This is more of a "placeholder" post than anything else, because I want to follow up on this but don't want this to necessarily linger too long. Basically, my thought process went to time travelling --courtesy of Star Trek, pick an episode, any episode-- and just how far back a time traveler could go before they could no longer understand what is being said to them.
As this Reddit thread indicates, this is not a new question. However, listening to people and understanding the words as well as the slang are one thing, but understanding the culture enough to fit in is quite another.
After all, just look at the generation gap we see between parents and their children, much less great grandparents and their descendants.
Yes, I'm quite aware that the pace of change has accelerated quite a bit since the industrial revolution, but that doesn't make my question less valid. I'm not going to post the invented quote attributed to Socrates about the decay of youth so as to prevent the spread of misinformation, but given that parents and grandparents of my generation --and yes, the Boomers before us-- thought the same thing, it wouldn't surprise me if this attitude about how the youth are different from their elders stretches back to antiquity.
Why is this relevant to gaming, you may ask?
Because we, as people living in the 21st century, will put anachronisms into our various forms of fiction to make it easier for us to relate to.
Just look at the humble tavern.
The often mocked "you all meet at an inn" starting point for many an RPG campaign arose because people could relate to meeting at a pub or a bar or an inn. Yes, I'm aware that Chaucer started his Canterbury Tales that way, but that doesn't mean that taverns operated in a way that we 21st century inhabitants of the world can understand. We just assume it does so we have a common point of reference.
So.... What about it?
As I've said more than once, I believe this will involve some research on my part to get to a better understanding. And no, it doesn't mean I'm going to be visiting a lot of taverns and drinking the beer/ale/mead --my health issues would kick my ass if I tried with abandonment-- but I should investigate this further. I'm aware of the book The Past is a Foreign Country, so maybe I should start there.
NOTE: This post has absolutely nothing to do with gaming. Sorry about that.
The other day I came across a book of school and sport photos that my mom had given me over the winter, and since I'd not seen any of these photos in what has been well over a decade or two, I sat down and perused them.
That was probably not the smartest decision I've ever made. Why, you may ask?
I wasn't prepared for the emotions that they stirred within me.
It's not as if I've never seen pictures of myself as a kid before. On the contrary, my mom has plenty of them around and every so often she likes to pull them out to show "younger me" off to the mini-Reds. When they were younger, that was cute, but now that they're grown, it's kind of awkward.
But still, those photos are of us on vacation, at home, things like that.
These were the formal class photos and sports team photos that I had as part of the baseball and basketball teams I played on. All my elementary school photos were there, up through middle school. No high school pics here at all.
The guilty party.
When I sat down to peruse the photos, I was struck by the changes from black and white to color photos. My Kindergarten and First Grade photos were in color, but when I changed schools to my Catholic grade school for Second Grade up through Eighth Grade, we reverted to black and white. It was only in Fourth Grade that the class photo returned to color, as if the school couldn't afford color until then.*
The second thing were the outfits.
Oh Lord, the outfits.
My elementary school years stretched from the Fall of 1974 to Spring of 1983, and that wide swath of the 70s was reflected in the loud outfits of the day, such as corduroy jackets and pants.
Yikes. And they come in "Husky Sizes" too! From the 1975 Sears Fall/Winter Catalogue, page 418. From christmas.musetechnical.com.
My first two years of school were at the local public school, because the Catholic school only went from 2nd through 8th Grade, but despite the latter's uniform requirements our formal photos looked a lot like those found in the public school. So... the same loud clothing.
Despite the loud clothing, I had a hard time wrapping my head around these photos. My own kids are all adults now, so this feels like multiple lifetimes ago. Still, as I perused them, I remembered aspects of my life that I'd buried under decades of daily work.
Such as how I looked when I got glasses in Sixth Grade. My glasses came after our school photos, so I was glasses-free for my class photo, but in Seventh Grade... Between the bad plastic frames and the awkward horizontally striped shirt, I don't know how that photo could look worse. I also began having dandruff issues (thanks for the genetics, Dad), so if you want to talk middle-school awkward, that Seventh Grade photo was it.
In Eighth Grade, I got a new prescription which included new glasses with metal frames, and they looked a lot better. I may have looked more confident in the school photo, but I certainly was that awkward kid with the hormones who couldn't dance to save their life. (That was on display at the Eighth Grade Graduation Dance, although the most memorable part of that dance was the one kid who thought it would be funny to walk around with his pants down. The chaperones escorted him out.)
