Month: June 2025

And just like that, we’re at war.

PNRJ current events, politics , , , , , , , ,

Jun 29 JDN 2460856

Israel attacked Iran. Iran counter-attacked. Then Israel requested US support.

President Trump waffled about giving that support, then, late Jun 21 (US time—early June 22 Iran time), without any authorization from anyone else, he ordered an attack, using B-2 stealth bombers to drop GBU-57 MOP bombs on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities.

So apparently we’re at war now, because Donald Trump decided we would be.

We could talk about the strategic question of whether that attack was a good idea. We could talk about the moral question of whether that attack was justified.

But I have in mind a different question: Why was he allowed to do that?

In theory, the United States Constitution grants Congress the authority to declare war. The President is the Commander-in-Chief of our military forces, but only once war has actually been declared. What’s supposed to happen is that if a need for military action arises, Congress makes a declaration of war, and then the President orders the military into action.

Yet in fact we haven’t actually done that since 1942. Despite combat in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Libya, Kosovo, and more, we have never officially declared war since World War 2. In some of these wars, there was a UN resolution and/or Congressional approval, so that’s sort of like getting a formal declaration of war. But in others, there was no such thing; the President just ordered our troops to fight, and they fought.

This is not what the Constitution says, nor is it what the War Powers Act says. The President isn’t supposed to be able to do this. And yet Presidents have done it over a dozen times.

How did this happen? Why have we, as a society, become willing to accept this kind of unilateral authority on such vitally important matters?

Part of the problem seems to be that Congress is (somewhat correctly) perceived as slow and dysfunctional. But that doesn’t seem like an adequate explanation, because surely if we were actually under imminent threat, even a dysfunctional Congress could find it in itself to approve a declaration of war. (And if we’re not under imminent threat, then it isn’t so urgent!)

I think the more important reason may be that Congress consistently fails to hold the President accountable for overstepping his authority. It doesn’t even seem to matter which party is in which branch; they just never actually seem to remove a President from office for overstepping his authority. (Indeed, while three Presidents have been impeached—Trump twice—not one has ever actually been removed from office for any reason.) The checks and balances that are supposed to rein in the President simply are not ever actually deployed.

As a result, the power of the Executive Branch has gradually expanded over time, as Presidents test the waters by asserting more authority—and then are literally never punished for doing so.

I suppose we have Congress to blame for this: They could be asserting their authority, and aren’t doing so. But voters bare some share of the blame as well: We could vote out representatives who fail to rein in the President, and we haven’t been doing that.

Surely it would also help to elect better Presidents (and almost literally anyone would have been better than Donald Trump), but part of the point of having a Constitution is that the system is supposed to be able to defend against occasionally putting someone awful in charge. But as we’ve seen, in practice those defenses seem to fall apart quite easily.

So now we live in a world where a maniac can simply decide to drop a bunch of bombs wherever he wants and nobody will stop him.

Toward a positive vision of the future

PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 22 JDN 2460849

Things look pretty bleak right now. Wildfires rage across Canada, polluting the air across North America. Russia is still at war with Ukraine, and Israel seems to be trying to start a war with Iran. ICE continues sending agents without badges to kidnap people in unmarked vehicles and sending them to undisclosed locations. Climate change is getting worse, and US policy is pivoting from subsidizing renewables back to subsidizing fossil fuels. And Trump, now revealed to be a literal fascist, is still President.

But things can get better.

I can’t guarantee that they will, nor can I say when; but there is still hope that a better future is possible.

It has been very difficult to assemble a strong coalition against the increasingly extreme far-right in this country (epitomized by Trump). This seems odd, when most Americans hold relatively centrist views. Yes, more Americans identify as conservative than as liberal, but Trump isn’t a conservative; he’s a radical far-right fascist. Trump recently gave a speech endorsing ethnic cleansing, for goodness’ sake! I’m liberal, but I’d definitely vote for a conservative like Mitt Romney rather than a Stalinist! So why are “conservatives” voting for a fascist?

