Monthly Archives: February 2013

Georgette Heyer and the Via Negativa

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Recently I was reading Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer, and—

OK. Half of you are saying, “Who’s Georgette Heyer?” and the other half are saying, “Hey, you’re male.” Time for a recap.

Georgette Heyer was an author—or, so I gather, the author—of regency romances in the middle of the 20th century. Regency romances are romance novels set in Regency England, in the time after George III went made but before his death. I do not usually read romance novels, but there’s something about Heyer, as authors as diverse as Lois McMaster Bujold and Julie Davis have noted. She’s funny, she has great characters, she writes well; and when you’re in the mood for something light and frothy, they are great fun. I suspect that she is more akin to P.G. Wodehouse (though less farcical) than to the average romance novelist. And it would be hard to overstate her influence. Some years back there was a flood of novels intended as sequels or companions to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and with the noted exception of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the ones I glanced at all seemed to owe as much or more to Heyer as they did to Austen. She created her own fictional world, every bit as carefully constructed as a good science fiction or fantasy milieu, and millions have accepted it as the Real Thing. (Give her a try. Try Frederika. Or possibly Talisman Ring. Or maybe The Grand Sophy. I’ll wait.)

So anyway, I was reading Cotillion, in which a thirty-something man of property is travelling from London to the country to make an offer of marriage to a long-time acquaintance. He is not in love with her, or with anyone, but he’s the heir and it has been successfully impressed upon him that he must marry. He well likes his long-time friend, and so off he goes. On the way, he encounters a young woman of good family, great spirit, equal beauty, and little experience who is running away from home because her grandfather, the patriarch, won’t let her marry the man she wants to marry, because she is too young. What’s a gentleman to do? She has a grand strategy, but he can see it won’t answer. He can’t take her back to her family, because she won’t tell him who they are. He can’t leave her on her own; there are unscrupulous people about, don’t you know. Got to take her with him. And from there, of course, the tangles increase.

Now, here’s what led me to reflection. All of his acquaintance are wondering what has happened to him. They hear about the girl, and they all begin to jump to conclusions. Long, drawn out, extremely logical, plausible, believable conclusions, all of which happen to be quite wrong; and they go wrong for two reasons: first, they don’t have all of the information; and some of the information they do have they disbelieve. But as I say, their conclusions are, given the information they have and choose to believe, completely logical.

It occurred to me that we are in much the same position relative to God. It is possible (see Thomas Aquinas) to deduce the existence of God from first principles; and given that He exists, there are certain things that can proven about Him: that He is omnipotent and omniscient, for example. But is less obvious is that these statements are essentially negative. God is infinite, you see, not in the mathematical sense, but in the sense of being unbounded. We can put no bounds on His knowledge or His power. That doesn’t mean that we truly understand what it means to be omnipotent; we don’t. It is simply not conceivable to us.

And yet, on a daily basis we try to make sense of God, and thus to put bounds on Him. And perhaps we even reason logically, and come to valid conclusions, based on what we know for sure. But the one thing we can know for certain sure is that God eludes our intellectual grasp. This why Pope Benedict in his writings frequently refers to God as the “Wholly Other”.

And yet, all is not lost. We are doomed to intellectual failure, but we are not doomed altogether.

We cannot grasp God, not intellectually, and certainly not by reasoning from first principles. But He knows this, and He doesn’t leave us orphaned. Instead, He has revealed Himself to us, first through His history with the Israelites, and then in the person of Jesus Christ. He’s in fact told us quite a lot about Himself, and all we really need. It’s partial information, but it’s enough.

Of course, we still go astray intellectually, just as the various on-lookers in Cotillion do. But the confusion does not go on forever. In time the gentleman comes home, and the on-lookers are able to find out from him what’s really been going on. And so we can go to God; and so in time He’ll bring us to live with Him, we are allowed to hope, and we will see Him clearly, and all our questions will be answered.

