Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 16

Ghost You Walk the World to Watch it Fall

[Bad username: rush-that-speaks] has a new review up that you should be reading. Go read.

The Game of Spoons - How Susannah Slept with the Duchess

Preface - the following example comes from Dragon's Dogma, a video game for current-generation consoles in which, saliently, you get to create and customize the appearance of a protagonist and their main support character (incidentally, the source of the phrase "the beast fears fire").  In my first playthrough, I created as my protagonist  a tomboyish, freckly girl named Susannah.  This is her story...

So Susannah, this young fishing woman, she survived getting her heart torn out and eaten by a dragon, and was consequently fated to kill the thing.  She goes to the city, meets with the Duke, has some adventures, kills some critters; romance is not on her mind, though the captain of the guard and the guy who trains the volunteer soldiers out in the countryside are both kind of attractive to her.

She also gets contacted by the Duchess' maid to meet with the Duchess in secret.  There's been hints that something shady is going on in the duchy, and the Duchess is a lonely girl, recently wed and subsequently ignored who might know some things Susannah really ought to learn.  Susannah sneaks out to meet her and the first thing that happens is the Duchess confesses undying love for her.

Okay, girl is really isolated and and feels helpless, Susannah can dig; she's out of her element, too.  Susannah is a warrior in a country where the only other female warrior is an obvious sham and the Duchess was probably brought up on tales of courtly bullshit in the fantasy France from whence she came.  She's reading from a cultural script.  It's a little weird, but maybe they can help one another.

Then the Duke comes in and tries to strangle the Duchess, not knowing Susannah is even there, because of reasons of which Susannah is not aware.  Susannah intervenes, ends up in the dungeon for her troubles, escapes, and the whole castle plays it like nothing happened.  Even the Duke.  Okay, the duchy is fucked.  A while later, the maid shows up and says the Duchess got locked in a place awaiting either execution or a quieter sort of murder, and Susannah is the only one who can save her.  So she does.  She gets into the cell where they are keeping the Duchess.

They kiss.  Susannah throws her (gently) on the bed.  Discretion shot.

My first thought:  WAITAFUCKINGMINUTE Susannah's not gay.

My Second thought:  I am so glad I didn't end up playing this as a 12 year old boy.**

So how and why did Susannah fuck the Duchess?

Player Characters (PCs)* are not like characters in fiction.  They have a lot in common with characters in any other fictive medium, but their priorities as a tool of transmitting fiction are heavily skewed from those of characters in other media.  Heavily enough that I'm coming to envision them as a different sort of thing entirely.  PCs are, more than any other kind of character, vehicles for the player, as the player, to interact with the setting and story.

But that's how all characters work, right?  To an extent.  A significantly lesser extent than PCs.  You can identify with Dean Winchester all you want on the screen, but it is the choice of the writer, the director and the actor to determine what Dean does, how he behaves and how he communicates his thoughts and feelings.  You can control how you view the subtext and sexual tension, but if you want him to just kiss Castiel already, you've got to write fanfic.

If you want Bella Swan, a character praised and reviled for being as close to a vehicle for readers as a literary character can be, to go with Jacob instead of Edward, or realize that she's 17, out of her depth and put that rainy town of shirtless monsters in her truck's rearview, you've got to write fanfic.

With a PC, you can make these decisions based on what you want to see happen.  You can decide that Bella Swan is through being like Bella Swan and wants to be like Dean Winchester, and mechanics of the game might reward or punish the decision, but it can't prevent you from making it.

This is less the case in video games than in tabletop games, but it is still possible.  Susannah did not have to go on the mission to rescue the Duchess that led to the cutscene in which they had sex.  The mission was, however the only way in which you can access that location, so if exploration is why you're playing Dragon's Dogma, you will also, perforce, be exploring the Duchess' vagina.  Quoting myself: play or don't play.

Whether or not you or I buy into this notion of PC as vehicle for player to interact with the world, it's a concept that sits at the bottom of all game design, or, at least, all games in which a player controls or portrays a character.  The PC is not a fictional person, it's a diving suit or sports car or space ship.  It's your tool for interacting with the story, with the game mechanics, with the setting and with the other fictional people.  This is already running on kind of long, so I am going to have to look at how ableism rises from this starting point in the next part of this series, but ableism is far from the only fucked up thing that comes out of this concept.

