Stuff you don't get.

[bluestarultor]

It can be common tropes from games and movies, stupid things people do, common misconceptions, or anything else you can think of. Just post the stuff you don't get and maybe even get an answer from your venting.



In my case, it's about water spells and several types of weaponry in games. Water, in many cases, does not get representation, and in other cases is classified as a healing element. I get it, water is "the source of all life." But, practically, water is incredibly heavy. If you get hit by a big wave while standing, you go down. Because it has a density of 1, for every liter of the stuff you have thrown at you, you get hit with a kilogram (better than 2 pounds) of weight, or better than 8 pounds per gallon of the stuff. With how much mass an average spell throws around, water spells should be beating people senseless, not making you feel better.



On the weaponry front: staves, bows, and especially guns.

Staves are more understandable. They have a long real-world history as a nonlethal weapon and an association with magic that goes back pretty much as far as the written word. You're not going to slice somebody open with one or use it to impale people (ignoring fantasy staves often bearing ornaments that look like they'd really hurt if they didn't break). On the other hand, you can really kick butt with one, too. If you whack someone upside the head with one, they are going to go down. I can pretty much count the games I've played on one hand that have treated them as a martial weapon.

Bows are less understandable. You're shooting pointy objects into people, here. Edgar's AutoCrossbow is pretty much how this is SUPPOSED to be. Rosa's not bad using bows, either. So I guess early FF gets a pass. On the other hand, a lot of other games treat it as a weak weapon. I get you have range and all, but this is the weapon that led to the fall of an entire society (Sparta). Crossbows are better off in general because they do have a more limited effective range than a longbow, but longbows and short bows all too often go under the "may as well just hit them with it" category. Then again, I have yet to actually see a game that treated a longbow correctly by making you fire it in an arc, so maybe that's why?

Guns don't get a pass, though. Unless you're shooting spitballs, there is no reason a gun should be anywhere as weak as the rest of the weaponry in a game unless you're shooting energy. Bullets do a LOT of damage. There are TONS of good reasons a gun might be a poor weapon besides not being made out of a shinier material:

1. It's a shotgun. Shotguns have crap range and don't do a lot after a certain distance. Impose this limit on your gunner, have range determine damage, and off you go. Point blank can kick ass, further out maybe can ping whatever's in the cone of fire. We have the technology to do this.
2. It's inaccurate. No matter how good a shot you are, old-timey guns are a crapshoot with accuracy. If you're doing pre-industrial, give guns a poor hit rate and be done with it. The damage will balance out. Even in modern settings, hitting a moving target with an object the size of a knuckle isn't easy.
3. It either is magic or isn't.
   1. If it's magic, hand wave the magic bullets it produces aren't all that good and be done with it. Infinite ammo at a price. For bonus visibility and shininess, make them energy shots or trail colored light.
   2. If it's not magic, consider the number of bullets it holds. A fully-automatic weapon generally empties in under ten seconds. A pistol generally holds 20 or fewer rounds. A revolver holds a paltry five or six in most cases, although Wikipedia says there are some with ten or more. When those bullets are out, they're going to need to be refilled, and doing so can take varying amounts of time. Maybe you lose a turn or have an arbitrary time limit before you can act again. Maybe ammo is just hard to come by and you end up pistol-whipping more often than not.

Unfortunately, nobody ever addresses any of those in games where guns stand next to more archaic weaponry.




So, yeah, to bring this back around after all that, what are things you don't get?