Are We Not Gods?

It's a problem that every RPG DM or developer has to grapple with eventually: what do you do when the players in your campaign (or game) become too powerful? 

I'm not talking "famous" or "powerful" or "admired", but POWERFUL.

As in "demon lord slaying on home plane" powerful.

Or "defeating Death" powerful.

Or "Godslayer" powerful.

Or... You get the idea.

That was a problem I grappled with back when I first played D&D, as my first characters to survive to L20 or higher were so powerful that I had to do something with them. They steamrolled Orcus and Demogorgon, for pete's sake, and while that was also back in the days of dungeons containing rooms filled with "five red dragons!", I at least understood enough that I ought to retire my characters. So, I rolled a die and adjusted my characters' stats upward, anointed them as gods*, and retired them. Having the original Deities and Demigods book by TSR around didn't exactly hurt in that regard.

But still, what to do with overly powerful characters is a problem that people wrestle with all the time, whether it be in a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign or a video game.

Baldur's Gate 2 confronts that problem in the course of the main storyline, and without invoking spoilers, let's say that I totally understand Bioware's solution to the conundrum. I'd like to think that I could handle that situation as good as they did, but I do realize that I never really had the chance. That solitary situation in my youth was the only time I've ever been a part of a campaign where my characters' levels reached crazy powerful territory. I mean, the Cleric in the recently concluded 20+ year D&D 3.0 campaign never reached above 9th Level. It was just the nature of that game to not progress fast, and while that lack of progression didn't bother me, the lack of progress on the overall story did.

None of the games I cited above had the baked in issues that are confronted by online games, such as MMOs, however.

***

MMOs --especially those who have a progression based model-- will eventually confront the problem of "the characters are too powerful". And I don't mean "too powerful for low level zones" either, because that's a separate (although related**) issue. This is more along the lines of when a main character in a novel becomes so powerful that they venture into Mary Sue/Marty Stu territory, such as Pug and Tomas in Raymond E. Feist's first Riftwar series.

Or, say, the problems confronted by Saitama, the One Punch Man.

Yeah, pretty much.
From imgflip.com.

Part of the problem is the scale of the enemies a player faces; because of the scaling up in power, the enemies have to scale up as well. So you may have started from humble beginnings, but by the end you're hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

Every video game RPG ever.
From Reddit.

Do this a couple of times over the course of a few expansions, and the next thing you know you're consorting with godlike beings. 

"Here goes nothing."

"Eeep."

Now, this trajectory doesn't have to happen --at least to at this much a degree as it has in some MMOs-- but eventually all online RPGs that hang around long enough will hit this wall. 

But is it a wall?

Well, once you get past a certain point, the scope of the game changes. You're no longer in "Kill Small Creatures" questing scope but "Kill Big Ol' Demons" territory.

Or you progress beyond that into "Slay an Old God" territory.

The people you interact with in game changes --either slowly or quickly depending on the game involved-- and you're far beyond those salad days of digging up turnips for a farmer in The Shire.

***

He looked all round him and it was only then that he recognized the place as his own cell.

'Yes,' said he, 'there's the stone I used to sit on! There are the marks where my shoulders rubbed their shape on to the stone! There's the stain left by the blood from my forehead the day I tried to batter my brains out against the wall! Oh, and these numbers . . . I remember . . .

--From The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Unabridged Edition, pp 1048.

Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo --D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers is another-- comes into power and consequently the story changes around him. The stakes are higher, because the people Edmond seeks revenge upon have maneuvered themselves into positions of power and prestige, but they remained fundamentally the same lowborn conspirators who betrayed him all those years ago.

Or in Baldur's Gate, you're introduced to the Big Bad (in game) in the intro, only you don't realize what the context is until you've played the entirety of the game. By the end of the game your position in life has changed, but the Big Bad has not. 

Both, however, are works with a defined beginning, middle, and end. MMOs don't really have that luxury, so the stakes constantly change with each expansion. And the easy way out for MMOs is to raise the stakes with each successive expansion. Unfortunately, that can back developers into a corner, content-wise. 

A Legion thing I presume.
From Know Your Meme.

That meme aside, when you get successively more earth shaking and more powerful end bosses in each new expansion whose plots to do "whatever" are even more outlandish than the one before it, you get past a breaking point. 

