Fuck YES!

[BobtheTree]

Chris Avellone said in an interview that Kreia was supposed to embody his critique of the Star Wars universe. In that context, she's exactly what he intended her to be.

 

[Erzherzog]

Leland...intelligent? Dude totally can't see where his decisions are leading. Supposed to subtly bring chaos to the world to increase sales, not fucking bring the house down like he was doing.

Dagoth Ur seems like the best designed villain to me. But then again I like my villains to explore a single theme quite in depth. Dagoth Ur is corruption at its basest.

 

[Fowyr]

Arena was a great game.

I liked Arena. It was nothing spectacular, but pretty fine game. I remember liking exploring wilderness just for sake of finding random fort.

And yes, the trick to beating Arena and Daggerfall with less frustration is mastering the Passwall spell.

Daggerfall don't have Passwall.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Wasn't that crazy about Leland, but I really liked Marburg. Having a "PC equivalent" in a CRPG is pretty cool. VAN BUREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

 

[hiver]

I guess you can see irebnicus as someone just butthurt over loosing his elven chick, or someone who just wants power so he can troll everyone.

But thats not what he really is.

First, loosing his love was a consequence of what he did.
Secondly, he is not seeking power just for its own sake.

Its not like all of that isnt explained pretty clearly.

Apart from the possible best ever voice over by an extremely cool dude David Warner - Irenicus is actually at war with gods and mortality.
That is the reason he is seeking power.

In the dreams you have about him he shows you how mortals are just puppets to the gods. How death erases any sense and meaning out of existence.

Therefore, he decided to fight it. To take on the ultimate quest.
Unlike a popular image of a "hero" he does it selfishly, trying to help himself rather than everyone.

His struggle has appropriate serious consequences, which is very cool, in that he looses his love and even capability of feeling love - therefore - he makes you think. Well, at least some of us.

Which puts him above many other so called villains whos motivations are simplistic to the extreme.

The way he is introduced throughout the game is excellent in that he makes you impressed by his power, then he makes you hate him since you end up on the receiving end of his quest quite often and directly throughout the game, and then makes you pity him in the very end.

 

[Roguey]

The Irenicus in your dreams is actually Bhaal, so those aren't his motivations.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Leland...intelligent? Dude totally can't see where his decisions are leading. Supposed to subtly bring chaos to the world to increase sales, not fucking bring the house down like he was doing.

Oh no.

Those are actually PARKER's plans. He is the analyst designing the strategy for Halbech to succeed. He fails because he is not on the "ground-zero". The entire part about him is also a criticism of analysis of political situations.

 

[hiver]

No its actually Irenicus. Bhaal dreams are a different matter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=schKIswVdPc

 

[Erzherzog]

Leland...intelligent? Dude totally can't see where his decisions are leading. Supposed to subtly bring chaos to the world to increase sales, not fucking bring the house down like he was doing.

Oh no.

Those are actually PARKER's plans. He is the analyst designing the strategy for Halbech to succeed. He fails because he is not on the "ground-zero". The entire part about him is also a criticism of analysis of political situations.

So then Leland is uninvolved in the plot besides ordering that it happened. That's even more boring.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

What made Sephiroth a good villain?

He's babby's first villain. Even compared to other final fantasy villains, he's pretty incompetent and swallow (but his backstory is presented in a convoluted way due to Cloud's amnesia / mindfuckery so it looks DEEP)

 

[Redeye]

Soviet Russia is the best historical vilain. It has great motivation, beyond unrealistic and manichean "me-want-to-conquer-the-world" like the Mongols or the Nazis have. Really, there is no relevant "morale" choice against them. Moreover, Lenin / Stalin / Trotsky have pretty good design as well (not counting the enemy in-fightings). Brejnev was a letdown as a vilain, though, they should have kept Khroutchev.

So, what is the NWN2 build for Soviet Union?

Paladin/Blackguard/"Dwarven" Defender/Arcane Trickster ?
(Can't work Cleric in due to Atheism, unless maybe Divine Champion for the fantasy ideal.)

USA?

Assassin/Arcane Archer (or Ranger) -for killing at a distance whenever possible/Cleric (Domains? Gods? Abbathor and Mask and Talos? But pretend to serve Helm and Waukeen while downplaying Tyr as less important than Red Knight/Tempus. Of course they believe they have a Special Covenant with Ao. I didn't keep up with the 4E crap, just the earlier crap.)/Bard? (Hollywood/self congratulating mythos/etc.)

