Me: doing my thing

God, visibly sweating and white-knuckling his desk as he watches on the computer monitor: No, no! Stop! Don’t stretch it like that! I didn’t design the desmosomes to last under that kind of pressure! Oh goooooood, stoooooop! Not the ammo box!

Full time critics must be weird to talk with for any length of time. I know my own work bleeds into my perceptions and interests, and can’t help but think that critics have their judging hats on for routine, everyday affairs. Imagine your partner sitting in the passenger seat, idly commenting on the lighting of a city park as you drive past (I don’t have to imagine, lol, because my partner does amateur film work as a side gig and he loves to talk about his cameras).

I believe there’s a copypasta/good comment floating around out there from the reddit days that details everything that has been referenced about the godfather films, and so, if you watch many movies that are popular or considered good, you’ve already seen almost everything that stands out in the godfather films. Throw in the great many improvements in cameras, acting methods/filming techniques, and the ‘drift’ that means one generation prefers certain tropes/themes/scenes/actions over others, and of course an older film is going to be less entertaining for us.

I think there’s a middle ground where the game ‘world’ can acknowledge there are political maneuverings happening, while not forcing you to track the shipments of food and goods so you can squeeze nobles who depend on certain economic routes into complying with the king’s orders to rally troops for a cause.

Bounty orders style campaigns are fun for a short while, but there’s only so many ‘go here, kill x, biggest change is the layout of the dungeon and enemy vulnerabilities’ before the game sessions all bleed into one long blurry dice roll. That’s close to warhammer/battletech/etc territory. I want a real story to go with the campaign, and that necessitates a ‘politics’ somewhere unless you’re playing one of the barbarian/end-of-the-world games where there is no civilization or npcs at all aside from enemies.

But I think we can all agree that the “politics” of motions and passing votes is not what was being addressed by OP.