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Terminology: Superempowered

Thomas Hobbes based his political philosophy on things he learned from his experiences during the English Civil War.  You've probably heard the aphorism about life being "nasty, brutish, and short" (woo oxford comma!), but one section that struck me ferociously was...well, here:



That is, no one person is so big and tough that they can't be killed while they sleep, or by some team of five other people.  That this was true in his life time, I feel I just have to take his word.  Has it changed?  Well, there's a good argument that technology disproportionately empowers individuals, especially individuals with good ideas.  But there's an even better argument that, in Hobbes' time, casual violence, even murder, was prevalent to a degree most internet citizens would find incomprehensible.  Warren Ellis (a expert on the subject if there ever was one, he said, rolling his eyes and smirking conspiratorially) once said that the person who wins a fight is not the stronger or faster, but the person most willing to permanently damage (not his words) another living, feeling human being.  So I think that when you find people whose lives have led them to be unhesitating in the distribution of violence, they'll go through people who hesitate like tissue.

But no, that's probably romanticizing again.  You see, there's this meme in fiction (and certain related political parties) where the opposite is true: where some people are just better than everyone else.  You see it all over the place, from the Iliad to Die Hard to all the animoos there are.

I've been trained to see it as cool!  How terrible is that?  "Wouldn't it be great if some people could just take charge and run and jump and kill and there was nothing the norms could do about it?!  But no, it'd be okay, because, you see, they'd be more real and cool and interesting and morally invested than the people/objects they would practice their will on!"  I remember someone arguing for that interpretation of Exalted (an old favorite of mine) back in the old days when I went to forums, and I felt mildly ill from it.  Well, sure, some games have characters that are fraught and challenged and made to deserve the gains they have, or else you're permitted to portray them as evil existences, and then it's gotta be okay that they can jump through buildings and be faster than a locomotive and whatever, right?

But anyway, I think that "superempowered," the word John Robb coined for the individuals and small groups who have far greater effect on large systems than you'd expect, is a good name for these people.  So mote it be!

Old School of Hard Knocks

I've always been very fond of the Dark Sun setting books for Dungeon and Dragons.  They were the D&D equivalent of Chuck Berry records, causing imaginary Tolkeinian to complain about "that blasted noise."

"Screw you, mental projection of simplistic moral fantasies!  Dark Sun's the keenest!"

But beware rose-tinted glasses.  Recently, as part of a personal quest to assemble a toolbox for playing the setting with the Solar System (see The Shadow of Yesterday), I read The Valley of Dust and Fire, a supplement that I had a temporary difficulty understanding.

In the middle of an immense sea of silt, which swallows the unwary and harbors horrific monsters, is an eternal sandstorm, which steals the breath and strips the flesh.  At the center of this storm is a ring of lava.  Only one traveler has ever seen it and lived to tell the tale.  The ring is miles across.  In the center of it, surrounded by walls as tall as mountains, there is an insular and xenophobic city, larger than any in the known world, so large that sectors of it may lay fallow and grow forested, the better for nobles to hunt in.  In the center of this city is a park, a garden, where no man enters, and no animal crawls or flies.

There lives the Dragon.

It may seem strange to people unfamiliar to Dark Sun: unique among setting for a game called "Dungeons and Dragons," there is precisely one dragon in Dark Sun, whom everyone calls "The."  His origin is unknown, though his existence is universally famed and feared.  He travels the wastes, and holds cities for ransom.  He is a twisted and terrible and impossibly powerful being.  "His is an absolute existence," as they say, and an inscrutable one.  Where did he come from?  What does do to fill the depressing hours of his empty life?

He is a deadly gem, and the book attempts to gives him a worthy setting: an implacably hostile and depressingly unrewarding home.  I read nearly the entire book before I realized that at no point in the book was any reason given to actually, you know, go to this horrible place.  Where are the plot hooks?  Where is the GM advice on how to weave interesting adventures about the fabled lost city of the Dragon?

Then I found the tiny section addressing this question, with three answers given.