***
My classmates generated a large share of the memories of my youth, both good and bad.
Like the kid who became good friends with me in Kindergarten, to the point where we exchanged telephone numbers to try to get together during the Summer. But when I called him up, the woman on the other end of the line said "nobody of with that name lives here". And that Fall, he wasn't at school. It was as if he'd up and vanished.
There was the girl in Third Grade who loved to read as much as I did, and we had a semester's long competition as to who could read the most books. I kept pace with her for a while, but she ended up beating the pants off me in both quantity and quality of books**. I found her interesting and funny and vexing all at once, but at the end of the school year she told me that her family was moving, and I never saw her again after that Spring.
Oh man, I'd almost forgotten about the kid in Third Grade who never did his homework. And I do mean never. He'd get in trouble for that, but then one day when he came to Math class he told the teacher he'd done his homework, she was happy... until we were supposed to open our math workbooks to show we did our homework. Oh, those blank pages he presented did not go over well. "DON'T YOU LIE TO ME!!!" the teacher yelled and grabbed the kid by the arm, yanking him out into the hallway. There was an impromptu meeting among all of the other Third Grade teachers and the Principal, with the kid in tow, which dragged on for over 20 minutes. (I know, because I was watching the clock in total silence, along with the rest of my class.) I don't know the end result of all this, but the kid was never in class again.
In Fourth Grade, I absolutely loved my homeroom teacher; she was patient yet demanding, encouraging and calm, and she pushed my academic interests far more than the nuns ever did. But more than anything else she was tall. She was easily the tallest woman I'd ever known at that point --I want to say she was at least 5' 10"-- and I found out later that she was the daughter of a local doctor who played basketball back in the day. In what I now identify as a trend, she left the school at the end of the school year because she could make more money being a secretary for her dad's office than she could as a teacher.***
I discovered girls in the Fifth Grade, but looking at these photos now I'm having a hard time viewing the girls and trying to remember what I found attractive in them. I mean, they look so young, and my vantage point is a mid-50s man who looks at women in their early 20s and think that they look far too youthful for my taste.
There was the "love triangle" in the Sixth Grade between one boy and two girls that everybody seemed to think was absolutely cute, including the two girls involved, but the boy seemed very embarrassed by the whole thing. I was simply baffled, because I thought that if I were caught that way between two girls, it would make my head hurt.
A boy who was only there for Sixth Grade --his family moved to West Germany after the school year, so it's likely his was a military family-- taught everybody the "Diarrhea" song. He was constantly in trouble, and it was widely rumored he was in and out of juvenile detention.
In Eighth Grade, I had to deal with constant bullying from a girl who would get into my face and yell "WE HATE YOU!!" I've been bullied before and since, but that was probably the worst. I hated her with a passion, but the teachers did nothing and I decided I wasn't going to respond to her directly. But oh, I dreamed about hauling off and slugging her for that.
***
All that was well and good, until I reflected on what happened to some of the kids when they grew up.
There was one girl I crushed on --not my original crush, but one that people knew about in grade school-- who was very smart and attractive, but she got pregnant and she ended up marrying her boyfriend and dropping out of college. I think she may have eventually gotten her college degree, but I have no idea if she remained married.
A similar fate befell the kid who dropped his pants at the Eighth Grade Dance; he finished within a hair of being Salutatorian at high school and had a sports scholarship to a Division I university lined up, but his girlfriend got pregnant and... that was that.
The girl who bullied me in Eighth Grade? She developed an eating disorder in high school. I have no idea what became of her after that.
One classmate spent time in prison for embezzling funds, but I believe he's out now.
In a "no surprise" event, one of my classmates died when a drug deal went bad. He was a constant thorn in my side, and despite his small stature he was a bully. When I was in high school he was caught by the police slashing tires in the parking lot of our elementary school, which I was no real surprise.
Another classmate committed suicide by jumping off of the tallest building in town. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around that one, 30 years after I first heard it. He was the class clown type, and from what I've read about comics and depression I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it still hurt.