But setting aside the question of why people voted for Trump, we still have the question of why the left has not been able to assemble a strong coalition against him.

I think part of the problem is that the left really has two coalitions within it: The center left, who were relatively happy with the status quo before Trump and want to go back to that; and the far left, who were utterly unhappy with that status quo and want radical change. So while we all agree that Trump is awful, we don’t really agree on what he’s supposed to be replaced with.

It’s of course possible to be in between, and indeed I would say that I am. While clearly things were better under Obama and Biden than they have been under Trump, there were still a lot of major problems in this country that should have been priorities for national policy but weren’t:

  1. Above all, climate change—the Democrats at least try to do something against it, but not nearly enough. Our carbon emissions are declining, but it’s very unclear if we’ll actually hit our targets. The way we have been going, we’re in for a lot more hurricanes and wildfires and droughts.
  2. Housing affordability is still an absolute crisis; half of renters spend more than the targeted 30% of their income on housing, and a fourth spend more than 50%.Homelessness is now at a record high.
  3. Healthcare is still far too expensive in this country; we continue to spend far more than other First World countries without getting meaningfully better care.
  4. While rights and protections for LGB people have substantially improved in the last 30 years, rights and protections for trans people continue to lag behind.
  5. Racial segregation in housing remains the de facto norm, even though it is de jure illegal.
  6. Livestock remain exempted from the Animal Welfare Act and in 2002 laboratory rats and mice were excluded as well, meaning that cruel or negligent treatment which would be illegal for cats and dogs is still allowed on livestock and lab rats.
  7. Income and wealth inequality in this country remains staggeringly high, and the super-rich continue to gain wealth at a terrifying rate.
  8. Our voting system is terrible—literally the worst possible system that can technically still be considered democracy.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are the issues that seem most salient to me.

2 and 3 both clearly showed up in my Index of Necessary Expenditure; these costs were the primary reason why raising a family of 4 was unaffordable on a median household income.

So it isn’t right to say that I was completely happy with how things were going before. But I still think of myself as center left, because I don’t believe we need to tear everything down and start over.

I have relatively simple recommendations that would go a long way toward solving all 8 of these problems:

Climate change could be greatly mitigated if we’d just tax carbon already, or implement a cap-and-trade system like California’s nationwide. If that’s too politically unpalatable, subsidize nuclear power, fusion research, and renewables instead. That’s way worse from a budget perspective, but for some reason Americans are just fanatically opposed to higher gas prices.

Housing affordability is politically thorny, but economically quite simple: Build more housing. Whatever we have to do to make that happen, we should do it. Maybe this involves changes to zoning or other regulations. Maybe it involves subsidies to developers. Maybe it involves deploying eminent domain to build public housing. Maybe it involves using government funds to build housing and then offering it for sale on the market. But whatever we do, we need more housing.

Healthcare costs are a trickier one; Obamacare helped, but wasn’t enough. I think what I would like to see next is an option to buy into Medicare; before you are old enough to get it for free, you can pay a premium to be covered by it. Because Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance, you could pay a lower premium and get better coverage, so a lot of people would likely switch (which is of course exactly why insurance companies would fight the policy at every turn). Even putting everyone on Medicare might not be enough; to really bring costs down, we may need to seriously address the fact that US doctors, particularly specialists, are just radically higher-paid than any other doctors in the world. Is an American doctor who gets $269,000 per year really 88% better than a French doctor who gets $143,000?

The policies we need for LGBT rights are mostly no-brainers.

