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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Why are DPS Players so Bad?
This wasn't an issue in pre-TBC raiding because the early WoW 1.0 raid DPS requirements were abysmally low. It wasn't until you got to AQ40 that DPS had to start performing anywhere near their full potential.
Let's take Gruul the Dragonkiller. If your DPS does an average of 500 DPS, you are looking at a growth 16 kill. If your DPS does an average of 600 DPS, you're looking at a growth 12 kill. Is asking for 500-600 DPS really too much for your DPS players?
If you look at the WoW Raid & Dungeons forums, you'll see a lot of newer guilds posting WoW Web Stats logs, and asking for help. And time and time again, you'll see the response focusing on the DPS players and how they are underperforming. People not packing enough +hit, using a bad spell rotation, using direct damage instead of DoTs.
If it was just a couple of people with problems, we could say that it was an issue with the player. But the scope of the problem is so large that I think it points to systemic faults in WoW.
DPS players have never had to reach 500 DPS before in the game. All solo mobs and quests are killable with much lower DPS. And it has to be this way, otherwise paladins or other low-DPS characters would never be able to kill anything. So for a DPS player, solo mobs die so fast that there is no need to tune her damage to the higher output.
Boss fights are also much longer than regular fights, and that means that Damage-Over-Time effects become more powerful than Direct Damage. A very common mistake is to see rogues using Eviscerate instead of Rupture. But this makes sense in regular play. Most mobs don't survive long enough for Rupture to finish. Instead, using Eviscerate to kill the mob faster is the way to go. The problem is that the rules change when it comes to boss mobs.
Another common mistake is not packing enough hit rating. There's a large jump in misses between level 72 and 73 mobs, especially for spells. Players who don't know about that jump often don't pack enough hit rating. They go for stats like crit, which have proved more useful in regular play.
The other major problem for DPS players is that they don't have enough feedback. They're just pouring damage into a central pool, and it is really hard to tell if your individual contribution is enough. In contrast, healers get immediate feedback. If a healer doesn't heal competently, people die. This forces healers to improve at a much faster rate. Similarly for tanks, if a mob gets away, or if DPS is consistently pulling off the tank, the tank knows she needs to improve.
So far, the common theme is that regular play, including 5-man instancing, does not prepare DPS players for raid boss fights. And when you combine that with the lack of feedback during boss fights, it's no wonder that DPS players are having problems, especially when first getting into raiding.
The only real way to improve DPS players currently is out-of-game research and theorycrafting. It would be better if there was a more organic, in-game way, to prepare DPS for raiding.
28 comments:
Ideally everyone would go to EJ every day and check upon all the theorycrafting regarding their class. In practice it usually ends up falling to the officers and class leaders of a guild to know this information and communicate it to the other members. Thanks in large part to the Armory it is much easier for raid leaders to know exactly what members are lacking in and to correct the problem.
I personally have actually seen a great improvement in the quality of dps players and especially gear since TBC came out. For one, the drops from 5-mans and heroics come with the stats that dps players need for endgame. Unlike the drops from instances like Scholomance and Stratholme (which were mainly just +agi/str/int) we are now getting drops with things like spell hit and melee hit rating from easy 5-mans. Another big contribution to this area is from jewelcrafting. Back in vanilia if you didn't have enough hit it was SOL. Nowadays if you're running low on spell hit you can swap out those +12 damage gems for +8 spell hit.
I think blizzard has done much better in regards to getting people gear they need for raiding. Now it is just the responsibility of getting those players the information that they need to do their job well.- Anonymous3:35 PM, September 11, 2007
A lot of great points, but I beg to differ one one point.
The problem with DPS is not necessarily "lack of training" but rather lack of commitment on the part of most dps, and healers for that matter.
The general path of progression should be level 70 5-mans->Heroics->Karazan-> Gruul, and so on.
But quite simply, most raiders do not devote the time necessary to skill themselves up by facing difficult 5-man content before doing raids.
With karazhan nerfed several months ago, karazhan is actually easier than most heroics now so its not as good for training people for hard raid encounters in SSC and beyond.
I think it was a big mistake to remove the trials of naaru requirement from SSC and The Eye attunement. That was a significant barrier that made sure only capable people were going to do SSC and The Eye. My old guild barely had gruul and mag on farm status before setting off to do SSC after the attunement quests were removed. Only about 5 people had done the trials of naaru quests.
Over the last 3 months they have downed about 3 raid bosses since then, an absurdly slow rate of progression IMO and one due to the fact that there was not enough time devoted to skilling people up.
And I beg to differ that gear matters that much.
As a healer, the difference in gear between tiers can easily be made up by chain drinking mana pots and demonic runestones.
Gruul has very easily accessible elixirs that are worth a tier in gear level.
The fact is that most players simply suck.
Rogues are supposedly the best sustained DPS in the game but in almost all 5-mans/heroics you never see most rogues do a lot of damage. Only the top raiding guilds have the rogues that can do 1000 dps, every other rogue only does around 300-400 in instances and bosses. True, having top-tier weapons are more important to rogues than other classes but the simpel truth is most people suck at the game and don't do even 60% of the damage they could do with their gear.
Its just the demographics of WOW. Most people that play it are dumb and not from the upper classes of professionals that understand how important research and accountability are. I deeply disagree with the lack of commitment comment.
In my experience, most DPS are trying to do a good job. But they're flying blind. They lack that feedback loop which makes improvement possible.
They try to take techniques that have worked for them in other areas of the game, and apply it in raiding. And that doesn't really work so well, and they aren't sure why it doesn't work.
Most people aren't theorycrafters, aren't able to see the implications from the math. They learn by doing, by trying new things and judging which is more effective. They need the feedback cycle to become better.flying blind? maybe, but personally, i've met tons of these so called "flying blind" players, who dont theorycraft, but also wont take suggestions.
pure stubbordness, yes, but its true, try to tell a raiding frost mage that fire outdps's him? wont work, because he wont agree with you, and there aint much you can do about that...
i think a good way to add feedback to the DPSers would be to imput a DPS meter into the game, so that everyone has them, and everyone sees them, if you're a DPS class (not hybrid) and you're always last on DPS... gotta be something wrong, no?I'd claim that DPSers do get feedback, although that requires the use of the dreaded damage meter.
Knowing the formulas behind hit and crit ratings helps, but looking at a decent damage meter (such as Recap, Recount, SWStats or Damagemeters) will give you decent feedback, sometimes even real-time. You can see your overall damage, sustained and burst DPS as well as your damage by skill/spell. In addition, the damage meter shows how your teammates are performing. If you're getting outdamaged by your teammate in inferior (in regards to item level) gear, you are doing something wrong. In this sense, competition is good. It drives you to improve yourself.
Of course, you can only use this method if you're raiding regularly and fighting bosses that don't oneshot your tank randomly. If you're not, your only real option is Dr. Boom, but he has one large flaw: He's not a level 73 mob. This makes hit rating increase your DPS less than it would in a real raid. But he does allow you to gauge both your burst and sustained DPS, allowing you to refine your spell/skill rotations and optimize your mana usage to maximize your total damage.Oh, and when it comes to fire vs frost.. The problem (at least for me, a raid-only frost mage) is that I don't have Spellfire, which any decent Fire/Arcane mage would use anyway. Changing specializations and crafting, enchanting and socketing the new set is a major hurdle. This prevents me from evaluating my DPS potential accurately. I might be able to do more DPS if I respecced to fire, but I'm not spending 500-600 gold to find out.
And for the record, I do keep up with and even outDPS similarly-geared fire mages in my guild. ;-)- Anonymous11:54 PM, September 11, 2007
People have their own little specs and will stick by them. Even if they have some knowledge they will be trying to make the most of a bad spec rather then start afresh.
We have been running alt kara recently and I ran a wws. The alts in all cases did twice or more dps as the casual mains who also attended, indeed the Kitty druid main who managed 200 dps on curator in comparison to the mage alt who had hit 70 2 weeks before and got 600 dps just wanted to make me cry.
