OSSR: Ravenloft Boxed Set (reviewed by Frank and K)

[squirrelloid]

If I was going to write rules for 3e horror campaigns, the first thing I'd write is 'no full casters'. Seriously.

Ravenloft is a series of demi-planes that are only briefly coplanar with various prime material planes. Most of the time they have no connection to any other planes outside Ravenloft. Not only does this make travel in and out of Ravenloft difficult, it also means that Divinities cannot access Ravenloft, and thus most Divine Spellcasters cannot cast spells at all. While there may be priests in Ravenloft, there are no clerics or druids.

Find a reason why arcane spellcasting is at least limited. Bards might be okay, but wizards and sorcerors are not.

Rangers and Paladins are in principle fine, but you have to come up with some nonsense about why their mojo works and other divine casters don't.

Anyway, once Rogue is the pinnacle of power, and then we reveal that basically 90% of everything is immune to sneak attacks and magic items are really rare (the 2nd major change is redefining the wealth by level table), well, the fighter is starting to look pretty good.

Now we can tell horror stories beyond 5th level.

(Note: I do not recommend randomly shanghaiing characters into adventures in ravenloft, because then you have to screw over players who are already playing full casters. Start a new campaign in the setting or go home, and strictly enforce whatever caster limits you end up with).

Edit: If you want PC necromancers or something, write a full class that's on-par with the 3.5 fighter and doesn't get spell progression. Give them appropriate SLAs that do necromancery things.

[Koumei]

"We're all fighters!"

So... play 4th Edition? Yeah, this is why "fear of the bigger stuff" is the worst kind of horror. Because it's awful to actually play.

[squirrelloid]

"We're all fighters!"

So... play 4th Edition? Yeah, this is why "fear of the bigger stuff" is the worst kind of horror. Because it's awful to actually play.

Balancing at fighter tier doesn't mean everyone is a fighter. It just means your point of balance is fighter tier and not full-caster tier. I'm not sure why that would necessarily be horrible to play - surely we don't have to rock out the full caster every time just to enjoy the game.

Heck, I even advocate writing caster-flavored classes which just don't get the crazy that is typical D+D spellcasting.

[Grek]

If you've banned full casters, told the rogue he doesn't get sneak attacks and told everyone to just play a fighter, you have stopped playing D&D. If this is going to work as a setting, it needs to be able to handle higher level characters.

[Username17]

if I was going to do Ravenloft in the modern era, I would do it like a police procedural. No gimmicks to fuck with class features. No limits on character classes. No Romanian hillbillies. Just you getting kidnapped by the mists and being unable to leave until you solve the mystery.

You really can't scare D&D players by threatening their characters. They are playing a game that is quite lethal on both ends of the screen and has a high body count. So what you do is have the villagers be nice people and have reasonable interactions with them, and then start having helpful NPCs turn up dead in grizzly ways. Then have the players have to closely examine the dead bodies of people they got along with in order to get clues to solving the mystery.

Most D&D divinations aren't actually very useful for that sort of thing, and there's no reason to nerf them. You don't need horror mechanics. You just need the people who are helping the PCs escape from the mists turn up mutilated in areas bleak and described by purple prose. That's plenty.

As Hellboy showed us, it's not actually terribly difficult to have horror protagonists who are inhuman or nigh invulnerable. You just have to threaten other people. Even if the players get the bright idea to herd all the NPCs into the church and try to force a confrontation, you've gotten them to buy themselves into a frightened siege mentality, which means your job is half done.

If people want to play robots or giant mantises or something, just let them. Their job is to protect innocents, not to cry like little girls when fighting normal D&D monsters.

-Username17

[Username17]

Chapter 10: Van Richten’s Overview

K:

Ok, so Van Richten is the Van Helsing of Ravenloft….. because…. ummm….it’s not a rip-off if the name is only almost identical?

This section is the cross-promotion for the Van Richten line of full supplements that focus on a single monster each (long story short, the vampire one is great, the lich one is OK, and the rest are shit).

That stupid aside, this is the best section of Ravenloft. All of the iconic monsters that you’d expect to be in Ravenloft get juiced up, defined, and otherwise made into far more interesting monsters than you’ve been fighting before.

That’s saying a lot since vampires and liches were among the most interesting things you were fighting in 2e anyway because they often had levels in classes.

