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We Had to Destroy the Empire to Save It

Finished with the “Rome and the Barbarians” lectures. Although the early lectures duplicated much of the basic Roman history you can get anywhere, the later lectures offered a lot of new (for me) details on the decline and eventual collapse of the empire.

Traditionally, the story of the decline and fall is one of internal decay, in which barbarian victories are a symptom, not a cause, of Rome’s decline. Rome’s collapse is blamed on decadence, which empties treasuries and treats military service as unattractive. Rome becomes so rich and spoiled that leaders can advance more readily by exploiting office and plundering their political rivals than by winning victories for Rome. And the barbarians, who could easily have been crushed by republican Roman might simply move in on the self-indulgent imperial Romans.

No doubt all of that is true, to some extent. Certainly Rome suffered increasingly from civil war and its own generals’ ambitions. Certainly, too, the idea of moral decay fits the Roman narrative of the time. That narrative is open to question when we consider the source: patrician scholars insistent that the plebs go out and start dying again to advance patrician glory still further, rather than enjoying their own rising status on the income from colonial conquests.

Professor Harl’s lectures add a lot of texture to this basic narrative of decadence and betrayal within, describing how the barbarians kept getting stronger as a direct product of Rome’s success and expansion. To some extent, this was the product of learning from defeat, but to a greater extent, it was a product of being taught to fight by the Romans themselves, who simply had to turn to their colonial subjects to fill out the ranks. Every time a barbarian people was conquered, Rome was obligated to defend them from the next barbarians down the road. There simply weren’t enough warm bodies in Latium to police it all. And, to a surprising extent, the old barbarians were happy to join in. The bararians wanted to be Romanized. Several of the most fearsome invasions began as some barbarian general seeking recognition for his service and elevation into the ruling body, rather than a desire to sack Rome.

This was the true tragedy of Rome’s fall. Students may not admire Rome. It was a brutal empire, however you measure its virtues, and as it transformed from republic to empire, it failed in its own most treasured principles, never mind the principles of 21st century democracies. But whatever its shortcomings, even the people who brought it down liked and admired Rome. Many institutions that contributed to its downfall grew out of expedients meant to preserve it against the current threat: the wholesale admission to citizenship of tribes inadequately assimilated to the culture, the debasement of the currency, the escalating abdication of civic legitimacy to religious legitimacy, the gradual passage of authority from patrician to Roman general to barbarian general to whoever could hold a patch of land or body of soldiers together while Rome, and later Constantinople, dealt with more urgent collapse elsewhere. Everyone could see events spiraling out of control but nobody knew how to stop it, or even how to stop themselves from contributing to the collapse.

That Roman history should be pregnant with lessons for US history is no coincidence; the founding fathers admired Rome and modeled our own government after it. If the past is prologue, then the disintegration of Rome in the hands of its most vocal patriots is a sad thing to ponder.

2010 09 02 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Jungle Queen

Replaying Dragon Age: Origins, I again find considerable difficulty keeping on Morrigan’s good side. Actually, that’s not true. Thanks to numerous gifts included in the game precisely to bribe your way into your companions’ good graces, it’s easy to stay on everyone’s good side. But as far as dialogue goes, and choices of who to side with in the various power struggles about the land, Morrigan hates everything I do and say and think and probably my haircut too. If it weren’t for gifts, she’d have slit my throat in camp long ago.

This is because Morrigan is a hateful bitch. Other PCs can be relentlessly nice (Alistair, Leliana, Wynne) or frequently harsh (Sten, Oghren, Zevran), but the harsh ones still abide by some kind of consistent moral code, even when it bites them in the ass—Sten locks himself up for murder, Oghren turns on his wife, and even moral opportunist Zevran abides by his promise of eternal servitude when you offer him manumission. Morrigan is presented as someone with a harsh but fair moral code: a hyper-libertarian law of the jungle born of growing up in a swamp with no companionship but a demon posing as a bitter old woman, preparing Morrigan as a sacrifice to her own eternal life. Unlike her fellow companions, however, she won’t abide by that code.

