374 karma · joined January 30, 2018
They are very common in the Middle East.
Personally I wouldn't do without one and would install one in any new home I moved to.
Looks at Rings of Power; absolutely gorgeous, and some great dialog sprinkled here and there, but the plotting, world building, tone, and story-beats are amateurish.
There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise, and writers have absolutely no patience; an old example, but one I think highlights this, is the movie "Solo"; I quite liked the movie, much more than I expected and more than the general public did, but it was infuriating how they had to put in every single plot point that Han Solo mentioned in the original trilogy, as if without it we wouldn't understand who Solo was, or how clever the writers were.
Similarly Black Panther 2; so much good stuff but ruined, in my opinion anyway, by too much exposition given to us as dialog rather than flashback - Namor's backstory was probably unnecessary, and if it was necessary it would have been better as an opening sequence (not to mention the movie being at least an hour too long).
> "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
vibe to it...
(or a Life of Brian "you're all individuals" thing)
I think also the Horror genre often ignores or subverts the Hero's Journey.
As he points out, there's a lot of troubling stuff in The Hero's Journey, but there's still a lot that is of interest, particularly with how it informed the Star Wars universe.
it's mostly around being interrupted mid sentence, in my experience (and it's certainly the thing that annoys me the most)
Excepting a few, most of their monsters are generic fantasy monsters too or random combinations of "let's stick this head on this body".
The stuff that is copyrightable they do a terrible job at monetizing (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberon, various planes, higher powers, etc.)
3.5 was an update released for balance reasons, as I understand it and didn't change core gameplay - it removed some of the more broken exploits, but you can use 3.0 material with 3.5 with relatively few, if any changes: most of the balance problem was player side.
I used to play basic D&D as a child, and then sort of ignored the whole genre until around 2005 when I picked it back up again, using 3.5, so I'm not an expert on it by any means.
My understanding (relatively naive, though I am a long time consumre of D&D products) is that Hasbro has been making some questionable decisions recently particularly regarding their golden goose, which is Magic the Gathering. Some of those decisions have really annoyed the fan base, e.g. the Black Orchid debacle (they replublished a bunch of cards that they promised would never be republished, at hugely inflated prices).
In an attempt to shore up their share price and profits, they've reviewed their other product lines to see if there's any slack that can take up the load: which puts D&D in play. The bean counters believe that Hasbro is leaving a lot of money on the table; It's very popular and has had something of a resurgance recently due to popular media like Stranger Things and Critical Role, along with the well received 5th edition.
Ignoring direct IP licencing (e.g. games/movies/etc.), the majority of the revenue is from Games/Dungeon masters (as I understand it, in line with my experience), and not the players. DMs buy the books and run the game. DMs are a fraction of their player base, and there's certainly many who depend on free/open products to save costs. The powers that be believe that some of that can be monetised more effectively and they're trying to think of ways to extract more money from more people.
D&D 5e does fill an important niche; it's the public face of table-top role-play gaming, and it's pretty easy for anyone to pick up and run/play, however it's not the only product on the market and there are many products that serve the customers better (even if they're less accessible and require an understanding of the genre to choose) - Hasbro/WotC have to make this work, and quickly, or they run the risk of losing everything.
Paizo (via Pathfinder) probably has the most to win here; it's well known in the community and has much better support for people who prefer a "crunchy" game. Paizo are probably kicking themselves for not removing their dependency on the OGL when they released Pathfinder 2e (which is what my group plays most frequently).
I imagine that a large part of the issue is that productivity increases seem to benefit the top and not the bottom. I haven't thoroughly reviewed all the snippets, but my casual view is that people are complaining that younger people aren't willing to do the work that the complainer used to do without complaining, ignoring the fact that the nature of work has changed significantly over the decades, with significant mechanisation/automation. IIRC one of the examples is that youngsters don't want to break rocks any more (I exagerate perhaps a little there).
is rather unfair I think - there are very good reasons why an unpleasant action might be necessary