Student of Trinity

Most people here find Jeff's games pretty easy on Easy/Casual, especially in the second half of the game; but I think Jeff knows that some people still have a lot of trouble with them. He sees this as a serious problem and tries hard to fix it, but it's not as easy as you'd think.

RPGs are all about building up your character over many levels. There have to be a lot of options, or it's boring. But that means that, by the middle of the game, there are really a lot of different character builds and equipment sets. Jeff's biggest problem seems to be that quite a few of these possible builds are bad. Most people seem to avoid those bad branches of the build tree, but some people do get stuck in them. If this happens to you, then the games do indeed become really hard. You might not know it, but you're character is totally gimped. You're playing on Easy, but you're playing with both hands tied behind your back and your head in a bucket, because you've been making bad skill choices for ten levels or so.

Maybe what Jeff's games most lack is some kind of ongoing tutorial or hint system to advise novice players on character building.

Bloody Old Exile.

(Bloody American auto-censor.)

Ah. Bob can be found in the BOE forum, if you have the 'Speak to Bob' quest.

Our safety procedures are extremely rigorous. Somehow, though, it keeps happening. A thread gets out of control, rogues are spawned, and an entire forum has to be sealed forever behind impenetrable slabs of internet granite. This has happened several times in our history.

Are you bold to the point of rashness and ambitious to the point of folly? Then you may breach the seals and pry lost secrets from their deadly guardians.

As long as you have the quest, that is. If not, go speak with Bob, in BOE.

The rules are mostly common sense, here. Except the rule about tipping.

The game was a good idea but the scoring was broken. Just reset all the scores to zero, send some goons to repossess Lilith's absolutely nothing, and try again.

.

Will the estimable Abu-Bakr now become available as a vassal or servant? If so, should Emir Hasan take him on?

If that, too, is so, could competitors get him to try to kill our worthy emir, as he killed the vile Rostam at our worthy emir's behest?

If that is also so, then I have one last question, given that it is possible in this game to buy horses.

Can one also buy dogs?

You could run an impressively useful steam engine by burning wood, and coal would be even better. The main bottleneck, I think, is not refining the fuel, but rather attaining the metallurgy and machining to make the engine itself. The whole advantage of combustion engines, over simple devices with wound-up cords or falling weights, and over animal or slave power, is that engines can generate tremendous force. The engines themselves have to be strong enough to contain that force. A combustion engine that isn't made of very strong material is just a bomb (though maybe a fizzling bomb, if it leaks too much to build up high pressure).

So a useful engine really has to be made of metal, and even that's not enough: the metal has to be strong everywhere, because the thing will break if it's weak at any point. Worst of all, for combustion engines you need to have metal parts that fit closely enough to seal against high-pressure gas, and yet slide freely enough past each other not to jam. So you need really good metalworking for engines, not just the ability to pound lumps of iron until they're fairly flat.

One thought I have pondered over for years: what if the ancient greeks had had fossil fuels? (ie. Easily accessible gas, oil or coal.) They had basic steam engines worked out, and knew of the existance of electricity. Maybe, if they had actually had motive and possibility to advance their engines, well, who knows?

No, they didn't really have steam engines. They had aeolipiles. Aeolipiles are astonishingly ancient, but they're not useful. You can get one to spin around, but good luck getting it to do any actual work. It just won't actually generate any significant force, unless you can make it strong enough to hold enormous pressure, and heat it enough to generate that pressure. Ancient societies couldn't do either of those things. Even then it's not a good steam engine, because it doesn't condense the steam again, just blows it out, which is why aeolipiles have remained toys for over two thousand years, and never been used by anyone as practical engines.

Saying that the ancient Greeks had steam engines because they had aeolipiles would be like saying that they had airplanes because they had paper airplanes. (Of course they didn't have paper. Vellum airplanes?)

(The idea that Heron of Alexandria invented a steam engine that would open temple doors seems to have been a conflation of two different devices that Heron described. The door opener was actually a different device, not a steam engine at all.)

I don't see how the ancients really knew about electricity, either. The word 'electricity' is derived from the Greek word for amber, because rubbing amber makes static easily. (It's a good insulator with a smooth surface, or something, I guess.) I read once that there was some archeological evidence for ancient chemical Voltaic cells, but these could at best have been for tricks, making sparks or shocks. To do anything useful with electricity, you need a generator to make a steady current, and generators and electric motors are quite tricky devices. There's nothing intuitive about them, and they don't work like anything else. They're crackpot contraptions with coils of wire rotating in magnetic fields. You wouldn't set out to make one unless you knew the quite advanced theory; and you wouldn't likely stumble on them while messing around, unless you were a YouTube genius building a perpetual motion flying saucer, and you'd only be that if you knew that electric motors existed. They weren't invented until after Michael Faraday had discovered the phenomenon by which they work, electromagnetic induction, in 1821.

