Comic for Thursday, Apr 20, 2023

[Amiable Dorsai 70]

Here. Yeah, once you been in a few magical battles for your life, rolling dice to save a fictional chicken pales by comparison. Nanase needs to borrow Grace's imagination.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,619]

So a black belt who has actually fought with wizards, monsters, vampires, and an overbearing mother finds little appeal in an abstract, numerical simulation of combat? 

This is clearly the fault of the multinational corporation that published the module. 

[Darth Fluffy 338]

3 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

This is clearly the fault of the multinational corporation that published the module. 

It's only recently that RPGs are mainstream enough for The Hasbros and Disneys of the world to take notice. The glory days of modules were published by shaky corporations or less. TBD if anything better will emerge.

I recall Ellen saying or thinking she used to play this game. It's been around for a while.

For comparison, the original Star Wars was produced on a shoestring relative to the media universe it has spawned. The newer offerings are in a cinematic sense much more polished, the CGI is orders of magnitude more advanced. But the original was ground breaking; it changed the direction of Sci Fi cinema; it had heart (at least, it did before Lucas kept mucking with it). The recent offerings feel derivative, because they are.

This is even more so for Star Trek. TOS was groundbreaking, both for the cultural themes it broached, and for the (for the time) advanced special effects it used. TOS has not aged well; it looks lame and crude by modern standards, it is not well paced, the settings seem artificial, and the plots do not flow well; it is almost painful to watch in retrospect (although it come up in conversations, indicating the immense cultural impact it had; 'wears the goatee' comes to mind). The newer offerings? Much more polished, generally good in their own right, but again derivative and drifting from Roddenberry's vision of a platform for pontificating his views. (That's one of the risks of dropping dead, folks tend to forget your agenda.)

None if this is unreasonable in context. After proving their profitability, the properties are bought up by a few all-consuming dinosaurs, deconstructed into a gooey grey-brownish paste, water is added, they crap out a marketable product that looks almost like the real think in the right light (they also provide the lighting).

Hey, like superhero comics? Guess who's driving the boat now?

Someday soon, you'll be able to buy and play a module of a movie you just watched. Cool beans, huh?

Is it a bad thing? Nah, not particularly for it's own sake, but it demonstrates a shift in power, in ownership, in entitlement, and in stifling opportunity. Culture is moving toward a feudal model. Maybe that's its natural resting place. We seem to stray back there whenever we think we've stepped away. The Arnesons and Gygaxes are cut out of the action; well, they didn't handle it all that well when they were running it, so is it a bad thing? Lucas can no longer modify his own IP, it's not his IP any more; well, I'm not a fan of his retro-edits anyway.

Still, I have to wonder about the long dark night time lurking in the wings. When 'The Bottom Line' really is 'The Bottom Line', then literally nothing else is sacred; deforestation and becoming the next Venus make sense, because we look good right now, and hey, it's not illegal if they don't enforce it, we won't be around to pick up the tab anyway. I'm with you on that; I won't have to deal with this personally, either. (Bacteria are not an exception; they change continually.)

Change happens. So do extinctions. They are, in fact inevitable. A species either dies off or succeeds. If it succeeds, it is replaced by its offspring. The big headed monkeys of Sol 3 had their run, it was interesting, if a bit short of spectacular, perhaps it's time for someone else to take the stage. Maybe the squirrels? The trash pandas? I'm sorry I will miss it, it promises to be entertaining, and I'd probably laugh my ass off. I'd watch the show. Five *****, recommended.

In summary . . .

Edited April 20, 2023 by Darth Fluffy
Added cartoon link