You All Meet In A Tavern

Or: But I don't even drink!

So, tavern-based roleplay. It's like a single's club for dark, brooding, sociopathic menaces to society. I haven't had to stoop to this in a while.

Tavern roleplay, like the aforementioned single's club, is a great way to meet people. The very nature of the place demands people attend. My very first experiences in roleplay, in fact, were through tavern RP - in ancient MSN chat rooms where typing speed determined victory - no lie! Nowadays, if your characters get into a violent conflict of interest and the other guy responds with a rapid-fire series of posts detailing the utterly one-sided victory he's just stolen from your battered corpse, you turn and walk away, slapping him with an /ignore so fast their head spins clean off.

At least, that's what I do.

So, anyway, there are some benefits to tavern RP, but there are some drawbacks as well. Like I mentioned up there in the subtitle (who reads those anyway?), the tavern just isn't the place for everybody. Raise your hand if, like me, you've never set foot in a bar for recreational purposes.

Now, put your hand down; you look kind of silly.

I imagine anyway. No, I really can't see you.

The point is, not every character is going to work well in a tavern. Shy characters and claustrophobes spring to mind. Honestly, would Loner McWoodsy - the high elven ranger so feral he understands his wolf companion better than other people - really spend much time in any civilized establishment at all? Really?

No, not really.

That's what I thought.

Not only that, but what about all these great warriors, mages, healers, and little kids? (I've seen it.) I'm reminded of the scene in the original Mass Effect where Shepard tells off General Septimus for acting like a drunkard instead of the proud military man he's supposed to be.

Assassins I can forgive, since they need a place to meet up with potential employers but ...

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if tavern RP is the only kind of RP you have on your server, there's a problem. And the problem is only highlighted, underscored, italicized, and in bold print when even that's nonextant.

So I moved servers. I'm quite content with the change.

Nothing else to report though.

A Sense of Darkness

Hell, why not, this is why people keep journals, right?

Tonight is Saturday night. I leave work the same as I always do, a little later than most everyone else, but not terribly so. There's a woman waiting for a ride, so I briefly chat with her. I've been given a kind of honorary ... thing which grants me better parking spaces than most of my coworkers, so I look for the allotted parking space before I leave.

As I reach my car, I am nearly overwhelmed with the sense that I should not take the Interstate. As I mentioned, I tend to listen to my instincts, even if they make no sense. The weather isn't bad; there's no reason to take the other route, but I feel like I should. Pulling out, I turn right, and am torn between two options. For no discernable reason, I turn right, taking the slightly longer path out of the lot, past a stand of trees. Everything looks like the stray limbs of some eldritch horror, but if something was watching me, I could not say. Night driving takes a toll on me, not because it is so dark, but because of the brief flashes of intense light.

There is something off. I am on edge the entire trip home.

When I cross the train tracks, near to my work, I am confronted with a red light, and there is a man in the center of it all, directing traffic. This is unusual. To my right, along the side of the road, there is a vehicle with lights flashing, though I can see no cause for this disruption. It does not hinder me terribly.

It is hard not to see the Tall Man in the many stands of trees, though truly I doubt He was there.

He is after all so busy elsewhere, is He not?

When I enter town proper, there are more flashing lights, and a siren. As I pull up to a red light, a fire truck speeds through, going from right to left across my field of vision.

There is not much else to report; my sense of dread seems to have been unfounded.

Of course, when I finally arrived home, there was a wild, swinging party going on at my neighbor's house, and no parking to be found the entire block. This was unusual only in that their gathering made any noise at all; in months prior, it had been deathly silent in the house located at the epicenter of the lost parking, and only the leaving visitors were any indication of where to lay blame. Tonight I had to use a back alley, and come through the back fence. Every shape seemed ominous until identified. Even the large tree was vaguely threatening.

I have no tolerance for gatherings, even at the best of times. I am not invited to such parties because I have no interest in such parties. I must confess I do not like people very much, and I have grown very tired of having to solve their problems over the course of my employment. Except that I am still in need of revenue, I cannot say that I will be displeased to become free from my tether.

