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2020 Choices

Sometimes I get really tired of seeing through the bullshit. In this case, it's the pretense that there will actually be an honest competition for the Democratic Presidential nomination. The DNC has already made it abundantly clear that they will never allow Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders to get the nomination - and that every other candidate is in their pocket. That particularly includes Elizabeth Warren, who has received donations from quite a few billionaires and has stated that she WILL accept big business donations in the general election. She also transferred ten million from her Senatorial campaign to her Presidential one. That ten million includes a lot of money from businesses and the rich.

I was listening to some DNC people on NPR tonight, and the plan was so obvious that it was painful: they're going to ram Biden down everyone's throat, with a token minority VP - probably Harris, Buttigieg, or Booker - to give themselves an SJW club to beat down angry progressives. "Unity" will be brayed at progressives day and night. Progressive discussion groups will be subverted, taken over, or shut down. The attempt to guilt progressives and paint them as responsible for Trump will be ceaseless. Obama will be rolled out to support Biden, and we'll get lots of identity politics and egregious virtue-signaling.

Unfortunately Bernie has already made it clear that he'll play ball with the DNC's plans, and will campaign vigorously for whoever the DNC anoints. He'll be a broken man at that point, presumably, but it won't matter. He'll be finished.

None of this takes much imagination. It's exactly what happened in 2016, with different names.

Biden will probably end up losing, and the DNC will blame progressives until human civilization collapses (probably in about thirty years or so).

If for some reason Biden falls through, Warren is clearly the DNC's next choice. After that they have Harris, Buttigieg, Booker, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, and the third tier of corporatist toadies. In any case, the DNC is the best friend that Trump could ever have; they'll gladly hand him the Presidency again as long as they can keep progressives split, confused, and disorganized. Forestalling an anti-capitalist populist movement is the DNC's primary purpose.

Personally, I see the real question as being one of human survival. Our species is in clear medium-term jeopardy; we are within a decade of the point of no return, if we're not already there. Billions are going to die if we don't take radical action, including ending the fossil fuel industry and embarking on an unprecedented remaking of human civilization to allow our species to have a survivable future.

None of the DNC's candidates will tolerate the sort of drastic action necessary for us to avoid extinction. Period. Trump will kill us a bit earlier, but the oligarchs that the DNC serves are implacably opposed to the sort of worldwide movement that is our only option for survival.

The DNC and RNC are working for humanity's extinction, whether or not they admit it to themselves. Supporting human extinction is something that I absolutely refuse to do. I will not be supporting Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, Booker, Gillibrand, or Klobuchar. The only candidates that I would support are Gabbard or Sanders, as those are the only two who offer any hope that my (not yet born) grandchildren will survive.

Otherwise I'm voting Green. The Greens were right all along. They deserve credit for that. I'm quite sure that the votes will be rigged and the Presidential results will be falsified to show virtually no votes for the Greens, but at least I will know that I didn't participate in the genocide of our species.

Kicked out...again

If there was a world record for being kicked out of so-called "progressive" and "socialist" groups for non-trolls, I'd be a lock.

I was just banned from Reddit's socialism subreddit for "equating antifa with fascists". It really does seem that my opinions are either intolerable or threatening to every single political discussion group that I've been part of. I can't help but wonder why.

And I really hate being banned. Any time some authority figure tries to shut me up, I'm instantly filled with rage. I handle that better now, but I still won't stay in a group that silences me.

In this case, my crime was pointing out that many antifa members seem to be inspired by the same fascistic urges that they despise in their opponents. They want to silence them, and many seem positively eager to engage in preemptive violence.

I have no objection to self defense. But that's not what these people are advocating. Time and again, I have seen them claim that merely holding and advocating for an opinion that they disagree with is equivalent to a physical attack on themselves. That is fascism, or at least a critical element of fascism.

That a so-called socialism group has an official policy of banning people who point out the simple truth is simply incomprehensible. So once again, I find myself here. This is the one place where I can safely express my opinions, simply because no one ever reads this blog. I can say anything I want, because I might as well be whispering into a deep hole on an outer Jovian moon.

