What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Chronicles of the Black Company

As I've mentioned more than once in this blog I'm not a fan of the grimdark direction Fantasy and Science Fiction has gone in the past couple of decades. My quotable quote on the emphasis on personal suffering by the protagonist and a high body count among the supporting cast has been "If I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news."

So why did I find The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook so interesting?

The Chronicles contains the
first three books in the series.
Official pic is from Amazon because
I was lazy and didn't want to take a
pic of the book myself.

That I'll never know for sure, but I think some of it has to do with Glen Cook's writing style. He writes in a sparse style of prose that suggests a background in newspaper reporting, but from what I can tell he hasn't any training in that area. Glen's writing style does evoke a bit of Stephen King --who did have some experience as a newspaper reporter in his youth*-- and Fritz Leiber, whose Fafhrd and Gray Mouser short stories did influence him.**

Another reason why I guess I feel comfortable with these books is because of the very nature of the story itself. The Black Company is a mercenary company in a similar vein to the Free Companies of the Medieval and Renaissance eras; they are professional soldiers who accept a contract and follow it loyally, despite any misgivings they personally have. The Black Company is likely a bit more professional in stance and loyalty to a contract than historical Free Companies, but that professionalism is rooted in Glen Cook's own experience with the navy in the Vietnam war era. (Yes, Glen is a few years older than my mom.) I suppose you could also argue that his experience working at a General Motors assembly plant has an influence as well, where you do your job even if it's not the most mentally stimulating thing out there.

I'm not giving away any spoilers here when I say that the Black Company accept a contract that turns out to be held by the big stereotypical "evil empire" of this fantasy world. The members of the Company don't like it, but they honor their contract. I suppose you could call the series grimdark because of the nature of that internal conflict, but the Company's moral quandry is lessened quite a bit because the "rebels" they frequently fight against are little better than the "evil empire" itself. This isn't a matter of the rebels going down to the level of the Empire to survive, but rather the rebels are almost trying to outdo the Empire in morally reprehensible behavior. 

In this world, which evokes a lot of the Sword and Sorcery subgenre, the members of the Company are loyal to each other and to the contract, which keeps them together as a unit. 

I led him back to the fire and settled beside him. "What's the matter? What happened?" I glimpsed the Captain from the corner of my eye. One-Eye stood before him, drained by a heavy-duty dressing down.

"I don't know, Croaker." Goblin slumped, stared into the fire. "Suddenly everything was too much. This ambush tonight. Same old thing. There's always another province, always more Rebels. They breed like maggots in a cowpie. I'm getting older and older, and I haven't done anything to make a better world. In fact, if you backed off to look at it, we've all made it worse." He shook his head. "That isn't right. Not what I want to say. But I don't know how to say it any better."

"Must be an epidemic."

"What?"

"Nothing. Thinking out loud." Elmo. Myself. Goblin. A lot of the men, judging by their tenor lately. Something was wrong in the Black Company. I had suspicions, but wasn't ready to analyze. Too depressing.

             --From The Chronicles of the Black Company, Shadows Linger, by Glen Cook. pp 244-5

Yes, people do die in the books, but in a mercenary unit it's established up front as fact of life. There's no excessive body count for drama or gravitas, and the members of the Company basically try to keep themselves as far away from politics as possible. Well, that doesn't exactly happen, but they do try.

The protagonist in the story is Croaker --not his real name, but the one he enlisted with in the Company-- who is the Physician and Annalist of the Company. If you remember your Top Gun, everybody has their own "name" or handle within the group: One-Eye, Silent, Goblin, Elmo, Raven, Otto. I always wondered if that aspect of Top Gun was the most fake, but apparently that's not the case. At the same time, the names in The Black Company are more accurate than what you find in Top Gun because they're more ironic or snarky or referencing a screw up rather than the dramatic sounding Iceman or Maverick. After all, a physician named Croaker evokes black humor in spades. 

