Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Neverwinter Nights 2: First Impressions

    I booted up NWN 2 for Mac a few weeks ago, and have played through to about 8th level already, at what for my inept level of talent is quite a pace. I am currently being sidetracked by my Dwarf mate, Khelgar, and his quest to become a monk.

    My impression of NWN 2 so far is that it is vastly superior to NWN, but nowhere near as good as Baldur’s Gate 2. No surprises there… the graphics are nice, although on the Mac at least it has a few annoying interface issues. Particularly, I can’t seem to slow the window rotation speed, so as soon as my mouse touches the edge of the window the whole scene jumps rapidly, making it difficult to focus on the point you want to see. The first person camera is almost useless, because frequently one is under attack from all sides, or from a long range, and the camera doesn’t give a clear sense of this (not that this matters – I never use first person camera). Also, of course, NWN 2 is right-mouse-button based, and the Mac doesn’t have one… but this is easily circumvented. Amusingly I have had to switch from “Space” for pause to “enter”, because if I mishit my space I strike the kana entry button on my japanese keyboard, and this buggers the software completely…

    The plot seems to be better than NWN 1, and the play is more like the original Baldur’s Gate. You have direct control over all your PCs, including all their attacks and spell-casting and movements if you turn on “puppet mode” (which of course I did, because even on its weakest spell-casting setting the AI chews through the sorcerer’s spells too fast). The side-adventures for companions seem to be quite good, and there is a degree of interaction and script quality in this which is much higher than in NWN 1. Neeshka and Khalgur are particularly entertaining.

    Unfortunately I have chosen to play a Warlock, which so far is nowhere near as entertaining as I had thought it might be. This is not too bad since I get complete control over my companions, so I can also essentially play a sorcerer, fighter and thief, though I can’t change their character class, but it’s good enough for me. The encounters are not as difficult as I would like, although there was a battle in a warehouse which was actually quite challenging, requiring regular saving and restarts and the use of most of my magic items. One frustrating little aspect of the gameplay is that you can only be defeated if all your PCs die. So if one PC with no healing spells or skills remains alive  at the end of an encounter, you all get resurrected with 1 hp. This is sensible, I suppose, since it assumes a basic familiarity with first aid on the part of all PCs which is reasonable given their profession; but it also means that battles are a tad easier. Though the final battle in the aforementioned warehouse was only won by me after 2 tries, with Neeshka on 1 hp and everyone else “dead”, and bereft of magic items – I think that counts as “challenging”. Nonetheless, I would have spent several more hours on the job if PCs were non-resurrectable…

    Overall it is holding my interest well, particularly since the companions are almost entertaining and the battles occasionally challenging. Unless things go drastically awry with the plot, I think I might even see it through to the end…

  • Role-playing by Skype

    For the last year or so while living in Japan I have been running a role-playing campaign set in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, a time ripe with possibilities for adventure. Unfortunately, my Japanese is not good enough to role-play in that language, and Japanese role-players are rare (especially in a country town). This is a shame, since I really wanted to try and do this while I was there  (both playing, and doing so in Japanese – which is beyond impossible).

    So in order to continue role-playing I decided to do it over skype with the old players from Australia. The Delightful Miss E joined in for lack of anything better to do, and the good Dr. A joined from Amsterdam. So for 6 months to a year we had a campaign running with 2 Australians, 1 Australian in Amsterdam, and 2 Australians in Japan. The whole thing happened in Skype, for 3-4 hours every 2 -4 weeks on Thursday evenings (Thursday mornings in Amsterdam). 