I posit the tale of Susannah as an example.  You get issued a love interest (and another discretion tumble shot in the credits) based on stuff you've done with and for characters during the game.  There are five women set up as potential love interests and developing affinity with them is very easy.  There are significantly fewer males set up in the narrative as potential love interests and  I've figured out through subsequent playthroughs that it's kind of tricky to get a male love interest.  Actually, a couple of them are hard to even encounter, and the only one I've ever successfully secured (the real dragon's cultist-sycophant's TV Tropes style dragon), I did so by killing and bringing back to life (Julien really digs you after that).  Still have not gotten hot warrior action from either of the guys Susannah had her eyes on.

(ETA I cannot be 100% certain that this is not set up so to explore and encourage women loving women, but I'll let the difference between how the silver chestplate looks on male and female models (female version not included, but if you google "Slave Leia" you'll get the same level of coverage) and note that a large proportion of the support characters (appearances and gear chosen by other players) are female and wear them sit here as evidence in my favor.)

I assume it's because Capcom assumes that I will be a dude, and playing a dude!arisen (or will have a lesbian fetish), and I will give them that it did throw me to have Susannah assigned a sexuality by the narrative which was not the one I had in mind (at least in Bioware games, you have the out of saying "Oh shit, sorry I led you on" when someone wants to take you to bed).

These assumptions sit at the bottom of the awful shit that came out during the development of the recent Tomb Raider game (which is apparently, a lot better than I expected) about the player wanting to protect Lara from the dudes on the island.

Apparently, video game designers and publishers, when enough teeth are pulled to allow a game out with a default-female protagonist, they do not give her a love interest.  Jim Sterling (I'll link the segment when I am not at work, as the Jimquisition is all kinds of NSFW) quoted a publisher as saying players (guys) would find it weird for a hetero female protagonist to kiss a male love interest.

I'll let that sink in.

If nothing else, it's strong evidence after the point I'm making that PCs aren't characters in the sense that they are fictional people, but meant to be hollow vehicles for players.  Players about whom publishers and developers carry a lot of assumptions.  Players about whom tabletop designers carry a lot of assumptions.  Link and Gordon Freeman are mute.  Susannah slept with the Duchess, despite my believing she had a thing for Ser Berne.

Next time, I'll be getting mechanical and dorkly in describing how this translates into a lot of the ableism in how tabletop games work.

*Player Character - the character a player controls, PC for short, in most tabletop games.

**Seriously, I almost played as a 12 year old boy at first, but I could not get him to look right.  I'm glad I didn't. 

A Game of Spoons (Part 1 - Double Jump)

A few weeks ago, I played some of Ni No Kuni.  It was very pretty, but not my kind of gameplay and the story was not one that grabbed me, so back to GameStop it went.  One of the first things available to the player in terms of character customization, was the ability to jump, which the description flat out says has absolutely no bearing on the game in any way.  It was the first customization I bought with a rather scarce resource.

In Dragon's Dogma, which I am still playing, 9 months out, I tend toward playing my character in the archery classes even though I am a terrible archer because they can double-jump.  I get frustrated with the inability of the warrior classes to double jump, though it rarely affects exploration or combat (the mage classes can Princess-Peach-Hover, which splits the difference in terms of satisfaction, even though I find it a lot more useful for exploration).

My most empowering dreams are of me agile and strong as Spider-man, leaping, climbing, performing feats of athleticism that I (and most people) cannot perform.

I am a fully able-bodied person.  I cannot double-jump.  I am reasonably certain that double-jumping is entirely outside of human capability.  I could be mistaken.  I'm a fan of the martial arts and I have seen people do other things that I thought were beyond human capability, so I hold a sliver of doubt.  If there is such a thing on You Tube, let me know.