Misdiagnosing Your Neighbor

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God leads us to him via our interests, because grace perfects nature. And that means that even if I were able to give every thing under heaven its due importance, my own life would still emphasize certain things over others. Let’s assume* that I have reached that degree of sainthood that I am able to do this. Thus, I know that I love the object of my interest for Christ’s sake:

Step1

Other folks, however, can’t see into my heart. What they see is this:

Step0

Birds of a feather flock together, naturally, and so when it comes to my particular interests in the faith, I’m going to tend to look for and hang out with other people who look like me:

Step0

And because I like them, I may tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they have it all together:

Step1

But of course, I don’t know that for sure. And if they are in a different place than I expect them to be, they can lead me quite far astray. Do they love the poor for the sake of Christ, or do they love Christ for the sake of the poor? But probably they are OK.

But then there are those other people in the church…the ones who don’t seem to share my interests. The ones who are always talking about issues that I just can’t get exercised about. You know, the ones I suspect of being doctrinally incorrect.

Confusion 1

Now, really, what am I supposed to do with people like this? They don’t use the same words as I do, and they don’t do the same things that I do, and they talk about things that don’t interest me all that much. How am I supposed to be sure that they haven’t run off of the rails?

Confusion 2 1

Gosh, I might have to talk to them, get to know them a little, and find out what they really think. Maybe I’d discover that everything’s quite all right.

Confusion 3 1

Or I could just go on assuming the worst…

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* For the sake of argument. You understand.

Christ vs. Other Things

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We all love many different things. When we first become Christians, Christ becomes one of the things we love:

Interests 1

Over time, if we persist in following Christ, our relationship with the things we love begins to change. In particular, we begin to love Christ more than the other things, and to love them for his sake:

Interests 2

And in time (and by God’s grace) we begin to love all things in due proportion to their worth, and all for Christ’s sake; and some things we used to love we abandon altogether:*

Interests 3

But the things that we cease to love, we cease to love because we now see that they don’t deserve our love. All that is good, we will love as it deserves; and thus it is said that if we seek first the kingdom of God, all these things will be added unto us. Woohoo!

______________
* This is an advanced move, but one to which we should all aspire. Kids, do try this at home!

How to Go Wrong in Three Easy Steps

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By our nature as human, we all have objects that interest us. This is a good thing; we’re supposed to be interested in things:

Step0

But grace perfects nature. Those of us who become Christians learn to see Christ in the things that interest us. We love him through them. For example, we might learn to love the poor because we see Christ in them:

Step1

Now, the saints learn to love Christ for his own sake. But some folks learn to see the things they love in Christ. They begin to value Christ because he adds value to those things. For example, we might learn to value Christ because he tells people to love the poor. This is a mistake:

Step2

But things really start to go to hell when we lose interest in Christ and immerse ourselves in the object only, certain that Christ has our back and will support us in everything we do:

Step3

At this point, we are no longer looking at him at all; and we will ride roughshod over anyone who disagrees, or has some object of interest that we dislike.

So don’t do that.

My Pope

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When Pope Benedict was elected pope in 2005, I was not yet Catholic; but I was already interested in the Catholic Church. I was reading Catholic blogs, and buying Catholic books. I’d heard of Cardinal Ratzinger, God’s Rottweiller, and had known people who could not say his name without emphasizing the word “Rat”. I wanted to know more about the Church; and since the Church had elected God’s Rottweiler, I wanted to know more about him, too. As they say, look before you leap over the Tiber. (Although, please note, it was by no means certain at that time that I’d ever do so.)

So, being me, I bought some books. I got his first two interviews with Peter Seewald, Salt of the Earth and God and the World, both of which I need to re-read. And the man I saw there was about as far from being a Rottweiler as one could imagine. In these books I discovered a teacher, a man who wished always to speak the truth, but who could speak the truth in love and gentleness. I discovered a pastor, one with great compassion for human frailty, but who refused to water down the gospel just to make people feel better about their sins. Sin is a moral illness; what we need is a cure, not an anesthetic. In these books, in which the future pope spoke of the problems of the day, he addressed all of the problems I was familiar with from my time in the Episcopal Church, the forces that were driving that communion to schism and irrelevancy. Not only did we need a cure; the Cardinal was familiar with the cure we needed.

