Accidental duplicate post

Nothing to see here.

[AD&D] Dark Sun: The Order (motivations)

Dragon Kings has a blurb about The Order, a clandestine organization of high-level (21st-30th level) psionicists with three tenets:

They must personally confront heresy according to their roles; they must pursue greater psionic mastery themselves; and they cannot personally use their psionic powers for any purpose that is completely good or evil.

Furthermore, a PC who reaches level 21+ as a psionicist is "marked for death" if he's not neutral-aligned.

Once any creature attains 21st level as a pure psionicist, his mind attracts the Order's attention. Mediators send one or more entrants to investigate the new psionicist and learn his motivations. If the new psionicist is of neutral alignment, they approach him to join the Order as a new entrant. **If his alignment is either good or evil**, or if he refuses to join the Order, he is marked for death.

(Emphasis mine.)

On the one hand, I get it. The Order isn't supposed to get involved. They may perhaps have the power to turn deserts into verdant forests and free everyone on Athas from the tyranny of the templars and sorcerer kings, but they've been designed not to do that. Instead they're a threat for high-level parties.

They're a stabilizing force, not a destabilizing deus ex machina like Elminster.

But if merely being good-aligned (always kind to children, goes out of his way to help poor folks and old folks) or evil-aligned (happily exploits business loopholes, keeps slaves, bribes templars to look the other way while paying employees the absolute minimum he can get away with and overworking his slaves--or maybe even just because he secretly enjoys watching his commercial rivals go out of business and starve!) is enough to make The Order conclude that you're abusing your psionic purity and need to die... that's just stupid. That's the old Aggressively True Neutral druid thing that Dark Sun thankfully did away with w/rt druids. So... how can we fix The Order so that it stays aloof and uninvolved but not in a stupid alignment-driven way?

Steal from Star Trek and/or space opera. Give The Order their own version of The Interdict or The Prime Directive. "Enlightened minds (a.k.a. powerful psis) must not interfere with the development of lesser beings--must not alter the course of history or affect individual lives on a large scale--because natural [Darwinian] selection is vital to the eventual coadunation (psychomaturation) of the collective planetary mind. The penalty for violation is death." It's still kind of pig-headed and stupid and virtually guaranteed to make The Order an antagonist to many PCs, but it's a coherent motivation that you can actually imagine an earnest NPC reluctantly killing for, as opposed to the ridiculous nonsense of "I'm killing you because you are too nice to widows and orphans."

Maybe Mr. NPC is willing to overlook a 21st level psionicist who seeks out buried water sources (for free) to help farmers establish new farms, because that's small potatoes. But if a psionicist--even a "mere" 15th level metapsionicist--sets up shop Empowering items with metapsionics including the Empower, Receptacle, and Convergence powers to achieve a psionic Singularity of sorts (eventually you'll be creating dozens of new Empowered items a day), wow, that could change the course of Athasian history pretty quick, and Mr. The Order NPC should be horrified and act ruthlessly to prevent that "disruption".

Instead of the story about the little elf boy:

One day, an intolerant shopkeeper, no doubt a recent victim of one of the boy's pranks, sought the strongest psionicists in the village to control the adolescent. But the entire village went wide-eyed with panic when the boy dealt back more than he took, even from the greatest masters in Ledopolus. Enraged, the boy turned his youthful anger full-force on the villagers, killing and maiming, lashing out with all the ferocity that fifteen years of scorn had burned into him. Those he didn't kill he enslaved, controlling their minds to do his wicked bidding. 

But within the month, a stranger appeared at the edge of town, a shrouded elf whose brown wrappings indicated loyalty to no tribe. The elf made no sound, yet the half-breed boy sensed him and appeared. Their mental struggle took only an instant. Then the stranger left, leaving behind the shattered village, its newly awakened (and very confused) inhabitants, and the corpse of the evil half-elf boy. Thankful, the villagers sent out their fastest riders to reward the solitary elf, but they never found nor heard from him again. 