Not all was doom and gloom, however. A few people married their high school sweethearts and remain married today (or at least as far as a couple of years ago). Others survived the bullying gauntlet and became successful in life. And still others are, well, doing their thing, I guess. If they're like me, they don't respond to correspondence about school reunions or things like that, because they prefer to forget their experiences in grade/middle school.
***
Admittedly, this reflection wasn't what I expected it would be, as when I began perusing the photos I didn't expect to be reminded of all of these events. I could have just shoved it aside and buried it deep in my psyche, but I felt it was important to let this stuff come out. There's a lot more stories I could tell from my grade school years, but I'm not exactly sure how to tell them.
My grade school was, well, kind of fucked up in its focus. I don't know if it's the case in other parts of the country, but here in Ohio the Catholic grade schools emphasize athletics to an inordinate degree. As in "far beyond the healthy levels" of emphasis. For example, my school's priorities were in full display on our annual "yearbook" that we were given out for free at the end of the year. My kids' yearbooks growing up included a lot of photos of the various classes and the kids doing all sorts of activities; my own only included the formal pictures of the sports teams that the school sponsored, as if sports were all that mattered at the school. (In some ways, it kind of did.)
However, there were at least a few pages for autographs and other comments, so there was that at least. And like a lot of kids, I got some signatures from people I knew.
This was in my Seventh Grade yearbook. Names have been removed for privacy's sake. And before you ask, no, we never dated.
Again, this is from Seventh Grade. The guy who wrote this is, well, respectable these days. I think that blows my mind more than anything else.
In perusing the autographs, I don't think I had an "bad" autographs, but that kind of went without saying. After all, you're not likely to ask someone you didn't like to sign your yearbook. Still, I can tell the years I felt more isolated than others by the (lack of) autographs in my yearbook.
But I do wonder about how much the petty drama drove so much shit at school. Probably 95% of it, if I'm being honest with myself.
***
Okay, I have to put all of this aside for now. I'm glad I got to put some of this down on pixels, because it feels rather cathartic to bring all of this out every so often. Maybe it's just me that I'm surprised that as many kids in my class of 90-100 eventually turned out to be as well adjusted adults as there were, but then again maybe the churn of shit below the surface is quite normal for any school. Who knows?
#Blaugust2023
*That wasn't the case; it was more the fault of the Pastor being a cheapskate. That particular priest was a stereotypical cigar smoking, hard drinking asshole in his mid-50s who always found something to dislike in whatever you were doing. His fingerprints were all over what high schools were welcome to recruit at the school as well; he went to the high school I eventually attended, and because of that he refused to let the local Jesuit high school recruit students. The same thing went for the girls' high school: the girls' school right next to my high school was welcome, the other, more prestigious ones were not.
**She was reading middle school level books by the end of the school year, and just cruising through them.
***I saw her years later when I broke my collarbone in Eighth Grade; she certainly remembered me, which was both gratifying and embarrassing to a 13 year old kid that his Fourth Grade teacher remembered him. Of course, I now know that isn't so unusual, but back then I certainly thought it was.
I figured I'd start an exploration of some of my PCs and toons with my AD&D 1e character, Alarius. You know, stick to the classics at first.
I'd originally joked that I should name him "Joe the Cleric", hence the "Joe" there. And yes, when someone says something funny at the table, it goes on my character sheet somewhere.
Alarius is, in some ways, an unfunny me. He takes himself far too seriously, doesn't really like "the Hilarious" moniker he was given*, and doesn't talk much about his gods. There's an out of game reason for that last part, as one of our game group is a Methodist Minister, and therefore I'm not inclined to be obnoxious as far as in-game religion is concerned.
Alarius began the adventuring life following up on rumors of slavers operating in the area, and joined up with a group to pursue those rumors. Along the way, the slaver conspiracy kept growing in scope and size, and as the group gained in knowledge and strength they began to find themselves a target of the slavers themselves. When they finally reached the heart of the slaving operation, they were instead captured and thrown into the dungeon, presumably to await execution. Only a fortuitous volcanic eruption --"A gift from the gods!" Alarius said at the time-- allowed them to escape, find their gear, and overwhelm the guards at the docks.
(Yes, that was the content of the old AD&D Slave Lords modules, A0 through A4.)
While perusing the slavers' documents, Alarius discovered that a shipment of slaves had been sent out to a remote area, which stood out from other possible locales. The party reassembled and headed out to investigate, only to discover that the surrounding countryside was under assault from a clan of Hill Giants.
