. Many states add additional penalties for firearms. So if you walked up to someone and poked him in the butt with a barrel of a gun, you've technically committed aggravated assault with a firearm and probably face a maximum penalty of 25-30 years.
For later reference, PO's comment got stuck in the moderation queue, so despite its position above, it appeared after my comment above this one.
DeletePO, I'll agree that's a good one if we're talking about assisted suicide of terminally ill individuals in states where it's currently illegal. I wouldn't call the crime "victimless" if you just offed anyone who had suicidal intentions.
I took Ahab to be responding to the "most serious crime" question, not to shamhat?
DeleteMy answer to the most serious crime question, where by "serious" I mean "is bad" instead of "is regarded as bad or has a high level of punishment," would probably be some kind of negligence. Like if you drive drunk and don't crash (and no one finds out), I'm not sure there's a specific victim, but you've committed a serious crime. So maybe scale that up to some kind of corporate negligence that could've poisoned a whole city's water supply but didn't wind up doing that.
CRPG Addict - That was a response to you, not to shamhat. It's not hypothetical either - there are centuries of theological writings that consider blasphemy to be the most serious transgression, and some of them even concede it does no actual harm! These have certainly influenced historical theocratic rule. To this day, Saudi Arabia administers harsh punishment for blasphemy and apostasy.
DeleteBut maybe you were more thinking of absurd technical crimes akin to flinging pennies at a Mexican outhouse - on that angle, I suggest a variation of the famous Ronald Opus legend, where the suicidal jumper is intentionally shot and killed mid-fall.
Yep, I completely misunderstood, and you are correct. Or homosexuality in such societies. I should have qualified my question to limit it to the U.S. or other secular, western nations.
DeleteI would guess a lot of countries have some surprisingly easy way to commit "technical" treason. I know the US legal definition of treason is unusually specific because the founders had some negative experience with the European tradition of defining treason as "Basically any form of pissing off a sufficiently powerful person"
DeleteI'd say, consensual sex between two underage persons. Depending on nation and age, I guess this might qualify as rape in some circumstances, even if it were impossible for the judge to say who the "perpetrator" and who the "victim" is.
Delete