Frank:

The Van Richten guides were super popular because they presented monsters as interesting and multi-dimensional. Not just a pile of hit points with a nonsensical special attack. That being said, the idea of Van Richten Guides was often better than the reality. The Van Richten Guides to Constructs and Demons were both written by the woman who wrote World of Darkness: Gypsies and would need a fair drought of booze to review properly in and of themselves.

K:

As we get into the actual sections, I think that this is not the version I read in my youth.

I recall that the original Ravenloft Vampire write-up was telling you to make vampires with local flavor and powers reflectd in their backstory, so you were supposed to have vampires changing into panthers in the domain with panthers, but this section now seems to be a straight rip from the Van Richten Guide to Vampires.

This makes me a sad panda. One of the best parts of Ravenloft is that they had vampire variants like the Halfling vampires that were repelled by pipe smoke and hearth fires and died in the rain. That shit was tight.

Oh well, I guess the only thing you need to know is that vampires got age categories like dragons and lost weaknesses as they aged, so basically a full rip from Ann Rice.

They also got to control undead as an evil cleric, so it cemented them as a boss monster.

Frank:

This was the era of special writeups for Kender Vampires and Halfling Pony Centaurs, so I'm not sure that failing to mention Halfling Vampires in this book was really a bad thing. Sadly, I think that this isn't so much an Anne Rice ripoff as it is a Vampire: the Masquerade ripoff. Which is weird, because Vampire the Masquerade is of course a ripoff of Ravenloft, so we've come full circle. This wouldn't be the first time. The AD&D Thri-Kreen is a ripoff of an Arduin monster that in turn is a ripoff of the Gelugon from... AD&D.

K:

Ghosts on the other hand, don’t get anything interesting. There are some power levels and hints that in their Van Hels… Richten Guide that hey get some more powers choices, but at no point do I care more about ghosts.

Frank:

The problem here is that AD&D is still stuck with Shadows, Wraiths, Specters, and all the rest. So the various “ghost” shticks are divied up pretty fine and no individual monster has enough conceptual space to work with in order to be interesting overall. So you can't have the “Ghost” be invisible but still cast a shadow as they did in life, because while that's a cool description there is a whole monster for that called a “Shadow”. But an actual Shadow isn't allowed to do anything else interesting or cool because all the other bits of coolness are similarly claimed. It's like they played Hungry Hungry Hippos with too many hippos and not enough marbles, so no monster can get enough cool descriptive text to win the prize of being “not stupid”.

So instead what they did was to create “Ghost Magnitude”, which gives Ghosts various numeric bonuses you don't care about and no one cares. Sad.

K:

Liches are turned into major bosses with some dramatic undead ruling powers. They also get needed flavor text about what kind of spellcasters they are and how they memorize spells, so overall you want to do more lich hijinks after reading this.

Frank:

This seemed totally unnecessary to me. Liches are already arbitrarily powerful. They are Wizards. They can do anything. Giving them extra arbitrary powers over the arbitrary powers they already had was just lazy writing. Seems like it would have been better to use this space to talk about some of the batshit stuff you could do as a AD&D wizard with infinite free time and more villainy than sense. Also problematic is that the rest of the Ravenloft rules are all about how you don't get any treasure and can't use your high level abilities. So I have no idea how you're supposed to fight a Lich in Ravenloft and not just get your ass killed. It's like writing up extra minor powers for Astral Dreadnoughts.

K:

The lycanthrope section is straight bullshit. It makes lycanthropy worse and not more interesting, so major wasted opportunities here for storytelling and adventures.

No power-ups or interesting flavor skins here, something that confuses the shit out of me considering how lousy with were-beasts this setting is.

Frank:

The book laments that the Van Helsing Richten Guide to Were-beasts was mostly about lycanthrope psychology and stuff, which is their sorry excuse for not being able to come up with anything interesting here. This seems like a very weak excuse. The guide to Were-beasts was written by Nigel Findley of Shadowrun fame before his tragic death by heart attack. I remember that book rather fondly, ans as I recall was mostly about constructing plots around the sort of “one villager goes missing a night” investigations against time limits that Ravenloft was relatively good at. Also, it had this for a cover:


This version is just a tirade about how in Ravenloft Lycanthropy Cures You! Really missed a huge opportunity here.

K:

Golems get an interesting thing where they have OCD and you can exploit that, but otherwise it’s a section that hands out some flavor stuff and straight power-ups.