***

War is war. Fighting is fighting. And The Chronicles of the Black Company don't try to sugarcoat it. The first novel, The Black Company, starts so abruptly without much of a lead-in that you're thrown into the deep end of the pool before you realize what's happening. It took me about 40-50 pages before I kind of caught up with a background as to what I was reading, although people who have performed some military service or grew up in a military household will probably have an easier time of it than I did. The setting may be Sword and Sorcery, but the people evoke a more modern military viewpoint. Not necessarily the official modern military, where author Myke Cole described the modern US military as basically driven by rules, not gung ho fighting. 

Still, in spite of this trilogy being everything I ought to not like in a SF&F series, I did like it. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I guess in the right conditions I enjoy a Dark Fantasy series. Maybe it's because the story is never quite hopeless in scope, unlike some other grimdark stories. Or that Glen Cook doesn't take perverse delight in killing off characters that you cheer for. 

As you may have surmised, The Chronicles of the Black Company leans hard into the Military F&SF subgenre, and I've seen it noted more than once that Glen Cook's books have a cult following among the military. I can certainly see why, but one thing that I did note is that the first three books in the series don't hew toward a political standpoint that some other Military F&SF have (such as John Ringo's Into The Looking Glass or Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers). The focus of the story being on the Company itself and their reactions to the world help tremendously in that regard. Croaker himself is a likeable protagonist who tries to make sense of the bigger picture but recognizes that's of secondary importance when fulfilling your contract and staying alive are of primary importance.

One thing that I did note is that there's a dearth of female characters in the story. Yes, I know, there's The Lady and the White Rose as well as a few others (sorry, spoilers there), but for the vast majority of the novels the fact they are women is almost incidental. The Black Company is pretty much an all-male outfit, but the very nature of The Lady and The White Rose is such that people in the world don't think of women as a weaker sex and that "fighting is man's work". 

The stories were written in the early to mid 80s, and yes it shows. I'm still surprised that I missed these stories when they first came out because there weren't nearly as many SF&F novels released back then as there are now, but I might have dismissed them when the back blurb begins with "Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead." But I also think it possible I missed these stories because I was busy reading the "classics" from an earlier era: Michael Moorcock's Elric and Corum stories, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and the old Grand Masters of SF (Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein). The F&SF of the 70s/80s that I did read were of the Epic Fantasy variety, such as Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, David Eddings' The Belgariad, Dennis McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy, and Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords. 

Mea culpa on my part, because I think I'd have liked it back then.

Will I pick up the other books in the series? Probably not. I'm happy that the trilogy ended as it did. Sure, there are some loose ends, but I'm comfortable with it as it is. 

*Stephen King, On Writing, pp 55.

**I found this out when I began writing this post, and when I discovered that interview I linked to above I thought "Oh. Of COURSE. That makes sense." It's become more difficult to chase down copies of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, which is a shame. They kind of stood somewhere off to the side in their own snarky little corner away from Tolkien's good and evil epic fantasy and Michael Moorcock's antihero counterpoint, although the stories were closer to Moorcock than Tolkien by far. 

EtA: Grammar corrections.

Meme Monday: Dungeon Master Memes

In honor of the D&D movie --which shocked me by actually being loved by both critics and movie goers*-- I figured I'd post a few memes honoring the (not so) humble DM.

The DM (or GM, your choice) is the leader at the table and facilitates the action. They also are the arbiter of what happens, and in the end their word goes. They also come up with adventures and keep people on track in a "herding cats" kind of way.

In our AD&D 1e campaign, I hope
we don't make the DM facepalm too much.
From Tumblr.

I've had DMs who think like this.
And people wonder where my paranoia
comes from.
From Tumblr and ifunny.co.

Ah, genial Bob Ross, whose Joy of Painting
was a secret love of millions of college
aged students back in the 80s.

I've never had a DM actually say "Whoops",
but this is the scenario I think of.
From allthingsdnd.

And one bonus meme for those of us who grew up with Mr. Rodgers:

From litrpgreads.

*Anybody who lived through the disaster that was the original D&D movie back in 2000 would be shocked as well. It was so bad that comparisons to the Star Wars Holiday Special are not totally unwarranted. Based on that movie I was mightily concerned about what would happen to The Fellowship of the Ring when it released a year later in 2001, but thankfully that turned out okay.

