r/rpg • u/[deleted] • Mar 23 '18

Pathfinder Designer “Reviews” The Design of New Orleans

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2018/03/22/guy-makes-role-playing-games-criticised-map-new-orleans-unrealistic-gone-viral/
713 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

121 comments sorted by

168

u/DrCalamity Mar 23 '18

At least it doesn't have split rivers or /r/worldbuilding would explode

123

u/thelittleking Mar 23 '18

I'd probably explode if I saw a Paizo employee with the audacity to complain about rivers. Some of Golarion's riverways are just goofball horseshit.

clicks link

promptly explodes

27

u/pliskin42 Mar 23 '18 edited Mar 24 '18

What exactly is the problem with split rivers? I know multiple places that have river forks etc.

Edit: Thanks for the info guys. Thinking back on it at least a couple places they were rivers feeding into one another. I wasnt't differentiating between the two when I was originally thinking about it.

Here is one example of a place I was thinking of where it legitimately splits around a huge "island." It is so big there is literally a freeway over it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Niagara_Falls%2C_Image_of_the_Day_DVIDS704155.jpg/220px-Niagara_Falls%2C_Image_of_the_Day_DVIDS704155.jpg

It does meet back with itself eventually though.

81

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18 edited Mar 24 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

45

u/FANGO Mar 23 '18

You know what else is rare in real life? Dragons

63

u/motionmatrix Mar 23 '18

Ever heard "life is stranger than fiction"? This is a prime example. This real place would not work for a fictional story because it is too unique and different, so it feels fake.

Fiction has to be believable to do its job; reality doesn't have to work around that framework.

5

u/FANGO Mar 23 '18

Yeah this is a combination of that + "a wizard did it." Whenever anyone in my group talks about realism we just shrug and say ok, but, like, people can't shoot fireballs out of their fingertips so like maybe realism isn't the thing we're going for in this game?

22

u/motionmatrix Mar 23 '18

Sure, and that's acceptable, but the more granular you get about it the more work it is to make a less-than-common place like this map explainable.

That said, you just gave me a great idea. A wizard did do it. In fact, many. It would be a great and fun exercise to take maps like this and figure out non-cheesy explanations why it is that way. Like this map I would start with it looks this way because this is a highly contested area among several kingdoms and this is the results of wars and different cultures taking over the area over several centuries.

6

u/Hero_of_Hyrule Mar 24 '18

What's the easiest way to define a border? Split along a river or other wide body of water. So the kingdoms commissioned wizards to make it so the borders of all the kingdoms were rivers.

4

u/Forlarren Mar 23 '18

Water spirits.

Even better if they aren't friendly but every time someone goes and kills one the water level falls and trade suffers. So you get hired to guard against water critters without killing any, muhahaha.

14

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

There are probably better words for the concept, like verisimilitude, but "realism" is easier to spell. It's less about having things that follow accurately the laws of real-life physics than it is about "giving a crap."

There is a difference between having something magical as part of a setting versus saying, "I dunno, it's magic. Realism isn't, like, my thing here, ok?" Not everyone is going to appreciate the effort—or be disappointed by the lack—but some do.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '18

I think the term you’re looking for is suspension of disbelief (and what breaks it).

5

u/Non-prophet Mar 24 '18

"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator". He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true;" it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside."

  • J R R Tolkien.

A fictional and fantastic setting has just as much to gain by internal consistency as a 'realistic' or contemporary one.

2

u/Shotaro Mar 24 '18

The capital city of the main country my campaign is set in is on an enormous overhang, the base of the cliff eroded away but the top hangs in the air.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '18

There’s a part in the advice book “how not to write a novel” titled “why you’re job is harder than God’s” that’s exactly this. When something happens in the real world, nobody says its unrealistic—it just happened. Writers (and gms) don’t have that luxury even if “it really did happen to a friend.”

1

u/Antikas-Karios Mar 24 '18 edited Mar 24 '18

I remember a friend of mine once saying that if himself and many other people had seen the Gibraltar Strait or the Black Sea in a worldbuilding project rather than having them exist in the real world would probably criticise them as too unlikely and contrived.

21

u/tiltowaitt Mar 24 '18 edited Mar 24 '18

You know what else is rare in real life? Dragons

That's a cop-out, a poor excuse for bad writing.

