I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s worse than damning with faint praise. “The best part was when it was over.”

Spoilers: they can’t, but they can render the show bland and productized and consistent. I’d rather have the misses than the dull, endless march of more MCU style storytelling.

RTD was always “the overarching plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but we’ve got an emotional core to hang the beats on”, Moffat was “I’ve created a complicated puzzle box that doesn’t make any sense”, and Chibnall was “Nothing makes any sense, but DINOSAURS! (or other suitable gee whiz hijinks)“. That arguably makes…

Moffat shares the credit on IMDB, though weirdly as “show-runner”, which can’t be accurate.

But that’s an insanely low bar to clear. Moffat had some stellar individual episodes, but never wove together any sort of coherent arc that wasn’t some puzzlebox nonsense. Chibnall just.. look, it was an absolute mess. Chasing the fun with no sense of how that fun needs to be structured to make sense.

Remember when David Tennant got turned into Dobby but then got better because Martha Jones traveled the world to convince people to believe in Fairies- er, the Doctor, and when they all clap at the same time he turns back into a normal Doctor and the day is saved?

Oh, for sure. Tennant’s appearance was the wankiest thing I’ve seen.

I’m trying to imagine seeing someone like Ace through the eyes of a viewer who’s never seen anything before Tennant’s run. “Wait, she just baseball bats a Dalek? And doesn’t get vaporized?” Or even “who or what the hell is Adric?”

I’ve said it many times, but for as much shit as the Chibnall era gets on writing, the scripts aren’t actually that bad. Oh, I mean, the nods to the Cartmel Master Plan, the Forgotten Child nonsense, like that was all bad, but the bread-and-butter scripts were mostly just average.

> Do you push the envelope and try something new?

Which the book had the good grace to point out was a stupid business model, but the creator didn’t care- it was a proof of concept for something that they could monetize someday, somehow, making it the most realistic thing that happened in the book.

Minus the NFTs, this was a key plot element in the rather ridiculous (but, to me, enjoyable) REAMDe, by Neal Stephenson. A genius technerd launched an MMO where the world had realistic geology and if you wanted iron for a sword, you had to go mine it. Same for gold for your currency. So players in poor countries could…

Gina Carano did a speedrun from “mildly popular bit actor” to “conservative troll”. Same arc as Kevin Sorbo but in a fraction of the time. Like, I respected her stuntwork in the otherwise boring-as-hell Haywire, and she was getting some pretty major gigs up through the Mandalorian, and she couldn’t wait for her career…

As somebody who does more improv than is healthy, I loathe the Interdimensional Cable episodes. It’s all of the worst aspects of improv, that go-for-the-joke, lol-so-random nonsense.

I mean, I agree with your stance on mechanics, but Advantage/Disadvantage is a blunt instrument with none of the flavor that, say, Aspects in Fate can give you, and hit points have always been a design mistake. I’ll die on that hill: I hate hit points.

I mean, 5e is bad design- it’s a bland, boring game (and I don’t like earlier versions of D&D much better, but for wildly different reasons, so this isn’t me being an edition snob), and I do think it’s design is looking towards computers automating the boring rules so that players end up doing more improv absent…

You seem to be mistaking a general statement (computerizing RPG design) with a specific thing (this particular shitty VTT). There are a lot of people looking to bring computerized tools into the gaming table in ways that aren’t just VTTs, though of course VTTs remain the centerpiece of the efforts.

My underlying problem with computerizing the math of a game is that it paves over badly designed mechanics. The underlying mechanics should be simple and easy to explain and not really require much mental space for the player. If you “fix” bad mechanics by having a computer offload some of that mental effort, all…

I want to take a moment to appreciate how absolutely bonkers the ending of the third season was. Every single plot beat paid off in ways that were ridiculous in an enjoyable way. From what the President does, to the Mars launch, to the Johnson Space Center and Molly. What a capper to a show.

Actually, the perfect D&D movie was “Your Highness”, and before you say, “but that movie sucked”, yes, it did, but it also accurately captured what RPGs played like when I was growing up.