Nightmask wrote:Seems like many of the posts speak in absolutes, how this post's events will always be countered by the follow-up post, when RL (or a reasonable approximation) is never like that. Just as you can never always counter a suicide attacker you can't always counter other things. So the question really is which side in spite of setbacks and failures caused by the uncertainties is most likely to win, who can better adapt when things go wrong.
Agreed.
Though we'll probably disagree on who that generally is.
Whenever somebody comes up with a "brilliant" attack on the CS (and some of them actually are pretty brilliant), and complains that the only reason why the CS exists is because Kevin wants them to, because the Federation of Magic, or Tolkeen, or whoever the heck is involved in their scheme would
obviously execute Plan X that is within their resources, and that they see no reason why it could fail... all I can think about is the fact that the United States is still here, and that the 9/11 attacks were the exception rather than the rule, even though similar stuff would still be possible today, or any number of other plans that
should succeed, and which are perfectly plausible... yet have never happened.
Because ultimately, people don't behave as we think that we would if we were in their shoes.
Sometimes because they can't, sometimes because they simply don't want to, sometimes because even though we can think of a clever plan, they cannot. Sometimes because they lack the guts, or the physical ability, or simply the luck needed to get the job done.
There are too many things that can go wrong with any plan, and the reason why we don't see clever plans succeed more often in the real world is simply because things DO go wrong.
And the game world is no different.
So people can come up with whatever "OMG! Teh CS would be SOOOOO dead!" plans they like, and Dead Boy can come up with whatever "OMG, they would SOOOO NOT die!" responses... but it's all just so much guesswork that doesn't take into account any number of real-world-type factors that can some into play.
Like personality, conscience, intelligence, and luck... and they don't always work the way that we'd expect.
In fact, they very, very often don't.
After the 9/11 attacks, I expected some random stabbings or other murders by terrorist operatives, scattered throughout the US. Just a quick "stab, stab, stab," or "bang, bang, bang," then leave a note to the infidels, and the attackers disappear before they're caught.
Just to stir us up, to make us more paranoid, and to make us scared... to terrorize is.
It's a simple plan, and it would have been easy enough to perform for all that I can see.
There's no reason that it didn't happen, and it would have been the smart, obvious thing to do.
But it never happened.
Because the really-real world just isn't like that- it's beyond our expectations, and beyond the limits of our own minds.
Just because we think something would happen, that it's the obvious thing to do and that it would obviously work, doesn't mean that it actually would happen.
And in a fantasy setting, the
realistic thing would be that we'd get much the same results.
We'd feel cheated or relieved by the lack of the world fulfilling our expectations.
But that's just how the world works, any world.
We can say that the FoM would have realistically though of Plan X, and carried it out... just like we can say that realistically al Queda would have realistically thought of and carried out Plan Y by now.
But when the world disagrees, where does that leave us?
We can ***** and moan that God, or the writers, or whoever just aren't as freakin' brilliant as we are, we who have never created any comparable world on either level, reality or fantasy.
Or we can assume that there are things we don't know, and things that we can't conceive of, and that it's the unknown factors that are responsible for what we see happening (or failing to happen) around us.
But that first option just makes us seem small, and petty, and ignorant.
So, personally, I try to lean a bit more toward the second.