I know I'm not the only one who sees things this way. It's horrifying that so many people believe that they are enlightened, when they are in fact just as fascistic as those they claim to oppose. The hypocrisy and ignoranceiis sickening.

I sure wish I could find some fellow travelers!

Diablo 1 HD Mod: Belzebub

If you’re a Diablo fan and haven’t played the Diablo 1 HD mod, you have a total delight in store. It’s an amazingly detailed and enormously expanded version of Diablo 1, updated for modern displays and Windows versions. Some of the best elements of Diablo II have been added as well. It’s rebalanced to make it effectively more than four times bigger than the original Diablo 1. The mod is named Belzebub (yes, that’s the way they spelled it). But it is, in truth, the original Diablo 1 game - with huge improvements. And it really seems to have been a labor of love.

The graphics are from the original game. They look a bit better, but they’re still not anything close to modern.

But it wasn’t amazing graphics that made Diablo 1 a genre-creating game anyway. Unlike Diablo 1, Belzebub will run on Windows 10 (and Windows XP, and everything between those OSes). You can set it to as high as 1920 x 1080 resolution, allowing you to see a much larger area of the game. You can also zoom in and out within a large range by using your mouse’s scroll button.

Original Diablo 1 - Tristram (click to enlarge)

Diablo 1 Belzebub - Tristram

Storage

Storage has been expanded to an almost ridiculous extent. Your own character’s storage is still the same; 40 individual slots. But you now have a private stash in the village which contains 50 tabs with 100 slots each, for a total of 5,000 slots.

Private stash

What’s more, you also have a trade stash. This is ten tabs of 100 slots each. It works like normal storage, except it can be accessed by any character that has been run on the same installation of Belzebub. In other words, you can effortlessly trade items between your characters.

Trade Stash

Items in these storage containers are saved with the game. You can exit and come back later, and they will still be there. There’s also an additional storage option, but that’s connected to Crafting. I’ll discuss that later on.

Gold has been made much more convenient. Rather than being limited to 5,000 gold per slot, the limit is now a million gold per slot. You can also put gold in your private and trading stashes. If my math is correct, that means that you can have a total of 6,400,000,000 gold. That’s over six billion!

Installation

Installation is extremely easy. All it takes is downloading the files, copying them a drive, and clicking on Belzebub.exe. That's all it takes to play. Of course you can make a shortcut to the executable, if you want The total size of all files is 560MB. That’s not a typo. Five hundred and sixty megabytes. And you don’t need the Diablo 1 CD to play the game. Nor do you have to have ever installed Diablo 1.


There are several places that you can download the game. You can Google “Diablo 1 HD mod Belzebub”, or just use these:

Links

The mod files can be downloaded here: https://diablo-hd-belzebub.en.uptodown.com/windows

Make a new folder (I call mine Diablo 1 HD Mod) and unzip the files into that. Also download the DIABDAT.MPQ file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0GjgCzh8BBgTVpXU3NIbVdtNlE/view

Put DIABDAT.MPQ into the same folder as the other files. It makes a Diablo 1 CD unnecessary.

For help with quests and other Belzebub issues, here's the best resource I've found to date: https://mod.diablo.noktis.pl/quests

Saving has changed. It’s no longer a snapshot of the instant that you saved; rather, it saves when you exit. Waypoints that you’ve opened will remain open, but levels will be re-generated and re-stocked with monsters. So it’s now the same as Diablo 2, in that regard.


I’ve heard that Multiplayer play is possible over a LAN, but I haven’t had a chance to try that yet.

Classes

Character classes have been expanded. You can play the original Warrior, Rogue, and Sorcerer classes, but now you can also play a Barbarian, Necromancer, or Assassin. I should note that I’ve only played a Sorcerer so far, so I can’t yet provide class-specific tips for the other categories.

The six classes

Skills

Skills have been fixed and expanded to greatly increase class differentiation. The Repair skill of the Warrior and the Recharge skill of the Sorcerer are now actually useful. Rather than reducing the maximum charges of a staff or the durability of a weapon, the skills now have only a chance to work - but don’t damage the item.