(Oh yes, it's THAT module.)
Alarius and Company defeated the Hill Giants and followed the trail to a stronghold of Frost Giants, and subsequently to a fortress of Fire Giants. It was only then that they discovered the long rumored but never seen "dark elves" or Drow not only existed but were directing the Fire Giants in their acquisition of slaves.
At the moment, Alarius is somewhere underground, following a path marked on an incomplete map to what appears to be a Drow city. The party already had to fight off some Drow slavers, who took off with some of their number, and followed them to an underground supply post. The abductees were subsequently rescued and everybody escaped an underground supply post by the skin of their teeth.
(Yes, we're finished with module D1 - Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and are about to start D2 - Shrine of the Kuo-Toa. For those who don't know who Kuo-Toa are, think giant murlocs. EVIL giant murlocs.)
***
Aranandor is up next, an Elven Champion in LOTRO:
There are stories about that already?
LOTRO is an ideal game if you want a story, because the original Shadows of Angmar story is absolutely fantastic. You can get bogged down a bit while you level and the UI is really bad for the Red/Green colorblind, but if you're a fan of Middle-earth, it's always worth a trip.
So... Aranandor.
I made a point of making a character with an "accurate" Quenya name, although after the royal "Aran" I think it means royal/noble of Andor. Or maybe not.
Aranandor spent some time earlier in the Third Age at Rivendell but eventually grew restless and made the trip to Ered Luin, where the Grey Havens lay. As the Shadow of the east grew larger, he considered following the call of the sea and going to the Undying Lands, but instead he chose to stay and fight the Shadow as best he could. The Witch King wove many intricate plots around Eriador, from Ered Luin to Bree and even as far east and south as Eregion, and no matter how hard Aranandor tried, he always felt that the minions of the Witch King were a step ahead of him.
As Angmar looked unstoppable, The Witch King's chief minion decided to dole out his own twisted form of justice on a minion he perceived to be insufficiently loyal. That turning on a loyal minion, causing the minion to in turn betray the Shadow, was the break Aranandor and the Free Peoples needed.
"Strange how such a thing as petty jealousy can cause the downfall of the great," Aranandor once mused while resting at Imladris.
After the Angmar affair, Aranandor spent time with the Dwarves in Khazad-Dum, a relentlessly grim place that he shudders to remember. The boughs of Lothlorien were more to his liking, his kin from afar dwelt there, after all, but even there the Shadow stretched its arms toward the Golden Lady. He would die for Galadriel and Celeborn, but rather than asking that sort of sacrifice they instead chose another: to draw the attention of Mordor away from the Fellowship, Aranandor was tasked with assisting an assault into Mirkwood. The darkness that dwelt there reminded the Elf far too much of the darkness in Moria, and as companions died his spirits flagged.
A change was needed.
When he returned to Imladris for healing and rest, Elrond summoned him to his side. "Word has reached us that Aragorn has need of his Kinsmen," he told the elf. "Assemble the Rangers of the North so that they may head south and rendezvous with him in Rohan."
Ever the dutiful Wood Elf, Aranandor rode throughout the north, bringing word to the Rangers and then riding south with them to the country of the Dunlendings. There he found loyalty and betrayal among the people so thoroughly dominated by Saruman, yet he also found courage and heart in those few Dunlendings who rejected the Shadow.
It is there that Aranandor's story ends, for much lies before him and is yet to be told.
As you can guess, Aranandor's primary motivation is his desire to see the Shadow defeated, but the long and often lonely paths he has trod has worn on him. He smiles less now, and he has seen far too many of those he calls friends fall in battle or to the plots of the Enemy. Yet he has not totally forsaken the Grey Havens, as he knows that when this age is over he may yet cross over the sea to the West.
I recently volunteered to do a one shot RPG with a friend of mine, and I was allowed to use any existing PC I've created and are currently using in an RPG.
"Do mouthy WoW toons count?" I asked.
Oh, shush. That was a term of endearment.
Although this wasn't exactly what my friend had in mind, it was a player character for an RPG (of a sort), and as I am currently playing an iteration of this particular PC, my friend decided to allow it.
I will be the first to admit that I have had my share of RPG campaigns over the years, and plenty of PCs to choose from, but as far as personalities go, that's a big conundrum. Until my MMOs came along, my experiences in creating PCs with a somewhat divergent series of personalities was pretty limited.