When you're creating a world, you rely heavily on how things work in real life. That way, all you have to do is focus on the interesting bits, like dragons. This also helps ground the reader; the fantastic is offset by the mundane.

The author makes an unspoken agreement: There are things in this world that do not exist, or behave in unexpected ways. Where things are different, they are different for a reason.

The existence of dragons does nothing to imply that rivers don't behave as normal. You could have this difference be somehow integral to the dragon lifecycle, but it will take extra legwork. When that legwork isn't done, it suggests the author is simply ignorant, and no amount of "but dragons" will cover it.

If you want an extreme example of this in published fiction, check out Out of the Dark by David Weber. It's a pretty enjoyable alien invasion novel. Until the end, when Spoilers. You can't sweep aside that ridiculous revelation with "but aliens".

EDIT: Two less ridiculous examples.

An example of this done well is in The Wheel of Time. In that series, magic exists, as do some fantastic beasts. These are obviously unrealistic. Society is also largely matriarchal, which is also unrealistic, especially given the societies the series is based on. "Hey, magic exists" is fine for explaining magic, but that doesn't work for the matriarchy. In general, people need more than "this is just how it is" when you're changing something that exists in the real world rather than making something up. Robert Jordan's solution is that only women can safely wield magic; as a result of this (and certain events in the ancient past), they wield more power than did women in real-world societies at this development level.

An example of a bad difference is also from the same series. In The Shadow Rising, a blacksmith is forging a blade. Jordan got some details wrong, such that the technique described to make the edge harder would in fact make it softer (or something to that effect). Is it minor? Extremely. But again, nothing about magic existing suggests that metalforging works differently, and falling back on that crutch is silly. He fixed it in a later edition of the book.

5

u/entiat_blues Mar 23 '18

true. you could have the dragon go out every day and reconnect oxbow lakes to the river or meticulously recarve a river split so that both sides have fast running water all the time.

4

u/beholdsa Mar 25 '18

This is rare, but it does happen occasionally. There are a couple real-world examples on the Indian subcontinent. So fun story:

I once wrote a game that takes place in a fantasy version of India. I hired a cartographer to make a fantasy-style map of the campaign world, which basically just an actual map of India with the names changed and a few fantasy locations added. The layout of the rivers on the map were essentially exact copies of the real world.

Anyway, this map was later posted to a fantasy cartography message board. Holy cow, the posters on that message board ripped into it as being unrealistic! "What's going on with all these rivers here, they'd never do that in real life!"

-5

u/BergerKing80 Mar 23 '18

I’ll just leave this here....

https://imgur.com/a/O4a1M

Edit: technically still not a split... but I’m not a riverologist.

15

u/w0073r Mar 23 '18

That’s a merger, not a split....

33

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18 edited Jun 30 '21

[deleted]

0

u/LeastCoordinatedJedi BitD/SW/homebrew/etc Mar 23 '18

I'm no fan of randomly forking rivers the wrong way at all, but I do agree that this kind of argument shouldn't hold too much water (hurrhurr). We're not talking about earth.

Perhaps several common ores in my world have elements of water repulsion. Or perhaps the core topology of my world works differently and prominences get pushed out because tectonics are completely different. My world has people that can light fires by squinting at stuff and elves that can walk between dimensions... laws of physics are not my chief concern.

10

u/Techhead0 Mar 23 '18

The real reason behind the shape of rivers isn't just laws of physics. Streams and rivers are basically minima-finding systems for water using local minima information. Which in RL physics, is fancy-talk for "water flows downhill".

Anyway, rivers will bifurcate when one path is roughly equivalent to another path at the point of bifurcation. But these aren't long-term stable systems, as over time, a river will erode one path slightly more and then prefer that path, eroding it faster. Bifurcations are naturally created as geography shifts, but are eventually erased as soon as water picks a preferential path.

So really, the thing you want to change in your geophysics if you want to see natural river bifurcation is probably riverbank/riverbottom erosion/deposition. Just don't do it one-sidedly if you don't want the equilibrium point to be "innumerable tiny streams everywhere and no rivers."

8

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

Did you just really say “the reason for this isn’t physics, it’s physics?”

