T w e n t y S i d e d
Sometimes the most sadistic thing the DM can do to is to let the players have their own way.
Romance in D&d sounds fun in theory. Right up until the moment that you and the DM both realize you have to pretend to flirt in front of three other people. It takes a good friend to be willing to pretend to die in your arms, and an even better one to actually talk about the fact that your characters probably kissed at some point.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Not everyone can have the level commitment of Abed and Hector the Well Endowed.
This is such a tricky area to negotiate, especially with a stereotypical group of male geeks. My original way through was; ‘it happened; Dex check for quality, Str check for performance, Con check for recovery’, and let the dice stimulate (pardon me) the player reactions. It worked insofar as everyone actually enjoyed the moment. In games with a reputation mechanic, the after effects could be quite lasting… but still fun (the usual golden rule of roleplaying).
No, I was too nice to force a save vs. Disease. And no, it didn’t come up again. (Sorry!)
In a later, more mature and gender-diverse group, a number of relationships were rearranged, one long-standing relationship broke down entirely and this was allegedly due in part to an overly seductive vampiric embrace. The whole situation was so awkward the group fragmented shortly afterwards. :-(
The most fun I ever had with this area was in a convention game for which the GM provided pre-gens which included one character having a particular attribute (call them X) for which another character (mine) had an active fetish. Initially I avoided playing to this out of concerns for appropriateness, but when X started bed-hopping his way through the NPC’s (and only partially for information) and everyone including the GM took this in their stride, I concluded that it was ok to go along and play with a few boundaries (strictly IC!). I don’t know what the GM was thinking when he set up this combination of pre-gens, but he was suddenly uncomfortable with the resulting predictable subplot, while the rest of us were crying with laughter at times. Everything ended well, except that I’d bet that GM never used those two attributes in any pre-gens ever again!
I suppose the moral is; handle with care, and watch the reactions of your table.
I found it so weird when starting my first game and the DM went through Lines and Veils. And I thought – we’re all adults, why are we bothering with what is just an inherent part of normal social etiquette. And then he mentioned sex scenes, and said that if they happen he’d just ‘fade to black’. And I thought sex scenes, what on earth, why is that even being mentioned? What kind of weirdo is going to roleplay amorous encounters among friends/acquaintances/strangers? Why is this even going to come up? Little did I know about D&D and its players…
You never know you needed to talk about boundaries until someone crosses them.
Part of it also depends on the game being played. Monsterhearts, for instance, assumes PCs who will have sex with other people, including each other, and can’t control when another PC turns them on.
“How sexy is your campaign?” Yet another thing you need to discuss with the group before you begin.
Typo: Her line should be “This is just too weird.” rather than “to weird”. That missing “o” is important.