Anonymous>> I think it could be taken as fact now that a Shattered halls Heroic is harder then Void reaver.
Mate from Proudmoore I think the title of this post is misleading. The post itself says the problem isn't the players, it is the system. Please change the title :)
Also, the entire post talks about raid DPS in SSC, TK and above. You realize this is applicable to less than 20% of the player population? (checkout wowjutsu if you don't believe me). DPS are doing just fine in everything up to Gruul, including Heroics - no need to rag on them.
Gruul and Void Reaver both have massive DPS requirements yet include many effects that make it hard for DPS to nuke continuously. As the post says, heavy use of DoTs is a must but mages, hunters and shamans and to a large extent rogues simply don't have DoTs. As a mge I do the best DPS I can but fight mechanics mean that Warlocks will always out-DPS me in the VR fight due to their DoTs. You can clame all you want it's my fault or that I somehow am doing something wrong, but I know the truth :)- Anonymous4:32 AM, September 12, 2007
This is why curator is the coolest boss fight in WoW right now. DPS has very good benchmarks and the fight is automatically a fail if they dont kill the flares before the next one spawns.
Drakesilver Every boss mob, including Kara and Heroics, is for all intents and purposes a level 73 elite mob. That means in order for a melee dps to hit the boss consistantly (1% miss chance) they need 8-9% melee hit for special attacks and 2 handed weapons or 27-28% hit chance while duel wielding (I give ranges because Blizzard still has yet to confirm what the true miss values for bosses are, and different tests yield different results). Spellcasters on the other hand need a flat 16% spell hit in order to reach the resist cap (1% chance to resist fully, partial resists are not affected). I'm not exactly sure but I believe the hit cap for ranged weapons is the same as 2 handers. Hit rating needs to be the first thing any dps is stacking. By reaching the hit rating cap you will see a remarkable increase across the board in dps. This is especially important for spellcasters, as a full resist costs full mana, so being hit capped also increases your dpm by quite a large amount.
After you have reached the hit cap most players look for crit. This is by no means bad, as long as dps players understand that crit only helps overall dps to a certain extent. For example, a ret pally with more than 27% chance to crit is basically wasting points, as after that point he reaches 100% Vengance uptime and Attack Power and Haste rating become better for his sustained dps. The problem is that most people don't understand this, and you end up seeing mages with 40% crit chance but only 600 spell damage.
From there it becomes a matter of learning the most efficient shot/cast/move rotation for your class and making sure your spec makes good sense raid wise (PvP talents are great for PvP, but they really have no place in endgame raiding).
That is why people need to take initiative and look up the current theorycrafting regarding their class and spec. If someone honestly doesn't know that his Sinister Strike will only miss 1% of the time if he gets 9% hit then he needs to be informed one way or the other. WWS is a great tool for newer guilds; after a successful boss kill post a WWS of the fight so that everyone can see exactly what they are lacking on. Running Sw_Stats or Recount (or to a lesser extent DamageMeters, though it doesn't have anywhere near the options of the first two) can also help greatly. But again most players aren't going to take the time to read EJ every day, so it falls to the class leaders and officers of a guild to make sure that everyone knows the class mechanics.
This does have a huge application before TK/SSC. Bosses everywhere are level 73, not to mention Kara/Gruul/Mag are the training grounds for these harder instances. Your dps may be fine in Kara, but if they work on improving not only will it help you clear Kara faster but it will make fights like Gruul easier for everyone.
DPSing is not an easy job. There are no easy jobs in endgame raiding. Everyone needs to do their part and do that part to the maximum extent possible.- Anonymous6:57 AM, September 12, 2007
Interesting discussion. Sorry in advance that I'm so long-winded... :)
I'm running into these questions myself as our guild sets up for its first Kara run.
I've done research and my shadow priest is trying to increase +spell damage and/or +shadow damage. Yes, the research was necessary to learn that a shadow priest in raiding is essentially a DOT-er, with VE, SW:P, and Mind Flay as mainstays while working in Mind Blast and SW:D. Since Shadow Priests are so DOT-heavy, and DOTs don't crit, then +spell crit fell off my priority list.
I chose to change professions at level 70 to get Shadow Tailoring for the Frozen Shadoweave set, and also have farmed the mats for other good +spell damage tailoring items (such Bracers of Havoc and Cloak of the Black Void), and I'm also working on the mats for enchants (leveling up an alt to level 35 to D/E items). Finally, I've run enough old-school PvP to fill in some other gaps like an epic ring and a +12 spell damage gem (and some +stamina from PvP items helps survivability). I've shelled out the dough for many a Living Ruby for +9 spell damage. And many slots are filled with rares that give weaker overall stats than epics, but better +spell damage. Not sure I'm willing to do the time for the Arena Spellblade though...
But none of the other priests in the guild come close to my +shadow damage, and discussing spec can be kind of like discussing politics or religion. I'm not sure how to approach that, exactly, when people seem to range from the opinion that you get a key and go to Kara to the opinion that you gear up in Heroics for a time before setting foot in Kara -- but "gear up" needs to be directed, or you're not necessarily making progress in the right direction.
My main tool is the Internet, ranging from WoW forums and blogs to the Armory to sites like Thottbot and Allakhazam. The flexibility of WoW - "Which item is better for me?" - is both a strong and weak point of WoW. The tools are out there, but I agree that they are not evenly accessible, and that your choices will vary based on PvE solo, instance, heroic, and raid content, or PvP in its various flavors. You need a good source of information - a guild, a website, maybe even the General channel - with the catch being that if you don't know and someone else who is clueless (but thinks they know something) is your advisor, you can head down the wrong track.
But at this point I don't think I would agree with the premise that a high DPS requirement in raiding is a bad game design. I think that the assumption - correct or not - is that endgame raiders are the cream of the crop, at least in terms of organization and information. When you're talking about endgame raiding, the silent assumption in TBC is that you're not in easy mode anymore. Pre-TBC raiding was, from accounts I've read, pretty much a matter of organization, and there was a lot of room for dead weight. But in TBC, by all accounts I've read, there is no longer any easy-mode raiding. I would say that's a good game design - but probably is a painful surprise to pre-TBC raiders, while a person in a TBC raid with no old-WoW raiding experience more-than-likely *expects* it to be a hard road to the top.
Rivana on Rexxar - Anonymous8:24 AM, September 12, 2007
I could ask why tanks are so bad? Or healers?
I've seen some incredibly terrible everything while pugging. Regularly.
We seem to be having some issues with tanking Al'ar and Hydross, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that tanks are generally tunnel visioned and stationary. It's a new challenge.
We wipe all the time from tanks dropping, I assume because of a mis-timed or poor choice of heal or two, but the healers are hardly incompetent and inadequately trained from earlier content. Things get in the way of normal healing.
Perhaps the DPS classes are overcompensating on Gruul and VR right now. In Gruul's case, leaving too early is better than being tossed. In VR's case, folk will learn not to run as far when they get used to the range on the Arcane balls. It's a matter of balancing solid DPS and making sure we stay alive to do DPS in the first place.
I bet if you started assigning people from the whole WoW player base to a scale you'd see a curve similar to post secondary grades. You'll have a few on top shining above the rest, a bunch in the middle doing so-so, and a few bottom feeders.
Or liken it to financial status.. few really rich, majority in the middle, and few on the streets.
You can't expect everyone in WoW to be an elite gamer while the rest are in EQ/UO/etc. Nor the split to be Raiders=Elite, Casuals=Normal, Kids=Inept.
Enough info is available for any class/spec in the game to improve themselves. It's the people that make use of it or don't. Can make use of it or can't. Care enough to push themselves and carry their weight in a group or choose to just be in the group to see content/socialize and let others do the work.
Tanks and Healers have to do plenty of out of game research and theory crafting too if they want to be on top of their game. It's no different. Look at the thought that goes into your healing macros. How do any of the 5-toon instances prepare tanks for the positioning in Al'ar? Or the transitions and add-collapsing for Hydross? Or suggest effective healing/tanking macros?