    Role-playing in skype is remarkably possible, though it has its limitations. The main limitation from the DM point of view is the inability to see people’s character sheets and dice rolls. Only one of my players was familiar with AD&D (the rest are complete role-playing amateurs) so they had to have things regularly explained to them, and this is hard to do over skype. One needs to reach over and point. I made Excel spreadsheets for character sheets, which were a big bonus, and I was in the process of redesigning them to incorporate automatic attack rolls, etc. so my players didn’t get so bogged down in detail, but then I moved to London and we haven’t got around to restarting yet (and I don’t have a reliable internet connection for another week or so). I was also kind of hoping that the July release of 4e would lead to an improvement in my online role-playing opportunities, but sadly they seem to have cocked up the release of the most innovative role-playing enhancement in the whole package. So it’s back to skype… 

    Interestingly, playing online with beginners helps one to understand where the complexities are in the system. The noticeable problems one finds when one is unable to point at the physical part of the character sheet are:

    • ability scores vs. adjustments/bonusses: this is just a ridiculous waste of time and complexity. Why bother?  Just give everyone an ability score roughly between -1 and -4, have it affect everything directly, halve the strength of all modifications to ability scores and make +1 magic items slightly rarer
    • multiple attacks: we all know the Hit Point System is meant to be abstract – 20th level human beings don’t have the ability to sustain 20 times as many solid dagger blows as 1st level human beings, they have more luck, take more glancing blows etc. But multiple attacks make it seem as if the system is based on direct attacks and defenses. They are also fiendishly complex to administer and very tedious when people are typing in the numbers after they roll them (and bad at adding to start with, and drunk, somewhere in Sydney, on the other side of the world). Ideally the abstract nature of the combat system would be reflected in the multiple attacks, with higher level characters gaining a slight improvement to damage with every additional possible attack, perhaps not commensurate with the full base damage, so that essentially a 20th level fighter is better at squeezing damage out of a sword than is a 1st level fighter
    • spell levels and character levels: you’re a 3rd level mage, so you can only use 1st level spells. Why? This is like the ability score/adjustment thing, it’s pointless. Since I can’t be bothered going through the entire spell list of every class and dividing it into 20 levels of spells, this has to stay – unless the actual spells go. This is particularly frustrating to explain and keep reminding people of when they are multi-classing and spell-using. Sheesh! At least I used power points, so the  issue of memorised spells was not relevant.
    • spell casting: if you’re using a touch spell like <i>ray of enfeeblement</i> in combat you have to a) do concentration b) roll touch to hit c) possibly roll damage d) tell me the details of the spell so I can roll a save. This takes a long time under the drunk/remote/inexperienced/typing conditions alluded to above. If we could resolve all of this with one single roll (so spell-casting is no more time-consuming than combat), life would be so much easier…
    • armour classes: this is unavoidable, i think, but it’s really hard to get the right AC from someone given all the possible conditions they can be in. Barkskinned, Wisdom-enhanced, mage-armoured monks who have been surprised, for example. I tried writing every possible situation in the aforementioned spreadsheets, but it got difficult. This problem would be eliminated by the 4e virtual tabletop, methinks, but sadly…
    We were, as I mentioned, doing all our skype playing by typing not talking. This experience has helped me to see what parts of the system are tedious, what parts are hard to explain or contradictory, and given me some ideas on improving them. I shall return to these in future… but in the meantime, suffice it to say that role-playing <i>can</i> be done over skype, though it is a little slow at times and requires learning slightly different manners.

  • Chimaerae: The Battle Thumb

    So called because of its bizarre resemblance to an enormous thumb, the Battle Thumb is the Chimaeric creation which elevated York Constructs, Inc. to greatness. Bought in bulk by the armies of several nations, the Battle Thumb is much respected for its endurance, great strength and reliability. Though not easy to armour, its hide is naturally thick and it has some resilience against extremes of temperature. It is not agile but is highly mobile, requiring little space to turn and capable of reversing as well as walking forward. It is not capable of high speeds but its cunning physiognomy makes it a stable combat platform in any situation – mounted archers can fire from its back even when it is at full sprint. It is also capable of carrying quite heavy weights, though it is not efficient given its overall size and its speed and mobility decline rapidly as the weights increase.  It is, however, an excellent scouting and light combat mount, especially useful for archers, scouts and skirmishers, and useful for adventurers who need to move over rough or mountainous terrain. It has one other admirable trait which makes it much desired by military planners – it can eat anything. This beast is rather uncharitably referred to as “the Duke of Yorks Cock” by many soldiers.

