Aristeia Diaspora

From: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=159

Mask of the Betrayer review

Review – posted by Vault Dweller on Fri 26 October 2007, 00:31:06

More info on Neverwinter Nights 2 – More info on Obsidian Entertainment
Mask of the Betrayer – so good even the Codex likes it!

That’s what the word on the street is. MotB – so good that even those elitist assholes at RPG Codex liked it. It’s so good that even Vault Dweller, the infamous internet hooligan and miscreant, liked it! Pretty much, gentlemen, pretty much. It’s definitely, 100% one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It’s that good.

Now before we open the game’s hood and see what’s under, let me amuse you with my old, but relevant rant, creatively called “Why fantasy RPGs suck?”
…

Fantasy RPGs often suck because the fantasy aspect isn’t overly “fantastic”. In fact, usually it’s generic, boring, and bland. Let’s say that you’ve bought a new fantasy RPG and have just installed it. What do you have there? A young guy/gal in a small place is forced to get the fuck out and explore a very predictable world and eventually save it. When you see a town, you know pretty much what to expect. It’s not a place of wonder and strange customs, it’s a place to get quests and buy/sell shit. You can easily replace a town with 3-4 NPCs standing in the middle of fucking nowhere offering quests and shopping. In fact, that probably would be more interesting than a generic and boring as fuck fantasy town #3471.

Now, compare it to Planescape: Torment. You wake up in a mortuary. Dead. Yes, DEAD. A gravity defying skull starts chatting with you.

WHAT! THE! FUCK!

That alone throws you off. Suddenly, you realize that you are definitely not in Kansas anymore. The rules are completely different and you have no idea what they are. Where are the familiar elves and orcs – the foundation of quality storytelling? Why aint the ancient evil stirring? Where is a kind lord of the realm to send you on a mission of great importance (usually involving killing some poor fuckers)?

You open the door. OMG! Zombies are everywhere! Ok, I know where this is going. Where is my trusty weapon… WAITAMINUTE! The zombies are not attacking. You can kill them, of course, but you can also walk around studying them and even get some unusual items from them. You finally manage to leave the mortuary. You are in a city, and what a city it is! It’s a city of doors, filled with portals that can take you anywhere, assuming you have the right key. You see a bar, a familiar place in this strange land. The first thing you see is a floating, burning, yet still alive body – a lovely conversation piece of decor. Some ugly looking demons are having a drink; they greet you as an old friend. Great, that’s just fucking great. Wait, it gets better though. The bartender casually informs you that he still has your eye – my WHAT? – and if you have the money, you can have it back. You buy the eye, mostly because it’s so different from the usual selection of RPG goodies, wondering what the fuck you should do with it. An insane option to rip out your existing eyeball and shove in the new one, which was floating in a jar like a pickled egg a minute ago, presents itself. You do it and your old memories start pouring in. At this point you are absolutely lost. You, the player, are a stranger in a strange fucking land, and that’s the fucking beauty of it.

Your quest? To find out who you are. *sigh* What, did you guys run out of demons to kill and worlds to save?

Let’s compare it to recently released NWN2:

A young guy/gal in search of adventure living in a small village – check. The village is attacked by monsters killing everything in sight – check. The monsters are after you, because you are – you better sit down – the chosen one and special in every possible way – check. You leave your village and fight your way to a large town filled with thieves who steal shit and guards who, well, guard shit – check. You accidentally run into your enemies in every major dungeon, spoiling their plans – check. Instead of throwing everything they’ve got at you, they continue to underestimate you, until you level all the way up to the MegaUberPrestigeFighter, the Destroyer of Worlds and Crusher of Hopes – check.

Don’t know about you, but I can hardly handle all the excitement. Give us something different, put us in a strange place with strange rules. Discovering these rules, understanding laws, habits, and customs of these places and its denizens are an important aspect of gameplay that shouldn’t be discarded.
…

Well, what do you know? My hopes and prayers have been answered. Ironically, the savior is an expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2. While I had to force myself to play NWN2 (and still couldn’t finish it due to a complete lack of interest in knowing what happens next), I couldn’t stop playing Mask of the Betrayer and was completely immersed in the game. If only the original game was that good.

NWN2 vs MotB in a nutshell

Now let’s pop that hood:

The character system

You start the game at lvl 18 to reflect your legendary NWN2 accomplishments. That gives you a nice opportunity to try different classes and skills combinations before you start the game, instead of discovering that your build sucks in the middle of the game.

If you’ve played computer DnD games before: More of the same plus new prestige classes, epic feats & spells, and uber weapons. Whether it’s good or bad depends entirely on your point of view.

If your experience with Dungeons & Dragons games is limited or non-existent and idiotic reviews led you to believe that DnD is only slightly less complicated than rocket science:

You pick a race and a class, increase your 6 attributes: Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha, increase skills and select feats (feats are various abilities like Combat Expertise, Dodge, Spell Penetration, Two-Weapon Fighting, etc.) Then you kill some monsters, do some quests, level up, pick a class (you can continue improving your original class or pick a new one to gain different skills and abilities), increase skills and pick new feats. As you gain levels and abilities, new classes, spells, and feats become available. That’s all there is to it.

The character system is the least interesting aspect of the game, but that’s not the designers’ fault. DnD, as most other game systems, is at its best during the early levels and start losing its appeal after lvl 18. The epic levels simply don’t offer anything interesting and could be filed under “more of the same” category, offering you original feats like Epic Weapon Focus, Epic Toughness, and “stat” +1.

My name is ZORRO!

Combat

It’s the second least interesting aspect of the game, mostly because DnD was never meant to be real-time. Once your spellcasters join the party and start casting spells like “orbital bombardment”, “tactical nuclear strike”, and “summon Death Star MK2″, the party is pretty much over, but then again, what do you expect from an epic real-time DnD campaign? Overall, the game is not very challenging when your spellcasters are fully rested (i.e. ready to nuke anything in a 5-mile radius) and very challenging, when your spellcasters are out of heavy spells and start casting lvl1 spells purely out of boredom.

Let’s just say that while the combat is more challenging and interesting than NWN2’s battles, which may or may not say anything to you, it’s rather mediocre overall and less enjoyable than the Infinity Engine games.

Nuclear lunch detected!

Disco Inferno

The setting & story

The setting is glorious. Gone are vanilla locations of NWN2. Instead Obsidian takes you on a trip to a real fantasy land that doesn’t need to be saved from some ancient evil, to the land of Rashemen, where spirits walk among men, witches rule the land, ancient hags plot in sunken towns, granting audiences to all manners of creatures, shadow versions of the reality are a portal away, and the planes themselves and the City of Judgement are waiting for you. And this pretty tree.

A tree in bloom.

The story, as Obsidian had promised, is personal. You wake up in a bear-god barrow. The shard is gone; the wound is stitched. Soon you realize that something was contained in the depth of the barrow – an ancient curse that was trapped there by its last carrier. Now it’s in you and you feel its hunger for spirits. Some say it’s a curse, some say it’s a gift. The main quest revolves around figuring out what it actually is, who helped you get it and why, and what to do with it. The curse/gift thingy is old and has a story of its own that can be traced to a long forgotten battle fought by a top priest against his deity on another plane of existence. Unravelling that story will take you cool places to see and interesting creatures and dead gods to meet. The story is pretty damn good and very interesting to follow. A real treat.

How very PST!

Quests, choices, consequences…

That’s where the game starts to shine so brightly that you completely forget about any flaws the game has and get lost in a well crafted gameworld. It’s like a dream come true – a non-linear game loaded with well-written dialogues, interesting quests, more choices than you can handle, and enough consequences and to make the game highly replayable. It’s hard to imagine a better feature list.

I can’t stress it enough. The choices are everywhere. There are plenty of consequences. What you did may even cost party members their lives. Many characters respond to and recognize your choices, commenting on what you did and affecting your gameplay. I couldn’t believe how many opportunities to do things differently the game offers. Here is an example:

So, I was told that I have this curse. Well, that kinda sucks, but oh well… Then some kid shows up and says that it’s a gift. Well, well, well, isn’t that interesting. The motherfuckers lied to me about the curse thing. My buddy Okku the bear-god and I go to visit that place where the kid is from. Nice touch, I’m thinking. Instead of going with a one-dimensional “you are cursed, sucks to be you!” approach, you are given an alternative opinion and path. Anyway, these, uh, “people” are kinda evil. They want to eat me and pass the gift on to someone more worthy. Well, not exactly what I expected, but I guess these days you can’t expect meaningful choices and truly different options.

Then I replay the game with a different character. I devour Okku’s spirit and decide to visit my old evil pals. This time the conversation is completely different. Turns out they approve of my choice to end Okku’s existence and see it as a sign of awesome – in a very evil way – things to come, so they won’t eat me and will even teach me a new power that my predecessors had. After I bring them some people to eat. Even here I was given a choice. I could send them a sweet girl or give “I know a good shortcut” tip to a merchant and his family. Then I was given a choice to use the new power on my new friends. Then I was given an option to spare or kill their kids, which isn’t something you see in games often these days.

I know a great shortcut…

Here is another example that surprised me. There is a small garrison near a spirit-infested forest. Two witches are in charge of the garrison: one helps you, one doesn’t. At a certain point you are a presented with a reasonable option to start a revolt against the witch in charge, the one who doesn’t help you. You even get a quest to talk to all berserkers and get them on your side through persuasion, intimidation, or other abilities. It seemed to me that that’s the only option to move forward and the only real choice here is how many berserkers you manage to sign up. Sure, there was a “no” option somewhere in the dialogue tress, but I thought it was one of them fake options, i.e. you say “no”, she says “well, if you change your mind, I’ll be, like, here” and then the game waits for you to change your fickle mind and aint going anywhere. On my next playthrough, I actually said “no”. Much to my surprise, this option was viable and actually gained me a short-term ally in an upcoming battle. Overall, there were 3 outcomes there and different reactions from the witches in a nearby town.

The game is filled with stat and skill checks, so just like in Planescape: Torment, playing a straight fighter could be the least interesting of all options. Lore, Spellcraft, Wisdom, Charisma get a lot of love, so don’t miss out.

Even after finishing the game twice, I haven’t explored all the possibilities and outcomes, and if that aint the highest praise the Codex can give a game, I don’t know what is.

Let’s see what’s inside…

The party members

MotB offers you 5 companions: a red wizard, a hagspawn shaman, a winged celestial cleric, a bear-god spirit, and an undead construct, who is the most awesome companion you could ever loot dungeons and kill people with. As your influence over the construct grow, you can ask it to manifest different personalities: rogue, berserker, or warlock, which is very handy. Every now and then the construct encounters characters he would like to devour and add to its collection of spirits, which unlocks special abilities and classes (like warlock). One-of-Many has quite an appetite and even gods won’t be safe with it in one room. Whether or not you let One-of-Many devour its victims souls it do is entirely up to you.

Once your influence reaches certain levels – now you can see the influence number and state on each party member character screen – your party members offer you certain powers, which you can refuse or accept. For example, Safiya gives you “The loyalty of a red wizard” feat, which gives you +1 INT plus DC spell bonus, if you like to cast spells. Later on the feat could be upgraded to “The devotion of a red wizard”, upping the INT bonus to +2 and increasing your spell casting abilities. Gann the hagspawn gives you “The Dreamer’s Eye”: +1 CHA and a bonus to your Devour Spirit ability. One-of-Many graces you with a negative, intimidating aura, and so on.

Overall, the party members are well defined and much improved. They don’t argue about stupid things, and don’t act like 12 year olds. Suffice to say, I doubt that many people would prefer to play solo.

My best friend and I!

One-of-Many is born!

Say Hi to Brute. He aint that bad once you get to know him. Well, actually, he kinda is.

“Let me show myself to the lich so that it might know fear for the first time in its unlife”

Dinner time!

The Spirit-Meter thingy

I have to mention the spirit meter because it was criticized in every review for being confusing, hard, and just not fun. Well, guess what? It’s a pretty damn good feature and an excellent moron indicator. If you failed to understand this feature, odds are you’re a fucking moron. Sad, but true. Let’s blame the clearly failed education system and the leniency toward degenerates in your homeland.

Anyway, a handy guide to the spirit-meter.

The game revolves around your condition. Some say it’s a curse, some say it’s a gift. You are a spirit-eater. You consume spirits and sometimes souls (if you choose the evil path). Game mechanics-wise, your condition is represented via two meters: % level of your spirit energy (100% is good, 0% is dead) and your hunger level. The higher your hunger level is, the faster the spirit energy level drops. The lower your spirit energy level is, the heavier your stat penalties are.

- STAT PENALTIES?!! WHAT THE FUCK?!!! THIS GAEM SUCKS!!!!

Now that you understand the basic idea, here are the two basic paths the game offers.

The good path: You consider your affliction a curse. You suppress your hunger, thus significantly slowing your need to feed. Eventually you acquire “good” feats like Eternal Rest, which allows you to grant rest to undead spirits and restores your spirit energy without increasing your hunger. Soon (very soon) your hunger is pretty much at zero and you focus on the rest of the game.

The evil path: You realize that you’ve been given a power and that only a fool would give it up. You devour spirits and eventually learn to devour souls. You gain very powerful spirit essences (to craft VERY powerful items) this way and once you fully unleash your gift, you gain significant combat bonuses.

So, what does it all mean? It means that if you are a good person, you can pretty much ignore this feature by suppressing your hunger and enjoy what it adds to the dialogues. If you are an evil bastard, you can “go with the flow” and become a powerful being through the special spirit essences, feats, and abilities. However, all that power – and that’s the brilliant part – comes with a price. You must constantly look for spirits to feed on to stay alive. Compare that to Knights of the Old Republic, for example, where the difference between good and evil is purely cosmetic as both sides are equally balances and it doesn’t cost you anything to join the Dark Side.

The only problem with the spirit meter is the alignment adjustments. Whenever you make a spirit system related choice, you gain a few alignment points, becoming more Lawful, for example. Since the DnD alignment system is a subject to many interpretations, some players would disagree with how the spirit system handles your alignment. I don’t think it’s a big deal, to be honest, but if you care a lot about this aspect, I suggested getting a mod that can remove and change the adjustment to fit your own alignment beliefs.

Different camera angles

The influence system

The biggest problem with the influence system is its name. It’s like calling a boy a girl and then complaining about the penis and hairy legs. So, let’s flip it around and call it a “How much people like me!” system. See, it’s perfect now. Basically, the goal is to get people to like you as much as possible. Much like in real life you accomplish it by telling people what they want / like to hear and sucking up to them. The system works like a charm. You can’t, however, influence them and, for example, force the celestial chick to change her beliefs, so don’t expect any of that.

And in conclusion

To put it simply, the game is a masterpiece. Sure, it has flaws and things-that-should-have-been-done-better. Overall though, it’s one of those rare games that people will remember for a long time and I definitely expect to see it on “top 10 RPGs” lists in the near future. It probably won’t get any “RPG of the Year” awards from the mainstream media as such honours are reserved for awesome games like Halo 3 and cult classics like Oblivion: Fighter’s Stronghold Expansion, so if you liked what I had to say about the game, go and buy it today. Support Obsidian’s efforts to bring us something different and vote with your money.

A fantasy world is simply a tool. Some use it to explore their amoral (or immoral) self. I personally enjoy morality stories in fantasy: most traditional fantasy stories ala Lord of the Rings adopt this. Here is some other random dude’s view on it:

http://www.spectacle.org/1195/fantasy.html

Richard Dawkins, author of the famous (or infamous?) God Delusion has engaged in ‘academic’ debate with John Lennox on three seperate occasions. A quick search on youtube or google will quickly give you access to these. The first was (in my opinion) a rather farcicle form of ‘debate’ in which Dawkins is given a chance to comment on a passage read from his book, and Lennox would then respond to Dawkins’ comments with appropriate criticism. It was farcicle because Dawkins was never really given a chance to respond to Lennox’s criticisms until the very end, where he gets the last word.

After this, the two meet again privately for a discussion, and finally they have another stylised ‘debate’.

Although the two Englishmen are very articulate in their discussions, I’m distraught that the two are often arguing on different levels. Dawkins often gets frustrated at Lennox’s responses because Lennox has the right answers, but they are not the answers to the questions Dawkins is asking!

For example, Dawkins is arguing about whether a deist god can exist, not whether the Christian God exists. These are from the outset two different questions. However, despite that, Dawkins reveals his inability to remain ‘neutral’ when he displays obvious emotional disgust as specific Christian claims such as water into wine etc.

What’s even funnier is that Dawkins likes to ask questions about the water and wine, and Lennox falls into the trap of answering those questions? I don’t think any Christian beliefs in the water turning into wine as being scientific: its simply a logical extension of our faith. As Lennox pointed out, if we can believe that Jesus is God, then none of us really has a need to question the almost pass-you-by water to wine event. This really is an application of logic! So the question that Dawkins should be asking is “Is Jesus God”, as opposed to “Is there a God”? The approach to the latter question is often purely intellectual (or academic) and not empirical or through experience, and even so, by the third debate Dawkins already admitted the possibility that a deist god could exist, but not the Christian one.

Really, their debate is as confusing as my segments in this blog.

Lastly, I would just like to add that Dawkins, like a true Atheist, still propounds an amoral world, even though it is simply a corrolary of his belief system. And secondly, let me illustrate what I mean with arguing at two different levels:

Christians are often accused of being anti-scientific. We are accused of rejecting scientific advances that make the human race as a whole better, or even advances such as abortion methods. From then it seems only logical to conclude that Christians are anti-well-being. We reject science because it is ‘ungodly’ and it explains or helps humanity without needing God.

This view is distorted. At the end of the day, our goals are very much similar to non-christians — to improve human life and well-being. So on that higher level, christians and non-christians have the same objective. Skepticism from science comes from the fact that the positive benefits touted by many scientific discoveries often have imperfect information on the side-effects, interactions, and other externalities that are mentioned — that is, the story we are told, or the only side the scientist know is the good side. Often we don’t know how much we don’t know. This compound ignorance is what Christianity is fighting against – the battle against (some) scientific ‘advances’ isn’t so much that we don’t want people to be healthier or live longer, but rather, science only offers conditional solutions to our problems. Abortion to save a mother or to make a single parent live easier comes at the cost of the child. Caesarian births could reduce the bond of the mother to the child. Chemoteraphy does all sorts of other things to the body  ——- science never offers us something unconditional: we always have to trade-off. If science could unconditionally make humanity better off, Christians would take it up in a zip, but until then, wisdom dictates we strive for full-information on all possibilities before we tout scientific discoveries as the best and only way forward in the development of human kind.

Yay I’m off topic again.

In economics, we love specialisation, and in the simplest model of the labour market, the individual ’specialises’ in working and in enjoying leisure. He can only do one at the cost of the other, and the benefit from working is purely to earn a wage.