Okay, I can admit to some reasonable nuance when it comes to trans women in pro sports (the statistical advantages they have over cis women are not as clear-cut as many people think, but they do seem to exist; average athletic performance for trans women seems to be somewhere in between the average for cis men and the average for cis women), but that’s really not a very important issue. Like, seriously, why do we care so much about pro sports? Either let people play sports according to their self-identified gender, or make the two options “cis women” and “other” and let trans people play the latter. And you can do the same thing with school sports, or you can eliminate them entirely because they are a stupid waste of academic resources; but either way this should not be considered a top priority policy question. (If parents want their kids to play sports, they can form their own leagues; the school shouldn’t be paying for it. Winning games is not one of the goals of an academic institution. If you want kids to get more exercise, give them more recess and reform the physical education system so it isn’t so miserable for the kids who need it most.)

But there is absolutely no reason not to let people use whatever pronouns and bathrooms they want; indeed, there doesn’t really seem to be a compelling reason to gender-segregate bathrooms in the first place, and removing that segregation would most benefit women, who often have to wait much longer in line for the bathroom. (The argument that this somehow protects women never made sense to me; if a man wants to assault women in the bathroom, what’s to stop him from just going into the women’s bathroom? It’s not like there’s a magic field that prevents men from entering. He’s already planning on committing a crime, so it doesn’t seem like he’s very liable to held back by social norms. It’s worthwhile to try to find ways to prevent sexual assault, but segregating bathrooms does little or nothing toward that goal—and indeed, trans-inclusive bathrooms do not statistically correlate with higher rates of sexual assault.) But okay, fine, if you insist on having the segregation, at least require gender-neutral bathrooms as well. This is really not that difficult; it’s pretty clearly bigotry driving this, not serious policy concerns.

Not exempting any vertebrate animals from anti-cruelty legislation is an incredibly simple thing to do, obviously morally better, and the only reason we’re not doing it is that it would hurt agribusinesses and make meat more expensive. There is literally zero question what the morally right thing to do here is; the question is only how to get people to actually do that morally right thing.

Finally, how do we fix income inequality? Some people—including some economists—treat this as a very complicated, difficult question, but I don’t think it is. I think the really simple, obvious answer is actually the correct one: Tax rich people more, and use the proceeds to help poor people. We should be taxing the rich a lot more; I want something like the revenue-maximizing rate, estimated at about 70%. (And an even higher rate like the 90% we had in the 1950s is not out of the question.) These funds could either provide services like education and healthcare, or they could simply be direct cash transfers. But one way or another, the simplest, most effective way to reduce inequality is to tax the rich and help the poor. A lot of economists fear that this would hurt the overall economy, but particularly if these rates are really targeted at the super-rich (the top 0.01%), I don’t see how they could, because all those billions of dollars are very clearly monopoly rents rather than genuine productivity. If anything, making it harder to amass monopoly rents should make the economy more efficient. And taking say 90% of the roughly 10% return just the top 400 billionaires make on their staggering wealth would give us an additional $480 billion per year.

Fixing our voting system is also quite straightforward. Ranked-choice voting would be a huge improvement, and has already been implemented successfully in several states. Even better would be range voting, but so far very few places have been bold enough to actually try it. But even ranked-choice voting would remove most of the terrible incentives that plurality voting creates, and likely allow us to move beyond the two-party system into a much more representative multiparty system.

None of this requires overthrowing the entire system or dismantling capitalism.

That is, we can have a positive vision of the future that doesn’t require revolution or radical change.

Unfortunately, there’s still a very good chance we’ll do none of it.

What does nonviolence mean?

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 15 JDN 2460842

As I write this, the LA protests and the crackdown upon them have continued since Friday and it is now Wednesday. In a radical and authoritarian move by Trump, Marines have been deployed (with shockingly incompetent logistics unbefitting the usually highly-efficient US military); but so far they have done very little. Reuters has been posting live updates on new developments.

The LAPD has deployed a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the protests, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls; but so far they have not used lethal force. Protesters have been arrested, some for specific crimes—and others simply for violating curfew.

More recently, the protests have spread to other cities, including New York, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, San Fransisco, and Philadelphia. By the time this post goes live, there will probably be even more cities involved, and there may also be more escalation.