Frank:

Golems are still relatively slow, and generally unsuited to long range attacks of any kind. Outside of a “dungeon environment” where they can be guarding a macguffin in a small stone room, they aren't much threat. Juicing their combat stats makes them worse to encounter in their natural dungeon inhabitat, but has basically no effect on the basic calculus there.

K:

It finishes with Mummies, and does nothing for me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of mummies because they have always just seemed like zombies to me, but Ravenloft created power levels for them so….there you go: jumped-up zombies.

I think you could do interesting things with Mummies if you played up the religious angle and made that the focus of their powers and not just intensify the strength of Mummy rot.

Frank:

Mummies are interesting if and only if they are dark sorcerers. The Mummy from the original “The Mummy” or the remake with Brendan Fraser is an interesting mummy. The Mummy from the later Mummy sequels who is just a big dude in bandages isn't interesting or frightening at all. This book talks about how you can increase the combat stats on the boring thuggish mummies and no one cares.

This being the era before the internet, the book ends with a call for submissions and a plugging of the next Van Richten guides (Fiends and Vistani, both of which were rancid and should be compared to World of Darkness: Gypsies, albeit for different reasons).

And that's the end of the book. But it's not the end of the box. There's also a Domains and Denizens book, a map, a poster, and a deck of cards. But that, I think, is a review for another day.

-Username17 & K

[norms29]

LAST MINUTE ADDITIONS:

then any heinous lie to an evil monster like one that sends it into an ambush is a 1% or 2% chance

Even if we accept your premise that things that explicitly don't require a check are "really" a check with a 0% chance and thus open to modification, what lie do you tell the monster that qualifies as "Unusual cruelty"?

The lie where the monster is led into an ambush where it is murdered with extreme force.

If lies leading to someone's bloody death don't count as extreme cruelty, I don't know what would.

the standard isn't "extreme unpleasantness" it's "unusual cruelty" I don't consider extreme murderization to be unusual in the context being described

and in the process of attacking it is another 2-4%

m sorry, I don't see where this one is coming from.

It's an assault before it's murder.

You don't get a discount on the assault because it ended in murder. There are two checks there because they take place at two different times.

except unprovoked assault on an evil isn't a check.

and if you use any spells that mighty be considered torture (like most DnD spells) there are more checks.

Ok, this is just a blatant assault on the english language, Torture requires that the monster is already being held captive. So I can't grant you that even if we delve into a realistic look at the flavor text of spells for how insanely painful they should be.

Melf's Acid Arrow. Any of the Polymorph spells. Any of the mind control or holding spells if you use them to kill someone. I really can go on and on.

DnD spells are cruel, many to the point where you should consider them torture. There really is no way around it.

It was one thing to insist that the expected response to a monster be described as "unusual" but this is just... I will admit that some spells are tortuously painful, but that doesn't make them torture in the normal usage of the word as long as the subject is capable of fleeing and/or killing you back.

I mean, unless you don't think it's torture to make someone watch and feel as you force them to stab their own face. Or you turn them into a fish and let them die gasping while feeling the shame and horror of being turned into a fish. Or you destroy their mind with Feeblemind.

Seriously, I can do this all day.

in order; 1.yes it's Torture, because they already blew a Save-or-lose and are now captive, 2. possibly torture because you could have killed the fish immediately instead of leaving it to suffer (BTW "shame of being turned into a fish"?), and 3.No, no more then destroying their mind by hitting them.

or the checks you might face if you are a follower of a good-aligned god with ideas about killing or theft.

Ok you can't blame Ravenloft for that one, because if that's a violation, then it's a punishable infraction for clerics in any campaign setting.

In Ravenloft, anyone can violate their own faith and face divine punishment, and anyone violating anyone's temple can be punished too regardless of their faith. Clerics are not the only ones for either in Ravenloft.

I don't think you got what this one meant, I was trying to get a across that clerics are already beholden to the tenets of their faith or they lose their spells, so if playing a Cleric of of a good aligned god doesn't normally involve regularly losing spell casting because of theft and murder, then in ravenloft the tenets don't get anymore restrictive.

