Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: Morrowind

[quote name="Ray of Light"][quote name="Zseni"]Fun facts from the magick trenches! When wizards and witches and psychics and all that bullshit each other about their magick fae combat when they get in flame wars that go too far, it manifests itself in a variety of silly forms. The parry-n-thrust type you see in BG2 and fantasy novels is strictly bush league on these lines. How seldom do the psychics foresee the need to take umbrellas when StormLord28 gets angry with them! Powergamer fantasias abound (I saw all of this a long time ago and took steps then. I don't need to worry about anything a HYOOMAN could do to me. My minions protect me.... I'll see your precog, mortal-immunity, and demonic minions and raise you a Vedic transcendental plane attack you couldn't <i>possibly</i> have anticipated since you have always shown ignorance of my magick....) The smart guys who are serious about studying the texts never seem to get into fights...<i>lowly <b>hedge</b> wizards</i>.[/quote] What I could never get past is the alignment business, the RPGs' abstraction of good and evil into a checkbox: Click Evil, your clothes and motives darken, next question. The designers miss the purpose of evil -- that is, to galvanize "good" into existence -- and that to have one eradicating the other is not just nonsensical but <i>paradoxical</i>. Self-consistency in these franchises would have each installment cannibalizing some fringe element of the previous good into a lesser evil, destined to be fought by a lesser good until, by episode Ten, the two <i>great, opposing</i> forces are separated only by the hemlines of their kimonos. Orson Scott Card, whose "Ender" series followed a diminished hero and his dead enemy, said that readers will believe the impossible, but never the improbable. In a genre whose titular purpose is role-playing, I can't accept a role so improbable as what they offer. And that's why I play Quake, role-playing an angry man with a gun. Ray![/quote]