But for now, at least, the protests have been largely nonviolent.

And I thought it would be worthwhile to make it very clear what I mean by that, and why it is important.

I keep seeing a lot of leftist people on social media accepting the narrative that these protests are violent, but actively encouraging that; and some of them have taken to arrogantly accuse anyone who supports nonviolent protests over violent ones of either being naive idiots or acting in bad faith. (The most baffling part of this is that they seem to be saying that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were naive idiots or were acting in bad faith? Is that what they meant to say?)

First of all, let me be absolutely clear that nonviolence does not mean comfortable or polite or convenient.

Anyone objecting to blocking traffic, strikes, or civil disobedience because they cause disorder and inconvenience genuinely does not understand the purpose of protest (or is a naive idiot or acting in bad faith). Effective protests are disruptive and controversial. They cause disorder.

Nonviolence does not mean always obeying the law.

Sometimes the law is itself unjust, and must be actively disobeyed. Most of the Holocaust was legal, after all.

Other times, it is necessary to break some laws (such as property laws, curfews, and laws against vandalism) in the service of higher goals.

I wouldn’t say that a law against vandalism is inherently unjust; but I would say that spray-painting walls and vehicles in the service of protecting human rights is absolutely justified, and even sometimes it’s necessary to break some windows or set some fires.

Nonviolence does not mean that nobody tries to call it violence.

Most governments are well aware that most of their citizens are much more willing to support a nonviolent movement than a violent moment—more on this later—and thus will do whatever they can to characterize nonviolent movements as violence. They have two chief strategies for doing so:

  1. Characterize nonviolent but illegal acts, such as vandalism and destruction of property, as violence
  2. Actively try to instigate violence by treating nonviolent protesters as if they were violent, and then characterizing their attempts at self-defense as violence

As a great example of the latter, a man in Phoenix was arrested for assault because he kicked a tear gas canister back at police. But kicking back a canister that was shot at you is the most paradigmatic example of self-defense I could possibly imagine. If the system weren’t so heavily biased in fair of the police, a judge would order his release immediately.

Nonviolence does not mean that no one at the protests gets violent.

Any large group of people will contain outliers. Gather a protest of thousands of people, and surely some fraction of them will be violent radicals, or just psychopaths looking for an excuse to hurt someone. A nonviolent protest is one in which most people are nonviolent, and in which anyone who does get violent is shunned by the organizers of the movement.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean that violence will never be used against you.

On the contrary, the more authoritarian the regime—and thus the more justified your protest—the more likely it is that violent force will be used to suppress your nonviolent protests.

In some places it will be limited to less-lethal means (as it has so far in the current protests); but in others, even in ostensibly-democratic countries, it can result in lethal force being deployed against innocent people (as it did at Kent State in 1970).

When this happens, are you supposed to just stand there and get shot?

Honestly? Yes. I know that requires tremendous courage and self-sacrifice, but yes.

I’m not going to fault anyone for running or hiding or even trying to fight back (I’d be more of the “run” persuasion myself), but the most heroic action you could possibly take in that situation is in fact to stand there and get shot. Becoming a martyr is a terrible sacrifice, and one I’m not sure it’s one I myself could ever make; but it really, really works. (Seriously, whole religions have been based on this!)

And when you get shot, for the love of all that is good in the world, make sure someone gets it on video.

The best thing you can do for your movement is to show the oppressors for what they truly are. If they are willing to shoot unarmed innocent people, and the world finds out about that, the world will turn against them. The more peaceful and nonviolent you can appear at the moment they shoot you, the more compelling that video will be when it is all over the news tomorrow.

A shockingly large number of social movements have pivoted sharply in public opinion after a widely-publicized martyrdom incident. If you show up peacefully to speak your minds and they shoot you, that is nonviolent protest working. That is your protest being effective.

I never said that nonviolent protest was easy or safe.

What is the core of nonviolence?

