aluminiumtrioxid

That's just because you didn't invest in Lockpicking Doors usually don't have tank treads and laser eyes you know. Maybe where you live.. You're clearly underestimating the number of ways a door can kill you

That's just because you didn't invest in Lockpicking (It also totally wasn't overpowered. Not to give ideas to the GM, but I wouldn't really say a (non-damaged) tank can be below level 6, and armor 3 is kind of a joke.)

Seriously though, I never thought I'd ever have reason to IC utter the words "I'm proud of you, son. You vanquished the fearsome door through the power of 4chan."

It's Door-Whack-In, you filthy heretic! The Church of the Dragonfly will enact revenge on you for misspelling the name of the Son of the True God!

Hmm. Hmm? Maximizing gun utility and maximizing cost-efficiency related to maximizing gun utility are not the same thing.

If I was a government official tasked with dealing with the issue of the regulation, I wouldn't give a **** about who needs them and who doesn't - I'm not interested in optimizing gun utility (in lives saved and crimes prevented), I'm interested in optimizing cost-efficiency (the benefits of regulation - hospital bills prevented, f'rex - need to outweigh the costs of implementing the regulation). "Need" doesn't factor in. Wrong. People can and do change dramatically and in unpredictable ways. You're right, regular checkups would obviously be optimal, but the number of deaths/injuries prevented that way would not justify the cost. This way you can at least select out the obvious nutjobs.

And my point is that guns are unlike fire extinguishers, therefore you should make sure to limit their availability in a way that maximizes their utility to those who need them, while minimizing the harm that comes from mishandling them. Which can be easily accomplished by requiring a psych evaluation and accomplishment of safety courses before letting anyone buy them.

...or a rather sizeable percentage of people posting in these very topics (although I'm obviously not talking about you specifically). I dunno, most people I've talked to are more concerned about ethics than mra stuff. I'll admit there is strong opposition to what is viewed as "postmodernist third-wave feminism", but support for egalitarianism and equal rights is much more prevalent than redpill stuff, which is bat**** crazy. That said, I purposely stay away from the redpill dudes. I find them....unpleasant. I didn't say they were redpillers, I just said that some people around here have an unreasonable hatred of all things feminism-related, to the point where it utterly eclipses their ability to think rationally.

Generally very few people ever die to fire extinguishers.

...or a rather sizeable percentage of people posting in these very topics (although I'm obviously not talking about you specifically).

IMO, Cernovich and the dude behind Sarkeesian Effect possess the dogged desire to discredit feminism that can only come from someone with enough money to blow on whatever stupid **** they want. It's clear that they've involved in this because they smell a chance to take the piss out of feminism To be fair, they're hardly alone with that mentality among GG supporters.

Yeah, he got owned by Chris Kluwe pretty hard. Then again, this is a dude who believes that male seed cures women's depression, so it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that he's proven himself to be the intellectual lesser of an ex-NFL player. Edit: seriously though, why the hell can't I use medical terms without being censored?

Now there's a fine article if I ever saw one.

Something something phallic something? Honestly though, no idea. But "my right to own a gun trumps the huge probability of stuff going literally life-threateningly wrong if every idiot can also have a gun" is a fairly irresponsible position to take, I think.

Mass Effect 2. I'm starting to notice a theme here...

Well, it's either that easy, in which case it takes about 10 minutes for a modder to do it (and let's face it, the crowd who finds the utterly irrelevant ability to kill plot-relevant NPCs somehow important will play the game fully modded), or not, in which case the argument is completely reasonable. If one argues about how the Elder Scrolls series is dumbing down in a 30-minutes long video, and about 10 minutes of that 30 are spent on repeating "everything was better in Morrowind" and "filthy casuals" in various guises, one should not be surprised when he's called out on the fact that no, actually, Morrowind did faction reactivity way worse than Skyrim. It absolutely is about Morrowind comparisons, because it's responding to a video about Morrowind comparisons. So, out of all the things like various pissed-off people sending thugs and assassins after you, people naming you as their sole heir if they like you enough, and Thalmor attacking, one is not triggered by player action. The rest of them still are; the point stands. (Still more reactivity than what Morrowind had!) Believable like "behaving like actual groups of like-minded people instead of weird monolithic entities". Also, being able to become Harbinger and Archmage is still more believable than being able to become the head of two different churches, which is totally doable in Morrowind. Yay, improvement! (Which is, incidentally, exactly the polar opposite of dumbing down!) Three words: voice acting costs. I'd rather have VA in a triple-A game than detailed instructions on how to find quest objectives. As an aside, I also like quest markers. Having an extremely limited amount of time for gaming, I'd rather spend that time doing the actual quest than deciphering possibly-poorly-written instructions on how to get there and trying to follow them. Heh.

