78 - Secondary Strategy
“Okay, it’s official now. We’re lost.”
Cloudbank bit her lip at Aisle’s pronouncement, looking around despite knowing that it was futile. Just like every other time, fog filled her vision, thick enough that she could barely make out her friends. Everything further away was completely blanketed in white.
They’d been wandering around in there for what felt like a brief eternity, though Cloudbank knew that it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. At first she’d thought that they’d find the shelter that Lex had set up in this warehouse right away – how hard could it be to locate an interior room large enough to hold a bunch of ponies? – but they’d barely started to look for it when they’d realized that most of the place was covered in a thick mist.
It was the result of Lex’s wards, Cloudbank knew. That was the only explanation for why there’d not only be fog inside a building, but why it wouldn’t seem to move no matter how much she and Drafty flapped their wings at it. It refused to be pushed or compressed into a cloud either, despite Cloudbank having done that hundreds of times in her old job.
As bad as that was, it still shouldn’t have been enough to seriously slow them down. This warehouse wasn’t that big, after all. But for some reason navigating the interior had become unusually difficult. They hadn’t taken a single turn, but Cloudbank was certain that they’d been this way before…
“Maybe we should try marking our path with some chalk or something?” suggested Cozy.
Drafty glanced at her sides, raising her wings as she did. “That’s not a bad idea, but I don’t have any.”
“Me either,” added Aisle.
When all eyes turned to Cloudbank a moment later, she shook her head, causing the others to sigh with disappointment. “So much for that idea,” she muttered.
“We should keep going. So long as we head straight, we have to hit something eventually,” said Aisle, gesturing forward. Cloudbank frowned, but didn’t have a better idea, and a moment later they began moving again.
It wasn’t very long before Drafty squinted, looking ahead. “I think the fog is thinning out!”
Cozy brushed her necklace at the news. “Lashtada be praised, finally!”
Cloudbank gave a relieved smile, breaking into a trot as she moved ahead of Aisle, eager for the promise of safety to be fulfilled. “Okay! Now that we’re here, we can…can…”
She lost her train of thought as she exited the mist, stopping and staring at the sight that greeted her: the same door where she’d managed to stop that monster from getting inside. A moment later, the others caught up to her and had similar reactions, gaping in stupefaction. This should have been impossible, and yet there it was anyway.
They’d ended up right back where they’d started.
Monitor slammed a finned limb against the wall, but the kill-now enemy had already passed through it. Blinking its bulbous eyes, Monitor held itself ready for another strike in case its foe showed itself again, but after several seconds it realized that wasn’t going to happen. Turning away from the wall, it went to go check on the kill-later enemies that had come there with it.
The larger one had finally managed to snuff the flames that had engulfed it, and Monitor could hear it wheezing and groaning in pain. The other one was still alive also, as it was roaring quite loudly from the bottom of the hole it had fallen into. Monitor briefly considered killing one or both of them now, but decided not to; there was still a kill-now enemy nearby, and they were kill-later enemies. Instead, it simply stood still, waiting for them to either recover or die.
The larger one was the first to recover, slowly winding its way back into the air. The smell of burnt flesh drifted off of it, less unpleasant than the acrid stench coming from the hole where the other one was still splashing around. It paused to survey the surroundings before turning back towards Monitor…or at least, it seemed that way, beneath the blur. Then it moved over the hole, looking down into it.
“GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW!” roared Lirtkra, the anger in his voice not quite able to mask the pain.
“That would require that I use my ‘maa-jik’ on you,” rasped the Cripple, smug disdain dripping from every word. “Otherwise, you’ll need to find your own way out.”
Its answer was enough to make Monitor blink again; couldn’t a length of chain or something else have served to accomplish such a task? Or had the larger one decided that the one in the hole was a kill-now enemy? If so, it would have been wiser to attack it instead of simply talking at it. Otherwise it was just a waste of breath.
A moment later the larger kill-later enemy twisted to the side, frantically dodging the trident that came shooting up out of the hole to lodge in the ceiling, rope dangling from the end of it back down into the hole. A few seconds later the rope went taut, and grunting and cursing could be heard from the pit. The larger kill-later enemy swam through the air, putting some distance between itself and the hole, making Monitor shift slightly so that it could watch both of them at once.
It took a little while for Lirtkra to climb out, barely managing to pull itself above the lip of the pit before swinging over and awkwardly jumping back onto solid ground. Once it did, it yanked sharply on the rope, tearing the trident free from the ceiling, gouging a large hole in the wood as a result. Only after it did that did Monitor notice that Lirtkra was no longer carrying its shield, apparently having discarded it to be able to climb out.
As it was, the sahuagin kill-later enemy had apparently suffered a fair amount of damage from the kill-now enemy’s trap. Large patches of the sahuagin’s body had turned an angry red, and there was blood running down its legs and tail. But it looked more furious than hurt, and even as it retrieved its weapon it cast a glare at its companions, as though daring them to try anything. When neither did, Monitor noticed that Lirtkra’s stance relaxed, though only slightly.
“The pony is currently moving,” came the larger one’s whisper. “It doubtlessly wants us to follow it so it can try something like this again.”
“Of course it does!” snarled Lirtkra. “That’s pathetically obvious!” It flexed its clawed digits over its trident as though barely able to contain its anger, but Monitor knew that it hadn’t resumed an attack posture. “This time, we’re not going to allow it t-”
“Wait,” interrupted the other one, causing Monitor to blink.
“You dare interrupt me?!” hissed Lirtkra, and this time his posture did shift into one that suggested imminent violence.
“He’s coming back!”
“What?” asked Lirtkra in obvious confusion.
“That pony, he’s heading back towards us!” The larger kill-later enemy sounded rather surprised, pointing towards the opposite side of the room. “That way!”
Lex narrowed his eyes as he made a beeline for the wall of the restaurant portion of the inn. He hadn’t been gone very long, so hopefully those things were still in there. It not, he’d need to figure out where they’d gone quickly, otherwise the chances of this working – which were already slim – would worsen even more.
As it stood now, he was going to have to check and make sure, which meant exposing himself to danger again. He had no doubt that whatever magic they were using to track him was still in effect, which meant that they’d know he was coming. But that couldn’t be helped; or rather, if this worked then it would actually be to his advantage. Steeling himself, Lex flew through the wall.