For example, she’s big on freedom to establish personal contracts, but gets pissy if you take side quests from the Chantry board. We’re wasting time, she argues, and besides, all those people are weak and helpless. She doesn’t seem to mind wasting time on side quests for apostate mages, though, and begs your assistance against Flemeth when Morrigan finds herself in need. She’ll try to seduce Sten even if you’ve taken her as a lover—she explicitly announces your shared sex life is freely given and without attachments when you take her to a tent—but objects if you should later decide you prefer to bed Leliana or Zevran, and even gets catty about your flirtation with bar wenches. She gets huffy about being “volunteered” to rescue Arl Eamon from the Fade, even though there’s no option to get her approval first. She constantly puts down fellow companions for stupidity, and holds religious faith in contempt, then tops them all with a scheme to give birth to a god—on no more rationale than blind faith that raising a demonic creature from beyond the Fade with a little caring and without any darkspawn taint will make it not be a demon. Whether it could be horribly dangerous even without being a demon apparently hasn’t even crossed her clever little mind.

Morrigan’s loud and frequent protests of the value of individual freedom and responsibility are merely a veneer of respectability pasted over complete sociopathy. “Freedom,” for Morrigan, means “freedom for Morrigan,” and “jack squat for everyone else.” “Personal responsibility” means “confessing your actions,” usually without apology, not seeking to repair harm you’ve caused or—Maker forbid—taking care not to do harm in the first place. She seeks the freedom to do whatever she likes to whomever she likes, without consequences or interference, and the same for mages like poisoner/blood mage/thief/apostate Jowan. It’s the law of the jungle, minus a sense that that sword cuts both ways. This makes it hard to find game choices that please her. Even if you consistently go with the “hateful bitch” option, offending all your other companions in the process, she often finds grounds to take offense, because you have to side with somebody in every discussion, and the roulette wheel that serves as her moral compass will arbitrarily demonize oppressors or demonize their victims for being too weak to deserve better. Side with the wrong one, and you’re either sponsoring tyranny (Morrigan -5) or preserving weakness (Morrigan -3).

Turns out she’s not very good at crowd control, either, which is supposed to be her forte as an ice/mind control mage. If you want crowd control, you’ll have to generate it yourself, whether as a tank or an ice mage or a stun-heavy rogue. Worthless bitch.

2010 09 01 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

My Character Just Wouldn’t Do That!

A crazy night at yesterday’s game, in which my duties as GM came uncharacteristically in conflict with my goals as GM.

The scenario is complicated because each player is currently handling two PCs, which may have conflicting interests. These PCs are rarely “on-screen” at the same time, but as the campaign comes to a climax, we have increasingly seen players handling different characters in consecutive scenes.

In one scene last night, the issue at hand was whether the (mostly NPC) crew of (PC) pirate captain Roan would mutiny, having been pressed to the limits of reasonable danger to body and soul. The crew included exactly one PC, Arik. In another scene, Roan and his scholarly buddies (all PCs) were reunited with (PC) Z’ev, long held prisoner by the invading Ajini fleet. Both Z’ev and Arik had loyalty issues: Arik because he might well agree, in character, with his fellow pirates espite every reason to disagree out of character, Z’ev because he’s decided he rather likes his Ajini captors, largely for out-of-character reasons. And both Arik and Z’ev belong to the same player, who is becoming a “problem player.”

Some causes of this transformation are beyond her control. A change of membership in our group has shifted the demographics of gamer types from an even (and often awkward) mix of many types to a predominantly plot-driven group, stranding her as the lone character-driven player. Perhaps the long campaign, or the conspiracy genre, or the basic conflict bore or frustrate her. Certainly, we are tragicomically unable to communicate at times. Other causes of the transformation are problems of her own making: a growing habit of blogging rather than paying full attention to the game, and a long history of designing characters with little concern for integrating them into the setting. As a result, she has recently made a series of choices which threw monkey wrenches into the story line—classic examples of the age-old conflict between individual character integrity and the needs of the broader narrative. Always frustrating for a GM, such derailments have grown blatant enough and frequent enough to trigger resentment from other players, as well.

Specifically, last night, Arik decided to defuse the mutiny. Arik’s player was undoubtedly just trying to do the right thing: keep his fellow PCs’ options open and save them from being marooned on a zombie-infested island, helpless to stop the Evil Conspiracy. Unfortunately, I wanted the mutiny as a way to raise the tension and force captain Roan to seek out the violent and alien Ajini as his only escape, and Roan’s player wanted to be marooned so as to indulge his perverse delight in seeing PCs boned. In this case, the obviously helpful choice was in fact not helpful, and not fun.

Later that night, Z’ev decided not to flee with his fellow PCs when opportunity presented itself. The decision was motivated by a complex web of factors, some in character, some decidedly out of character. Regardless, it dislocated the obvious direction of the story and denied the other players their moment of triumph in rescuing Z’ev.

