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?

[Kim]

Awkward humor. You know, where something happens and everyone on screen is incredibly uncomfortable and you're uncomfortable watching it but you know the person who made the movie/show thinks it's the most hilarious thing ever? God I fucking hate that and I don't know why it's so popular.

[BitVyper]

I don't think it's so much that guns are weak in videogames so much as they have kind of a set power. Even if that power is quite a lot, compare it with a guy who can who can explode flying mecha by throwing playing cards at them. When you're dealing with people who can, through personal training, become strong enough to punch down mountains and move fast enough to appear in ten different places at once, guns aren't going to measure up very well.

[Amake]

The symbolic values of water include healing, purifying, giving life and adapting its shape to flow around things. Also slowly eroding stone over geological ages. It can only deliver brute force in enormous amounts, like in tsunamis and floods. Physical practicalities have nothing to do with water elemental properties.

As to the weapons, most of those issues arise from the need to keep a game balanced and the rest from the fact that swordfights are cooler than gunfights.

People get uncomfortable because they still have juice left in their shame glands. Getting rid of it is probably good for you, so be sure to expose yourself to as much awkwardness as possible. It's how actors get the courage to get in front of the camera to begin with. That and some of them are born with underdeveloped shame glands.

Things I don't get? Can't think of anything I'm afraid. Much like the elevated being in Scott Adams' God's Debris, my consciousness encompasses that of lesser, mortal beings and I'm able to understand their failings and limitations and sympathize with them. Having had my first bottle of pepsi this week and being awake at 1:30 AM may have something to do with this astonishing insightfulness.

Oh wait, I just thought of one thing. Mogadishu, the most dangerous, corrupt and lawless city in the world. I don't know how to fix that. Maybe just get people away from there and let it fall apart.

[Lithp]

Whenever a character will dodge or block bullets. It's very rare to make this work. It usually makes the character come across as overpowered & boring. In situations without supernatural justification, it's completely ridiculous. When that justification is supplied, it's still completely ridiculous, because then we're expected to believe that far more mundane forces can beat this person.

Additionally, that nonsense about "cutting air so it attacks." That's dumb. Just attack the person directly.

So any form of Improbable Fencing Powers, I suppose.

I also don't get how so many of the Command Materia in FFVII can only be justified, ironically, with A Wizard Did It.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

I would make a detailed and thorough response to this, but I'm a bit drunk and I need to sleep, so I'll do it in the morning when I can be more clear and intelligible. Needles to say, Fire = pure destruction, at least in videogaming terms. By comparison, water = pansy element to the pure, uncontrollable power of fire, while wind generally = speed enhancements and earth = armour enhancement. So water is relegted to healing.


On the weapons, that's mostly due to balance issues. Yes, bows and guns are more powerful, but they each also get more range bonus' as they increase in power, so they need to lower one stat while increasing the other in order to give a reason not to abandon bows and other weapons entirely, in favour of guns which have both greater power, and range, AND accuracy AND fire rate, and everything else.

Also, the "shotguns have poor range" idea is purely fiction created by videogames to promote balance within the game. Real world shotgun shells will easily travel hundreds of metres before becoming innefective, similar to any other ballistic round, and in some cases will do more damage than certain solid slugs over the same long range distance due to they fact that the pellets are more numerous and impact a larger area, digging into the skin and becoming harder to remove, assuming they don't rip your flesh apart straight away.

I'll give you the "old timey" weapons being shit though. Most musket style guns had an effective range of about 10 feet, due the numerous sizes of ball bearing used in such weapons, which would shoot about all over the place while traveling down the inside of a barrel and once reaching the end could shoot off in any manner of angle, but any manner of weapon that used rifling technology would (and should) be pretty damn precise.

EDIT, Ok, so apparantly being drunk doesn't hampen my ability to create coherent internet posts. I think...

[Aldurin]

2001: Space Odyssey, my mind shuts down every time I try to think about that movie. I watched it with my dad and afterwards he promised to never show me a film by the same guy who made this one.

[Kim]

Originally Posted by EvilEarl

2001: Space Odyssey, my mind shuts down every time I try to think about that movie.

That's just because you haven't read the book.

[BitVyper]

It's very rare to make this work

Wait, rare? Do.... do you know someone who can deflect bullets? I mean, there's always random chance, and you can run around to make yourself harder to aim at, but there's no "making it work."

I don't really see how characters in fiction doing it makes them overpowered though. It's just superspeed. Not even like, high level DBZ/Flash level superspeed. It's just like, the next step up from "so fast ordinary people can't see me move."

Additionally, that nonsense about "cutting air so it attacks." That's dumb.

Not if you're moving your sword fast enough to deflect bullets. That's pretty much mach at minimum. You could probably generate a pretty significant amount of air-pressure that way, which would be a nice way to extend your range a bit (or a lot, if you're one of those anime characters who can hit things fifty feet away with your air pressure attacks), though the air pressure obviously wouldn't be nearly as effective as your blade itself. Probably more of a shove than anything, but one inch of range can make all the difference.

It's really more hyperbolous than impossible.

Edit: Kenshin handled that in a slightly more reasonable way, where Kenshin's super-fast ougi created a significant enough pressure difference to knock Shishio off balance.

[Aldurin]

Originally Posted by NonCon

That's just because you haven't read the book.

I don't want to read the book now that I've seen how the movie is.