Better still, new character-specific skills have been added for a total of five per class. I’ve only played a sorcerer so far, so I can’t talk about the skills of the other classes yet. But in addition to Staff Recharge, Sorcerers now have access to Elemental Drain (which temporarily increases your ability to penetrate resistances and immunities), Mana Shield (which is no longer a spell, but acts as one), Etherealize (reducing the damage you take for a short time), and Temporal Slowdown - which slows down the rest of the world for a short period, from your perspective. Mana Shield also no longer ends when mana reaches zero; if you restore mana with a potion before all your hit points are gone, further damage goes against mana again.

Permanent effects

Permanent effects have been fixed. Remember the shrines and cauldrons that could ruin your character forever by reducing maximum mana? Those are now timed, temporary effects which can be canceled by simply clicking on an icon in the upper right corner. On the downside, characteristic-increasing potions have also been nerfed. They only work for nine minutes, and don’t stack. But on the plus side, the permanent hit point loss caused by Black Death zombies has been eliminated.

Spells

Spells have also been greatly increased. There are now six levels, with seven spells in each level. In addition to the old familiar spells, there are new spells  - some of which are based on Diablo II spells. There are cold spells, more area-effect spells, and convenient new spells such as Warp, which teleports you to the nearest entry or exit point within range.

One old spell has been seriously nerfed: Stone Curse. It now has only a chance of turning a target to stone, and can be resisted. What’s more, if it’s successful the target gains a very high damage resistance while it’s petrified. That makes it more a spell for crowd control, rather than the ultimate spell that it was in Diablo 1.

Waypoints have been inserted from Diablo 2. There are still the usual 16 levels, but there are now waypoints on every second level. That’s Cathedral levels 2 and 4, Catacombs 6 and 8, Caves 10 and 12, and Hell 14 and 16. The Waypoints must be activated just as with Diablo 2, of course.

Waypoints

Gameplay

Quests which were planned for the original Diablo 1 but were deleted before release have now been completed and implemented. They include three village-based quests, as well as quite a few additional quests underground. Some of these take you to new areas which are effectively areas in themselves. For example, the Butcher is no longer in the usual room; once you’re there, you have to find a way to get to the Butcher’s lair, which is filled with a lot more demons before you get to the Butcher himself.

There are two quests which require a bit of explanation. An Arcane Sanctuary quest has been added to the Catacombs; you reach it when you find three Ancient Tomes in two squares and a rectangle. There’s also a quest in the caves which requires you to stand on four stones in the correct order. A hint: it’s always best to consider what’s new, or what’s snew!

Bosses and mini-bosses are now much more difficult. They tend to have more resistances and to be generally much tougher; it’s no longer practical to just spam a mouse button. Strategy is necessary. For example, the Valor quest is much as it was before, except that the end boss is a killer. He’s not just more powerful; he actually uses spells such as Firewall against you, too.

Death has become less painful. That’s good, because you’re likely to die much more often - or at least, I did. Rather than dropping your equipped gear, you simply drop some gold when you die. It’s a substantial enough amount to hurt, but at least you come back with all your gear!

The number and variety of Items have been enormously increased. Again, this seems to be based on Diablo 2. There are set items which show in green; so far these all seem to be the same as in D2. There are uniques and rares, with prefixes and suffixes. Many items have quite a few properties! Qualities which were once given in absolutes or with a limited number of possibilities now have their improvements listed as percentages, which vary quite a lot. For example, hit recovery speed is now a percentage, and can be increased by multiple equipped items at once. The same is true for speed of attack.

There are also items which can increase Spellpower. These generally increase damage for all spells by a percentage. Items which increase spell levels (either for individual spells, all spells, or both) also still exist, as do items which increase casting speed.

Tristram itself has changed a bit. There’s a couple of new NPCs, including one from Diablo 2. NPC locations have been made a bit more convenient (especially Wirt), and more characters give quests now. Vocals seem to have been recorded for the reinstated quests when D1 was created, so you can hear some interesting new comments from old favorites. As I mentioned earlier, there are some quests which are now village-based.

One thing that seems minor, but that really makes a difference is NPC movement. Some NPCs still stay in place, but others now move around the village; they look as if they’re talking with each other. It gives the village a more real feeling, somehow.