Just because someone is in a raiding guild doesn't mean they're going to be in the upper class of elite gamers. Some just like to socialize and see stuff they can't get to on their own. Some are undoubtedly better suited for casual play but are dragged into a raiding guild by friends who are good raiders.
You have to expect a curve of abilities in a guild as much as across the whole of the WoW player base as in anything else in which people involve themselves in RL.
People's behaviour/abilities aside, not all fights are equally suited to the array of classes/specs. Movement, self-healing, 'unlucky'/unfortunate damage (chained cave-ins or multiple arcane balls), resists, etc, all hamper a player's ability to function at their theoretical best. Whether it be DPSing, tanking, or healing.
It just happens that Gruul and VR are very hard on DPS classes. In Gruul's case, we need to err on caution to avoid being tossed and wiping the raid. I'll spend a half-dozen seconds doing squat waiting for the toss to finally happen but you can rest assured I won't kill anybody with a shatter.
In VR's case, there's often more time spent moving instead of DPSing; this could be solvable by spreading out better and returning to our own spots, but you can't pin that on the DPS classes.
In both cases, DPS are on their own for heals and 8s bandages between running in and out of danger is a big loss in DPS.
Finally, as you said, we need to average 5-600 DPS to drop Gruul in 12 growths. That means a majority in the 5-600 DPS range, some approaching 800+, and some approaching or below 300 DPS. And I think our raids have been pretty well balanced in that respect. - Anonymous8:37 AM, September 12, 2007
@ Coriel
What a complete troll post. You basically presume dps players are unskilled on the average, without having significant 1st hand experience playing as a dps. The +hit and spell rotation comments are just basic tactics anyone can read in a forum, though they are valid.
Of course just standing around as a dps turret, a high output is easy. But what you do not understand since you do not have experience playing dps in difficult fights, is that very few boss fights are like that anymore.
DPS is now a game of juggling boss fight tasks, movement, threat management, mana/energy/rage efficiency, group awareness, and also damage output. To imply that DPS is bad at this while only really pointing to the DPS part of the pie shows you ignorance and inexperience in that role.
It would be like a mage who never played a tank making a topic "why are tanks so bad at threat generation", and then proceeding to bitch that they are always threat capped. Boo hoo. "Its just the demographics of WOW. Most people that play it are dumb and not from the upper classes of professionals that understand how important research and accountability are."
#1 it is a GAME
#2 not everyone takes it as seriously as you.
#3 you want to give your guild applicants a mensa test before they join?..
Let's look at the pally I pugged with a few nights ago. Holy spec. Not ONE piece of plate! 30% cloth, 30%leather, and 30% mail, and some sockets not filled. Caused at least one wipe because he ran around like a little priesty crying 'get this mob off of me!'
Healers can suck too, and often do. Same goes for tanks.What was the quote? Tanking is a responsibility, Healing is a job, and DPS is a game. That's my belief on DPS in WOW. While I have met some really good DPS most of them are on the slow end of the learning curve. A tank has to be on the forefront because if he goes down everyone else goes down. Healers have to be on top of their game as well because without heals the tank is going down in a very quick manner. The DPS meanwhile just sit around and pew pew things. It's not as obvious(most of the time) if they're slacking and therefore not brought up as much as a bad tank or a bad healer.
And to the above anonymous poster, having to worry about positioning, threat management, and mana/rage mangagement is a sorry excuse for your DPS not being where it is. Learn to multi-task and quit giving excuses. I don't make excuses when I have to reposition a boss or with my mana management. I agree with Coriel on this that DPS needs to learn how to play.
And to Karl, crappy tanks and healers tend to get weeded out earlier because it is very obvious when they aren't doing their jobs.- Anonymous1:13 PM, September 12, 2007
It used to be true that DPS could be dumbasses and sit there and pew pew. It's no longer true. Fight's like the Curator and many others are DPS skill checks. Moving and all the other tasks while managing good DPS is just as hard as tanking an healing.
Most fights a tank just sits in one spot going through thier known rotations. Healers play whack a mole. These don't take any more skill than DPS. - Anonymous11:30 AM, September 13, 2007
"Moving and all the other tasks while managing good DPS is just as hard as tanking an healing."
"Most fights a tank just sits in one spot going through their known rotations. Healers play whack a mole. These don't take any more skill than DPS. "
I think you missed the point of Coriel's post...
The heart of what Coriel pointed out was that DPS does NOT have a skill check until the bosses in end game. There is no way to prepare them for things and thus they are usually found to be lacking when the skill check happens.
It's NOT easy to generate really good DPS, and its particularly not easy to generate it against raid bosses. In that, you're in agreance with the post...
Consider what a tank sees with trash mobs, or in pre-raid instances. The tank has to develop an effective rotation to develop threat. If the rotation is not effective, there will not be enough threat generated and people will die. This rotation will work just as well in raids. Very little changes for the tank when moving on to this new content.
Whereas for DPS, when suddenly faced with a mob with level > 72, a lot changes. The fight is longer so you have to know how to handle damage over time. The miss rate is higher, so you have to gear differently. There's more going on, so you have to do more random stuff while keeping your dps up...
So with all that extra crap involved in these raid boss skill checks, it is significantly harder to output good DPS. The problem is that you could use less than ideal abilities in pre-raid content and generate good enough dps. But once you get to raiding, you need to know how to get the max, and that's where a lot of DPS players fall short. Whereas (going back to the earlier example) the tank's threat generation is required to be at the same level no matter what content he faces. So moving to raid content is easier for the tank than for the DPS...
Which brings it all back to Coriel's fundamental point: there's probably a design flaw in the game regarding the transition to raid content for DPS. Why does anyone here think they can demand someone to change their class for a very narrow minded goal?
Sure, players should think of playing for the team when they choose to do raiding, but is it really their fault Blizzard has shown an incompetence for doing anything other than upscale DPSing the raid bosses? Do more DPS is not progression.
More the reason RAIDING is a waste of time.- Anonymous3:21 PM, September 13, 2007
"Its just the demographics of WOW. Most people that play it are dumb and not from the upper classes of professionals that understand how important research and accountability are."
Dude, when did you forget it was a *game*? - Anonymous3:34 PM, September 13, 2007
Anonymous above this one and above heartless are dead on.
You don't have to DPS at the same level that you do in the highest levels of raiding until you get there. Even once you start raiding, effective DPS on a boss is very different from what you need to do to get to the boss.
To help the party get to the boss, you are most useful putting out burst damage. Depending on where you are and what class you are playing you might also be doing a lot of crowd control. To do both well at the same time you really have to be on your toes, but that's a skill set that will have naturally evolved running five mans so most DPSers can make it look easy. In my experience it's is just as hard as tanking and a lot harder than healing.
Then, when you get to the a giant gnarly raid boss, suddenly it's all about maximum sustained DPS. Burst is irrelevant in most fights. That's a very different ability rotation for most classes/ specs. It's also often a different set of gear than what was good for the entire 70 previous levels of play. - Anonymous7:54 PM, September 13, 2007
I think someone already said something similar, but WoW being so friggin simple 90% of the time leads to never really preparing the player for the challengin content where armor/weaps/skill sets REALLY do matter.
The PvPers alreay know how important these items are, because they are constantly trying to be better then their counterparts. But since you can completly skip this aspect of the game, most of your players don't have a clue why +8 spell cast speed is better the +12 agility, or why a DoT is more effective then a large up front DD spell.
I blame WoW then. It tries so hard to appeal to the kiddies, and their grandparents, there is no true drive to prepare the player for raid content.
