sulfurousacid

I'll be here when it all gets weird

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37, huge nerd, ace/aro 🔞minors dni🔞
I like weird porn die mad about it



Partheniad
@Partheniad

D&D is so monolithic that it is looks over every conversation. Imagine if you wanted to talk about films, but the only way you could bring up that space was to talk about the Marvel movies because those were all people were familiar with. And I'm not going to even get into whether you like the monolithic thing... But it's a roadblock to every conversation because you have to get over it. And even if you get to indie spaces it's constant conversations about how much the monolith sucks.

Like there's cool community and stuff, but people are so hesitant to venture out of the shallows you will legit get folks saying the equivalent of "Oh yeah I've seen some indie films, you ever heard of Star Wars?"


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in reply to @Partheniad's post:

I do kind of agree! I also think it's just kind of an inescapable genre-definer, by its own merits or not. Just about everything we play exists in some sort of conversation with it, so it is kind of relevant to most ttrpg conversations. It's also really useful as a tool for comparison, since it's the one game you know everyone has played. D&D 5e analysis is like a universal language. A language owned by Hasbro.

This exact gripe became an in joke amongst my friends of "Play another video game!!!" because it would be an absurd way to interact with the often similar media of video games. If you only ever played one video game it would be weird. Even if it was your favorite. Nobody would take you seriously. You would get so sick hearing people trying to make the video game into something beyond what it was capable of. It does not make sense to try and mod Skyrim into a block based mining and crafting game when you could instead make Minecraft. But it's happening in near perfect parallel with D&D.

It's funny, because there was a phase where people were trying to mod Minecraft to do all these other genres, and it was very funny. But those people built up their skills and then moved on to make their own games.

Its gravity is unmatched. You can have a discussion about Kubrick or Carpenter or Lynch stuff without mentioning Marvel, but the second you add a second party to a TTRPG discussion, D&D gets brought up, either in praise, criticism or a reference point. It's so bonkers.

"Unlike DnD this game does..." Or "This mechanic is kind of like how spell slots work..."