It’s really very simple. So simple, honestly, that I don’t understand why it’s hard to get across to people:

Nonviolence means you don’t initiate bodily harm against other human beings.

It does not necessarily preclude self-defense, so long as that self-defense is reasonable and proportionate; and it certainly does not in any way preclude breaking laws, damaging property, or disrupting civil order.


Nonviolence means you never throw the first punch.

Nonviolence is not simply a moral position, but a strategic one.

Some of the people you would be harming absolutely deserve it. I don’t believe in ACAB, but I do believe in SCAB, and nearly 30% of police officers are domestic abusers, who absolutely would deserve a good punch to the face. And this is all the more true of ICE officers, who aren’t just regular bastards; they are bastards whose core job is now enforcing the human rights violations of President Donald Trump. Kidnapping people with their unmarked uniforms and unmarked vehicles, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

But it’s still strategically very unwise for us to deploy violence. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Using violence is a sure-fire way to turn most Americans against our cause.
  2. We would probably lose.

Nonviolent protest is nearly twice as effective as violent insurrection. (If you take nothing else from this post, please take that.)

And the reason that nonviolent protest is so effective is that it changes minds.

Violence doesn’t do that; in fact, it tends to make people rally against you. Once you start killing people, even people who were on your side may start to oppose you—let alone anyone who was previously on the fence.

A successful violent revolution results in you having to build a government and enforce your own new laws against a population that largely still disagrees with you—and if you’re a revolution made of ACAB people, that sounds spectacularly difficult!

A successful nonviolent protest movement results in a country that agrees with you—and it’s extremely hard for even a very authoritarian regime to hang onto power when most of the people oppose it.

By contrast, the success rate of violent insurrections is not very high. Why?

Because they have all the guns, you idiot.

States try to maintain a monopoly on violence in their territory. They are usually pretty effective at doing so. Thus attacking a state when you are not a state puts you at a tremendous disadvantage.

Seriously; we are talking about the United States of America right now, the most powerful military hegemon the world has ever seen.

Maybe the people advocating violence don’t really understand this, but the US has not lost a major battle since 1945. Oh, yes, they’ve “lost wars”, but what that really means is that public opinion has swayed too far against the war for them to maintain morale (Vietnam) or their goals for state-building were so over-ambitious that they were basically impossible for anyone to achieve (Iraq and Afghanistan). If you tally up the actual number of soldiers killed, US troops always kill more than they lose, and typically by a very wide margin.


And even with the battles the US lost in WW1 and WW2, they still very much won the actual wars. So genuinely defeating the United States in open military conflict is not something that has happened since… I’m pretty sure the War of 1812.

Basically, advocating for a violent response to Trump is saying that you intend to do something that literally no one in the world—including major world military powers—has been able to accomplish in 200 years. The last time someone got close, the US nuked them.

If the protests in LA were genuinely the insurrectionists that Trump has been trying to characterize them as, those Marines would not only have been deployed, they would have started shooting. And I don’t know if you realize this, but US Marines are really good at shooting. It’s kind of their thing. Instead of skirmishes with rubber bullets and tear gas, we would have an absolute bloodbath. It would probably end up looking like the Tet Offensive, a battle where “unprepared” US forces “lost” because they lost 6,000 soldiers and “only” killed 45,000 in return. (The US military is so hegemonic that a kill ratio of more than 7 to 1 is considered a “loss” in the media and public opinion.)

Granted, winning a civil war is different from winning a conventional war; even if a civil war broke out, it’s unlikely that nukes would be used on American soil, for instance. But you’re still talking about a battle so uphill it’s more like trying to besiege Edinburgh Castle.

Our best hope in such a scenario, in fact, would probably be to get blue-state governments to assert control over US military forces in their own jurisdiction—which means that antagonizing Gavin Newsom, as I’ve been seeing quite a few leftists doing lately, seems like a really bad idea.