I still believe the one thing missing from making WoW 'the one ring to bind them' of MMOs is Realm vs Realm combat, not the Unreal Tournament style Battlegrounds that are currently in the game. If no one has a reason to take pride and improve their armor besides to best the next higher level PVE mob, then being unprepared for Raid content is here to stay for 99% of WoW players. Good luck guild leaders. - Anonymous5:41 AM, December 08, 2007
Another problem with DPS players training in regular instances is that not many tanks can hold up against a DPS player giveing her fullest. DPS players that try to squeeze max damage out of their mana/energy/rage will wipe most normal instance groups and almost always need to hold back. and the few tanks that can hold aggro against that get angry becouse it's 'to hard to hold aggro against that'. Mind that for instance a mage at full burn can make 1200 tps even with the 'subtlety' enchant without much efford against most tanks doing around 400 tps or less. That is not a healthy situation for normal instance groups.
So when a DPS player is used to holding back she will have to flip a switch for raids to be effective against bosses like Void Reaver that are DPS races. - Anonymous4:50 PM, July 25, 2008
when was this posted? seriosly? 300 dps as rogue? i get 700 dps in heroic and just toped 2100 yesterday
ReplyDelete - Anonymous12:55 AM, July 26, 2008
Pushing 2k DPS prior to T6 content is just burst damage, even with the welfare epics i've yet to see anyone get near it. The closest i've seen is a destruction lock friend of mine doing 1600 dps on alar and solarian. Straight Shadow Bolt spam. As a DPS/Healer (elemental shaman, fills in as resto as needed), I will definitely agree that DPS is stupid. While this is my second elemental shaman, at lvl 69 i was in a gruuls run. I was doing 650-700 dps during the DPS phases. People who cant manage that in their mainspec at lvl 70 with epics need to re-evaluate their approach to the game.
Wow certainly is a game, but its a game of skill, and a team game as well. I hate it when only 1/3rd of your team is doing their job and struggling to make up for the other 2/3rds trying to ride the gravy train. As I write this, my shaman is just over 1.1k spell dmg unbuffed, hitcapped, and 35% spellcrit. Yes, unbuffed. Most of my gear is from LW and badges, a couple from heroics, and one piece from karazhan. I'm not saying this to brag, but when I can spam one button (lightning bolt, which isnt even a great dps rotation, just mana efficient) and push 1200-1300 dmg on DPS burn fights like morogrim, alar, and anatheron, while a rogue wearing 4 pieces of T5 struggles to break 800 on the boss (without switching targets), its pathetic. - Anonymous8:24 PM, October 11, 2008
Karl said:
"#1 it is a GAME
#2 not everyone takes it as seriously as you.
#3 you want to give your guild applicants a mensa test before they join?.."
Anon said:
"Dude, when did you forget it was a *game*?"
Yes, it's a game. Play solo all you want and no one will care how much DPS you do.
But as soon as you start doing things with other players, expect to be judged on your performance. Tanking and keep losing aggro on the boss? Punt. Healing and keep losing the tank? Punt. And yep, DPS and fail to actually put out any decent DPS (you know, the thing you're *supposed* to be focused on doing with that character)? Punt.
No one can impose performance levels on you, unless you expect to join a group of people who want to succeed in beating some of the toughest challenges the game has to offer. At that point you shouldn't be surprised at being asked to live up to some kind of performance measure, you should expect it.
But I agree with the OP on the feedback issue. A tank knows if she loses aggro on the Boss. A Healer knows if he isn't able to keep the tank alive. But the DPS, using the stock game, has no clue about how much DPS he is putting out unless he pulls aggro, at which point he knows only that he's exceeding the tank's aggro.
It shouldn't require add-ons, macros, and theorycrafting fan sites to help a player play better. But it does. I play a Hunter. Without theorycrafting sites I'd have no clue how much Hit Rating I needed to never miss. With those sites I can see from WWS logs that I have entire raids where I never missed. That's literally thousands of shots without a single miss. This is the kind of feedback the game should provide without add-ons and log parsers. But at least the WoW designers made it friendly for third party developers to integrate those add-ons and other tools into the game. - Anonymous12:30 PM, December 21, 2008
Given that endgame raiding is done by only a small percent of the WoW player base, I think needing addons isn't bad.
It would be better if they were bliz supplied off by default builtins (maybe written in lua like some of the other blizzard supplied stuff though).
I would have a differenb opnion if addons were harder to make or install, or if blizzard didn't support them (as in make them religavly easy to write) - Anonymous9:40 AM, March 03, 2009
As a lvl 70 Warlock, i can out DPS a few of the lvl80 Mages in my guild (per damage meters) and I can strip Maroes or Curator right off our NAXX cleared lvl80 TAnk if I REALLY open up. I do no research, all i do is raid with my buddies and go with what makes fights end quicker.
I also OWN most arena tanks after they pop their trinkets, and woe to the pally that forgets to cleanse him/herself.
AND YES--I'm A CASUAL PLAYER. I think a lot of it goes with them not having to pay attention to anything other than big numbers coming up on their screen, If you're a healer, you need to manage mana,health bars, etc. But of course now with cataclysm and wrath expos we did get new content where they needed to dodge fires, so it's okay~


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subset: commoncrawl


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Baroque music instruments list
Sundays at 8am:
Sunday Baroque, hosted by Suzanne Bona is a celebration of beloved and appealing music from the baroque era (1600-1750) and the years leading up to it. Some of the greatest hits of the baroque include Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons Concertos, George Frideric Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music Suites, and Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. You'll hear their tuneful and lively music – and music by their talented contemporaries and predecessors – as part of the mix of familiar favorites and new surprises on this weekly radio program.
Sunday Baroque offers great performances of their work by yesterday's and today's best performers. Fresh and inviting, genial and inspiring, and often surprisingly modern sounding, it's the perfect accompaniment for this unique day of the week, whether you're sleeping in, joining family and friends for a leisurely brunch, going to worship, or relaxing alone with the Sunday paper and a steaming mug of coffee.


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Pastoral tacos
A friend was in town visiting from Mexico City last week, and we'd planned to get together and cook. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented us from hanging out, and so she said to me, "You need to come to Mexico!"
Indeed, I do.
My last trip to Mexico City was a couple of years ago, and while I ate myself silly all over town, my favorite meals were held at El Califa, a taqueria that was close to where I was staying. I had both my first and last meals at El Califa—along with a couple more in between—as their tacos are fresh and wonderful.
El Califa is a taqueria that specializes in tacos made with tender pieces of grilled steak or thin, juicy slices of al pastor pork. I love al pastor tacos but recreating them in my own kitchen has eluded me, primarily because they're traditionally made with pork that's been cooked on a vertical rotisserie, which is a tool I have not been able to recreate in my home.
So imagine my pleasure when I saw El Califa's al pastor tacos get a shout out in Joe Yonan's new book, Serve Yourself. Now, if you don't know Joe Yonan, you should. He's the food editor of the Washington Post who's won many James Beard awards. His writing is heartfelt and charming, and his recipes are always inviting. But perhaps more importantly, Joe is a homesick Texan who grew up in San Angelo and went to school at the University of Texas.
The book is called Serve Yourself because it's intended to be a cooking-for-one cookbook. Joe's philosophy is that even if you're eating along, this doesn't mean you have to eat soulless, sad meals from a microwave. Besides a host of recipes that have been scaled down to one or two servings, he offers tips on how to store leftovers, such as half an avocado or half a jalapeño. That said, his recipes could be easily upsized for more portions.
Besides the al pastor tacos, Serve Yourself also has recipes for cheese enchiladas covered in his proper Texan chili, which does not include either beans or tomatoes. Yonan also pays homage to the classic taco salad we all grew up eating (though it was known as bean salad in my house, and Texas salad in his), updating it with a bit of feta and a cilantro vinaigrette. His food, while obviously influenced by his Texas upbringing (he has a whole chapter on tacos), also shows a love of sweet potatoes, Asian flavors, fresh vegetables, pizza, bacon, and cheese.