Every day I am forced to think because another person refuses to, I find the façade cracks a little bit more, and I care a little bit less.

I am just so tired of people.

Sensory Overload

So, in an attempt to be somewhat more cheerful than Friday's uh ... BLACK ABYSS of DESPAIR, I decided I'd elaborate on some of the topics mentioned there, especially the sensory thing, which you might have guessed by the title.

Because describing my perception of the world has always been incredibly cheerful before. Yep.

So, TL;DR: I seem to have reasonably acute senses when measured against other people. Kind of. The end.

For anecdotal proof, read on:

I took some psychology classes in college and high school as electives, because the subject interests me. I can't really recall if this happened in college or high school, but one of my psychology teachers set up sensory tests as part of the chapter on the senses. The one I remember vividly involved the sense of taste: the teacher presented four jugs of water and insisted only one of them had a minimal amount of sugar. This was untrue; all four jugs had a different amount of sugar in them. All four of the glasses of water I was presented with tasted different.

So yeah. That's nice.

The hearing ... hm. I've got a couple of stories on that. When I was very young, they put us through a few hearing tests, one of which was off in a kind of in a quiet room. Essentially, the idea was to raise your hand when you heard a beep, depending on which ear you heard it in. Well, I raised my hand when a phone three rooms away rang, despite the noise-canceling headphones I was wearing at the time. This sense hasn't really diminished much at all over time, probably because I don't really think "bleeding ears" is an acceptable decibel level for music to be played at. On a practical level, this is a huge advantage in my current - and previous - lines of work. At the haunted house, it allowed me to filter through the din of all the ambient noise and music to hear where a group of customers was, pretty much throughout the house. At a call center, it helps when a customer is softspoken and can't seem to figure out which part of the phone to speak into.

Sight is ... interesting. As I might have already mentioned, I've got significant visual disturbances that no eye doctor has been able to attribute to actual physical damage. It's probably some kind of disruption in the nervous system. Or alternatively, y'know, crazy person. I also wear corrective lenses as I am nearsighted. That said, up close especially, my eyesight is fairly acute. In addition, I have remarkable night vision, which is both a positive and a negative. On the positive side, we have all the normal benefits of good night vision, plus things like this post, which was written with the aid of a very dim, green, LED bulb placed across the room in otherwise complete darkness. With the aid of a glow stick, I was actually able to write at almost my normal font size, and read with no difficulty. On the negative side, we have a certain amount of photosensitivity: bright lights are uncomfortable, especially oncoming headlights on the road, for example, but also a bright, sunny day can, if I'm not prepared for it, lead to a bright, shiny headache.

Smell is one of the less useful senses for me, and I seem to be more easily overwhelmed by powerful odors than most people. However, since most of the people I know are smokers due to the whole "call center" thing, it's not really like I've got any kind of baseline to work against If possible, I completely avoid the perfume and detergent aisles of any store; they make me lightheaded and dizzy. Smell is also one of the easiest senses to ignore in day-to-day life, and one of the harder senses to measure against any other person's regardless.

Touch is ... well, pain is part of the sense of touch, right?

I can't say I feel much of anything acutely, other than pain. And cold. And pain as a result of intense cold. Painkillers don't really work effectively for anybody in my family, least of all me. I also tend to ignore my body unless it's actually in pain, and even then, if I distract my mind, I don't even often notice there's anything to feel until it's excruciating. I do know I have a completely numb patch on my right leg that sometimes hurts when touched. I suspect nerve damage from an early-life bee sting to be the culprit: I had a bad allergic reaction.

I like to run my hands along walls as I walk.
It helps ground me in reality.

I don't think I'm really outside the parameters of normal human functioning, as far as sensory data goes. I just know that some things, like the gentle clicking whir and beeping of my computer's normal operation (distinct from the fan), is audible and comforting, while the high, shrill noise of a supposedly "off" TV sets my teeth on edge, and most people seem oblivious to these things.

So there. Probably the most boring thing I'll ever write.

Hooray.