LOTRO had it easy, relatively speaking, because that MMO followed the books, right up until the end when the Ringbearer completed his quest and Sauron was destroyed. Now the MMO becomes, "What do we do next to top that?" And there's no easy answer.

But other MMOs, such as WoW, have a harder time of it when you have to raise the stakes with each successive expansion without falling into any one of the following traps:

• "I'm not bad, I'm defending us from the NEXT Big Bad!"
• Meet the new Big Bad, same as the old Big Bad.
• Bait with one plotline and Switch to a repeat of an old plotline.
• An "I was Good (or at least Neutral) but now I'm Bad" Big Bad.
• Changing the backstory to create a new Big Bad out of whole cloth plotline.

Even if the plotline of an expansion covers one of these traps, you can still find an MMO story/expansion that doesn't necessarily have a corresponding escalation in power to match the players' own arms' race. It's not a given by any stretch. However, it takes a rare MMO to avoid falling into the "more bigger better MORE" design. 

More gear.

More shinies.

More powers.

More everything.

And then you wake up one day and wonder just how you started out as this:

And then you find yourself looking like this:

And this is before the current
expac in WoW Classic.

And you are hanging around with people like this:

You bet your ass she's bowing.

Or this:

I'm running out of screen space.

How the hell do you describe this to people back home without them wondering what has become of you? And what do you do when a suitably lofty opinion of yourself creeps into your psyche? When beings of this amount of power and prestige call you friend and invite you to sit at the table, it can't help but influence your opinions of yourself, and just how far away from your beginnings you have come. 

"More" indeed.

There's no easy answer to the power creep per se, since to a lot of people there is no problem at all. There's always another hill to climb, another challenge to overcome. But I guess getting on toward middle age has taught me a bit about that spiral; how there always is an upper barrier on what can be achieved, and eventually we all have to live with our limitations, our regrets, and our failures. 

Of course, a game that provided such an outlook wouldn't have a lot of players, because it's more fun to win than be reminded of our mortality. (Dark Souls notwithstanding.) Even changing the overall trajectory of the power creep just a little bit, whether it be by level squish or moving the focus away from a world shattering in-game story, can engender more than its share of angst. Think of Dragonflight, and how there were more than its share of detractors when the expac was announced. I, for one, applauded the movement away from "the world is ending" vibe that tends to permeate the WoW ecosystem, but I wasn't so foolish as to think that WoW was going to stop being on a gear treadmill once the Dragonflight released. That treadmill is still there, and the surest sign that WoW is still WoW is that you get to help choose the next leader of the Black Dragonflight.***

Think about that for a moment: why would the two rivals for leadership of the Black Dragonflight, a Flight (in)famous for their haughty attitudes toward all "lesser beings"****, be wanting your support? They only respect people more powerful than their own. That I've yet to see a post saying "Hey, waitaminute" from my blog feed pretty much shows that people simply accept that you can make the choice. Not necessarily that you may want to, but that you are in the right to do so. In effect you are the Cardinal Richelieu of Azeroth.

"Who are you for, King Wrathion or Cardinal Sabellius?"

--D'Artagnan, probably

***

I guess that this is the nature of the beast, that power creep is inevitable and you either accept it or jump off the train. Okay, there's a third option, to simply ignore it and...

I hear Silvermoon is nice this
time of  year.

Or maybe just hang around The Pig and Whistle and roleplay? Or maybe The Lion's Pride?

From Reddit.

Or create a twink for BGs and just do that?

Or run one of those places in FFXIV?

Or form a band and play in Bree on Fridays?

Or maybe be a roadie for that band.
(FWIW, this band still plays on Friday
afternoons on the Gladden-US server.)

There are things to do, but they are decidedly against the spirit of MMOs.

Or are they?

Nothing says that you can't simply ignore what the developers want you to play and just do your own thing. Crafting your own resolution to The Hero's Journey isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, after all. You're in effect doing what I did all those years ago: retire your character from active adventuring.

And again, nothing says that you can't spend your days playing a D&D campaign that consists of minding a tavern as adventurers pass through.

Just gonna put this here.
I was so happy to give my 
local bookstore my money for this.