  • Current reading: The Black Magician Trilogy

    I am in a holding pattern this week, because tomorrow the Delightful Miss E joins me from Japan, on Friday is my 35th birthday, yesterday I moved house, and on Saturday a friend of Miss E’s  is coming here on a holiday (from Japan). So in between all these things there is not much to do except tidy my new house and … ah … read. So I need trash, and as a consequence I am reading a fantasy trilogy.

    This time around the trilogy is about a slum girl who becomes a novice magician in a very privileged guild. She is super powerful of course but everyone else hates her because they are rich and she is poor. So it’s kind of like Harry Potter meets Ursula le Guin meets Trotsky. Of course the poor girl has to prove herself, gets help from well-meaning rich people who, you know, care for the poor, and then she stumbles on a dark and evil magician who is super-powerful and going to kill everyone. All is not, of course, as it seems. In this instance there is some dispute as to who is good and who is evil (which is a nice degree of nuance for a fantasy trilogy).

    There is again a hint of the Global War on Terror written in the books. The magic guild is in the nation of Kyralia, which lies at the heart of an alliance that includes a very harsh and clearly islamic-seeming nation with very harsh laws and slavery. I am thinking Saudi Arabia, except in a nasty twist we get to visit this kingdom’s version of Mecca and discover that the book contained therein holds no real power. Hint, hint, nudge nudge, wink wink. The alliance seems to be pretty pluralistic and accepting, as if in fact it were a modern secular state… but over its borders is evil and mysterious sachaka, which is exotic and oriental and once laid waste to by the mages. It doesn’t contain much civilisation by the sound of it, and what it does contain is unknown and dangerous. Sounds a lot like Afghanistan… and it sends regular assassins to Kyralia, terrorists even…

    … There are also hints that the head of the magicians’ guild is, perhaps, a difficult man burdened with a hard task, who is forced to make unpleasant decisions for the sake of the greater good… almost like, um, George Bush.

    I don’t believe people actually intend to write these ham-fisted allegories, I think they just come out the way they do under the pressure of the times. It is fun to read too much into them – wait until I get onto my review of Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing. Which will have to wait, because I am reading John Kooley’s book on the foundation of the Taliban next; and then I have discovered a clear rip-off novel, which is Flashman in Space, and which I also want to read.

  • things never seen…

    Besides a bit of grainy ww2 footage, I’ve never seen a pogrom in action. But thanks to the joys of online worlds, anything is possible. Here is a pair of 12 year old losers hunting down a couple of online characters they think are gold farmers or bots. The first one takes a healing potion, and  the second one tries to tell them to go away. I wonder if these are really bots? The commenters certainly aren’t so sure.

    The game is runescape. It looks really bad.

  • Current gaming: Traveller

    Variety is one of the good aspects of playing weekly for 3 hours in a haphazard tavern environment with a large club. Because groups collapse, change and reform quite quickly one often moves between groups, or starts a new campaign after a short time. So I have had an opportunity not only to play (a rare innovation for me) but to play different systems. So far, WFRP and A song of Ice and Fire, but this week was Traveller. I haven’t played Traveller since … 1989? A long time ago! It hasn’t changed  much either, the same dry and simple system, the same sense of an empty universe, the same 70s techy feel. I remember when I first got traveller nobody had home computers in the real world, and the computers in the spaceships were clearly envisaged as the mainframes of the ancient world  – taking up huge amounts of space and having just enough power for navigation and firing weapons. Now of course your average Tech Level 15 Traveller “4bis” computer sits on the dashboard of any decent Japanese car…

    Traveller also had that sense of being lonely on the edge of space, which I liked, and of being very <i>normal</i>, which I don’t like at all. Neither of these properties has deserted it in its latest incarnation. We have in fact plunged off into the never never, some little island of systems isolated in The Great Rift, a vast empty patch of space which cannot be crossed in a single jump, and so is inaccessible to normal spaceships. Our top secret mission – to scout out a secret jump path to enable the Empire to cross the Rift. The complication – the bunch of star systems we are investigating is inhabited by loony low-tech Frenchies, who reached the systems many millenia ago on generation ships of the European Space Agency (!) and may be a tad touchy about ending their isolation. I like this a lot! Though I wonder how the ESA managed to land Frenchies in the Great Rift when they can’t land a robot on mars. But I suppose they were aiming for Alpha Centauri and missed. I just hope me and my mates don’t end up having to do a Dunkirk – we have not enough fuel to get back…