EtA: Just a note that my AV software flagged allthingsdnd.com as using a certificate not meant for that site.

A Day in the Life

You can tell that I'm a gamer from my YouTube home page. There's a ton of gamer related links, from video games to pencil and paper RPGs to board games, and in between you find some trailers, music, and some sports related suggestions. Anyhoo, a reaction video by Asmongold popped up entitled "Shadowlands Hurt WoW Forever" appeared, and I thought, "Yeah, you could make that argument. I wonder who he's reacting to?"

So I went and looked, and found he was reacting to a snippet from a Preach Gaming livestream:

I figured the smart move was to watch Preach's original (above), because I'd rather make my own impressions.*

Preach admits in the video clip that he's going to develop this into a full video post, which is something that I would very much like to see, because he's far more plugged into the WoW community these days than I ever was even back in the day.** But one focus he's been considering at this point in the video is what he calls A Day in the Life of various MMOs, as in what do you do when you login to, say, FFXIV, WoW, GW2, etc. for the day. I'd also like him to do that for WoW Classic, because I do wonder about how Wrath Classic compares with Retail in terms of what people do in a day in the life.

I know what a sizeable number of people did for lot of TBC Classic, and that was three things: a) finish a bunch of daily quests for gold and/or reputation, b) run the Normal and Heroic dungeon daily quests for badges and/or gold, and c) raid if it was raid night and/or work on their attunement quest chains for raiding. Some leveled alts, but a lot of those finished leveling up by the time Phase 3 of 6 rolled around, because my experience leveling Linna and Neve later in the expac was that the leveling areas and leveling dungeons were devoid of non-max level toons.

***

But I do wonder what a typical day in the life of various MMOs does look like.

I read this with Paul McCartney's voice.
From @beatlesbeetwif and ifunny.co.

There isn't a singular "typical WoW player" in as much as there isn't a "typical GW2 player" or "FFXIV player", but I read enough blogs to get a feel for how much the Holy Trinity of Endgame --raids, (Mythic+) dungeons, and PvP-- dominates both Retail and Classic WoW. And I also know the joke about Endgame in FFXIV being "fashion" from my son, but I do wonder about what a typical day in the life is for a sizable portion of the player base of various MMOs. Alas that the only people with the actual source of truth to the matter are the game companies themselves, but I do commend Preach for wanting to try to find out. He has the visibility to make a go at it, whereas any attempt from my corner of the MMO-land would vanish into the ether.

Preach mentioned in the video that he believes that WoW needs to break out of its current Endgame grind by providing more "fun" things to do in WoW. And I do agree with him, but I suspect that most of the "fun" things that Blizz would eventually come up with involve daily quests, because Blizzard is a firm believer in providing a carrot on a stick*** (typically via daily quests) to encourage people to do those things. And if the MMO player base has proven one thing, it's that they have a knack of converting the optional into mandatory. So we'll see.

***

It's not that the question hasn't been raised before, because it has in the official Blizzard forums last year, but what makes Preach's thought experiment different is how the various MMOs compare to each other. It might be a bit of a fool's errand given the complexity of the major MMOs out there, but in my experience the various MMOs do have different player bases that have unique quirks. I'm fond of mentioning the band that plays on Fridays after work on the Gladden server in LOTRO, but my oldest reminded me that there is an actual group --The Brandywine Theater Company-- that puts on musicals in LOTRO. 

Seriously.

They've put on Phantom of the Opera and Wicked, and while I can't recall what their upcoming production is, you can bet that they'll attack it with gusto.

Obviously these are a bit of an outlier to the "average" player, but they provide an insight into the differences that LOTRO has from other MMOs. 

So I'd definitely be curious about the differences between the MMOs from an "average player" standpoint. 

Good luck with that, Preach.

*In parts of the video it sounds like Preach is chowing down on dinner --which if I tried to pull that the spirit of my dead father would materialize and rip me a new one-- but once I realized it was the equivalent of talking at a bar while noshing on some food I was fine with it. Just my own upbringing coming back to haunt me.

