4/30/2023 0 Comments Lost soul aside tropes![]() ![]() ![]() If you fetch it, they will give you gold and experience points and send you on more fetch-quests ad infinitum Either wander in the dark or hold a torch, sacrificing your shield arm in the process.Įven games I like wear thin fast thanks to boring quests and storiesģ. Just once I'd like it if a game actually required us to carry a torch ourselves when spelunking long-forgotten caverns. Is there some secret society out there, traversing the multiverse, keeping our darkest halls lit long after the living have departed? Do skeletons and mummies really require this luminescence as they slumber, waiting eons for a flesh-and-blood wanderer to come unwittingly into their cold, glimmering clutches? In a dungeon long since empty of any living thing, we're nevertheless lighted on our merry way by a plethora of brightly glowing torches that never go dim. It's not problematic simply because it doesn't make sense, it's problematic because it's lazy.Īlong these lines, I can't help but wonder if the same forgetful people who leave gold lying around everywhere are the same people responsible for lighting torches in every dungeon and cavern from Skyrim to Amalur. ![]() In many, but certainly not all, role-playing-games, gold and other items are too easy to find in haphazard, illogical places. For that matter, why are there health potions on a table in the middle of the dungeon? Why is nobody protecting these valuable commodities?Īnd who is it that's leaving all this gold there for the taking in the first place? For every wandering knight or wayward sorcerer, there must be at least ten NPCs too rich to keep track of all that good, hard currency. Or bundles of useless junk that have no business in a game to begin with. In almost every RPG out there, one thing is a certainty: if you smash enough barrels, or look in enough wooden crates, you're going to find gold. There are no cats in fantasyland, and the barrels are filled with gold Here are six lazy, over-used tropes we find in video game RPGs that need to die a swift death - or, at the very least, need to evolve into something new and better.ġ. It wasn't so much the realism that mattered, it was the importance of making games that had mechanics that made sense.īut I'm not just bothered by implausibility baked into pen and paper games I also find much left to be desired about video game RPGs, which seem to follow in the footsteps of the worst, most kitschy and predictable sort of fantasy fiction. Wouldn't you be easier to hit with more armor, but harder to wound? So I tried to make rules that reflected this. With Dungeons & Dragons I never understood why more armor made you harder to hit, for instance. Stupid rules aren't meant to be broken, they're meant to be replaced. Maybe this is why ever since I've spent (or perhaps wasted) so much time making my own games, with my own rules. I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition for years, but my first RPGs were ones my friends and I made up ourselves. Either way, I've had this nagging feeling for years now that escaping is getting harder and harder to do - not so much because I'm getting older, but because the games we're playing aren't growing up. Maybe I'm an escapist, or just can't grow up. Likewise, my exploits into the fantastical universes of Tolkien and his spiritual successors have accompanied me since childhood, and will remain my literary genre-drug of choice. ![]()
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