This one also felt topical

Happy 10th anniversary Undertale.

#undertale10thanniversary
#undertale

On 9/15/2015, Toby Fox released a game to the world that showed us we don't have to listen to that demon. We can save the world, we can find our happy ending, and then we can put the controller down and let those characters live in peace.

There is a demon within games that tempts us to abandon empathy and connection. It wants us to see sets of numbers and lines of dialogue when we should be seeing meaningful characters written by human beings.

I quickly reloaded my save to before I had even attacked the first guard and continued my adventure as if none of this had ever happened. "Thank God games can't remember," I thought to myself.

The victory felt empty, and the experience felt like a waste of my time.

I asked myself, "Why did I do this? Why did I want this?"

I waited for another enemy to appear but nobody came.

The rush of joy and accomplishment quickly wore off. All the characters of Riverwood were gone from my game and all I had to show for their deaths was a handful of experience points.

I would be lying if I said I didn't feel some sense of accomplishment. Destroying the entire town, like any other objective, took effort and required several attempts before I was successful. I was determined to achieve this goal and after trying again and again, I finally stood in an empty town.

So I killed the guards, and soon afterword the townsfolk reacted. Some fled, some called for help, some attacked me. Soon, I had killed every person in Riverwood that the game allowed me to.

I remember clearly the first time in Skyrim that I killed all the guards in the starting town of Riverwood. Nothing in the narrative prompted me to do this. Hell, there were plenty of enemies to fight elsewhere but I wondered to myself, "What happens if they die?"

The catharsis experienced towards those characters can transform people, real people, and allow them to exit a book, movie, or game feeling empowered and braver then when they entered it.

So what is it then about games and human nature that drives us towards destructive curiosity?

All this to say, more realistic historical games and stories are not bad (I absolutely love Kingdom Come Deliverance!) just as realistic fantasy and sci-fi games and stories are not bad. It's just a shame when people perceive realism as the only way to approach historical media.

I've been playing Dynasty Warriors Origins all week and have been constantly delighted by its deep connection to myth and history while utterly disregarding any concern for realism or strict journalistic accuracy. This allows the game to truly embody the larger than life romance it is based on.

But this is not the only way to approach history! History, myth, and fantasy are far more interconnected than our materialist society often wants to admit. When we approach history with creativity and imagination, we are engaging in an artistic tradition far older than this modern approach.

When imagining history, concepts such as "historical accuracy" and "realism" often seem to restrict our creativity and imagination in ways that fantasy worlds do not. For many people, this barrier of entry is simply too high to ever even consider attempting to cross.

Anyway, it's good stuff!

2024 D&D will definitely be going alongside the Dragonbane core rulebook for texts I reference when trying to determine how I'll organize my own TTRPG projects.

Since roleplaying games are such a niche hobby compared to the behemoth of digital games, it's easy to assume anyone picking up a book already understands the basics of the hobby. In a post D&D-streaming world though, it's always important to remember that this isn't the case.

Also, a lot of work obviously went into the first chapter describing what roleplaying games are and how they function. I know this is something I often need to remind myself to prioritize when writing TTRPG manuscripts.

Defining rules alphabetically in the back of the text feels like a very elegant approach to rulebook design. The closest thing to this I've seen before are rulebooks with a "spot rules" section but I often find those very indiscriminate over what they consider a spot rule or not.