“POH-NEE!” came an enraged scream. Immediately, the points of a trident pierced him, and the pain Lex felt told him that it was magical as well. He kept going though, moving further into the middle of the room. The other fish-thing, the one with the bulging eyes, sprang at him as he moved, lashing out with its bare limbs. Lex didn’t slow down as he flowed around the strikes, heading towards the opposite wall, near where the creature under the blurring magic was hovering. Circling out of the way of his apparent charge, it chanted a spell, and Lex immediately recognized it; it was the spell designed to cancel an active magical effect. For a moment, Lex wondered what it thought it was doing…and then the answer came to him as he felt his body sudden solidify, sending him crashing to the ground.
For a split-second, he felt surprised. Although it made perfect sense now that he thought about it, the idea that his horn’s dark magic could be subject to the same weaknesses and limitations as other forms of spellcasting simply hadn’t occurred to him. But there was no time to focus on that now; he needed to act!
Turning back to where the other two monsters were rushing towards him, Lex looked past them, at where the small, spectral hoof that he’d brought in with him was still hovering by the wall, just above the floor. Smirking at their apparently not having seen it, he cast a spell of his own, pleased that he’d made sure to compress its energy enough that it could be delivered via the spectral hoof. A moment later, he felt his muscles spasm as the spell went off, the price of compression making itself known. But across from him, the ghostly limb pressed against the far wall, and a moment later an aperture opened in it, easily large enough for two ponies to walk through side-by-side. With that done, Lex knew that he had to concentrate and return to shadow-form as quickly as possible, but that thought had barely crossed his conscious mind when he suddenly found the points of a trident in front of his face.
“Poh-nee,” hissed the sahuagin, and Lex could see that it was baring its teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Now I will feed on your flesh! Every last piece of you will be consumed!”
If the thing was expecting him to be intimidated, it was going to be disappointed. “Funny you should mention that,” answered Lex steadily. “Do you know what this building is?”
Lirtkra frowned, confused by his prey’s apparently lack of fear. “What?”
“This building,” repeated Lex. “Do you know what its function was, back when it was in use?” Even as he spoke, his eyes swept over his opponents. The sahuagin was directly in front of him, ready to thrust its trident through his skull, while the other fish-thing was next to it, slightly off to the side.
“It was a restaurant.” The whispered answer came from the third one, with the blur spell still obscuring its features. It was further away, keeping its companions between itself and him.
“That’s right. This is a place where ponies would come to eat food.” Lex couldn’t help but wear a grin of his own – though a part of him wondered how a monster that was almost certainly aquatic would know something like that – at the layout of his foes. All of them were facing him, their backs to the wall where he’d opened the breach, apparently unaware of it even though they’d seen him casting a spell. To think that they’d be so stupid as to ignore magic being used just because they hadn’t noticed an obvious effect.
“So what?!” hissed the sahuagin. “Now you will be food!”
It reared back with its trident, but Lex’s only response was a dark chuckle. “I invited a few other ponies, or should I say former ponies, over for a bite.”
That comment seemed to do the trick, and the sahuagin whirled around just in time to see a horde of undead ponies begin pouring into the room through the hole that Lex had opened.
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Remember the good old days when falling into a acid spiked pit trap was a One Hit Kill?
Oh well, Level 1 Undead vs L10 mid bosses in a resteraunt. Which track to put on, or wait while Lex uses the hordes distraction to booby trap some doorways with lightning spells and illusion spells?
7979396 Hey now, that pit didn't have spikes.
And that track definitely won't be Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" while the bad guys whack some undead.
Pitting one foe against another, risky but the benefits from it's success might be worth it. Provided his shadow form isn't dispelled again, Lex can just watch them fight it out if he wishes and ensure that neither will bother him in the future though given the horde of ghouls charging through the breach, the Crippled isn't going to get the chance.
Huh, so the Monitor doesn't see Lirtkra or the Crippled as allies, merely enemies to be killed later. I guess his kind doesn't care much for anything not of his kind. Though I am a little surprised that the rope survived the acid.
Despite the severity of the situation outside, I can't help but smile at Aisle and the others' predicament. It would be funny if Lex came back just in time to see them coming back to the entrance due to the ward's effects.
7979853 That's definitely what Lex is hoping will happen; whether or not it works remains to be seen. At the very least, it should give him some breathing room, though.
I wanted to put some more text in about the rope's surviving the acid-bath, but couldn't find a good way to do so. It was basically that Lirtkra was trying to keep his arms (and, therefore, his weapon) above the acid. He only had limited success, but it was enough that the rope didn't take too much damage, and he was able to use it to get out.
As for Cloudbank and co., they've got their work cut out for them. The shelter is so close, and yet so far away.
7978660
True. The whole "moves the sun" thing is pretty out there, so even if I personally wouldn't say Celestia is incredibly powerful given what else we see from her, I can see where they are coming from.
Mechanical power creep be damned, if it's there for narrative reasons, it's so much worse. 2nd ed deities are, in my opinion, the worst thing to happen to D&D to this day.
On note of the misunderstanding:
I do think I did misunderstand what you meant. The way I read it before, you said that 2nd ed allowed for more freedom in character creation as opposed to 3rd ed, which struck me as really weird. The view of "3rd ed did improve things, but not nearly far enough" is far more understandable.
Well, you do still require an idea in most cases though. The best (or worst, depending on the viewpoint) 3rd ed power build was Pun-Pun, but I have a hard time to see people playing him because he was the most viable.
I think what you mean is things like the "Ubercharger", where people with the same basic idea would wind up with exactly the same build, simply because only a single type of build order made an Ubercharger viable.
So the different "sets" of "gamist mindset" versus "narrative mindset" would be the road to take (on the ubercharger example:
Gamist: "I want to make my character able to charge" -> "Ubercharger is the best viable option for my character concept of a character that charges" -> "???" -> "My character, [Name], has developed along that path because [Story]"
Narrative: "My character, [Name], has developed along a path because [Story]" -> "???" -> "I want to make my character able to charge" -> "I give him the ability to charge"
"???" represents the transition from the narrative into the mechanical or the other way around (in the example, the ability to charge is mechanical, because charging is a mechanic in the game). The gamist wants to turn a mechanical concept into a character by adding a narrative (why does he charge into battle, who is he etc.). The narrative wants to turn a narrative concept into a mechanical character (he has the tendency to charge into battle, so I give him the ability to charge).