Let's not forget South Park: the Stick of Truth. This was a pretty good year.

Both Mage games had rotes, which were basically ready-made spells. Add contextual casting prompts to model improvised magic, and you're golden.

Well, in the WoD Mage games (Mage: the Ascension, Mage: the Awakening), mages are incentivized to use their magic in subtle ways, keeping the effects in the realm of the probable. They can throw lightning bolts and create giant flaming Gordon Freeman figures out of burning oil, but it invites Paradox, a force that perverts their spells against their goal. It's also generally a bad idea to use magic to hurt or kill people.

Encapsulates the gonzo insanity of Second Edition pretty well, but 3E is going to move away from this somewhat. To the direction of Even More Awesome.

I'm not a big fan of the "heh, silly kitten, you thought your choices matter?" attitude in an RPG. I mean, even in the tabletop games based on the IP (Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu), you can at least postpone the untold death and devastation that the awakening elder gods would bring. Usually. At great personal cost. ("Half the party dies, rest goes irrevocably insane, also some get horribly mutiliated" is a good outcome.)

"Dude gets away from the horrible thing to live out the rest of his years irrevocably insane" is a pretty significant difference from "dude dies a horrible death by ancient sea god" in my book, but YMMV.

I think both sides present silly arguments on this one. First, as you point out, the rebuttal is nothing more than an absurd rationalization that does not actually explain the design decision. (the radiant quest system is designed to specifically take into account the potential death of a quest giver, so why in the world is it being cited as a reason why NPCs are immortal??) Second, the guy in the OP's video is exaggerating. You'd be surprised at how FEW NPCs in Skyrim are actually flagged as 'essential' and thus cannot be killed. The vast majority can be slaughtered. Anyone who's installed the Dawnguard expansion has seen, first hand, how fast a village can be emptied out after a few of those random vampire attacks. Yeah, it's a fairly dumb explanation to a fairly dumb complaint. It's pretty much the weakest point of the video, by necessity of the weak complaint it's responding to. Edit: to make my position clearer on the issue, I think a well-made RPG shouldn't even need to discuss whether to make plot-essential characters immortal or not. Did Planescape: Torment have many players boasting about how they totally shot themselves in the foot by killing characters essential to the advancement of the main story? None that I know of. When the greatest amount of fun the players of your game can wring out from your product is "derail the entire storyline by killing off important characters", that is a failure state of design in itself. It's not solved by allowing or not allowing them to kill important NPCs, it's solved by making the player care enough about the story and the characters to not want to kill them.

Going out and actually reading some Lovecraft would be a tremendous help in dispelling such misconceptions.

You know, I'm biased as I'm making a game on Lovecraft, but these are ridiculous standards to hold to. I'm sick of people shredding their creativity in order to stay on the "tradition" route. Not to mention that in the original cthulhu story, Call of Cthulhu, the supposedly-invincible Great Old One was defeated by essentially being ran over with a ship. End can totally be about the player besting the villain (and then spending their life in an insane asylum, haunted by horrible nightmares). Meh, problem is, a great and uncaring universe devoid of a benevolent God was a frankly horrifying prospect in the 1920s, but nowadays it's more like the baseline of how people think about their place in the world. The "Lovecraftian purist" approach has little resonance in our age. It simply isn't scary anymore.