while I'm being all out of patience with people disingenuously bleating because of maritime bullshit, lemme also get curmudgeonly because I see a publication which reports on the mainstream of TTRPGs has surveyed the entire field as they understand it — which is to say, D&D and Dungeons & Dragons and the current edition of That Game WotC Make and even, squinting right out to the far horizon on a clear day, supermarket own brand "Pathfinder" D&D — and concluded that gosh, romance in TTRPGs, that's underserved, innit, why doesn't anyone make—?

fuck me, yeah, there's a dead horse that hasn't seen a beating in at least a fucking week!

my take, as always, is that there are actually plenty of TTRPGs which do...well, whatever people have in mind when they say that, and fuck me if that extreme and inherent vagueness is part of what makes this topic so very annoying...and very little acknowledgement that actually, plenty of TTRPG groups shouldn't touch specifically-romance-focused games with a 10-foot pole.

You know how humans, notoriously, are so bad at telling when a relationship isn't a genuine intimate one that artificial ones that skip a lot of the establishing-intimacy stages, e.g. therapists, have to specifically fend off people whose brains have gone, well, we're already doing the intimate sharing bit so we must have The Feels here, better jumpstart that? Yeah?

You know how heterogenous friend groups containing cishet men are notorious for going off-kilter even under ideal conditions because a cishet man decided that not being treated as an automatic walking rape threat is instead an automatic invitation to fuck?

...You see where I'm going with that?

All the best to people who are looking for romantic games, whatever badly-defined thing they actually want; and I envy them the friend group that they feel safe sharing them with. Kinda. But my god I think you have to responsibly acknowledge that even if the RPG industry didn't treat RPGs as "D&D, and maybe going above and beyond to Pathfinder as a special treat" specifically-romantic RPGs still really, really couldn't be anything but niche.


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