**If Mike Ybarra said "Who?" in response to my name like he allegedly did when he was told Preach was visiting the studio, I'd have no issues with it at all. I mean, at best I was a minnow in the WoW-verse. But Ybarra saying that about Preach, when Ybarra presented himself as "one of us" as a hardcore raider and given that Preach is fairly well known within WoW hardcore/streaming circles... Yeah, I'm not believing the Ybarra "one of us" act one bit. I can smell the bullshit from Anaheim all the way here in the Midwest.

***Not the Carrot on a Stick trinket, mind you...

EtA: Made some tweaks in about three sentences for clarity.

Comfort Food for the Gamer

No, I'm not talking about actual food or recipes inspired by games and SF&F franchises.

I mean in the same vein as what comfort food represents: something familiar and makes you feel like all's right with the world. Maybe for some people they have an actual meal that gives them that feeling (for a coworker, it's all about the Texas style brisket when they get back to Texas) or for others it's getting to play a favorite game (for my wife, it's getting her crossword puzzle done) or still others it's curling up with a favorite book (for my brother-in-law, it's his annual reading of The Lord of the Rings). No matter what it is, everybody has some sort of comfort food.

For me, there are certain games --or places within certain games-- that I return to when I want a helping of comfort food.

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" is how the old saying goes, but when life gives me lemons I give life the finger and go play Sid Meier's Civilization IV.

Well, Hatshepsut isn't too bad a leader
to start with. And at least the random
location gave me a river with some resources.
I've been in worse starting positions, for sure.

It's a game I've been playing for over 15 years now, and it's the sort of game I can knock out anywhere from 2 to 5 hours depending on how the game plays out.* I can also get an early feel for whether my position is untenable or not --if I don't have access to Copper or Iron, for example-- and I'll just kill the game rather than die a slow death. 

But when I feel the need for gamer comfort food and I'm in an MMO type of mood, I return to the old standbys: create a new character and run through the areas I love best: the low to mid level zones.

Like, oh, this one:

Hel-lo, Ord Mantell.

For the record, the new on-screen map makes me look like I'm playing TERA** rather than SWTOR, so I'm grateful I can go into the Interface options and turn the damn thing off.

Or maybe start up a new toon in this game:

I'd never created a High Elf before, 
so I pulled out some of my Middle-earth
sourcebooks and started throwing names together.
I decided to not put umlauts over the last 'e'
like Tolkien would have; too messy to type.

There's something peaceful and pleasant about Ered Luin under starlight, just the way the Elves of Middle-earth like it. For all the quirks of LOTRO --such as trying to read those damn maps and the ability icons all looking the same-- the scenery, tone, and storyline are all highly evocative of Middle-earth.

And not to be outdone, I do have favorite places in WoW as well:

I always wondered what that Sentinel
was doing there.

I realize I'm in the minority, but I truly do love Teldrassil, Darkshore, and Ashenvale. They have that ancient Elven forest vibe down so much that you'd think you were in Lothlorien or something.  Yes, I do like Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Eversong Forest, The Ghostlands, and even the damn Barrens, but for pure atmospherics the Night Elf areas are dead on perfect. 

***

The more I go through some of these old original or vanilla areas on these MMOs, the more I enjoy them. You never get the impression that you're "the chosen one" or that you're there to save the world and/or galaxy --okay, the Jedi Knight story does somewhat sound that way-- but you're also not out there hobnobbing with all of the Powerful of the game world. Sure, you run into them from time to time, but it's not like they're saying "Champions! Meet me at the Town Hall! We need to take the fight to Mal'gannis!" At best they may offer counsel (Elrond, Gandalf, Satele Shan) or some quest direction (Aragorn), but nothing like what you find in later expacs in these MMOs. 