    … anyway, it has all the elements of classic Traveller – we’re skipping around possibly hostile star systems in a freighter, not particularly well armed (though better than the locals!), trading our way to the next system and trying to work out how we will make our fortune. My suggestion is going to be: betray the Empire, sell a trade route to a big trading company, and become fabulously rich and powerful on the proceeds, in a wierd French backwater space system where everyone worships us as Gods. But I presume that something is going to go horribly wrong very soon. Which is a shame, because I won’t be attending for the next 2 weeks, and I rather suspect I will miss all the fireworks.

  • More on the Economics of Virtual Worlds

    Terra Nova blog report on the results of an economic experiment they conducted in a virtual world. In essence, this experiment showed that increasing potion prices reduces the amount that players buy, suggesting that at least some commodities in some virtual worlds show price elasticity of demand. 

    Not only does this suggest that economic laws work (inasmuch as economic laws ever do) in virtual worlds, but also suggests that virtual worlds could represent excellent places to test economic interventions. I would have thought that these experiments can be done pretty easily in World of Warcraft – the good Dr. A, for example, has a WoW add-on which analyses the sale price of all his possessions in auction. Presumably add-ons like this could be used to build up economic time series (even high-frequency trading data!) It would be interesting to see the results of a server-wide experiment in which Blizzard shut down access to all raw materials for a potion, and withdrew them from all stores…

    I wonder how long it will be before we see economics departments negotiating with Blizzard for the delivery of experimental data. De-identified and anonymized, of course. Would such a negotiation have to go through an ethics committee? And if so, would the ethics committee be in the virtual or the real world? And if it was in the virtual world, would the Lich King get a seat?

  • A World of Warcraft Business Model

    In discussion with the good Dr. A and Miss B. in Amsterdam (and we weren’t stoned) I conceived randomly of a kind of alternative or next stage business model for WoW gold farmers. I don’t know if the model itself is viable, but were it to become so it would represent a huge contribution of the gold farming business to the online economy of world of warcraft, though not necessarily for the better. 

    The model I envisage is one in which a gold farming company establishes a kind of value-added process for producing gold. Instead of sending lowly warriors out to grind weak beasts for small amounts of gold, this farmer employs moderate level characters, and buys in-world large amounts of raw materials – gold, herbs, essences etc. – and all day has his employees use their secondary talents to turn these materials into product –  swords, potions, etc. – which are then sold in bulk to guilds (or individuals) for real money. They could also be sold in-world for gold, and the gold sold to players for real money in the usual way.

    For example, according to thotbot an Insane Strength Potion costs 7 gold 53 silver at auction, while its ingredients (3x terocone and an imbued vial) cost a total of 2 gold 60 silver at a vendor. So by buying these objects in world from a vendor, our enterprising businessman can recover 5 gold. Apparently these things sell at auction in lots of 5, so there is already an option for bulk sales. I imagine before a big guild raid one would need at least 5 of these, and a lot of mana-enhancing stuff, so a guild practicing one of its big raids could easily fork over 30 or 50 or 100 gold in a single night to a suitably equipped business. Maybe this would be a more rapid way of generating money than merely farming it…? By comparison, a mottled boar (again according to Thotbot) drops items in general worth 4 or 5 coppers… so grinding those poor bastards is going to take a while to build up gold.