Z’ev’s choice, following so closely on the heels of Arik’s decision, and on the heels of blatantly contrarian behavior in recent sessions, triggered howls of protest from the players around the table. Believe me, I shared their frustration! Nevertheless, I had to step in and defend Zev’s player.

Player independence, the free will of the PC, is sacrosanct. For many players, the opportunity for free expression is the whole damn point of role-playing games, and it’s a vital element to producing satisfying games even for the rest. Unfortunately, freedom includes the freedom to screw things up. Players whose primary concern is their own character’s integrity often screw things up for fellow players, but even the most altruistic player occasionally does the same. It’s just in the nature of the beast, and not entirely a bad thing. Awkward individual decisions are a vital source of dramatic conflict in RPGs. The “cure” of eliminating free will would be worse than the “disease” of obstreperous choices.

So, despite all that I desired to the contrary while wearing my “storyteller” hat—the controlled rise of dramatic tension, the need to steer events to a conclusion through the Ajini, an opportunity for Z’ev to inform his fellow PCs about the Ajini and their motives, everything—my “judge” hat took precedence. The fundamental need to preserve everyone’s rights trumps the fundamental objective of pursuing the group’s fun as a whole, and the job falls to the GM to enforce it, because he’s the only one with the authority to do so.

2010 08 31 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

My Picnic With Who

We visited Central Park yesterday, for a gathering of Doctor Who fans. The weather was hot but not oppressive, as long as we stuck to the shade.

I don’t remember even being to Central Park before, though I may have forgotten an earlier visit. Though I can see it performs a vital service in offering greenery of any kind to Manhattan, it looked a little seedy to me, if only because the park, large as it is, is still insufficient for the city’s needs—too many intrusions of sidewalk vendors, too many bandstands, too many lawns worn bare by an excess of pedestrians, not enough toilets.

It is a great place for people watching, though. Geeks on parade are usually the most interesting people around, willing to defy normality in pursuing their interests. But this is New York City, where personal expression is a high art, and you really have to commit to attention-grabbing if you want to stand out from the crowd.. The ordinary pedestrians filing past, on their way to or from or coincidentally past Strawberry Fields, were at least as interesting as the twenty-or-so Who fans at the picnic—moreso, since they didn’t share even the modest homogeneity of a geekfest.

Lacking an interest in Doctor Who myself, I found keeping my attention on the conversation at hand difficult. This surprised me. No longer enjoying the more intensive geek contact my youth, I expected to feel more “among my people,” the specific fandom notwithstanding, than I did. Sign that I’m growing more normal with exposure to normal people in classes, or merely a sign that I’m growing more boring?

2010 08 30 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Turkey Pastrami

A few months ago, we bought two turkey breasts rather than let a $25 coupon go to waste, even though neither of us is big on turkey. I smoked the first, and my-oh-my was it good. Even so, I felt at the time that I had erred: with the breast already prepared, I went to a book on grilling to find a turkey pastrami recipe. Eileene loves beef pastrami, and I’m rather fond of it too, so that felt like an opportunity missed.

I tried the pastrami recipe on the other breast last week, and discovered we hadn’t missed anything. Not that the turkey pastrami was bad, mind you. It was tasty, but not OMG-good. And it didn’t taste anything like pastrami.

I blame the coriander. Steven Raichlen’s recipe calls for a lot of crushed coriander seed in the rub. This lends the bird a pleasant piquancy where you carefully scraped it off, but it’s easy to miss a seed stuck to an odd angle, and it’s easier yet to miss a seed or twelve in the tiny crannies, and those crannies taste like burning. Same problem with the salt caught therein. The mild turkey breast is totally by the seasoning. That can be great if you’re into intense seasoning, but it doesn’t really do justice to the bird.

I’m glad now to have made the “mistake” of unadorned smoking first. Trying the turkey pastrami first would have dampened my enthusiasm considerably for continuing exerimentation.

2010 08 27 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Coalition of the Self-Destructive

Former RNC chair Ken Mehlman comes out of the closet. Big deal, right? Yet another major agent of homosexual oppression is actually exhibiting homosexual repression; it’s almost become axiomatic.

The only noteworthy element of the story is Mehlman’s defense of Bush the lesser, insisting the former president was no homophobe: “He often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called ‘the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.’”

I mean, how many errors can you find in that short sentence? Here’s a few to get you started:

If Islamic jihad is indeed the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now—a point open to challenge—the Republican party is at least in the top three, alongside the Vatican, and easily presents the greatest threat of those three to homosexual American voters.
There are other organizations than the homophobic Republican party and the homophobic Islamic fundamentalists from which to choose as political bodies a homosexual might support. At least one directly opposes the Republican party. Perhaps Bush has heard of it, though I expect he’d still mispronounce its name.
Perhaps homosexuals feel that launching unprovoked wars against predominantly Islamic nations, and especially the indiscriminate casualties produced in bombing those nations, is not the most effective way to undermine fundamentalist Islamic leaders who would persecute homosexuals.

The longer you think about it, the more stupidity leaks out of the quotation. Maybe it’s better not to think about it too hard; it’ll just get you mad, and won’t have the slightest effect on the stupid.

2010 08 26 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Death Magic

Just finished Jonathan L. Howard’s Johannes Cabal the Necromancer today, on a friend’s recommendation—not as a good read, exactly, but as a useful resource for Fairyland, since the plot revolves around a literal and moderately elaborate deal with the devil.

It proved not as useful as I’d hoped. As a work devoted to tying together the classical elements of fairytales and deals with the devil, it validates many of my conclusions but doesn’t really stand out from the crowd when it comes to examples. I mined a good, usable quote from it, however, as Satan and Cabal resolve their wager:

“As to the wager, it is no such thing [says Satan]. There was nothing in the rules that said I couldn’t make things more interesting if I saw fit. I saw fit.”
“Don’t be fatuous,” replied Cabal. “There were no rules in the first place.”
“Then you have nothing to complain about.”
“Fine. Then I claim the period of one year to be a Plutonian year.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A Plutonian year. That’s two hundred and forty-nine terrestrial years. Approximately.” He crossed his arms. “You don’t have a monopoly on facetious interpretations.”

A strong candidate for a chapter starter for Rule 3: Details Unspecified are Open to Any Interpretation. Now I just have to decide whether I prefer that or Homer Simpson’s wish for a turkey sandwich, and whether to try to work in both. Decisions, decisions.

As a book, Cabal is also passable but not all I’d hoped. I appreciate the author’s respect for the classical tale of deals with the devil, especially in light of how he puts a spin on the old tropes by making his protagonist thoroughly villainous. The balance between novelty and fidelity is a narrow one. On the other hand, Howard is too much in love with his own turns of phrase. His sardonic wit and his thick use of superlatives and grotesquerie remind me of Pratchett, but Howard tries too hard. Where Pratchett is clever, Howard is affected. Close, but no cigar.

But then, this is also Howard’s first novel, after a career at computer games. (!) I recall that Pratchett’s first several books were positively lousy, so there is hope yet for great things. And none too soon—Pratchett’s fans already mourning his loss to Alzheimer’s—prematurely, in my opinion, but it’s still reassuring to know promising understudies wait in the wings. Much better than Jim Butcher’s potboilers.

2010 08 25 mdlake Writing Comments (0) Permalink

Tempted by Fate

I expect to be done with our current RPG by early October. Give or take. Pinning down the conclusion is impossible without treading too far upon the players’ free will, even when the conclusion for the world at large is foregone. Ella intends to be ready with her campaign by mid October, give or take. It’s possible we may pad out the schedule with a one-shot, wherein Dave can give the new FATE engine a spin.

I’d like that. I generally enjoy one-shots more than regular campaigns, and, like Dave, I really get into analyzing the merits of RPG systems. Looking over the PDF for “Spirit of the Century,” the FATE adaptation to two-fisted pulp adventure, it shows promise.

FATE closely resembles the older FUDGE system on which it is based, but it abandons the generic, normative mechanics for mechanics that remain focused on gaming spectacle. For starters, FATE dispenses with the symmetric bell curve, lumping different levels of incompetence together where players rarely use them and expanding room at the top of the scale, where games often need to distinguish between expert, world-class, and superhuman mastery. FATE also dispenses entirely with basic attributes, though it keeps the skills, and takes a page from Over the Edge by adapting FUDGE‘s gifts to ask players to make up their own abilities and weaknesses (aspects), broad themes of abilities that set them apart from ordinary men.

Most interesting, FATE offers players fate points, earned by enduring setbacks triggered by their aspects. These fate points can be used to inject some directorial control over the story, subject to GM approval, or they can be used to fuel cinematic uses of their skills—“stunts.” For example, a character with skill at intimidation might burn a fate point on a dramatic entrance, striding into a mafia hideout while all present fall silent and watch with bemusement, rather than simply gunning him down. A character with stealth might choose to burn a fate point to activate the “Just follow me and you should be all right” schtick, allowing an entire party of less stealthy people to creep silently along behind him. Any player who’s seen a cunning plan ruined by one lousy stealth roll out of five will appreciate that one. I’ve seen fate points in other systems used for directorial control, but not to activate stunts in this clever and character-embracing fashion.

Other elements I’m not so keen on. Allowing players to sacrifice the use of an aspect for the rest of a session in exchange for a significant bonus goes the wrong direction, trading character definition for mere pluses to the dice. I haven’t yet entirely wrapped my head around the idea of “tagging” other characters’ aspects, giving them fate points in exchange for immediate penalties, especially as players are expected to guess what the aspect might be while tagging it. And the power level seems a little high to me, though that’s probably a personal foible.

It took a year, but I finally got all my players to see something worthwhile in OtE—some took longer than others, and nobody was truly converted, but I didn’t really expect conversions. I’m satisfied to get them used to the idea of rules-light systems with a generic resolution system. Perhaps FATE, like d6, would make a good compromise between simple, free-form rules and explicit rules with lots of powers from which to choose.

2010 08 24 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Free to Play; Winning Will Cost You

An article I read this morning on the success of freemium models for online games is rather creepy. The freemium profit model abandons the monthly subscription model of MMOs for a kind of pay-on-demand service: play is entirely free, but much of the gear you’ll want to equip your player is available for real-life cash money. This shift in business strategy can be good or bad news for players, depending on what they really want from the game, and how aggressively the game pinches its players for cash. A very casual player willing to wear rags, or one of the hard-core types who wants to earn everything the hard way get a great deal, while a semi-casual player who likes to identify with his in-game character and values the prestige of good gear pays more. If the game makes you cough up money for basic necessities like sufficient healing potions to complete an adventure successfully, or to lift an onerous death penalty, then the freemium approach hides a rip-off behind the fig leaf of “you don’t have to buy them…” There’s also a problem for PvP play, if any: gear can give enough of an edge in battle that victory goes to the richest kid, not the most skillful player.

That the freemium model should be successful is no worry; that it should be this successful is, a little. Like casinos, it begins to develop the whiff of predation on people who can’t help themselves, either because they’re too foolish to watch their expenses or because they have addictive personalities. Not strictly illegal, and making it illegal would require measures worse than the problem, but still… sleazy and abusive.

The family of four to plunk down $35,000 on gear for its MMO characters might be filthy rich, and I doubt they’ll go hungry over gaming purchases. They should, at least, be comfortably well off; as the interviewee says, “We actually called their bank to make sure they could afford it. Apparently they can.” But you never can tell—we’ve seen a lot of news on families living way beyond their means in the Reaganomics generation. I know there have already been several disturbing cases elsewhere: families whose rent money is in jeopardy over games, or parents whose salaries have been gutted by kids using a credit card without sufficient supervision.

Still, nobody has to play these games if they don’t want to. Nobody has to let their kids play with the family fortune, and nobody has to pay $20k for the matching chainmail outfit. So long as viable contenders with different profit models exist, we’re fine. If the freemium model remains this successful, however, I’m a little concerned. Big business is firmly at the helm of game design these days, and if the freemium model makes more money, that will soon be all we’ll see, whether or not it makes better games. Even WoW has succumbed to temptation, although its freemium offerings remain strictly esthetic: you can buy a prettier mount, but not a faster one. The news sounded like the first soft crackling of the ice under our feet.

2010 08 23 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Cash Fueled

According to a report I heard second-hand today, Meg Whitman, Republican contender for the Californian governorship, has spent $100,000,000 so far on her bid, while Democrat Jerry Brown has spent only $900,000. (A quick net search confirms both figures, but not from a single source, so I’m not sure these numbers compare apples to apples. Take it for what it’s worth.) The news, as I first encountered it, was presented with a note of triumph: despite the hundred-to-one ratio of campaign expenditures, Whitman has merely pulled even with Brown.

I’m not sure triumph is appropriate. All right, so she’s only drawn even, but that means: She’s drawn even. Coming from the relative obscurity of the CEO seat at eBay (which she screwed up), she’s now running even with the state’s attorney general and former governor, a huge disadvantage in name recognition. Since name recognition takes on exaggerated importance in the early stages of a campaign, when nobody knows much about the candidates, Whitman is even and gaining. At enormous expense, to be sure, but the lesson I’m taking away from this is that the office is for sale, to anyone who can afford the hundred million entrance fee.

2010 08 20 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink