– Aerendel’s Background –

– Kameron – Probably a ‘Faer Elf’ – guarding Mushrooms in Glacier Valley – He’s been passing himself off as an Ottarian – When we get the animation routine just right – he shoujld be able to morph himself into a domestic cat and run around casting nuisance spells on jerks who threaten his favourite plants and animals. 😉 –

Raisons d’Etre & Philosophy

— The first role playing game that captured my attention was “Dragons Gate” – a Text-Based Multi-Player Role Playing on GEnie { Which – for you Millennials & others who have no idea what GEnie was – was General Electric’s attempt to corner the market on On-Line Computing – I think Delphi came first and numerous BBSes sprouted up wherever anybody with a computer and a modem was stupid enough to keep the computer and modem on most of the time. {{ Mostly local ‘Bulletin Board’s were hosted by individual computer geeks and some companies, including a local Fire Department in Milford, Connecticut whose sign-off page included “You downloaded xx files ad gave us nothing” – }}  — Earlier attempts by friends to interest me in playing on-line role playing games left me wondering why anybody would want to spend time and money doing that ( when, for instance, GEnie cost $18.00 and hour between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm – and dropped down to $6.00 an hour from 6 pm to 8 am – & all day and all night on weekends and Holidays )

— One friend got me interested in “Dragons Gate” in the days when the game was so new that the whole world often crashed if one character died in a battle. A lot of whole new regions were planned and their programmers were working on upgrades that would allow player’s characters to have companions – either animals, or ‘sentient’ NPCs { NPC = Non Player Characters – townspeople, bad guys that give you a reason to have your character kill them, or knock them out and take all their stuff. That was one cool thing about Dragon’s Gate back then, You could knock an attacker out with a ‘sleep spell’ strip them of weapons and gold and silver and they would wake up, scream and run away. Physically wimpy characters with a couple good spells could make out like bandits. } — One of my friend’s best in-game friends had a character who ‘got pregnant’ and had her baby stolen seconds after it was born because they hadn’t quite gotten the software right that would allow her to carry around her baby, and upgrade infant to toddler in a short time – etc.

— But the people my friend had befriended were intelligent, creative, sometimes exhibited slightly demented senses of humor – and were what I am tempted to call ;elegant’ role players. One of them who lived outside Hollywood, California – had an artistic job working on the production of ‘The Simpsons” – she jokingly told us, “Yeah, I work for the brat-” – And for a lot of highly intelligent – creative, imaginative people – interacting with friends they might never meet, as characters they could only imagine – was more relaxing and more exciting than socializing with the people they worked with, lived with and/or encountered in their everyday lives.

— I began to think of that crowd of on-line friends as ‘Finesse Players’ – in the modern sense – not the “Olde English” definition of finesse as beating somebody on the head with a billy club or black jack in order to knock them out and steal anything of value they might have. And, ya know? some of these people put more thought and imagination into their characters than I’d ever imagined anybody could. And ya know they got a lot of enjoyment and fun out of it.

— But then there were these vampire-like characters with enhanced stats that received bonuses from attacking and draining the life force of other players’ characters. They were supposed to be loners – they could hypnotize and drain their victims and steal everything they had and get away with it before their victims could move – but they could only come out at night – imagined sunlight in that imaginary world would burn and slow them down and even kill them – And when they started hunting in packs, they were so belligerent – { and called that ‘Role Playing’ } that most of the Finesse players logged out at sundown – game time – and stayed away for six hours until the sun came back out. My friend, who got me interested in that game in the first place, grew tired of that and gradually stopped playing as many of the original bunch of friends also lost interest and went on to other things.

— I began writing my first text game for my nephews, who were around 8 and 6 years old at the time. It as a wimpy game, written in Applesoft Basic, with a program limit of 32K – and the only way it worked was to string programs together – One basic weapons skill, and a self-healing skill and six ‘rooms’ to go and ‘search’ for monsters. and the combat routine, and the healing routine were so wimpy that your character would take a swing at the bad guys and the bad guys would swing back. You could leave your computer for several hours and come back and nothing had changed – you’d take another swing and your opponent would swing back – and for some ‘monsters’ – if you began to worry that the monster might kill your character, you could blow some dust in the monste’s face and it would explode and leave weapons and money behind. There was a separate program where you could cash in the weapons you’d taken from the bad guys and buy new and better armor and weapons – another program where your character would go and train for higher skill levels when the character was ready – and several of the programs were actually the same program with six different room descriptions and some f them had tougher monsters – And then I worked in another program where you were just as likely to find wounded good guys and bad guys bleeding to death on a battlefield. Your characters could use their healing skills to get the wounded NPCs back on their feet and the wounded NPCs would hand the healers a family heirloom, jeweled dagger or the like, and say, “I guess I’m not cut out to be a warrior, either use this yourself or give it to someone who can put it to proper use -” “Or sell it to the store guy and get some really spiffy new armor – If an abuser tried to kill the NPC that NPC had one last desperate swing left in him ( or her ) and would kill the jerk who was trying to get an easy kill. – And then there was this -Rabid Bear- if you tried to kill it, you were dead, If you tried to heal it, the grateful bear would lead you to a hollow log where some long gone adventurer had stashed some gold and some really valuable weapons.