    It occurs to me that there could be a whole vertically-integrated business model for this. One enters Gold Farmers Inc as a level 1 loser, and spends time grinding monsters  for coppers. One will of course ultimately gain levels doing this and become more powerful, capable of killing better monsters faster for more gold. One could also do after-work study (i.e. play a lot) to build up skills, and when one had reached a level with talents, one could apply for a promotion. Then one would be sent around the world gathering raw materials based on one’s talent – e.g., gathering herbs or metals. One might be content to do this, but if one was really career focussed one could aim higher, continuing to play one’s level up in one’s spare time until one could build items oneself, and then apply for a promotion to start making items with the raw materials one’s junior colleagues provided to  the company. And of course there would be a role for middle management, who would collect all the raw materials coming into a mailbox from across the world and send  them on to suitable characters; or one would spend a lot of time going backwards and forwards from the mailbox to the auction room and the vendor… I can see a whole corporate structure building here, with peoples’ position in the office determined by their character’s role in the world… 

    … but the whole business would be completely dependent on the economy of the WoW world, since there is a finite rate at which resources replenish, and others might compete for them. Flooding the world with potions would push down their price, etc. And of course players would object to this industry – currently the players occupy a position in-world very similar to the individual artisans before the industrial revolution (though occasionally they gather into … appropriately … guilds), so any industrialisation of the means of production of magical items would of course impact the value and esteem of what they do. They might be tempted to try and pass laws against these industrialists – and if that happened they might scapegoat the workers, attack the looms, or even attack the workers themselves. Economic change is never an uncontested thing…

    The idea that I really like behind all this is the possibility that an enterprising company could pay the gaming company for the right to change or manipulate the underlying physics of the world, to make new items or spells. Obviously they would need to make items which were useful for people, which would require some kind of R&D process. And they would need to stay abreast of the plot and quest changes going on in the world, since they would need to know what new markets for their products to target. The best way to do this would be to petition the gaming company for particular quest lines or monsters… a kind of lobbying, if you will.

    Lobbying God, effectively. I think the possibilities inherent in this are endless…

  • Current reading: The Faded Sun

    This weekend just been, I had to travel by boat to Amsterdam to spend the weekend with my World of Warcraft friends, the good Dr. A and Miss B. This meant much time to myself in trains, boats and the like, so I bought myself a hefty book : The Faded Sun Trilogy by CJ Cherryh. It was so good (and my time so unconstrained) that though it was 800 pages long, I finished it by Tuesday.

    This trilogy is an effort at one of my favourite things, writing about aliens so that they are genuinely alien. Other authors who have done this – Samuel Delany, Paul Park, and Ursula le Guin – are big favourites of mine for the same reason. Imagining difference is what sci-fi is all about. CJ Cherryh is apparently a bit of a regular at this, though I think this is the first book of hers (?) that I have read. This series was published in 1973 in a trilogy, and bound together for this “classic” series. 

    The essence of the story is a conflict between humans and 2 other alien races, 2 members of this triangle being rather hell-bent on genocide or something like it, and one member being rather ambivalent about stopping it. Three people end up having to go on a long, hard chase across the galaxy to try and prevent disaster, but they aren’t all from the same race, and this makes things hard for them. The central plot is driven by deep moral tension, as people try to rise above their own horror at others’ immoral or evil behaviour to try and prevent worse moral outrages occurring. I would say that the essence of this moral tension wasn’t adequately conveyed at times, and particulary the explanation for its cause was ultimately a little weak. But the story held you to it without much extra imaginative effort, and the difficulty of understanding the motives of the aliens made it very engaging and very difficult to guess how it would end. So that was good.

    I was struck at first by how much one alien race – the Mri – were like the alien race in RM Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire,  and also by how much they at times seemed to be like bedouin, or like a fantastic orientalist would imagine bedouin to be. They had the veils, most of the action took place on harsh desert planets, they were unrelenting and unbending in their cultural outlook, and they were fierce at war (so maybe also like the muslim soldiers who fought against the crusades). Another race, the regul, seemed a lot like they might be a caricature of The Eternal Jew – ugly, dirty, only interested in trade, physically weak,  unwilling to do physical labour, infanticidal, and with impossible memories. This book came out in 1973, a year after the Munich olympics and 4 years after the PLO brought “The Palestine Question” to the eyes of the world, and I wonder if it somehow influenced CJ Cherryh – at times it was as if the humans were caught up in the Mandate, trying to work out what to do about competing claims. The moral tension at the heart of the story seems to reflect one possible interpretation of the Palestine issue, as well. However, not all the parallels and analogies stuck – the mri are the nomadic race, moving from world to world, and no-one in the story could really be cast as blameless in the various genocides and cruelties contained therein. 