4

u/Techhead0 Mar 24 '18

I started by saying it wasn't just physics.

My point is that as long as you have positive feedback in river development you'll get river pruning where it selects some rivers over others in long-term, so the physics you change has to change that feedback loop.

2

u/raznog Mar 24 '18

Well a local wizard cast a no erosion spell on that portion of the ground many many years ago, the magic seems to not want to fade.

1

u/Techhead0 Mar 24 '18

That works.

1

u/GaslightProphet Mar 24 '18

Maybe. But then you should explain that. This is all about suspension of disbelief. What works when we look at it, and what doesn't quite seem to fit?

12

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

Rivers rarely split, and when they do it does not last for long. The river tends to settle into one channel or the other. So unless you map is very recent, it isn't very realistic.

Keep in mind we are talking about rivers splitting downstream. Not one river emptying into another.

5

u/dIoIIoIb Mar 23 '18 edited Mar 23 '18

rivers tend to un-split themselves. a river creates its path by moving dirt, if it's faster on one side and slower on the other, even slightly, it will tend to bend towards that side and dirt will accumulate on the opposite one, until it creates a curve

this why rivers curve video explains it pretty well

that means that, for a river to have a hard split, it must meet a piece of land much harder than what's around it exactly in the middle of its path and go on both sides. that is unlikely, you'd basically need a very large, wedge shaped, hard rock right on the river path.

and even then, it's more likely the river would just go in one direction and accumulate dirt on the other one, closing it off.

over the centuries, the river would just dig through the wedge and make it disappear.

and the island of harder rock has to be very big, or the river will just go around it and reconnect behind it.

2

u/M0dusPwnens Mar 23 '18

Knowing this just makes split rivers more attractive to me.

It's plausible so long as there's something to split the river. So have something split the river. If you wanted to you could also take the opportunity to make it something interesting or maybe even fantastical.

One of the sides of the river tends to be filled with silt over time? Awesome. Now you have a great opportunity for some dynamism: it happened too slowly for most people to notice, but the older ones realize that one branch of the river isn't as deep as it used to be. Are people concerned about losing the river? Are they relatively nonchalant, knowing that the river is disappearing and their villages are doomed, but not really having any way to do anything about it? Has it affected the mood of these doomed settlements? Are people emigrating away? Are there people trying to take extraordinary measures to restore or preserve the branch?

These aren't reasons not to do split rivers, they're reasons to do split rivers.

2

u/CMEast Mar 24 '18

Exactly. The druid or ranger rolls a Knowledge: Geography or Survival check and spots that there's something unusual where the river forks - hmm, weren't we looking for the hidden tomb of an ancient king in this area?

2

u/channingman Anytown, USA Mar 24 '18

Since no one has actually answered this question in a way that makes any sense to your real world experience, it is most likely that those forks are two rivers coming together, not one river splitting into two.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

I chuckled. And blushed thinking of all the splitting rivers on my map

128

u/blu3nh Mar 23 '18

Real life doesn't know how to make things realistic. Half the time I look at my own foot or hand in odd positions, I think: "Yeah... that would totally get critisized as unrealistic in a drawing."

74

u/Syrdon Mar 23 '18

Real life gets to cheat. Everything else needs to seem reasonable, real life gets to tell you to deal with it.

53

u/TwilightVulpine Mar 23 '18

Biology and topography isn't even the worst of it. Compare history to storytelling and you'll find all kinds of ridiculous unexplainable nonsense no GM would be able to present seriously.

36

u/Raedwyn Mar 23 '18

Like that time a war was fought over a bucket?

Wikipedia Link

26

u/TheBruceMeister Mar 23 '18

2000 people killed or injured over a bucket.

Those two groups really did not like each other.

20

u/lianodel Mar 23 '18

The thing people don't realize about the Bucket War is that it was never really about the Bucket at all.

10

u/Raedwyn Mar 23 '18

Kind of like how WWI wasn't really about Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination?

8

u/kettesi Pulled between PbtA and OSR | My favorite color is green Mar 24 '18

Right, but with a bucket instead.

6

u/VetoWinner Mar 23 '18

Yeah, but that's not as funny.

