We're all very sorry to disappoint.

You're wrong.

Becuase we can't play as Vehk.

What in the world are you talking about?

Vehk isn't a player character, but has CHIM.

So, what are you talking about?

I've met him a couple of times. Not all of these times he was clad head to toe in brilliant flame. CHIM is a double-edged sword. Even to Vehk.

It's a double-edged sword alright, and I'll say that his apparent lack of flame is purely a graphical restriction.

I really can't see what this mode of thought will give us.

CHIM is when the dream becomes the dreamer.

The fourth wall isn't broken because the http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0121.html, the fourth wall is broken because the characters walk into your mind and become as real as anything else.

Quite a few people who write about one character for a long time experience this. I don't have any famous references on mind right now but http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=550458&st=0&p=7932009&#entry7932009 sorta shows it. When done in this way, it can hardly be called over done because I haven't seen it done anywhere else yet.

You know, I hate the postmodernist, fourth wall-breaking interpretation of CHIM that Fergus so accurately described. It makes for funny jokes, and such, but it defies the rule of BATW and shortchanges the fictional universe that it's a part of. After all, if PC's from the different games have CHIM, then it betrays the fact that they are SUPPOSED to be mortals in the continuity and is just stupid.

I mean, I get that, from a meta-Tamriel perspective, CHIM is in part a jab at the fact that video game characters don't really understand that they're in a video game. I get that. But since the entire idea of immersing yourself in a fictional universe is to temporarily assume that that universe is REAL, I think it's self-defeating to define CHIM in out-of-TES terms when it doesn't exist outside of TES.

Hence, I'd like to think of CHIM in terms of TES mysticism, not as the shallow, postmodernist joke of a "game within a game" and all the associated drabness that comes with such a jaded outlook.

I have to agree with this fully. Though, the only real reason why this strange, wall-breaking version of CHIM had immerged is people's inability to appropriate the power of their PC's with the TES world.

Quite so but it is one of the layers in there. The problem is with thinking that it is just that and nothing else. In the same sense that Pelinal is a man without a heart and a robot from the future and the Adamantine Tower is a spaceship and a tower and a rather Freudian image.

Agreed entirely, hence the begrudging approval of it in the middle paragraph of my post; but, as you said, the problem is when people just act as if that's all it is. Which I suppose, IS technically all that it is to us here in our universe...but then, like I said, we don't play TES to revisit our universe, do we?

Ask the people who said Morrowind was too weird.

Edit: Daebryn, there is a perspective on lore that you clearly don't share, but I'm going to mention it anyway. Knowledge of ES is itself a journey into obscurantism. Whether it's some ghostly Blade in Sancre Tor mentioning the Underking or wonder what the [censored] is up with those giant mushrooms, the allure of the half hidden is what drives many new players. From listening in on a very conversations in the forums I became enthralled by a being called Vivec, without knowing the first bare facts about him. I hadn't played Morrowind yet or read the texts, but I had perceived a hidden world with many layers. This style isn't meaninglessly obtuse, it's a natural progression into what's on the surface and the weirdness beneath. It's almost expected, and it's the best way to get in character in a video game universe that has never done very well developing characters.

I on the other hand highly enjoy the journey as well as the ideas themselves, it reassures me that the text is not of my world...

You 'did a little poetry', that statement hardly reassures me as to your knowledge in poetical criticism. It's not about liking poetry, it's about recognizing that certain forms of poetical expression are warranted. Song of Pelinal is a completely different class from the 36 Sermons - the former is more along the lines of elegant prose (and arguably prose poem), the latter is metaphor, symbolism and riddle all wrapped together in a poetical allegory designed for a particular purpose (that being to instruct the Nerevarine). I can't seem to find the unneeded jargon that you seem to dislike so much about it, but for the Sermons to lose a part of themselves would make them simultaneously lose much of their flavor.

As for the Loveletter, it's almost cliffnotes. It has alot of jargon and you may be forced to go through alot of "make-work" in order to get to the ideas when read from the outside, but you have to consider the in-character recipients, not yourself - afterall, why should the metaphysical discussions of an alien world be readily understandable to us in terms of the jargon used or the apparent obscurity. I should hope it would be obscure, else it might as well not be part of an alien world...

:foodndrink:

This is why we get along, not because we have the same odd taste in rps, but because we have one mind... :ph34r:

When you turn off your game, is your character still there?

EDIT: Better question -- when you put down your controller and walk away, and someone else picks it up, what happens?

Closed for bickering.

I am going to say this only once, because if I have to say it twice, some people are going to find themselves without access to their accounts for a few days.

Be nice or keep your thoughts to yourself.