There's something comforting in the anonymity provided in these vanilla-esque zones. Even if you're on an active server, you're still not likely to run into many other players at all in these original zones because the latest and greatest zones are "where the action is". That is even the case in these megaservers in Wrath Classic, where most everybody has gotten multiple toons to max level and unless there's another 50% XP boost they're not likely to run another alt through the gauntlet. (I discovered this while waiting around for a Deadmines run in the past couple of weeks.) While those dungeon runs were active in the lead up to Wrath Classic launching, they're almost totally dead now. So, while you wait you go out into the world and quest. Or fish. Or level a gathering skill. Or explore. All of those sorts of things can be done on those three MMOs***, at your own pace without any concern for life, the universe, and everything. (Thank you, Douglas Adams.)

***

While these areas tend to be quiet and relatively empty, disruptions can show up when a high level toon rolls by and wipes an area clean of questing mobs. Perhaps they were going back and completing quests that were left behind, or perhaps they were farming for materials. Or maybe they did have a slightly cruel and/or trollish streak and did it just because. Whatever the reason, the effect was to basically throw off my cadence and I have to wait for respawns. If said high level toon zaps those, then I just abandon the area; arguing with idiots never ends well in my experience.

As a consequence, I've learned to do any low level questing on my high level toons when I know I'm not causing disruptions to people already there. On a (now) empty server like Myzrael that's not a big deal, because there have been times when I've literally been the only person in a zone for several zones in a row. But an "active" server, or a server where I'm new? Yeah, I'm sensitive to disruptions.

***

Okay, enough about me. Where do you go --or play-- when you just need a helping of comfort food?

*All about whether I've got a combat heavy game going. The combat heavy games are much longer than the ones where I simply out-develop the other civs.

**Minus the ridiculously sexy clothing (and the Elin), of course.

***Okay, so you can't fish in SWTOR, but you can do a lot of crafting and datacron hunting.

Meme Monday: Laggy Memes

We've all been there. We're in the middle of something online, whether it's Patch Day, a PvP match, a raid, or just questing or chatting. 

And then it strikes.

LAG!!!

It's a truism of gaming, really: Death, Taxes, Lagging.

Truth.
From imgflip.com.

I've come back from a bio break to
discover that I've been removed from the
group. "Oh, we thought you were lagging!"
"I SAID 'brb bio'!!!"
From imgflip.com.

Uh, yeah. At least I'll admit the last one.
From UNILAD Gaming.

And here I thought it was being ganked.
From 9gag.com.

Yuppies Redux

I was minding my own business, just mining a little ore here and there on Linnawyn, during the primary raiding time for the server, when the whisper came in.

"Hey," it began as it slipped into a practiced sales pitch, "We're a mid-core guild and in need of a Ret Pally for our raid team."

I kind of zoned out when I read the rest of the pitch --I think there was even a mention of helping Linnawyn get geared to join the team-- but I let the person finish before politely declining. 

The whisperer thanked me for being polite, wished me luck, and moved on.

It was only a few minutes later when the thought struck me: how did this person know Linna was a Retribution Paladin? Did I run an instance with them, group up for a quest, or do something else with them in some capacity? I mean, why whisper Linna when there are a ton of Ret Paladins out there on the server? The current Meta dictates that you bring only one Retribution Paladin onto a 25 person raid, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with a body.*

"Oh right," I muttered. "The Tacotip addon."

There it is in its full glory.
Kind of innocuous, isn't it?
From Twitter and AltertimeSK.

Tacotip is known colloquially as the GearScore addon; although there are likely other addons that will provide a GearScore (or GS for short), Tacotip is the most popular by far. While GearScore is the reason why most people will use Tacotip, it can also inspect a player's talents and determine what Spec they are playing as. 

I finally broke down and added Tacotip simply because I wanted to see why Linnawyn was not getting into to a lot of Heroic 5-person dungeon runs. As she was then a newly minted max level toon, the easiest and best way to get some decent gear was to run 5-person Heroic instances. It's not like they're that difficult these days anyway, compared to when we had to re-acquaint ourselves with Heroics in Wrath Classic. But outside of a few runs here and there, I was simply getting no takers, and I couldn't figure out why. 

Then I saw her GearScore: 2000 (ish).

Not exactly a surprise, mind you, given that she was still in gear from quests and some Wrath Classic Normal dungeons, but when people are posting in LFG GearScores of 4000 or more** for Heroic runs people will select the more overpowered player.