The gamist should have no problem in a 3rd ed environment, because his character "grew up" in the world he'll be playing in: The mechanics are how the world works, as simplified as they may be. If the person that's been a fighter for years misses a commoner, it makes sense for the character, because failing at an attack, no matter the training, is natural to him.
The narrative, on the other hand, doesn't have that: His character is, at least at first, entirely alien to the world he'll be dropped into, which might make the character in question unable to have all the abilities he "should" have, add an unnecessary bunch of abilities, make the character overleveled and cause other problems to arise because the narrative isn't necessarily compatible with the world he's in. If that character misses an attack despite having been a fighter for years, the character would mostly just be confused, because the world he's in isn't really a part of him, his history or his mindset, even if he's now a part of the world.
Eclipse eliminates a large part of the problem for narrative characters (virtually everything except being overleveled, really), so I can clearly see why Eclipse is as attractive for the "narration goes first"-viewpoint.
Well, but here is the problem: What if the GM simply decided to limit an option you'd like for your narrative character?
I'm fairly certain that Lex, as a narrative concept, couldn't be realized if the DM said "We use Eclipse, but I restrict every non-mundane option". A GM that bans options isn't necessarily more harmful to a narrative concept as he is to a mechanical concept. It's just harmful without any sort of preference.
I totally agree that Eclipse allows for narrative concepts to be built with far more ease, but that requires a "pure" Eclipse that doesn't have restrictions in place that negate your entire character concept from the get go.
...Can you enlighten me with what exactly you came up first? I'm still sorta confused on the topic. The thing you came up first wasn't mechanical, that part I've got. For example, Lex being able to cast spells was clearly not part of the narrative concept.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but the points I could figure out from the backstory was:
-Has a hard time making friends
-Likes science and magic (but is neither necessarily good at spellcasting or knowledge checks)
-Is studious
-Had an inherent drive to overthrow the government from a very young age
-Has (or at least had) a desire to be "always right" and for advancement
Now being smart, a spellcaster and being trained in various knowledge-skills seem to fit well, but aren't part of the narrative concept (requiring increased stats, a casting progression and the allowance of buying skill points per level, which could technically be disallowed, as I said above).
So were these five bullet points the idea you had when you started to build Lex or am I missing something entirely?
7980896
That's what I thought at first also, and then we had Hearth's Warming Eve in season two, which told us how the unicorn ponies collectively (though exactly how many is unclear) moved the sun and the moon before Celestia and Luna were there. That changed the assumptions inherent in how incredible it is to move the heavens around, since then it went from "something only Celestia and Luna can do" to "something any group of unicorns can do together, which the alicorns just happen to be able to do alone." In other words, it made that an issue of the cosmology itself more than it was about how strong the alicorns were.
Of course, a lot of fans didn't like that, as they had apparently become attached to the idea that Celestia and Luna were demigod-like beings; by that point only Discord had been shown to eclipse them, and now they were being downgraded further, a trend that would continue as Celestia lost a fight with Chrysalis, King Sombra was shown to survive their banishing him, their being kidnapped by Discord's plunderseeds, etc. So then we got "The Journal of the Two Sisters" published as an actual book, which tried to dial things back by saying what the "real story" behind the unicorns moving the sun and the moon was...and in doing so caused far more problems than it solved.
The irony is that the show would later make a much better attempt to walk back the ideas presented in Hearth's Warming Eve. That was in A Hearth's Warming Tail, where Starlight casually mentioned that the story in the Hearth's Warming Eve play is "just a story," making it ambiguous as to whether or not she's correct. That actually works very well, since it suggests that story is somewhere between history and myth, with the truth being unknown. That's a far more elegant way to resolve the issue to the everyone's satisfaction, and with a single line of dialogue.
That's only true when you have something that's written so as to be explicitly stated to be beyond stats, which isn't a point of view that I'm fond of either. The idea of having deities be beyond stats wasn't the best decision ever, but to be fair AD&D 2E didn't go quite as far as everyone seems to think it did, since if you look at Legends & Lore it does lay out rules for deities...just not complete rules. It still lists their number of actions per round, saving throw values, magic resistance, and some other things. It's just that things such as hit points and Armor Class aren't there, so you couldn't hit a god, but could drop an imprisonment spell on it, and it might even work...although the odds were against it (and it probably was holding an action to disrupt your casting).
That, and there were instances of demigods having full stats given. Hercules was given full stats right there in Legends & Lore itself!
Well, I think I didn't do a very good job conveying my meaning. But yeah, Third Edition didn't go far enough, but I can understand why it stopped where it did. There's a certain point where even the warts become a defining part of something; most people that I know think that character classes are a fundamental aspect of what makes D&D D&D. Removing that changes the intrinsic "feel" of the game for them.
That was because Pun-Pun was, whether intentionally or not, a reductio ad absurdum example of playing mechanical optimization for its own sake. It wasn't the only such example, just the most egregious.
I don't see these as being equivalent. It's entirely possible that the narrative outline you give could, in theory, develop along those lines, but most characters that develop along a path because of a story aren't going to refine a single ability to an absurd degree; there will usually be some sort of diversification in there, simply because it's inevitable that such a character will eventually run into a situation where that single ability won't be able to help them, at which point their monomania becomes a weakness. Now, that diversification will often be framed as a "variation on a theme," wherein it's using the same source of power to accomplish a different effect, but from a mechanical standpoint it's using a different power that's just been reflavored to thematically tie it in with other abilities.
While I'm sure there are some exceptions out there, the general rule is that characters that over-specialize tend to find themselves boxed in at some point, which makes it hard to see how a narratively-developed character could be made such that a mechanical representation of them that had fidelity to their original presentation would ever have something like an "ubercharger" build.
The typical answer to this is to invoke the Stormwind Fallacy, and that's technically true; narrative development (i.e. role-playing) and mechanical optimization are, in the strictest terms, orthogonal to each other. But as that link notes, the actual point is only that the two are not mutually exclusive, and strictly speaking they're not. But they due tend to develop with different goals in mind, and so result in characters that look different from each other.
I believe what you're outlining here is that a character that's developed narratively, with no particular game system in mind, will often find that the mechanical representation of them in an RPG system will typically be less than perfect insofar as recreating the original character concept(s), and I agree. The official MLP:FiM RPG, Tails of Equestria, comes out in the next month, and from the previews I've been checking up on making a character like Lex - even in his original presentation (e.g. that first blog post with his stats, before the idea of him ever going to Everglow entered the picture) - looks like it would be very difficult under those rules, despite how minimal they are.
