Student of Trinity

Well, sure — if you're too much of a wimp to stab the tip of the arrow with the point of your sword, like a real man.

Some Japanese swordmasters can cut an arrow in half in flight.

Really? I'm pretty skeptical. I mean, anyone can cut an arrow in half in flight, if they're really lucky. And anyone who practiced enough could probably learn to catch an arrow with a sword consistently, if the arrow were launched consistently every time, with one-two-three-go. But when the archer is really trying to hit you?

That's the uncomfortable bottom line, for me, the Kierkegaardian "either, or". An omnipotent God could make absolutely anything worthwhile. "You can't understand, but trust me, it's worth it," is an unanswerable defense for God. It may not be convincing, but it's entirely self-consistent.

To me, the unfortunate 'you can't understand' part is an unavoidable part of the self-consistency. It's never been conceivable to me that the universe should be easy to understand. I mean, if God made a universe that was all about guaranteeing that a few billion primitive creatures enjoyed safe, happy lives, fulfilling their primitive instincts, then somebody would have to come along, grab God by the shoulders, and say, "Dude — you're omnipotent. What are you doing, still living in the basement like this, playing computer games? Go out and set the world on fire, for God's sake! Do something!"

It has also always seemed rather arbitrary, to me, to suppose that God cares a lot about whether human beings manage to hold the right opinions. Yes, a lot of religions call that important; but to me it seems like an easy assumption to drop. With it, I find, an enormous weight falls off the whole discussion. Believers in God stop having to raise embarrassing defenses, and doubters stop having to stomp straw men into the ground.

Yeah, pretty much. Though actually it's more kind of, "Come back and tell me again how to run the whole universe, after you can make even a tiny-ass fish." That is a point.

Job has indeed always been understood mainly as a takedown of theodicy. It's not that people didn't notice that. It's the party line.

I'm not sure it's so easy even for God to perform miracles great enough to prove that God is God. I'm thinking of Q, from Star Trek. Q isn't God, and certainly doesn't deserve anyone's worship; monotheism, at least as I understand it, implies that even Q is just a semicolon to God. But it seems to me that Q could perform anything that humans could experience. Hence it seems to me that there is no miracle possible which could prove to us that God exists: it's easy to imagine things that couldn't be faked by human agency, but pretty hard to think of things that couldn't be done by a merely cosmic, but non-divine, power.

It's true that Candide summarizes that viewpoint, but I think the standard reading of Candide is that this is satire; I hope I didn't mislead about this. I believe Leibniz originated it as an earnest position.

The best theodicy I know — and I don't consider it a knock-down argument, just one that seems to me the best you can say — is the one Jesus made. You can look it up in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, but my personal summary is that bad things exist because fixing them can be leveraged immensely. Now, part of this is just the flat claim that the bad stuff is worth it, trust me; and ultimately I think that's the bottom line, from God. But the problem with that, when that's all it is, is that it seems pretty quietistic; just grin and bear it. What Jesus says is better than that, in this way: he implies that the big pay-off comes precisely from remedying the bad things, so get off your butt and do something to make things better. With that, I feel a lot better about the whole theodicy thing. It's not just me trying to prop up my theory of God, any more; it's motivation to work.

Of course the tricky thing about the healing of the man born blind is that the story only works with a miracle. Ultimately that's honest, too, though, I think. If God really won't do anything whatever, no matter how low the chips fall, then even the cleverest theodicy is beside the point. There's a promise there, that if you do try to make bad things better, then not only will the pay-off for success be greatly disproportionate, but you may get some help with the effort.

I could see writing that sort of thing into a story, but I'd have to take pretty much the whole book to work up to it, and even then, I'd be very uneasy.

That's kind of my concern as well. If you've got an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent character in your story, then either there's not much suspense, or your God has to be pretty inscrutable. But this may depend on theological perspective. Some people think that God's will is pretty clear, to the point where the power of prayer isn't so much different from the power of gravity. It's a reliable effect, that characters can use. Suspense comes from other things.

I'm not sure I fully buy this, myself; I can accept all kinds of basic reality rules in fictional universes, but I think that reliably efficacious prayer may be a broken magic system. My own experience is that the real God has not implemented it in the real world, and the idea that it's a broken system is part of my own theodicy. Other people seem to have other experience, though, and different understandings of God.

I think I can understand the market appeal. If you believe that God always grants the prayers of a righteous man, then stories in which prayer is not implemented just seem unrealistic. You can suspend disbelief to enjoy them, but you're happy to find something that takes seriously the things you know are real. Soldiers often like military fiction, and scientists often like hard sci-fi; they're disappointed if the author gets something wrong, and pleased if things are accurate.