Since Tacotip allows another person to actually inspect a player to verify their GearScore and class spec, anybody could check me out to see if I was halfway decent --gearwise-- before they whispered me.

And there's the meta fueled Ret Paladin stigma.

***

Back when I ran Wrath the first time in 2009-2010, I never saw such a stigma toward Ret Paladins. I didn't raid back then, mind you, but I never had a problem pulling my weight in a dungeon. Even when I wasn't geared, and given that I only ran dungeons meant I was undergeared for a lot of Wrath, I never felt shunned over my class and spec combination. But now, in the era of the meta, Ret Paladins are like Frost Mages: Kryptonite to PvE group content.***

So rather than get annoyed even more than I was before, I decided to run battlegrounds to get some gear. And for me, "battlegrounds" meant Alterac Valley.

I figured the gear from running AV would be enough for a starting point, even if it wasn't the highest current PvP gear available. That gear was reserved for people who run arenas, but I knew that already. What I didn't know was that due to changes in how PvP works in Wrath Classic, PvP weapons where reserved only to those running arenas and with a set Arena score threshold. 

If I want a weapon and didn't want to run arenas, I had to either farm weapons via Heroic or Heroic Plus 5-person dungeons... or raid.

Sometimes you can't make shit up.

So I decided that rather than deal with the GearScore crowd I was gonna live with the frumpy ol' weapon I got in a normal 5-person dungeon. At least until the next Arena season drops and I can then get that PvP weapon from the consignment shop.

The thing looks like some sort of
weird cross between a viking/Vrykul
ship and a hacksaw.

***

I was mentioning this encounter to my questing buddy and she asked me if it was a guild she knew. I'm pretty sure she'd seen the guild name around, but I was reluctant to mention this particular guild name. I don't really have a beat on their reputation, and I've never really had any interactions with them before either. Finally, this hasn't been the first time since our little 10 person raid team broke up that I've been the subject of a recruitment pitch, but the only time I've mentioned it.

"If they tried to recruit you like that," she observed, "odds are good it's not likely a raid you want to run with anyway."

"That's what I was thinking," I replied.

My questing buddy has already joined another raid --our friend Jes' Friday/Saturday night pug raid-- and she made a desultory attempt to recruit me, but I turned it down. I know that Jes probably runs her raid the way I'd like it to be run, but I've seen who joins the raid and on more than one occasion that's included people from the franken guild that I don't care to group with ever again.

Besides, Ulduar hasn't grabbed my imagination, and the naked pursuit of gear and the meta has soured me on raiding in general on Atiesh-US. I lived through the 80s and the Yuppie culture once already, and I've no desire to relive it in a virtual world.

***

I think the crux of the matter is that there's no true sliding scale concerning raiding in WoW Classic. People gravitate toward either the hardcore or the "tourist" raids --embodied in WoW Retail with Mythic on one end and LFR**** on the other-- and raid teams that start in the "mushy middle" have the hardest time keeping personnel as they leave for both directions (mostly toward hardcore). Raiding in WoW Classic with Valhalla was a fortuitous turn of events for me as I got to see all of the content, but I also got to see it in a hardcore environment that didn't feel like one because I was in a class in demand (Mage). Once the veneer was stripped off in TBC Classic and I started over with a another toon with a different class I realized just what it meant to be hardcore, particularly when I no longer have the physical skills to be as hardcore as my class demands. 

"...So speed run practices become expert practices, and, well, over the course of years, that cooks your brain. Classic ought to have been our salvation from this; after all, the content doesn't demand the kind of optimization we've been discussing, not by a long shot. And yet it's gone the other way. Wrath of the Lich King Classic has become a nightmare of instrumental practices. Yes, it's not difficult, but the difficulty isn't the appeal, instead it's about going about this process perfectly. To be good at Classic is to learn and adopt the right practices. To play the right class as the right race, with the best professions; to level the quickest, get server first, to get that Shadowmourne you never got back in the day. In some cases, it seems really weird. It's like reliving high school. This time you're gonna pick better electives, be cooler, bet on the Cubs in 2016, and smash when you got the chance.*****

At the launch of Classic these practices existed but they were largely invisible. By definition it did not mean anything to you that some guys were in Molten Core while you were in Wailing Caverns. Whatever. But after you quit Classic at Level 47, these players, they stuck around. And they established the practices of what it meant to play Classic. This process of riding the curve to the greatest extent possible, it's not the exception, it's the rule."