I went on to read books he’d written himself (I’ve got a whole shelf of them now, many of which I’ve read and many I’ve not gotten around to yet). I discovered a clear thinker, and a clear speaker, a man I could learn from. And in a short time, I came to love this man, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. I still do.

Am I sorry to see him retire? Yes, and then again, no. He is my pope, the first pope I came to know and trust, and his successor, whoever he will be, will be another man altogether. I love him, and I trust him, and letting go will be tough. He is a tough act to follow.

And yet…when it is time, it is time. I’ve no doubt he made his decision after much prayer, and that it is indeed time. And now, as the papabile-mobile gears up, and saints, sinners, and out-and-out nutcases across the globe are speculating as to who the next pope might be and what kind of pope we should have, I am serene. God’s in charge. He’ll give us the pope we need. I’m content to wait and find out. I’m just glad he gave us Benedict, just at the time I needed him most.

George’s Saga: Angband-Style Combat

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George As I promised, I’m now going to go into some detail about how combat works in Angband. Those of you who are not game geeks can feel free to move along.

In Angband, combat is based on skill and armor class (AC). Every mobile (by which I mean both the player character and the monsters) has an armor class; for monsters it is a fixed number, and for the PC it’s a number based on the armor the PC is wearing and many other factors, including the PC’s dexterity. The higher your AC, the harder you are to hit.

Similarly, the higher your attack skill, the easier it is to hit your opponent. Each PC has an attack skill based on his race, class, and level, and his equipment and circumstances can increase or decrease his “to hit” modifier. The basic equation is

	K = BASE + BONUS*LEVEL + 3*TO_HIT

A level 2 human warrior has a base attack skill of 68, and gets 4.5 more points for each level he attains. He might have an enchanted sword that gives him a to-hit bonus of +1. His attack skill is then

	K = 68 + 4.5*2 + 3*1 = 80

Thus, the PC’s skill goes up as he gains experience (and hence levels), and as he uses better and better equipment. There are also magic spells that will increase his “to hit” modifier, and other circumstances (such as wearing armor that’s too heavy for his strength) that will decrease it.

A monster’s skill level is similar; for normal physical attacks it’s simply

	K = 60 + 3*LEVEL

Thus, a level 5 monster will have an attack skill of 75. However, it gets a little more complicated because monsters have a wide variety of kinds of attack in Angband. Some monsters are poisonous, and will crawl on you to poison you. Others breathe fire, or spray acid, or such like. The base skill differs for each of these kinds of attack, and the level bonus might differ as well (I don’t recall, offhand). At the moment, the monsters in George’s Saga only have physical attacks.

Okay, so we have attack skills and armor classes. Let’s bring them together.

The probability P of a mobile with skill K hitting a mobile with armor class AC is

	P = 100 * (K - 0.75AC)/K

(It’s a little more complicated than this, actually; the code needs to handle the case where K is less than or equal to 0.) I don’t know how they came up with that particular equation; but it allows me to roll percentile dice for any attacker/defender pair, and if the roll is less than or equal to P, it’s a hit.

Well, actually…all rolls of 5% or less are deemed to be hits, and all rolls of 95% or more are deemed to be misses. (But that’s by the way, except that when the roll exceeds 95% I get to animate a “Swoosh” over the defender.)

If the attacker hits the defender, then he rolls for damage, and the damage is immediately applied to the defender. The armor doesn’t absorb it.

This system has many advantages over the GURPS Lite system, at least for my purposes.

  • It’s simpler, in that combat is resolved after one roll: the attacker hits or he doesn’t.
  • If the adversaries are of similar levels, the attacker will hit and do damage more often than not. There’s no frustration because you can’t hit the monster that’s attacking you.
  • If the defender is of a much higher level than the attacker, the attacker won’t be able to hit nearly as often (and will probably be toast in short order). This is appropriate.
  • Attack skill increases in small increments with levels gained and with “to hit” bonuses from equipment.
  • Armor class similarly increases in small increments with bonuses from equipment.

