I could sit here and pick these apart all day. I figure this is something everyone does and I don't mention it to feel special, but to feel normal.
Speaking of trying to be normal...
I got in touch with some specialists this week to see if my childhood sounding like a kid with undiagnosed autism was a real thing, or just a coincidence. Considering they wanted $2600 just to start poking at my brain I decided that I made it this far not knowing, I can make it the rest of the way to the grave.
it's a common problem in tabletop roleplay games in the D&D tradition to come across a moral problem with the "monster races" such as goblins and orcs. as a genre convention these races exist largely to provide enemies to menace good folk and for the heroes to slaughter in great numbers, but a problem arises when you think about what goblins and orcs and all the others are capable of – manufacturing and using tools, employing language to communicate, planning for the future and having social structures. the problem is, they're people. this is actually what makes them interesting enemies! an orcish warband performing a mass blood sacrifice to summon their evil god can't happen unless the orcs are people, with all that entails. this results in a moral problem where the heroes are now cutting swathes through armies of people, which invites all kinds of moral questioning. do orcs have children? do they fear death? are they simply defending themselves from the heroes' unprovoked attacks? were they lied to to convince them to fight this battle? this adds a level of moral complexity to stories about heroes saving the world that's difficult to resolve. interestingly, the problem is actually older than the fantasy genre itself: Tolkien himself struggled with this in his depiction of orcs.
however, baldur's gate 3 has an extremely clever way of dealing with this moral dilemma, which allows for example the goblins to be both interesting characters to talk to, while also making sure the player doesn't have to get into moral quandries about killing them. the way it does this is by making them english.
I NEED A BREAK FROM WRITING ESSAYS so come join me and my buddy Liquid_Otacon as we play more SUPPLICE and suffer through co-op DAIKATANA
we are LIVE with the PRESHOW! come hang out!