To be fair, however, there's a reason for this: not all RPGs are meant to (try to) be holistic in the character concepts that they allow you to make. Many restrict character options deliberately for reasons of genre emulation, or similar restrictions to better encapsulate the nature of a particular story or setting. While some RPGs do profess universality in what they allow for, just as many deliberately sculpt their rules to a particular setting, and eagerly embrace restrictions on that front (such as the aforementioned MLP:FiM RPG). That's why I don't hold AD&D's restrictive rules against it; it's not trying to be all things to all gamers (even with 2E's myriad campaign settings). Rather, it had a certain style of game-play that it wanted to present, and didn't try too hard to go beyond it; such attempts were the basis of particular campaigns or supplements, if they were done at all.
Point-buy character-generation tends to be better generally, but Eclipse is a particularly good implementation of that design. As you noted, short of needing more levels than you have (and even that's somewhat flexible, since there are ways to squeeze more out of your CPs and/or simply get more), there's not much you can't do.
It's important to note that there's a shift in expectation going on with the issue you bring up. Prior to now, we've been discussing creating a character from a narrative standpoint, and then figuring out how to (best) represent them under RPG rules, and how that differs from the sorts of characters that you'd make if you were to design them around mechanical abilities first and then layer narrative cohesion onto that after the fact. The key thing to note here is that all of this is taking place in a vacuum; this development is happening purely for its own sake (e.g. for making a character and posting it online, for your own amusement, etc.).
If you know that you're going to be making a character for actual game-play in someone else's campaign setting, then it's incumbent on you to get the salient details of the campaign - ideally both the narrative nature and scope of it, as well as what mechanical options are allowed - and use that as the basis that you start from when thinking up what sort of character you'd like. If you really want to play a half-celestial cyborg kitsune, and your GM tells you that his next campaign is going to be set in a low-magic, low-technology human-only world, then you're going to need to shelve that particular character concept. You're not wrong that dreaming up any character - without restrictions - with Eclipse is going to therefore require that you have access to any of the book's options, but that's understood to be a far cry from what happens at the table anyway; those two scenarios are simply different animals.
That said, I honestly think that particular abilities being restricted isn't quite a big deal - insofar as limiting character concepts - anyway. That's because most concepts (at least insofar as their powers and abilities go) tend to define them in terms of what they can do, and how they do it. The "how" is easy, where the game rules are concerned; you can reskin powers to say they're caused by whatever you want. The actual game rules are more concerned with "what" you're doing. To that end, one of Eclipse's greatest strengths is that you can accomplish an effect in myriad different ways, for different costs. I've seen a lot of people suggest that this means that those abilities aren't "balanced" (to use a loaded term) against each other, which always makes me shake my head every time, since that assumes that every single option is on the proverbial table. What it actually means is that the GM can remove certain powers and abilities without removing entire possibilities from the game.
If you really want to play a character that can raise the dead, for example, and the GM isn't letting characters purchase magic progressions (i.e. slot-based spellcasting), there are still plenty of ways to do so, from taking an Inherent Spell to having taking Siddhisyoga with an item that can animate the dead to channeling with conversion, and that's just off the top of my head. The flexibility of what Eclipse offers means that even if some abilities are off the table, the narrative impact isn't as great as you'd think.
I wrote a new blog post (here on FimFiction) that talks about this more. I've been kicking around this particular blog entry for some time now, and your question galvanized me to go and finally write it down.
That said, you've pretty much got the right of it. Lex's original conception was to make a very smart character that had very poor social skills, who was able to conceive of grand ideas thanks to how intelligence he was, but couldn't get any traction in their dissemination and implementation because of his prickly personality. That, in turn, would lead to frustration which would cause conflict, which is at the core of any narrative. Said conflict would be internal (e.g. "To what extent can I legitimately force people to do things that I know would be better for them?") and external (e.g. trying to revolutionize the incompetent - as he sees it - political order into something more proactive and dynamic).
That was the core of Lex's character from the beginning. Since he was originally conceived of as a pony, I did take the basics of Equestrian characteristics into his design (e.g. spellcasting, since I knew I wanted him to be a unicorn, due to the high degree of variability which spellcasting offered), but the central aspects of his character would have worked in any setting, regardless of the kind of magic used (or even if there was none at all).
7982390
Huh, I should really check that book out then. The idea of something being beyond stats is always weird: If the GM wants rocks to fall, he can just say that rocks fall, he doesn't need a book for that (or make the rocks sentient).
Yeah, that's what I meant. It's the build that is, from a purely mechanical standpoint, the only real "viable" build. It's a really stupid build, but it works. Still, no one plays it, so the people that are really only in it for mechanical advantages seem to be thin. In Eclipse, building Pun-Pun would be an expenditure of 18 CP, but it's just a really unattractive concept.
Well, in Eclipse that might be true, but in regular 3.5, you are already limited in what you can do and how low the floor is. Even if you build your "Ubercharger" the way you generally build them (Barbarian 1/Fighter 9/Frenzied Berserker 10), you are still diverse enough to contribute to a combat that doesn't involve charging into battle: You can still pick up a shield and a shortsword and play it that way in close quarters. You won't be as effective as someone who trained for that scenario, but as it's not your primary tactic, it wouldn't make sense for you (be it narrative or mechanically) to be exceptionally good at a strategy you don't use often.
In Eclipse... I'm not 100% sure how you would even build a character that can only do one thing (especially if you are allowed to build a race) beyond maybe level 3 unless you start to specialize your abilities to the point of absurdity. You'd also need to avoid a situation where you use abilities to make a tactic viable where it normally wouldn't be. Justifying an Ubercharger in Eclipse is really hard... Not so much as why he has so many charge related abilities (like double damage or augment attack) as why he has so many abilities specialized to only apply while charging (like a load of enhanced strikes).
Yeah, that's a valid point.
I think we are starting to talk about different things again. I mean, it kinda is a shift, but we had that a while ago, didn't we? I figured that when you said you'd frown at people assuming every option to be on the table, you meant to say that mechancial options were inherently meant to be limited by a game master while they wouldn't limit narrative options. In which case, we would now be dealing with an imaginary game master who reserves his right to veto every ability, but also every concept, as opposed to being in the vacuum we were before. Then you now wrote that:
Which is the point I was trying to make: Only because your concept isn't based on mechanics doesn't mean it can't be veto'd. If we go by the example of raising the dead, if the GM says you can't do that, you can't do that, even if you purchase inherent spell for Astral Construct which you could probably refluff if you really wanted to.
