My brain went to exactly the same place.

And if you can show me even one time that he actually apologized and admitted he was wrong on this, I’ll happily agree.

I want to see people be better. But I’m smart enough not to assume it without evidence.

Yes, but then you’d have to actually play FATAL, and you really don’t want that.

FATAL is, somehow, simultaneously a masterclass in realism for the sake of realism, and also the most unrealistic game ever made. There is a specific stat for how many words per minute you can speak, a stat for the longest word you know, and a stat for how far back your earliest memory is. But also, the system uses the concept of “humors” as something that actually has real-world effects, has the aforementioned critical system where you can crit individual organs but leave the surrounding organs unscathed, the ability to roll up a 4 year old with B-cups, and all kinds of other absolutely deranged nonsense that has no business whatsoever calling itself realistic.

Oh, and if your character’s intelligence is low enough, you get to roll to see if they have “R****d Strength”. So that’s great.

It is, and that’s somehow one of the least offensively bad things about it.

My issue isn’t with the mechanics; yes, I’m sure that stuff can be modded.

My issue is with the idea that I should give my money to someone who will actively defend the claim that I do not exist.

Put it this way; if there were no non-white people in Rimworld, and the reason why was because the creator firmly believed that by the time humanity gets to space white people would have “won the race war and exterminated all the scum” would you still feel comfortable giving that person your money just because “I can mod that out”?

I didn’t even get into how the underlying system is abysmally bad even when you try to strip away all the gross shit.

Like, stats are generated by rolling 10d100/10-1. Yes, you read that correctly. Then there are five derived attributes generated as an average of four base stats, so if something modifies a base stat you have to recalculate the derived stat, but then those derived stats also set things like your carry weight, so you have to recalculate that and… It’s exhausting.

Combat is atrocious. There are criticals, but they have no relation to each other, so you can cleave through someone’s appendix and their belly button but leave everything in between untouched. Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly. The whole thing is an ungodly nightmare.

Rimworld was originally coded so that all women were at least slightly bisexual, if not fully gay, while all men were either gay or straight. According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on “research” - bisexual men like me don’t exist.

That’s honestly just the start of the rabbit hole. The game was hardcoded so that men always prefer younger partners and women always prefer older partners. Also women were eight times less likely to be willing to hit on someone. This is, to be clear, supposed to be a scifi game set in the future, but modelling sexual politics apparently taken from 1980’s TV.

There’s an amazing breakdown of the whole thing here; https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rimworld-code-analysis

You can find the creator of Rimworld in the comments defending all of his nonsense and making a total ass of himself in the process. Unfortunately the rest of the comments are a total shit show because the average gamer simply does not have the mental maturity needed to handle critical analysis deeper than “graphics bad”.

I’m told they eventually changed some of this stuff after enough backlash, years later, for whatever that’s worth. Maybe the creator actually did some learning and growing, and if so, good for them.

There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.

Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.

By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.

My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.

My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”

Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.

And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.

If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.

See, my question here would be “Why is combat boring in your games?” Because I see a lot of people try to fix D&D by focusing on making the most interesting board game possible, but roleplaying games aren’t board games, they’re stories.

For me, combat in systems like Shadowrun, D&D, WFRP, Storyteller and so on is boring because it brings the game to a crashing halt. The fact that it can takes hours of table time to play out a few rounds of combat in most of those systems is, to my mind, a far bigger issue than their relative quality as tactical gameplay experiences. Shadowrun tried to layer on more and more special moves and manuevers and combat abilities in the name of making combat more “interesting” and the effect was the exact opposite as so much more of the game became looking up the mechanics for the specific action you’re trying to take.

Combat should be fast and vibrant, and sometimes really scary. A firefight in Shadowrun - my go-to because it’s the game I run the most - should feel like a shootout from Heat or Ronin, or a John Wick movie. And it’s impossible to make anything feel like that when it takes an hour for everyone to get a single turn in.

This is just my take at the end of the day, but I don’t think the solution to boring combat is more or better rules. I tried that for years and nothing ever worked. What did work was finally shifting to more narrative focused systems with minimal, versatile rules that allowed me to treat combat just like anything else in the game. That way I could stop focusing on tracking hit-points and initiative, and I can make combat flow into the rest of the rest of the story in a way that feels natural, fluid, and visceral.

Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don’t think I’ve been able to make it happen even once.

Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.

The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.

The comic being fully committed to the idea that D&D teaches you actual magic spells that actually work in real life is fucking wild. Like, bro, this is supposed to be Christian propaganda but you’re out here telling me that one small spell can get me $200 of D&D sourcebooks? Sign me the fuck up for Satan, this Jesus dude ain’t shit.

This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.

+1 for Burnout 3. That’s a series that desparately needs a new entry.

Zone of the Enders was phenomenal.

Ah yes, single player open world Helldivers.

Absolutely amazing game. Just Cause kind of captured some of the same energy, but never quite there. There’s nothing quite like being able to deploy cluster bomb strikes at will.

Alright, you just sold me on borg backup. Well done.

Gamers try not to be massive creeps in public 2025 challenge. Level: Impossible.

“I mean, they can’t get any worse, right?”

Spoiler alert: They can.

Don’t buy anything from EA, ever again.