I don’t mind there being some feminine options in RPGS. In Dragon Age Origins, I just kept my girl in her mage robes because I liked them.
But the “sexy” armor is not where it’s at! And most of the armor options should be made to fit both the men and the women anyway
I was pleasantly surprised when I looted one of those off a corpse in Fallout New Vegas and it stayed in all its midriff-baring glory on my dude. Rocked that look for a long time in the game. 
Obsidian does love to play with things like that. In Deadfire, there is a “dancer” outfit that’s something between long shirt and mini-dress on ladies that turns into tiny towel when put on dudes.
There’s one trope I thought of where it can be done either really well or really poorly but I seem to find the latter more often, the Conflict Killer.
Basically it’s when there’s a big war or other conflict going on between multiple factions that quickly gets pushed by the wayside when a major crisis occurs. Now that’s not a problem in and of itself, I can think of several compelling scenarios where that’s happened. Two factions uniting against a common foe is a great general premise.
There’s two key problems that I keep running into.
One thing I’ve been seeing a lot of recently in IF that I dislike is phone text conversations. I don’t know what it is about them, but they completely break all immersion for me.
Also if they’re using images to make the conversations, they tend to not have the greatest resolution, so they’re often a little blurry when playing on desktop.
How dare you… I love them! They make me think of the book as a game. You’re wrong! Denied. 
The blurry pictures tho… they kill me every single time. Like you, I play from my desktop, and they always look like something straight out of the early 2000s.
I can’t stand excessive trigger warnings for small stuff like hugs. Fields of Asphodel was so poorly coded, it kept asking me every single time a character wanted to hug me. Dayuuum, I was cringing hard. It felt so unrealistic to be asked for permission… by my boyfriend… a hundred times over. Again and Again. 
But what if your boyfriend wanted to do something really lewd in public, like hold hands ? I bet you’re grateful for the trigger warning then!
(No hate to trigger warnings, they can just be a little excessive sometimes lol)
I’ve found myself in an odd dilemma where I really adore giving traditionally evil roles (i.e. overlord, necromancer etc.), aesthetics, and mannerisms to heroic characters, but have long since grown tired of making traditionally heroic roles (i.e. angels, paladins) evil, especially because that usually leads to social commentary I really don’t agree with like antitheism or libertarianism.
(Because we’ve had some issues with this in the past, if anyone tries to start discourse about religion, I will immediately involve the mods.)
I kinda have the opposite issue, ironically. I don’t necessarily hate those themes themselves when they’re explored properly and not just used for surface-level edgy contrarianism, but I’m kind of tired of seeing heroic characters with evil aesthetics and evil ones with heroic aesthetics, since it feels like a really common cliché at this point. Especially since it’s often used to try and give those characters more depth by subverting expectations or whatever, and it’s just—there’s other ways to subvert expectations that don’t have to rely on the same exact trope that’s been used a thousand times before.
Yeah, I have like, a visceral hatred for both. Antitheism is just a form of xenophobia with pseudointellectual trappings and sometimes a veneer of progressive intentions. The libertarianism… that’s a very broad category, I’m including anarchism, right-wing libertarianism, and also stuff like police abolitionism sometimes believed even by non-libertarian socialists. I’m not gonna go on a diatribe about the actual beliefs other than that I vehemently oppose them, but I’ve also just had like, the worst experiences with people who believe this stuff. For all that the ones on the left like to emphasize the idea of compassion for people (even the worst people when we’re talking about crime), they tend to be STUNNINGLY unwilling to be even slightly civil with people who don’t share they’re extremely fringe opinions on the concept of authority. I can’t see anything anarchist without getting a bad taste in my mouth, even if it’s a more nuanced depiction.
Probably not very sporting to warn everyone you’re going to get mods involved if they engage you on a topic you brought up and then get up on your soapbox about it anyway.
Fair enough. I kind of have the same reaction when I see something with antitheist themes, though on my end it’s more general wariness and frustration since I’ve seen the ball dropped so often and I wish it was done better.
Antitheism I think kind of just naturally spawned as a knee-jerk reaction after centuries of religion dominion and persecution, and then got brought to its extreme version as people lashed out and pushed back on general religious dogma. And then with libertarianism… I guess it’s just the usual people being so far up their own asses thinking they’re progressive and better than everyone else that it kinda leads them to become what they’re fighting. Classic horseshoe theory in action in both cases.
(Mind you I’m generalizing in that second one since, like you said, it’s a very broad category.)