But what about those pork tacos? He calls them Pastoral Tacos, as they're not technically al pastor tacos, but instead a hybrid of the grilled steaks and the marinated pork tacos he ate at El Califa. To make them, you take pounded pork cutlets and marinate them in a simple pineapple juice and vinegar solution that's been made smoky and earthy with pimentón and ancho chile powder. While the pork marinates, he has you whip up a quick pineapple salsa, which when paired with the pork, makes for a combination that's tangy, spicy and slightly sweet.
When I made the tacos, they came together in little time, making for a quick, weeknight supper. Joe suggests serving the tacos as whole cutlets, but I preferred cutting them into strips. An added bonus to this method is that served with rice and beans, there was enough pork to feed two. And while they aren't exactly the rotisserie meat offered at taquerias, these Pastoral Tacos are so moist and flavorful, I don't think you'll mind at all.
Pastoral tacos
- 3 2-ounce pork cutlets
- 1 tablespoon white vinegar
- 2 tablespoons fresh pineapple juice
- 1/4 teaspoon pimentón, smoked Spanish paprika
- 1/2 teaspoon ancho-chile powder or red pepper flakes
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/2 cup fresh pineapple chunks cut into 1/4-inch cubes
- 1 shallot, diced
- 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
- 1/2 medium jalapeño chile, seeds and stems removed, diced
- Juice from 1/2 lime
- 1 teaspoon extra-virgin olive oil
- Corn tortillas
- Place each pork cutlet between two pieces of plastic and pound until they're 1/8 of an inch thick. Place the cutlets in a plastic food-storage bag.
- Mix together the vinegar, pineapple juice, pimentón, ancho-chile powder, salt and black pepper. Pour the marinade over the pork, seal the bag and give it a good shake to coat the meat. Let it marinate for 10 minutes to 1 hour unrefrigerated.
- While the pork is marinating, for the salsa toss together the pineapple chunks, shallot, cilantro, diced jalapeño and lime juice. Add salt to taste.
- To cook the pork, heat up the oil in a large skillet on medium-high heat. Take the cutlets from the marinade, shake off any excess and add to the skillet. Cook for 2 minutes on each side, or until lightly browned and cooked throughout. Turn off the heat, and allow the cutlets to rest for a minute. Add salt to taste.
- Warm up the corn tortillas. Place the pork—either left in a cutlet or cut into strips—in a tortilla, and top with the pineapple salsa.


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From Dodgers.com:
Charlie Haeger, the apparent front-runner in the murky competition for fifth starter, gets the call Saturday for the Dodgers against Ian Snell and the Mariners at Camelback Ranch. As a knuckleballer, Haeger could almost fill two roles, starting every five days, while coming out of the bullpen once or twice between starts. That versatility is one of the reasons he seems to be highly regarded by management. Haeger will be followed by Russ Ortiz, another contender for the fifth starter spot.


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Report: NCAA to charge Haith
CORAL GABLES, Fla. (AP) Two former Miami assistant coaches have been told they will be charged with "unethical conduct" when the NCAA presents the Hurricanes' athletic department with its notice of allegations, said two people familiar with the situation.
The people spoke to The Associated Press Monday on condition of anonymity because neither the NCAA or Miami have announced the contents of the long-awaited letter, which the Hurricanes may receive at any time. The people say the coaches will be cited for violating NCAA bylaw 10.1, a broad rule that covers conduct and cooperating with investigations. One of the coaches has been told to expect arrival of an actual copy of the allegations on Tuesday, one person told the AP.
Parties who are named in the notice of allegations are entitled to a copy, though it is unclear if all will receive the letter simultaneous to its delivery at Miami. It's unknown how many current and former coaches and staff members will be charged with wrongdoing.
The NCAA does not comment on ongoing investigations. Miami officials have said throughout the investigation, which started in 2011, that the school is cooperating with the NCAA and will decline extensive public comment out of respect to that process.
The people told the AP that Miami still has not seen a final version of the notice of allegations, the arrival of which will essentially bring just the first chapter of this Miami-NCAA saga to a close. Several people involved with the process have either reviewed draft documents or been advised of their upcoming mentions in telephone calls with investigators. Most of those calls took place last week.
Another individual who was interviewed during the joint inquiry told the AP that the NCAA has not been in contact since. That suggests not everyone who at one time was thought to be under investigation will not actually be mentioned in the notice of allegations.
Earlier this month, Miami coach Al Golden said he did not expect the university to be surprised by the NCAA's findings. Several people involved in the investigation said Miami has had representation at many interviews the NCAA conducted with persons it found to be of interest.
A CBSSports.com report published Monday said that the NCAA could not prove former booster and convicted Ponzi scheme architect Nevin Shapiro's claim that former Miami men's basketball coach Frank Haith or a member of his Miami staff paid $10,000 to the family of former Hurricanes' player DeQuan Jones. Shapiro has said that he provided that money.
Jones was suspended by Miami last season after Shapiro's claims were published in August 2011 by Yahoo Sports, then ultimately allowed to return to the team.
CBSSports.com also said Haith will face the "unethical conduct" charge because of inconsistencies the NCAA found in his account of Jones' recruitment. CBSSports.com also said Haith will be charged with "failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance" because relatives of two players were given impermissible airline travel.
"The University has been in communication with the NCAA regarding their ongoing efforts related to the University of Miami investigation," Missouri said in a statement. "Coach Haith and the University of Missouri continue to cooperate fully. However, we are not at liberty to comment further out of respect for the NCAA process."
One of those players, current senior Reggie Johnson, was suspended for a game last season after Miami and the NCAA found members of his family accepted what they called "impermissible travel benefits." And guard Durand Scott, the Hurricanes' leading scorer, was for the end of last season and the start of this season after he was also found to have gotten unspecified extra benefits.
Whenever the actual letter arrives, Miami's receipt of the notice of allegations will usher in the start of the sanctions phase.
And that could take months - meaning actual penalties may not be handed down until this summer, or later.
Typically, schools and individuals named in the notice of allegations have 90 days to file a response to the NCAA's findings, all of which would be reviewed by the committee on infractions - which operates separately from the NCAA's investigative arm.
Some of the sanctions have already gone into effect, since they were self-imposed. Miami's football team has missed three postseason games - two bowl games and what would have been an appearance in this season's Atlantic Coast Conference championship game - in response to the investigation, and Golden is holding back a number of scholarships from the 2013 roster as well.
Shapiro, the former booster, is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for masterminding a $930 million Ponzi scheme. Virtually all of the individuals who were named by Shapiro in his detailed claims that were published by Yahoo Sports are no longer at the university, and several of the people to whom the NCAA wanted to talk simply refused during the inquiry.
The NCAA inquiry started several months before that August 2011 article.


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This will be an actual vacation-type trip, not a 1,000 Knitters trip, though maybe I'll be able to chat up a yarn shop owner while I'm there about a return visit. I remember San Francisco fondly from time I spent there during a two-month gig working on a rather unfortunate production of Gounod's Faust with a regional opera company in the late nineties. Any excuse to go back is fine by me.
I definitely plan on visiting Lacis to breathe in some lace. Any other suggestions are, of course, welcome.
Before I head for the airport, a couple of things to mention, in no particular order.
- Contestant photographs for "America's Next Top Romney" (aka the Dolores Look-Alike Contest) have been sent to our panel of celebrity judges for commentary and ranking. We had more than two dozen entries, and may I say I was amused, touched, and occasionally horrified by what you folks came up with.
- My buddy Tom has an eBay auction going on that may be of interest to those of you who collect vintage needlework. It's a set of crocheted placemats (with matching centerpiece) made as part of a wedding gift for his parents back in the forties. Nicely worked, I've seen them in person. If you're interested, here's the link. The auction ends pretty soon.
- The thousands of us who have missed Brenda Dayne's Cast On: A Podcast for Knitters during her hiatus (she was dealing with her son's wedding, in Italy, for which she sewed the bride's beautiful gown) are about to get our fix at last. The new episode is slated to appear today, and I do believe I'll have an essay in it.