--From It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft by Folding Ideas, at 1:02:37.

It's not just a matter of me saying that people who are better than me are "hardcore" or "no lifers" --although the effort it takes to really 'get gud' can be quite astonishing at times#--

This meme (from Pinterest and all over)
will live on forever.

it's more about the ostentatious lifestyle that this method of play promotes that makes me want to reject it. "Lifestyles of the Max Geared and Achievement Driven" hosted by Rhonin of Dalaran isn't what I had in mind when I went to go play WoW Classic, but wandering around Dalaran or Shattrath (in TBC Classic) and seeing the people showing off their mounts or their gear makes me feel... Hmm...

Well, not like high school, like Dan Olson of Folding Ideas suggested, but a high school reunion instead: you're showing off how successful you were, how awesome your spouse is, how great your body is via exercise and/or plastic surgery, and you have pics of your kids/pets/house/cars/vacation/whatever just to show off that you did something with your life rather than being the person stuck in a compartment marked "Loser" for the past 10 or 20 years.## Here you are, years after original Wrath, showing off your Time Lost Proto-Drake or Scarab Lord mount in Dalaran that you never got back then. 

Ah, Yuppie Drone. An 80s novelty classic.
"I love my car and house..."

I'm as guilty as the next person, since I'd like to finish the Loremaster achievement for the Alliance side and tool around Dalaran with that title. At the same time I very much prefer my anonymity, so even if I got my Loremaster achievement I'd probably never display it. I derive more satisfaction in completing the task rather than the trappings of doing so. Cardwyn and I are very much alike in that regard.  

Fair point.

Yet at the same time, becoming a tourist isn't exactly what I had in mind. I don't mind being in that mushy middle if I can find the right place for me, and where I don't have my in-game life defined by raiding. Or whether I like it or not, how other people in the raid define that raiding. I'm extremely wary of group content these days, not because of the content itself### but rather those who comprise the groups. I'm not so wedded to seeing the content that I'd do whatever it took to see the content --and no, before you ask, I wouldn't care to try LFR if it existed in Classic just to see the raids-- but it would be nice if the meta weren't so dominant in WoW Classic --and video games in general-- these days. 

If there was one thing that I swore I'd never become, it was a Yuppie. I haven't become one in real life, and I sure as hell won't become one in a virtual world either.

*And for a 10 person raid, you can forget about bringing a Ret Paladin at all. Paladins are already covered in a 10 person raid with one of two healers (Holy Paladin) and one of two tanks (Protection Paladin), so inserting a Ret Paladin into the remaining 6 DPS slots is... No. Not gonna happen. I tried to take Linna into our little social 10 person raid, and I was told flat out that they wanted Card instead.

**To put this in perspective, Deuce ran strictly 10 person raids in Phase One, which meant she only got gear from the 10 person version of Vault of Archavon, Naxxramas, Obsidian Sanctum, and Eye of Eternity. She'd maxed out on her gear by the end of that Phase, and her GearScore was listed as slightly higher than 4000. That was more than enough to stomp her way through most "regular" Heroic 5-person dungeons. Neve, with a GearScore of roughly 3300, has no trouble at all dealing with either "regular" Heroics or Heroic Plus. So people throwing around GS of 4400+ for just running 5 person content is the equivalent of a dick measuring exercise. 

***The irony is that in the age of the Heroic Plus, a Mage's Frost abilities have come back into vogue once more. The instant cast Ice Lance spell --no world beater on the DPS meters-- is highly critical to breaking stuns, web wraps, and other "extra" abilities mobs now have in these Heroic Plus 5-person dungeons. Call me vindicated.