I know it seems like I'm just nitpicking at this point, but I think it covers a larger point. your example, or even just those parts of it that I'm willing to concede, is a fine illustration of a worst case scenario of DM incompetence, belligerence, or insanity. But I feel that enough people tried to use these rules, and there were enough flaws in the idea and it's execution that a review ought to focus on (and I tried to focus on) the problems that will arise when a DM earnestly attempts to implement these rules as he read them.

[Username17]

It was one thing to insist that the expected response to a monster be described as "unusual" but this is just... I will admit that some spells are tortuously painful, but that doesn't make them torture in the normal usage of the word as long as the subject is capable of fleeing and/or killing you back.

You're fucking joking, right? The book defines torture as "intentionally causing physical or mental suffering", and further divides it into two categories based on whether it "might serve some purpose".

If you cast spells on people for the purpose of killing them, and it causes physical or emotional suffering while doing that (which they all do), then that's "Torture, routine", and doing it "exceeds the range of normal powers checks. The dungeon Master should refer to "Acts of Ultimate Darkness"".

You're also fundamentally reading the chart backwards. The Dark Powers percentage check isn't defined by the victim, it's defined by the perpetrator. Player Characters and Innocents get a 1% powers check for every lie they tell, regardless of the alignment of the people they are lying to.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

You're fucking joking, right? The book defines torture as "intentionally causing physical or mental suffering", and further divides it into two categories based on whether it "might serve some purpose".

If you cast spells on people for the purpose of killing them, and it causes physical or emotional suffering while doing that (which they all do), then that's "Torture, routine", and doing it "exceeds the range of normal powers checks. The dungeon Master should refer to "Acts of Ultimate Darkness"".

-Username17

Now you're just clownboating.

We can all agree that smelling your own flesh burning is pretty fucking horrible. But you don't cast fireball to "cause physical or mental suffering", you cast it to make the other guys stop breathing. Flame swording a deranged cannibal is fine, taking a hot poker to a captive after the fight to get to the gold is torture.

War on Terror innovations aside, the distinction between fighting and torturing is not hard. The inclusive (and utterly wasted) definition of torture is to nail the Bart Simpsons of the world from going "But I'm not touching him, so it can't be torture", not to take a smelly dump all over ganking wererats for great justice.

[norms29]

You're also fundamentally reading the chart backwards. The Dark Powers percentage check isn't defined by the victim, it's defined by the perpetrator. Player Characters and Innocents get a 1% powers check for every lie they tell, regardless of the alignment of the people they are lying to.

-Username17

??? ok this one was just so out there that I had to pull the book out again to double check, I had to give you the benefit of the doubt because there was no way you came to this bizarre conclusion without it explicitly saying so, while my reading seemed so obvious that I thought maybe I assumed it and glossed over some contradictory text.

Which made it all the more surprising to me when I found this, page 45, column 2 ,paragraph 1, sentence 2.

Note that each category is cross-referenced against the type of person or persons suffering from the act

so... I have to ask, How the fuck did you come to your conclusion?

[Username17]

so... I have to ask, How the fuck did you come to your conclusion?

That chart has victimless crimes on it. The "suffering" in this case is the Dark Power Attention. It has to be, because there is no one else to cross reference for their looting an abandoned temple example.

This is also why it says it bones PCs more than NPCs. Because the chart very definitely does.

-Username17

[fbmf]

But you don't cast fireball to "cause physical or mental suffering", you cast it to make the other guys stop breathing.

Wait...what? Fireball is not a SoD; it causes hit point damage.

You're honestly saying you only cast fireball if you know you can generate enough damage to kill the victim outright? You never do it just to lower their current hit points as part of an ongoing effort to kill a victim?

Game On,
fbmf

[norms29]

so... I have to ask, How the fuck did you come to your conclusion?

That chart has victimless crimes on it. The "suffering" in this case is the Dark Power Attention. It has to be, because there is no one else to cross reference for their looting an abandoned temple example.

How are you reading the "unholy acts" part of the chart? because I can't think of what you think the categories mean if not the alignment of the faith you transgress against.

you looked at a chart wherein desecrating a holy place has it's own category, and you're going to argue that it was intended as an example of a victimless crime? in a game like D&D, where gods are verifiably real, and would obviously be the victim of having their temple desecrated.

Actually, I have a better question, what the fuck do you think the non-alignment entries meant if they weren't referring to the actor's relation to the victim?

