Samantha Patri's Blog

Renegade Studios  is releasing the Cobra supplement to their GI Joe setting, and the Cobra pitch is ... pretty spot on. It points out society is corrupt, the lazy and greedy hoard all the wealth, while the working class effectively slaves under them. And Cobra wants to change things! The thing I enjoy doing when I run games is have the villains be perfectly honest about things - it makes them sound reasonable, and makes the hero's job harder. But this means GI Joe isn't 'fighting for what's right', they're fighting to keep the status quo - they aren't effecting positive change. At the end of the day, the world is as it was, with little changed. And this is a problem with most super heroes - they're pushing to keep the status quo against anyone who would change it. There's this fascinating little story I saw on Tumblr, showing what happens when you have a superhero who tries to enact positive change. That story doesn't miss the mark, either. Imagi...

Alright. If you've been paying attention, you know who Mr. Beast is. If you're in the loop, you know that recently, he helped  restore the eyesight  of one thousand people, then dropped a whack of cash more to cover the lost income of some of these people, then a whack load more to cover even more surgeries to help restore more people's eyesight. He's known for doing huge, charitable events, and making YouTube videos of it. He has an entire channel dedicated to philanthropy . He's also known for doing games and contests to give out money, too. And there's people who aren't happy with any of this. They complain he's using the disabled and poor as a commodity. They're saying that if he's going to help people, he should shut up and not make videos of his work. And we're saying these people are missing the point, or don't understand the reality of the situation.  If he didn't do video, he'd not get money.  No money, no means to help...

Food for Thought We've seen a number of people - especially game designers it seems - think Good is uninteresting or weak . That evil is a lot more interesting for game play. Whether this be character classes, abilities and options, or simply entire races. Monster manuals? Filled with evil stuff. Opponents and foils? Evil. Who get all the cool powers? Evil. Who performs world-shaking magic? Evil. In most adventures, Evil is rarely the underdog. The PCs are left scrabbling to deal with whatever plot Evil has come up with. We find this boring . Very, very boring. Time and time again it's 'the weak heroes have to band together to stop the all-powerful bad guy'. Here's the thing. It's unrealistic. It's a tired trope. It's overused. We want to see Good creatures given the same treatment Evil creatures are. We want to see powers and abilities given to Good creatures that are on par with the Evil creatures that are depicted. And we want to see th...