    Nonetheless, I am interested by the coincidence of the release of the book and the onset of Palestinian struggle – and fear of the Arabs during the Oil Shocks – and I wonder if the political events of that time of CJ Cherryh’s life are reflected in the novel. If so I think this merely strengthens the novel’s claim to greatness, were it to be said that the novel can discuss the moral tensions inherent in the political dramas of its times, but in a subtle enough way to separate them from their earthly element, and look at them in the abstract. This is the joy and the greatness of good sci-fi, in my opinion.

  • Shock! Palaeocon curmudgeon gives RPG negative review!

    Buried deep in the google pile of a search on “Warhammer fantasy role-playing” I found a “scholarly article” by one Mark Wegierski, a grumpy old palaeo-conservative curmudgeon writing for the “literary journal” known as Praesidium, which appears to be sponsored by The Center [sic] for Literate Values. Praesidium, of course, stands for “Watchtower”, and like all good curmudgeons, this group have set themselves up to be a watchtower against corruption of culture and literature by that most terrifying of groups – young adults! I don’t recommend visiting their “about us” page, because it’s full of pre-literary waffle (our society is now post-literary, of course, so I presume they must be pre-literary). However, one can tease out this gem of self-importance if one does:

    The academy excommunicates “universalists” without a hearing: The Center promotes selfless conduct whose humanity transcends cultural conditioning and impulse.  The academy encourages such absurd varieties of “self-expression” as exotic sexual experimentation and flippant iconoclasm: The Center defends the West’s oft-tested cultural tradition as a key to true self-discovery

    So: a bunch of curmudgeons who have set their great intellects against the universities of our age, which of course were much better before the  war, when I went, and did I tell you about the time that Dave and I went fishing at the grand Rapids? It was down near Fartarses Bar, which as I say was greened over back in the day and … do you mind son, getting me a hot water bottle… ah, where was I…

    … But I digress. In their issue of “Fall 2005” this genius curmudgeon has set himself the blood-chilling task of delving into the dark world of RPGs, and showing how over time they have become more sinister, more disgusting, more illiterate, and more and more representative of all the diseases of modern youth. 

    Most of the article consists of a review of the history of D&D (where would we be without D&D to cop the blows for the entire hobby?), followed by a brief overview of other “famous” games like “Conspiracy X” (who knew?), and serious consideration of serious titles like “All Flesh Must be Eaten”. During this he of course makes clear the faults of D&D – one of which is its soulless reproduction of Tolkien’s world, without the values – and of the other games – Shadowrun, for example, has the fault of “revisioning” Tolkien’s world, which is an insult to his memory, which is best preserved by soulless reproduction of … oh, wait…

    He then proceeds, in his rambling fashion, to a conclusion, in which we find the meat of the “argument” as to the way in which RPGs reflect on modern society, and the Yoof. Rather than bore you with neverending tedious recitations of the flaws of every RPG ever to flop in a bookshop, let us cut to the conclusion, and see what our character flaws are, which are shown so clearly by our choice of hobby:

    First of all, there is the uttermost and thoroughgoing atheism and/or nihilism of many young people today. For such people, the notion of surrounding, powerful dark forces is the basis only of diversionary, jaded entertainments. It should be made clear that they do not actually believe in vampires, demons, and conspiracies—but are even more remote from believing in God.

    The sheer arrogance of this rubbish beggars belief. We are nihilistic because, rather than crouching in our darkened hovels in terror of  Mr. Wegierski’s imaginary sky-fairy, we play entertaining games in which we imagine other sky-fairies, and pretend we believe in them. That, my friends, is nihilism.

