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In other news, my desktop computer is kaput.  I’ve ordered a new one (and am writing this from Annie’s old Macbook which has some sort of weird, intermittent video problem where the screen goes all snowy and unresponsive sometimes).  Since the HP desktop I had been using was more than 6 years old and not so hot to begin with, I guess it was time, but now I have to engage in the pain-in-the-assery of trying to recover all my data from the old machine — mostly scans of artwork (and some of the artwork I don’t have anymore, so getting the scans is pretty important).  I think the hard disk is OK, so I guess when I get the new machine I need to figure out how to set up the old one as an external drive and then just move the files.

Fantasy Economy Boondoggles

Is that a chastity belt on the counter?

One of the curiousities of RPGs (computer or, my favorite, playing RPGs with people) is that I often seem to end up playing one of those characters who is always picking shit up all of the time and taking it with me, hoping that it will either prove useful, or, more often, selling it for money so I can buy goods and/or services that my in-game character wants or needs (usually healing and more weapons/armor). This is strange, because in real life I don’t ever kill someone, take their stuff and sell it. But I also wonder where all that stuff that I loot and sell goes.  Does the merchant at the corner store have an absurdly large inventory? Do other adventurers walk into the store, decide what I just dropped off looks like something they need and then buy it? Or is there some ‘off the map’ market for all of these used goods? I imagine some gigantic underground cavern economy, far from the sight and knowledge of most, where goblins, kobolds, feral gnomes and mutants buy and sell used underpants, old shoes and rusty daggers by the cartload and do gods-know-what with it. I guess in real life I have bought a used firearm in a gunshop and I have been in the ‘Salvation Army’ thrift shop more than once; that (and bottle rocket fights or urban exploration) is probably about as close as living “La vida adventura” that I have come.

Just a few of the 2,700 pairs of shoes of Imelda Marcos

I fear my deep-seated natural greed becomes more assertive when I am playing computer games than in real life (or in ‘pencil and paper’ rpg games).  Perhaps that is because in computer games, I can ‘take’ something by just clicking on it, whereas in the real world I have to pick it up and carry it with me and in pencil-and-paper games I have to (sigh) write it down.  In some of my favorite computer games (Oblivion and Fallout 3), I have a penchant for playing real packrat characters. While playing ‘Oblivion’ I noticed that the designers had included an unusually large number of different kinds of shoes in the game (most of which had, as far as I could tell, no effect on game play— wearing ‘padded leather shoes’ did not make you walk faster/slower/noisier/more quietly than wearing any other kinds of shoes, which was curious because what kinds of boots you wore did make a difference). I made it my goal to collect at least one sample of each kind of shoe which I stored in a chest in my character’s house just so my character could have a “hobby.” ‘Collecting shoes’ was actually not strategic for gathering the most coins with the least trouble; in Oblivion, shoes have a much less favorable weight-to-value factor than many other things (like expensive wine or rare books).

Donkey thinks, “Well, this sucks more than usual.”

I don’t have a lot of experience with CRPGs, but the few I have played always make me want to find/buy a house for my character because that is usually the way you can get around the carrying capacity limitation. Your character can only carry ‘X’ amount, and each item is given a weight — once the total of that weight surpasses your carrying capacity you start to move at a snail’s pace (or, if you are playing Oblivion, you suddenly can’t move at all).  I discovered the hard way that if you just found a cabinet or box in the game and stuffed your extra belongings into it, they might not be there when you came back to collect them, but if you owned the house, your stuff wouldn’t dissapear.  My Fallout 3 character has/had piles of spare weapons, armor, food, liquor, clothing, etc., squirreled away in his house’s storage lockers. How does he fit 14 Assault rifles in various states of disrepair in a desk drawer?  I have no idea.  How does he carry over 800 shotgun shells in his pockets? Curiously, in Fallout 3, ammunition has no weight but empty whiskey bottles, tin cans and mole rat meat do, so I can carry enough ammo to supply an army, no problem, but pick up one too many bits of road kill or trash and suddenly I can barely move.

You can eat the mole rat, but would you want to?

The realities of spoilage are similarly usually ignored in rpgs, whether computer-based or played in the real world with books and pencils.  If I remember right, my Fallout 3 guy had mole rat steaks and other disgusting meats stuffed into a filing cabinet where it stayed, without rotting, for weeks.  My Oblivion character similarly kept mutton, beef, venison, etc., in his pockets or his cupboard without ever suffering food poisoning. In real life, I’m constantly sniffing and tasting things because I’d rather be hungry than have food poisoning.  In Dungeons & Dragons, I think my characters always ate ‘iron rations.’ I’m not sure what ‘iron rations’ were supposed to be but I always assumed they were the medieval equivalent of c-rations/MREs.  Aside from pretzels and ‘Panneforte,’ I can’t think of any medieval foods made specifically for travel — any ideas?

Things I learned from Fallout 3

Things I learned from Fallout 3:
A bomb made from a child’s lunch box, an explosive fruit, 10 bottle caps and something called a ‘sensor module’ is a lot more deadly than a ‘frag mine’ manufactured according to military grade specs.

“Rock-it” Launcher.

A  weapon called a ‘rock-it launcher’ is made from the spare parts of a leaf blower and a vacuum cleaner and fires teddy bears, pool balls, books, boxes of detergent, coffee cups, empty whiskey bottles, etc.  It is a lot more effective than most pistols if you goal is to kill your opponent.  I shot a raider in the forehead with a 10mm pistol and he cursed at me and stabbed me with his knife. I had to shoot him several more times before he went down.  I then used my rock-it launcher to shoot his buddy in the face with a box of detergent and his buddy’s head exploded.

Super Mutant head shot

If you shoot someone and they explode into fragments, you only need to find one fragment, no matter how tiny, and search THAT fragment in order to retrieve all of their possessions. There was a raider up on a balcony shooting at me, so I shot him with my hunting rifle.  His head exploded and I found an eyeball lying on the ground. I ‘searched’ the eyeball and was able to retrieve his weapons, his ammo, his armor, etc.  Later I went up on the balcony and found his headless body lying there, dressed only in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt.

The ‘Fat Boy’ will allow you to launch miniature nuclear bombs, which is great fun. You can use your Fat boy to kill a whole mess of raiders all at once and scatter their broken bodies all over the landscape, but the Fatboy will not blow a rotted wooden door off of its hinges, shatter an empty whiskey bottle or kill a child.

Some things look like weapons and ARE weapons.  Other things look like weapons and are not weapons. You can hit an enemy with a tire iron, pool cue, baseball bat or sledgehammer and hurt or kill them.  You cannot injure or hit an enemy with an ordinary hammer, wrench, crutch or frying pan (unless you are firing these things from the aforementioned rock-it launcher).

Reading a comic book will make you better at smashing your enemies with a baseball bat. Reading a book about Nikolai Tesla will make you better at shooting them with laser guns.

When I fire my weapons, I can see the brass cartridges fly out of the gun and land on the ground.  Then they quickly evaporate.

Raiders are bad-guys who look like those dudes from the ‘Mad Max’ movies.  They have mohawks and wear S&M armor outfits that consist of leather straps, codpieces, spiked shoulder pads, etc., and this raider armor leaves most of their torso bare.  If you kill a raider and take his/her armor, you will suddenly see him/her lying on the ground wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, even though previous to you removing their ‘armor’ all they had covering their chest was a few straps and maybe a metal bra-like thing if they were female. So, somehow, mysteriously, between the time you killed them and the time you took their armor, they somehow managed to put on a white t-shirt, despite being dead at the time.