I don't want video games to let me choose whether my character has Penis A or Penis B, I want them to administer a comprehensive twelve-part questionnaire about how I think elves reproduce and procedurally generate a set of genitals based on my answers.
This post has attracted the expected number of this-is-just-Homestucks, but I have several questions for the person who tagged it #pokemon mystery dungeon.
a few of Nova's moves gain additional properties the more red health he has, in this case he gets a soft knockdown off of Gravimetric Pulse
he can just armor through a viewtiful joe bomb to get red health
This is a very good TikTok.
Thank you to my personal-personified algorithm-person, who found it for me.
"Link Legendofzelda would never have sex with anything" absolutely false – if Link encountered a puzzle where solving it required a small cylinder that thing would be out in a heartbeat.
What traits would you assaign to Kermit The Frog... or is he not especially muppety enough for the pretenses of Eat God?
(With reference to this post here.)
I'd probably give a God-eater who is legally not Kermit the Frog "Amphibious" and "Striking Mien (Trustworthy)" to start. The third Trait is a bit of a toss-up, because Kermit doesn't really do much in the source material, so we don't have any obvious physical capabilities to riff on, and Traits in Eat God are 99% physical. You could go a lot of ways with it; personally I feel like it would be extremely funny to go with "Vile Venom (Hallucinogenic)" and give them a poisonous bite.
Hey why DO all those old tabletop RPGS and adventure games have such weird obtuse "act in this one scene or softlock forever" moments? Like, these weren't designed like arcade games that munch quarters... Why was this sort of thing so commonplace?
(With reference to this post here.)
Funnily enough, for tabletop RPGs there's actually a good answer.
If you're familiar with the popular history of tabletop roleplaying games, you've probably heard the idea that they developed out of fantasy wargaming. That's not actually terribly accurate; tabletop RPGs and fantasy wargames are more like two parallel branches that split off from the recreating-historical-battles kind of wargaming at about the same time, and for the first couple of decades there wasn't a bright line drawn between them like there is today. Many are genuinely hard to classify by contemporary standards – there are a lot of early fantasy wargames that look more like modern tabletop RPGs, and vice versa.
One of the consequences of that lack of sharp distinctions between tabletop RPGs and fantasy wargames is that early tabletop RPGs were often played in a sort of "competitive co-op" format at wargaming tournaments. Multiple groups would run their parties through the same adventure in parallel, and be ranked on their performance; sometimes this would involve scoring points for completing specific objectives, or speedrunning the adventure and aiming for the fastest time, but the most popular tournament format was the survival module: adventures which were deliberately designed to be unreasonably difficult, with whichever group's last surviving character's corpse hit the ground furthest from the dungeon entrance being judged the winner.
The upshot of that popularity is that many published adventures early on – and certainly the greater part of the more infamous ones! – were originally written as survival modules, created to be run competitively at a particular tournament, and later repacked and sold as commercial products. Of course, practically none of them actually explained that; like nearly all tabletop RPG material of their day, they were written under the assumption that all tabletop roleplayers had come up through organised play at university gaming clubs, and thus already had all the context I've just outlined. This ended up causing no end of confusion when the hobby's mainstream visibility exploded in the early 1980s, and suddenly there were folks who'd picked up the rulebooks at their local bookstores trying to teach themselves how to play from first principles with no prior contact with gaming club culture.
As for why adventure games were also like that... well, this is going to sound bizarre by contemporary standards, and I don't blame you if you don't believe me, but once upon a time, point-and-click adventure games were considered the gold standard for Serious Gaming. Unforgiving routing, bizarre moon-logic puzzles, and a bewildering variety of unique ways to get yourself killed off were held up as the mark of the serious gamer in much the same way that janky soulslike combat systems are today, and a large chunk of the genre was made to cater to that ethos. Gamer culture is a hell of a drug!
(If you're about to ask the obvious follow-up question, "what changed?", the point-and-click adventure game's fall from grace and subsequent dismissal as casual fluff tracks more or less directly with a large demographic shift in the late 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing predominantly female – and, well, you can probably connect the dots from there.)
"Can't you, like, shoot blood at it or something?"
"No, you're thinking of hemourgy. I practice hemomancy."
"What's the difference?"
"Well, for one, a hemourgist couldn't tell you you're not getting enough vitamin D."
I am a Chronomancer and my arcane focuses are Pocket Watch and Google Calendar.
It is Wednesday, my dudes.
One of Eat God's playtesters remarked that the current slate of Traits doesn't let you build Birdo from Super Mario Bros., and thus.
Okay but can we explode?
Like, under particular circumstances, or just in general?
At will. Every good bestiary has a little bastard that runs up on you and ruins everything in the immediate area. Could be represented as taking a number of stress and adding that number to whatever roll your taking at the time, maybe? A recoil trait.
Walking up to people and torching everything in the immediate area is already covered by the effortful application of "Elemental" (or whatever it ends up being called in the next revision).
Yes, but the important part is that you are also getting blown apart
When you've only got three special ability slots ever, devoting one of them to something that you can only use by removing yourself from play is hard to justify.
You could always just get better
If it doesn't remove you from play, then we're right back at it not being mechanically distinct from "Elemental".
