# Veilguard and the Obsessive Validation tags: #thoughts I promise, this is *not* going to turn into a video game garden. Despite the fact that "I have thoughts". But, damn, if some ideas didn't occur to me today. ![Veilguard and Obsessive Validation](https://x.com/squidlord/status/1853285530001146190) --- You know, I think this puts its finger directly on a lot of issues going on in modern media but specifically role playing games not just CRPGs but TTRPGs. They have become a degenerate form of communication. They are specifically pruned, shaped, and forged to communicate *one idea* and only allow *one idea* to be communicated. Even if the entire experience would be better if they didn't go out of their way to validate every single thing about that singular idea. Just so we're clear, this is equally applicable to Wizards of the Coast **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D 2024]]** , as it is the entirety of the OSR movement, as it is a large swath of the indie TTRPG space. It's why we get a full-page screed on how they don't want any fascists playing their game in **[[Iron Valley]]**, an **[[Ironsworn]]** variant which is specifically designed to effectively play narrative-first **[Stardew Valley](https://www.stardewvalley.net/)**. (After I virtually threw the book at the wall, I was immediately overtaken by the desire to run a Soviet gulag using **Iron Valley**. I'm pretty sure the authors wouldn't have appreciated that. After the lecture, I didn't fucking care.) ![[Iron Valley (cover).jpg|200]] Everything wants to desperately pander and attempt to validate you, thinking that the only thing you can accept, and will accept, is entertainment that provides no challenge at all to your personal beliefs or your expectations. As long as you believe *exactly* what the author believes. All corners are padded. All edges are dulled. All points are missing. Perhaps not surprisingly, I hate that. --- ## Post Scriptum It occurs to me to mention another example of indie TTRPG book flinging which I didn't bring up in my original thread: **[[Spectres of Brocken]]**. A game which you would *think* was precisely in my scope of concern with giant robots and a strongly narrative-driven GM-less set of mechanics, plus a beautiful cover. The layout's gorgeous and clean. By all rights I should love it. ![[Spectres of Brocken (cover).jpg|200]] The problems start early, with *three pages* of the *introduction* given over to talking about safety concerns, safety tools, and engaging in the worst kind of soft language. Let's not have any challenges here. Let's not have any ideas which are unapproved. We aren't trying to get people on the same page so that they can tell a compelling story they care about. That's not our concern. Let's give you 100 different tools for *not* playing the game. And then we get into the rest of the text, which seems to have two obsessions. Firstly, the safety rules at every freaking turn. And secondly, gender pronouns. All of the accoutrements of the woke aesthetic. Does any of it *need* to be there? No, absolutely not. It just keeps getting in the way of me, personally, who reads a vast number of TTRPGs and thus probably is way oversensitized to this stuff coming up in the first place because I am sick and tired of it. But here it is over and over again. Other than that, it's a great game — If it was rewritten to throw out all of the soft sensibilities and rephrase things as hard sensibilities, I'd be all up on it and recommending it on a regular basis. But I can't, even if I want to. This is a game which has all of the mechanical support for players to have very oppositional ideas and literally mechanizes putting them at odds with one another through their characters with a mechanic which specifically is called **Blood**. The language of the text is at odds with the mechanics and intent of the game and that ruins a lot for me. It sands off the edges and blunts the corners. Grabbing an example from later in the book on page 96, at the top of the chapter named *Notes and Advice for Players*. The very first thing listed starts with, *"No idea or cool story beat is worth undermining another player or making them uncomfortable."* Of course it is. Player discomfort drives some of the most powerful gaming ever experienced at the table. You want to bring the horrors of war to people's minds and make them wonder about the decisions they've been making? You need to make them uncomfortable. You want to bring concern about the choices that other people have been making and maybe drive some sort of quest or question which causes the character to retrench? You have to make the player uncomfortable. It's *literally* a game about a group of characters who start in effectively school or an academy or training together who end up on opposite sides of a massive physical fatal conflict. Making another player uncomfortable or undermining what they've been saying is a critical facility. I figured a longer, more detailed explanation of the sort of thing I mean in the context of TTRPGs would be useful to add as context for this discussion. I don't expect anyone to agree with me. But, that's sort of the nature of the beast, isn't it?