Has HiPS but it mostly just works on itself.


China? Monk/ASoC/Red Wiz/Nw9 or Sorc (Dragon Blood) or Druid (Dragon Form/Companion/etc.)?


NWN2 definitions don't work even with 4 classes each. (And mine aren't fully legal anyway.)

 

[Stinger]

Since this thread is now about favourite RPG villains I'd say that in recent games Elijah from Dead Money was a great villain. He was easy to hate (bomb collars) and I thought his motivations were fairly interesting and did a good job to show the ugly side of the Brotherhood of Steel.

 

[ScottishMartialArts]

Since this thread is now about favourite RPG villains

And you guys accuse me of hijacking threads.

 

[Serious_Business]

Any redeeming feature Irenicus might or might not have are nullified by the fact that the setting where the character happens is shit. You cannot build good things on a base of shit. I'm going to spare you the deconstruction of the FR, it'd be far to banal an enterprise to be worth spending the words over. You cannot associate any kind of in-depth motivation with the character because the setting does not allow it. There's too much parameters that make human existence trivial and mechanical in this goddamn setting - magic, gods, life after death, etc. I'm not being clever about religion, I'm saying there is nothing to antagonize over in a world where you know what happens after death and where human capacities for experience have no intrinsic limits. There can be no tragedy if there is no finitude. Of course, there isn't even a coherent worldview that holds the FR together, even though it pretends itself to be coherent above all else. Compared to the settings of japo games like Final Fantasy, who don't bother making sense, I don't know what's worst. It's just a bunch of teenaged nonsense, and pretending this to be good writing is an insult to Grunker's penis.

Jaesun trying to act all mature, what a riot.

At least I am not a shit spam poster.

Are you going to prove that any time soon? I, myself, am a shit spam poster, so I have nothing to prove. It's a much more healthy scenario, you should try it

 

[Menckenstein]

I can't think of a good RPG villain since The Master, and even he wasn't so great.

 

[Skittles]

RPGs aren't about the villains. Maybe they matter in crossover games, like System Shock and Deus Ex, but that's because they get their storytelling cues from Hollywood-esque FPS games.

RPGs are about the character(s) you play. For a really effective villain, you need an antagonist who has conflicting values and goals, who meets the protagonist at the right times and does the right things. That means you need to take away some control of the character's personality and, more importantly, the playstyle in a game.

Leland WAS a good implementation of a villain because you could converse with him (keeping player defined personality) and he'd react to some extent in his own personality--which also makes perfect sense because he's intentionally trying to antagonize the character. He also succeeded on the second point, but only because AP, like SS and DE, took cues from FPS to tell the rest of the story.

I think a much better kind of villain was Darklands'. It still limited character definition (you weren't going to be playing this game through as anything but paladins and priests). But the important thing in Darklands was that the villain wasn't the antagonist. It wasn't some dick out to dick you over from the dicking start. It was an insidious evil plaguing the landscape that the player uncovers, tracks down, and vanquishes as he plays the game. It met and surpassed the second problem admirably--you don't have to rely on contrived encounters between a 'nemesis' and your heroes to build emnity. You let the players come to see the nemesis as something to be taken down just by exploring and enjoying the game as an RPG.

P.S.: Leland was also a great tool in that game because you could rub his face in it when you actually gathered the right intelligence and presented it the right way to him, if memory serves well. That's maybe the first villain in any computer game that I can think of that you can have a verbal battle with before the inevitable showdown. That was a real update on the Master that the same Codexians who shit on AP seem to love still.

 

[grotsnik]

RPGs are about the character(s) you play. For a really effective villain, you need an antagonist who has conflicting values and goals, who meets the protagonist at the right times and does the right things. That means you need to take away some control of the character's personality and, more importantly, the playstyle in a game.

In one of MCA's Alpha Protocol interviews, I think he started rhapsodising about the idea that the villain should be a serious part of the game's reactivity instead of just someone to turn up in a cutscene, talk about how you'll never uncover his brilliant plans taking place down at the docks tonight, and then disappear. If the player is an expert hacker, the villain should rig the computers in the place to blow. If the player thinks he's some kind of badass in heavy armour, the villain won't bother sending men after him - he'll just flood the dungeon with water. And so on.