I mean, I guess that's my fault for not making myself clear: When I said that the GM would restrict an ability, I didn't mean the things detailed under Paths and Powers or Special Abilities, I mean the GM restricting the "ability to do X", regardless of what special ability was used to produce the effect.
Interestingly enough, a character who does one thing only (an Ubercharger, to bring that example back) would be far less inconvenienced by restriced special abilities than someone with diverse abilities, because the specialized character can invest more CP into the more expensive options, while a character with a wider profile would miss out on abilities entirely due to a lack of CP.
And I'll be taking a look at that :3
7983865
To be clear, Legends & Lore was the title of both a 1E book about gods and the 2E book about gods. For 1E, it was what they eventually changed the title of Deities & Demigods to (after they removed the Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythoi). For 2E, it was the name of the gods book right off the bat, and outlined the powers and limitations of gods in 2E. (Those same powers and limits were later reprinted in Faiths & Avatars, which was itself an excellent book, as well as the first of a three-part series.)
But yeah, I don't care much for the idea of something being beyond stats either. I can see why Eclipse has an option for that (i.e. Divine Attribute), but for the most part it's not something that's meant to be permanent. Personally, I got quite a kick out of The Immortal's Handbook: Ascension and Immortal's Handbook: Epic Bestiary vol. 1; they utterly broke the math of the d20 System, but damn were they epic for just how far they pushed things! There were so many ideas - plus things like new spells and artifacts - in those books that they were worth the price of purchase for those alone. (Plus I've heard about a few people who were actually crazy enough to try and game at those levels.)
Yeah, that's why it's the logical end-point of "mechanics first" character design. When you go for optimization to that degree, then trying to layer a story on top of it becomes somewhat meaningless. Obviously it's the most extreme example, but it's emblematic of the weaknesses of that particular philosophy. Which isn't to say that the same thing isn't true for an extreme version of narrative development, which is essentially all prose and no actual rules.
This is largely a matter of nitpicking as to what constitutes "being able to contribute." I agree that a build specialized around one particular feature doesn't mean that you can't do anything if that particular feature becomes useless (or otherwise unusable) in a fight, simply because if all else fails, you can try and make an aid another check, let alone just whack at the opponent normally. But that's not usually what's understood by "contributing" in the conversations that I'm privy to. Rather, the people involved want to 1) be able to do something that other characters can't do (as well as them), and 2) have it make a meaningful impact. Obviously, terms like "as well" and "meaningful" are notably plastic in what their practical definitions are - which can't really be helped, since most instances are going to be at least somewhat situational - but that seems to be the general understanding.
Now, to a degree, it's expected that sometimes that just won't be feasible. There are simply going to be sometimes when certain circumstances restrict you from bringing out your specialty. But if you've put everything into a single trick, rather than diversifying, then your character is less robust in the face of such circumstances. That's particularly notable since, as you level up, it's going to become more and more plausible that enemies have heard of you, know what you can do, and will start trying to arrange countermeasures. If you're really good at charging, expect to encounter difficult terrain a lot more when the bad guys can pick the battlefield, or they'll start flying, or make sure to have high enough speed to stay outside of your charging range, etc. The point being that when you just have one trick, that's easier for enemies to deal with, at which point you're suddenly restricted in what you can do, and become, in that example, just another fighter.
I'm not sure there was a mutual understanding, there. When we were talking purely in the abstract, it was about which method of character generation we prefer and why, before moving on to practical aspects of doing so for a game, as opposed to in a vacuum. Insofar as an actual game is concerned, a GM does - and should - preemptively decide which mechanical abilities in Eclipse are vetoed or altered. Insofar as narrative concepts goes, that's a stickier bit of ground to tread, but there's also some room for saying that particular concepts are also disruptive, because they can be - you don't need to break the rules to impinge on other people having a good time.
Sure, that's within the GM's purview as well, as I see it. If they want to say that their campaign world is one where the dead never come back - either as undead or brought back to life - then that's that, and it doesn't matter what abilities you take. That particular restriction would apply to narrative as well as mechanical options, so you couldn't say that your character had been resurrected previously (unless you wanted your character to be a conman or charlatan). Now, this might cause some conflict if a player is adamant about wanting something, but that's the sort of conflict that will need to be worked out between them.
I disagree with you there, because there are several presumptions that are being made. The major one is that a diverse character is "missing out" on something due to spreading their CP expenditures around; that presumes that the character would be taking all of the related abilities if they could, and that's not a given. Eclipse is diverse enough and customizable enough that taking one or two abilities in a particular set might be all that were wanted. Taking Witchcraft, for example, doesn't mean that you're in it to acquire all of the Witchcraft powers in a single path. That's sort of the point of a diverse selection - you don't go into a particular suite of abilities too deeply because you don't need to.
In that case, the character is much less likely to suffer when they can't use one of their abilities - which, as noted, can be situational rather than due to the GM simply disallowing it from being picked - since that means that they have other abilities that they can fall back on.
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I can't understand the need for something truly omnipotent in any setting, really. I mean, if there was one such being, then everything that happens happens because said being wants it and can't really be stopped, making an "adventure" a rather pointless endeavour. I do appreciate the fact that it's temporary in Eclipse, though I think it was more intended as one of those abilities Thoth put in to allow people to build characters from any media.
I do have Ascension, but not the bestiary. Some abilities in the later levels of power are clearly broken, but surprisingly enough not much more broken than some of the Salient Divine Abilities in standard 3.5.
I don't remember spells in it though (well, aside from that one epic level spell), but what I remembered (and liked) were the different domains and how they influence the deity associated with them. Has a nice "power with a price"-feel to it: You don't use a domain, the domain uses YOU!
Well, given that my example was a mundane character with full BAB, it is quite likely that he can whack people far more efficiently than others of his level een without his speciality applying. If that's "meaningful" is questionable in a lot of cases, at least at higher levels, because a cleric is, hands down, just often a better fighter than the fighter.
Sure, but in standard 3.5, that's the issue of multiclassing. Of course, if you don't specialize in something, it's clear that you have more options if you diversify. Of course, that also means that enemies won't be able to plan against you. The reason for that is simple: Why would the enemies plan for a strategy someone uses if said someone has a lot of different strategies and none of them are effective anyway?
