Talk To Me Not Of Patriotism
Well, we’re gonna default on the debt ceiling. Maybe we’ll pull some weird last-minute save, but I’m not betting on it; Boehner and Cantor are sacks of wet Jell-O when it comes to standing up for themselves, and Obama really can’t afford to bend on this particular issue, lest American politics degenerate.
(If you’re really for what the Tea Party is doing, ask yourself whether you’d be cool if, after the next gun schoolyard massacre, a small subset of Democrats refused to pass any budgets until handgun registration was enforced to their liking. Because I guarantee you, if the Tea Party shows this “holding its breath until we all die” thing works, then it’s going to get used by both sides. And you will not like the outcome.)
But the Tea Party strikes me as someone who’s severely Othered the enemy, which is to say that all of the people who voted for Obama and Obamacare and liberal politicians didn’t do it for valid reasons – they did it because these maniacs are dangerous and will destroy America. And in their minds – not that they’ve thought this through explicitly, but it’s at the core – they kinda believe it’s okay if America’s destroyed, because the people in charge of it are no longer American.
It’s kind of like Picard, deciding to blow up the Enterprise when it got overrun by the Borg: you don’t want to let this thing fall into the hands of the enemy. And if you have to destroy it to show them that you’re serious, well, oh well.
Which is shit, really. I miss the humanization of my opponents. I know a lot of conservative people, and they’re pretty dim on some things, and dangerously misguided on others, and in other things they simply have different priorities. But most of them genuinely want what’s best for people – they just disagree with it. I can oppose them, and oppose them vigorously, without having to demean or demonize them. Despite what the world would tell you, “meaning well” is a virtue, because if someone means well then you at least have the opportunity to convince them that your course is the right one.
Someone out to do harm never gets that far.
And so, one suspects, we’ll see America’s credit get blown, and probably have the doors opened to the Chinese saying, “Well, why don’t you peg the currency on our much more stable nation?” and a long downfall of American power. Maybe not. I mean, the Japanese looked unstoppable in the 1980s, and they had their own foibles that yanked them back; the Chinese have their own issues now, particularly with their psychotic demographics coming to roost. But we weren’t as dysfunctional then as we are now, and I’m not sure how to handle that.
I wish the Tea Party didn’t have to make Obama into Hitler, or make Obamacare the worst law ever passed in the history of America (go back to the 1850s, you’ll find a few that might be worse). I dig things are bad from their perspective, but part of democracy involves losing gracefully, and cleaning up when it turns out that yeah, that was a disaster, the way we did with Prohibition and Slavery, and we’re still reeling from the effects of those bad laws but in general it’s been an upward curve away from the nadir of that thought.
Maybe Obamacare is a disaster. I’m willing to acknowledge that. But if so, we’ll need every bit of America’s strength to get through it, and this ain’t helping.
Life With Shasta
*Ferrett gets up from his chair*
Shasta: YOU’RE UP YOU’RE UP YOU’RE UP! WHAT MAGIC WILL YOU UNDERTAKE NOW? WHAT CRAZY WONDERLAND WILL YOU LEAD ME TO?!? TAKE ME THERE, YOU MADCAP HUMAN, OH LEAD ME TO YOUR MYSTICAL GARDENS!
Ferrett: I’m getting the cable bill.
*Shasta dances for another ten minutes after I sit down*
*Ferrett gets up*
Shasta: HE RISES, TO WORK HIS GLORY UPON THE WORLD! SHOW ME! SHOW ME WHAT GREATNESS IT IS YOU INTEND TO ACCOMPLISH, OH MASTER! I CAN’T HOLD MY ENTHUSIASM – LOOK, I’M DANCING! I’M DANCING! WHEN WILL YOU UNLEASH THE PARTY HELD WITHIN YOU? WILL YOU _
Ferrett: I’m peeing, Shasta. That’s all there is.
*Shasta looks at me expectantly*
Ferrett: Seriously. You don’t have to watch my every micturation.
*Shasta sits, patiently, waiting for some urine-related magnificence that will never come*
Interesting Writing Techniques: Ann Leckie And Holly Black
I cannot write well if I’m not reading well, for I am a seething mass of envy and hatred. Some people read great works of literature fling up their hands, and cry, “How can I ever write like that?”… whereas I buckle down, read harder, and think, “If I read their works hard enough, I will steal their souls.”