- I gather from the comments that some of you like Abigail's snowman hat and would be interested in getting a pattern. Well, happy to oblige. I made it up as I went along, but I'll work on writing it down and even try my hand at re-sizing for baby/child/adult. Thank you for all the compliments–it was a heck of a lot of fun to make, and I can't wait to put it on her head.
- I have some news! But...oh gosh...look at the time. Gotta jet. Byeeeeeee.


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Monday, June 1, 2009
Pulp Fantasy Library: The Trail of Cthulhu
Much of that watering down is the result of August Derleth's tireless attempts to market the Old Gent's works to a wider audience throughout the 1940s and 50s. Derleth rationalized and regularized Lovecraft's intentionally incomplete myth cycle, filling in every empty space and elaborating on each and every reference in order to bring about a consistency that the originals lacked. In addition, he engaged in posthumous "collaborations" with HPL, in which he'd take an idea or some names or even a snippet of text and use it as the germ for a story entirely of his own devising but that, because of the use of Lovecraft's name in association with it, acquired an authority it otherwise would have lacked. In short, it is Derleth, not Lovecraft himself, who is the true father of what we now call the "Cthulhu Mythos," for Grandpa Theobald had no such conception in his mind as he wrote his stories, each of which was a unique creation that might or might not have some connection to what he'd written previously. That is, Lovecraft simply wrote stories, whereas Derleth (and those influenced by him) wrote stories about Lovecraft stories.
1962's The Trail of Cthulhu, published by Derleth's own Arkham House press, is a good example of the distinction. Collecting together six short stories written by Derleth between 1944 and 1952, they tell the story of the thoroughly un-Lovecraftian scholar-adventurer Laban Shrewsbury's battle against the forces of the Mythos on Earth and in realms beyond. Shrewsbury has spent 20 years traveling the cosmos, amassing eldritch lore and arcane power with which to fight his private war against the darkness, in the process becoming nothing less than an occult superhero. It's fun, enjoyably written pulp goodness, but it's about as far from the existential horror of its supposed inspirations as I can imagine.
The fascinating thing is that, as a source for gaming ideas, Derleth's stories are often more rich than are Lovecraft's own. That's not to say that they're better -- that's an entirely subjective judgment I won't make -- but I would certainly argue that the Call of Cthulhu RPG would largely have been impossible without the example provided by Derleth's Shrewsbury and other similar characters. I can and do appreciate the point of view of Lovecraftian purists who think Derleth's enthusiasms did a disservice to HPL's legacy by diluting it with ideas and concepts utterly alien to it. I am myself a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist and abhor the way that others often strip mine their predecessors' works for things they can use for their own efforts. At the same time, I also concede that popularization can occasionally have a salutary effect on source material, making it not only more accessible but also more generally useful. To some extent, I think Derleth's "Lovecraftian" efforts proved more beneficial than harmful, at least as far as gaming goes, but I am open to being convinced otherwise. At the very least, I think it's quite fair to say that gaming owes a lot to Derleth's ideas, perhaps even moreso than it does to Lovecraft directly.
28 comments:
I mostly agree with the gist of what you're saying. One of the big downsides, IMHO, is that by Derleth's shoehorning the "mythos" into a pseudo-christian setup of good and evil gods, we've lost the much more interesting message Lovecraft was offering. The entities he presented were alien, not just in biology but in intellect and abilities. It was their alien yet often clearly superior minds that put humans in their place. By placing them in a good/evil cosmology they are humanized, given a human base of motivation, when in reality Lovecraft believed the opposite, that humans are essentially animals, there is no God, and in fact humans are probably not at the top of the food chain in the greater cosmos. Through Derleth this is all sort of mutated by his own religious beliefs, which is a shame.
ReplyDeleteYou raise some notable points. I would add that everything which makes people want to know more about the origins of an idea is a good thing. I am not familiar with August Derleth's works, but surely things become a bit muddier when someone rewrites the works of others (like De Camp and Carter did with Howard) so that it becomes difficult to discern the contributions. Luckily today one can find Howard's original works in print; are Derleth's works still mixed with those of HPL is a similar fashion?
Antonio- AnonymousJune 1, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Lovecraft simply wrote stories, whereas Derleth (and those influenced by him) wrote stories about Lovecraft stories.I think this is a fair analysis. As you say, the concept of "Cthulhu Mythos" is a latter creation - the pulp authors swapped ideas and used each other's proper nouns for a laugh, but it's only under Derleth that you really get an interconnected, broad Cthulhu world.
Also, I think you're right when you say that Derleth's work might better from an RPG point of view. Sure, the addition of "good gods/bad gods" changes an important part of the world view of Lovecraft's works - but it's much easier to create heroes and run campaigns in the Derleth-esque world, I feel, whereas Lovecraft himself will always be consigned to the "and then a hellbeast ate him" one-off. ;-)
As an aside, it seems to me that Cthulhu et al have really mutated from their literary origins, with influences from the pastiche writers, the RPG and general nerd culture warping Cthulhu in particular into The Ultimate Badass Who Is Unkillable when I don't think that's necesarilly what the original stories convey. Or at least, Lovecraft's writings are much more sparse on details which are now overwritten in a lot of people's minds with "eats 1d4 adventuers per round". I think a proper reading of his works (as you clearly have done) is something more nerds should do before pontificating on Cthulhu - and I feel bad for never going back to that short story collection of his I read, thusly forcing me to acknowledge myself as unqualified to discuss this further. :-)
George Q I don't think Derleth's Shrewsbury is completely without precedent in Lovecraft's own work, or even that it's necessarily the best model for what became the archetypal Call of Cthulhu approach. Let's not forget the investigations of Willet in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - or, even more appropriately, the trio of Armitage, Rice, and Morgan in The Dunwich Horror, who walk like a CoC party, talk like a CoC party, and quack like a CoC party.
Call of Cthulhu, specifically, seems to reject the vision of the Lovecraftian adventure put forward in The Trail of Cthulhu in two important respects:
1: Interdimensional travel is never routine.- In Lovecraft's work, frequent trips outside Euclidian spacetime has an ultimately negative effect - just look at The Dreams In the Witch-House.
- In Call of Cthulhu, whilst supernatural means of transport are available in the form of the byakhee (used in the Trail, yes, but also used in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath), it's never a trivial thing to do such a thing - if nothing else, it involves the use of magic, which grinds you down just a little bit further. It also entails subjecting your character to the tender mercies of the GM. What's more, going to a trip to the library of Celeano, if the GM decides that it exists at all, is decidedly difficult.
- In The Trail of Cthulhu Shrewsbury treats byakhee a bit like enormous faceless taxi drivers.
2: If you ever actually see an Old One, you lose.- In The Dunwich Horror the party's success lies in preventing Wilbur from summoning his otherworldly father to Earth. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward an ancient and dangerous evil is defeated - but said evil is simply an (admittedly experienced and accomplished) human wizard - no Old Ones appear onstage whatsoever. The sailor in The Call of Cthulhu does, admittedly, manage to delay the Old One's return by ramming him with his ship, but it's only a delay - Cthulhu is still alive and active in the world through his cult, which is more than capable of avenging the tenacled one; the Old One endures, whereas in their respective stories Wilbur Whately and Joseph Curwen are destroyed.
- Wise Call of Cthulhu players know that preventing the cultists summoning their dark master in the first place is always preferable to fighting the beast itself.
- Shrewsbury's grand overarching scheme in The Trail of Cthulhu involves tracking the big guy down and dropping a nuke on him. Granted, it doesn't work, but it's precisely the opposite of the sort of approach generally encouraged in Cthulhu-inspired gaming. Any CoC investigator, on learning that Shrewsbury was planning to stroll up to an Old One's lair and poke it with a (nuclear-tipped) stick, would make their excuses and leave the party in a great hurry, if they didn't just shoot the raving old idiot dead to prevent him from making such a foolhardy mistake.It is interesting how the actual text of Call of Cthulhu again and again criticises Derleth's approach to the Mythos, and yet, as you point out, the game, with its emphasis on normal folk actively fighting against eldritch horrors, rather than fleeing whenever they can, seems to have more in common with Derleth.