Prokopetz how does it feel to be the single most patient person on this entire hellsite.
I actually find this sort of thing valuable. Even when the suggestions are terrible, they can provide insight into how someone might accidentally build a character who can't do anything because they didn't think through the mechanical implications of what they're trying to accomplish, and I can use that insight to head off some of those possibilities in the text.
(Don't think that's not a valuable insight to have. Anybody who's ever played Dungeons & Dragons can tell you that "I just picked what seemed cool and accidentally built a character who's bad at everything" is a real and present peril, and it can happen in much simpler systems than you'd intuitively expect!)
One thing I'll say in favour of the Evil Dead franchise is that I enjoy how committed it is to treating its title with perfect literalism: the titular antagonists are a. dead, and b. evil. They aren't hungry or angry or driven mad by suffering, they're just mean. They're cruel not because they have to be, but because they choose to be. There's no cool backstory, no grand occult secret, no shadowy government conspiracy. These zombies are huge assholes for no reason.
I'm generally of the opinion that it's bad form to try and Sherlock Holmes anybody's gender, but over the years I've made the acquaintance of a number of self-styled Internet toughguys who insist they're into gender-bending stuff for edgy, not-giving-a-shit-about-your-lame-social-norms reasons, and whenever one of them re-enters my personal orbit I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't quietly check their profile to see if anything I know needs updating.
@omnybus replied:
It took me a while to realize that your use of "Sherlock Holmes" as a verb means "trying to suss someone's "true" gender by scrutinizing arbitrary traits and/or behaviors", and not "take someone's gender and add cocaine and autism"
I mean, the way cocaine was used and regarded socially in Arthur Conan Doyle's time is roughly equivalent to how absurdly over-caffeinated energy drinks are used and regarded socially today, and while I'm no expert, I'm given to understand that "taking one's gender and adding Monster Energy and autism" is sometimes how it goes.
The problem with Batman in his present incarnation is that we need simultaneously to believe that this is a man who can effortlessly ninja his way through dozens of gun-toting mercenaries, and that this is a man to whom Danny DeVito with an umbrella is a credible threat.
Okay, that was glib – let me expand. I'm fully aware that Batman comics generally don't have him fighting guys like the Penguin one on one these days. That's not the problem. The problem is that superhero power creep has rendered Batman functionally immune to hired goons, but owing to his roots as a street-level vigilante, like half of his classic villains are guys whose primary threat vector is the ability to field arbitrary numbers of hired goons. There just aren't a lot of ways to work around that without either doing violence to the villain's idiom or making Batman carry the idiot ball – though I'll grant that some of the attempted workarounds have been very entertaining!
#i say we give the goons powercreep too #some goon moves to gotham and is gobsmacked at the average goons fighting ability; that would render them their own mob boss in another city (via @chaoticspacedust)
You joke, but that's literally one of the workarounds I'm referring to. One of the reasons that recent Batman stories keep looping back around to ancient ninja conspiracy stuff is that an answer to "how do we make hired goons a credible threat when Batman is an invincible ninja?" is "the hired goons are also ninjas".
Imagine turning to crime out of financial desperation and you can’t even land a job as a dumb knuckle cracking brawler anymore without five years of martial arts training, a CDL in evasive getaway driving and a hand written recommendation from an active member of The Court of Owls.
Since you've talked about genre taxonomy at length before, I feel like you'd have a fun answer to the question: is Pokemon GO a gacha game?
Pokémon GO is technically an invasive species of orchid.
Punkpunk RPG where characters get cool powers based on what their players think the definition of the word "punk" is.
oh gee discord should I try adding numbers? should I try that???? should I try adding numbers to the end of my username so that it's individualized and only mine???? should I try adding numbers??????????
The real challenge of cooking for one is that potato size takes on disproportionate importance. There are so many dishes where one average potato isn't enough, but two average potatoes is too much, so now I'm assessing diameters and ratios like a tuber phrenologist in search of the potato that's just the right amount of potato.
Try going by overall weight rather than size
Do I strike you as the sort of person who can reasonably be expected to keep track of partial potatoes?
consider: any partial potato can simply be boiled. miniature mashed potato for you
Any partial potato will be forgotten in the back of the fridge until the resulting mould culture starts developing a state religion.
The Avignon Potatocy
My mental state on a good day is like a character in a video game where status conditions that do opposite things stack rather than mutually annihilating. All of my numbers look perfectly normal, but then you look at my status HUD and see that I have every buff and every debuff all at once perfectly cancelling each other out, and not even God knows which one is going to wear off first.
The reason you can't easily ascribe real-world political stances to most comic book supervillains is that in comic book reality being an iconoclast genius inventor actually works. It's not even necessarily a rich-guy thing – there are working class supervillains garage-building working time machines, which is something that unavoidably does things to a person's perspective on social responsibility.
Like, yes. Dr. Malfarious may hold certain opinions which superficially resemble real-world Libertarianism, but the difference is that in the real world a person with Dr. Malfarious' attitude and skill-set would end up smeared across a mountainside trying to send their car to space, while in comic book land that exact same attitude and skill-set lets them be an immortal science wizard who lives on the Moon.