Instead, it would be a story about a dwarven mindmaster with the crazy goal of greening the desert. He worked hard all day every day creating figurines and statues which gave uneasy villagers the feeling they might be alive--and the desert began to green, and the statues began to spread, until one day... the brown elf showed up, broke the dwarf's mind and smashed all his statues, and left. The villagers had mixed feelings about this but overall they were glad because nobody knows where this all could have led, and people fear change, especially on Athas where news is so often bad news.

Explanations

E.,

I want to vent a little to you about something, but first let me explain why. President Nelson said something true and overall immensely helpful to me in a recent conference talk, but there's part of it that I have an issue with, and I want to vent about it, and I want to vent about it with you in part with the ulterior motive of proving that just because we don't have the same religious beliefs any more doesn't mean we can't have a conversation about religion that you and I will both enjoy. I think you will "get" my issue with this quote and also why I don't ultimately consider it a big deal, but that it's still worth noting.

The quote is:

"As you think celestial, you will find yourself avoiding anything that robs you of your agency. Any addiction—be it gaming, gambling, debt, drugs, alcohol, anger, pornography, sex, or even food—offends God. Why? Because your obsession becomes your god. You look to it rather than to Him for solace. If you struggle with an addiction, seek the spiritual and professional help you need. Please do not let an obsession rob you of your freedom to follow God's fabulous plan."

Both emphases mine. The bold part I have zero problems with and find immensely helpful. (I've been struggling with a food addiction for years and it's super helpful to have official sanction to think of it as an actual spiritual problem, as opposed to something I consider a spiritual problem but am embarrassed to talk about to anyone else because they won't understand why it matters.)

The underlined part I find unsatisfying and a bit of a cop-out. There's an answer but it's much deeper than that, and if I were talking to Heavenly Father directly he would probably say to me either "There are psychological dynamics in play that result in food addiction doing X to your habits which results in Y or Z" or he would say "It's harmful but you're not at a stage yet where I can explain to you exactly why, except via [analogy]."

I'm not saying President Nelson was wrong to phrase it that way because his job is to talk to the world, not only to Max, and I think the world would generally respond poorly to the kind of explanation Max would benefit from (especially the "you're not at a stage yet where I can explain to you"). But the Holy Ghost says to me at least that the Max-directed explanation exists and would satisfy me.

If I know you, E., I would say you have probably had your own run-ins with explanations that are unsatisfying and a bit of a cop-out. I know how it feels.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

Mirror of the Fire Demon

[from another forum]

We once talked... about adventure seeds and my preference for dynamically unstable situations as adventure hooks, instead of status quo. Here's a concrete example:

I'm prepping Mirror of the Fire Demon. It's a good adventure in many ways with lots of mechanically interesting stuff going on: interesting terrain, monsters that hear combat and come out to investigate, at least one really tough fight, and so on.

But the central hook of "there's a megalomaniac gathering a horde of monsters to take over the world, and the wind spirit will tell you how to stop him" leaves me cold.

In particular, I feel that it makes roleplay more difficult than it needs to be. If the adventure is going to be purely hack and slash, "there's an evil warlord with a magic mirror, go take it" would suffice. The existence of hooks can only be to support roleplaying elements such as character motivation or informing interactions with monsters and rival adventuring parties, or aiding suspension of disbelief, and yet the default hook makes me feel like it raises more questions than it answers such as "what exactly has the bad guy done so far with his tens of thousands of troops, and why aren't there more of them at his main headquarters?"

So in the course of prepping this adventure I plan to make the situation more dynamic.

Rather than "this bad guy is gathering an army but hasn't done anything yet and everyone wants to stop him," which is a mission to maintain the status quo, it will work better at my table if it's "this bad dude has been in power for a while, doing terrible things to his subjects, but now for reasons unknown (to you) he's missing! His generals are jockeying for position, it looks like maybe a succession war is brewing, his armies are hunkering down and unsure which internal faction they're going to support... and in the middle of all this, word gets out that his old spymaster has defected and is selling secrets about bad dude's sources of power. Agents of nearby nations are greedily eyeing each other on their way to rendezvous with said spymaster. That's where you come in..."

