J.E. Sawyer

I wasn't so much talking about anti-heroes, which today are often defined as heroes who are sassy jerks, but characters who have serious negative flaws. Wolverine is a sassy jerk, but I wouldn't really consider him to be an anti-hero. Elric of Melnibon

A lot of people today think that good and evil are codified things and they probably don't really like the idea of agony in a character whom they control. It's kind of disappointing, but I think that God of War was more adventurous in the presentation of Kratos than most RPGs are with their characters.

In college, one of my German tutors went off on a rant about the pronunciation of Tolkien. To this day, that rant has made me incapable of knowing the proper way of spelling the name without immediate reference. And yeah I messed up Kalevala sry.

Caveat lector: these are a bunch of rambling thoughts written down over the course of half a week. I didn't start out with a destination in mind. The writing was prompted by thoughts about game plots and their characters. *** RPGs are historically grounded in mythic tales. Though the pen and paper hobby grew out of tabletop wargaming, those wargames were quasi-Medieval and fantastic in style. The systems, like Dungeons & Dragons, and the settings that grew out of them drew much inspiration from Tolkien. Tolkien, in turn, took much of his own inspiration from myths like Beowulf, the Prose Edda, and the Kalevala. Mythic tales, if we are to believe some of the central things that Joseph Campbell writes, follow observable patterns in the development of the central characters and the struggles that are of major import to the story. These mythic standards are so ingrained into our culture that people almost instinctively identify with stories that follow the traditional patterns, or so the theory goes. It should not be surprising that RPGs, which took inspiration directly from myths, wound up with similar stories and themes. Dungeons & Dragons attempts to play with the concepts of good and evil, law and chaos, but mostly in superficial ways. Evil people are fundamentally selfish, good people are fundamentally selfless. There are grades within those categories, defined on a Moor****ian law and chaos axis which indicates a preference for collective governance vs. individual freedom, but it doesn't delve much deeper than that. Certainly the published D&D settings that enjoy popularity fall back on these basic concepts. Most Zhentarim of the Forgotten Realms, the Scarlet Brotherhood of Greyhawk, and certainly characters like Strahd and Azalin from Ravenloft are "traditionally" evil. D&D allows for villains to be likeable, but there is never any question that they are villains. It's rare in the extreme that the heroes have any major flaws, anything that could truly alienate the player from identifying them as the good guys. Could Bob Salvatore's Wulfgar still be a hero if he were an unrelenting misogynist? How about a racist? On a higher level, there is also rarely any question about whether the actions of the heroes are worse than those of the villains. Even in games like Fallout, where the player has the ability to play a truly despicable character, there's very little the character could do that compares to the Master's plan for wiping out the human race. In the absence of such grand visions of destructions, many RPG settings provide the comfortable framework of higher morality at work. Elements of the story reinforce that there is a clockwork mechanism that underlines the good and bad deeds of the universe and reacts to them in an established way. Even a setting as thought-provoking as Planescape relies on this; it's fundamental to the setting's concept. Good and evil aren't ideas in the heads of characters, they are codified realities defined and regulated by higher powers. "Remove all doubt, gentle readers, gears are turning." In myths and in early morality plays, the facts of higher order were assumed. There's no question about what needs to be done to Grendel. Grendel's inherently evil nature makes Beowulf's actions against the creature obviously righteous. RPGs might occasionally throw a pseudo-curve ball at the player by providing token justification for why the antagonists are doing what they are doing, but the reasons are almost never intended to excuse the actions of the antagonists. Marvel

The amount of time required to build, texture, skin, weight, and animate a character in a contemporary video game is immense compared to the time required even five years ago. The same applies for levels. If all a module-builder wants to do is scale and tint critters that are already built in the NWN2 toolset, great. But if someone wants to create new creature or prop/building models, it's going to be a lot more involved than it was in the first NWN.

Yeah I don't think anyone is saying that FPSs shouldn't have ammo, but quiet dark-haired girls are so played that I got a free quiet dark-haired girl air freshener the last time I filled up my car with gas.

"Beta approval" + "art almost done" = "not Beta"

Has anyone mentioned yet that F.E.A.R. basically smashes together every played horror cliche of the past few years and puts it in an FPS? Because that's what I came into the thread to do!

So are we. We've been playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory locally because BF2 online is virtually unplayable with our connection.

I didn't understand what you were trying to say. I've had groin pulls that were more fun than KotOR combats, but otherwise you're right.

wait what

I'm not saying that there aren't situations where you can't know everything that's going on, but that's in the hands of the writer/designer. What I'm saying is that making uninformed choices isn't really that fun because you could effectively roll a die and involve the player as much. "Quick, which do you like more: orange or green?!" "Orange!" "Okay, your enemy is the [irish Republican Army]!" "Wait what..."

The reason I'm not as fond as having a "murky" antagonist that gets defined somewhere along the way is that I don't feel the player is necessarily making an informed choice. Having different gameplay experiences is cool, but unknowingly making very important choices doesn't necessarily seem great to me. I'm playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on my Nintendo DS right now. There are often cases where the animals ask for your opinion on something (their clothing, what sort of movie you think they'd star in, etc.). You have two, maybe four options total. There's no way to know what effect each response is going to elicit, so it's kind of frustrating.

No, I'm thinking of having multiple powerful people who are trying to accomplish different things related to the same central plot. There may be one person against whom all ire is directed because of his/her activities, but later the motivations of that person may cause the protagonist to feel sympathy toward them and against his/her detractors. So, if the Master from Fallout had some legitimate beef with Vault 13 for intentionally aggressive actions, the Overseer might become the antagonist. It's not so much that things change as it is that a cast of powerful characters grows into a set of people at odds with each other with the support/defeat of any one of them resolving the main plot.

I think IWD took place in 1280/1281 with IWD2 taking place sometime in the early 1300s. Maralie Fiddlebender was supposed to be mature (well, physically an adult, anyway) by the time of Black Hound, which was "contemporary" 3E Forgotten Realms.

I like the idea of the player deciding who the antagonist is by weighing the actions and motivations of the movers and shakers against their own character's goals. But I guess I wouldn't view that as the same thing as Gromnir is suggesting.

There has to be some reason why the player's character gets done what he or she gets done instead of someone else. It could be due to circumstance, lottery, or some other random factor -- or maybe it's because the universe aligned to make him or her a Very Special Childe. Personally, I like circumstantial heroes better because I don't like it when my character is told he or she is special before accomplishing anything.

I'm waiting for the D&D supplements where human characters with dark skin cannot be paladins and always have rogue as their favored class.

If Dutch ambassadors snuck their way into your house and received visitors as though they were on sovereign territory of the Netherlands, would your house be the Dutch embassy?

Mother Egenia and Everard weren't baddies.

That's pretty easy to do. Trust me, there is a large casual crowd.

He was never a legitimate priest to begin with, just someone who took it on to abuse the privileges of the title. That's nothing particular to Catholicism. People have abused rank and position for as long as there have been ranks and positions to abuse. The Poquelin form was a Tartuffe/Rasputin figure. Jean Baptiste Poquelin is the real surname of the playwright Moli

At E3, most of the booths have front areas, where limited-pass people hang out, play the games, and ogle girls (if present). They almost always also have back areas, or another small booth, where people in suits meet and discuss things that are actually important to the financial success of a game. Companies with booth babes get a lot of people coming to them and they might get mentioned in some press about the game, but usually not by association with an evaluation of the game. The trio of 40 year-old sellers from Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy who push their way past the dummies out front don't really care how many people are waiting in line to get a t-shirt thrown to them from a model. Even though they don't understand games that well, they do understand the bottom line, and they pretty much exclude what's going on out front from that equation. Some press people are influenced by it, but not the ones who are worth a hill of beans. Some might say, "So what?" E3 is a noisy, hard-to-navigate mass of people and immobile obstacles. The huge stages, powerful flashing lights, and mobs of people make the conference a horrible place to try to work. It is hard to hear things and be heard, much less remain coherent over the course of an 8-10 hour day The smaller the "non-industry" traffic/population becomes, the more the conference focuses on interactions between developers, publishers and retailers -- which is the whole point of the event. Want to sell sex? Sell it where it matters: online, print, and television ads. At E3 you're misplacing your efforts and making the conference a difficult place to work.

Planescape II: Shift Harder!

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