I’m not saying that winning a civil war would be completely impossible. Since we might be able to get blue-state governors to take control of forces in their own states and we would probably get support from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, it wouldn’t be completely hopeless. But it would be extremely costly, millions of people would die, and victory would by no means be assured despite the overwhelming righteousness of our cause.

How about, for now at least, we stick to the methods that historically have proven twice as effective?

The CBO report on Trump’s terrible new budget

PNRJ current events, politics, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Jun 8 JDN 2460835

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. We’re back to talking about economics, which in our current environment pretty much always means bad news. The budget the House passed is pretty much the same terrible one Trump proposed.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), one of those bureaucratic agencies that most people barely even realize exists, but is actually extremely useful, spectacularly competent, and indeed one of the most important and efficient agencies in the world, has released its official report on the Trump budget that recently passed the House. (Other such agencies include the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. US economic statistics are among the best in the world—some refer to them as the “gold standard”, but I refuse to insult them in that way.)

The whole thing is pretty long, but you can get a lot of the highlights from the summary tables.

The tables are broken down by the House committee responsible for choosing them; here are the effects on the federal budget deficit the CBO predicts for the next 5 and 10 years. For these numbers, positive means more deficit (bad), negative means less deficit (good).

Commitee5 years10 years
Agriculture-88,304-238,238
Armed Services124,602143,992
Education and Workforce-253,295-349,142
Energy and Commerce-247,074-995,062
Financial Services-373-5,155
Homeland Security27,87467,147
Judiciary26,9896,910
Natural Resources-4,789-20,158
Oversight and Government Reform-17,449-50,951
Transportation and Infrastructure-361-36,551
Ways and Means2,199,4033,767,402

These are in units of millions of dollars.

Almost all the revenue comes from the Ways and Means committee, because that’s the committee that sets tax rates. (If you hate your taxes, don’t hate the IRS; hate the Ways and Means Committee.) So for all the other departments, we can basically take the effect on the deficit as how much spending was changing.

If this budget makes it through the Senate, Trump will almost certainly sign it into law. If that happens:

We’ll be cutting $238 billion from Agriculture Committee programs: And most of where those cuts come from are programs that provide food for poor people.

We’ll be adding $144 billion to the military budget, and a further $67 billion to “homeland security” (which here mostly means CBP and ICE). Honestly, I was expecting more, so I’m vaguely relieved.

We’ll be cutting $349 billion from Education and Workforce programs; this is mostly coming from the student loan system, so we can expect much more brutal repayment requirements for people with student loans.

We’ll be cutting almost $1 trillion from Energy and Commerce programs; this is mainly driven by massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (why are they handled by this committee? I don’t know).
The bill itself doesn’t clearly specify, so the CBO issued another report offering some scenarios for how these budget cuts could be achieved. Every single scenario results in millions of people losing coverage, and the one that saves the most money would result in 5.5 million people losing some coverage and 2.4 million becoming completely uninsured.

The $20 billion from Natural Resources mostly involves rolling back environmental regulations, cutting renewable energy subsidies, and making it easier to lease federal lands for oil and gas drilling. All of these are bad, and none of them are surprising; but their effect on the budget is pretty small.

The Oversight and Government Reform portion is reducing the budget deficit by $51 billion mainly by forcing federal employees to contribute a larger share of their pensions—which is to say, basically cutting federal salaries across the board. While this has a small effect on the budget, it will impose substantial harm on the federal workforce (which has already been gutted by DOGE).

The Transportation and Infrastructure changes involve expansions of the Coast Guard (why are they not in Armed Services again?) along with across-the-board cuts of anything resembling support for sustainability or renewable energy; but the main way they actually decrease the deficit is by increasing the cost of registering cars. I think they’re trying to look like they are saving money by cutting “wasteful” (read: left-wing) programs, but in fact they mainly just made it more expensive to own a car—which, quite frankly, is probably a good thing from an environmental perspective.