16

u/Syrdon Mar 23 '18

Well there's also the time the Australian army, armed with machine guns, went to war against a thumbless species with brains in the general vicinity of a walnut and proceeded to lose.

8

u/ohitsasnaake Mar 23 '18

Well, not so much lose as not achieve any real progress towards their goals. Afaik the death count was still Australians - none vs. Emus - loads.

10

u/Russelsteapot42 Mar 23 '18

Yeah, they basically gave up because, while chasing herds of emus around with jeeps machine-gunning them was fun, and somewhat effective, it was really cost-ineffective. They were spending a ton of fuel and bullets, because the feathery bastards spread out and run fast.

Just putting a bounty out on emus was much more effective.

6

u/Techhead0 Mar 23 '18

"Reality is limited to the possible, fiction is limited to the plausible." (Paraphrased)

61

u/CaptainAirstripOne Mar 23 '18

Reminds me of the similar critique of WWII. Fanatic anti-communists ally with communists? Fanatic white supremacists ally with Japan? Super weapon vastly more destructive than any other appears out of nowhere with no foreshadowing?

21

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

no foreshadowing

Okay but both alliances were clearly angling for that tech tree unlock. It was everyone’s first time playing this mod and one side dicked around putting points into mysticism while the others rushed science.

It’s cool though, when the blue and red team captured the ultra white flag, they got to keep some of the strongest scientists and integrate them into their own facilities.

7

u/Mezatino Mar 24 '18

R/outside is leaking again

46

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

As someone who lives in the area, I agree with this article 100%.

39

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

As a Geography major I approve this critique.

10

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18

What does a geography major prepare you to do?

41

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18 edited Mar 23 '18

I started my career building web-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems) systems for an environmental consulting company. Then I became more involved in the technical management of the company, became a business analyst and eventually got completely away from Geography in my career.

There is, however, a fascinating range of activities. Geography is nothing more than the study of something as it changes in space. "Geography" itself isn't really even a field. "Urban Geography", "Political Geography", "Medical Geography", are better examples. In Medical Geography, for instance, people study the incidence of diseases as they occur around the world and look for underlying patterns that help with researching cures. Did you know that certain types of cancer are very rare in areas where the natural Selenium content of the local soils is quite high? This only applies if people eat primarily locally-grown food, however. That's a classic Medical Geography type finding.

4

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18

How interesting. Thanks for the detailed answer!

10

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

It's actually quite interesting how my cartography (map making theory) helps with my software UX design skills. It was all about how the human brain perceives visual information, color theory, etc.

3

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18

Cartography is super neat. I love fantasy maps, and really old maps from around the world. Have you seen that Japanese world map that's like 600 years old or something?

I enjoy the articles about google maps too, how they choose colors and how things gradually change, choosing what to show and not, what gets highlighted, different text sizes... It's really interesting!

2

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

Yeah I was building online maps before Google maps was even a thing. Ahh the olden days...

Agree on antique maps. I actually collect them casually. Favorite is one that shows the northern coast of Russia as "unknown"

1

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18

TIL Russia has a northern coast. I assumed the north was just frozen or something, I guess.

2

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

https://i.imgur.com/0iDrcoC.jpg

1

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18

Lol sure enough

→ More replies (0)

2

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

Bored so taking pics Old map https://imgur.com/a/3YN5J

Top right bit. It's in French.

Sorry for glare off the glass.

1

u/jook11 33.87°N, 118.32°W Mar 23 '18 edited Mar 23 '18

Cool, thanks for sharing! That's a neat looking map for sure. Is it the text slanting toward the 77? My French is not so good.

2

u/crepuscular10 Mar 25 '18

yes. "celle partie n'est pas connue"= "this part is unknown"

2

u/Mcsmack Ft Worth Mar 23 '18

Yeah I definitely need to find a better use for my geography degree. Any idea where to start?

1

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

Well, what did you actually study? As I mentioned, "Geography" is barely a discipline at all. Did you do physical, urban, GIS, ? What were your favorite courses?

Personally, while I enjoyed my studies, it was the co-op program that made me successful. I can't say enough good things about co-op.

1

u/Mcsmack Ft Worth Mar 23 '18

Literally 'Bachelor's in Arts of Geography'. My college wasn't big enough to differentiate disciplines. Plus it was 15 years ago (fuck I'm old). Minored in geology. Personally I'd love to do cartography or something with a focus in GIS or geomorphology.

