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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9441207" data-attributes="member: 18">Interesting, had it on in the background. A few observations:1) Matt didn't handle the legal stuff very well, like, he's too busy trying to be a hero and blaming the evil lawyers, and also frankly overcomplicated some fairly simple stuff. Not sure why he wanted to discuss that seemingly almost unprepared on stream lol. I could have done a better job, frankly, without even being prepared. You can't have that sneering/blaming attitude to lawyers, man, not when you're explaining a legal contract.2) Oooof some very sophomoric opinions and Just So stories re: film, though I feel unqualified to offer comment on his Gen X music opinions. Particularly insane to hear that the 1970s didn't have attractive movie stars and that Robert De Niro wasn't good-looking (on what planet?). I feel like this is very cis-hetero-male talk of the most blind kind lol. Like, oh yeah Robert Redford, Al Pacino, Bobbie De Niro, John Travolta, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, etc. none of them were at all outstandingly hot to the point where they're considered paragons of hotness to this day! You could perhaps make more of a case that some less-conventionally attractive women got more starring roles (which is I'm sure what he's thinking), but "Oh now we just cast hot people for escapism, not like the 1970s" has to be one of the worst and least reflected movie takes I've ever heard.3) Interesting stuff about design and what choices they make and how they make them. This is where he seemed most "in his element" to me. Agreed with most of his points.4) Lore stuff was decent but it's kind of a pity we're getting yet another fantasy setting where elves are Just Better Than Everyone Else And Everyone - including the other races -  Agrees With That. Also the whole "gods are definitely real and highly active" seems hard to square with people venerating them the way they alleged do, and with there being so many of them with such precisely defined domains, but maybe that's just because he wasn't being asked to explain that part. A lot of the gods had fairly decent concepts in the sense that they weren't dull and felt somewhat original (or at least entertaining), but most of them seemed like total wankers, in an unacknowledged way, which, in a 1994 product might have been forgivable, but in a 2024 one seems far less so.Like, the supposedly-super-popular farming god believes physical strength denotes honesty and goodness, and has people have tree-cutting competitions to show who is telling the truth, etc., which is obviously horrifically ableist, sexist, ageist, arguably racist, and so on, and I felt it was a little weird he didn't like, nod at that, he seemed to think this was just a belief one might reasonably have (AFAIK, no known historic human god has ever had anything even close to this belief, note, before anyone suggests otherwise) - like does Matt even know that that's totally creepy and messed-up? Does he realize that any society which venerated physical labour the way described would be pretty terrifying for like, the majority of humans? Or is this part of the same Gen X cis-hetero-guy deal that makes him think they didn't have super-attractive movie stars in the 1970s?And the god who believes if you share knowledge or skill, it diminishes the power of that knowledge/skill, that's like, super-creepy. That's an evil god, directly deleterious to society (esp. when one considers stuff like medicine, sanitation, structural integrity of buildings/earthquake resistance, and so on). But he seems to think most people would be totally happy and cool with that? That's the kind of stuff that tears societies apart. That causes mass slaughters because the believers are trying to strengthen the power of some knowledge by reducing how many people know it! Especially as he stresses that believers routinely go around publicly blaming failed architecture, broken swords, etc. on sharing knowledge! This is a god who is literally opposed to science, opposed to the advancement of society, even opposed really to engineering etc. - but it's Nekros the Tyrant we're supposed to be afraid of? Hmmmmm. Feel like that guy is less likely to cause huge problems for society in the long-run than Mr Knowledge Is Power And Should Be Secret.It's difficult to discern if he's just letting us draw our own conclusions, but understands the issues - absolutely no evidence from a single word he said here supports that, sadly - or just doesn't understand that this stuff is creepy-as-hell and deeply anti-heroic in this supposed heroic-fantasy setting, which unfortunately seems like it might be the case. I agreed with his earlier design statement that you shouldn't, say, jam a cosmic-horror-themed character in a heroic-fantasy-themed game (or vice-versa), but he seems to be very keen to put some seriously creepy Dark Fantasy/Grimdark gods in a heroic-fantasy-themed setting.</blockquote>

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