Absolutely it does, and the fact that you're not engaging with that shows the problem you're having in understanding the problem here.
This is about themes and styles and tone, and you just don't seem to be seeing those or engaging with those concept at all.
Engaging with a concept is not the same thing as agreeing with you.
In other words, that I disagree doesn't mean I'm not engaging the subject.
You said it would be a major gameplay loop.
You should check again. I never said the word "major" nor implied it.
The jump from what I actually said, "smithing could be a part of the game", to that is wild.
You were the one who said it would be important.
Again, no I did not. What you appear to be conflating together is the statement that a game, by virtue of being interactive, fundamentally necessitates the presence of things that would be superflous in a film, with the statement that smithing could be a part of a LOTR game.
These are separate statements, and the points being made by both are only tangentially related. The former is pointing out that games are about doing things, not passively observing things happen, and the latter is relating that LOTR isn't somehow compromised thematically by smithing as an activity.
I maintain that in 3rd Age-set LotR game, it would be entirely inappropriate to make smithing any kind of major part of gameplay. It's completely tonally and thematically inappropriate.
You can keep saying this louder and louder all you want, but that doesn't make you more right. If you want to keep asserting this you'll need an argument thats more substantial than just escalating the tone of your writing voice.
An argument, mind, that we can actually
discuss the merits of; I can't imagine you find yelling your opinion at me to be all that productive, and you decided to ignore my attempt at providing more substance.
To reiterate, one of the core themes, arguably
the core theme of LOTR is the impact even the smallest of things has on the tides of history. Thats the thematic appeal of Bilbo's and Frodo's pity on Gollum, and why Tolkien spends so much time building up not just the Hobbits themselves but the world they're ushered into.
They practically don't exist in the great scheme of Middle Earth, and yet after the great Isildur falls, its three Hobbits that ultimately shape the entire destiny of that world.
The way in which Tolkien portrays is this is precisely by focusing on those things that you insist are antithetical to what he was writing. Smithing is just one small thing amongst many that'd be representative of that. The kinds of Heroes Tolkien celebrated
were nothing more than your humble blacksmith, and many were even lesser than that.
After all, one has to remember that Tolkien and Christopher didn't believe LOTR was filmable, and it makes sense why when you actually read the books. So much time is dedicated to things that do precisely diddly and squat to serve a plot, but do everything to convey the emotions and message of the story.
A film simply couldn't spend the time deep diving into the lore about a random hill in the middle of nowhere, and we see that when Weathertop is reduced to a vague reference in Fellowship.
Do you want to take a guess which artistic medium
could spend the time doing things like that?
Games, again, are about doing.
You are Frodo Baggins. If Frodo's story, his journey from the Shire to Mordor to the Crack of Doom and back again, covers things that would waste the audiences time in a movie theater, we can't look at that story as depicted in a game and assume the same things. Games are about
doing.
You're not doing if you're skipping over half the struggle Frodo went through.
But, this whole diatribe is kind of pointless to begin with, as MCDMRPG isn't a Lord of the Rings adaptation. We know what its about, and its about being a fantasy action RPG.
And there's nothing wrong with that, and I should know,
because I never criticized the game.
Because you factually cannot implement something like that in tabletop game.
If you believe that then I'm going to need for you to precisely, and calmly, elaborate on what you believe the concept of "multiplayer crafting" entails.
I suspect you're using words I ostensibly understand to mean something entirely different from what I understand those words to mean.
It hasn't been done, and asserting that it should be done for the first time in some entirely inappropriate RPG is bizarre, frankly.
Its bizarre to try doing new things for a change?
The idea that it's a fallacy for me to point out that you're engaging in a fantasy about a system that doesn't, and where you only example couldn't be implemented in tabletop is pretty funny
Oh, you think you couldn't do Space Engineers in tabletop? Sure, in the strictest sense of copying exactly what Space Engineers does yeah thats not possible on tabletop.
But in the sense of cooperatively building a ship together?
Absolutely possible, if you're willing to iterate on existing mechanics.
The board game Galaxy Truckers for example provides a foundation for ship building, and would be pretty trivial to iterate into a cooperative rather than competitive experience, especially if it was then combined with Chvátil's other game Space Cadets, which covers the players cooperatively running the ship.
As an aside, this is actually my base theory crafting for what my take on a scifi RPG would be like mechanically, insofar as what customizing and running ships together would be like.
Also kind weird to be complaining about the lack of innovators in this space, whilst attempting to complain about a game that's actually innovating, and innovating enough to upset some people. Maybe attitudes like your own are part of why get fewer innovators?
I'm not complaining about anything, least of which the game.
And lets not confuse them saying this game is "Heroic", the thing I was actually talking about, as "innovation".
It's not about the literal minutiae.
Not according to what they wrote. Has to be said, but you and others have consistently tried to accuse me of not reading the game's own words...
And yet you and others pay no heed to the fact that the game's own words spends much more time on the minutia it isn't about than the themes. 6 paragraphs to 2, respectively.
That's beyond pointless mate.
Well yeah I've been telling you that, and yet you have seen fit to turn it into a massive argument.