Second and last attempt with the spicier ones
D&D and TTRPGs in general
People who think character optimization is bad in D&D (and other games as well but D&D is the big one) and/or that you can't do it AND have good role-play at the same time shouldn't be allowed to get within 3 kilometers of a game table.
Agree
Hell, a lot of good stories irl have characters that are "optimized" in some way, simply because in a series with superpowers or action, the question of "who's the strongest" is probably gonna come up in some capacity.
(I'm about to be shot for this one I feel)
Having read about the first half of the first and all of the second...Beserk and Attack on Titan are overrated (keep in mind, things tend to be overrated when they're good to begin with). I suspect a lot of it comes from the gore and...other...stuff they use, making people falsely believe the story to be more "mature" and/or "realistic" than others based on that alone.
I do need to read Berserk properly, but from what I've heard the excessive grimness of it is mainly necessary so that the moral of continuing to struggle no matter how bad things get is more poignant. I don't think the author includes ultraviolence and grimdark themes to try to be edgy (except in the first few parts, which presumably just happened before he decided what he actually wanted the series to be), but to really emphasize that theme of
no matter HOW bad things get.
If you're gonna convey a powerful message of continuing in horrific adversity, the adversity in question is gonna need to be pretty horrific.
Skill?
Skill debates can be fun and are important in a fight, though not always and not as important as some people seem to think.
There should also be more "ties".
Finally, clearly phisically impossible "skill feats" (from cutting space to dodging rain or anything that doesn't leave enough space to dodge to sensing stuff from other dimentions and more) should not be treated as anythting but powers, AT MOST letting one "scale" above another in-verse (as flawed of a reasoning as "skill-scaling" can become)
Agree. As I have pondered deeply and had a lot of character development around the concept of skill in general and why I like it so much, I've come to the same conclusions.
As a caveat on the second point, I think what level of skill should be considered "too bullshit" relies heavily on the verse in question.
If Juuzou Shishimi showed up and started cutting concepts and black holes apart in, say, The Incredibles, that would suck, because even the outright superpowers in that verse don't get that intense. But he's fine in his own series, because it's a series full of bullshit hax in general, and he just happens to be 'the skill guy' for it. Super-skills work best as a foil to super-powers.
Stats
Stat equal matches should be added to profiles, you just need to create proper rules and regulations and it can (and will) work just as well as, if not better than, speed equalization
I agree, and I would love this change to happen. But in my years of arguing for it (admittedly with some pretty terrible arguments), I have come to the conclusion it's a lost cause, like many unfortunate aspects of the wiki (
supergenius intelligence).
Bang! (no, not the card game, sadly)
Guns in near-enough all of "superpower/fantasy fiction" are turbo-cringe and they should be removed from any story the moment a character tanks being thrown through buildings and/or dodges anything resembling a lightning bolt (or other feats on that scale and above)
They're also cringe irl but that's a whole different conversation that we won't get into here.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhh
I
really really see where you're coming from.
But I would like to add just a
slight qualifier that I think it's fine if there's a reasonable assumption for them being some kind of "super-guns" that work on that level.
Like in Tenkaichi, where guns are clearly just blatantly stronger than in real life, because that series is a bunch of exaggerated historical stuff.
Historical skillchads and muscle monsters become weebshit skilled and superhuman demigods, therefore guns have also been strengthened to retain the sense of menace they had in that era.