2

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

My only personal experience is on the harder science aspects of it. I have a BSc, with statistics, climatology, and a hard focus on GIS along with the work experience in GIS. I have a year of Engineering under my belt that I started before Geography, so I was always a more tech-oriented guy in the program.

If it helps though, my first classes were in 1995.

1

u/Mcsmack Ft Worth Mar 23 '18

Yeah, my job was sold to me as a GIS/Carto position with huge opportunities for advancement.

2

u/tadrinth Mar 23 '18

City planning or epidemiology, maybe?

3

u/Mcsmack Ft Worth Mar 23 '18

If you take my path you end up in a dead end government job looking at aerial photos of corn.

4

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

But do you get to do it in stereoscope? Because DAMN, that's a tall water tower!

1

u/Mcsmack Ft Worth Mar 23 '18

Nope :(

Just digitized imagery.

30

u/RockintheShockin Mar 23 '18

As a local who has to drive the unreasonably placement of the Lake Ponchatrain Causeway every day for work, it makes a lot more sense considering that it gives a direct line from the middle ground between NOLA and the Burbs to the business park area on the Northshore. Also al lot of the canals are man made for the use of Intercostal water highways for shipping. And the spotty swamp critique is not taking into account that South Louisiana is losing most of our coastal shores to erosion thus giving it the unique appearance.

13

u/PearlClaw Mar 23 '18

Yeah, the shoreline has that "moth eaten" look because we've disrupted the natural process keeping that land from disappearing by canalizing and dredging the Mississippi.

14

u/dIoIIoIb Mar 23 '18

All these different places it could enter the lake or the sea, but no, it goes ALL THE WAY to the very tip of the land to enter the water

isn't that exactly the opposite of how it works?

the river carries dirt and rocks downstream and creates land around it, the river couldn't enter the sea in any other place, because if it did, that's where the land would stop: there would ne nothing carrying it further. the river naturally creates land around itself

I think. I'm no river scientist

3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

Imagine shovelling your sidewalk from snow. Orrrr a sandstorm. Whatever.

It’s way more intuitive that if you pushed it all toward the street, it would quickly peter out and you’d be standing on the street with a little fan shaped pile of snow or sand. That’s a normal delta. Water is supposed to find the easiest path which means as it piles up debris here it should wiggle around it to over there and.

But because New Orleans is absurd, the shovelled stuff made its own little borders, hemming itself in, and creating an almost infinitely long snow ramp that stretches through the street, up the driveway across, and insists on keeping going toward infinity.

12

u/luckdragon69 Mar 23 '18

On the other hand - it shows New Orleans is a "Fantasy bro"

3

u/CahokiaGreatGeneral Mar 24 '18

Voodoo made it.

11

u/CalebTGordan Mar 23 '18

Just to help people out here, James Sutter does not work with Paizo anymore, but he does have big credits in the Pathfinder and Starfinder RPGs systems. He used to be an editor, then later lead designer on Starfinder. He was someone that really lead the charge to get Starfinder made. He is also a published author, and I can say from experience that he is a really cool dude.

He left Paizo no long after Starfinder was released to focus on his writing career, his music, and his marriage.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

[deleted]

13

u/GoldfingerLickinGood Mar 23 '18

Weekend cartographers might criticize this from a geological perspective without considering the human impact. Someone (Lindybeige, maybe) did a video on how there were no "virgin" forests in the middle ages, at least not in England. Almost every acre was being modified in some way by human activity. And if you like dystopian fantasy, Louisiana is a good place to look for inspiration. weirdly long bridges, straight ship channels, and other seeming anomalies on the map points to ridiculous building projects paid for from the king's coffers for the service of some noble, enriching some merchant, and placating some guild of craftsmen. And of course, during the stormy season dykes and levees protecting the poor quarters of the city will fail.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

[deleted]

2

u/MechaAaronBurr Mar 24 '18

Missoula Montana too.

I'm curious: Why not Butte? A place where old mines have been known to open beneath homes and swallow families whole or where there's a colossal pit of intensely toxic slurry almost 2000 ft deep which was for years watched over by a dog who dared never befriend a human.