I never do, of course. Souls are very firmly affixed. But I do pick up interesting techniques as I go, learning things I didn’t realize could be done. And so the more I read, the better I write, for I learn the mechanics of writing from masters.
This week’s masters are Holly Black and Ann Leckie, both of whom took a pretty standard cliche in literature and turned it on its head.
Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl In Coldtown is about vampires, and it teaches us all a lesson about in media res. Too many people think that in media res means “in the middle of the action,” and so you have beginning authors starting a story with “He shot her!!!!! In the face!”
The problem is, we don’t care about the people getting shot yet. People think gunshots are exciting, but seeing a random Stormtrooper get hit means nothing to the average person.
What in media res actually means is “in the middle of things,” and what Holly Black knows is that while it’s good to start as close to the action as possible, you need to build up the character as quickly as possible – so that we’re invested in their story, and care about what happens. And so her lead, Tana, wakes up in a bathtub after a party, and as she works her way through her hangover to find her shoes in the clutter, we see Tana’s lifestyle – how she got too drunk last night, made out with the wrong sort of people to show up her kinda-not boyfriend, the regret and weird shame she feels.
Then she discovers all her friends dead in the next room, sucked dry by vampires.
That’s not the trick, though. Because weirdly enough, I felt my interest start to drop as Tana found her dead friends, because I’d seen that scene before – the sole survivor, baffled, has to figure out why her friends died, and expresses confusion about what’s going on. There’s going to be the inevitable Oh, but vampires don’t exist! narrative, and the muddled cops who somehow blame Tana for this event, and the clue that only she finds that puts her on the trail of the supernatural…
…and Tana immediately determines that someone must have drunkenly left a window open last night and knocked aside the garlic cloves, that’s how the vampires got in, and oh God she has to call 911 but she’s lost her phone.
That hiked my interest way up. Because that single reaction hints at a ton of worldbuilding bubbling beneath the surface – okay, vampires in this world are a known danger. Furthermore, clearly they can just roam around and attack parties at will. But there are still cops, and suburban teenaged parties stealthily held when the parents leave for the weekend. So how does this all work? We’ve got a whole new world working here, and my interest jumped as I wanted to see what Tana did next. Because even if what Tana did was entirely normal (hint: it isn’t), the world Holly has hinted at is sufficiently different from ours that we want to explore it just to find out how it ticks.
Note that cleverness here: there’s a lot of worldbuilding in The Coldest Girl In Coldtown, as Holly’s posited a mostly-working version of how vampires would work in a world that still remains similar to ours, but she does not deliver this via infodump. (At least, not in the first chapter; there are infodumpy sections later on, but I think those are unavoidable in a world as complex and stories as Coldest Girl.) Instead, she presents us with a situation people would react to in a standard way, and instead informs us that this place is very, very different by having her protagonist’s concerns be wildly different. Which is subtle, and effective, and gets us through the first chapter – the most important point in any book.
Ann Leckie also has a different character problem to solve in her debut novel Ancillary Justice, which has been making waves because she’s got a great twist on space opera: her lead character is a warship.
Yet that’s an issue, because the warship is actually a centralized intelligence: it has many bodies, called ancillaries, that it works and sees through. The trick is that the warship was actually destroyed due to some nefarious sabotage, and her protagonist is one of those stray bodies seeking justice.
Ann does a lot of work with language here, as she gets across the concept of an AI in a human body by using slightly formal words to describe everything. There’s something clinical and compelling about Breq, who feels emotions but recounts them at a slight distance at all times – a stiff formality in reporting that serves to make Breq feel alien without robbing her of humanity.
Yet what Ann faced was an interesting challenge: how do you write a scene from the point of view of a fully-functioning warship? After all, in her prime, Breq – or Justice of Toren, as she was known in her fighting days – had a hundred bodies working from a hundred different viewpoints, all analyzing and recording things on a scale no human could match. And there’s a lot of ways one could write that to lesser effect – flashy stuff like having each of the datastreams be in a different font, to constantly flashing between bodies, to having some other jumble to represent the warship’s multiple point of view.
It’s a risky act. Because if you don’t do something from a narrative perspective, then a warship’s viewpoint feels too human, and you make what should be the extraordinary mundane.