— Then I wrote a character rolling series of programs for the text game I thought I could create in “C” This version of C was supposed to have unlimited size potential, but it crashed and died at 1 Meg. I stung together 5 programs to create a highly detailed character rolling program that gave you the history and plusses and minuses of each race and in game class/occupation. I did that on a 286 IBM clone and when it blew up I lost a bit, but when I tried to load the 8 & 1/2 inch floppies I had copies of everything I’d done on – they had degraded to the point of being useless.

— I kept trying different platforms, had one text “MUD” { Multi-User Dungeon } game’s software that was really promising, again – all text – and I was doing fairly well with that when not even my nephews were interested in playing a text game when they could play something with characters and bad guys they could see.

* * * * *

— I ‘got into’ Personality Theory – and the MBTI – { Meyers-Briggs Temperament Index } which took ideas first proposed by Carl Jung and ran with them. – Carl Jung { Pronounced “Young” } was the pioneer in Psychology who broke with Sigmund Freud and went his own way – and came up with ideas and theories about ‘The Collective Unconscious” – Higher Consciousness and the like. The MBTI system takes four polarities and combines them to come up with sixteen distinct Personalities/Temperaments and has an empowering explanation of why not everybody wants to be, or can be – a sports hero – or a millionaire rock and roll star – or anything else.

— The polarities are Extrovert – Introvert, Sensing – Intuitive,  Thinking – Feeling, and Judging – Perceiving. The quick and dirty explanation of each is: (1) When an extrovert is traumatized/wounded/humiliated or whatever – they want to be out with the crowds and the noise and the lights and excitement to regain their self esteem and the feeling that life is good. When an introvert is wounded, traumatized, etc, they want to crawl into a cave and lick their wounds, or find a nice, quiet place to relax and recuperate. The weird thing here is – the difference between extroverts and introverts is that the introvert’s senses are sharper and more apt to overload. (2) ‘Sensing’ individuals want to be able to see – touch – hear – smell and/or taste the world around them – and can be uncomfortable with abstract ideas, concepts and imaginary stuff they want to believe is ‘a crazy waste of energy and time’ – Intuitives are happy to deal with imagination and abstract things like negative numbers and possible worlds that might be different from their own. (3) Thinking people would like everything to make sense, intellectually. Feeling people believe that they’d rather not destroy somebody’s peace of mind than hit them over the head with some absolute truth their friend can’t accept for whatever reason. Thinking people can have emotions. Feeling people can be intelligent – they’d just rather function on an emotional ‘up’ than an intellectual satisfaction. & (4) The biggest difference between judging types and perceptive types is that if a judging type plans a happy outing to a park and it rains, that person is likely to go into a tail spin and be grouchy and unhappy all day. The Perceptive type person will probably shrug and say something like, “Oh what the heck – we can go to that indoor sports stadium, they have nothing going on today and I know somebody there who will let us in and have our picnic on the fifty yard line.” Or, “So we can’t go to the park – how about the theater? Or the shopping mall?”

— One important concept that is part of Personality Theory is that these attitudes are hard wired into us before the age of 14 and they’re pretty much with us for the rest of our lives. So if a born musician is bullied by somebody who wants to grow up to be a Football Hero, or a Hockey Star – the musician probably cannot decide to start lifting weights and bulk up to the point where he or she can face their bully in the future and beat the living cement out of them for old time sake.

— And then there are theories of Moral Growth – in which the really odd thing is – that a person stuck at a lower level of moral development actually believes that people who have grown to a higher level are actually immoral or amoral – I’ll get into that  in another page.

— Another concept that seems to be fascinating to Role Players and Role Playing Game Developers is “Alignment” – characters in some games have to fit into strict definitions of “Good”, “Evil”, or “Neutral” / aligned with the Light, with Darkness, or Neither { Maybe Selfishness? } – And then there’s the monkey wrench of ‘Ethics’ —> And I’ll describe Morals and Ethics on another page. Right now I want to move on and get to a new page describing the ‘Sentient Races’ in Aerendel.