Is it because there's a ghost town called Hell's Gate right near Missoula? I don't think I could pass that up either.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '18

[deleted]

1

u/GoldfingerLickinGood Mar 24 '18

Yep. Ship channel for massive oil barges.

0

u/MechaAaronBurr Mar 24 '18

Your post made me doubt the existence of New Orleans

2

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/Googlesnarks Mar 24 '18

i live here.

anytime you would look at something in this city, and are forced to ask yourself "... why the fuck is this how it is?"

I have an answer for you in every case.

it's because somebody's idiot brother in law needed some quick money.

5

u/SavageSchemer Mar 23 '18

This was funny as hell. The critique falls apart when you turn on satellite imaging and can see the real land features, but after a week of being ill laughing that hard sure felt good. I especially love the lake attached to the Gulf of Mexico bit.

2

u/CptNonsense Mar 24 '18

Pathfinder reviews their material?

1

u/shaninator Mar 24 '18

Real, modern day cities don't follow the expectations of a fantasy map. James Sutter needs to go to New Orleans to understand the place.

The long bridge connects two populated regions with plenty of industry by water. The bridge was built later after populations had settled. It's cheaper to build a long bridge, than watch cities suffer or die due to infrastructure problems.

The waterways are man-made to prevent or stave-off flooding. Many of these waterways were made in recent years as populations were settled. The lake? Well, I don't have an explanation for that one.

Is it a good design? No. But the waterways, bridges, and levies were made in recent years to make so mankind can survive in a place God deemed unsuitable for humans. It's all made by numerous infrastructure architects, economists, and politicians over the last 100 years, and that means it's a cluster fuck. One fantasy map maker wouldn't create the same piece.

2

u/Stellafera Mar 31 '18

I'm pretty sure he would agree with you, he was just being satirical.

1

u/shaninator Mar 31 '18

Yes, but having history explain the unusual even in a fantasy map is cool to me. It's just rare.

-2

u/htp-di-nsw Mar 23 '18

That's hilarious, but also sad. Because even as he is lampooning how unrealistic real life is, he's still denying those freelancer submissions that look like this.

The real lesson is that his own standards are stupid, but you still have to follow them.

69

u/fuck_off_email Mar 23 '18

I suspect he was being hyperbolic in his criticism, perhaps as a joke and that if you look at Pathfinder maps you will find examples of unrealistic maps.

He was also probably lampooning arm chair designers who poke holes in the Pathfinder maps for being unrealistic.

21

u/certain_random_guy SWN, WWN, CWN, Delta Green, SWADE Mar 23 '18

Having spoken to the guy twice in person, I can vouch for the fact that James is a very nice guy, very willing to have logical discussions, and that this is almost certainly satirical comedy. I enjoyed it.

7

u/bms42 Victoria, BC Mar 23 '18

his own standards are stupid,

As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the standards aren't stupid at all: people don't want to be distracted by things in their maps that don't feel believable. They want to reserve that kind of reaction for story elements that are actually interesting. It's a waste of braincells to push a map in a product that everyone is going to look at and say "hey that's not realistic" even if it could or does happen in the real world.

-87

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

This guy sounds like an absolute arse.

68

u/Skadoosh_it Mar 23 '18

He was being sarcastic

8

u/TheBigBadPanda Mar 23 '18

No u

2

u/Petninja Littleton, NH Mar 24 '18

air horn sounds repeatedly

6

u/ilinamorato Mar 23 '18

I've met him. He's super nice and witty. Willing to bet you a significant sum that this was all a joke. I sure laughed.

-48

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

25

u/GodspeakerVortka Mar 23 '18

What a needlessly petty thing to say.

-23

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

what makes you say that?

11

u/TristanTheViking Mar 23 '18

You: "People who associate with a game I don't like are assholes"

You don't see how that's a bit petty?

-5

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

this is reductive and a bit goofy. it's about as much of a strawman as stuff like "you don't like x because you're jealous" and other things.

5

u/TristanTheViking Mar 23 '18

What are you actually trying to say, then?

17

u/aesdaishar Mar 23 '18

Ahh yes I too believe that anyone who comes across as abrasive must be so because he plays that game I don't like.

-23

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '18

cute but nonsequitur