All that said, aside from Armitage and company (as Arthur points out), Lovecraft's own Howard Carter is certainly less of a protagonist, and much more of a pulp hero.Derleth's stories in Trail of Cthulhu are great fun. You have to read them as utterly different from Lovecraft's approach in order to appreciate them, though.
They are more suited to an RPG, it's true, but I think the RPG isn't Call of Cthulhu, it's something different ... it's more about beating the horrors than about surviving them.- AnonymousJune 1, 2009 at 11:27 AM
I enjoyed reading Derleth's Cthulhu Mythos stories--once. They don't bear re-reading, unlike Lovecraft's stories that can be read over and over.
I agree with what you say, James, about the Derlethian Mythos being more gameable than the Lovecraft Mythos. In my CARCOSA, Derleth has more influence than Lovecraft, Lin Carter has more influence than Derleth, and DDG has more influence than Lin Carter. treat byakhee a bit like enormous faceless taxi drivers.
...stroll up to an Old One's lair and poke it with a (nuclear-tipped) stick
I'm afraid I've played in campaigns where we did both these things and cheerfully paid the price.
One of the things I love about CoC is that it's possible to play it anywhere on a continuum from doom-laden angst through two-fisted, cultist-bashing adventure to hapless comedy - sometimes all in one sitting. I can't remember who said that nothing is really funny unless is has something terrible in it, but I've found that where CoC brings the terrible/tragic, players very often manage to find the comic. That bothers some people: A small subset of CoC players I've met have been mighty prescriptivist about the "authentic" mood for the game, and about keeping their HPL references "pure." That can be good and powerful, but I think it can also miss a lot of the potential of the Mythos as a genre.
confirmation word: nosan. James, your page is messing with me.I'm not a huge fan of Derleth... but not because he "bastardized" Lovecraft's vision, so much as because he's just not that great of a writer.
If anything, the concept of other writers taking "Lovecraftian" themes and interweaving them into their own stories was always Lovecraft's vision anyway. People tend to forget how much other writers contributed concepts that are considered "core" to the Mythos; writers like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Block, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, etc. And August Derleth was hardly the first to posit that human characters could meet the eldritch horrors of the cosmos with a somewhat two-fisted approach. Robert E. Howard's rather extensive Mythos fiction tends to gravitate towards that paradigm, perhaps to no-one's surprise.I'm not gonna lie to ya, James. I actually like Derleth a little better than Lovecraft. Partly 'cause, as you said, Derleth's stories are a little more two-fisted, partly because they're more organized, and partly because I simply don't understand why Lovecraft is scary. I mean, I can understand why that might be in a less enlightened time where mankind thought it was hot shit (IE the period Lovecraft lived in), but now I think people are jaded enough that a lot (myself included) would look at a Lovecraft story and say "So the universe is big and uncaring. What else is new?"
This is not to say that I think Lovecraft's stories are bad, of course. Merely that I find them more intriguing than horrible.This discussion about us no longer being horrified by an uncaring universe the way HPL was (with his preoccupation with Providence), reminds me of this:
Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room — in moments of devotion, a temple — and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated — darkness still. H. G. Wells, "The Rediscovery of the Unique," The Fortnightly Review, July 1891
I guess it's been going on for quite a while.The Trial of Cthulhu RPG (which I must admit I thought this post would be about when I saw the title - it's very much a "players work it out yourself" rather than a "roll dice to see if you worked it out" game and so I had contemplated doing a blog entry about how it has an Old School core to it) has two settings for rules - Purist and Pulp which covers both bases. In Pulp guns are useful for dealing with cultists and uppity natives, in Purist guns are useful for suicide. The book does make the point (made above) that HPL often jumped between the two opposing poles.
You can go Derleth or Lovecraft with the same ruleset.
A mythos writer who seems to be ignored these days is Brian Lumley - I'm not a huge fan of his works, especially Titus Crow his blatant Dr. Who ripoff, but his Mythos stuff is very pulp and even as I disliked it when I read it I was aware that there was much more game potential in it than a lot of the mood pieces that Lovecraft wrote. His Dreamlands stuff is quite good in a swords and sorcery fashion.I was a Lovecraft purist when I read his stories, but when I ran CoC I was for sure a Derleth man. I wanted characters to be on the road to becoming heroes who could fight the Mythos while at the same time studying it. I wanted them to be more akin to a Titus Crow than one of the short stories doomed fuddy duddies.
Of course HP had at least a couple of heroes who seemed to be able to survive mythos encounters. Inspector Legrasse(sp) and Randolph Carter come to mind.Here is a question for Lovecraft fans--where to start? I've been wondering that for about 30 years. I'm not interested in being a completist or scholar--just read the best or most representative. I've put it off because, well, because even the flying monkeys spook me (the Auntie Em/Witch sequence in the crystal ball was far scarier). Just looking for a starting point from among the many releases.
ReplyDeleteRusty, Antonio and Chris have given good suggestions. "The Call of Cthulhu" is a good overview of the cults-and-monsters aspect of the Mythos, and has been mentioned above, while "The Dunwich Horror" is a good example of a Call of Cthulhu investigator team in action; I haven't read the latter in a long time, but I remember it being quite a chore, whereas the first is a great deal more readable. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a great read, rattling along at a brisk pace while maintaining a sense of horror and menace. I haven't read "At the Mountains of Madness" in about ten years either, and I remember it also being a bit of a slog, but I may feel differently now.
ReplyDeleteFunny thing about RPG campaigns is that they themselves are almost always of necessaity 'hack works' and 'pastiches', strip-mining the original classics for content. Cliche, for instance, works great in RPGs, where it's anathema to good literature. And for this reason hack authors are often more useful as inspiration than the originals, because they are our useful models. I can't run a Conan game that truly captures REH's genius, because I am not a literary genius, but I can run one that resembles the works of his lesser imitators.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it's a bit of a different beast altogether, I actually think "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" is the best Lovecraft piece. It's a bit sword & sorcery, but it's also one of the best Mythos stories there is at the same time, ironically.
Other than that, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Dunwich Horror" "The Whisperer in Darkness" and of course "The Call of Cthulhu" are the most iconic stories he wrote, I think. "Pickman's Model", "Cool Air" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" are also personal favorites that I don't hesitate to recommend. Some of the "lower grade" classics are stuff like "The Colour Out of Space", "Rats in the Walls", "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Strange High House in the Mist."
After that, I think they all start to run together a bit, personally.I should've thought of this before: Ken Hite's Tour de Lovecraft is actually a nice introduction and overview to the tales, as well as being a really sharp collection of essay reviews full of Stuff To Think About.
Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is supposed to be a good essay on the man, and not nearly as one-sided as you might imagine from the title.


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Hand Sanitizers: Do They Help Stop All Germs?
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Hansa D. Bhargava, MD
Feb. 8, 2013 -- With winter cold and flu season in full swing -- and a new strain of norovirus circulating -- everyone's trying to dodge the bugs. Norovirus causes intestinal illness, and it's often the root of outbreaks at schools and in nursing homes.
The question is: How best to avoid infection? Thorough hand washing is typically recommended. But use of hand sanitizers is promoted, too.
However, a recent study found that staff in long-term care facilities who relied too much on hand sanitizers over hand washing actually reported more outbreaks of norovirus-related illness.
WebMD turned to the experts for perspective on what to do now.
What is the active ingredient in hand sanitizers?
Hand sanitizers have a form of alcohol, such as ethyl alcohol, as an active ingredient. It works as an antiseptic.
Other ingredients may include water, fragrance, and glycerin.
Which bugs can hand sanitizers prevent?
''Alcohol-based hand sanitizers are clearly a very useful and important method to prevent most bacterial and viral infections, with rare exceptions," says Aaron E. Glatt, MD, executive vice president of Mercy Medical Center, Rockville Centre, Long Island, N.Y. He is a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Viruses cause colds and flu.
