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Re: Forrest, Forrest, Forrest…

Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= (as3-1-1.HIP.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: 6/4/2001 at 6:27 p.m.

In Response To: Re: Forrest, Forrest, Forrest… (Dan Rudolph)

: I interpreted this differently. Since the narrator wasn't
: actually there, I think what we see is the truth and
: it had become 100 Berserks in the retelling by the
: time it got to him. We know of other cases where stuff
: we hear isn't exactly true such as wounds from Souless
: javelins being unhealable, and I think this is one of
: those times.

The narrator may not have actually been one of those Berserks, but he was definitely nearby when they left. He was down at the Ghôl holding off Soulblighter when the Watcher was first petrified, but his group then rejoined the rest of the army and moved north out of the marsh; only afterwards, with the narrator present, did a hundred Berserks peel off and return to finish off the Watcher. So the narrator was close enough to events for his estimate to be reliable.

When he *is* far away from events, he generally mentions it in the journal--as with the Five Champions' quest, or the retaking of Myrgard. He didn't say anything like that here.

I think the Berserk discrepancy and the Soulless javelins are both cases of necessary inaccuracies in the *in-game* retelling. The small number of Berserks is simply one example of the many cases where there's surprisingly few units in-game, given the storyline. No matter how vital the task or how huge the battle's supposed to be, somehow you never see more than a few dozen (Twice Born being the exception to this, but they're mostly uncontrolled) Light units fighting a few hundred Dark units. You can argue that the rest of the army is always off-screen doing something important there, but the real explanation is of course that the game's limitations and style of play don't permit too many units. You can't select more than thirty units at a time; even if you're willing to alternate between unit subsets it's no fun to try to coordinate 50+ units at once; and you can't have more than a couple hundred units on-screen at any one time. So the story has to be messed with a little to work with these concerns.

And the side effects of the Soulless Javelins are far too frequently mentioned to simply be an error in the text. I agree that their wounds aren't absolutely *unhealable*--GURPS says that's a bit of an exaggeration and, after all, anything's healable if you're an archmage--but it's said over and over again in both games that they produce excruciating pain and cause nasty diseases, and it's perfectly feasible that the wounds never heal on their own without powerful magical assistance.

Again, the reason we don't see these effects in-game is that it doesn't work with the gameplay style and engine limitations. It's hard to simulate injuries which cause crippling pain and gradually fester and infect, and it's not much fun for the player to drag around a bunch of ailing, agonized soldiers (particularly when just about every unit's gonna get hit with at least one javelin.) So they leave it out. The same way they leave out the "slow bleeding death-fever" that all victims of a Wight explosion are supposed to experience, or the long-term contamination that a Wight explosion is supposed to produce in the surrounding land and water (so that if a Wight part is thrown at you, it paralyzes you, but if you walk right through a pile of Wight parts, nothing happens.)

Just like GURPS, in-game reality is "impure." It's certainly more reliable than GURPS because the people who wrote the original story were more closely involved in its creation, but it's still taking a story and twisting it to fit the limitations and quirks of a particular game engine and gameplay style.

--SiliconDream

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