When it comes to covering weaknesses, the fighter can do that just fine, because in standard 3.5, a lot of the fighters abilities depend on equipment rather than feats. Every Ubercharger can pick up a bow and be effective with it. Now if you want to be REALLY good at fighting with the bow, you'll need at least Point Blank Shot, Rapid Shot and Manyshot, which are feats that you'll lack for improving your charge. The most problematic part is if you branch out before getting Shocktrooper, leaving you in a positon where you can't hit whenever you charge and probably only fire a single arrow because you have yet to acquire Rapid Shot. In 3.5, you simply have rather limited resources, and splitting them up works in the same way taking one year of schooling in three different jobs and completing none of them as opposed to taking three years of schooling in a single job and completing your education: Generally badly.
Now in Eclipse, that's a different matter entirely, because it (mostly) eliminates feat chains and all the problems associated with it, and even where it doesn't eliminate feats chains you can specialize the parts you don't need to work as nothing but a prerequisite.
Oh, that's an option too, but then your quickly risk falling into the position of "Jack of all trades, master of none": You don't have all the related abilities, so no one will counter it on the count of your character not being effective in the first place.
The problem this creates with the concept above is that you end up in a spot where even if you are in your "speciality" (if you even want to call it that), you are unable to contribute as good as others, though I'll admit it does have the upside that you don't delve into ability chains too deeply and are resistant to things like Blood Curse or the "Bestow Curse"-spells and always have at least SOMETHING to do, even if that something maybe worse than the aforementioned "Aid Another"-action.
Now another possibility would be to instead create a backup-plan, so you are reasonably good at two things and can switch between them OR you have an ability that let's you at least contribute when you otherwise couldn't due to most circumstances. This still means you can be shut down, but it's harder to do so. In 3.5, again, you'd lack the resources to do so with abilities unless you cannibalize your first ability (meaning you just changed your speciality instead), but can buy one or two magic items to help you out (like an item of constant flight).
In Eclipse, that can be done without greater expenses via Innate Enchantment, Witchcraft or Rune Magic (provided you have at least some Mana already). As Innate Enchantment is used by a lot of characters anyways, putting 2 points into it for a use-activated CL1 Power Word: Pain can allow you to slowly take down enemies you couldn't touch due to DR or AC, at least at lower levels. Witchcraft has Inner Fire as a fallback, and needing more than spells a quarter of your level for something secondary strikes me as weird. Rune Magic costs only skill points, but even if you have to buy Mana it helps for the occasional rare effect. You won't be able to cast more than one or two spells per encounter with Rune Magic, but that's just how it is, and if you need it more often, you are being targeted anyway and should consider Leadership or a similar ability.
My favorite "backups" are Witchcraft II (preferably with Adamant Will) for 12 CP plus "The Inner Fire" and a refluffed "Lure of Darkness" (corrupted for increased effect to only provide apprentices), gained via the Gateway and the Duties-pact.
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That usually gets into issues of "won't (or can't) get involved (at that level), for whatever reason," which sort of makes the entire thing superfluous. I personally also find such things to be very unhelpful where world-building is concerned, since a character's abilities are how they interact with the world, and gods and similar super-beings will be the main power-players that have helped make the current setting the way it is, whether politically, militarily, religiously, or otherwise. Knowing what they can do and how they do it is kind of helpful in that regard.
To be fair, most of the new spells and artifacts (which were a relative scattering) were in the Bestiary, which I highly recommend. More notable were the various epic adventure seeds with the associated monsters, which were very evocative. It's such a shame that the next few volumes never came out; I enjoyed those books so much.
Which is sort of the point; with his special ability shut down, he's basically just another fighter of his level, which is considered to be the minimum threshold for "contributing" at all, since fighters tend to be the baseline by which other classes are judged. He's not useless, but his ability to do something that the other characters can't do at that point is going to be very much in doubt (unless they have no other martials and no buffed cleric, as you noted), and that's without getting into issues of his contribution being (perceived as) meaningful.
That's really the thing to keep in mind; a character with their special ability/abilities negated doesn't have to be rendered useless - the standard isn't "can they do anything at all now?" it's "how can they continue to meaningfully contribute to the scenario?" For most characters, just whacking at the monster isn't usually enough; once they've gotten beyond the low levels, even martial characters tend to have special powers and/or equipment that let them utilize different abilities in conjunction with their combat prowess.
The problem is that 3.5 impinges on diversification pretty hard, because it tends to make special abilities cumulative in their efficacy. Feat chains, class ability progressions, and similar "build-on-what-came-before" abilities mean that going down that path will let you reach the "best" options after you've paid your metaphorical dues. Dabblers, by contrast, don't tend to get anything to call their own that someone else isn't able to do better, which places them in the awkward position of being understudies who only get to shine if there's no one else trying to full a particular niche that they can step into. This is worse when you face opponents who are specialists, since it tends to require a specialist of some sort of counter their own optimization.
You say that the ubercharger with a bow can "be effective" with it, but is that the same thing as being able to meaningfully contribute? With its single major trick off of the table, it's going to - at best - be able to do as good as any other un-optimized martial character could (or even a buffed cleric, as you noted). It can still add to the encounter, but not being unable to do anything isn't the bar that we're aiming for. Rather, it's that they can do something that everyone else can't (or at least not as well) and can make a meaningful difference that way. That's going to be far more difficult to achieve when you're operating at a level that's considered to be basic, which any other character of your broad type (i.e. martial) could do, and which someone else is likely already doing better. As you noted, multiclassing tends to make this worse, because abilities are segregated by class, forcing you to get to the higher levels to get the options that really help in this regard.
Exactly, which tends to remove the problem of having to work your way through long sequences of abilities to get to the ones that are really helpful. That, along with not tying certain abilities to specific levels, suddenly makes diversification something that's plausible without it reducing a character to a specialist's understudy.
If you're talking about Eclipse here, then you've lost me. As previously noted, that isn't really a problem that Eclipse characters suffer from.
I don't think that's the case, at least where Eclipse characters are concerned. With diversification no longer punishing you via sacrificing higher-level abilities in exchange for preset lower-level ones that other characters likely have, it's far more likely that the entire party is sporting such a degree of differentiation that no one is going to step on anyone else's toes to begin with, outside of very basic things like possible skill overlap or someone having a few more points of BAB than someone else. At that point everyone is able to contribute meaningfully simply because there's no more measuring yourself against other characters; everyone is bringing something so different to the table that you can't really measure yourself against another character in the first place. Even if one of your specialties gets locked out, you'll typically have something else to fall back on.