Hence the reason for this post.*
***
When I first began playing RPGs, I was in 7th Grade and the concept of 'roleplaying' itself was reduced to "you enter a room with 5 Kobolds and 4 Orcs." Not exactly stuff that will engage with my inner Master Thespian, I can assure you. That didn't mean that I didn't dream of being the Knight (or Paladin, in this case) fighting evil wherever I found it.** That dream of inhabiting a character was there, it's that my "characters" were, well, me. The were simply extensions of me and my personality, no more and no less.
It was only when I was forced to go "underground" on my RPG playing and in turn embraced reading a lot of SF&F that I began to understand a bit more about how roleplaying could work. The PCs didn't have to be me with just different names, but they could be created and/or voiced by me. They could have different personalities, just like that found in the various novels I read.
So... A lot of my characters began to act similarly to those that I read out of Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, or The Elric Saga. (Among others.) Not that much of a reach in terms of personal motivation, but when the alternative was "acting like me", it was a decent enough stretch for someone taking their first steps into a fictional world of their own making.
The summer of my Senior year in high school, I had a discussion with a couple of my co-workers about how an RPG campaign works. While they were proponents of the "you meet at a tavern and then go out and kill monsters", I went in a different direction.
"Sure, you could initially meet in a tavern," I admitted, "but say you take a contract to do something small. You do it well, then that leads to another job, a bigger one. This continues until you begin to acquire a reputation, and you attract the attention of someone in power. They decide to take a chance on you, and whether you perform well or not means that they become either your enemy or your patron. Or, you could become the King's personal problem solver, a 'Mission: Impossible Team'***, ready for when he needs you to take on a big job."
Nothing much came out of that discussion, but looking back on it now it seems that was a sort of turning point. Between then and me heading off to college a short time later, I turned a corner in terms of what I wanted out of an RPG.
Well, kind of.
My first big RPG experience in college gave me an example of how a DM was restrictive because he wanted us to play things his way. He had designed this entire elaborate campaign and recruited about 14 people to play --at once-- but the campaign and his DM style left his players no room for role playing. It was "play the campaign the way I want you to or else". Well, without giving the players any real freedom to do much more than react to what he was telling your character was they were doing, it became all about him and his story. The fact that he had far far too many people playing in a single campaign at once became a recipe for disaster.
The campaign lasted a grand total of one night, and somewhere about an hour into the game he came to the realization that he couldn't control the situation and left in an offended huff.
There were 5 of us who kind of hung around after, critiquing what the DM tried (and failed) to do, and we all wanted to still play. One of us piped up that he'd DMed back in high school, and he had some campaigns he could run.
And our primary D&D campaign in college was born.
This second RPG experience lasted much longer --it eventually evolved into the 20+ year campaign a decade later with a subset of players from that group-- but I reverted to form and basically played, well, a version of me.
(Gotta go with the classics, I guess.)
Even its descendent campaign, the 20 year one, I ended up playing a version of me, personality-wise. Oh, he started out as an inquisitive type who was so wrapped up in their own studies that he only broke out of it when presented with a carrot on a stick in the form of a mystery to be solved, but ol' Lucius Raecius devolved into a version of me who would charge into battle, spear at the ready, because that was naturally what a Cleric of Zeus would do.****
I only began to break out of that when I was given a Wizard character to play in addition to Lucius: the original Nevelanthana.
Yes, Neve started life as a D&D PC of mine, an L4 Wizard in D&D 3.0. I'd advocated for a magic wielder of some sort, because we didn't have any in our game group, and I could see the need for magic in a future campaign.
The D&D version of Neve was snooty, somewhat arrogant, brilliant --and boy did she know it-- and really wanted to be the game world equivalent of an Elven Ranger like her father, but she wasn't good enough to join the corps. So, she became a Wizard instead, like her mother,, but she still kept practicing archery to prove that she was better than everybody thought. (Rejection can be a helluva motivating tool. Believe me, I know from personal experience.)
Oh, and one more thing: she spent several years of the campaign as a ghost.
Yes, she died not too long after she joined the campaign. It was a classic case of one of the party members being mind controlled by a harpy and turning and attacking the closest player: Neve. He rolled --in succession-- 20.... 20.... 20!!!