Exactly. With no moon, there might have been no terrestrial life, because maybe evolution into tidal zones was a crucial intermediate step. All the proportionally big-brained sea creatures are mammals that went back to the sea from the land, so with no terrestrial life, maybe there'd be no intelligent life. Earth's moon appears to be anomalously large, so it's conceivable that intelligent life is rare in the universe because big moons are rare. Or maybe: no, tides weren't important, big moons are no big deal, and intelligent life isn't rare for that reason; maybe it isn't even rare at all.

Changing things with far-reaching implications is only interesting, in my opinion, if you have a specific set of consequences in mind, and you just want to tell that story. It's only with simpler details that had limited and immediate consequences that I can see a well-posed problem in "What would have happened if...?".

Embarrassing true fact: shortly after my PhD defense I was sitting around a table with half a dozen physicists, including at least two successful professors of theoretical physics, and it occurred to me to ask why there were two high tides every 24-hour day, when there was only one moon in the sky. I had never thought about this before. No-one at the table had a good answer.

This was bad, because the connection between the moon and the tides was the decisive proof of Newtonian physics. My packaging of Newton and moon together wasn't just facetious; it's a serious possibility that what really defines Newton's role in history is the tidal effect of the moon. Newton figured it out, and the moon making tides was his smoking gun proof that he had it right, precisely because he could explain why there were two tides each day, and not just one. It's not just that the moon pulls up the water in a heap, and the earth's surface rotates through the heap. It's more complicated than that.

In Germany everyone knows this, because Newtonian tides are in the standard undergraduate curriculum. In Canada this wasn't so, and from a modern point of view there may not be any reason it should have been. It shows how smart Newton was, though. Pretty smart.

Aborting Isaac Newton is the kind of alternate history that I find uninteresting because there are too many plausible consequences to consider, and I can never convince myself that I've thought of them all. Newton's work had few consequences immediately, but its eventual effects were incalculable.

Consider first just the minimal core content of Newton's contribution to science. The laws of nature would still have been there without Newton, so someone else could have figured them out. On the other hand, humans had gone thousands of years before Newton without discovering the laws of motion. Perhaps it would have taken centuries for someone else to do the job. So in talking about the absence of Isaac Newton, it's unclear whether we're talking about the absence of basic physics, or not.

It's also unclear how much of subsequent history really depended on Newton's basic discoveries. Many technological advances were made purely empirically, by people who never even tried to solve Newton's equations. On the other hand, Newton's well-known success in reducing so much of nature to simple equations may have given everyone on the planet a subconscious optimism that encouraged tinkering.

Then there's the fact that Newton's insights took a particular detailed form, which might have been different even if somebody else had found the same basic ideas. Newton talked about moons and planets and comets, when perhaps he could have had a more terrestrial context instead, and perhaps made the launching of physics as we know it into more of a break from the astronomical tradition that dated back to ancient Egypt and Sumeria. Perhaps an alternative Newton could have incorporated some kind of philosophical slant that would otherwise have shaped later science differently. Or perhaps Newtonian physics is digitally mastered, as it were: it is what it is, a set of notes that are exactly the same no matter who plays them, and neither Newton nor any alternative Newton could have colored them or spun them any differently. These things are all very hard to imagine.

Finally, this kind of 'big' alternate history makes me unsure what it even means to ask what would have happened if everything was the same except for one thing (in this case, Newton). We don't know enough about what 'the same' really means. Perhaps there really was this other kid, born just twenty years after Newton, who also had some funny thoughts about geometry and planets, and then found that Newton had already done this stuff, so he gave it all up without making any mark on history at all. Is it an additional wild speculation to postulate that kid, as well as removing Newton? Or is it an additional wild speculation, to leave that kid out?

Maybe what we mean by "What if no Newton?" is really "What if there were no Newton or any other person like him in his time?", because that's the interesting question. But if we're bundling speculations together just because the packaged speculations are more interesting, how do we know where to stop? Should we say that "What if no Newton?" really means "What if no Newton and no moon?" because that's the more interesting question? That ought to be taking it much too far, but I'm not sure how to draw the line above the slippery slope.

"A sign," he said, "a sign."

 

"It is this," I answered, producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire a trowel.

 

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let us proceed to the Amontillado."

Elric was in the stapled booklet "Gods, Demigods and Heroes" before Deities and Demigods. I'm really not sure that Gary Gygax had much to do with either of those supplements, which were authored by other people.