Of course you're not obligated to buy any new MMO expansion --or in the case of LOTRO or SWTOR or some other MMOs you don't have to buy anything at all-- but that's up to you. If nothing else, you can control your own resolution to the power creep, which is a good thing. You have the option to say that you are not a god, you are a person. And even the heroic need a reality check from time to time.

*I think I "officially" called them demi-gods, because being a good Catholic kid I wasn't messing around with actual godhood itself.

**Some MMOs --Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, Elder Scrolls Online-- adjust your level downward if you're in a low level zone, and dole out rewards accordingly. This has varying levels of success based on the amount of tuning the devs have performed, but at least it's an attempt at a solution. Some MMOs don't even bother trying.

***I'd have called it spoilers, but you can't throw a stick in a Retail WoW blog without some mention of it in there.

****Admittedly, the Twilight Drake Vesperon says "You pose no threat, lesser beings! Give me your worst!" But come on, where do you think that Vesperon got that idea from?

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes

Because the memes can pile up without a specific theme, here's a few of an assortment of memes:

This is Cardwyn as DPS facing
Patchwerk in Naxxramas. Pretty much.
From Pinterest.

Because I can't resist teasing my son.
But there's a bit more to this than just
that; something worthy of an actual
post. From Know Your Meme.

This, along with "it took
you more than a week to get
to level cap?" are two defining
features of old versus new
MMOs. From Elder Scrolls
Online forums.

And that's why I'm a bit of a minimalist
regarding addons. From Know Your Meme.

And We Just Couldn't Get Rid of Him

Well, I guess the era of megamergers is over, for the time being.

This is the graphic the BBC used for
Activision Blizzard. I was about to use
the acryonym "AB", but that was too close
to Anheuser-Busch for my mind.

The US Government filed suit to block the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Blizzard was essentially along for the ride anyway with this acquisition, as this was mainly about Activision and Call of Duty. Go figure, right?

I guess that means that we're still stuck with Bobby Kotick for now. 

Meme Monday: You All Meet in a Tavern Memes

It's a standard trope in any RPG, whether it be a tabletop game, a video game, or even an MMO*, that "you meet at an inn/tavern" is how the party gets together. Given that I spent my weekend repairing my tavern (painting my home office and moving stuff around), I thought it appropriate to share some tavern themed memes.

At least I can read/write Common.
From Dungeons and Dads on FB.

You know, I don't think I have
started a tavern fire yet.
From Pinterest.

You know, I could make
a month's worth of Meme
Mondays just dedicated
to Goldshire. And not
have them officially NSFW
either!
From Pinterest.

...and one straight outta Jojo's
Bizarre Adventure.
From ifunny.co.

*Think Goldshire... No no... DON'T think Goldshire! Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

Watching the Bronco Busters Work

I'm watching the initial posts about Dragonflight from the sideline, such as Kaylriene's, and I wonder whether Dragonflight is for me.

Or maybe a better question to ask is whether Dragonflight is for someone who liked the open world of Vanilla Classic but gradually became disappointed with the tone and direction of TBC Classic and Wrath Classic. 

I already know I don't like the revamped Old World brought about by Cataclysm over a decade ago*, and the focus of you in Wrath (and onward) as a sort of superhero for merely doing the job of killing ten rats kind of wears on me. Yes, other MMOs have something similar in design --such as SWTOR and LOTRO-- but... the transition from Vanilla's do a variety of things or a couple of mini stories in a zone to your character having a soundtrack straight out of a Bonnie Tyler song by the end of Wrath doesn't quite do it for me. 

If I'm coming back to Dragonflight, it will be from the standpoint of a player who had effectively retired after defeating Arthas, teaming up with Neve to teach apprentices away from the crowds of Stormwind and Silvermoon. Card would have to be coaxed out of retirement by acquaintances among the dragonflights; in her case it would likely have been Haleh (or maybe Awbee) asking Card to come help explore the Dragon Isles since her eye for detail would prove invaluable. 

Coming back into the fray after having been (effectively) away for 20 years would be difficult for Card, which mirrors my own difficulties stepping back into Retail and finding so many different systems and expectations beyond what things were like in Retail Wrath.** Look at it this way: there have now been just as many expansions in World of Warcraft after I left than before I left, 8 years ago. That's a lot of "learn something only to discard it two years later" playing, but also a lot of changes to the basics and the systems behind the game. 

