Wandering Adventure Party

@Tim_Eagon @chgowiz From the way you put it, I am assuming 100,000 people is a lot in Iowa?

Bringing Cthulhu to D&D sounds like Deities & Demigods all over again.

"If it has stats, we can kill it."

#ttrpg

Vanilla is not flavorless.

Vanilla is extremely flavorful. It's just really expensive. So ice cream producers use as little of it as possible to just be faintly detectable as a hint of vanilla.
If you only put the tiniest amounts of chocolate or strawberry into ice cream, it will taste pretty flavorless as well.

#enshittification

@zozo probably knows this already.

#transformers

Of course I knew the old claims 25 years ago, that Dungeons & Dragons is just a braindead game about killing monsters. But as a 16 year old, I did not really listen to it, as I still saw enough depths and potential in what you can do in the game, even without much in the way of social mechanics and with XP for combat.

But it's only now sinking in how much the worldbuilding of all D&D settings is based around the assumption of the PCs being a badass elite assault unit.

#ttrpg

@kyonshi After listening to Vance, the pope decides he does not want to live on this planet anymore.

@libraryogre @Tim_Eagon Reading the story under the assumption that he's full of his own shit made it very inoffensive reading it again as a grown up with taste and an appreciation for quality.

Mara Jade also really isn't a Jedi demigod in these books either. Just a Dark Jedi.

It's the fanwank of later writers that distorted them to silly proportions.

@Tim_Eagon @libraryogre One thing I noticed when reading it again a couple of years ago is that pretty much all the fluffing for Thrawn's brilliance and magnificence comes from the mouth of Thrawn. Much of it being assurances that any apparent setbacks actually don't matter because his real plans are actually so brilliant that he already factored in the possibilities.

@libraryogre @Tim_Eagon The entire Expanded Universe is only mediocre.

They are works that introduce great new ideas to the setting, but none are very well executed.(Except the KotOR comic series.)

#StarWars

@libraryogre Any time you come across something really bonkers and out of place, that you can't recall ever having heard of before in 90s Star Wars, it's almost certainly from Dark Empire.

There are reasons writers were always building on elements from each other's stories, but nobody ever referenced things from Dark Empire.