****I rarely invoke LFR on the blog, but it stands for "Looking For Raid". It's the automated raid finder built into WoW Retail --it debuted in patch 4.3 during the Cataclysm expac-- and it has an extremely poor reputation among WoW players. The hardcore look at it as "easy mode", and the fight mechanics are simplified to the point where a subset of raiders could carry the rest of the raid. And from what I've been told, that frequently happens. Preach of Preach Gaming once posted a video back in 2013 where he demonstrated that an LFR raid could succeed without him doing anything at all throughout the entire raid. 

*****Uh. smash when I get the chance? That wasn't gonna happen. Being a geek back in the 80s kind of sealed THAT deal, particularly at the Catholic schools I went to. And if I ever were in that situation, I'm sure that Catholic guilt that every Catholic kid was imprinted with would rear its ugly head at the worst possible time. Alas for my youthful horny self.

This! Which is why I'm happy we
didn't raise our kids Catholic.
From Twitter (duh).

#I've seen my questing buddy plot for her gear, and while she's not what I'd consider hardcore she revels in the plotting and acquisition of gear with a singlemindedness that can be awe inspiring. All I can say is that if this is how she went after her husband, he didn't stand a chance.

##I knew someone from grade school and high school who went to one of the reunions to prove that he made something of himself. He definitely didn't need to prove it to me, as he always wanted to be a doctor since he was a kid and became just that, with a loving wife and family, but all those people who picked on him or dismissed him were his target. I happened to run into him at a game store some weeks after the event, and he told me all about how everyone finally got the comeuppance he'd so wanted. He also added that my name came up more than once during the reunion, as in "I was hoping Red would be here so I could see him again," and he was very blunt with the people who asked: "You're never going to see Red at one of these. Red holds grudges for a long time, and he has never forgotten how he was treated in school."

###My opinions of Ulduar notwithstanding.

Meme Monday: Lore Memes

Typically this would cover World of Warcraft, but really it can cover RPG game (or non-game) world you want to cover.

If there's one thing that drives me absolutely crazy about the lore in game worlds, it's that we --as campaign DMs-- or a dev company as an RPG designer or an MMO designer-- don't think much at all of creating a game world with a history 10,000 or more years old.

(See: Middle-earth and Azeroth for two well known examples.)

Think about that for a minute.

What do we know of our human history from 10,000 years ago, or 8,000 BCE?

Well, we were just beginning the warming from the last ice age. There were neolithic settlements around the Fertile Crescent, such as Jehrico and Çatal Hüyük, and most of the rest of the world had paleolithic settlements. In the Americas, there's evidence of the beginning of agriculture. And... not much else.

It's not that we as a people don't want to know more of what's going on from 10,000 years ago, it's that we only have what we can find via archaeology, and that's not a helluva lot. 

But to a fantasy world, 10,000 years ago isn't a big deal: War of the Ancients. The Elder Days. The Crown Wars.* It's quite amazing just how much a fantasy world can stuff into such a time as if it were a short bit ago. 

For a semi-historical reference, the period of time generally associated with The Trojan War is 1300-1200 BCE, at the end of the Bronze Age. In an RPG, that's the blink of an eye.

I suppose we tend to forget just how compressed history can truly be, particularly how the acceleration of the pace of technology was in the past 200 years. My great aunt was born the year before the Wright brothers from Dayton flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and she lived to see the first landing on the Moon and the first space probes reach Neptune. 

So, keep all this in mind when designing your RPG, I suppose.

Yeah, kinda like that. And that's not
even covering what I mentioned above.
From 9gag.com.

If you're gonna go bonkers on lore, then
you'd better remember to tie up the
not-so-subtle loose ends.
From pinterest.

Yeah yeah yeah.
For some reason, Jupiter from Holst's
The Planets just started playing in my head.
From DnDMemes.

Then again, Azeroth has no monopoly
on bonkers lore. From ifunny.co.

And one bonus pic, if you think that the RPGs mentioned above have some bonkers lore/backstory, let me introduce you to Runequest's Glorantha...

From basicroleplaying.com.

*From D&D's Forgotten Realms setting.