I think it's not that difficult to be reasonably good at numerous things, though that's going to vary depending on your level and how many CPs you've spent, but the point is that dabbling is so easy in Eclipse that it's almost hard not to. You can make whatever sort of martial-focused character you want, but you can probably afford to buy some Mana, maybe some ranks in a particular Rune Magic, and right there you have something that can help you out when you're in a bad martial position. Throw in an Occult Talent, maybe some Innate Enchantment, and you can potentially have numerous other ways to contribute that won't be the same as anyone else in your party.
It sounds like you're agreeing with me, at this point.
Eclipse, to my mind, doesn't go quite so far as to totally reverse the usual 3.5 paradigm of "specialists rule and generalists are terrible, unless a specialist is somehow locked out of their specialty," but it does completely blow it apart. The lack of major ability chains - and even when it has them, the powers along them tend to be (though not always) different, rather than cumulative (e.g. the advanced Channeling abilities), which means that you can take just a few of them and be just as good at those abilities as someone who went deeper - or tying abilities to specific levels means that generalists tend to shine just as much as specialist, because every generalist has become a de facto specialist, since no one else will likely step too far into their niche within the party, simply by virtue of how many possibilities there are. That's before you even get into specialization and corruption.
So having one particular ability locked down will often mean that you can just use another, and won't suffer nearly the same loss of effectiveness (in terms of contributing) that you would in 3.5.
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I should take a better look at the Bestiary then.
I believe there was a half-finished version of a new book out there, but I'm not 100% sure if that's true. Sad that they didn't continue producing books. Granted, the stats on a lot of the abilities and all that were absolutely gamebreaking, but the ideas were nice.
Well, whacking monsters is everything a fighter does, even when he utilizes his specialization. An Ubercharger may deal 4-digit damage per strike, but it's still whacking a monster at the heart of it, and I struggle to see a situation where a fighter is ever gonna do something else than that, no matter the feats he actually took. Even taking Martial Study into account, he'd be limited to 3 abilities and the few stances he can unlock with that, and I doubt they can provide anything that a good magic item can't grant.
If you don't consider whacking a monster to be a meaningful contribution... It would probably best not to play a fighter in the first place...
That doesn't mean there aren't martials that can contribute in different ways, such as Tome of Battle initiators, but a fighter lacks that.
The most a fighter could do would be... Maybe taking Binder feats, but even that is only valid at lower levels, so it would come down to equipment. And let me tell you, being an Ubercharger is in no way so expensive that you are entirely broke at the end of it, since a Valorous Claymore and a Belt of Strenght is normally all that's needed item-wise.
In 3.5, it's not a matter of very hard: It's impossible. If you want to shine in an area, you are screwed when your speciality isn't available. As a matter of fact, the same goes for wizards. Their speciality is just spellcasting, and an Antimagic-Field destroys that. So does the fact that Antimagic-Fields exist make wizards unplayable in 3.5? I'd say far from it.
But it checks out: Can only do one thing (spellcasting), that one thing can be negated (Antimagic) and if their one thing is negated, they are worse at nearly everything (they don't hold a candle to most classes when it comes to working in an Antimagic-Field) compared to other characters.
In 3.5, you are bound to have specialties. The only few things that get around that are Gishes, Ardents and Clerics of Mystra, with the former two taking advantage of two clearly unbalanced classes (Abjurant Champion and Ardent) and the third one being effectively immune to Antimagic.
So the issue of non-specialists being useless out of their element isn't so much inherent to the Ubercharger build, it's part of what makes D&D 3.5 the game it is and cannot be fixed without someone in the design team creating a class that somehow does specifically that (which would make it a staple pretty quickly, as it would effectively need to advance everything) or homebrew.
Well, sorta.
See, the way I view it in Eclipse, you can easily sustain more abilities than in 3.5, making a matter of multiple good abilities possible or allowing you to have abilities you can use should your general approach fail. What I have to say is that, in baseline class-3.5, that is not possible outside of a few inherently unbalanced classes.
What I also think, and I think this is the point our opinions (might) diverge on, is that Eclipse still has a limit on how many different abilities you can have before individual abilities dilute. For example, I believe that if you have two "specialities" in Eclipse (let's say Spellcasting and mundane combat), you are worse in either of the two than you would be if you were a specialist in that one, but only inconsequently worse. What I don't believe is that you can continue to add abilities without the individual abilities starting to becoming more ineffective individually. To continue with the example: If you now want to add Shapeshifting as a third full-on ability, you have to sacrifice CP for it as opposed to putting them into the other abilities. Now, that doesn't make you a much worse user of spellcasting or mundane combat compared to someone who only concentrated on these two, but you will start to notice a small gap between your abilties and the abilities of someone who specialized in them (you might lack a few caster levels, proficiency with all exotic weapons or a few specialized hit die). Add a fourth (let's say you want a load of skill points too) and you have a small gap between you and someone with only two "specialities" too and the specialist that only concentrated on a single thing starts to outshine you in that one area. If you then want to add a fifth one (you want to channel energy too) you are starting to reach the point where you'll want a relic and/or one of your abilities might not be up to speed anymore.
So when you say:
I agree with you, but would still like to point out that it's there, even if it's significantly smaller.
I did say that making an Ubercharger in Eclipse would be hard, because you'd have bought pretty much whatever you need at early levels because it isn't locked behind a level/class-wall. However, I also think that a character that has an ability that fits every possible scenario will probably not shine as much in any given sceario as a specialist would shine in his speciality.
So this:
Is true, unless someone goes out of their way to make it "competetive".
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I heartily recommend it!
There is indeed such a book out there; it's called The Immortal's Handbook: Gods & Monsters. The format of the finished write-ups, in terms of introducing new spells, items, artifacts, etc. as adjuncts to an individual's or creature's listing, is something also found in the Bestiary.
I think that we're having a difference in our thinking here; it's not just that the fighter is "whacking monsters," per se that defines what he does; it's how. This gets back to the idea of "meaningfully" contributing, and doing so by a method that no one else in the group is putting forth. Different methods of specialized attacking are seen as fulfilling that role, whereas having that specialty negated and being reduced to just making an "ordinary" attack aren't. It's not a question of bonuses per se, but rather that the character has found a niche and has unparalleled (compared to the rest of the group). An ubercharger might just be making attack rolls if you get down to the base description of what they're doing, but in fact that's them fulfilling their function, as opposed to having to operate in a manner that any other fighter could do.
