I got the first one not too long after it came out. It seemed like the kind of thing I’d like: an immersive, detail-rich game mechanic with lots of fiddly bits, and a fairly explicit swapping of the game and meta-game elements (i.e. the whole point is building ships that can fly – where they take you is an ex post facto justification, at best).
And I did enjoy it at first, just knocking around, experimenting, and trying to figure out how stuff works. It was funny watching my ships careen wildly out of control (if they even made it off the launch pad) before spectacularly crashing and burning. At least it was funny the first few dozen times, but then it started getting old, and when I went to the internet to find out how to play, the best answer was basically “watch these six (or was it sixteen?) hours of youtube tutorials, and then git gud,” and I kind of just noped on out of that.
In short, I found it to be punishingly difficult and, although I suspect that would have made any successes that much more enjoyable, I just don’t have the patience for that kind of time-sink any more.
Oddly enough, I still really want to like it though, and admit I will be tempted by the sequel.
I actually disagree with some of her argument. I think games should offer balancing tools, to keep parties relatively balanced with each other and with canned adventures, and should encourage abled players to consider disabled characters.
Not sure which article you’re talking about, but I’d guess the Game Mechanics one? I lean toward narrative vs mechanics. I can see how in a mechanics-heavy game, there could be things that might seem unrealistic, but like you say, they aim for balance. So if your character has a disability, they get a bonus in some other area. And in narrative-driven games, it’s entirely up to the people playing what they make of it, and it adds an interesting angle, so kind of encourages people to try it out.
FATE is narrative-heavy, but has a whole book on playing some disabled characters. It’s hard to translate to less narrative games.
Savage Worlds and others have hindrance systems. The complaint is that people take disabilities for extra points, and then don’t play them right. In my opinion, that’s better than if people never play disabled characters.
Pathfinder 2 SRD has short rules for some disabled characters. The thing is that players don’t get extra anything. So these rules discourage players who might play disabled characters, and with Pathfinder’s focus on party roles, challenge ratings, and balance elsewhere, I worry it may feel like a party weakness to play or play alongside disabled characters.
As far as I know Mythras, Runequest, Basic Roleplaying Core, etc. still don’t have rules for disabled characters.
Another complaint, not there but elsewhere, is that the rules should help create adventurers, they aren’t intended to create everyone, and disabled people aren’t adventurers… Well, fuck that.
I want to make a warrior , so I have the most HP and damage possible. Since dual wielding nearly doubles my damage output and gets the bonus of two magical weapons later, I will dual wield . At level 5 I am going to take - Dual Wield Finesse which will make my off-hand weapon act as a shield anyway. I will take phobias for three things, the maximum, that almost never come up - Cacti, bardic music (even with a phobia I can easily overpower a bard) and witnessing alchemy . OK, that gives me three bonus points. One goes to “resist fear” which will nearly eliminate any impact of the phobias. I will put one point into Katana mastery .
That leaves one bonus point. Oh, I will add correctable nearsightedness for two extra bonus points. One of those I will use for magic, invisible, corrective lenses that never fall off under the family heirloom trait . The remaining two bonus points are used to increase the critical damage percentage of katanas and then enhance the resulting damage .
OK, so I now have the maximum damage per round for a level 1 character. I got 5 bonus points for my phobias and weaknesses, but essentially removed the effect using 2 of the bonus points. The net was 3 bonus points that I dumped into stacking katana damage bonuses for my two katanas. My backstory? I guess I am a ninja or something.
Given the snotty things Amazon says about my (admittedly low-end DSL) connection, probably not.
Plus it’s the same old conundrum with streaming anything. Pay for the hardware. Pay for the subscription. Plus the already-sunk cost of paying for the internet connection, plus any overages increased use bring.
And for games, yeah, waiting for downloads sucks, but what else sucks is downloading the same level over and over again until you best it and move on.
I guess ultimately it depends on your Internet plan.