The DM decreed it resulted in an instant decapitation.*****
Rather than having Neve simply shuffle off the mortal coil, the DM kept Neve around as a ghost until we were able to figure out how to bring her back.
During that long period of "Ghost Neve", I learned how to work with a player with a distinctively different set of motivations than mine were. Ghost Neve couldn't fight, and she couldn't be heard by almost everyone, but she could still affect the game in some ways. Because of that, I couldn't fall back on playing Neve like an extension of myself. I was still me, and Lucius was still me, but Neve was definitely her own person. Her personality was such that I turned to my experiences writing fiction to try to keep her narrative fresh and interesting, and both my role playing and my fiction improved as a result.
The irony is that were it not for a dead PC I wouldn't have learned how to play living ones better.
***
And a further irony is that I needed to play single player story driven games to give my MMO players their own motivations and personality.
My original MMO, World of Warcraft, doesn't have a lot of story driven content from the standpoint that you get to choose how a player reacts. You roll on up, you get the quest, and you complete it. The original SWTOR had modifications to that formula as you could select various options, some of the Light Side and some of them Dark, but the net effect is that you don't affect the story nearly as much as you might think given some of the weight you may place on certain decisions. The Elder Scrolls Online is a similar MMO where the overall story moves in one direction, and while there are small decisions you can make the overall thrust of the story is predetermined.
I suppose that's also the case with single player RPGs, the effects of various decisions in them can be larger, much larger, than that of MMOs.
Take The Witcher, for example. I've only played about half of the first game in the series, but that first game showed me what the consequences of my actions are. "Because I chose X, X enabled me to get to Y, and then I could reach Z," were the obvious connections the in-game narration provides. It might be beating you on the head with a stick, but those actions and the follow-up from the same provide the basis for a character's decision making.
And from there, a personality can emerge that drives that decision making.
Of course, this can go awry, as "it's what my character would do" can be driven to extremes and ruin everybody's fun. Obviously being a Grade A asshole doesn't help anybody, and if you're going to have a character of yours do that, you'd better be
In a single player video game
Writing a story
because if you play a character that actively sabotage's the group, people won't want to play with you. As one of the replies in that Reddit thread I linked to pointed out, D&D is as close to a coop game as you can get. When you play as an asshole without regard for the group, then expect the group to rebel against you.
Okay, I digress.
Due to those single player games and the sometimes uncomfortable situations a player may find themselves in, I learned how to evolve a personality which simply isn't an extension of my own.
Does that mean my method of playing is superior to these others? No, it's just different. It's kind of hard to explain, but my understanding and satisfaction of roleplaying has changed over time, and each type of roleplaying from "extension of me" to " a fully fleshed out three dimensional character" give me a lot of satisfaction in their own way.
If you've got the time, Matt Colville has a great lecture about this actual topic:
So we have come full circle. As I began playing WoW Classic back in 2019 I began to have thoughts about why the toons I was playing were out adventuring. Vanilla Classic has some really good initial questlines for low level players, and the Defias -> Deadmines story is the best of the lot, but it was a new toon's initial arrival at the starting zone was what puzzled me. Those ponderings eventually lead to two offspring: this post about player motivation in general, and the creation of One Final Lesson.
In it's own bizarre way, were it not for Neve, I'd not have had Card to play with.
What sort of person is Cardwyn, anyway? Or the WoW version of Nevelanthana? Or Linnawyn? Or Quintalan? Well, that's where Part 2 comes into play.
#Blaugust2023
*And yes, my friend is going to see this post, because why not? It's not as if I want to hide any of this from her.
**Or a Jedi. Or a Cowboy, or a Naval Officer. Okay, that last one might seem like a stretch, but we had an old set of 1954-ish era World Book Encyclopedias at home, and I stumbled across what US military dress uniforms looked like. Lo and behold, the Naval blue dress uniform looked a lot like the sport coat in my closet, so... I'd dress up in my sport coat, attach paper "rank sleeve stripes" via scotch tape, and voila! Instant military uniform to play... uh.... Army with? Oh well, it wasn't perfect.
***Our boss was really into Mission: Impossible, so whenever we had team get-togethers, video recordings of M:I episodes found their way onto the television.