This is also why it says it bones PCs more than NPCs. Because the chart very definitely does.

are you high? It doesn't say that it bones PCs more than NPCs, it says that IT DOESN"T EFFECT NPCs AT ALL.

so if the person committing the crime is the one who "suffers from the act" then why do the NPC entries exist at all when the text explicitly and repeatedly tells you that NPCs don't roll on the chart?

[Desdan_Mervolam]

you looked at a chart wherein desecrating a holy place has it's own category, and you're going to argue that it was intended as an example of a victimless crime? in a game like D&D, where gods are verifiably real, and would obviously be the victim of having their temple desecrated.

As I recall, gods are very explicitly barred from interacting with Ravenloft. Clerical spells are provided by the Dark Powers wearing the trollface.

[norms29]

As I recall, gods are very explicitly barred from interacting with Ravenloft. Clerical spells are provided by the Dark Powers wearing the trollface.

shit... that does sound familiar... still, the point stands that "unholy acts" are

cross-referenced against the alignment of the faith that has been offended

[Koumei]

are you high? It doesn't say that it bones PCs more than NPCs, it says that IT DOESN"T EFFECT NPCs AT ALL.

I would say that's a case of it boning PCs substantially more than NPCs.

[Surgo]

Thanks so much for writing this out, guys. Had a blast reading this, especially the bits about the sad state of ghosts in D&D land.

[K]

This is also why it says it bones PCs more than NPCs. Because the chart very definitely does.

are you high? It doesn't say that it bones PCs more than NPCs, it says that IT DOESN"T EFFECT NPCs AT ALL.

so if the person committing the crime is the one who "suffers from the act" then why do the NPC entries exist at all when the text explicitly and repeatedly tells you that NPCs don't roll on the chart?

Read the text again. There is an entire section that only "advises" you to not use the chart, and says that you "shouldn't." They want you to decide when NPCs degenerate instead of using the NPC entries on the chart, but you can totally use them.

That being said, I hope it's clear to everyone that it's not possible to use the Dark Powers section in good faith. Where it's not contradictory or confusing, it's cruel and/or stupid.

Pretty much the benchmark for unplayable terrible mechanics.

[rasmuswagner]

Wait...what? Fireball is not a SoD; it causes hit point damage.

You're honestly saying you only cast fireball if you know you can generate enough damage to kill the victim outright? You never do it just to lower their current hit points as part of an ongoing effort to kill a victim?

Game On,
fbmf

No, What I'm saying is...you don't cast fireball to cause suffering, you cast fireball to lower the other guy's HP. If you could get an equally effective "monoxide poisoning ball", you'd be just as happy to cast that.

Even though Fireball is horrible and painful, it's still a long way from torture.

[Username17]

No, What I'm saying is...you don't cast fireball to cause suffering, you cast fireball to lower the other guy's HP. If you could get an equally effective "monoxide poisoning ball", you'd be just as happy to cast that.

Even though Fireball is horrible and painful, it's still a long way from torture.

We understand that is what you're saying, and it doesn't mean shit. It's a silly and pointless thing to be saying. Ravenloft has two entries for Torture. The worse one is the one where you do something that causes suffering for the purpose of causing pain. The lesser one is the one where you do something that causes suffering for some other purpose (their example is "get information", but any other purpose would do).

No one is saying that fireball is the worse form of torture, just that according to the definitions in Chapter IV, fireball counts as "Torture, Routine", and is still pretty bad. The fact that the suffering is incidental to the overall goal of mass murder (itself another source of powers checks) disqualifies it as the higher form of torture but solidly defines it as the lesser form of torture in that book.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

No, What I'm saying is...you don't cast fireball to cause suffering, you cast fireball to lower the other guy's HP. If you could get an equally effective "monoxide poisoning ball", you'd be just as happy to cast that.

Even though Fireball is horrible and painful, it's still a long way from torture.

We understand that is what you're saying, and it doesn't mean shit. It's a silly and pointless thing to be saying. Ravenloft has two entries for Torture. The worse one is the one where you do something that causes suffering for the purpose of causing pain. The lesser one is the one where you do something that causes suffering for some other purpose (their example is "get information", but any other purpose would do).

No one is saying that fireball is the worse form of torture, just that according to the definitions in Chapter IV, fireball counts as "Torture, Routine", and is still pretty bad. The fact that the suffering is incidental to the overall goal of mass murder (itself another source of powers checks) disqualifies it as the higher form of torture but solidly defines it as the lesser form of torture in that book.