Ann found a great solution, though: scenes from when Breq was a warship are written from a mutated third-person omniscient narration. Breq/Toren knows everything there is to know about the officers, as she’s not only lived for millennia and knows their family history personally, but also can read their biometrics, so Breq-as-Toren becomes almost a different setting. She’s a warship, expected to keep her opinions to herself, and so what we have is Breq’s memories of the event as she saw other officers making history on her decks, and the subtle biases a living warship enacts to the people she dislikes on it.
(I should also add that having read through the entire book, I don’t necessarily know that Breq counts as a “she,” as there’s a lot of work with language and gendering in Ancillary Justice. I’ll call Breq a she. Even though really, she’s an it.)
So what we get is active, betrayed Breq in the current storyline, trying to work her way back to her homeworld, and a more studied version of her past where we get a sense of the political issues that brought her to this point. Which is a very interesting, and effective, way to handle it – since we’re constantly flashing back to Breq’s old self, we get a sense of what she’s lost in being made singular, which intensifies the “current” segments. (And if you’re interested, there’s an interview at the end of the book where Ann confirmed my suspicions of how difficult this was to write from a warship’s perspective, outlining some other alternatives she considered and discarded.)
This unique viewpoint is why, one suspects, Ancillary Justice is getting a lot of buzz. It’s got some serious juice behind it. I’d go check it out, if I were you.
Public To Private, Private To Public
Inspired by this comedian getting bent out of shape when someone wrote a blog entry about his rape jokes, here’s my personal rules about public spaces:
Anything you broadcast to a public space can be responded to in a public space.
If you’re speaking in an area where strangers can drop in, and are speaking loudly enough to be heard, then you’re speaking in a public place. This can be getting on stage for a comedy showing, or posting a blog on the Internet, or a post on Facebook if you post it to all comers. Hell, if you refuse to shut up at the coffee shop, blathering loud enough that other people have to shut you out, then that’s a public space.
If you’ve chosen to talk in a public space, I am not obligated to take you aside to discuss the problems I have with what you just said one-on-one.
It’s kinder if I do, and I’ll frequently do so for friends. But if you step on a platform to broadcast your thoughts to the world for public consumption, my reaction may well be to broadcast my thoughts on your thoughts over here. And if you’ve said something particularly dim or ill-informed in a public space, I may well choose to point at you as an example of What Not To Do.
That’s not cowardly. You’ve chosen to make a public spectacle of your thoughts, and part of the cost of “speaking to a larger audience” is “inspiring wider conversations.” You don’t get to control the message when you’ve decided to hand it wholesale to everyone within ear’s reach. As such, not everything said about you is guaranteed to be kind – which is why you should consider very carefully before speaking to crowds of large people.
And for God’s sake, if you’re going to be “edgy” and go for the big reaction, then shut the hell up when it turns out the big reaction you were purposely seeking wasn’t the one you received. You took a chance. You knew it could blow up in your face. Don’t play the victim.
Anything you discuss in a private space should, generally, remain private.
On the other hand, if you’re talking quietly to some buddies at a coffee shop, or making friends-locked posts, or just shooting the shit among friends, then whatever you say should generally be kept in private. People need private space. It’s where they can short-hand conversations for comfort, or say stupid things and get feedback safely, or even try out potentially thoughts to see what their friends think.
You need that space. God knows we’d all look like idiots if our every word was broadcast. So you should respect that privacy.
I’ve accidentally blogged some dumb things my friends said and used them as examples of wider problems, and it’s invariably cost me the friendship… which, I’m shamed to say, was the correct move on their part. They were talking to me, in a protected space, and I hauled them out on stage to have their thoughts dissected. They did not ask for this, and it was rude of me to do so. If someone says something sketchy to me in a private space, I should call them on their bullshit in an equally private space – which is to say, either debating their idiotic behavior in front in the same friends’ group they just spoke in front of, or tugging them aside for a private chat.
I’ve been hung on the Internet for my failures. That was painful, but at least it was my own choice. If a so-called “friend” of mine had dragged my private thoughts out in public and I’d been pilloried there, it would have been awful.
Which is why I feel bad when I’ve blown it. People with stupid opinions are, well, stupid…. But “stupid” is not a static description. Quite often the way people get rid of their stupid opinions is by having them rebutted in private, not broadcast to the world to be the Punching Bag of the Day.
But there are exceptions.
