Telling Stories: Keeping it tense with zero stakes
I will freely admit that I have seen a decided minority of Doctor Who, but I’m always fascinated by the lengths that the show goes to in order to justify its plots. And kind of with good cause. The Doctor’s TARDIS is basically a get-out-of-plot-free card, able to travel through time and space with an ease usually reserved for making instant popcorn. Many of the conflicts in the show could be solved simply by going back in time to before the antagonist had a certain idea and then throwing him into a locked vault.
I am aware that the Doctor has a rule against killing; that is also a mechanism to avoid having him solve every single problem with infanticide.
Of course, every single story ending like this would make for a terrible series anyway, so I’m not begrudging the existence of these contrivances. The alternative is awful. But it raises an important question about roleplaying, wherein you have no such artificial narrative blocks. You can leave at any time, and you have absolute veto power over what happens to your character. And that’s for good reason, obviously, but it also creates an environment wherein you can always, always leave.
I would be thankful
If you’re in America, like me, you’re eating one of these today.
For a couple of years, I had a regular column that inevitably ran on Thanksgiving. Never one to pass up an opportunity for an easy gag that tickled my fancy, the joke was that every single year saw me wishing readers a happy every-holiday-other-than-this-one. I didn’t have enough time to eventually move into St. Swithin’s Day, but given enough time I am certain that would have happened. I can, in fact, be dreadfully predictable every so often.
This year, I do not have that duty. Instead, I’m sitting here and thinking of the many things I do have to be thankful for this year – a successful first year of marriage, the excellent reception I’ve gotten for this project thus far, Final Fantasy XIV, Defender’s Quest, BoJack Horseman – along with the many things that I can’t be thankful for because they aren’t, strictly speaking, real. They should be real. I think all of them are pretty self-evident, inevitable, and we’ll be happy when they come around. But the sooner these things pass into the desert of the real, well, the more thankful I’ll be.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV -Interlude-, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I had really wanted to get through the whole of -Interlude- in one part, but alas, it’s just a little bit too long. You’d think there’s be a more solid sense of progression as a result, but instead it’s kind of scattershot and all over the place, starting you in the middle of leveling with an odd assortment of gear and no super-clear picture about how long you’ll be here. It’s an odd duck, is my point.
Last time, we left off with Rydia acting as if she is far too drunk to be near crystals and loaded onto the Falcon, which is weird enough in and of itself but still leaves the question of why monsters in the Sealed Cave were acting up in the first place. Also, apparently Edge is doing something, although it really hasn’t tied into the game in a significant fashion yet either. I really hope these plot threads start coming together soon, there’s not a whole lot of interlude left.
Sorry, not a whole lot of -Interlude-. That title formatting looks really ugly. Did anyone point that out?
Hard Project: Dungeons & Dragons
Taking on Tieflings as a basic race was probably a wise move, but it also speaks to that back-and-forth process of taking something, making it non-generic, and then trying to make it generic again.
When Gygax and Arneson first came up with Dungeons & Dragons, it seemed to be half for a lark. Cue years of discussion, back and forth, debates about the nature of roleplaying, the inclusion of computers, debates about the nature of what makes a computer game a proper RPG or not, and so forth. Amidst all of that, the franchise has steamrolled on, and let’s be fair, we’ve gotten some pretty great games set in one of the many Dungeons & Dragons settings over the years.
We’ve also had some horrible ones. And quite frankly, they’re hard to get right no matter what you do.
Part of the problem is that Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t quite have a mythos so much as it has disconnected setting elements rammed together in order to make tabletop games work. But I don’t think there’s ever a way to make that title into an easy project, despite the good games that have come out of it. For a lot of good reasons.
Demo Driver 8: Vector
Maybe they’d stop chasing you if you stopped pirouetting all over the place and making them feel like total dickwads.
You are being hunted. Go.
We don’t need more elaboration than that. We’ve seen countless films wherein the big action sequence is as simple as trying to outrun pursuit. There’s no fighting back against your pursuers, no hope of reasoning, only escape or collapse. They are at your heels, they are coming for you. No time to pause, no time to think, no time to do anything but hurtle forward and try to be as quick and clever about your escape as possible.
Vector is meant to tap directly into that urge, the “flight” portion of fight-or-flight, the need to escape however you possibly can and as fast as you possibly can. No frills, no waffling, no nonsense, nothing except the straight pitch of your character from left to right, traversing obstacles, vaulting railings, smashing windows, slowing not a whit until you have outrun your pursuit. And it does pretty well at that, if not perfectly.
Go.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 