Refreshment has been added at Adria’s. Just as Peppin the healer will heal you for free, Adria apparently offers free drinks; these restore your mana to full. It’s a nice idea.

Village Movement speed can be increased up to 200%. To call up that menu, tap g.

You can make the labels for objects on the ground (treasure and gold) appear temporarily by pressing the shift key. You can toggle those labels to remain on or off with the Ctrl key.

Crafting

Crafting is a major addition. It’s not quite like crafting in D2 or D3. It can only be started once you’ve successfully completed the Anvil of Fury quest. Once you have, the Anvil is set up next to Griswold’s forge. You can use it to Salvage magic items that you don’t want to sell, creating gems, oils, tokens, and symbols. These are the ingredients for crafting new items.

You can also salvage items which have zero value, such as cursed items (they must be magical, however). They generally don’t produce much, but they will produce something of value.

At about the same time that you finish that quest, you’ll start finding recipes occasionally among treasure. They look like scrolls, but they are listed in orange text. These are learned by simply right-clicking on them once they’re in your inventory. Once you’ve learned a recipe, it disappears. But you now know the recipe permanently.

Using the Anvil you can put ingredients and items together to create powerful new class-specific items. Recipes include random powers along with specified ones, so you can redo a recipe if you don’t like the result. There are higher levels of recipe which produce more powerful items, but these are only available in higher difficulties.

Oh, one more tip: the area of the Anvil where the gems/oils/tokens appear from salvaged magic items is another durable storage area. The items in it persist from game to game.

Crafting at the Anvil

Difficulties have been increased by one: there’s now Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Torment. However those levels are effectively seamless. Difficulty has been rescaled, making the higher difficulties feel more like direct extensions of the previous ones. Once you’ve beaten Diablo on Normal, you can start playing Nightmare - but you can’t just cruise through the Cathedral and Catacombs, as you could with Diablo 1. Even first-level monsters will be a challenge.

Also there are many items, spells, recipes, and skills that you can’t attain in Normal. That's part of what makes the game itself feel more than four times bigger.

To get specific for a moment, Golems have been changed a bit. They don’t seem to be quite as aggressive any more, and they’re less liable to open doors on their own. They’re not affected by your own attack spells (which is a BIG improvement), although they can still be injured and destroyed by standing in firewalls or lightning walls. They can be healed with Heal Other, which is handy.

One drawback to golems is that sometimes they can block a doorway or narrow space. If you move towards them, however, they move a little away from you and you can get through.

The Cow Level!

Sorry, there is no cow level in Belzebub, as far as I know. But there is a way to get large amounts of treasure, over and over. Once you've entered the first level of Hell - level 13 - you'll be able to get a new quest from Wirt, the Lost Treasure. That quest gives you access to a new cave entrance to the west, which takes you to the Secret Tunnel. 

Lost Treasure

The Secret Tunnel leads to a small monster-free room with three treasure chests (warning: there's a triple-immune miniboss on the way). These chests hold a huge amount of treasure; there's an example in the image above.

If you trigger the explosive barrels in the room, you'll get an entrance to an area with enemy boss sorcerers. They provide some good treasure, experience, and at least six spellbooks. If you have an effective ranged or remote attack such as Guardian, you can clear them out at virtually no risk. Those sorcerers never seem to be fire-immune, at least up through Nightmare difficulty. And as I noted, you can repeat the Lost Treasure quest over and over - as often as you want to.

Summing Up

Although the game has been enhanced to a remarkable degree (it’s really impressive) it’s still the original Diablo 1 at its core; the classic horror ARPG that created the genre. 

It runs on PCs. It’s a hell of a lot better than any mobile game. It’s huge, free, and has no microtransactions (*cough* screw Diablo: Immortal *cough*). What’s not to love?

#Diablo #Diablo1 #Diablo2 #DiabloImmortal #games

Diablo 1?

If I were to write a longish post about the Diablo 1 HD mod, would anyone here be interested? Should I put in the effort?

It runs on anything from Windows XP to Win10. It's Diablo 1, the game that created the modern computer RPG genre, but extremely expanded - deleted quests have been finished and implemented, as have a number of features from Diablo 2. It's a truly impressive piece of work.