Gygax's vision of D&D was always — and often explicitly — against the epic, worlds-at-stake scenarios of Tolkien and Moorcock. He tried to make a game of endless picaresque adventures, where there was always another range of mountains to be scaled. I think that was his main innovation, in fact. D&D grew out of tabletop miniature wargaming, very much like what Warhammer is now. Other people developed gaming that simulated individual combat rather than armies, including fantasy combat with magic and monsters, and even the notion of character advancement; but it was focused on short campaigns, with advancement being a one-time improvement kind of like making a 'king' in checkers. Gygax invented leveling as we know it, a very long progression over campaigns that can last for years. This is the opposite of Tolkien, where the whole world changes in just a few months, and the only boosts for which a character can even have time are things like finding a ring or reforging a sword.

About strange 'attributes': The mathematician G.H. Hardy, mainly famous now for discovering Ramanujan, had an odd set of characteristics by which he measured people, with scores from 0 to 100. According to C.P. Snow's preface to Hardy's Mathematician's Apology, some of the characteristics were 'Spin', 'Bleak', 'Stark', and 'Old Brandy'. Bleak and Stark were fairly self-explanatory, though the difference between them seems to have been expressed only in the fact that 'a stark man is not necessarily bleak: but all bleak men without exception want to be considered stark'. Spin was a cricket term, indicating a knack or tendency for subtlety and indirectness, or something. Old Brandy measured the kind of borderline eccentricity exemplified by a character who drank nothing but old brandy: bizarre, yet just conceivably reasonable, from a certain point of view.

Huh. IAWA costs $5 for the PDF rulebook, so I just bought it, on the off chance that it'll be fun to play with family over Christmas. At least, I tried to buy it. I'm not sure anything is actually going to happen. Maybe I need to roll.

EDIT: No, it just worked. I now have the PDF. You mark my words, this internet thing might catch on big some day.

I once put a couple of janitorial ogres into a relatively high-level dungeon. They wore coveralls, and carried mops, and pushed trash cans around. They didn't put up much of a fight, but they caused enormous consternation. I was horrified that the players just slaughtered these harmless janitors. I was expecting them to be surprised by mild-mannered ogres, but they were all Good, so I thought they should at least ask a few questions before shooting. Nope. I reproached them, and they complained to me that I had violated a genre convention.

After that I stopped identifying unusual monsters as stock types. Orcs were all evil, but 'hairy humanoids with big teeth and bandy limbs' could be anything, and players were more cautious. That was probably fair.

Fantasy evil isn't always sure what it wants. Is it just ruthless and selfish? Or does it pursue harm and misery as ends in themselves? Maybe good is similar, up to a point. It's one thing to be soft-hearted by nature, and enjoy helping others if it isn't too hard; it's another to sacrifice your life for what you know is right.

In a game you kind of need all these types. Evil-for-its-own-sake is convenient in both boss villains and trash mobs, but ruthlessness is handy for ambiguous NPCs that can switch hit between opponent and ally. Kindly NPCs are good for helping out the party, but if they're too heroic they'll steal the party's thunder or even do its job, so you need a bunch of nominally 'good' folk who still aren't really up for the big challenge. Then of course you need the truly noble types, who can be relied upon to keep the campaign moving through thick and thin.

I tried for a while to make an FRPG that would bake into the rules most of the stock play elements that always seemed to drive campaigns in practice, and to my surprise the main moral dichotomy turned out to be between direct and indirect approaches. Do you confront things toe-to-toe, relying on direct strength, or do you manipulate things indirectly, using skill?

Is Turtledove's whole alternate history in the same continuity as The Guns of the South? If so, it's a bit different as alternate history because its premise is not just a small change that could plausibly have occurred. It's a great book, so I don't want to spoil it, but it can't be a spoiler to mention the image on the cover: Robert E. Lee with an AK-47.

Hmmm. I'm not sure it should count when the 'surprise' is only that I've never heard of the obscure copy-cat.

Yes, the terrible burden of responsibility is now lifted. Without the obligation of being a role model for this raucous community of unschooled internet vagrants, I can now cut loose with all my own unschooled vagrancy. I can post snarky put-downs against all the people who have annoyed me.

Hmmm. I don't seem to be annoyed right now. Already had coffee.

I have a faculty meeting this afternoon. Haushaltskommission. Maybe that'll do it.

SoT, i guess the core of our argument is that you've been focusing on whether fanfiction can be good writing and i don't actually think that literary merit, however defined, is anywhere near the most important thing about how most people relate to fiction (fan or otherwise). i'm not especially invested in saying that fan fiction can be "good writing" by any particular set of standards because i think to a large extent "good" and "bad" are beside the point. i mean, Michael Bay movies consistently manage to be major cultural spectacles, even though only a contrarian would say they have much objective artistic merit. you keep asking "why does fanfiction exist? why do people write it and why would anyone read it?" and yet you keep distracting yourself from the reasons you're offered by coming back to whether it's good writing, which doesn't really play a big part in any of those reasons

I don't seem to myself to have been distracted, because of course for me whatever it is that is drawing my interest is the thread. I agree that the topic is a bit ill-defined.

