#108echoes

Could do. I’m going to assume you’re already aware of most popular action RPGs in the style of Borderlands or Diablo, and that their skill trees are nowhere near complicated enough for you (or else you wouldn’t be asking!), so I won’t waste your time with recs along those lines. I’m also excluding MMOs, since those are deliberately structured so that it takes forever to actually work your way up their skill trees. Let’s see what else might fit the bill.

The first game that springs to mind is CrossCode. Not only does it have huge, sprawling skill trees with all sorts of complicated interactions and branching paths, but every time you finish a major dungeon, you gain access to a new, entirely separate skill grid themed after that dungeon’s element. You can swap skill grids at any time, which enables some truly disgusting tricks, like changing to a completely different build right in the middle of performing a combo. You don’t have to exploit the mechanics in that sort of depth – the game’s quite happy to just let you muddle through, at least on the lower difficulty settings – but it really rewards the time and effort you put into it.

Second, if you don’t mind console ports, you might have a look at Tales of Vesperia. It uses the “learn skills from your equipment” approach you see in many JRPGs rather than the skill trees more common to Western RPGs, so it’s not 100% what you’re describing; on the plus side. there are rather a lot of them – each character has in the neighbourhood of 120 skills they can pick up over the course of the game, and you can freely respec your mastered skills any time you want, so there’s a lot of territory to cover build-wise, and it definitely qualifies as an action RPG.

Finally, If your rubric for “action RPG” covers Metroidvanias, you might have a look at Sundered. Its particular brand of pseudo-roguelike gameplay is admittedly something of an acquired taste, but if light puzzle platforming interspersed with getting swarmed by literally hundreds of monsters is your idea of a fun time, you could do worse! Beautiful animations, too. As for the skill tree mechanics… well:

Actually, it’s the other way around, with death and leaving the battlefield triggers being the odds one out compared to other zone change triggers. It’s just that these triggers generally outnumber the other types of zone change triggers (except maybe ETB triggers) that people don’t realize this. Anyway, enough semantics, onto the rulesy bits:

Normally, an ability that triggers when a card changes zones will look at that card in the zone it’s moving to. e.g. ETB triggers look at the permanent once it’s on the battlefield and not in the zone it’s coming from.

This category includes the “graveyard from anywhere” abilities, which means that these abilities will always trigger from the graveyard and not from the battlefield and so cards like Yixlid Jailer can shut them off.

Leaves the battlefield triggers (including death triggers), on the other hand, look at the permanent as it last existed on the battlefield to determine if the ability should trigger. This is because some of these abilities trigger when the card moves to a hidden zone, i.e. the hand or library.

Well, it’s not the easiest thing to sort some of them out from the others, but here goes. Robert Smirke built fourteen passages, but how am I supposed to know whether or not Robert Smirke knew everything that was going on? It seems to me that an entity that is a personification of your greatest fears would be too alien for you to ever perceive it in its whole. Forget the Lovecraftian “if you perceive it in its whole, it will break your mind”; here, it’s impossible to perceive the whole, no matter what state your mind is in.

1) Beholding and 2) The End have been clearly marked out.

3) The Vast seems to be associated with empty spaces and a feeling of vertigo, of not being able to tell up from down. It seems to be associated with both empty sky and empty sea, though if you ask me, the sea deserves an entity all its own.

4) Darkness seems to be its own thing.

5) Fire seems to be its own thing.

6) You’ve got the Hunt, and I’m not sure whether an entity like the Piper and a person like Alfred Grifter fits in with that or not. All seem associated with violence.

7) Spiders seem to be their own thing, associated with (obviously) spiders and control. The spiders don’t seem to play well with others, but then, something associated with authoritarian control really would have a hard time cooperating with most of these other beings.

8) Isolation seems to be its own thing, represented most strongly by the machinations of the Lukas family. I wonder if the sense of underground, eldritch claustrophobia associated with ‘Lost John’s Cave’ has anything to do with it, or not.

9) Michael and his reality-warping powers. Whatever he’s about, it’s probably the entity associated with gaslighting we’ve seen in episodes like ‘Lost and Found.’

10) The Flesh Hive and whatever the hell John Amherst is supposed to be probably share a parent entity.

11) Meat, patron of cannibals, nihilistic statements about how the whole world is a slaughterhouse, and possibly/probably the Bone-Turners, if Jared Hopworth isn’t the only one.

12) The Not-Them, the Circus of the Other, the angler fish entity/entities and their victims seem related to each other. I’ve been calling their parent entity ‘The Other’ (the social commentary present in ‘Tightrope’ is what put that into my head), though I’ve been trawling along enough to have also heard it called ‘The Stranger.’ Seems to be connected with paranoia and the fear of strangers, and of people you know and love not being the kind of person you thought they were.