First, the characters could mistakenly believe that the Valley is the utopian city of legend. Seeking out a land of wealth and ease has sent many an explorer off to adventure-just look at Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. The wild tales of the Orient they heard helped inspire their journeys. Player characters could decide all by themselves to seek out the hidden city.

First reason: because they think that it's going to be a safe and blessed place.

Except that, as the book throws in your face, it's not.  So even if you reach a city which is impossible to reach, everyone there is a backwards ancestor-worshipper that wants to whip you to death.  Served you right for dreaming, moron!

Characters ready to accept great risk in the hope of rich reward might come across Galek Sandstrider's account and read of his journeys. Any AD&D® game player worth his or her salt should jump at the chance to explore what might be the greatest treasury of knowledge and power in the entire DARK SUN™ campaign world.

Second reason: Treasure!

This is, as the exhortation implies, the prototypical D&D story: the characters realize that a life of travel and violence can lead to rewards slightly disproportionate to its terrible risks (because the Dungeon Master will usually lean on the side of not killing all the heroes, since we presume he wants to keep playing the game with his friends), and they want those rewards because...

Well, some players, I'm sure, say more.  But the game does not expect you to give it a moment's thought: your character does this sort of thing because we're playing a game where your character does this.  How indie of it.

Quick, think of great fictional characters motivated to quest into dungeons by their desire for treasure!

Well, Indiana Jones wanted treasure because it belonged in a museum.  It's not gotten into, but I feel safe in presuming he wants the great art and sciences of ancient cultures to be in the common possession of all mankind (remember, he is a teacher).

There's the American adventuring party from The Mummy.  I love those guys.  They are a pack of Joneses.  They are rough and tumble, and they want to be rich, and they know that the whole world is out there waiting to get shot up and drop gold by their pure American-ness.

What do these characters have in common?  They each have some place to go back to.  They have some safe and pleasant life somewhere which stands to be enriched by what they can find out in the hinterlands.

Peasants don't go adventuring.  That shit's for knights, nobles.  What's the use of treasure if you have no home where the social contract lets you count your gold in peace?  And anyway, what's the point of counting your gold in peace if you're an adventurer?

Adventure, if you must, but there is no Princeton on Athas, no America, no peaceful place with luxury and ease and renown awaiting delivery of your spoils.  Traveling alone, unprovoked, to collect gold that, not to put too fine a point on it, you have no real way of holding onto...it's suicidal.

Speaking of which...

Lastly, very powerful characters might decide to take a shot at the Dragon. Their research should show that it frequently travels the silt, implying that it maintains a lair in the wastes. Of course, destroying the Dragon in its own demesne is a herculean and probably doomed task—, but your players can find that out the hard way.

Let's dissect this: We're playing a game where combat presents a fun and interesting challenge, and the majority of character ink is spent describing how they interact with the fracas and melee.  And you're rewarded for fighting!  There's all these great deeds and monsters out there which you can only experience (fight) by leveling up (by fighting) and getting better gear (from fighting)!  The game is a series of progressively tactical challenges in a sea of semi-randomized tactical challenges punctuated by "story stuff."

There's nothing wrong with that.  I would describe Final Fantasy Tactics, one of the great games of our generation, with an identical sentence.  And millions of people, myself included, play World of Warcraft, questing and delving and heading off to defeat the Dark Lord in the High Tower in order to avert the Certain Doom over and over again!

What the digital versions of this game-type have in common is a save and restart feature.  When you fail a map in FFT or die in World of Warcraft, you lose nothing but time: either the time since you last saved, or the time it takes to fully recover from your death and resurrection.

The same thing is true in Dungeons and Dragons, except that instead of losing minutes or hours, you're losing months.  How long would it take a group of players to successfully reach the levels required to realistically challenge the Dragon?  Years, easily.  This is a game people play for years.  With the same character.  Who is permanently destroyed by being killed.

But by all means, let them find that out the hard way.

These is the sort of thing that I think of when, say, Malcolm Sheppard talks about how anti-social modern games are.  That there are people who actively seek these kinds of games, I will accept.  Different strokes.  But I am just not yet equipped, by experience or revelation, to distinguish the attraction of the old school from, say, when people who went to English boarding schools laugh and say "Ah yes, they certainly did beat the shit out of us, too right, what what?"