With little character/stat/plot-focused reactive touches, providing challenges geared specifically towards the player's play-style, you could make the villain feel like a proper in-game nemesis without having to force the player to adopt a particular attitude or particular values. And to be fair to it, BG2 did try that once in a plot sense, albeit in a very Biowarean way; if the player's bothered to romance a party member, Bodhi will deliberately target them, and if the player clearly doesn't give a shit, Bodhi won't bother.

Whereas on the other hand, you've got someone like Marburg, who had a perfectly interesting character set-up, but who ended up being reduced to an ineffective plot function. You just can't have a villain feel like a credible threat when you're making him do shit like this;

1) Plot requires Marburg to identify himself, and to move the story along; so rather than simply capturing or killing Thorton upon their ill-advised meeting, he makes some threats, glowers a bit, hints that Thorton's onto something big, then leaves. Idiot.

2) Plot requires a big cool escape level in Marburg's mansion; so he leaves Thorton alone with two guards in an unwatched room and never checks in on him again, despite the sound of gunfire and the explosions for the next thirty minutes. Idiot.

3) Plot requires a Big Difficult Moral Choice at the end of the Rome hub; so, rather than just blowing up the museum quickly and efficiently, Marburg splits his men into two groups and sends them to opposite wings of the museum, and then hangs around the security system so he can monologue at Thorton when he arrives and tell him that they've got a named character held prisoner at one end and the bomb's at the other end and he only has time to reach one, ha ha ha, for some reason. Idiot.

Poor bastard just ends up being Dick Dastardly.

 

[Erzherzog]

RPGs aren't about the villains.

Err, what? Games, movies, books require conflict to keep them interesting. Without the conflict, usually a small group of individuals, there's nothing to judge my performance by. The game should be a build up. That final boss battle should be a judgment on the decisions I made while leveling up. This is why games that force you to a certain playstyle to beat a boss suck. I'm looking at AP and the fucking Brayko fight. Yeah you can spike his coke. By siding with one of the combat orientated characters, way to fuck up one of the only non-combat options for that fight.

And hell, "outsmarting" Leland has nothing to do with character development. It has everything to do with just doing every quest.

I also find it amusing that you tried to draw parallels between confronting the Master in Fallout to Leland. In Fallout it required a character to focus on diplomatic options the entire time. As I already pointed out, that's not the case for AP. And hell, aren't you the first person in this thread to bring up the Master? Strawman much?

EDIT: Ah, one person. Same person also said he wasn't a very good villain.

 

[Skittles]

First off, conflict isn't limited--in any genre--to man vs. man. To trot out the short list, there's easily: man vs. society, man vs. self, man vs. environment, man vs. abstract (fate, death, etc.). Read a book or watch a non-action movie.

Can you actually name an RPG that sustains itself using only conflict vs. one villain? Where the only driving force is the recurring conflict against one character?

Conflict as a central component of an RPG usually takes the form of man vs. environment. You wander the dungeons, you pass through obstacles, you beat monsters that get more difficult as you progress.

Others you could frame as man vs. self (this is the story of PS:T, isn't it? Literally and abstractly?) or even man vs. society (FO, I think, fits this nicely).

And in reality, the conflict is usually secondary to saving something. Every time you save the world, you could argue, you're saving it from something, not someone, in a video game with a plot beyond a basic "there's this evil wizard and he's going to destroy the world because he's a dick,'' automatically making it about something other than the guy, the villain.

Conflict, especially conflict with a villain, only serves to support the real driver in most RPGs, which you mentioned. It's building power and strategies. All the conflict is there for is to make the building power interesting. And unless the only fights in the game are against the final boss, it's retarded to think that the game is 'about' the conflict with the final boss, the villain.

With regards the Master reference, maybe I was unclear. What I was pointing out was how the Master is remembered on the Codex for having a non-combat resolution. The last time there was a FO vs. FO2 debate on the Codex, and I suspect every single time before that, a pretty significant number of people pointed out that Horrigan was horrible because you had to fight him while the Master could be dealt with through diplomacy--of a sort. Brilliant observation that it wasn't mentioned before in this thread (also, it's not a strawman in the least because I'm the one arguing for the position I'm articulating[also also, quit writing like a 12-year old girl: video games a re a VERY SERIOUS TOPIC]).

In AP, you're required, as a player, to seek out all the extra intelligence in the missions and apply it properly. It wasn't a matter of just doing them all. You needed to complete them all well to get the tools to 'beat' the Leland conversation and then you needed to use those tools well. Which is exactly what every decent boss battle requires: you play the game and it rewards your characters with the tools to beat the boss. You, the player, have to use those tools effectively.