Hand sanitizers won't work, Glatt says, against the infection caused by C. difficile, a bacterium that can lead to life-threatening inflammation in the colon.
What about the study finding more norovirus outbreaks with use of hand sanitizers?
"This study does not change my routine recommendation that people should use a hand sanitizer," Glatt says. He sees them as especially useful when water is not available.
In the study, published in the American Journal of Infection Control, CDC researchers looked at the use of hand sanitizers by the staff in 91 long-term care facilities. In those where the staff were equally or more likely to use the hand sanitizers over soap and water for routine hand hygiene, the chance of an outbreak was nearly six times greater.
"It's one study," says Glatt.
More research is needed, he and other experts say.
So, is hand washing better than hand sanitizers to prevent infection spread?
Both are important, say Glatt and Brian Sansoni, spokesman for the American Cleaning Institute.
"Soap and water are number one," says Sansoni. "Hand sanitizers are a very effective additional tool."
The sanitizers are meant to supplement, not replace, good old-fashioned soap and water washing, Sansoni says.
The CDC agrees. It says that for norovirus, washing hands is your best prevention, especially after using the bathroom, changing a diaper, and before eating and doing food prep. Sanitizers may help, but "they are not a substitute for washing with soap and water."
They also can be used if soap and water aren't available, the CDC says.
What is the best way to wash hands?
Proper hand washing involves ''20 to 30 seconds of vigorous scrubbing with soap and warm water," Glatt says. "It's the physical rubbing that does a lot of the work. But the soap is important."
What is the best way to use hand sanitizers?
To use hand sanitizers properly, use one or two squirts or pumps, Sansoni says. Rub hands together briskly, front and back, between fingers, around and under the nails, until hands are dry.
If you have a sick child, what can help contain those germs?
Use normal household cleaning agents such as bleach to wipe down surfaces such as diaper-changing tables, Glatt says.
"Pay careful attention to infection control," he says. "Wash [hands] with soap and water before preparing food. If you are sick, don't prepare food.''
Those with more than one child should be careful to wash their hands between tending to the sick child, such as diaper changing, and tending to the well child, he says.


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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
And I'm Audie Cornish.
As morning breaks over the Indian Ocean, crews are searching for objects in the water that could be debris from a missing Malaysian Airlines jet. Australian satellites spotted two objects: one that appears to be almost 80 feet long, the other about 15 feet long. They were located way out at sea in an area of the ocean about 1,500 miles southwest of Perth, Australia.
We're going to hear about the search, and we'll hear from Beijing, where the families of passengers are still waiting for word of what happened to Flight 370. But first, to NPR's David Schaper. And, David, first, tell us more about this floating debris.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Well, as you said, Audie, it's two objects floating in the water that are quite sizeable and whitish in color. And it's the most promising development yet, according to Australian authorities. Here's Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who spoke about it at a news conference earlier today.
PRIME MINISTER TONY ABBOTT: We don't know what that satellite saw until we can get a much better, much closer look at it. But this is the first tangible breakthrough in what up till now has been an utterly baffling mystery.
SCHAPER: Australian rescue officials say four planes began searching for that debris yesterday. They're back in the air today, searching again, along with planes from the U.S., India and a couple of other countries that are lending help to this search again.
CORNISH: David, it's a huge area. I mean, how do they conduct such a search over such a wide stretch of ocean?
SCHAPER: Well, the satellite images show fairly well where these objects were, at least four days ago when the pictures were taken. The hard part is figuring out where those objects are now. So they need to determine which direction the winds are blowing and have been for the last couple of days, how the ocean currents are moving things. So they drop a buoy and measure the speed at which it moves. Then they will just calculate how far it could have moved and begin searching in the areas the wind currents and ocean currents are taking it.
And once they start searching, they'll drop another buoy in the search area as a point of reference and go in a back-and-forth pattern from the air to search the area that they believe these objects may have drifted off to. First, they'll use radar, which will work if the objects are floating and sticking out of the water a little bit. If the weather permits, they will search visually, too, from a lower altitude. But bad weather with a lot of wave action and poor visibility is apparently hampering the search efforts so far.
CORNISH: And so how will they determine if these objects are from the missing plane?
SCHAPER: Once the objects are located from high up in the air, a boat or a helicopter from a platform in a nearby ship will come in to take a closer look. And searchers will be looking for some structural characteristics of parts of the plane, but someone may actually have to get into the water to really determine what this is. And they'll be looking for airplane part serial numbers and the like to see if it is from the plane.
Crash expert Bill Waldock, who teaches how to investigate plane crashes at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, says that based on the descriptions of the size of these objects, one of them believed to be almost 80 feet in length, that raises some questions for him.
BILL WALDOCK: That's way too big to be a piece of that airplane. Most of the airplane's going to sink. But what it might be is a collection of smaller parts that are hung up in wires and some of the other materials, particularly from the aircraft cabin. We saw that in Air France 447 with the debris fields.
SCHAPER: So Waldock and others stress that it may take some time to actually locate these objects that were spotted in the satellite images, may take even longer to positively identify the objects. So everyone's urging patience in what has already been a long and gut-wrenching search for this missing plane.
CORNISH: That's NPR's David Schaper. Dave, thanks so much.
SCHAPER: Thank you, Audie. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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Mr. Speaker, today we mark the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. Every year we participate in this solemn commemoration but this year it has a special significance.
For the families of the victims and the survivors, the horrors of that bygone era remain so painful that it is hard to believe how much time has passed. The passage of years has not dimmed the memory or eased the grief. Not a relative or friend has been forgotten, nor have fond memories of native cities faded away.
Moreover, no accounting for mass murder has been made. Though many governments and legislative bodies around the world have recognized the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish Government consistently refuses to acknowledge what happened. For Armenians everywhere, Turkey's policy of aggressive denial sharpens the feeling of loss, embittering the lives of those who miraculously survived.
Today, those of us without Armenian blood share the sorrow of Armenians everywhere. I had the privilege in September 2000 of chairing hearings on the Armenian Genocide in the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the International Relations Committee. The reading I have done over the years, which has included detailed descriptions of the atrocities, shock me. But, I am resolved to speak about this issue, loudly and often.
The Armenian Genocide has significance for all of us. It created a monstrous precedent which launched a century of genocides. In numerous countries and cultures, an ethnic group that controlled the state has used its instruments of coercion to slaughter members of a minority group, religion or class. It is enough to recall Adolf Hitler's smug remark, "Who remembers the Armenians?" to grasp the universality of what happened to the Armenians.
Much has changed in the world since the mass, planned murder in 1915–two world wars, the fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Romanov Empires, the rise of the American superpower and most recently, the fall of the Soviet Union. One would have thought that we would have grown wiser over the years. Alas, we have not learned the appropriate lessons from the 20th century's first genocide. Just a few years after Rwanda, at this very moment, another genocide is taking place in Darfur. Yet, instead of mounting a united response, the international community has waffled or slithered away from responsibility, as hundreds of thousands are slaughtered.
The record of man's inhumanity to man is awful enough to produce a feeling of resignation. But we must fight that tendency. We must continue to remind the world of what occurred in 1915 and keep calling on Turkey to won up. We must not restrain ourselves from speaking of the Armenian Genocide. Along with many of my colleagues, I urge President Bush to speak the truth to Ankara, which needs to come to terms with its own past.
As this somber time, I want to note one optimistic point: OSCE negotiators are guardedly hopeful about the prospects of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. True, we have experienced such moments before and should not get our hopes up. Still, I am encouraged to hear that there is at least some reason for hope. We all pray for a peaceful solution to this conflict, which has caused over 30,000 deaths and many more casualties. Next year, when we once again commemorate the Genocide of the Armenians, I hope their descendants will be living in peace with their neighbors, building a democratic, prosperous country that will be a light unto the world.