As a gamer, I come to video and tabletop games at least partly for empowerment fantasies.  I don't think there's anything wrong with that, per se, anything immature or foolish, and I dearly hope that it causes no one else any harm.  I enjoy feeling powerful and competent in dramatic situations (with games, it's almost always violent situations, and that is worrisome, if not problematic, but that's not today's topic - though as a matter of disclosure, I am a big fan of Koei's Dynasty Warriors series, so, yeah).  I like to be able to do things as a character that I cannot personally do.

Conversely, there's nothing that throws me out of a game worse than feeling disempowered.  For those of you who remember Autumn War and wondered why that eventually morphed and morphed and morphed again into its current successor, the Beast Fears Fire project, well, what happened was that, in testing I discovered that the bleakness of the setting and the situation left players feeling disempowered, and while there might be powerful experience somewhere in there, it's not one my players wanted to have.  It's not one I want to have.

I take it as axiomatic that feelings of disempowerment and deprotagonization are the two things that I want to avoid as a gamer and a game designer (there's another topic in that, and some who question why this should be an axiom, but again, not this topic, not this day).

Until today, I also took it as axiomatic that the ableist assumptions that go into most games (particularly tabletop games) were a regrettable but necessary byproduct of games fulfilling empowerment fantasies, or, at least, beyond my ability to fix.  But fuck that.  That's a foolish thing to leave unexamined, a foolish thing that can and does do harm.  So I'm going to examine it.

Mind, a lot of the things I am going to talk about don't apply to many modern or Story Games, but they do still apply to many, many games; all of the traditional games of which I am aware, all of the games I have played regularly, and, to an extent, all of the games I have designed.  So, yeah, my dog is in this fight.  I'm going to be focusing on tabletop games, since I know how to make those (arguably), but if something comes up that applies to video games or board games, I will explore it. 

But When they Go...

The Revision Fears Fire

Started work on the revisions for BFF. This is what the second version looks like.

Murrenic Wolves
[Impulse – Gang Up]

Murrenic wolves are more aggressive and less shy of humans than most wolves, and that’s bad enough.  Travelers from abroad claim that the wolves of Murren behave in the summer the way most wolves do in the leanest winters.  So when Murrenic packs get pushed south into Crickton, always in the winter, it is very bad news.

There’s a popular story in Crickton that the wolves that come are the descendents of the Murrenic people that used to live in Crickton (ignoring the fact that there are still a lot of Murrenic people living in Crickton today) under the heel of the oligarchs in the days of the Oak Province.  The Oak oligarchs amassed fabulous wealth through ruthless, relentless exploitation of their people and the land, and the story goes that this left them, over time, jaded and bored and powerful.  Excesses followed, blue glazed kilns in every settlement, children roasted by the dozen in every kiln, lurid and abominable things.  Who knows if the people abandoned civilization and the human form out of outrage, due to their corruption from the top or because of some angry deity, but they all shed human form and ran for the steppes (after savaging the oligarchs or with same as their alphas, depending) and left the land open for the Savels to settle.  If you’re not sensing self-serving, racist propaganda, then do pay the fuck attention.

 Murrenic wolves run in large packs, and don’t mind losing a few of their lower status members on testing opposition and opportunity.  They’re not man-eaters by choice  but they will take people if people are what are available.

Harm [1D and Down, 3/2D if Down] This isn't terribly mysterious.  They surround you, hamstring you, pull you down.  Then things get bad.

Hunted by Wolves

Wolves move into position around you, at a distance, in shadows, unnoticed.
Wolves begin to reveal their presence in order to get you to run.
Lower status individuals attack and retreat to test you, and try to get you to run.
The bulk of the pack attacks and retreats, all sides, in waves.

Face Disaster to evade the pack or separate an individual from the pack far enough that you can dispatch it.  Individual wolves aren’t usually a challenge to a hero unless they are pack alphas.  The pack will suffer a few losses before they decide to be elsewhere, more than wolves from other parts, mind, but  they aren’t about to fight to the last.

Face Want to find a place that is sheltered from the wolves.  Wolves are better swimmers and climbers than many people think, but they aren’t quite as good as humans.  Usually, finding shelter just delays things with the pack, but they may find something else to chase.