In short:
1. Conflict does not necessarily mean man vs. man, nor does it commonly as implemented in video games.
2. RPGs tend to be more about levelling up characters and building player skill to overcome obstacles, not to beat the snot out of one dude.
3. The Master: play FO consistently with diplomacy and during one conversation you can join the Master or make him kill himself. Leland: play AP consistently with an investigative bent and over the course of the game, during multiple conversation/clashes with Leland, you can build a relationship with him that allows you to side with him (and then possibly betray him, taking over his operation) (with the options of killing or incapacitating him) or tell him to screw himself, at which point boss battle ensues, followed by multiple potential secret boss battles depending on how you handled/didn't handle other key characters in the game. Yeah, I think AP's ending sequence is everything a Master lover should dream of.

 

[Erzherzog]

First off, conflict isn't limited--in any genre--to man vs. man. To trot out the short list, there's easily: man vs. society, man vs. self, man vs. environment, man vs. abstract (fate, death, etc.). Read a book or watch a non-action movie.

Can you actually name an RPG that sustains itself using only conflict vs. one villain? Where the only driving force is the recurring conflict against one character?

Conflict as a central component of an RPG usually takes the form of man vs. environment. You wander the dungeons, you pass through obstacles, you beat monsters that get more difficult as you progress.

When I referred to conflict in general, I figured it was obvious that I was including all possible conflicts and then being more specific in that usually the conflict centers around a small group of individuals, I'm not going to list conflicts involving one villain because I already said that's not the usual fucking case. Got it?

And man vs. environment is boring as fuck in an RPG. 9 time out of 10 it turns the game into a fucking progress quest, or nearly into a LARP if it has an element of that "your character must eat" bullshit. The artistic elements of man vs. environment are poorly conveyed using video games.

And in reality, the conflict is usually secondary to saving something. Every time you save the world, you could argue, you're saving it from something, not someone, in a video game with a plot beyond a basic "there's this evil wizard and he's going to destroy the world because he's a dick,'' automatically making it about something other than the guy, the villain.

Conflict, especially conflict with a villain, only serves to support the real driver in most RPGs, which you mentioned. It's building power and strategies. All the conflict is there for is to make the building power interesting. And unless the only fights in the game are against the final boss, it's retarded to think that the game is 'about' the conflict with the final boss, the villain.

Even in a situation where the villain is a master manipulator that you rarely, if ever, directly confront, he's still the villain. So if I'm saving the world because of what John Q. Dick did and I have to fix all those problems in addition to killing John Q. Dick. How much of Fallout's environment is caused by the Master anyways? I'd say the majority of it. The majority of the game lives under the threat of supermutants.

And without a good villain, in the form of an encounter, is the game even fun? RPGs aren't just stories, hell story takes a big backseat to gameplay. I do believe that there should be something stronger than anything before it to test the character.

With regards the Master reference, maybe I was unclear. What I was pointing out was how the Master is remembered on the Codex for having a non-combat resolution. The last time there was a FO vs. FO2 debate on the Codex, and I suspect every single time before that, a pretty significant number of people pointed out that Horrigan was horrible because you had to fight him while the Master could be dealt with through diplomacy--of a sort. Brilliant observation that it wasn't mentioned before in this thread (also, it's not a strawman in the least because I'm the one arguing for the position I'm articulating[also also, quit writing like a 12-year old girl: video games a re a VERY SERIOUS TOPIC]).

In AP, you're required, as a player, to seek out all the extra intelligence in the missions and apply it properly. It wasn't a matter of just doing them all. You needed to complete them all well to get the tools to 'beat' the Leland conversation and then you needed to use those tools well. Which is exactly what every decent boss battle requires: you play the game and it rewards your characters with the tools to beat the boss. You, the player, have to use those tools effectively.

Once again, in Fallout, it's impossible without increasing your speech abilities at every level up. In AP it's literally just a question of "did you do everything which we clearly gave you the option to do?" You can get the non-combat solution with a fucking combat orientated character! This is exactly why action RPGs ruin the RPG aspect of themselves. Are you not understanding that there's a big difference? The diplomat character in Fallout gets gunned down like a joke. This is simply not the case for AP.

And anyways you say people like the Master due to him being favorably compared to all of one character. That's not much of an achievement. I'm not even arguing that the Master is good. He's fairly generic, somewhat boring but also the encounter doesn't have the obvious flaws that most other villains have.

