I’ve been following Erfworld for a while, and it’s been doing something interesting, where by interesting I mean terrible.

Erfworld is set in a wargame without apparent players. There’s mechanics to discourage factions from growing too large (the more cities a side has, the less it gets from each new city) and to create new factions (heirs to a side can also found a new side). There are also special artifacts that are supposed to be the tools of the original creators and possess great powers, but only for a unit that attunes to them. Also, there are different sorts of units. There are royal units and non-royal ones, where non-royal units can do everything a royal one can but have lower stats and level more slowly.

The opening of the comic has a non-royal side on the brink of losing to a coalition of royals. In desperation, they summon a perfect warlord, and the spell drags in someone from our world who’s been planning on DMing this scenario.

It’s a very nice setup. The wargame protagonist gets into trying to pull the game apart, but at the same time the game itself is dynamic. It’s moved beyond the initial setup and the people have all sorts of beliefs and philosophies and favored strategies. The royal units believe they were set as rulers by the titian creators at the dawn of the world – which is probably literally true, that the world was seeded with royal leaders and existing royal sides are descendants of those. There are known invisible stats, although it’s not clear if all things are stats or they just assume they are because it’s how the world works otherwise, and there’s also the belief that the royals have superior invisible stats as well. Beautiful emergent properties.

So the first book of it is all focused on that.

Then it all goes to hell.

The author of Erfworld is new to storytelling, and like so many before him, he’s decided to go for prophecy. In the first book prophecy was barely present – near the end we learn that there’s the prophecy of someone who would end war, which is what a scientific person would just describe as a thing people say because they want it, and we also learn that one of the characters claims she was fated to retrieve one of the tools. All good and well.

Then we start going into the mechanics of prophecy and fate for the next two stories, told in alternating form. Prophecy in Erfworld, it turns out, is absolutely immutable and the world will warp around to make sure it comes to pass somehow. It’s also incredibly common. Your only way of dealing with something fated is to try to make it come about in the best way for you, but the actual details can never change. And it’s not even something rare – Erfworld is a turn-based game. Turn starts at dawn unless two groups are interacting that turn, in which case one side gets dawn and the other later on, so that if you’re going to interact, you can tell in advance by your turn not starting at dawn.

The way it seems to be the comic appears to be that the game will cheat to make sure events happen. If a character is required to survive until they do something, the rolls in the game will be in their favor. If they try to go the wrong way, they’ll face more and more (nonlethal) trouble to push them back. The problem is that the absolute and infallible version is only something that works from a single player point of view. One example given is that if you’re fated to be ambushed that day, no matter what path you take the ambush will turn out to be there. This is easily doable from a computer standpoint, because nothing actually needs to be there before you arrive. But it flies in the face of the way the world is supposed to work – the central conceit is of a wargame where each little piece is a living, breathing person. Everyone setting up an ambush started in their home city, lived and made friends and did all sorts of normal stuff before one day setting out and deciding to set an ambush in at that location. No one just happens to appear there. The same thing for the order of turns thing – having your character’s turn start at dawn, then run across another side whose turn hasn’t started yet wouldn’t be an issue at all.

Now, the game can definitely tilt the odds significantly. A mechanic that says if you use the character fated to do X to do X, they get ridiculous bonuses. And of course, if a prophecy is really about a qualification rather than an absolute certainty, this would all be fine – initially, it seemed more like the character fated to get a tool was just flagged as “hidden capacity to attune”, so if she managed to get her hands on it, it would work for her unlike the majority of characters. There was nothing that really said she couldn’t die in the attempt. Now, though, we know she was immortal up to that point no matter what she did – and in fact, she does attempt to metagame things with that knowledge early on. And this doesn’t work and we find out that in addition to being super powerful at making things come to pass, fate can also warp things just as powerfully to punish you for trying to take advantage of it, which it somehow knows it happening.

To make matters worse, the magic system already contains a way of predicting events based on the numbers, which produces statistical likelihoods of something succeeding or failing, and ways of tilting the odds themselves by causing good/bad rolls. Neither of these interact sanely with fated predictions – calculating the odds is meaningless if there’s a prediction saying only one thing will happen, and altering the dice rolls has no effect whatsoever on them despite that being the most obvious mechanism they could use to work.

The forums have made some valiant efforts to make sense of this and that just further illustrates the problem.

One option is the idea these are all stable time loops, but that’s nonsense. The number of prophecies that would only become true if you tell people about them is far fewer than the number we see running around – furthermore, a wide number of people often end up finding out about the bigger prophecies, so the prophecy would need to result in a stable time loop for various combinations of people aware of it. It also doesn’t fit the biggest component of fate the characters know of, which is that it’ll force itself to come true. That’s why fighting fate is generally considered  a bad idea, it’ll throw more and more at you to try to get you to go the right way. This also can’t deal with the most basic, ubiquitous form of prophecy, battlefield turn order, because there should be nothing stopping characters from refusing to move if they’re not found during the other side’s turn. And, of course, it still doesn’t explain how fate would be able to know this stuff in the first place.

The other option is even more convoluted. The idea is there’s some overlord watching the entire game and if the wrong person dies, they reset a number of turns just like a human player with a save file when a plot-important NPC dies. Or fate itself is a smart enough AI to do it. Which in turn renders a main premise of the comic, the idea of the protagonist finding an exploit to break the game, meaningless – if it isn’t what the overlord who shouldn’t be there in the first place (remember, this is supposed to be a wargame without players, forgotten about and left to run) wants, then it’ll just be reset. It also means that this overlord can somehow alter things more directly, or else that they must rewind quite a while to start subtly messing with dice rolls to push things somewhere else completely.

All of it doesn’t work, and even something that didn’t make your head split open trying to rationalize how it can even happen still wouldn’t work with a story that’s supposed to be about finding exploits in the game and breaking free, which doesn’t work if the game has infinite leeway to cheat or just resets every time you go off its script. And if it’s true the protagonist is the fated one to bring peace, then his intention to break the game to do so is already false, and it kills a lot of suspense.

The worst is the meta explanation, which is that it’s all some self-aware bullshit about how the author already decided what’s going to happen and the characters can’t change the important events, which is by far the worst idea I’ve ever heard out of many, many bad writing ideas about prophesy.

There is, as far as I can tell so far, no reason for fate to be a central feature here, and it’s almost certainly a late stage addition (a lot of the descriptions of what it is/how it works don’t contradict what we’ve seen before, but don’t properly fit either, and they sound like off-the-cuff additions that really don’t make much sense). It seems to have grown out of the idea that the gameworld would tilt things in one group’s favor, but like with the prophecy to get a tool, there’s a huge difference between “given an advantage because the computer’s a cheating bastard” and “absolutely going to happen no matter what anyone does because the author says so”. The whole thing smacks of the same beginner’s mistake you see in fanfic, where the author is under the impression it’s really great to go back and say everything happened because of fate and prophecy because something like that would be impressive to see lining up in real life, except it’s a thousand times worse than anything I’ve ever seen by making it literally boil down to “because I say so, that’s why!” When the whole thing’s a story the author’s telling, the idea when they say something will happen it ends up happening is not impressive. At absolute best, it’s a waste of time to say it, at worst it makes you wonder why you even bother sticking around to see it happen.