    But what of this nihilism of “many young people today”? What to make of it, and of the curmudgeon’s crusade against it? Is there anything more hypocritical and disgusting than to be lectured on nihilism by a representative of the generation which disordered our world? Mr. Wegierski is of the generation which demolished the job-for-life system, sent our manufacturing industries offshore to make sure there was no such thing as even a job, destroyed the pension system, privatised everything that wasn’t bolted down and voted for a leader who famously claimed “there is no such thing as society” – for 12 years! Last time I checked, Margaret Thatcher was hardly a representative of “young people today”, but it was she and her generation who created this world without social ties, and now Mr. Wegierski turns upon us for wandering, nihilistic, through the nihilistic society they created. Is there  a greater hypocrisy than this? To blame us for preferring “jaded entertainments” over a futile attempt to re-order our society in the face of the economic destruction they have wrought? When last I looked, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan were not jaded 30-somethings. And then, to top it off, they wonder at our inability to love the sky-fairy they invoked while they did it.

    But Mr. Wegierski happily goes further, finishing his paragraph abut our ills with this gem:

    Yet, those who indulge in these amusements in a longstanding and obsessive fashion may open themselves up to a more concrete embrace of evil.

    I cannot think particularly what evil I have done, but I am intrigued to imagine the temptation of others. If the amount of role-playing I have done opens me for a “more concrete embrace of evil”, how much role-playing must George Bush have done, to prosecute a war of choice on a defenseless nation, killing a million people? I can see now, Pol Pot in his lair furiously rolling the d20s, every hour of playing rendering his regime that little, tiny part more evil. Never have I seen Kissinger with a Dungeon Master’s guide under his arm, but he must surely have the entire set, from every edition. There is evil, my friends, but Mr. Wegierski is so busy worrying about Warhammer 40k comics that he seems to have missed it. 

    Or has he? For Mr. Wegierski is certain as to the origin of our nihilism and atheism (rest assured I am know its origin Mr. Wegierski – we watched your generation screw up the Vietnam war, the cold war and the detente – you can fuck off if you think you will blame us for your nihilism). He observes

    Secondly, RPG’s can flourish only in a history-less milieu, where there are no identifications with the long history of one’s nation or people. It is also a milieu of highly pampered comfort. These young people have virtually never felt any real deprivation in their lives, nor confronted sharp existential dilemmas such as those in a world living under the shadow of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. These young people have never faced a real test of character or conviction.

    and continues

    Although we are now said by some to be engaged in “World War IV”—which might contribute to an atmosphere of “moral clarity”—millions of Americans and Europeans appear entirely unaffected by the necessities of the struggle.

    thus enabling him to finish, with the flourish of the truly professional soggy-sao eater,

    The self-absorbed participation in imaginative or pseudo-imaginative exaltation as mere entertainment is possible only in a late modern milieu where a person has usually never had to do real work, real thinking, and real fighting.

    Now, there is hypocrisy and then there is rank, callous, stinking, disgusting, immoral, lying filth like this. Mr. Wegierski’s generation, not content to wreck our economies and vote to dissolve our society, have  left us with the greatest problem of an age – global warming – which we will have to fix, and soon, probably by doing a lot more thinking they have done during the last 15 years while they callously denied its imminence. And their politicians – the Kissingers and Bush Seniors and MI5s of the 80s – built up the festering evil of al Qaeda, just in time for their retirement, so that they could sit in armchairs declaring that the generation dying in the sand in Afghanistan “never had to do real fighting”. Was it not Bush Jnr who declared that we should not tighten our belts in this war, but “keep consuming”? That, my friends, is the nihilism of one of Mr. Wegierski’s generation, who never did any real thinking or fighting, but a lot of draft dodging and cocaine blowing. Of course, they are good christians, while we are atheists, so the fault lies with us, and from their armchairs they will be sure to blame us for the problems they created. One can only hope that Mr. Wegierski’s armchair is near the rising sea.

    So which jaded entertainment shall we choose, my friends? Sitting back blaming others for the problems we created in the name of a voodoo god, or sitting around with our mates pretending to be clerics of a voodoo god? It seems to me that the latter sure beats shifting the deckchairs on the Titanic while we wait for Mr Wegierski and his mates to shuffle out of the bridge…