T w e n t y S i d e d
Then they will grumble about the threadbare nature of the campaign.
If you prevent them from doing this, they will accuse you of railroading them.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
I actually remember way back in the early D&D editions, they actually had rules and encounter tables for players who just wanted to go romping off the beaten path (like, “OK, you pass into the next hex, which is a forest tile. There is a 30% chance of encounters… Which is confirmed. Now we see WHAT you encountered… 63! You have encountered a band of centaurs that appear to be migrating to their summer hunting grounds. They eye you warily and finger their bows, but do not attack. What do you do?”) This kind of fell by the wayside as D&D evolved into a more story-telling/driven system, but I always kind of appreciate that they thought of ways to cater to players who just wanted to go gallivanting across the countryside and see what lay out there. :)
So basically, a modern dungeon-crawler boardgame…
Nothing wrong with a good dungeon crawl. Can be a really fun play-style if the entire table is OK with the raw combat!
But yeah. It’s a style currently not in favor. Even the PC games don’t do it much. For good and ill, a lot more focus on characters & story.
I just want to say that I’m so glad you’re redoing these comics. They’re just as hilarious now as they were before, and the ones around the end of Two Towers and beginning of Return of the King were some of the best.
Railroad goes ever on and on
To the only place that you can go
If you want to choose another way
You know the answer, it is NO.
When you get right down to it, Middle-Earth is a desolate and empty place overall.
In the story there was a lot of danger in the world that needed heroes or community for safety so not a lot of people braving the wilds. In the real world New Zealand has a lot of places too far from electricity, stores, and cell towers