I guess that's just a theological difference. I've been able to frame my own understanding of God in terms of authors and fiction, but what I say is: Human beings are not to God as fictional characters are to their author. Human beings are not even to God as semicolons are to the author. Human beings are to God as semicolons are to God.

That's an exaggerated statement. We are worth many sparrows, and a sparrow is worth many semi-colons. But in exaggerated form it expresses something I believe is important. I think it would be unhealthy for me to think about God as a character, and I'd feel that expressing the idea that God could be a human author's character would be such a big theological error to convey, that it would outweigh whatever truths my writing might otherwise express.

Sorry I got confused about your relationship with Randy. I hadn't seen you mention him by name before, had seen you talk about your husband, and so I somehow assumed they were the same. More logical would just have been to ask, Who the heck is Randy?

Sounds like an interesting book. I admit to some trepidation about overtly Christian fantasy fiction, though, where answered prayers affect the plot. I just couldn't do that. I believe it could possibly be pulled off artistically, though it seems as though it would be very hard, but I just couldn't do it myself, psychologically. It would feel blasphemous, to me, to sit down as an author and decide how God should act.

Editing really heavily might approach co-author status. Maybe you two should collaborate? Co-authoring can certainly be tricky, but some teams have definitely pulled it off well. And you know, for the Christian fantasy fiction market, a husband-and-wife team of authors might also be a selling point. That's obviously not a decisive factor, but hey, it's a real one. A couple percent more in sales might be the last little lift you needed, to get over a threshold into bigger attention.

Three-volume novels were big in the 19th century, long before Tolkien. They weren't trilogies; just big fat books, of around 200,000 words, sold in three separate packages. There wasn't any plot resolution at the ends of the first two volumes; if anything, I expect they tended to end with cliffhangers, to encourage purchase of subsequent parts. The format was so standard, it became a convention just to refer to the convention.

Why three was the standard, and not two or four, I'm not sure. We know from the Book of Armaments that Five is Right Out, but other than that, I'm guessing. The size of each volume was probably fixed by physical convenience. With legible type and decent paper, 300 pages made a convenient lump of paper to carry around, or something. I'm guessing then that three volumes was roughly fixed by the fact that 200,000 words is about as long as you can easily stretch a story. It's about twice what is reckoned a typical length for a modern mainstream novel. I conjecture that there's a sort of phase transition involved: you can pad a single story up to 200,000 words, but to go much beyond that, you somehow need to tell multiple stories, either in sequence or in parallel. So I'm thinking that the average Victorian novelist could consistently milk a story for three volumes, but four would have been pushing. Then, given those basic (conjectured) limits, simple forces of practical economics imposed a stricter standardization. Apparently there were standard book contracts stipulating fairly precise lengths, so that prices could be standard.

It's hard not to consider that some of the same issues are still involved in trilogies today. I have a feeling that individual volumes have gotten a little longer. I expect the average total length of a modern trilogy is over 300,000 words, but with some amount of resolution in the two intermissions, books may still be a little leaner now.

I'm actually wondering about this myself at the moment. My novel has reached nearly 120,000 words, and could conceivably end there; but I've only told about two thirds of the story I originally had in mind. I think my plan will be to write the remaining third, and see whether it really ends off in 60,000 words, or shows signs of running on towards 100K. In the former case, I guess I'll try for my original plan of a fat trilogy. In the latter, I'll have to look at something more like a pentalogy of slimmer volumes. I haven't really thought about the large story arc in that way. Trilogies are simpler, somehow. Which just brings me back to the question. I don't really know why.

Uncharacteristically, I've recently seen some movies. In particular the two newer Star Trek films. Also uncharacteristically, I've seen most of the older Star Trek films and series. I was never a serious Trekker, but I kind of liked the series.

I quite liked these new films. The funny thing is, they gave me a new respect for poor old William Shatner as an actor. Precisely because my first reaction was, Hey, it's neat to see these silly old characters played by real actors for a change. But the thing was this: I was in large part impressed by the new Kirk because, despite seeming a lot more lively and believable, he was recognizably Kirk. So then it occurred to me that for James T. Kirk to be a character you could recognize, even when played by someone else, William Shatner can't actually have done such a bad job.

Before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing; and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.

I guess there are some advantages to waiting for the Windows versions of these games.

Oo. A book?

Yeah, good old Strong Daze. I used to say that a baby could toddle through Inner Gazak-Uss with nothing but Strong Daze, pumped Mental Magic, and a sharp rattle.