You probably should've quit reading this at the TL;DR.

It rained today. We're under a flood watch.
It was so cold the rain became a centimeter-thick sheet of ice on my car.
It hurt so much to scrape it off with my bare hands.

Comforting Thoughts for Restful Sleep

Even if the Slender Man were to turn up, I'd never know it: I get sick a lot anyway, it is balls cold up here all the time in the winter, and I tend to avoid cameras of any shape, size, or description (I'm not precisely proud of my appearance).

I'm also a very boring person in real life. Seriously. I go to work, I come home, I play World of Warcraft, and sometimes I watch movies and listen to music. I'd probably bore the hell out of any real-life stalker, supernatural or not.

Also, after getting over the initial shock of someone with no face and tentacles getting into my house past the locks and burglar alarm, and after possibly attempting to bludgeon it to death, I'd likely be more curious than afraid, and more interested in opening some kind of dialogue than fleeing for my life. (How does his/its Alien Geometries work? How does it see without a face? How does it laugh without a mouth - or does it? Can I learn to be a supernatural ninja?)

Finally, I am a very oblivious person, so I'd totally end up not noticing I was being stalked, anyway.

Despite all this, it's probably apparent that paranoia is a persistent problem for me.

And I'm developing a bit of a cough ....

More Reasons to Dislike Level 58 DKs

So my last post was a rant about the PVE reasons DKs are evil.

Now for a different approach.

As you probably know, I'm an avid Roleplayer. It's interactive storytelling, basically, and it's intensely fun - when you do it right.

It is incredibly rare for Death Knights (especially level 58 Death Knights) to be doing it right.

I have a theory about that. It goes like this: in lore, Death Knights are incredibly powerful, and this is reflected by the class's starting level and array of skills. They are also the most triumphant anti-heroes of the piece. As a faction, they were more instrumental in defeating the Lich King than either the Horde or the Alliance, second only to the Argent Crusade for sheer, brutal effectiveness. Death Knights are damned - and also damned cool.

This combination of factors attracts young people with God complexes to the class. The high level is a cheat toward perceived power, even in roleplay. It's actually rather telling that even RP guilds often have a minimum level set for DKs well above their level 58 introduction into the wider World of Warcraft. The level also grants them access to a variety of clothing options. The cooler you look, the more powerful you are perceived to be, the theory goes, and since Death Knights are so fascinating and overpowered to begin with, as well as actually looking cool, Death Knight player characters generally end up not being cool after all.

To put it bluntly, ever level 58 DK I have seen roleplaying (with few notable exceptions) have done so poorly, and fall into one of three categories: the Death Knight godmoder, the Death Knight eRPer, and the "not-a-Death Knight" godmoder/eRPer.

And, since the death of the Lich King, Death Knights have stopped being particularly lore-relevant! The only thing we get about Death Knights post-Cataclysm is a little blurb about Thassarian and Koltira in WPL, which tells us that since their grand mission is up, most of them have pretty much just joined whatever faction they started out as ... maybe.

TL;DR: The Death Knight class tends to be just plain bad for RP, and bad roleplayers flock to it.

Need More Rage

Caution: This posting contains a RANT.

So, I think I've figured out why it is that back in the day, Warriors were the only tanks. That reason is rage.

I am right now enjoying my second ragequit ever, and have discovered that there is a hard limit to the number of people that can be vote-kicked from a group, period.

So I mentioned I have a pocket healer now. We've been trying to keep our levels together, and it is difficult, as I want to level while he's roleplaying, or on an alt - and vice-versa.

He's 56, while I just reached 58.

I think if either of us run BRD one more time we'll both go mad, so we agreed to queue for UBRS on a whim.

For nostalgia, he said.

I should note here that I am not a very nostalgic person, and I don't remember UBRS all that well. I was very much a noobish idiot-child back in Vanilla, so it's probable that either I was never allowed to come with, or I just wasn't paying UBRS the attention it deserved but nobody got hurt since I was just healing.

The first thing we see upon zoning in is a Death Knight who made me ashamed of my server.