****Narrator: For a smart person, Lucius wasn't as wise as his Wisdom score would indicate.
*****I'm still pissed about that turn of events. Not the actual 20 - 20 - 20 combination, as that was just unlucky rolls distilled into their purest form, but that the player who did the rolling thought it was the coolest thing ever. The rest of us were horrified --or maybe said a few choice four letter words-- but he and the DM thought it was awesome stuff. And that sincere lack of sympathy even out of game pissed me off.
While I was buried under work today, a sudden thought struck me:
What if World of Warcraft's Arenas were decoupled from the rest of the game?
Now, I don't mean that it's a separate program from WoW itself --although that could be an intriguing possibility-- but what if in the interest of getting new players into Arenas Blizzard essentially removes some of the roadblocks from getting people into Arenas?
In this case, I'm envisioning the following:
A player must have a subscription to WoW to participate in Arenas.
When you enter into an Arena fight, every player is set to a standard set of gear and their max level. It doesn't matter what your current level or gear is, everybody gets the current Season's PvP gear and is set to max level. Once the match is over, you return to your regular level and gear.
Customization (transmog) of your appearance is allowed, but offers no bonuses. They're just skins for the standard gear underneath.
Your class buffs are allowed, and every player is given access to a standard number of potions/scrolls/etc. based on their class, plus the PvP Trinket that breaks incapacitation. That's it.
All of your class abilities are still present for a max level toon.
All addons are disabled for an Arena match.
Arena victories yield rewards as standard, but since Arenas are temporary events, you can use your rewards to buy gear used in other PvP activities (such as Battlegrounds and World PvP).
If you want to play Arenas as they are now, you can under a separate naming convention. Call it 'Old School Arenas', maybe? Some people would hate to give up their addons to play, but others won't mind if it means they can play as soon as they subscribe to the game.
What this standardization process does is that it eliminates the grind and the gearing process from getting a player into Arenas. A player can create a toon and go straight into Arenas if they wish, or they can level and run dungeons, raid, or play in Battlegrounds. If you want to customize your PvP experience in the standard fashion --complete with addons and the grinding for gear process-- there's Old School Arenas to go play with.
I'm taking over a new position (it's a lateral move, don't worry) and after a month to a month and a half of "not much" going on, suddenly everything is happening at once. And my co-worker has taken a leave of absence for an unknown period of time, so it's all gotten dumped on me.
Oh yay.
Throw in the usual hits and misses as to whether certain parts of the job were missed or not, and.... Yeah.
Or as Nixxiom would put it in his Fun/Not Fun series of YouTube videos: NOT FUN.
Enough of my pity party; here's some memes about stress related to gaming and other stuff...
Yeah, I've been there. From SammichesPsychMeds.
Such is the nature of addiction. From OverMemes, a Facebook group.
Or worse, a floppy disk. I mean, remember when a clueless computer user would think those were coasters? From imgflip.
I have actually been in this situation, but then I die. From Instagram.
Friday night my Questing Buddy and I and another friend were attempting to complete Mara with 3 people (L60 Frost Mage, L60 Hunter, and L49 Holy Paladin) when the whisper came in.
"Hey, are you running boosts? I'll pay to join your group."
I didn't hesitate.
"Sorry, but we're running to get some quests done out of our log."
"Oh."
When I mentioned it to the group, my Questing Buddy pointed out that:
I am a Mage
I'm L60
I am in Maraudon
So, it made sense for people to think I was running boosts.
Which does make sense, but it kind of sucks. As I pointed out tonight when we ran Zul'Farrak with another friend, they had no idea I was a fresh L60 with absolutely no gear for running Frost Mage style boosts.
Or is it?
"I wonder if there's a Tacotip for Era. brb"
Sure enough, the dreaded GearScore app was available for Classic Era, and I quickly installed and restarted WoW.
"Yep, it's there. So there is a GearScore for Era."
"Oh great," my Questing Buddy grumbled. I could see why she'd be annoyed, as she had to deal with that enough in Wrath Classic.
"Well," I replied, "Era is a different beast. People here don't seem to care nearly as much about GS."
Which is a good thing, because unless you have a regular group to hang with, Wrath Classic pugging can be not a lot of fun. Another friend was complaining last night about a pugger being a real asshole in their Wrath Classic raid; he was complaining about the lack of DPS from people, and my friend was pointing out that she was taking care of the adds like she was supposed to, and here this pugger was shooting his mouth off implying they were all shit.