Sometimes, people count on this privacy-to-public buffer to get away with ridiculous stuff. Sexual harassment’s a classic case: a professor slobbers all over his students in private, counting on the fact that none of them will go public. Or someone’s such an active racist in private spaces that you have to say to the world that you do not want to deal with this dork any longer.
Sometimes, you have to violate the privacy barrier. But this should be done cautiously. It’s a slam-dunk if some professor pawed you in private, but what about a friend who said something stupid? You might well be misrepresenting what they said, or misunderstanding. I’m not saying not to go public, but I am popping up the little “This could be harming someone who you misunderstood – proceed? Y/N.”
If you decide that someone’s become bad enough that they’re worth hauling into the public eye, then pull that trigger. But don’t deny that it’s a gun you’re firing at them, an effort you’re making to try to harm them with the weight of public opinion enough that they’ll feel shamed and/or restricted into stopping their actions.
Sometimes it’s the right thing to pull the trigger. Just do it responsibly, is all I’m saying.
Grand Theft Auto 5: The Ferrett Review
I thought much more kindly about Grand Theft Auto once I realized the developers of the game actively despised me.
This fact was conveyed to me by Tom Bissell’s amazing review, which may be one of the best pieces of videogame writing I’ve ever seen. In it (among other many salient analyses of how videogame culture works), Tom states that Grand Theft Auto is, in fact, a large parody of its audience, and implies that actually, the developers don’t seem to like us all that much. Why else would they keep giving us boring tasks like mopping floors and driving twenty minutes across town to get to a mission?
The truth dawned: Rockstar’s entire genre is actually punishing us, in a way. They know how to make a fun game, no doubt. But what they’re doing is saying, “Okay, fuck it, the goal of Grand Theft Auto is not to make our customers happy, it’s to see how many hoops we can make them jump through for our amusement.” And once I began to internalize that idea, the concept that actually all of GTA 5 was basically one grudgefuck for an audience it actively loathed, Grand Theft Auto became enjoyable.
Because despite the frothing of reviewers everywhere, GTA is an ambitious game with substandard controls. It’s full of terribly designed missions: how do you learn to fly a plane? Not by taking the flying tutorials; no, those aren’t available until you’ve done the flying mission. And the flying mission has a literal three-minute segment where you soar over the ocean, gracefully headed towards home, and then crash on the runway because landing is tricky and you can’t read the little pop-up hints. And so, if you’re a bad flier like me, you wind up playing the same fucking mission for eighteen minutes, spending three minutes to get to the inevitable fuck-up at the end.
But that’s okay. That is, like Harlan Ellison’s AM, the way the game designers are taking out their aggression on me.
Grand Theft Auto 5 never quite becomes a game as I understand it. It is, in fact, an endless series of tutorials, many of them shoddy. Every mission is pretty much “Follow the instructions, and if you deviate from them in the slightest your mission is over.” Right up to the final mission, you’re chasing a dot on the screen, you’re learning how to squeeze the mop, you’re learning how to use a parachute. You’re always following orders from a God, and that God is cruel.
Because as noted, the tutorials aren’t particularly helpful. They’re all in small type, arriving when you’re distracted by other things – yes, let’s make you read things when you’re chasing a boat down a freeway! – and failing to comprehend them in time gives you insta-mission failure. In fact, pretty much anything gives you insta-mission failure. Take a wrong turn while chasing the celebrity? Insta-mission failure. Even though your travelling companion told you to turn right, this wasn’t the correct right, and now after following directions you will be chastised with the horrid blue “MISSION FAILURE” screen, you must do it again.
But that’s okay, because the game hates you.
The point of Grand Theft Auto is not to explore, really, it’s to see how closely you can conform to Rockstar’s demands. You do precisely what they say, or you don’t do it at all. And there’s a certain grim pleasure in getting through it, because the new and upgraded mission checkpoints mean that every mission is doable with enough repetition, so there’s not an actual challenge to it. The same could be said of Saints Row, but Saints Row wants you to have fun.
Grand Theft Auto, I’m convinced, is nothing but subtle hatred. I mean, they give you this grand and glorious landscape, meticulously detailed, and then on every mission they force you to glue your eyes to the little navigation box in the lower left-hand corner. They’ve surely seen other games where directions are given with cartoonish arrows pointing down streets so that you don’t have to take your gaze off the road, all so that you can appreciate the alleyways and mini-malls, and won’t crash into other cars while straining to see the GPS.