I am personally willing to give it more of a chance if done right bc I do like seeing those themes done right. But I’m also just… really tired of seeing those themes done in a Hazbin Hotel-style edgy storytelling, and I wish it was all treated with the nuance it deserved.
Bc those issues can be interesting and complex if authors actually bother putting thought into both sides of the argument instead of strawmanning Heaven into “angels bad and control freaks actually” and Hell into “Heck yeah, freedom 
”.
About the religion thing. I said that because the mods have had to intervene before. I did not say I would involve the mods for the anarchism thing, and only discussed my personal reasons for my dislike of it briefly which I feel is well within the scope of the thread’s purpose.
Ironically I don’t think Hazbin is meant to be antitheist.
Not originally, but it ends up going pretty hard on the “Heaven are douches” thing once it actually starts, so the end result is kind of the same. It still feels pretty cheap and petty to me, at least.
I don’t necessarily disagree. Mixed feelings about that show overall.
On a different note, I can’t remember if I brought this up before but there’s this tendency where if there’s multiple factions you’re expected to side with, the best ending is automatically when you refuse to pick a side and kill everyone. The “Omnicidal Neutral” run. I don’t ALWAYS hate it but I find it overdone, and even if it’s not portrayed as “the best” ending, often I find tons of people insisting that it is and getting really mad if you prefer an actual faction.
Another (again unrelated) trope I see is when you have a vigilante, adventurer, soldier, or whatever, who kills exclusively bad people, only ever kills bad people, but then the story hits you with “oh they’re not doing this because they have good intentions, they like violence and want an acceptable target!” or worse, “they SAY they have good intentions but really it’s a love of violence.”
I’m a staunch consequentialist so I just find it completely impossible to take this seriously as a moral dilemma. One’s mindset matters only as much as it affects their actions and the results thereof. I’ve already stated that I don’t like people trying to say it’s wrong to kill people who are just complete monsters or just objectively have done things where killing them is a proportional response is like, wrong or a slippery slope or something (I generally take slippery slope arguments with a grain of salt, you can say that about anything), but if the problem is just “they have the wrong mindset”, I am no longer taking this seriously.
Honestly on of my favorite tropes is like typically good, protagonisty messages making a villain.
Like Fate has a few characters where a previously good character goes evil just self actualizing and being/chasing being happy. One of whom is an actual protagonist.
Plus Fate’s church is fun in that while they are corrupt, they also do their job, which is super important for people to live.
Inversion on everything, usually annoys me if they’re aren’t at least some good things (setting permitting, like I love Helck)
Religious christian stories I tend to trust more if like, a certain denomination is involved since a bit more of a chance they actually are involved in or read up on the faith.
Caim my belovedWhat about a practical dilemma? Someone who loves killing isn’t guaranteed to keep killing people you think are bad guys. You could be the next person they decide is an acceptable target.
If the game is using this scenario well, there shouldn’t be any sense of safety around this kind of a character. A lot of murdergames pack their worlds so full of Obviously Murderworthy Bad Dudes that it’s easy to tell yourself that your psychopath buddy will never run out of targets. But for my money, that’s the bad trope: a world distorted to make for easy fantasies of redemptive violence.
Also: I reckon you’re at most a staunch rule consequentialist, given your moral reaction to the child sacrifice system in my game, which isn’t hard to justify consequences-wise.[1] And “kill people who are socially acceptable to kill” is not a rule that produces reliably good consequences.
Honestly, I’m not sure you’re as consequentialist as you think you are. You’re consistent in rejecting any moral role for intentions, but your reaction to “they’re killing kids!” suggests a deontological intuition that some things are simply wrong, without need to calculate whether they lead to better consequences than the alternatives. ↩︎
I think like time travel and/or future sight, trolley problems is the most direct and practical you can go with ends justify the means. Situations, where you can fix your horrible actions after the fact. Or alternatively go extreme killing people before they do anything to hurt others.
Or less extreme getting rid of whatever superpowers/macguffin that causes conflict if less people are hurt.
And the opposite end.
Or I could say killing the Joker would be bad cause he has saved the world (and ergo if he was dead when it happened the world would be gone) and actually killing him usually brings problems.
Again Caim my beloved.
Actually Metal Gear Rising did it pretty fun too, with Raiden justifying himself saying everyone he kills were bad people™ who chose it, and later realizing a lot of them literally didn’t have a choice… and then doubling down on liking killing.
Plus even if you have absolute faith in their morals, they can also just flat out be wrong. Or go to severe extremes. Or just be entirely circumstancial.
