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I’m the sort of person who plays RTS games for the single player experience. I like blowing stuff up as much as the next guy, but sometimes I also like to have reasons explained to me for why I am working demolition. Starcraft’s official site originally advertised it (circa 2001 or so?) with...

I can’t enjoy the story as an adult. It’s absolutely a mess. I can’t engage constructively with the fans either, since everybody who disliked the story left and those remaining don’t share any of the same tastes that I do. It really sucks for me personally because I think Starcraft has all the...

Really? Every story review I was ever able to find said otherwise.

I first played it back in the early 2000s and found it pretty fun. When I came back many years later and read the official plot synopsis... Well, at least the gameplay is good, right?

I think the types mechanic is fundamentally broken because the types are generally arbitrarily applied rather than clearly and unambiguously defined. Furthermore, a monster may only have one type even though that makes no sense. Plenty of monsters could be argued to fall into multiple types...

That may be further shortened to thon. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/third-person-gender-neutral-pronoun-thon

And how are you going to get that without falling into the trap of them being funny-looking humans? The same logic applies as writing aliens in hard scifi. How are you going to 1) communicate their fundamental physiological/psychological differences from humans and 2) in a way that is fairly...

This is mentioned in the cartoon Ben 10 at one point. Humans don’t have any fancy superpowers, but they do have flexible minds. Also, Earth is the only planet with more than one or two biomes.

Let me edit it further: "Chris stealthily approached the campfire which was surrounded by ten lightly skinned men. The rogue had a Wand of Fireball, and they was willing to use it. Once Chris got into range, they used the wand, but it backfired, and the rogue died a fiery death." If a verb...

I think a good way to distinguish races would be to give them extreme biological differences. For example: dwarves are all male and are carved from stone by their father. Elves are talking plants. Orcs pop put of holes in the ground as adults holding weapons. Etc.

Everything?

How much of the difference is cultural and how much is biological? How do you tell? How would you enforce roleplaying a race “correctly”? Why do fantasy races need to be more different than human races? The overwhelming majority of authors can’t pull off genuinely alien psychology, and most...

To be honest, this is probably the easiest way to handle all races. As shown by the fact that this is how all races are already played.

In fairy tales, all animals can talk. Trees and rivers can talk.

To be fair, that wasn’t widely known in the 1980s.

There’s plenty of other monsters whose shtick involves non-consensual or dubiously consensual sexual situations. Particularly when a monster is stated to be exclusively of a single sex. I know some of this goes back to folklore from around the world trying to impart a moral message to never...

There’s a blog that critiques AD&D monster manuals: https://your-dungeon-is-problematic.tumblr.com/ Personally, sphinxes stand out to me because some of them reproduce through rape. So I’m quite glad that 5e turned them into celestials summoned into existence by prayer or divine fiat.

Exactly. Explaining that the mooks physically cannot have families means that you don’t need to worry about that if you just want consequence-free violent slaughter fantasies. Although I do find myself partial to 90s adventure shows like Beastmaster where the hero was technically a pacifist. I...

Different game genres have different tastes. Some games prefer orcs as simple evil minions made of muck, others to tackle the gritty complexities of real (ish) war. But I’m sure we can all agree that it’s probably better not to take cues from colonialist stereotypes of indigenous peoples when...