For example, a level 5 monster can hit a PC with no armor 95% of the time. Once the PC gets his armor class up to 8, the monster can hit 90% of the time; and when the PC’s armor class is 50 the monster can only hit 50% of the time. That might seem like a lot; a PC with AC=50 is probably at level 20 or higher. How come the monster can hit him so often?

It turns out that it’s fine. The point is that as the player’s AC increases the monster will do incrementally less damage, because it hits less often. And then, there’s a factor I’ve left out.

In Angband, unlike GURPS, a PC’s hit points go up fairly dramatically with level. A level 1 character might have 10 or 12 hit points; a level 25 character might have over 100 hit points. What’s going on here, in my view, is not that the level 25 character has ten times more life. Rather, it’s that the damage he takes is less significant. One point of damage for him is a minor cut or scrape, rather than a serious wound. In short, a mobile’s maximum number of hit points is a proxy for his skill at defense; the higher it is, the greater the number of small hits he can take. So the level 5 monster hits the level 25 PC less often, and the times the monster does hit are less important.

This is the scheme I’ve adopted in George’s Saga, and it appears to be working quite nicely.

George’s Saga: The Angband Connection

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George Last time I wrote about how the combat system in GURPS Lite didn’t have the right characteristics for a computer RPG, or at least not for the kind of RPG I have in mind. GURPS Lite is a game in which hit points are limited, each successful hit on an opponent is a major event (and therefore successful hits are rare), and each skill increment makes a big difference (and therefore the total number of skill increments is small).

By contrast, I need a combat system in which there is a wide range of skill levels with small increments, so that a player character can grow slowly and but steadily in skill over the course of the game—and so that the monsters a PC faces can do the same. A table-top RPG might have these characteristics, but there’s no particular reason why it needs to; and so continue to look at other table-top RPGs seemed counter-productive. And as I’d noted earlier, computer RPGs are seldom well-documented, at least in my experience. To find one that is means turning to a free or open-source game; and of those the one I know best is Angband.

Angband is a massive dungeon crawl with roots that go back to the early 1980’s. I first played Angband’s immediate predecessor, Moria, on the college VAX-11/780 around 1983. (I killed an Icky White Thing, and then died of starvation.) Since then I’ve spent countless hours playing Angband or one its variants.

Classic Angband works like this. You begin in a small town, with a variety of shops and a dungeon entrance. Your mission is to work your way down to level 100, there to slay the evil Morgoth. This is extremely difficult to do, and almost never happens. You begin by designing your character, who belongs to a particular race and has a particular class; and then you begin your expeditions into the dungeon. There are many consumables that you need to survive, notably food and torches, many magic items, and of course weapons and armor. You start with basic equipment; everything else you need to find in the dungeon or buy in one of the shops.

The graphics in Angband are extremely simple, but the monster behaviors and the underlying combat model are rather complex. And it so happens that there are spoiler files available for download that go into a surprising amount of detail about how it all works. In fact, they go into much more detail than I’d realized. And it so happens that Angband has exactly the characteristics that I’m looking for. Next time, I’ll talk about them.

Compulsive Criticism

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Recently I read something on-line that gave me pause. A blogger I’ve been following for many years now had this to say:

We were talking about the habit of being critical—discussing a person we both knew who was caustically critical (and often entertainingly insulting) about everything. She said she didn’t quite approve of that attitude, because it was so safe.

I was surprised by that word, and asked her what she meant, and she said—more or less—that hating or criticizing everything was safe because it meant you don’t have to take a stand. Liking something means you are opening yourself up; if nothing is good enough for you it’s another way of saying you’re superior to everything. Very smug, very snug. Being insulting and critical, admittedly a position of attack when face-to-face, is psychologically actually a position of retreat.

This did not appear on a Catholic blog, nor a political blog; it appeared on a Photography blog, and the thing being criticized was, oddly, the new Chevy Corvette. But the blogger, Michael Johnson, could have gone one step further: he could have pointed out that this attitude is spiritually and morally corrosive. And that’s something we in the Catholic blogosphere need to remember. There’s much in our culture to criticize—but we must never let it become a knee-jerk reaction, lest we fail to see the good in your rush to condemn the bad.

In short, we mustn’t emulate Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff: