T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
The Loot Lottery
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
I think it’s just a common RPG trope?
Also, wow these players are toxic. Even for a comedy it gets depressing. Why even bother playing at that point?
When I first read this comic I assumed it was just exaggerated for comedy, who would play a TTRPG where they’re having a bad time? Since then I’ve read quite a bit of /r/rpghorrorstories, and why I don’t believe for a second that they’re all true story I’ve seen enough people “playing” in what were essentially recreations of the Stanford prison experiment and other people defending them coming back sessions after sessions that I’m not so sure anymore.
So after a bit of research (not too much) apparently ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ is a trap in the original Tomb of Horrors campaign from the 1970s.
You go into a room and the DM starts counting to ten. If you don’t quckly check for traps or run away, the ceiling falls on you and it’s campaign over. Seems to fit, given that campaign’s reputation…
Personally, it always makes me think of the ending of Neverwinter Nights 2 where the ceiling falls on you after the final battle. The game ran out of time, so content got cut. Ah, a classic Obsidian game!
(Sure, they did then make an expansion pack sequel (Mask Of The Betrayer) that ostensibly featured the same character, but the story there is ‘you survived the rockfall by being randomly teleported to the other side of the world to take part in a completely different story’, so…)
Random question on Obsidian game endings:
What’s better?
Rocks fall, everyone dies!
or
Your previously destroyed spaceship rises out of the ground to fly you away from the falling rocks!
I personally feel NWN2 made for a more comprehensible ending, but KOTOR2 still somehow landed better emotionally even if I didn’t fully grasp what was happening anymore by that point.
Can you imagine the DMOTR GM with Obsidian style budget and deadline constraints?
An actual good ending, that feels like it wasn’t rushed. Rare for Obsidian, but…
They managed it with Pillars of Eternity, but that was probably because they went to Kickstarter and got waaaaaay more money than they anticipated and had resources to spare.
They kind of managed it with Fallout: New Vegas, though sadly that ending for me is grossly overshadowed by memories of running back and forth through identical rooms in Hoover Dam during the final battle, because the objective marker was so unhelpful.
Oh, and Mask of the Betrayer too, though that benefitted from being generally shorter and more focussed throughout.
As for the DMOTR GM, in a sense, the is suffering from having too much content – backstory the party don’t care about, a GMPC who hogs all the glory, NPCs who just try and insert themselves into the story.
If he were forced to cut content, it might make for a better game – if he were aware enough to cut the stuff the players don’t care about, of course…
Both New Vegas and Pillars had much better endings, agreed.
New Vegas was sadly also shackled to a horrible core engine, while Pillars and me were a bit at odds as to what kind of tone fantasy epic RPGs should have…ah well. I still don’t regret playing it, but I’ve passed on the sequel for Pillars.
But Mask of the Betrayer I never finished. When it let me continue with the same character as in NWN2, I assumed it would continue with a similar tone (high fantasy with a dash of whimsy), but it did not. I then bounced off various level-gates for a bit before fighting plumage-bear. Then the game told I’d need to push the Good or Evil buttons every so often to not die from now on, and that’s when I decided I wasn’t having fun and left it at that :/
I’m glad it worked for those it worked for, but I never felt like it was a continuation of NWN2, which is what I was looking for at the time.
If NWN2 ran out of content and got cut, I would not want to play that cut content. I like NWN2, but the last 5 levels of the game are just a level grind slog against the same like 3 enemies because “it goes to 20 so you have to go to 20.” It sucks. And there’s literally not enough standard monsters to actually make that band interesting.
I’ve heard complaints that BG3 stops leveling at like 12th but keeps going ’cause there’s lots of optional content, and that sounds *miles* better than a forced linear slog through garbage.
I don’t think that’s what was cut. Once you’ve got the game engine set up, adding monsters and more combat is relatively easy (I think. Not actually a game dev).
What was cut was the story: the reason for those fights. The wrapping up of all the plot threads at the end. Voice acting. Adding different endings that account for who’s alive, who’s dead, who you romanced, etc etc.
That’s what would take the time to do.
BG3, meanwhile, has the opposite problem for me. Far, far too much content, and the fact that you aren’t gaining levels anymore means one of your incentives to engage with it is gone. I’ve never beaten it, because I want to do all the optional stuff – but there’s too much and I just get tired and bored.
(At least 4 times in act 3 I was following a quest thread, only to stumble into another. Sometimes a scripted event that means you can’t ignore it or come back later. The quest log just keeps filling up with stuff to do, and trying to do some of it just makes it worse!)
It’s a similar story to Divinity OS 2: love the game, but I’ve only beaten it once because it just becomes a slog at the end, going to do all the things. Even though they’re interesting things to do.
Same. I reach a point where I just have to start clearning out the quest log, and before long I just get tired of doing it. It’s one of the reasons I tend to like following guides if the game is old enough; they help manage the queue.
Looks like at some point Randy changed up the page names for the comic strips, so the link in the description no longer works, I believe Shamus was linking to this one:
https://somethingpositive.net/comic/peejee-dragons-pt-6/
I was going to comment this and on the Tomb of Horrors mention: technically the origination of the trope is Tomb of Horrors, and *allegedly* this was the first mention of the phrase “Rocks Fall. Everyone Dies,” or something similar. And it makes sense. However, the original use of “Rocks Fall. Everyone Dies (because you’re all pissing me off.)” is from the Something Positive reference. PeeJee ends up using it a few times. Much like any other popular thing, other players of the game the expression was first *used* at, which the creator of Something Positive, Randy Millholland, was a part of, do claim it predates the comic. Athough Randy’s specific use in 2002 is the fundamental popular use and functional origin, which they credit.
Dice Fall, Everybody Rocks!