Ben bought a collection of the original Traveler recently, which is full of this sense that I get embarrassed when I read it, as if I were staring at someone with a disability.  It's as it as Jim led me to believe it would be.

A Perfect Example of Atheism

The most common definitions for atheism I hear is along the lines of "confidence in the non-existence of a creator deity."

A more accurate simple definition would be "confidence in the lack of immediate, day-to-day significance of a creator deity."  That is, if you believe that there is something mysterious and magical "out there," but that no one religion has a special line on it, or that or that it's not moved by prayers, then welcome to Atheismville, population y'all.

Killing The Buddha is unsurprisingly full of examples, one of which was posted today, sparking my outburst.

Dogs in the Vineyard players will know what I'm talking about, but it's not an uncommon meaning among the reformation and revival churches; they realized that most Catholics didn't really, you know believe believe in YHVH.  They just believed in the Church (idolatry) or the power of Christ and the saints (also idolatry, though we free-thinking folks call it "polytheism" nowadays).  This is how we talked at Sunday school and bible studies in my good old country home, Riviera Presbyterian.

But beyond disputations between accepted, original, common and real original true definitions, there's a practical argument: it's just a very short step from thinking "people can be moral or immoral, and still follow the tenets of any or no religion" or "God is a diffuse inhuman omnipresence" to saying...

Well, you either have made that step or you haven't.  A speaker at St. Johns once compared process theology (that is, wrestling with the concept of God being both omnipotent and "good") to treading water in a pool: you can stop struggling any time you like by climbing up a number of ladders.  Some people find the "well I guess the human definition of good is incorrect" ladder, and some reach the "this God idea isn't helping me any, is it" one.  But both seem like cop-outs when you're in the pool.  Sunk cost fallacy.  "I've come this far," you shout.  "Why stop now?"

When you're in the pool, it seems to contain all struggle, all meaning and value.  When you're out of it, it seems like a sideshow, a distraction from the rest of the world, an exercise that you might be glad to have done but you're probably glad to have done with.  As for which is the correct perspective, the rationalist in me can only say:

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.  A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

KJV, Matthew 7:17-20

Underwhelming News Friday

NPR is my morning alarm, so I woke up to hear that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Color me lunatic fringe, but I'm not sure that continuations of the Bush detention, torture and secrecy policies quite puts you on the same level as Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.  "Thank You for Not Being Bush, Cries Grateful World."
Then I watched the live feed of the LCROSS impact, but the Centaur module sent up no visible flash or plume at all.  What a gyp!  Hearing the NASA commentators backpedal was a bit amusing, though.  Hopefully the LCROSS itself will be a bigger boom, and the spectroscopic analysis will be positive.

In good new, though, IaWA was great fun last night.  Jila (my character since session 1, who will almost certainly not be part of #2) was abused - as depressingly usual...be aware what you're getting into for playing a character both feminine and child-like in a game of brutal Conan-ery, with all-male players - but then had one of those abusers skinned (okay, it was a living statue, but it still hurt), and then (sadly) strangled the other personally.  I suspect that was the first time she had ever killed someone "up close," and if we ever play out subsequent events, she will be much changed.

Come on and cheer for IaWA

Tonight is finally the third session of In A Wicked Age, whose acronym I have now decided to pronounce like the state.



A clever move in the first session let me ensure my first character's continuing presence in the next two.  And in the previous session, she (?) fell in love!  Possibly!  It's ambiguous.  The point is, excitement!

Cabinet of Curiosities

I found myself rereading the first part of the John Dies at the End 2, John and Dave and the Temple of X'al'naa''thuthuthu.

It's true that this story takes place after John Dies at the End (an amazing book that I cannot recommend highly enough), and thus contains spoilers by its very nature. But it is also true that all of the real surprises are artfully concealed (okay, except for one), and that it is a radical/hilarious/soul-crushing story.

It's your choice whether you read it. I have read it before, and I was reading it again today, when I was greatly inspired by the following bit, which I think requires no context.

Read the rest -->