The original question was indeed about why fanfiction exists. For me at least the default premise about why fiction in general exists is that good writing is worthwhile in itself, so 'to write a good book' is always a sufficient answer to the question of why someone writes. So for me the question of whether fanfiction is good writing was an automatically spawned sub-thread.

The implicit thesis that I at least helped to propose, if only for argument, was that people read and write fanfiction, even though it is bad writing, for purposes other than producing good writing. I heard other people to propose the antithesis that fanfiction isn't bad writing, and the effort to write well is indeed part of why people write fanfiction.

The somewhat waffling synthesis seems to be that whether fanfiction is good or bad writing is in some way a bad question, so let's stop talking about it and just agree that there are other reasons for writing fanfiction. I'm pretty sure this is a cop-out, though. Calling writing 'good' or 'bad' is just a way of summarizing a whole bunch of more detailed reasons for why one might want to read it, and the cloud of aspects of goodness and badness is bound to have some overlap with the 'other reasons' for writing fanfiction. People seem to want other people to read their fanfiction; people seem to want to read fanfiction; and people seem to want to give and receive praise and criticism about fanfiction. The quality of fanfiction as writing does not really seem to be beside the point at all.

The kind of synthesis I'd like better would be to identify some particular ways in which fanfiction may be bad, and other ways in which it may be good. Then the conclusion would be that people who are into fanfiction weight some aspects of literary quality more highly than others. The emergence of this non-traditional set of preferences could be related somehow to the existence of the internet. The growth of fanfiction could be understood as a sort of genre speciation.

We've clearly bumped into this, but I at least haven't really framed such a conclusion explicitly. If I try to summarize things we've said so far, that lead in this direction, then I'd say we have indeed identified some ways in which fanfiction can be both good and bad.

On the good side, street-level writing of sentences and paragraphs is pretty much the same whether you're writing Twilight fanfiction or the second coming of Anna Karenina. I'd say fanfiction can be as good as any writing in this respect. And it would be pretty easy to understand a new tendency to value this aspect of writing more highly, in comparison to aspects of writing that are only relevant for larger chunks of text. Short formats have become more important, and I for one welcome our new tweeting overlords. People have been complaining for centuries that attention spans have been shrinking, but I just find most older writing to be ridiculously long-winded.

Also on the good side, figuring out what a given character would do in a new situation is a legitimate part of good writing. So is figuring out what new situations would best showcase a character. Fanfiction is clearly very strong on these aspects of writing. Why might people have become more appreciative of these aspects in particular, recently? Maybe the internet has brought so many characters within easy reach that the market is simply glutted, and using the ones we have better has risen in value, in comparison with generating new ones. I dunno. Something.

Given a situation and character one can determine what comes next, and given a character and an action one can ask what situation would be most appropriate. Fanfiction practices solving both those problems. The third comparable problem is to posit a situation and a series of consequences, and then come up with the character who would react to that situation by inducing those consequences. Fanfiction seems to be weak on this, and this happens to be the way I seem to like to approach characters, so fanfiction leaves me rather cold. I find it very hard to start with a character on a blank canvas, and feel I need to work towards characters, starting from other things. Conceivably this is a male-female difference. If that were true, then the fanfiction story could be that some relatively small other cause has made it a bit easier to produce writing in a way that comes more naturally to women, and so it has been amplified.

Another way that fanfiction is weak, I would say, is that it doesn't try to solve the hardest problem of all: given nothing, find a coherent combination of situation, characters, and events that is really interesting. This is really hard, though, and saying that fanfiction doesn't try to do it may just be like saying that a climber isn't tackling Everest. Even if you do aim for Everest, it's smart to get a lot of smaller mountains under your belt first. Perhaps for someone like me the fictional analog for climbing smaller mountains is to start with a rather unoriginal plot, a somewhat original setting, and then figure out the characters who will drive that plot in that setting. Perhaps fanfiction just permutes the elements, and starts from unoriginal characters. It may not be what I'd do to work up towards Everest, but it may not really be any less ambitious.

I will retire soon, too. The torch is being passed to a new generation. Well, to a new something. Anyway I hope somebody caught the torch.

I plan to become a mascara vilsh.

Naw, it's not a letdown. it's the end of the Blue Period.

Was it scary? Or do you just wake up and it's all over like a dream?

In Soviet Russia, Randomizer max-mins YOU!