The average person in a developed world works (off the top of my head) a 9-5 job (8 hours). Many work longer, especially in developing countries. The average person also sleeps for around 7 hours (more like 9 for me!). Taking into account commuting times, spending time in the toilet, having meals (even cooking!) and frantically checking emails, the average person would probably have (24-8-7-5) around 4 hours of solid personal time to enjoy ’specialised leisure’. So the ratio of work to ‘play’ is 2-1. In primitive societies this ratio was probably reversed, with most people only spending a couple of hours hunting and repairing tools, or planting. Where we’ve come today hwoever, is that in moving from 4 to 8 hours of work, we’ve increased  our effective wage probably around 100x (that is, we can consume 100x more goods today than we could 1000 years ago with 4 hours of work). This is all guesswork, but what I’m really wondering is that if we went back in time and asked someone back then if they would give up 4 more hours of each day in more work for 100x more goods, many would say yes…

Damn, and I started this article thinking I was going to write a tirade against specialisation …

Ah HERE’s my tirade: indivisibility. Economist rely on continuous models, assuming I can always choose an optimum trade off; e.g. 4 hours of work for $400. But why is it in society today contracts are largely based on “full-time” work. Doesn’t this result in inefficiency from the individual’s viewpoint? I can’t choose my optimal combination of work and leisure because there are no contracts out there that satisfy it. Those contracts don’t exist because of large fixed costs in training a specialised individual. And therein lies the irony: the more specialised we become, the more rigid or indivisible the leisure-effort tradeoff becomes.

For Christians, the phrases “Surrender to the Lord”; “Not with your own Strength”; “By the Spirit that is in you”, are perhaps, all too familiar. But what do they actually mean? How do I draw from an extraneous source of strength?  Is it with some mystical source of understanding or revelation? Is it by frantically flipping through my bible, or praying in rapid succession, hoping to break out in Tongues?

I’m not sure. But I think part of surrendering is to turn to God for comfort. Often we turn to others, to our money, our abilities, and a slew of other things to comfort us when things go wrong or don’t go our way. We may go on a shopping spree or a glutton spree to drown some guilt or sorrow. But I think the key is to turn to God for that comfort, for that cleansing and renewal. Materialist call Christians delusional or insecure. But I had rather rely on the truth and promises of a God I may not be 100% sure exists, rather than think that seeing  the bottom of an ice-cream tub really does mean life isn’t all that bad. Because, really, life is bad. Get a grip on it. And realise that icecream makes you fat; shopping sprees lead to too much junk; expensive cars lead to a mid-life crisis, but God’s promises lead to redemption and a way to face reality for what it really is.

http://www.solegends.com/citcat9×3/c92362emphalflings-01.htm

Black, White, and Grey

By BioWare

Due to ‘popular’ demand, it’s back – with a vengeance!

Now, the questions that seem to arise from my previous post is “to hoard, or not to hoard”. Some other interesting corollaries were “should we simply take our time and enjoy the whole experience, rather than rush to the end?”. I will attempt to think about this aspects of playing an RPG, and whether or not they have anything useful to say about life.

I think there could be a case for hoarding, but hoarding is for the purpose or the goal. In my opinion, in the standard RPG, the goal is to take the role of a hero and fulfill his destiny. The point of sidequests and hoarding is to gather enough enquipment/experience to make the final fight feasible/easier. Of course this is not always the case. In games such as Final Fantasy VII, I spent a whole lot of time fighting emerald weapon, getting the gold chocobo and knight of the round, and other junk. Suffice to say that when I finally fought the final boss I only needed to cast one spell and he was done for. But it kinda took the kick out of the game. What was the point of being overpowered for the final fight? I dont think game makers should overdo their sidequests. Another great example is Oblivion. They made sidequests so interesting that the main quest paled. That to me really made the game fail in my eyes. Which is why i thought Bethesda did a far superior job with Fallout3 where the plot was tighter and sidequests didn’t seem to be more important than the main quest.

Indeed, for me, I tend to move on from side quests once i feel my character has learnt enough. I’m not the sort to explore every nook and cranny (after all, the point of an RPG is to have different experiences — if everyone did everything there was, everyone would have the same experience!!!). I like to balance out side quests and the main quest. That way you don’t forget that there is a MAIN quest. Its easy to be sidetracked with money and stats promising side quests. Then you start getting bored and don’t even bother with the main quest altogether.