I could feel the heat from her words all the way up here in Cincy.
***
All this got me to thinking.
In my YouTube Recommended section, this particular video popped up:
I'm not a big Taliesin and Evitel fan, so I think he's kind of dancing around the problem that WoW has: it's player model of quickly leveling and then dungeon + raid (or as players in the Comments section pointed out that it's "Mythic+ and Raid") appeals to a small segment of the potential player base. I said 'potential' because I believe more people would play Retail WoW if the current model weren't so restrictive.*
A common theme in the Comments section was that WoW's Mythic+ pug scene is a toxic cesspool, and that perception --fair or not-- is going to drive people away from WoW if the alternative is to grind renown. And I can see that, because that was what happened to me in Wrath Classic. What I liked doing best in original Wrath, running heroic dungeons, was "enhanced" by Wrath's version of Mythic+ with the Heroic Plus (and Heroic Plus Plus) dungeons, which were all what people wanted to do once they came out.
But Taliesin saying that the Shadowlands 9.1 patch may go down as being the patch that eventually broke WoW is likely correct. It was bad enough that it broke the hold that the game had on enough people for the subs to likely plummet.**
And that leads right into another video, this time from Venruki:
Now, Venruki is a PvP player who plays Arenas, so he's got a different vantage point than I do. But the overall thrust of the video is that it takes far too much time and effort to get into playing Arenas if you're a new player, and all of the external systems --addons and whatnot-- are a major problem that keeps people from playing the game.
To illustrate his belief, he also points out at roughly 9:28 that damage rotations are far too complicated in Retail WoW, and uses the Arcane Mage raid rotation as an example.
Having played a Mage from late Wrath up through early Mists (and back again in Classic), I was floored by the complexity, which starts upwards of 10 seconds before the boss pull. Which to my mind, which sits in "I have to manage my mana" mode, is kind of nuts. When on top of it you have to also have situational awareness to move around and handle various aspects and mechanics of a boss fight, you're just asking for trouble.
Before anybody gets on a comment here saying "oh, it's not that bad, you only have to do that if you want to raid at a high level," let me tell you that perception is indeed reality. These videos are out there, and potential WoW players will see them. So commenters telling me "it's not that bad" are warring against that, not me, because those videos will tell people otherwise.
I can see why people aged 20-25 make up 37% of WoW players, and apparently people age 50+ make up only 0.5% of the WoW playerbase.*** It can feel that due to the complexity and requirements and whatnot that the game has passed me by.
NOTE: After this post, Shintar was able to determine that the data listed above came from a survey dating from 2013. (See the comments.) Whether or not the data is accurate is irrelevant, as the date of the survey is 10 years old. Therefore I'm striking the data and leaving the strikethrough visible. Still, I do feel that WoW is far to complex for its own good: it's difficult to get started, the systems you learn while leveling don't apply once you reach the current expansion, and the sheer grind and complexity once you reach max level becomes an albatross when newer gamers want to load up a game and just, well, play. And if you step away for a period of time, the game makes it paradoxically easy and hard to return: easy to level up, but hard to freaking pick up on all of the details you need if you want to truly embrace Endgame content again. And the community does itself no favors.
#Blaugust2023
*I get that my main complaint, that the story and focus has gone off the rails compared to Vanilla (and to a lesser extent TBC) days, is something that only a small portion of the potential player base is concerned with. To the majority of people playing Retail WoW, story only becomes a concern when it is gated behind a certain amount of activity (or in-game timers); whether the story makes sense or whether it appears to be created by conspiracy theorists in the midst of an LSD-induced fever dream isn't high on people's agenda. I'd probably be less harsh about the story if I felt like I had a stake in it, but really, I don't. Blizzard's story team made that plain when it is obvious that we're basically the meat shields for whatever the faction leads (or whoever else is in charge) decide.
**No, I have no idea if it is the case, just all I've heard. Even if it wasn't as bad as people say, the perception was bad enough that it takes on a life of its own.
***That chart that Nixxiom has on the video also shows people aged 30-40 make up 9% and 40-50 make up 1% of the player base, respectively. So... All us old farts who blog a lot are definitely in the minority.
EtA: Corrected some word flow.
EtA: Corrected some grammar.
EtA: It was Zul'Farrak, not Zul'Aman. Wrong Troll instance, and wrong expac.
