Overthinking Games

they've yet to make an experience more bewildering and confusing than trying to pick up a rpg after more than a week

the entirety of killjam xxx should be soundtracked by femtanyl, in my personal and completely correct opinion

I am not knowledgeable in the noble art of pope fighting and the only game I've played featuring it wasn't a metroidvania, but given the post's phrasing I take it this is a common thing?

Blasphemous (2019) is almost certainly responsible for popularising the trope via its final (non-DLC) boss fight (spoilers for the bad ending, if you care), though it's been imitated here and there since. The forthcoming Silent Planet - Elegy of a Dying World showcases a very promising Pope fight in its latest teaser trailer (skip to 0:38 if you're impatient), and the current demo for Being and Becoming features an excellent fight with an evil nun (gameplay footage – nun at 1:33), so I'm hopeful for a proper Pope fight in the full game.

Having a "stupider people have done this" attitude about the things you want to do can open so many doors

Literally the definition of imperialism and classism. Doesn’t matter how many peasants you sacrifice as long as the most powerful piece is left standing

Proximity of bishops to the rulers promotes theocratic oppression

the horse is so fuckable

It's a shame Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is one of those parodies whose author clearly feels the source material is beneath them and thus doesn't put much thought into how they're sending it up because a Regency zombie apocalypse that properly Examines the Implications sounds like a really fun time.

Like, my guy, so much of contemporary zombie media is subtextually really about class that if you're sticking zombies in your Regency romance and completely failing to draw a line between the class-driven subtext the former and the class-driven text of the latter, you are a hack.

what doesnt kill you is still valuable data points for a graph im working on titled "how to kill you"

I guess the big reason the sunk-cost argument for playing nothing but Dungeons & Dragons rings false to me is that, in my experience, most groups that hack D&D for non-sword-and-sorcery genres never actually get to a functional place. The GM is in permanent scrambling-to-make-just-in-time-fixes mode, and the only reason this flies under the radar is that D&D's culture of play insists this is normal.

Kind of funny to me that do a full blown “fuck it we’ll do it live” would be easier than what’s going on in a lot of dnd right now. Having to improv rules on the spot isn’t an easy skill to learn, but it’s gotta be easier than having to improvisationally build out from an established rule set that you’re also expected to have memorized.

In practice, trying to go that route often just makes things worse. If your experience with the medium is so narrow that you can't imagine what a game that isn't a D&D clone would even look like, inventing rules on the spot may not solve the problem of the experience of play the rules want to produce being askew of the experience of play you want to have – particularly if you've come up through a culture of play that treats that disconnect as expected. It's entirely possible for a rule you invented on the spot to disagree with you about what sort of game you're playing!

Oh yeah definitely. The world we have is one where trying to transition people from the current dnd mindset to a pure improv one would be just about impossible and make everything a lot worse before it got any better, if it ever did. I was more trying to comment that wotc offloading the work onto the DMs threaded the needle into the worst of both worlds, where DMs are expected to be expert improvisers with eidetic memories.