Then, last but certainly not least, we come to the staggering $3.7 trillion increase in our 10-year deficit from the Ways and Means committee. What is this change that is more than 3 times as expensive as all the savings from the other departments combined?

Cutting taxes on rich people.

They are throwing some bones to the rest of the population, such as removing the taxes on tips and overtime (temporarily), and making a bunch of other changes to the tax code in terms of deductions and credits and such (because that’s what we needed, a more complicated tax code!); but the majority of the decrease in revenue comes from cutting income taxes, especially at the very highest brackets.

The University of Pennsylvania estimates that the poorest 40% of the population will actually see their after-tax incomes decrease as a result of the bill. Those in the 40% to 80% percentiles will see very little change. Only those in the richest 20% will see meaningful increases in income, and those will be highest for the top 5% and above.

The 95-99% percentile will see the greatest proportional gain, 3.5% of their income.

But the top 0.1% will see by far the greatest absolute gain, each gaining an average of $385,000 per year. Every one of these people already has an annual income of at least $4 million.

The median price of a house in the United States is $416,000.

That is, we are basically handing a free house to every millionaire in America—every year for the next 10 years.

That is why we’re adding $3.7 trillion to the national debt. So that the top 0.1% can have free houses.

Without these tax cuts, the new budget would actually reduce the deficit—which is really something we ought to be doing, because we’re running a deficit of $1.8 trillion per year and we’re not even in a recession. But because Republicans love nothing more than cutting taxes on the rich—indeed, sometimes it seems it is literally the only thing they care about—we’re going to make the deficit even bigger instead.

I can hope this won’t make it through the Senate, but I’m not holding my breath.

Open World without Level Scaling

PNRJ Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Jun 1 JDN 2460828

This week I’m going to take a break from serious content and talk about something a little more fun and frivolous: Video games.

One of my pet peeves about a lot of video games, especially open-world games, is level scaling: As your character levels up and becomes stronger, enemies also become stronger, and so the effects basically cancel out. It’s kinda like inflation: Your wage goes up, but so do the prices, so you feel no change.

This became particularly salient for me when Oblivion Remastered was released, because Oblivion has some of the most egregious level scaling I’ve ever seen in a game. (Skyrim also has level scaling, but it’s not nearly as bad.)

This bothers me for several reasons:

  • It’s frustrating for players, and kinda defeats the point of leveling up: You put in all this effort to make your character stronger, and then your enemies just get stronger too, and it makes no difference.
  • It’s unrealistic and hurts immersion: Even if you are the chosen one, the world shouldn’t revolve around you this much. The undead who lay undisturbed in their tombs for centuries shouldn’t get more powerful over a month just because you did. The dragons laying waste to the countryside shouldn’t be weaker just because you are.
  • It creates incentives to metagame in strange ways: You sometimes want to avoid leveling up because it would make your enemies stronger. (This is especially true in Oblivion, because you can improve your skills without leveling up if you simply never sleep—and it’s actually strategically beneficial to do so. The easiest path to victory in Oblivion is to be a level-1 insomniac through the entire game.)
  • It’s a lazy solution: Rather than find a good way to maintain a constant sense of challenge throughout the game, they just have the hit points and damage automatically adjust.
  • If items are also leveled, it creates even worse incentives: You don’t want to go collect that ancient magical artifact yet, because if you wait a few levels, it will somehow be more powerful. (Oblivion does this, and I hated it so much I installed a mod that made it go away.)