As I recall there is a dude standing around outside Fort Mud who will buy gemstones and emeralds and such. He pays less for them than regular merchants do, but unlike them, he has infinite gold to pay with. So you'll get much more total gold over the course of the game by selling everything you can to that one guy, and selling everything he won't take to the regular merchants, until you drain them of gold.

I seem to recall that mined crystals are also necessary for making canisters, as well as the much rarer puresteel rings, so you may want to hang onto them for a while.

Otherwise, as Triumph said, Geneforge 2 introduced one or two special artifacts that can be made by combining some unique special items. The Emerald Chestguard, in particular, is almost a game-breaker. In addition to being quite good armor, it gives you 2 extra AP, and in the old combat system of G2, that's just deadly. With it and a couple of other things you can get your default AP up to 12, and then boost to 18 with Haste. That's just insane. You can run half across the map in combat, or walk into a room and fire off three Auras of Flames in a row. Ur-Drakon? More like Ur-Marshmallow.

If only a few hundred copies of BoE were ever sold, that implies that a very large fraction of the people who bought BoE managed to finish and release a scenario. Given how much work it is to make a scenario (even a bad one), I don't buy that.

Hmm. That's a pretty good argument. Okay, BoE sales in the thousands is probably about right.

I think by then we can look forward to Avadon VII.

I doubt it paid well, because I strongly expect that almost everyone who bought BoE would have made contact with the community here at some point. That puts an upper bound of around a few hundred copies sold. Not bad if you're only looking for beer money, but not great, when this is supposed to pay your mortgage.

BoE must have done well enough for Jeff to consider trying it again with BoA, but I suspect that this wasn't really such a high threshold.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

I am real or fake.

No-one is the best: the best is yet to come.

(Oh come on Lilith!)

-----

 

(Not again!) To elaborate furthermore, some scenario designers have different ideas, and they're no mediocre, they add a few, special codes which weren't taught in the docs. Like Kelandon's Bahssikava or TM's Canopy: Manufactured Womb. Jeff would explore little by little the endless possibilities that might happen, while debugging them if needed.

 

Sorry, but this has been heatedly discussed, literally for years. Lilith knows what she's talking about. Jeff doesn't really make game engines. He makes games. His engines are only debugged enough to run his games. Debugging them enough to run all possible games would be great, no doubt; but in order to have the time to get that done, Jeff would have to stop making new games for at least half a year. The money would not be made up in sales of his great Blades-of-Geneforge game, because hardly anyone actually wants to make their own games, because making games is hard. Jeff can't afford to lose that much income. The bank would take his house.

Jeff knows all this, because he's tried it twice. He got burned twice. He's not going to do it again.

In one way an Agent is a good choice for a first play-through. You probably won't build many creations, maybe even none at all, so you'll have less micro-managing to do in combat, and the game will go faster. Take Easy difficulty and that will be fine.

For the full Geneforge experience, you kind of have to play a Shaper at some point. Then you get to have some of those bizarre creatures on your side. Eventually you may be wheeling around a little army of seven personal monsters, and by cunning tactics, you can crush the enemy. This is a style of play that's much less generic in an RPG.

I've never played either game, so I find these reactions very interesting. It sounds as though a 'big open world' isn't everything, because if you can just go anywhere and do anything, then nothing really matters, and it ends up feeling as though you can't really do anything at all. On the other hand I can understand that the opposite extreme, of a small little world where the plot runs on rails, is somehow disappointing, too. For me what's best is a big world, where I'm free to wander around quite a bit, but where I'm likely to run into things that turn out to be important stories, not just one-shot side-quests. That gives the feeling that there's treasure out there to find — not in-game loot, but stuff that will be really cool for me as a player, stuff that will go somewhere, and actually matter, other than just by helping me level up.

The leveling system does also seem fundamentally flawed. It sounds like a good idea to enforce some realism, by making you gain expertise only in things you actually practice. But somehow it goes completely against the munchkin fantasy that the leveling mechanic is really all about. People are prepared to spend hours and hours in sheer tedious grinding, for the reward of being able to gain whatever skill they want. And people are prepared to spend hours pursuing side-quests, to gain particular skills given only by that quest. But what no-one wants to do is feel locked into a particular playing style indefinitely. That's not the power fantasy that RPGs are all about. That's weakness. Limitations are for real life.

I repeat my pet theory about the Awakened: already in G2 they weren't doing so hot. They still talked idealistically, but Ell-Rah was dead, and to avoid bringing war-trained serviles to a drakon-fight, the Awakened of G2 were hustling to catch up in the race for power. They were summoning demons, modifying themselves, and breeding drakons, just like everybody else. If anything, they were taking more risks than the others.