I’m playing Exist Archive

*Max level of affection between any opposite-sex characters: Love. Max level of affection between any same-sex characters: Best Friend. I call heteronormativity!

*The cowardly, sexist rich kid is less annoying than I expected. Actually, most of these people are less annoying than I expected. The only one I dislike so far is the mercenary. He feels a bit too much like Coldsteel the Hedgehog.

*Ice magic does less damage than fire magic, hits a smaller area, and is associated with a lower VIT? Who balanced this game?

*On the flipside, fire gauntlets for magic damage + katana for phys damage + broadsword for area damage = completely broken game. Throw in dual pistols for the odd enemy that’s only weak to ranged physical, and watch the enemies’ HP disappear.

*The game actually asked me if I wanted to skip a lewd joke. I have nothing against lewd jokes, but anything that’s so irrelevant that you offer a skip button might as well be skipped.

*The plot so far is a conflict between three entities older than humanity, all of which want mutually exclusive things, and none of which directly care whether your human protagonists live or die except insofar as they can be useful. Sounds like the sort of plot that would normally embrace nihilism, and yet it seems suspiciously like nihilism will get you a bad ending and trying to be be moral will get you a good ending. I’m interested to see how this plays out.

(no subject)

The more I read libertarian blogs, the more I think they’re consistent. There are no false assumptions, oversights, or contradictions. There’s simply a moral code in which corporations losing money is considered less acceptable than poor people dying.

(no subject)

This whole Homestuck thing about “meat or candy” reminds me of why Danganronpa pissed me off so much. There was a recurrent assumption that the reason you were playing the game was that you wanted to see young, attractive people get into sexually suggestive situations and/or get brutally murdered. Sometimes it mocked you or criticized you for this desire, other times it amped everything up in order to rub your nose in how you “wanted” this, and either way, it felt completely irrelevant to how I wanted to solve logic puzzles. Do I want meat or candy? I want to see you create according to your own interests, not try to extrapolate some version of me!

In response to that post about whether you can ethically have sex with a sandhill crane

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I’m reading hentai, part 5

First panel: “You fine people must agree with me! Beastmen need to get out of our country! Our city’s financial struggles are undoubtedly caused by the big handouts to the beastmen!”

Plot is about a beast girl spending one last night with her boyfriend before she moves out to escape anti-beastman prejudice.

Last panel: “Though numbed by her absence, I returned to my boring, everyday life. And the town continued to shun beastmen.”

Why don’t you just rip my heart out and stomp on it?

(no subject)

The difference between Prokopetz and basically everyone else on Tumblr who posts about tabletop roleplaying games isn’t specifically that he posts about games other than Dungeons and Dragons. What makes Prokopetz unique is that he posts about one-and-done games with minimal prep time. Tumblr is all about the massive settings where you create one character and then keep playing them for years, or else wargames where you field an army of hand-painted miniatures.

I don’t have any thoughts on this as a player, but if I were making games, I would much rather have Prokopetz as a customer. Prokopetz buys a game, finishes it, and then buys a completely different game. With a typical Tumblrite, the only way to keep selling things is to come out with more expansions and prestige classes. The more they have, the less space there is for you to fill, and that feels like a death spiral waiting to happen.

(The one weird exception: Tumblr was briefly into Ten Candles. I don’t know why.)