Khrux

The flip side to this article is that most of the criticisms, while really valid, talk about the intended play style for life sim games to be to live through the key points of their character’s lives with immersion.

For literally 20 years, I’ve barely seen it used for this purpose, instead people make themselves, their friends, their dream house, they cheat in money and turn off aging etc. Actually stopping to roleplay your character making friends is the activity most people do when their bored of the regular things they do.

Still, InZoi seeming to not simulate the lives of any of the other NPC’s is a big loss. Even if you’re not interacting with that part of the game, knowing it’s there is great. The Sims 4 (or 3, I forget) strove to reach the dream version of this: You buy a cheap property in a fully open world and ‘functioning’ town and you could walk from your front door to the town center, and the neighbour you see may also drive to town and you’ll see them there. Then as you play, you go from working in the gym to owning it, and can now modify it like your property because it runs on the same rules, the same goes for everything else. The Sims didn’t manage this but their later games clearly launched with this as their design’s guiding light.

I’m mostly interested in the game as a character creator and house builder, but that’s because I don’t expect any game to do a good job of what the article writer wishes for, The Sims included.

I agree, it’s unfortunately impossible to boycott AI outright. The game you love that didn’t use it for the writing, art or code probably still had plenty of planning meetings where copilot PowerPoint tools were used. A programmer who doesn’t use AI may use something from someone who did. An artist may get a job over another because they used AI for their job application.

And that’s ignoring everyone that uses it intentionally for projects. I genuinely loathe AI content but it’s not worth boycotting like many other causes.

In the 19th century, the Jacquard loom became widespread, using punchcards to automate weaving. Belgian workers who lost their jobs from this would protest by throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots into the machines. This act is the origin of the word saboteur. This era of industrialisation was shared by the movement of the romantics. Romanticism existed to contrast industrialisation and enlightenment, to celebrate nature and imagination and individuality. Poets like Lord Byron led wonderfully flawed but human lives, while capturing this feeling in their art, poetry and philosophy.

But humans although wonderfully flawed, seek convenience. Evolution loves convenience, dopamine loves convenience, capitalism loves convenience. When it’s allure comes from all directions, we cnt fault ourselves for succumbing to it.

Although their name lives on, the saboteurs couldn’t stop the world seeking convenience. Although Romanticism always existed before it’s heyday, it eventually diminished. From the punchcards of the Jacquard looms, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (the estranged and father-loathing daughter of Lord Byron) developed the general purpose computer. Technological convenience survived.

There is a growing opinion that we are living through a new romantic era, this time opposing the digital world, the algorithm and artificial intelligence. I agree with this sentiment. Although I consider myself a socialist, pro workers rights and supporter of radical ideals, I don’t see the new saboteurs winning; I don’t see boycotting AI, or poisoning our art and media with AI confusing language and imagery as a path to victory. Eventually convince always wins. Instead I want to be a romantic, who can celebrate everything human that AI cannot be, without believing that I can exist outside of it’s influence. I can both love human made art, media and content, and consume that which has been touched by AI.

God knows why I wrote this all I guess it’s just not a conversation I’d ever get to have in real life. There are probably typos in here, I hate to proof-read.

How do you mean? I know it’s pretty standard to pirate the Sims games because of their dlc costs, but I don’t know any way to get it legally and on steam.

If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.

When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that’s not really what it’s designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I’ve only ever heard great things about them.

The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it’s founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it’s prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.

Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I’ve ever discovered. I’ve played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. If you’re Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I’d bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world’s that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it’s just got good prompts. Despite that it’s got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.

I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.

I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I’m the GM, I’m always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it’s so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn’t get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

I deleted my comment because I came from the TTRPG network homepage and didn’t realise I was responding to pathfinder. I gave quite a few D&D 5e specific examples and was a little worried people wouldn’t be happy about it.

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I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.

I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.

I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.

Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.

The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.

I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.

I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.

It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.

This is also probably off topic because I can’t load the YouTube video.

I was talking about the second Dune film a little while back and saying how much I enjoy a well realised world that doesn’t try to convey itself by comparing itself to ours. I get the same feeling watching Dune and Lord of the Rings as I do when I watch a film from a culture I’m not familiar with; a sense of needing to adjust to their way of storytelling.

Pairing this with what you mention which is basically extra subtle show don’t tell, and you end up with something I absolutely adore, which is a story in a fully realised culture I know nothing about, that understands that the bare minimum amount of that culture I need to understand to fully enjoy the story can be the best amount to have.

I was going to say how rare this is but thinking about it, it actually isn’t. Tolkien’s cosmology is fully realised and vast yet I learnt basically no fluff about the world that wasn’t necessary to the story. Sometimes I just had to make peace with the fact that I didn’t understand the cultural context, I could only measure it’s importance in the attitude of the characters.

That’s the shit I love.

I’ve read quite a few anecdotes and quotes about Gygax’s misogyny before but I agree with you, I don’t think there is nearly enough information I these gods to extrapolate that it’ embodies all powerful masculine forces as good and all feminine as evil, especially as the article mentions how this perpetuates pre-existing coomo themes in story and myth. Everything we know about Gygax would say he’d lift from myths with sexist themes without adjusting that, rather than add them with intention.

Do do think there is myriad evidence that Gygax believed femininity to be inherently inferior, but that’s different from evil. It’s still stupid and worth highlighting but by excessively demonising him to the point of nearly making things up, it’s just fuel for people to dismiss the valid points.

A flash of light streaks toward a creature of your choice within range. Make a ranged spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 4d6 radiant damage, and the next attack roll made against this target before the end of your next turn has advantage, thanks to the mystical dim light glittering on the target until then.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something and the phrasing isn’t perfect but I’d say the combination of saying that the advantage is caused by the light and the advantage lasting to the end of your next turn would mean that the light also lasts until the end of your next turn?

I agree completely that it’s inconsequential, one issue with the arguement about creative characters is that people often blend being unique with being compelling. A compelling character is where it’s inconsequential what choices you make.

That said, I think players who aren’t aware of the tropes PC’s often fall into may end up playing “the straight man” to the group, who is comparatively very plain. Players who have played for longer may feel that this is similar to PCs they’ve seen before. But even then, it doesn’t really matter as this PC trope shines in contrast to the rest of the party and that rarely changes.

Unrelated but I wanna say how proud I was of my Baldurs Gate3 character. I felt that your TAV in that game was quite plain and generic no matter what you chose, so played as a human fighter called John Baldurgate who was the most generic character possible and had a blast.

Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.

Although you could travel the land. Perhaps not cross the Sahara but if you lived in the Roman world, you could quite easily take some years to walk off the edge of the map and just explore. There would of course be a good chance of death from illness, animal or person, but equally like today, you may also meet plenty of kind people who would let you stay and maybe even share their knowledge of the area and culture.

Oh no, I hate this art and design style:(