I think it’s here that the analogy can be drawn to life: do we have a main quest? Do we know what we’re actually striking out for? If not we’ll tend to get caught up with ’side quests’. We justify our pursuit of sidequests by saying “just one more time…i NEED that longsword +10000 or that Fatboy x100″. Similarly with life we say “i need to hoard money for my kids; i need to hoard money for rainy days; i need to hoard money for all sorts of reasons. Now, if we spend too much time hoarding money, don’t you think we’ll — just like the case of the RPG — end up getting ‘burnt out’/'bored’ and give up? Then we start to lose focus of what we’re really out here for. I believe a more moderate approach is called for. Some side quests + constantly going back to the mainquest to remind you of what you’re doing.

What’s the advantage of this? If you constantly go back to the main quest, you can tell if you’re ‘hoarding’ because you’ll generally know if you have too powerful weapons or stats, in which case you know you shouldnt sidequest anymore because you’re too powerful. Similarly with life: if you spend all your time hoarding but not getting back to the main quest, you’ll tend to overhoard because you don’t know how much you really need. But constantly getting back to your goal in life will let you know if you’re wasting too much hoarding money that after all, you dont need, and you could have used the time for better things.

Of course, the big question one should then need to ask, what is the goal or purpose of our lives? It seems pretty clear in RPGs. But that’s where the analogy ends.

p.s. thanks Jon for asking the questions you did — made me draw out more from the analogy than i had originally thought to!

I quit playing Drakensang: the Dark Eye. Reasonable story; great character building; too much combat and too little options or influence on the story.

But this post is not about my RPG adventures. Rather, tis a lil’ tidbit of perrenial musing, a product of  half-intentionally not listening to a Sunday morning sermon. In many ways, RGPs are like an idealised conception of life: you play a character — YOU (insert strange archaic name here)– whose main purpose is to: 1) realise his destiny 2)fulfill that destiny by levelling up and acquiring hoards of overpowered paraphernalia; and if you’re lucky enough the RPG will allow you to 3) fulfill that destiny in the particular way that YOU choose to (and not just because fate said so).

How is this similar to life?

1) REALISE YOUR DESTINY

Everyone’s out there hoping lightning will strike them — not literally of course — but everyone’s waiting for that big break. When an opportunity will show itself. Some actively seek that life changing opportunity. Others wait passively for it. In a typical RPG setting, heroes are very unseeming and start from meagre backgrounds.

2) FULFULL YOUR DESTINY

Of course, realising is just the beginning. For many of us, we may ‘realise’ all kinds of destinies as a child. But give up along the way. The real hero plods on and collect all kinds of paraphernalia along the way.

3) YOUR PARTICULAR ENDING

Now we get to the meat and potatoes of my little musing. Despite the lure of destiny, an RPG is only enjoyable if there are some choices to be made that have an impact on the outcome. Same thing with life. But what struck me even more is the fact that in my early RPG days I would save a lot of potions and 1 use items in the early parts of the game. I would not use them until the very end. However, most of the time I found out I had saved one too many potions and I could not finish them by the end of the game. And after the game ended, of course, all my saving was in vain. This ultimately changed my play style to be more balanced, and more willing to use whatever was acquired.

Similarly in life, are we ‘hoarders’? Do save and stock up money and skills but never use them because we are waiting …

Lastly, to me, the best part about an RPG is the connection you build with the characters and the story. The levelling up and item hoarding are just distractions, really. Because after finishing a fantastic game like Final Fantasy VII or Planescape Torment or Fallout, I don’t go “WOW I really liked how I ended the game with SUPER SWORD OF KICKASSNESS +100″ but rather “DAMN Im so glad I was able to save the world!!!!”. The point is, once the destiny is realised, you’ll in turn realise that things like the money, skills and weapons you accumulated throughout the game are gone – no longer meaningful once your destiny or goal is achieved. But the impact — the changes you brought about: those things wil go on forever.

If you knew how close death was, would you still be hoarding? Or will you take whatever you have, and go out and save the world at whatever the cost?

“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. ¹⁷He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

¹⁸“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ‘

²⁰“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

²¹“This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

~Luke12:16