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That's... certainly an outlook...

Given that in (especially older) D&D positioning, Good isn't necessarily about good, but about hurting and beating back Evil*, paying evil unto Evil, it's easy to see the outsider's view that they're not actually ideological forces, but opposing teams, one of which is admittedly full of bad guys...

I play the game to collaboratively tell a story. So a game is a structure for storytelling for me.

I mean 'round these parts 'superheroic' tends to mean 'literally nothing to do with superheroes from the past fifty years and even before that, just the One Guy.' or 'I don't like it.' Just like 'anime' and 'videogame'.

It's sadly less informed than that. I'm talking about the apocryphal 'when in doubt, kill a character'. Which makes sense for a horror/thriller, but is less useful in say, cozy romance or yes, heroic fantasy. You don't just randomly kill off characters and expect it to be poignant. And I...

The planned part is more about stories. Thanks to misreading Steven King, you would not believe how many writers just sprinkle in a little death without rhyme or reason and have no gameplan for how other characters react or how the story would be affected.

Having played the Abomination Vaults, Paizo's own definition of 'face first into every buzz saw' means 'opens a door after rolling high on a perception check while the enemy nat 20'd its stealth'.

The need to airdrop a New Guy and is still going to blunt and drama that comes from the death. Not to mention monkey-wrenching anything that character was formerly involved with. Which is why I don't see the value added by death in stories or game unless it was very carefully planned and executed.

Is death supposed to be part of difficulty -- a result of skill, a penalty for the DM thinking you did something stupid regardless of what you thought, or just blind chaos with no rhyme or reason because, dice?

Somewhere between zero and none. I'm not a fan of death as a stake since it's the only stake in anything these days

I've also abandoned species-specific gods, but my first point of reconstruction would be getting rid of the Tom / Jerry dynamic that springs up between a number of species gods (Mostly Corellion and Gruumish, but also Gaarl Glittergold in particular) where one god seems to be constantly...

"Let me tell you what the bumps on an orc's skull tells us about how okay killing their children is..." Science.

I think the bigger issue is trying to put the onus of writing xenofiction -- a very niche and unappreciated subgenre-- on the shoulders of every player that wants to play something the looks cooler than a sad shaved ape. It's comes back--however indirectly-- to this weird old D&D ism of making...

Not even being 'dumbed down' as people call it helps this, btw. I proudly write pulp. My work is just there for entertainment. I have a character who explicitly says he's a scumbag, who hates himself for it --and not in the Rick Sanchez 'I turn everything into a wacky catchphrase' kind of way...

I dunno, I think while neuroplasticity is definitely a thing, people can still be taught after the point. I sure was. But I'm right there with you on teaching media literacy. It's... terrifying seeing how people approach media these days. Like D&D for example...

Adults aren't the much less impressionable. Look at the 'joker' subculture, or all the people that think a movie literally called American Psycho is a handbook on how to be cool, look at how podcasts and tiktoks convince people of the absolutely dumbest things.

This past couple of week has been distressingly eye-opening. It's one thing to disagree with people about a game of pretend, but seeing just these streams of terrible stuff and disjointed, nonsensical defenses* of terrible stuff just rolling out of them. I have new respect for what OSR fans...

So because you don't like my argument, it's okay to just make up things about me to my face?

It's the hat. I am not okay with raw meat on my head and I cannot communicate why that's getting to me as I just discovered this limitation.

~The evening prayer of Kord.