And about your complaint about my writing style. This is the Codex. If I'm allowed free expression, I'm going to use it.

1. Conflict does not necessarily mean man vs. man, nor does it commonly as implemented in video games.

But it usually does. As the entire thread prior to our posts prove. It something that just does work, and therefore we're discussing what makes it good.

2. RPGs tend to be more about levelling up characters and building player skill to overcome obstacles, not to beat the snot out of one dude.

Severely underrating the enjoyment of a good final boss. It should be the encounter you remember.

3. The Master: play FO consistently with diplomacy and during one conversation you can join the Master or make him kill himself. Leland: play AP consistently with an investigative bent and over the course of the game, during multiple conversation/clashes with Leland, you can build a relationship with him that allows you to side with him (and then possibly betray him, taking over his operation) (with the options of killing or incapacitating him) or tell him to screw himself, at which point boss battle ensues, followed by multiple potential secret boss battles depending on how you handled/didn't handle other key characters in the game. Yeah, I think AP's ending sequence is everything a Master lover should dream of.

Sure you can do all those things. And all they do is fill the player with a sense of "did anything I had done prior to this matter?" Nope. Not really. It's no different than in old Nintendo 64 games. "Collect 90 stars and get this ending! Collect 100 stars and gets a better one!" Not saying it's not possibly enjoyable. But that has no place in a RPG and AP suffers because of it.

And why do AP fans always try to justify how good the game is after all this time? Why should I have to like it?

 

[Skittles]

Oh, sweet Jesus, I made it defensive. I was just asking for it with this:

(also, it's not a strawman in the least because I'm the one arguing for the position I'm articulating[also also, quit writing like a 12-year old girl: video games a re a VERY SERIOUS TOPIC]).

I'm sitting at that awkward edge where I realize that the person I'm talking to on the internet is really much more interested in making this a dick measuring contest than a conversation (admittedly, I was far, far too familiar with him--it gave him ideas). But I figure I might as well swallow my pride and give up an opportunity to troll by taking this tack:

Snarky intro ^ and...

Look, I really don't feel like you've understood what I was saying about conflict. It does deserve more discussion, but I'm not sure this poor thread can bear it. Can we leave it at 'you haven't convinced me because you and I don't seem to be speaking the same language on this issue?'

I disagree that the one guy is really the villain in either a visceral or logical sense. You don't hate someone who doesn't ruin your day and stand to shit on everything you love. Maybe with some suspension of disbelief you can hate some removed figure for the rats your poor character is having to kill in some godforsaken sewer, but I don't buy it.

I also think that the distinction between story and gameplay is kind of artificial. The rules of the game are the game's story.

Here's the conciliatory:

The distinction you're making between FO and AP is a potentially good one. It's undermined in its specifics by the fact that it's piss easy to accomplish even without significant investment in speech in FO. It's also undermined by the fact that if you play a character in AP with the wrong kind of personality, you close off end game options for yourself in AP. So I agree with you that the system you're ascribing to FO is preferable to the system you're ascribing to AP. I think 'ascribing' is the best way to put it though. Neither game carries through well enough.

Which is also why I fronted the Master. Ascribing. That and recognizing a potentially good idea to be built upon. Something I still believe most FO fans here also do. If you disagree, fine. Too bad. I was wrong about that. Doesn't have that much bearing on my argument, just an off-handed remark.

There's some more stuff in your post. I read it. It isn't really anything I can say anything constructive about so I'll leave it, except for this:

And why do AP fans always try to justify how good the game is after all this time? Why should I have to like it?

You don't have to like anything. I was just using one part of it as an example of a good idea in game mechanics in a thread about those mechanics. A point that at least one other raised before me (and the fact that it's being talked about makes it right, right? RIGHT!?).

But more importantly, I plug it because I care. About you. We're bros, both part of an RPG fan club. I like RPGs, you like RPGs. There's a game I like, maybe you'd like it too. No? Okay, that's cool. I'm still going to talk about it. Want to try to not jump down my throat for mentioning it?

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, I think AP's ending sequence is everything a Master lover should dream of.