Again, just "whacking monsters" is a term I was using to illustrate the idea of making attacks without being able to bring your specialty to bear. If you've been reduced to a role that anyone who's even remotely similar to you (e.g. another martial) can fulfill, then that is the definition of no longer meaningfully contributing, with the operative word being "meaningfully." You might still be doing something to help win the fight, but that by itself isn't enough, which is why aid another actions are so rarely utilized (at least by PCs). Fighters are meant to specialize, hence why they were given so many bonus feats right from the start - that didn't work out as the game progressed and virtually every other class got better abilities (and feats didn't pack enough punch to really help bridge that gap), but the idea was that a fighter making an attack was going to have abilities that differentiated them from other full-BAB martials, because it recognized that just making bog-standard attacks was the baseline that characters wanted to rise above.
In the strictest sense, multiclassing doesn't make this impossible per se, but that's largely because you could multiclass into prestige classes that are meant to make up for moving away from higher-level progressive powers by offering their own. In actuality, that was very hard to achieve, since prestige class design was often lacking at the mechanical level (and the narrative one was typically even worse). But otherwise, yeah, splitting your levels between base classes tended to be a question of degrees of losing, rather than anything else.
But having said that, I'm seeing another fundamental disconnect with what we're talking about here, which is that I think that spellcasting by itself is too broad to be considered a "specialty" unto itself, the same way all combat-related abilities are too broad to be categorized as "whacking monsters." Most options that limit spellcasting tend to focus on particular areas of applicability, such as energy resistance/immunities (thus reducing the effectiveness of spells dealing that type of damage), high spell resistance (requiring either specialized countermeasures such as Spell Penetration/Greater Spell Penetation, or shifting to spells that don't allow SR), or even spell level (e.g. globe of invulnerability). Antimagic field is the exception to this, rather than the rule, which is why it's not really the standard for determining when a particular specialty is shut down. That's more of a question of a fire elementalist going up against creatures with immunity to fire.
Sounds like a factotum to me.
But more seriously, 3.5 had plenty of generalists; just look at the bard. The problem was that the generalists didn't have a chance to shine, because specialists overshadowed them 99% of the time, with the other 1% being when the specialists were out of the picture for some reason. That didn't happen very often because designers discovered early on that no one liked having their characters completely shut down, regardless of how often it did or did not happen, and so became extremely reluctant to do that (which is why instant-death and save-or-suck spells kept getting nerfed). You could be a generalist in 3.5, but it meant that you were relegated to understudy the vast majority of the time.
The problem was that 3.5 had locked itself in from the get-go with its focus on singular specialization being so favored, and diversification coming with such a heavy opportunity cost. That wasn't really something that could be helped, though, since it was essentially baked into class level progression, particularly when people decided that they hated "dead levels," which required that you get something special every time (or at least sometimes when) you leveled up (in addition to "standard" things like Hit Dice, skill points, BAB, save bonuses, new ability points, feats, etc.).
Sure, no argument there.
This is, largely, where our opinions seem to differ. To be clear, it's not that I think that Eclipse has done away with opportunity costs altogether - at the very least, there's only so many CPs that you'll have to spend, so it's inherently in there - I just think that it's reduced it to the point of near-total irrelevance. That's largely because most abilities don't have progressive chains, and those that do tend to differentiate what can be done, rather than how effectively you're doing it. Taking advanced channeling abilities will increase your diversification in regards to what effects you can make when channeling, but typically won't make any given ability any stronger than it was previously. That's important, because it means that if you're not concerned with diversifying that particular ability in favor of diversifying by taking a completely different ability altogether, you're not being punished for it. That's one of the benefits of not having these abilities be tied to class level; they either don't need to scale, or they inherently scale on their own.
With that established, you're now free from "having" to take all of the related abilities in a given chain in order to make them remain relevant as you level up. With that gone, you can instead focus on taking feats that fit your character's personal theme, which is to say, their narrative as to who they are as a character.
Which, again, I don't disagree with, but I think that it's reduced nature is less notable than its reduced relevance. The progressive nature of abilities as mechanical "keeping up with the Joneses" isn't really there in Eclipse; you can take just a base ability and one or two modifiers and that won't really handicap you as play moves to higher levels the way it would in 3.5, because the abilities aren't trying limit themselves to particular gradations of power the way they would in 3.5, where how strong an ability is tends to be tied directly to a class's level, since that's when it's presumed to be "appropriate" to introduce into play.
Obviously, spellcasting progressions are an exception to this, but even then that's greatly ameliorated by alternative ways to get access to spell effects; the real benefit of spellcasting progressions are the variability inherent in them, since those (depending on how broad their theme is) allow you to be a specialist that changes their specialty at will.
The issue I have here isn't so much that I disagree as it is that I think that the benefit of Eclipse is that the possibilities of what someone can specialize in, or even generalize in, are now so broad that generalists will have a greater chance to shine due to the expanded breadth of possibilities that can be reasonably addressed. Specialization can't dominate when there's so much more that can be done.
Typos die!
While there are no typos here, this sentence does seem a bit weird. I suggest adding "while" or "and" before "looking around".
I believe this sounds better without the "only".
You like contractions, don't you? I think this sounds better without them. As in "They ended up right back where they started."
Party time! Hopefully Lex lives, otherwise this story is over. I can see it now, "Magical prodigy dead! In other news, the Princesses have come to the aid of Vanhoover."
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Typos slain!
I agree that something needs to be changed, but I think it'd work best by eliminating the second comma.
I thought it over, and I agree. It's gone now.
I do like contractions, as I think that they reflect a manner of conversing that sounds more natural. That's less true for narration, however. In this case, I used "they'd" as a contraction for "they had," which is the past perfect tense. Getting rid of that makes the verb tense become past participle, which I don't think sounds right.
I like to think that Nosey would write a more pithy headline than that.
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I like to pretend that Nosey isn't here. She has not been mentioned for several chapters, and out of sight, out of mind.
8171069 Aw, she'd be sad to hear that.
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Eh, she's good at being, well, Nosey, but I really just don't like her character. She seems to have a very messed up moral code, or something.
8171092 She's pretty self-absorbed, to be sure.