One need only look at the map to see evidence of that.

This is Wrath Classic, but it's functionally
unchanged since Vanilla Classic.

Yes, that's the original Azshandra.
The map is that smallish thing
with all of the quest markers and
whatnot in it.

The integration of the map with quest markers --along with other items-- would have been provided with addons until when the default map was changed, sometime after the Mists of Pandaria expansion. 

You can customize the map to an extent:

I had to hunt around for it, but this
is brought up by the magnifying
glass, above.

But not too much. The main quest markers are still present.

I guess I wouldn't complain about it so much if it was something I was used to from the start, such as SWTOR's map, 

Courtesy of my baby Imperial Agent.

except that SWTOR's map has changed a bit over the years. Some of the "non-story" quests are now hidden by default, and you have to manually select an option to show them, but largely it has remained the same. In fact, the quest design itself behind SWTOR is very similar to that of Wrath Classic, down to the display in the default UI.

Linna taking a short break at
Valiance Keep. Note the list of quests
in the upper right.

It's been so long since I played this
Agent that some things have been
reset, but the quest list is still present,
again in the upper left.

Of course, I never knew that the quest list being turned on by default was an innovation in Wrath itself until I began playing Vanilla Classic and discovered it simply didn't exist wasn't turned on. [EtA: corrected this but kept the original in editing. Thanks to Indy for pointing out the miss here due to my lack of clarity.]***

What I have found is that throwing away the map and playing in a non-optimized manner allows me to just explore and figure things out on my own, something I'd never experienced before in MMOs until I had the chance to in Vanilla Classic. I'm obviously in the minority here, because MMOs have evolved away from exploratory play and in favor of directed play. All you have to know about that is that Retail conditioned players to sprint to max level to begin the grinding of prepping for raids, despite design intentions in Dragonflight to counter that FOMO.

The relevant portion is at 0:51:10, about the

design change of players logging in without

mandatory content. However, if you've the time

the entire video is VERY much worth it.

Old habits are hard to break, particularly when the next expansion is well underway.**** 

***

All of that aside, the question remains: will a person who likes more of the open world, more cold war version of the pre-Cataclysm World of Warcraft find enough to love in Dragonflight, which on the face of it seems to be a completely different game?

If it were a matter of using the same subscription to go ahead and play that'd be one thing, but WoW still requires a person to pay for the expansions, so it becomes a matter of whether $50 is worth it to buy, play for a few hours, and then discard if I don't like it. And I don't know about you, but especially during the Holidays I don't have $50 just sitting around to blow on what to me seems a pretty risky gamble, so I'm going to sit on the fence for a while. I'm kind of used to that, as after all, it's not like I haven't done that before.

*I've been pondering that quite a bit lately, and I considered several reasons why I didn't like the revamp: the focus on the Horde and Alliance conflict, the shoehorning of Goblins and Worgen into an already existing world, and the constantly depressing viewpoints of the conflict (::cough:: Hillsbrad ::cough::). But I think the biggest reason why I didn't like the revamp was the need for every single zone to have an overarcing zone story. In Vanilla WoW, and to a lesser extent TBC and Wrath, there may have been stories set within a zone, but with a few notable exceptions (such as Westfall) there hasn't been a singular dominant story arc like that found in The Storm Peaks in Wrath. However, almost all of the revamped Old World zones have one dominant zone story to help propel the questing from hub to hub.

**Yes, for the record I stopped playing at the end of Mists, but I effectively stopped playing any sort of PvE group content shortly into Cataclysm; the toxic atmosphere and LTP noob nature of the LFD tool killed any interest in learning how to do group content beyond the occasional Normal dungeon run. Instead, I focused on (regular) Battlegrounds and by the time Mists of Pandaria was coming to an end I grew tired of the pervasive nature of bots and how the Alliance could only win the 40 person BGs. 