The Cathedral is a great place because of the options you have to complete it:
a) Kill everything with or without your Follower buddies
b) Wear robes to talk your way to Morpheus who'll send you directly to the Master
c) Lockpick those doors, sneak and arm the bomb
d) some combination of the above
AP's final mission? You're always going to shoot those guys who show up outside your room, have that conversation with Parker/Deng, kill even more guys, get the option to save/kill Mina (and killing her for Leland doesn't even make sense), deal with the situation in the server room, then go outside, kill Darcy, kill more guys, kill the helicopter, kill more guys, then shoot the boss (unless it's Leland who gives up if you break into his room). That's a tight rail they have you on with a couple of mad libs-like situations and to think it's comparable at all to the Cathedral is just so wrong.

 

[Erzherzog]

I disagree that the one guy is really the villain in either a visceral or logical sense. You don't hate someone who doesn't ruin your day and stand to shit on everything you love.

Once again, I never even said that the conflict normally revolves around "one guy." If you want to say we're simply at a disagreement then fine, but you keep insisting I've said something that I never did.

I also think that the distinction between story and gameplay is kind of artificial. The rules of the game are the game's story.

I strongly disagree. At most the gameplay and story are set up to be plausible with each other, but that's almost never an issue. The closest I can see with that is Mask of the Betrayer with the soul gauge.

It's also undermined by the fact that if you play a character in AP with the wrong kind of personality, you close off end game options for yourself in AP.

At that point it's literally choose your own adventure. I do not consider that a RPG.

That and recognizing a potentially good idea to be built upon. Something I still believe most FO fans here also do. If you disagree, fine. Too bad.

Fairly certain that I didn't.

And why do AP fans always try to justify how good the game is after all this time? Why should I have to like it?

You don't have to like anything.

Then pick your words more carefully because you said "you should like this." I answered with a rhetorical "why should I?" and now you're pretending that you didn't just say that I should like it.

You seem to have a bit of an issue anyways. The language I'm using isn't really that harsh. I disagree with you, if my language makes that apparent then that's good.

 

[Skittles]

Can you point to where I said ''you should like this?" The closest I came to that, as far as I can see, was by saying that the handling of Leland as a villain was a real update to the handling of the Master that causes people around here to defend him--and it was weird that people shit on AP while professing admiration for the Master's design. Of course nobody has to like a game with an element similar to an element in a game they like (or even agree that the element's in both games). It is weird that kneejerk hatred of a game would cause somebody to derail a discussion of mechanics when that game's mentioned. Please do what the rest of the Codex-against-AP does and make a scatological/homophobic jab at AP and move on.

I also don't accuse you of using a single harsh or foul word. Just of being defensive. I'm pretty sure that I've used nastier expressions than you anyway--which is why I pointed out that I may have been asking for somebody to make this personal.

Again, I go no futher. I address these points because I fully accept that you apparently think I've done you some personal slight and I do want to work that out. For the rest, I don't think we're speaking the same language on some things, on others, I don't think you're trying to have a conversation.

 

[Azarkon]

Any redeeming feature Irenicus might or might not have are nullified by the fact that the setting where the character happens is shit. You cannot build good things on a base of shit. I'm going to spare you the deconstruction of the FR, it'd be far to banal an enterprise to be worth spending the words over. You cannot associate any kind of in-depth motivation with the character because the setting does not allow it. There's too much parameters that make human existence trivial and mechanical in this goddamn setting - magic, gods, life after death, etc. I'm not being clever about religion, I'm saying there is nothing to antagonize over in a world where you know what happens after death and where human capacities for experience have no intrinsic limits. There can be no tragedy if there is no finitude. Of course, there isn't even a coherent worldview that holds the FR together, even though it pretends itself to be coherent above all else. Compared to the settings of japo games like Final Fantasy, who don't bother making sense, I don't know what's worst. It's just a bunch of teenaged nonsense, and pretending this to be good writing is an insult to Grunker's penis.

Jaesun trying to act all mature, what a riot.

At least I am not a shit spam poster.

Are you going to prove that any time soon? I, myself, am a shit spam poster, so I have nothing to prove. It's a much more healthy scenario, you should try it

Building a good story in a bad setting is easy: just throw out the shit and pretend that it doesn't exist, then redesign the rules of the world to fit your needs.

A setting is just a trademark in this business. Nobody ever implements the whole of FR or D&D. They pick and choose what they want, and use the setting mainly as an advertisement gimmick and as a way to ground themselves (because it turns out building an entire world from scratch is pretty hard - see Bioware's abominations).

This is the reason why PST can manage to tell a great story in a bad setting, because at the end of the day the Planescape universe is even less finite (and you can easily imagine a thousand different ways TNO could've solved his personal issues without going through what he did), and yet Avellone managed to make a good tragedy out of it.