#either they're designed specifically to be fuckable

[klysanderelias]

So I've been playing through the beginning of the wrath of the righteous crpg that just released and it's... weird. Part of it is because I had the adventure path books like 6 years ago and read through all of it then, so I have a minor level of stuff to compare in my head, but also because I kind of dramatically grew as a person re: rpg stuff and DND in particular. Not gonna spoil anything, although I'm likely to keep posting about it so I'll put a note in the tags just in case, but...

Pathfinder moved somewhat away from the bullshit of old-school 3.0/3.5/4e dnd in a lot of ways but there's still a lot of the bizarre genetic essentialism and really uncomfortable parallels being made to real-world ethnic groups (shoutout to the guy who created the continent of mwangi for his only understanding of africa apparently being congo by michael crichton), and I know that 2nd ed pathfinder did a lot of work to address THAT, but WotR still has a LOT of really uncomfortable moments.

and at the end of the day, I think what really bothers me is that CRPGs as a whole aren't really comparable to ttrpgs because the level of freedom and interaction is always going to be limited by file size, creator imagination, authorial intent, and natch, money. And, most crpgs spend their biggest efforts on combat and gameplay and tend to tack dialogue and character interactions on almost as an afterthought - I think pillars of eternity 2 was the best I've seen the system implemented, and nothing else has really met that standard since. And that's okay! It'd be almost a fool's errand to try and implement that in a crpg to anything close to the level a basic ttrpg could do, but then it basically feels like half of your character creation is superfluous or unnecessary because like, the game is designed around the combat. You have one character with a persuasion or diplomacy equivalent skill, and everything else is either for exploration or combat and that's it.

I guess it's just frustrating to have been like, 5+ years without a real ttrpg game in my life so I'm using crpgs to substitute and it's not at all the same experience, and yet I KNOW that it could be because I own the fuckin' adventure path and have planned how to run it in the past. Or maybe what I mean to say is like, i know what this recipe tastes like homemade, and the storebought mass-produced version is something completely different even though it's supposed to be the same.

I dunno, I'm only a few hours in and honestly, it's pretty good! I can genuinely recommend it as a crpg, and I know from kingmaker that the studio a) creates quality work and puts in the time on writing and b) patches and bugfixes like crazy unlike a lot of other studios that make crpgs.

Oh, but one thing I will say - I remember the adventure path being a lot more progressive about this shit from like, fuckin' TWENTY-THIRTEEN. They had a trans lesbian in their game like it weren't no thing, and WotR in 2021 feels a little like a step back, again because of weird genetic essentialism undertones as well as the tendency to equate fantasy religions to christianity to the point that one character prays to her goddess to forgive her sins etc and another character talks about seeking forgiveness from his god re: his terrible decisions in the past and it's like... y'all know that not all religions are christianity, right? And i say that as a white dude raised super fuckin' christian! Maybe it's silly but it makes me feel skeezy when a character starts spouting the sort of shit I have heard almost verbatim in a southern baptist church but here it's okay because it's regarding literal actual demons?

At least Anevia is still a lesbian, here's hoping they didn't walk back her being trans.