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Crispy™ Controversial opinions about RPGs that you know deep down are true.

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
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PST, Torment:Tides of Numenera and Disco Elysium have some of the best writing in the industry, and the reason people dislike them or call the writing pretentious is that they dont read many books, and as such the wall of texts and their slow reading speed makes them break at them.

Hard disagree. I haven't played Disco Elysium but I've beaten PS:T and played a handful of hours (around 4) of Tides of Numenera.
To make a long story short, this is what the writing in each game looks like:
  • PS:T: 200 words of dialogue, 30 words of description.
  • Numenera: 30 words of dialogue, 200 words of description.
My point is, Numenera spends far too much time on meaningless prose (I reckon that describing what I can't see makes sense in an RPG like this... but not when that information is entirely useless to the player), whereas PS:T spends more time on the valuable things, which are dialogue and characterization.
 
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Thac0

Time Mage
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I'm very into cock and ball torture
Overly flowery prose and wordyness is a sickness that High Fantasy is entangled with. Granddaddy Tolkien is prolly the best representative.

Read the classics.

No, I don't mean Tolkien.

I mean the real classics.

I have actually. I had a cool book about the origin of fantasy once that was just a collection of the short stories that served as the inspiration of the genre. But Tolkien was the man who took High Fantasy from pulp magazines to a somewhat respected genre.
 
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Thac0

Time Mage
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I'm very into cock and ball torture
But Tolkien was the man who took High Fantasy from pulp magazines to a somewhat respected genre.
no

https://www.jrrvf.com/sda/critiques/The_Nation.html

what tolkien did, was introduce tropes that defined the fantasy genre for the next century. ultimately for the negative, I would argue.

I am talking about impact, not about quality. A review is not relevant as a source to dispute the societal impact.
Although I think that Tolkien is absolutely excellent and fully deserves his reputation.
 

Latro

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I am talking about impact, not about quality
Quality has everything to do with respectability. Fantasy is not respected, except among fantasy enthusiasts attempting to justify fantasy. People like Wolfe, Lafferty, and many other sci-fi/fantasy authors went into the field knowing they'd have to fight for respectability, and I believe this won't happen until we nail Tolkien's coffin shut for good.
 

Butter

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Tolkien did nothing wrong. Whenever someone comes along and does something great, a thousand shitty imitators will try to coast by in his wake.
 

Latro

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Tolkien did nothing wrong. Whenever someone comes along and does something great, a thousand shitty imitators will try to coast by in his wake.
autistic emphasis on world-building and lore to the point of churning out garbage prose, static characters, and a predictable and infantile plot...

yes, tolkien and his fans are the RPG equivalent of storyfags...the "gameplay" of literature is prose and character. even in another dimension, combatfags rule the day!!!
 

Butter

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Tolkien's aim was to create mythology, not just literature. It would have been inappropriate of him to apply Dostoevsky levels of focus on character. It's been a while since I've read Lord of the Rings, but I don't recall the prose being especially good or bad.
 

Latro

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It would have been inappropriate of him to apply Dostoevsky levels of focus on character
which is an extreme on the other end, merely having the cast go through the trouble or develop a stronger sense of character would have been fine. at best, frodo goes from naive hobbit to PTSD hobbit.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
I don't think there's anything wrong with Tolkein's writing quality, it's just that it's more children's writing than adult writing. As children's writing, and writing that dope-smoking hippies would later get into, it's perfectly fine, even very good. But it's the simplistic nature of its allegory that diminished the reputation of fantasy.

Prior to Tolkein's popularity, the fantasy genre had actually had a perfectly respectable niche, generally considered as a means of propounding allegory or (as GRRM has emphasized) telling stories with heightened emotion. Quite a few classics in literature had been fantasy stories (e.g. Don Quixote, Rabelais, Gulliver's travels, Lord Dunsanay, right up to James Branch Cabell in the very early 20th century).

But Tolkein (paradoxically and ironically) actually lowered the fantasy level, and simultaneously made the genre less respectable because of the shallowness (good vs. evil) of his allegory - again, it was fine for children, but as it became more and more representative of the genre (as opposed to someone like Cabell) the genre lost some of its cachet. (That might have changed if he'd managed to finish the Silmarillion, but as it is the Hobbit and LOTR are what most people know of him.)

It think GRRM's done a lot to bring it back to respectability though, but the weird thing is he's done it by lowering the fantasy level even more - as if that's what was bugging people. But it never was, people have never minded the fantastical in stories, they just want some depth.
 

Latro

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It think GRRM's done a lot to bring it back to respectability though, but the weird thing is he's done it by lowering the fantasy level even more - as if that's what was bugging people. But it never was, people have never minded the fantastical in stories, they just want some depth.
I disagree with you a bit on this, however, I'd say what clearly defines the future of fantasy is whatever IP gets picked up by hollywood, and that's a pretty bad thing. Who knows, maybe Gormenghast or some Wolfe work will get adapted and pave a brighter future.
 
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RNGsus

Self-Ejected
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8,106
Only a storyfagging sjw like fatro demands respectability for his hobby.
 

barghwata

Savant
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Overly flowery prose and wordyness is a sickness that High Fantasy is entangled with. Granddaddy Tolkien is prolly the best representative.

Wordiness and flowery prose aren't inherently bad things, they're only bad if they're unnecessary or feel like they're only there for the writer to flex the number of words and adjectives he knows or to fake depth where there isn't, when people complain about Numenera's prose, they're not taking issue with the simple fact that it's there, they're actually taking issue with how useless and missplaced it feels even if they don't realise it.
 

Cryomancer

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Glory to Ukraine
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This is the best video to explain why modern games even when they try to be like old games fails.

-----------------------

Here is a controversial opinion. Instead of a Theater, Bards on BG2 should get a brothel.
 

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
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Wordiness and flowery prose aren't inherently bad things, they're only bad if they're unnecessary or feel like they're only there for the writer to flex the number of words and adjectives he knows or to fake depth where there isn't, when people complain about Numenera's prose, they're not taking issue with the simple fact that it's there, they're actually taking issue with how useless and missplaced it feels even if they don't realise it.

No, they are inherently bad things in video games. Any video game that is full of words is a video game that its best function is uninstall.exe .
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
Wordiness and flowery prose aren't inherently bad things, they're only bad if they're unnecessary or feel like they're only there for the writer to flex the number of words and adjectives he knows or to fake depth where there isn't, when people complain about Numenera's prose, they're not taking issue with the simple fact that it's there, they're actually taking issue with how useless and missplaced it feels even if they don't realise it.

No, they are inherently bad things in video games. Any video game that is full of words is a video game that its best function is uninstall.exe .

Well that's MUDs and MOOs told.
 

Polyphemus

Educated
Joined
Jul 5, 2020
Messages
34
Wordiness and flowery prose aren't inherently bad things, they're only bad if they're unnecessary or feel like they're only there for the writer to flex the number of words and adjectives he knows or to fake depth where there isn't, when people complain about Numenera's prose, they're not taking issue with the simple fact that it's there, they're actually taking issue with how useless and missplaced it feels even if they don't realise it.

No, they are inherently bad things in video games. Any video game that is full of words is a video game that its best function is uninstall.exe .
This would disqualify point and click adventures, interactive fiction, and text-based RPGs, which have been around since the 70s. It's a rule you just made up that makes no sense. No one plays Mass Effect 1 or Witcher 3 for gameplay. It's all about the lore and the world you're in. No one would talk about Kotor 2 or New Vegas if not for their dialogue. That's all....words. Or mostly, anyway, some is based on atmosphere, etc. There's such a thing as too many words, but Disco Elysium specifically doesn't feel like it's overloading you at all. It's even designed with characters (skills) that basically explain what's going on with short interjections. And unless you're picking every conversation option, which is neither necessary nor optimal, you don't have to do all that much reading.

I'm playing PS:T now and there might be a lot of dialogue but that's sort of the point. It's like criticizing Call of Duty: Zombies for lack of character development. Can't comment on Numenera.
 

DraQ

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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Immersion is where newer RPGs usually lose to the older RPGs (older, NOT wireframe ancient).

Balance dogma + Accessibility dogma made it. Modern RPG's don't care about making mechanics and lore in line...
Not only that, a lot of that is slavish adherence to dumb design philosophies and cargo cult design:
  • stat inflation (because numbers must go up because muh RPG)
  • item treadmill
  • HP based systems
  • shitty XP based systems with kill/approach dependent XP and shit like that
  • cooldowns
  • obvious game-y mechanics for the sake of... I honestly have no clue
 

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