True but sometimes the story doesn’t even have them cross the line, we’re just supposed to accept that it’s still wrong even if they never run into this issue. It’s not a particularly COMMON take on the concept but I’ve seen it and it’s rather frustrating.
Not really sure what you mean by “at most” in this context. However I’ve also been operating under the assumption that choice between the child sacrifice system, the Helotry, and the idea of completely destroying all industrial capacity is a false dichotomy (trichotomy?). I certainly HOPE it doesn’t actually come down to that, given that, as I understand, the harrowings are an allegory for labor exploitation and unsustainable energy sources (like fossil fuels), among other aspects of industrial society, and irl we already have viable or rapidly becoming viable alternatives to fossil fuels AND exploitation of the general population that doesn’t involve primitivism (which would actually worsen the latter issue). I believe you’ve suggested several possible solutions (self Theurgy, non-magical technology etc.), though we don’t yet know how implementation will look, how many we need to implement to achieve the best results etc. You did also mention a potential Hegemonic rump state that ALSO doesn’t harrow Helotry so that’s another factor.
I don’t see a reason to entertain child sacrifice unless all of these are proven nonviable, which I hope isn’t the case because that’d be one of those scenarios where a story gives you two horrible options to agonize over, without any real relation to real world ethics. A situation where it actually IS down to those three options is, in my opinion, completely disconnected from reality. There’s no situation irl where a society would actually have to pick between sacrificing one child or ten humans to sustain itself long term.
It’s true that “kill people who are socially acceptable to kill” isn’t a reliable system, especially since there’s a ton of people it’s “socially acceptable” to kill because of a serious problem with society at that place in time. These stories usually don’t go that route though. They’re usually going after murderers, rapists, slavers, evil government officials etc. I would also argue that heroes who don’t kill, often contrasted with this sort of character, aren’t any more reliable than their counterparts in terms of reliably producing results. Someone who goes around beating up criminals and turning them in after is illegal irl for a reason after all. If I can accept Superman being a genuine force for good, then why not the Punisher? Them always getting the right people is already the central conceit of the story so why is only the one who kills morally ambiguous? Sure it’s DARKER but rarely is it actually WORSE from a consequentialist perspective.
(There are stories where both of those characters DO get deconstructed but I mean as a general rule. It’s hard to make absolute statements about characters like that when consistency isn’t a priority in their medium.)
I am inclined to disagree. I don’t consider myself a cynical person but I don’t see a world where such “acceptable targets” run out any time soon. Plus, if someone cares enough about whether someone deserves to die to even bother going after deserving targets, I see no reason to assume that they will just go after innocent people if they somehow run out of guilty people. Some may, for sure. I know of instances where it happens, I would not even call it infrequent. But plenty of people, even the violently inclined, also do not do that. I don’t think it’s a given whatsoever. I think it’s just as plausible that someone will maintain their standards despite an admittedly unhealthy enjoyment of violence. Saying that someone who LIKES violence will inevitably turn evil is like saying anyone who ABHORS violence will inevitably allow innocent people to die because they hate fighting. The human experience is too variable for these generalizations. They can happen, they can also not happen. Both are possible. There’s tons of veterans who’ve admitted to enjoying wartime without slaughtering innocents.
But just because it’s POSSIBLE for such a person to turn evil doesn’t mean I want to see it every time. I’ve had my fill. I’m tired of it. I at least don’t want another example of such a character turning evil and being contrasted only by people who absolutely abhor lethal force in all circumstances. I obviously have nothing against people who hate violence irl, I dare say an aversion to actually having to kill is the norm when people are actually confronted with it, but that being the standard for ultimate virtue in stories is something I’ve long tired of. Someone is not a worse person for not having that aversion in a situation where violence is objectively justified.
I don’t need another story where the vigilante gets told they’re a psychopath for killing human traffickers. I don’t need a lecture every time about why vigilantism is wrong. I already KNOW vigilantism isn’t generally a good idea, I KNOW that it’s a poor substitute for an actual functional system. I don’t need every story to tell me that. There HAS to be another angle for the story to explore to add depth.
I think the funniest example I’ve seen of this recently is Peacemaker and Vigilante from the Peacemaker TV series. They’re both well-intentioned maniacs (with one being much worse than the other), but their bullshit both causes and solves problems to various degrees because of how well the show sticks to their characterization and lets them both see through their respective ideals.
It shows both the benefits and the downfalls of that kind of worldview in a way that isn’t overly preachy, and it’s actually pretty entertaining to watch.
(Mind you, I’m just at like, the halfway point of season 1, so idk if the show fucks it up later on or not. But so far it’s pretty good.)