But no! Aware of all the alternatives, Rockstar said, “Ah, fuck ’em, let ’em stare at a tiny map for seven-tenths of the game.”
The thing is, you are rewarded for all of this by some fascinating characters and rampant creativity. I like Michael, the bored and whiny ex-criminal. I like Franklin, the ambitious hood guy. I am compelled by Trevor, the psychotic, even as I pretty much hate him and the idea of him. And you get some wonderful dialogue and character interaction, and each of the missions are amazingly skillful in the writing. There are only a few core mechanics – go kill someone, go chase someone – but Rockstar is an absolute master of wrapping those repetitive goals in new ideas, so when you’re chasing someone for the fortieth time it feels fresh because you’re driving a bus on an assassination mission, or chasing a boat to get your kidnapped son, or beating some psychotic woman in a race you never wanted.
You’re doled out rewards. The game is just enjoyable enough to make it up for its many flaws. And, I suspect, much of the rabid fan base is Stockholm Syndrome in action; if you’ve dealt with all of this tedium, you eventually come to believe that this was a wonderful game, perfect, because you jumped through all of these hoops and you couldn’t have done that for no reason, could you? No. The game must be wonderful, without flaw, because you endured all of this.
But Grand Theft Auto’s ambition is endless, its execution flawed. Even the storyline turns out to be a disappointment; as much as I rooted for Franklin and Michael in the beginning, they have no character arc. Franklin’s lesson is that if he remains slavishly devoted to the incompetent remnants of his past, he will discover himself, and Michael’s lesson is that if he just keeps killing and making heists he will regain himself. Literally the entire tale is “Just keep on keepin’ on,” and while there are a lot of eddies and fun sidelines, there’s no real climax except for the endings which are, by the game’s own logic, the bad ones. The individual writing is beautiful, almost pristine, and the voice acting is hands-down the best I’ve heard in any game, but does it assemble into a coherent whole? It does not.
And as has been noted a thousand times before, it’s a little weirdly anti-woman. Yes, all the characters in GTA are overblown and bizarre, but some are at least sympathetic; the game tries mightily to give Trevor some understanding, implying a very bad past full of betrayals and abuse. Yet while the game will attempt to justify a meth-making, violent psychopath’s motivations, there is not one woman in the game who makes sense at all. They’re all shrews, intended to cut down the male characters, and they are only acceptable when they begin to bend to their wills.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is a lot better than GTA 4, and I suspect that’s all most people wanted. But it’s also not as fun as the GTA 3 lines, because there are fewer crowds to plow through, and it just seems harder to create massive mayhem. I wanted to blow up twenty, thirty cars, and I had to work far too hard to engineer such an environment.
Grand Theft Auto dislikes you. It’s mocking you for playing it. And there’s stuff worth there to play, very worthwhile, but one senses that they’re making you dig through the muck on purpose to find the jewels within. If I had to give it a rating, it’d be a B, maybe a B+ – some much-needed fine-tuning could have made this the best game in XBox history, but really, would Rockstar have wanted to make it that easy for you?
Three Things I Hate In Roleplaying Games (That Other People Love).
What I’m about to list are things that some roleplayers clearly get off on; they’re embedded in the DNA of almost every game, feature prominently in modules, and are generally repeated so thoroughly in so many games that I can only assume that they’re really popular among a large subset of players. But this is all stuff I jettison the instant I get into any game, the stuff I’m continually surprised to see popping up again, and it just makes me wonder.
Being A Banker.
A lot of modules assume the players will keep track of their wealth, down to the last copper piece. They negotiate frantically for an extra 5 GP, are thrilled to find an additional 4 GP in the flowerpot, and later on have to hire a coachman for 10 GP.
Whether I’m a GM or a player, I hate that crap.
I like knowing my players are wealthy, or poor, or whatever, but having to track every expenditure against their baseline is the D&D equivalent of balancing my checkbook. “Oh, my rations cost me 2 shins a day? Do I want to splurge and have a nice meal for 5 shins?” And to me, that’s just an annoyance that gets in the way of my roleplaying – suddenly, I’m not Thundersmash the Barbarian, but Thundersmash the Wage-Slave, frantically counting pennies to see whether I can afford a new set of gloves.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind playing poor. My current Mage campaign has me playing a notch above a homeless person, and that’s great; I’m fine, living in squalor. And some of the best campaigns have been that sort of race against poverty, where you’re starving and need this job, because otherwise you’re not sure you can make it through the winter. Victory is so much sweeter when it comes in the face of poverty.