-Username17

You're the silly twat who's saying that flame swording a wererat in the face during combat is exactly the same as hammering red hot nails in your wererat prisoner's johnson to get information.

Well, actually, you're the silly twat misrepresenting the text to make it say that, but you're still the silly twat here. Even Gary motherfucking G would not stoop to "Your arrow catches the Orc in his stomach, and he bleeds out in the hot sun, calling for his mother and cursing all humans. You just caused suffering to further your goals, congrats, you're no longer a paladin". It's just you sperging out over a bit of clarification and completely ignoring all context that makes this a thing.

That could be a cool Fantasy Horror game, though. Horror is all about fucking with the expectations of the audience - in this case, that enemies tend to go down fairly cleanly, like extras in a PG-13 flick. Playing the screams and crackling sounds of someone who's been firebombed in the background while you calmly describe the next players sword thrust into the gut of a "Bandit" who's maybe all of 13 years old, the bloodstain mixing with the piss stains in his pants...But that's not the game you're rewieving.

[wotmaniac]

Well, actually, you're the silly twat misrepresenting the text to make it say that,

yeah, that happens a lot.
what you're witnessing is a confluence of hyperbole and greedy reductionism.


I think that this may just be a function of his nihilism.

[Username17]

I am amazed and astonished that there are people who think you can define ethical behavior in terms of whether or not it "causes suffering" and not exclude "setting dudes on fire" from the list of possible ethical activities. This isn't an obscure edge case or something. If you say that causing people to suffer is a priori a bad thing to do, regardless of who is being made to suffer or why, then setting people on fire is very obviously going to be on the list of things that are bad things to do.

If you say anything different there is something really deeply fundamentally and obviously wrong with your ability to categorize things.

There are lots of solutions to this problem. Probably the easiest is that if you want people to fight enemies to the death with fire and sword that you probably shouldn't attempt to simultaneously enact a means-based morality system that stresses honesty and nonviolence. There's a blatant philosophical disconnect there and you should obviously do something about it.

-Username17

[K]

Even Gary motherfucking G would not stoop to "Your arrow catches the Orc in his stomach, and he bleeds out in the hot sun, calling for his mother and cursing all humans. You just caused suffering to further your goals, congrats, you're no longer a paladin". It's just you sperging out over a bit of clarification and completely ignoring all context that makes this a thing.

Gary Gygax would clearly let you hammer burning nails into wererat penis and retain Paladin status. He had no problem with PCs being murder hobos who stole everything that wasn't nailed down even if it originally belonged to shit-farmers who really could use the money to supplement their diet of shit.

That's because hero morality is different from civilian morality. Heroes are allowed to be judge, jury, executioner, and tax collector while civilians are allowed to do none of those things.

Ravenloft Dark Powers checks are based on civilian morality. They are clearly designed for the DM to occasionally dick with PC adventurers doing the normal adventurer stuff. This means that when the wererat is riding away on the only horse and the Wizard casts Acid Arrow at him and the wererat spends the next minute dying in agonizing pain as acid eats his bowels out, the Ravenloft DM can use that as an excuse to fuck with the PC.

A good DM would do Dark Powers checks just often enough to keep everyone's mind on the morality of their actions, but secretly never let PCs actually fail one unless they seemed like they were asking for it. Unfortunately, that advice is not in the boxed set.

[wotmaniac]

wait, wait, wait .... hows 'bout we actually nail down some specific definitions for our terminology before we continue to argue past each other. 'cause just swapping out synonyms is counter-productive.

The term in question is "torture"; which was defined above as "causing suffering" (or some such). For this to mean anything, there must be a distinction between "suffering" and synonyms like "pain" (for instance); because these ideas deep getting conflated (and apparently for no good ends).

Whether we like it or not, words can very well have nuances that aren't reflected in their explicit definition.
By Frank's definition, slipping a rock in to someone's hiking boot would qualify as "torture" .... which is just bat-shit insane.

the mere presence of pain does not necessarily mean suffering. just because your actions may happen to impart some temporary pain on to another does not constitute torture.

this is the kind of shit I'm talking about, Frank, when I accuse you of greedy reductionism -- it's your go-to M.O. ... you do it so much, that I'm starting to think you can't even tell when you're doing it.