I was thinking of writing it up, and noting all the differences that I've found between the original and this mod. Of course I'd include links to the files themselves, which are remarkably easy to install and don't require the original Diablo 1 CD-ROM. So...should I write it, or not?

Screw it

Okay, I'm done. Every so-called "social media" platform has turned out to either be a dead zone, abuse the privacy and personal information of their users, or be a home for bullies and assholes - and sometimes all three.

I'm tired of trying to share interesting stuff and being abused for it. And of making comments and posts only to be attacked by shills. So fuck it! I'll post here.

Nobody reads this, of course. It's like digging a hole at midnight, whispering your secrets into it, and then filling in the hole. But why not? At least it will be less aggravating.

I can't help feel that there's something wrong, somehow. I've spoken against social media before - I see it as a toxic, ersatz replacement for the face-to-face human contact which we as a species evolved to need. It's easily controlled and monitored by the economic and power elite. And those are the same forces which deprived us of neighborhoods and long-term social connections.

Isolated, inundated with toxic and controlled media, and fearful of each other. That keeps people helpless.
There has to be a better way than this.

Why I Love RuneQuest/D100/Basic Roleplaying

It was the early 1980s. Dungeons and Dragons wasn't the only roleplaying system; there were already many, both commercially produced and home-brewed. But most systems used many of the conventions which had been laid down by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Levels. Character classes. Experience points. Concepts carried over from the wargaming roots of roleplaying.

We didn't know any better. It was the early days, the good days, and we took the rules and customized them over and over. We hoped we'd find good players and DMs to use them with.

I wasn't part of the beginning. Somehow I missed out. But I'd tried D&D back in 1978 or so. It was a poor experience - the DM may have succeeded in being the most biased referee in history, in part because he REALLY wanted to sleep with one of his players - so after I while I stopped playing.

When I got to college five years later, though, I tried it again. Once again I had the misfortune of playing under a bad DM. He secretly daisy-chained the players in an assassination circle, using incredibly contrived definitions of alignment. But one of the players had heard of another group, and the two of us went over to see if there were any openings.

There were. And they were playing some system called RuneQuest II.

I was dubious. A different roleplaying system? What was the point? Didn't AD&D cover it all? But I was desperate (college can be a lonely place, at first), so I tried it.

Have you ever had the sky rip open above you and a host of angelic beings rain down blinding light while singing hosannas? Neither have I. But the moment when I first started to understand RuneQuest II was something like that. Because it made sense.

The artificial, contrived, it-doesn't-make-sense-but-you-have-to-for-play-balance rules were gone. Classes? Gone. The game was skill-based, the first of its kind. Characters were defined by individual skills, not by some profession which limited your options in ridiculous ways. Yes, wearing heavy armor made it harder to sneak around or use some other skills - but you could certainly try to use those skills, often successfully. Want to use a sword and still cast spells? Why not!

Levels and experience? Gone. Instead characters improved by getting better at the skills they used, or by studying, or by being trained. They could also train to improve physical characteristics. And likewise magical power could be increased by use in meaningful situations. Getting better through actual experience, rather than by suddenly clicking upwards after you've killed a certain number of enemies? Much more realistic!

The system mapped beautifully to the real world. Rather than leafing through book after book to determine the right rule to apply, and arguing about which was the right interpretation, there were a few simple, logical concepts which allowed resolution of almost any situation without any need to resort to duelling rulebooks.

For example, the resistance roll. The concept was elegant, and devastatingly simple. When two equal and opposing forces came into play, the chance of either overcoming the other was 50%. Each incremental difference in those forces changed those odds proportionally. So if two characters of equal strength were arm-wrestling, there was a 50% chance of one or the other winning. If one of them was one point stronger than the other, that person would have a 55% chance of winning. If they were three points higher, their odds of winning increased by (3 x 5%) 15%, for a total chance of 65%. If the weaker character was the active one, their chance was correspondingly reduced.