***Hence the prevalence of the Questie addon in the Classic community.

****It's like that in any software development house. At the one I worked at back in the 90s, the "official" release of our product was barely noticed by the development staff, as we were about 1/3 of the way into the projects already identified for the next release. And we didn't have issues like MMOs do, where the reception of systems and changes for the current expansion won't have a true impact on the game until two expansions later. That's because you simply can't change direction on a dime and devote a huge amount of resources to changing the game potentially mid-to-late expac development. In our case, it was a matter of which project got priority more than changing projects entirely.

EtA: I meant to put the proper code for Preach's YouTube video in there, but I forgot. Oopsie.

Meme Monday: Questing Memes

Oh, I could fill a year's worth of Meme Monday's strictly with memes from quests, but here are four that popped out of my pile...

And it even has "you meet in
a tavern"!
From Pinterest.

I guess being a courier IRL
is good training...
From Reddit.

Ah yes, quest weirdness.
From ifunny.co.

Pick a quest... any quest...
From knowyourmeme.com.

Good Enough for Government Work

I woke last night to the sound of thunder

How far off I sat and wondered

Started humming a song from 1962

Ain't it funny how the night moves

When you just don't seem to have as much to lose

Strange how the night moves

With autumn closing in

--Night Moves, Bob Seger, from the album Night Moves

This week is the first anniversary of my brush with the Hereafter.

After that week, and my subsequent trips to visit the Diabetes team, my Cardiologist, and my Primary Care Physician*, the past year has been... Rather boring.

Which is to say, that's a very very good thing.

I continued to lose weight --not a surprise given the diabetic and low sodium diet I'm under-- and my numbers continue to improve. To put this in perspective, let's talk about my A1C percentage. 

A1C is a measure of my blood glucose levels over a three month period. No, it's not a three months long test, but it measures the percentage of hemoglobin in my blood that has sugar attached. Everybody has some glucose attached to your hemoglobin, but diabetics have a greater percentage. And since it takes about 3 months for diet and other changes to affect those levels, that's why it's said that my A1C percentage measures the past three months' worth of blood glucose.

Here's a handy chart for what the percentages should be**:

Normal:            Below 5.7%

Prediabetes:       5.7% to 6.4%

Diabetes:          6.5% or above

Now that you know what the numbers ought to be, when I walked into the hospital a year ago, my A1C percentage was 12.6.

That might not sound all that large to you, but when I mention that to diabetics I've gotten to know, they all stop what they're doing and go "HOLY SHIT!" Typically followed by "I'M SHOCKED YOU'RE STILL ALIVE!"

So yeah, 12.6 is a lot.

Over the course of the past year, my primary care physician set a goal for me to get my A1C down to 7.0% and keep it there.

By June, I'd smashed through that goal and was down to 6.2%.

At my physical a couple of weeks ago, I tested at 5.8%, barely in the Prediabetic range.

My physician was pleased, and during the physical he began talking about dialing back some of my medications. (Within reason, of course.)

My cardiologist has also been upbeat, as since my tests back in April 2022 confirmed that my heart function was back to normal, she's been on the "keep doing what you're doing" path as well.

***

So where do I think things are?

Overall, a lot better than where I was a year ago, but anyone could say that.

I know I still don't hit my numbers all the time, and I've been repeatedly assured that I'm doing great by everybody, from my Cardiologist down to the Diabetes Team. Outside of persistent aches and pains that I've inflicted on myself by exercising too much at once, I feel pretty good. There have been a few notable side effects --one of which I have another prescription for that shows up on television commercials on a regular basis***-- but overall I guess I can't complain.

(About this, anyway. I mean, complaining is in my job description at PC here.)

I don't mean to disappoint people with more angst, but I'm doing well enough that it feels embarrassing to be talking about it. I mean, who wants to read a post saying "I'm still doing okay, thanks!" without much drama?

But I'm here, and that's good enough for government work.

*That is the current standard name for "my doctor" these days.

**Courtesy of cdc.gov.

***I swear, just about all commercials --outside of those for eczema or gout or HIV-- seem to cover drugs that I either currently take or had taken in the past. I suppose I should have more angst about this particular side effect than I do, and I'm sure that a lot of people in my position would do precisely that, but I'm happy that the drugs work. My having to plan my life around medications --and this is just one more on the pile-- is something I'm going to have to live with. My life is very much a planned set of activities, because I can't afford to let my guard down, and this is just another part of my life I have to regiment and plan for.