He died on accident before I had a chance to save him: at level 58, he was wearing cloth, leather, and mail greens.

For those who have not yet experienced Death Knights, the World of Warcraft Hero class, let me explain, with relish. And also ketchup and mustard.

There is literally no reason for a level 58 Death Knight to be wearing sub-par gear.

The gear the class starts with (at level 55) is composed entirely of plate greens. It has reasonably optimal stats, and it is sufficient for a level 55 to get by until 60.

The gear they get on the way to level 58 and joining the rest of the population is blue and can last until level 70: everything, every single piece of gear a Death Knight sees from 58-69 is either a sidegrade or, at best, a very minor upgrade.

IF the unthinkable had happened and this poor sod had been hacked, he's only 58. Rerolling his Death Knight from scratch loses him almost nothing.

So, as soon as possible, we lose the useless DK. While we wait to kick him, one of the other DPS flat-out leaves.

We get two more DKs.

And they are both idiots.

Both of them Death Grip off of me, which is actually the least of their sins, although one of the more frustrating to deal with as a tank. One of them apparently has a grudge against the very idea of wearing a helm, so we have to talk him into putting his on. They seem to want to do the [Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy!] JENKINS achievement, at-level for the instance, judging by the sheer number of eggs that ended up smashed before we ever reached the Father Flame event.

Neither of them are inclined to help me, so much as "wander off doing their own thing, which is, by necessity, in my general proximity."

The healer flat-out refuses to heal either of them, nor resurrect the first one to die (who promptly goes AFK for the rest of the instance). I can't blame him. As a matter of fact I pretty much just encourage his behavior - if there was any way for me to directly kill them, I would have done so myself.

By the third wipe, my pocket healer leaves, and I've /ignored three people before leaving, myself.

Thank you, level 58 Death Knights. You have so enriched my Warcraft experience.

An Ode to BRD

This is how it goes.

Twenty seconds in queue and a loading screen, then a groan. I'm here again.

Wait for everyone to get quests for a minute before the pull, where I nearly die to green mobs; the healer's DC'd abruptly. At least he comes back this time. It's a close thing.

Someone suggests a full clear, but everyone else just wants to skip straight to the end. Full Clear Guy leaves in a huff. We bicker briefly on whether to kill Bael'gar or the Inquisitor first, and all the new 55s are surprised when it isn't over after just the Inquisitor.

I'm lost again.

I get lost easily. I warn them up front, but they always act surprised that I'm fuzzy on how to get to the relic coffer room alone.

We don't have enough keys, anyway. Full Clear Guy shouldn't have left. We are slowly killing everything, backwards, including bosses even Full Clear Guy would have skipped.

At least it doesn't matter that I'm lost, now. As long as I keep our inexorable wave of death pointed at dwarves who are still alive, no one cares.

Ironically, skipping bosses has left us in a good position. We're killing the dwarves around the Ring of Law, having walked all the way back to the beginning on our circuitous murdering spree. It's still not quite enough, so after the spectators are dead, we jump down into the arena pit that is the Ring of Law proper.

Several bosses later, I've /ignored one of the DPS because he's just told one too many stupid penis jokes. It's a little surprising to note that he's from my server, but I smile a bit when I do it anyway. I've successfully made his queue a little bit longer.

All of the DPS die from standing in the fire on the second-to-last boss, as does the healer, and I'm left to finish the boss solo - which I do, successfully, seconds before keeling over, myself.

I stay dead at the healer's suggestion: he's not only my healer, he's my friend, and he knows I literally could not find my way back this far into the instance unaided. Besides, by the time I kill the boss, he's released and is somewhere near the Domicile as a stealthed kitty cat.

The DPS ignore the healer's suggestion, however, and somehow they end up dead. I hadn't thought we'd left enough dwarves alive to warrant such wholesale slaughter of our own group, but apparently we had. Once again, they release and run back, ignoring the healer who only wants to get this run done, he cries to me in whispers.

We end up disbanding before I even resurrect.

Thank you, BRD.

You have so enriched my Warcraft experience.