And the concept applied to almost ANYTHING. In D&D, your chance to resist hostile magic was a saving throw based on your character class, with possible bonuses or penalties from exceptional characteristics. They changed slowly, in most campaigns. In RuneQuest, your chance to resist hostile magic or overcome someone with your own spells was a resistance roll. Compare your magical power with that of your opponent, roll the resistance roll, and see who wins. Each magical combat could be different, and not just because of the dice.

Once you got the hang of those basic concepts, the "physics" of the game were easy. We had far more time for roleplaying, instead of wasting time arguing about rules which had their source in a wargame  - an origin that wasn't intended for roleplaying!

Anyone could learn magic, and did. Healing spells were available to all. Some powerful magics required in-game accomplishments to acquire, but these actually made sense. The most powerful spells came from the gods, so if you wanted that Resurrection spell you had to be highly ranked in your church ("cult", in RQ) hierarchy. Because that was another breakthrough.

Up to that point, most published fantasy game-worlds were bland. Relatively shallow. Kind of vanilla. Basically mild Tolkien clones crossed with generic movie fantasy. If you didn't want to use one of the published worlds, you could make up your own - but you were on your own. RuneQuest could be used with any setting (it could be easily adapted to any genre, too, and would be over the years to come), but the default world was one with more depth than any world published to date. And new material kept coming out. Better than that: it was well-written. Huge reference works came out and won awards. And it was such a fun world! Elves were members of the Vegetable Kingdom, literally. They were plants in humanoid form. Trolls were warriors of darkness, but not monsters; they had culture, religion, history, and grief. Unlike D&D, which artificially elevated human beings above all other sapient races and used differing rules for PCs and NPCs, new species were available to be played.

And the same rules applied to all! Just like player characters, all NPCs could improve their skills and abilities with use and practice. Opponents were no longer cookie-cutter "monsters" to be assessed and destroyed; they could surprise you, have new skills, and even become friends or allies. Culture and personality mattered.

Of course they could matter in D&D, too. The difference was that in D&D, the primary value of "monsters" was as sources of experience and treasure. To negotiate with one was to give up most of its value (unless you killed it later, of course). By making the same rules apply to NPCs and PCs, and by giving those NPC creatures culture and depth, RuneQuest encouraged roleplaying rather than combat.

In 1984, Chaosium (the original publishers of RuneQuest) made an agreement with the Avalon Hill wargaming company. They'd write the game, and Avalon Hill would publish it. The system was called RuneQuest III. It incorporated a major breakthrough. Previous versions had been percentile-based, but used strict 5% increments. That system had mapped more easily to the D&D system, with each 5% increment equalling one number on a D20. But with RuneQuest III, the system became fully percentile. That allowed far more flexibility and granularity. A few awkward rules were also replaced with far more intuitive ones based on the system's core concepts.

For a while things went well, but the relationship between Chaosium and Avalon Hill went downhill and eventually broke down completely. The system went out of print. And it stayed that way...for ten years.

But it wasn't entirely gone. There were other systems based on the original RuneQuest concepts, some of them quite successful games. Call of Cthulhu was probably the best-known one. Games such as SuperWorld, Stormbringer, Ringworld, and ElfQuest also had some success. And some of the key concepts were picked up by other systems...including D&D itself, which eventually added percentile skills.

As for me, I got older. I'd played many games using RQ, and ran still more. Even when it was out of print, I played and GMed it whenever I could, trying to spread the word of a game system that uniquely made sense. I created a website to support the system back in 1996, and nineteen years later it's still online.

But I've grown away from the system in some ways. The main setting of the system went downhill, in my opinion. I discovered that some of the people behind RuneQuest had feet of clay, although the primary author of the rules has always had my respect and admiration. There are many new versions of RuneQuest now, many of them under different names and published by different companies. I don't keep up with those versions any more. Game publishing is a dirty business, and I'm too old now to put up with nonsense.

But I still dig out my old RuneQuest III book when I want to play. It's a bit shabby and it's starting to fall apart, but if I have to I can use Chaosium's new Basic Roleplaying book instead - it's multi-genre now, and has a lot of optional rules, but it's quite faithful to the original concepts. Even now, it's fun to introduce D&D players to a system that makes sense.

And watch their eyes light up.