I do appreciate the need to maintain a constant sense of challenge: You don’t want the early game to be absurdly difficult and the late game to be absurdly easy. But I have a proposal for how that could be achieved without level scaling:

  • Each type of enemy always has approximately the same level, so there are no surprises when encountering familiar enemies.
  • Make it possible to avoid or escape most fights, so that if you find yourself outmatched, you can flee and live to fight another day.
  • Make tactics and advantages matter more, so that a well-prepared player can defeat higher-level enemies, and a player who is ambushed by lower-level enemies is still in danger.
  • When it is necessary to face more difficult enemies at lower levels, provide allies to support the player or add other advantages.
  • When it is necessary to face easier enemies at higher levels, make them more numerous or add other disadvantages.
  • When quests would have time limits in the story, give them actual time limits in the game, and consequences for failure. None of this “you arrived just in time!” regardless of whether you went straight there or waited 10 days. This way, quests with easy enemies can still be challenging, because you are on a time limit. (Conversely, if you want players to be able to wait as long as they need to, make that make sense in the story.)
  • As the player levels up, they should change what kind of challenges they take on. The escaped prisoner with only a rusty dagger and the clothes on their back shouldn’t be facing dragons or demons, and the chosen one savior of the world whose sword and armor were forced from dragonbone shouldn’t have any trouble with a gang of bandits.

The last one is very important, so let me elaborate further by offering an example of how progression could—and in my view, should—have worked in Oblivion:

  1. At very low levels, you should mostly be avoiding combat. You can earn money and experience by doing odd jobs in towns or running errands—or by engaging in pickpocketing and burglary. You could hunt deer, because they don’t really fight back. You can maybe defend yourself against wolves or goblins, but only if you really need to.
  2. Then, once you have started improving your combat abilities, you can start taking on easier enemies: Goblins are now no problem, and you can go out hunting for wolves, bears or sabre cats. If you encounter Mythic Dawn cultists, you hope you’re in a city, so that the guards can save you; otherwise, you’d better run.
  3. After that, you can start escorting merchant caravans and taking on bandits.
  4. As you get to moderate levels, you can start facing down Mythic Dawn cultists even when the guards aren’t there to protect you.
  5. Then, you can start facing magical creatures, like trolls and minotaurs.
  6. Then, you can start exploring ancient ruins and facing undead.
  7. Then, once you are getting quite strong, you can fight mages and necromancers.
  8. Finally, once you very powerful, you can finally travel through the Oblivion Gates to the Deadlands and face the Daedra. (This is basically travelling to Hell to fight demons.)

Notice how this still provides a steady progression of difficulty and reasonably constant challenge, but it doesn’t require any enemies to scale with you. Goblins are always weak, Daedra are always strong.

Moreover, I think it would be much more satisfying progression for players: As their character grows more powerful, they can take on foes that they couldn’t before, and enemies that were once difficult become easy.

It does mean that players can’t just do literally anything in any order; but there’s still lots of flexibility in the open world, because there are many different places you can go with various quests to do at any given level of difficulty. (And there should generally be this option when being offered a quest: “I’m not ready for that yet, but I’ll come back later.”)

It might mean that the main quest is too difficult to do without doing some side quests first; but if players want to go through quickly, let them lower the difficulty settings, rather than effectively forcing that on them with level scaling. Moreover, if players want to speedrun higher difficulties by facing opponents that by all rights they should have no hope against, that could be a very compelling challenge—and give them some serious bragging rights if they succeed!

Conversely, if players feel overleveled for a quest they want to do, let them raise the difficulty settings, rather than forcing that on them too. And sometimes being overleveled can be fun; you feel powerful and dangerous.

I would also be all right with making level scaling optional: If some players like to play that way, okay, let them do that. But don’t make us all play that way. (Wartales does this, but in kind of a weird way; if you turn off level scaling, it assigns a difficulty level to each region, which means that the same enemies in Drombach are much more dangerous than they would be in Tiltren. What I want is for quests and enemies to have fixed difficulty levels—not regions.)

Baldur’s Gate 3 did this well: there is absolutely no level scaling in the game. (It helps that Dungeons and Dragons 5E already has a system where proper preparation can allow you to defeat enemies substantially higher level than you are.) It’s not quite as open-world, because there is a fairly clear progression of what order to do things in, at least until you reach Act 3; but if that’s the price we have to pay for no level scaling, I’m willing to live with that.

You hear me, Bethesda? I want no level scaling in Elder Scrolls VI!