Face Violence [15] to stare down and cow wolves.  Godspeed.

Hospices and municipal governments sponsor wolf hunts fairly regularly, to the point where wolf hunting is a legitimate (if not highly regarded) profession.  They pay bounties for raw pelts, mark them with purple dye and make blankets, rugs and coats for the needy.  This makes Cricks associate wolf fur with poverty.  As such, they don't trade very well.

The People Fear Fire

Still here! Just at a loss for what the next blogging project ought to be, and coming up empty on comments for other peoples' posts, which makes me a poor LJer, and we're down to a population so small that everyone's efforts count. Soon, I will come up with something. Promise.

The Next Thing Fears Fire

And so I am finished with BFF (well, the first draft - editing comes next, revision, shilling, kickstarting, then real editing and real layout and who knows...) I'm not sure, yet, what is going to take its place. I know that it is not going to be as regular as BFF, simply because I need to write more things, short and long, and I want those to take precedence over blogging projects. I have a notion to go an mess with the old D&D Ravenloft setting and kick around its bizarreness for a little while. We'll see where that gets me.

The Beast Fears Fire - Trolls

This is the last of the Beast Fears Fire Monsters! Wooo!

Trolls [Want 4]
Impulse - To Curate the Past

Trolls don't really believe in the Mother. They know the sandrisas, they have seen them, and on the rare occasions that you can get a troll to say anything about them, they will usually say the sandrisas are full of it, but very powerful, so don't bother bringing it up around them. Trolls claim to be quite old, created from the Earth (with a little Wood thrown in), in the earliest days, they were tasked to dig the Underworld, and more than a few still live down there. Still others live on the surface, and tend to prefer the mountains and other out-of-the-way places to live quietly. They don't care. Not usually. Not about much of anything. There haven't been new trolls in only-they-know-how-long, so their numbers are few and have dropped from the old days due to attrition. Until recently, Cricks thought that the nearest trolls lived in the Surlycrow, but a handful have come down from the mountains since the receding of the ice,

Trolls are big, almost twice human size, but spindly and hunched with the distinct appearance of being carved out of roots and stone. They have long arms and can go on all fours when they feel like it. Trolls have no sex, but adopt gender (something that is apparently vary important to their identity), usually male or female, but occasionally neuter or intersex or something different, and refer to one another as sister, brother or sibling as the case demands. Trolls wear baggy garments full of pockets and long, richly dyed and carefully constructed coats, usually in bright colors. Trolls appreciate anything colorful, and are usually willing to trade for colorful objects. Trolls do not need to eat, but like to. They especially like noodles and dumplings, as well as spicy food and alcohol (though they cannot get intoxicated, they appreciate the taste). Every troll carries a great weapon forged from the tools they used to dig the Black Mansions as a symbol that they will not be enslaved again. Trolls are not especially violent, but they can be terrifying fighters and extremely difficult to kill. Trolls choose names based on plants, usually the flower, fruit or seed of the plant - Turnipseed, Cherrystone, Samarra, Catkin; something like that.

Harm - 4 Trolls are incredibly strong, tough as boulders and seasoned hardwood, and armed as a matter of course. They are usually not interested in fighting except to defend their person an property. If you fight a troll, face Violence as usual, and godspeed. Human-troll interactions are most common when one or the other is looking for something from the past. Trolls enjoy keeping collections, and know places where things were buried in the old days. They tend to make their homes in and around these places, old pre-imperial ruins, libraries, seed archives, research stations, military fortresses, things like that. Treasure hunters and scholars are the most likely to run into them on purpose (treasure hunters are the most likely to have to fight with them, if they don't mind their manners), and it's possible, though difficult to trade with trolls for something of the ancient world.

Sifting the Hoard
When you are going through a troll's stuff, either to trade or steal, face Want.
On a Hit, you find something of use or interest, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move (which, if you're stealing is, I bet, "The Troll Finds Out."
On a Hard Hit, you find something interesting or useful and the Troll is either willing to trade, or doesn't know you took it. Do be warned, trolls are good trackers, and you may be facing Disaster (and disaster) soon.
On a Miss, you find the thing you absolutely need for what you mean to do, but the troll isn't willing to part with it unless you do something (dangerous and difficult) for it first. If you're stealing it, the first you know that the troll has found you is when the troll bounces you off the walls a few times and you suffer Harm as stated.

Cause I love you like a mountain
Trolls should be a treasure trove of history, but their general indifference to the actions of human beings and their tendency to be hermits makes their recollections, when they can be persuaded to share them, of little use to historians. Lahesian trolls are somewhat divided by the sandrisas, into those who are willing to work for them and those who aren't, and the trolls report that troll-on-troll violence has resulted from these arrangements, something that scholars weren't aware even happened. This has left Lahesian trolls more than a little upset and makes trolls from other regions hesitant to make contact with them. There are rumors that troll bodies are composed almost entirely of esoteric wood, but anyone who successfully kills a troll had best keep that to themselves. Murrenic law treats that as murder and any troll who finds out is bound to return the favor.

The Beast Fears Fire - Thark

Thark [Violence 2/3 Gang]
Impulse - To Punish Transgressions

The prophets claim that the world was once perfect, ordered, unchanging, and the Mother-who-is-Earth was the only thing that lived on it. Then came Father-who-is-Water, a churning chaos that is never one thing for more than the briefest of moments, and he laid down on top of the Mother, and from this was born the green growing things, the Daughter, who desires the Mother and the Father to be a single being, a dynamic whole who is the Daughter. Or something like that. The point is the sandrisas, their prophets and bunyp and all that rules the mountaintops fear Water and hate Wood, and while they have limited success dealing with the one, they did manage to make a being that has a lot of people quite worried, something that has appeared before in different parts of the continent, causing awful destruction and barely being contained or destroyed.

Thark are similar to spirits. They have no physical form of their own and cannot embody. Those capable of seeing them outside of a host report that they have a long, segmented body with tiny, finlike appendages along their length. In order to interact with the physical world, they have to inhabit and possess a nonsentient (well, non-communicative) animal. Thark are apparent when inside a host through a manifestation of shadowy pits in place of the eyes and mouth of the host in question, sometimes rimmed in red or orange light. A dark, ashen substance continually leaks from these orifices, matting and staining the fur, feathers or scales of the host. Thark are eager, if sadistic and, like the bunyp, too focused on causing pain and terror to be able to focus on the long or medium terms of their masters' plans, servants of the sandrisas.

Harm - Variable Thark are endlessly petty and vengeful and will do anything and everything, however big or small, to hurt those they have been permitted to target. They will use their host up as a matter of practice, bringing any and all natural abilities of the host they took to bear against their targets. Thark are capable of manifesting a spirit body in the shape of their host only larger, if their host is particularly small. The maximum size they can achieve by "growing" their host is around 40 kilograms, but a 40 kilogram mountain horsefly is still pretty intimidating, and lets not get started on the wasps. Tharks are able to possess larger animals, like Lahesian cave bears, a species on the knife-edge of extinction for that very reason.

Once bonded with a host, thark cannot be affected by magical or psychic attacks that do not have material or physiological effects. They also cannot be exorcised or harmed directly by unmanifested spirits. They can be violently dislodged from their hosts through attacks on their shadow orifices and along the spine of the host, though they do their best to make this difficult on their foes and, if not dislodged, are perfectly capable of keeping their host going despite massive, lethal trauma. Disembodied thark are very susceptible to spiritual and magical attack and are easy to dispatch. Thark are able to communicate with others of their kind over fairly long distances, and though this takes some time and effort, they will usually attempt to do so when they face off against enemies to draw more Thark into the fight.

Shake It Off
When you face a Thark in a host, face Violence
On a Hit, chose one (Save the Animal, Kill the Thark, Suffer no Harm, No Thark Reinforcements).
On a Hard Hit, choose two.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated and another Thark in host arrives.

And it's hard to dance with the devil on your back
Thark were a major problem in Gulyban, a sister nation of Crickton's to the north, along the eastern edge of the Surlycrow. They have also appeared in Savel and in the west. In all these cases, they would cycle through as many animals as they could, killing them and causing as much damage elsewhere as possible until they were beaten down and hunted out. The fact that the prophets claim the sandrisas are responsible for their creation is new information, and a lot of Gulybans are quite interested in Lahey as a cause. Thark ash has proven useful to coat garments that protect their wearers from magic, and used on cloth masks, can sometimes allow a person to pass by Tharks themselves unnoticed. Lahesian rebels make heavy use of these masks.

There are reports of thark holding onto a host for long enough that the entire head gets lost in the gaping shadow orifice, and some capable to changing the shape of their host to something approximating human shape. There are a lot of rumors about the capabilities of these particular thark, but very little of it is substantiated. On suspects that a thark with the ability to concentrate on one host long enough to effect these changes is already dangerous enough. The process of a thark abandoning their host kills it, only being forced out offers the host animal any chance of surviving the experience.

The Beast Fears Fire - Dry Prophets

Dry Prophets [Malevolence 3]
Purpose - To Bring Forth the Will of the Sandrisas

You could be excused for mistaking them for the dead, even as they assure you they never died, these mummified figures in white robes with knit Murrenic skullcaps whose sleeves and hems sift dust with every creaking movement. These are the human, well, once-human ministers for the elusive sandrisas, populating cold and arid monasteries above the ice. Lahesians report that the dry ones are the day-to-day authority in the mountains, to the extent that they are willing to deviate from their contemplation of the static perfection of the Mother-who-is-earth.

Dry prophets appear to be dead; corpses mummified by the cold and wind of the higher reaches of the mountains, but they do appear to breathe, at least (sometimes as much as a couple breaths and hour when they are not talking), and require, or at least appreciate food (dried meats and vegetables and honey) and distilled spirits. Lahesians say it is sometimes possible for them to approach and interact with the dry ones directly (rather than through their chosen servants) with the right gift, though dry prophets are too suspicious of foreigners to allow them the same opportunity.

Dry prophets spend most of their time pursuing their own deprivations and listening for the infrequent orders of their sandrisa masters. Older dry ones start to grow crystalline formations from their skin (usually fluorite, but occasionally emeralds, rubies or even esoteric crystals). Most dry prophets are, apparently, male, for the reason that possessing the form of the Adversary allows them to remain in active service for a longer period before giving over to immobility and ever-more-rarified contemplation of the perfection of the Mother.

Dry Prophets are said to seek to subdue any foreigner they meet, or any Lahesian they judge contaminated by the lands below.

Harm 2/Peril [Parched] Dry prophets can martial jolms to their aid and defense and have powers analogous to those of Earth Witches besides, but their sermons tend to be their first choice for dealing with intruders. Dry Prophets can move surprisingly quickly, and are quite resilient, though they prefer to use their magic and desiccating words to physical violence.

A Dry Subject
When a dry prophet sermonizes at you, face Malevolence
On a Hit, the words chap your lips and parch your throat, causing you to suffer the Peril Parched. If you fall to this Peril, you are in danger of Death's Door, if someone does not get fluids into you quickly.
On a Hard Hit, you ignore the words and do not suffer anything. On the downside, this means the prophet has decided you are hopelessly corrupt and will stop at nothing to destroy you with witchcraft.
On a Miss, you suffer Harm and Peril, a terrible headache and the chance of also suffering acute renal failure, because dehydration sucks a lot.

You speak softly. We are capsules of energy
Older Dry Prophets are said to be almost solid masses of fluorite or ruby or emerald with cores of astracite. Pretty much a malign fortune in gems and crystals just sitting there, a fact which has drawn some thieves and adventurers up from Crickton. So far, none of them have returned with major hauls, but they have come back with the occasional handful of gems and stories of what goes on up on the mountain. The prophets run, loosely, a cadre of colorful coated earth witches and some other folk who account for most of the actual government of the mountain settlements. Surprisingly little in terms of detail comes from these tales, and each mountain settlement, as isolated from one another as they are from Crickton, seems to run significantly differently from one another, though poverty, repression and deprivation seem to be thematic in all of them.