But abstract the details. Tell me my belly aches from hunger, tell me how cold it is outside, show me the sneers of the noblemen passing me on the street. I don’t want to have to continually keep the medieval equivalent of Quicken at hand.
(Likewise, keeping track of every single inventory item. Fun in videogames! But just assume that if I’m a thief, I have a rope and some spikes. I don’t want to manage a huge list of Things I Carried, all as a “gotcha” so when it turns out that no, I did not remember to add “quill and ink” to my mage’s inventory, I can write absolutely nothing at all. Don’t get me started on somatic components.)
Puzzles I Am Expected To Solve Personally.
Look, if I wanted to do logic puzzles, I’d sit down and do a goddamned logic puzzle. Really, Mister GM, I haven’t been aching to solve the Towers of Hanoi one more time – and if I did, I wouldn’t want to do it with three other players debating the correct solution with me.
This is a classic D&D tradition, and I don’t mind it when it shows up in modules like The Tomb Of Horrors, which was basically a big middle finger from Gary Gygax to every ninetieth level wizard/assassin/cleric. Tomb of Horrors was basically there to screw over cocky fourteen-year-olds who’d abused the rulebook, and so in certain circumstances the long tradition of giving the players something frustrating and impenetrable is fine.
But I play characters. Who are routinely either smarter or dumber than me. They are not me. And so when you say, “Here’s a bunch of levers and switches,” it yanks me right out of all of this fine character-headspace I’ve built in; I don’t think anyone in the history of roleplaying has ever said, “How would my elf solve this puzzle?” – no, they go, “How do I solve this puzzle?” and then suddenly I’m basically spending time in real life doing things an iPad could literally do better. Time that I am not losing myself in the pathetic grade-school power fantasy that I came here to intellectually whack it to, goddammit.
Not to mention that half these puzzles are total BS in-game, too. The GM has to devise an elaborate reason why someone would spend hundreds of thousands of gold pieces on elaborate levers rather than just slap a magical lock on it with a passphrase, and usually has to put in cryptic “clues” handed to you by passing merchants or stuffed in lockers so you have a hope in heck of solving it. By the time you’re having the clues of “A to B, B to C, C to A again” then you’re basically acknowledging that there’s no real good in-game reason, you just wanted a puzzle.
Nothing wrong with puzzles. But they bring the game to a halt while I have to solve them, and if we don’t get them we’re usually not advancing the plot, and a third of the time it boils down to “Oh, make an Intellect check” anyway. So my preference? Don’t.
Mapping Out Exact Distances.
This is why D&D 4th Edition lost me.
As noted earlier, I come here for the roleplaying. I want to immerse myself in the visuals created between a DM’s descriptions and my own mental interpretations therein, and write a tale between the two of us. And I enjoying holding all of this glorious idea-landscapes created in my head, and then….
…I’m a doofy plastic piece on someone’s Cheeto-strewn coffee table.
Look, I’m not opposed to miniature wargaming. It’s a perfectly nice hobby. But when I’m roleplaying, I want to lose myself in swashbuckling, emphasizing the Rule of Cool – if I’m two feet short of my allotted move but it’s a great chandelier swing, I think that stuff should happen. I don’t want to constantly measure distances to ensure that I’m within range or not within range, and to see whether that stone wall is half a move away, and how are these guys?
I appreciate the tactical portions of the game. But keeping track of my guys with pieces feels like I’m playing some sort of embarrassing preadolescent chess, moving the big-boobed leather woman around, and it feels kind of shameful, seeing how my grandiose dreams have boiled down to these teeny silly bits that are going to be swept away the next time the cat jumps on the table. Plus, then I’m more concerned with rules than I am with flavor – and to my mind, if I’m going to do something that complex and flavorless, why not just play a computer game where all of that is handled for me automatically, rather than this slow pause while we all roll dice and do math and determine things?
Look. When I kill the demon, I want to imagine fire gouting from its chest, dying wings flapping, the terror on its face as it realizes a mere mortal has ended its existence on this planet.
What happens in real life is the GM tips the plastic toy on its side.
It’s not the same.