Now you've got a huge horde which is fearful and somewhat passive, rival agents/adventurers who are greedy, an oracle of sorts (the spymaster) hiding in a cave but with a clear motive to dispense information for a price, and a mystery for future adventuring: what happened to bad dude and is he coming back? BTW the answer is "he got careless in his troop movements and elven armies took the opportunity to ambush him and his company of soldiers, at a high price in blood, but unless someone breaks the mirror he's got Unkillable 3 and will come back angrier than ever."

That helps me roleplay everyone involved, because they've all got clear motivations for what they're doing and not doing. It also tells me to insert more civilians into the wasteland parts of the adventure, to showcase the bad things the bad dude and his armies have been doing, like putting orphans to work as forced labor growing food.

Why I finally switched from Visual Studio to VSCode + Ionide

I've tried out Ionide a few times over the years, but never permanently until now. There are three factors which individually wouldn't be enough to make me reprogram my reflexes for a new IDE:

1.) Font Ligatures. I've started to really appreciate the cognitive benefits of font ligatures, but there's a long-standing bug in Visual Studio that prevents the -> ligature from working. https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/846 This was my proximate cause for giving VSCode another try, and VSCode handles it like a champ.

2.) Github Copilot in VS completes whenever you hit Tab, and you can't reconfigure it. Copilot is pretty decent at guessing correct code completions but it's not anywhere close to 100%, and having erroneous code unexpectedly insert itself in the middle of my coding was distracting. In VSCode I set it to complete on Alt-/ instead.

3.) F# Intellisense in VS broke for me about six months ago (https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/14901) and while it's sort of working again now, it's quite slow, on the order of five or six seconds between fixing a type error and having the red squiggles disappear in VS. In VSCode it's approximately instantaneous.

In theory if VS fixed all three of these issues I would switch back, but right now I'm pretty happy about having moved over. There's some learning curve but the end result feels more productive.

 --

I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.

[DFRPG] Making demons demonic

From https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/diabolical/ an interesting anecdote, which may be written specifically for that article or possibly from an RPG sourcebook:

In the wake of these defeats Agrippa was consumed by anger, shame and dread. He feared the armies of Talabheim and Middenheim would arrive at any moment to slaughter him and seize the throne at Nuln. His wits perturbed by panic, he sought out Calidus for advice, who presented to him the most desperate and dangerous of measures. To this Agrippa agreed. Calidus called forth the infernal spirit Achorax and the young emperor entered into a most dreadful bargain with the demon. On Geheimnisnacht the demon would destroy the two older emperors, and thereby Agrippa would be left with an unchallenged claim on the Imperial throne. Yet the demon's price was high: the moonlight of that night would also be the last seen by Agrippa's daughters, who would be condemned to an eternity of torment in the Abyss.

The fatal Geheimnisnacht arrived and Achorax claimed his payment. Yet the demon's work was not done in Nuln. Two days before the night of the Twin Moons, the Emperor Konrad had succumbed to a sudden and mysterious illness and the Middenheim throne had passed to his twelve-year-old son, Arnulf. Achorax held to his bargain and that night tore asunder the two older Emperors: Lothar and the hapless Agrippa.

– Dietmar von Humboldt, A History of Sigmar's People, XVIII.43

To me this shows an interesting way to make demons fearful: by making them know stuff. Just like Dresden Files Outsiders always act together, flawlessly cooperating, maybe a good distinction between Tanar'ri and Baatezu could be that Baatezu share knowledge, maybe even magically, so that if you summon one Baatezu to demand power, it knows that Emperor Conrad is dead as long as any other Baatezu knows. It knows where all the bodies are buried.

That could be an excellent reason to be wary of ever signing a contract with one.

This will probably influence how I run demons and Elder Things in DFRPG.