(2/3) Rin was a prominent early example of the tsundere+twintails+miniskirt/stockings combo, and probably helped it spread. She's also canonically bisexual! However, she only realizes during Saber's route, when Saber and Shirou have to have sex for Magic Reasons and Rin decides to help with the foreplay. Otherwise she just stares at attractive women and decides that what she's feeling is jealousy. Gee, Rin, maybe that's a revelation to have before you're knuckle-deep in another girl.             

(3/3) I am forever and always salty that Saber/Rin fanfic is so hard to find. Saber/Rin/Shirou's even a decent OT3 (and follows well from the Good End of Rin's route), but nobody writes that either.             

Good information to have, thank you!

Hey there @108echoes . Thankee for the ask! 

I’ll answer the “demographics” question first, mostly by gender. (Also, as a heads up, I’m going to talk about “male” and “female” as generalities; nonbinary and trans folk simply aren’t in medicine in enough numbers to start really counting. I know the trans community is under-counted, in medicine just like everywhere else, and I haven’t forgotten you guys, but this is based on the data I can find, which is strict M/F.) 

Gender

Things differ specialty to specialty, but also job title to job title. For example, nursing is about 95% female (the 5% who are men are more likely to be supervisors and more likely to be paid better, because of course there’s sexism in “female” jobs too, why wouldn’t there be?), while surgery is overwhelmingly male. Physical therapy is mostly men, lab techs are a roughly even split, EMS is almost 50/50 (depending on the service), emergency medicine is fairly evenly split as well (maybe a touch more male than female). The “brainiac” specialties, like cardiology, neurology, etc. tend to be fairly evenly split, but perhaps more male-leaning, as I understand, but I could be wrong. 

OB/GYN is overwhelmingly female, and male providers are actually looked at with suspicion. (Because all men want to violate women, right? Who said sexism can’t go both ways?) Family practice -- the general “doctor’s office” we think of -- is also skewed female. 

Oh, by the way, regardless of rank or specialty, female providers tend to make less than their male coworkers. What, you thought medicine was equal? 

Age, by the way, makes an enormous difference in demographics. More than 50% of doctors under 30 are female, while only 30% of doctors in the West are women. That means that the next 30 years are going to see some big gender divide shifts in healthcare, which I heartily welcome. 

Politics 

In terms of liberal vs conservative, I think it depends an awful lot on other factors, more so than what the person does for a living. That said, the overwhelming majority of OB/GYN docs that I’m aware of are in favor of abortion being legal and easily accessible. But that view isn’t  born of a liberal mindset; it’s born of a strong understanding of the science. You can be a conservative OB/GYN and still agree that, while you may not want to perform abortion or even think it’s morally right, that it should still be safe and legal. 

Where someone comes from (and where they’re practicing, and where they trained) weigh heavily on their political views. A doctor who’s practicing in Dallas, for example, who was born in Seattle and trained in Baltimore will likely be a liberal, whereas someone who was born in Dallas, trained in Georgia, and is practicing in Milwaukee is likely to be a conservative. 

Similarly, the institution where one works can be conservative or liberal, depending on a few things. Privately owned institutions tend to be more conservative and tight-fisted; public institutions tend to be a little more liberal. Catholic institutions won’t terminate pregnancies even for the health of the mother in some cases. Research hospitals might be either more conservative (more $) or more liberal (more sciency). 

Any discussion of “conservative” and “liberal” will also have to talk about the fucked-up relationship between science and religion these days. Generally, science is on the side of the liberals; “scientific truth” should be a value not associated with politics, but given the way things are now, it’s a liberal value. 

Archetypes

It’s easier to categorize the specialties by “mindsets” or personality archetypes. Neurologists tend to use the organ they study as much as they practice on it, they tend to be very technical, intelligent, and thoughtful. Orthopedic docs and surgeons in general are often the jocks of medicine (surgery in general is very “jocky” and something of a boy’s club). Emergency medicine and trauma surgery are both specialties that require a love of high adrenaline, and don’t necessarily require the biggest brain on the block. Internal medicine and ICUs are pretty much split down the middle. 

Medicine is also very tribal. The specialty you’re in is the best specialty, dammit, the only worthwhile specialty. Everyone believes this no matter what. 

There’s also a saying: 

The emerge knows nothing and does nothing. Medicine knows everything and does nothing. Surgery knows nothing and does everything. And the ME knows everything and does everything, but is a bit too late to the party. 

Again, these are archetypes and generalities. 

I invite people from specialties outside of EMS to weigh in on this. Keep in mind that this whole response is based on quick Internet research and personal experiences. 

Hope this helped! 

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

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