(I understand a lot of them are more anime-inspired, but frankly, I have the same criticisms there. If your all-but-explicitly "Nichijou"-inspired RPG about cute girls doing nothing can't handle the scene from its source material where one of the girls beats up a cop, it is not fit for purpose!)
At one point one of the "Nichijou" girls beats up a cop.
I'm not saying your cozy slice-of-life RPG is obligated to have a full-featured tactical combat system or anything, but if its rules don't so much as contemplate the possibility of a player character getting punted into a lake and spending a month in convalescence, you're leaving money on the table.
The issue with many "cozy" games is they're so vibes-focused, they lose sight of the CONTENT of the media they're emulating. Yes, "The Wind in the Willows" involves sitting around drinking tea, but it also includes such heartwarming episodes as "Mr. Toad steals a car" and "Rat and Mole meet God".
Honestly, having a big red meter displaying a numerical abstraction of my gross structural integrity floating intangibly above my head doesn't sound half bad. I can't imagine it would be terribly useful in my daily life, but at least I'd KNOW.
(3/3) Your reasoning must thus become increasingly convoluted over time in order to continue automatically winning. Play continues until all players have accumulated a set number of nerfs, whereupon the game is declared to be balanced.
(2/3) However, each time you do, the game's notional designer determines that the ability in question is unbalanced and "nerfs" it so that that explanation doesn't work anymore; in the future, you'll need to invent a new way of interpreting the results that means you win.
(1/2) Meta TTRPG about playtesting a notional TTRPG. Your stats consist of a slate of randomly chosen abilities which specify PROCEDURE, but not INTERPRETATION. e.g., an ability might say "roll 5d6" or "draw two cards", and your job is to interpret the results to explain why you automatically win.
BRB, starting discourse about how writing fiction in which the necessary preconditions for problematic tropes are present is just as problematic as writing about the tropes themselves. You've got a couple of OCs who are blood relatives? You sick fuck.
Short-form and/or abortively halted serialised media constitutes the majority in every medium. There's no reason to single out long-form webcomics as exceptionally implausible.
There are comics running new material in the daily newspapers as we speak that have been doing so continuously since the First World War.
No, it isn't. Thirty years is a completely normal length of time for an ongoing piece of serialised media to run. If it feels like webcomics as a medium are too young for that, you need to recalibrate your frame of reference!
A pair of screenshots from the 1992 animated short film "Halloween is Grinch Night". The first screenshot depicts a Who holding a pair of reading glasses in their hand, looking up at something off-screen; their spoken dialogue is captioned "You know, sir, I like you much better with my glasses off." The second screenshot depicts the Grinch riding atop a horse-drawn wagon, pointing accusatorily down at something off-screen, presumably the Who from the previous shot; the Grinch's dialogue is captioned "You put your glasses back on and face the facts!"
(2/2) Any time I bring up a long-running webcomic it's like, okay, I'm glad this is such a Nostalgic Blast from the Past™ for you, but we are discussing an ongoing piece of serialised media that last updated as recently as this morning. Do try to keep up!
I sometimes joke about folks in my parents' generation who think Scooby-Doo ran for like one season in the 60s and are shocked to learn it has ~30 seasons, but it's become increasingly clear this is basically how a lot folks of my own generation think of any webcomic they read in high school. (1/2)
(Of course, by "the universe" we mean "the author", which is really the crux of it. I've seen many webcomics start out slice of life, then do a big epic story arc, only for the author to realise they preferred the former, but I've never seen the same comic go through that cycle quite so many times!)
Are you kidding? We still have three more evil magical girls who need chapter-long flashbacks explaining what their whole deal is.
To all evidence, Annie lives in a universe that just really, REALLY wants her to be the protagonist of a mid-budget indie dating sim, and it's not going to take "no" for an answer.
"Gunnerkrigg Court" is actually kind of structurally fascinating in terms of how literally every escalation – no matter how bizarre the circumstances or how urgent the stakes – manages to immediately settle into a new status quo that's conducive to several chapters of slice of life bullshit.
This isn't a "kids these days" grump; the average update schedule for webcomics both before *and after* Homestuck is once a week. There's just this anomalous cohort of readers who are currently right in the middle of the prime webcomic-reading demographic who think updating every day is normal.
One thing I will hold Homestuck responsible for is warping an entire generation's notion of what a normal update schedule for a webcomic is. Tell anyone born after 1998 that a webcomic that's been running for seventeen years has almost 700 pages in its archive and they'll wonder what went wrong!
A screenshot from the ending of the English localisation of the 1987 arcade version of the video game "The Ninja Warriors". Scrolling white text over a background depicting the collapsed ruins of a large mansion reads: BUT THE PEACE DID NOT CAME. BECAUSE NINJA WARRIORS, THEY ARE THE IMMORTAL MURDER MACHINES. . . . .
Today's aesthetic: video games that depict urban spaces at a true-to-life physical scale, but don't have the budget or the coding skills to populate those spaces with an appropriate number of NPCs, so getting literally anywhere is like a ten-minute walk where you see a grand total of three people.
Being a registered publisher makes what I do sound nearly respectable, but it's the kind of publishing where many people use their online handles on business paperwork, so in practice tax season involves asking a lot of questions like "okay, who the fuck is 'Rat Prick', and why do I owe them money?"
Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts and Three Lions" is not the literary source of D&D's alignment system, though it's sometimes mistakenly cited as such because its hero is the inspiration for the paladin character class (as well as a few other bits and bobs, such as D&D's goofy regenerating trolls).
Reading a D&D thinkpiece and slowly realising the author genuinely believes The Lord of the Rings was the sole popular media inspiration for D&D, and literally everything that can't be ascribed to that source is an original invention of Gary Gygax really shouldn't be a frequent experience, and yet.
Getting an esoteric hornypost and an analysis of the economic causes of Fascism in your feed back to back and they're both about hyperinflation.
As a very general rule, a table of Oddly Specific Shit that's expected to be used more than once per session needs at least 20 entries per roll beyond the first. A d100 table is just the right size to be rolled on half a dozen times per session without constantly kicking out incongruous duplicates.
Something indie TTRPG authors have got to accept is dice tables of Weird Shit cannot be brief. A haunted doll that looks like the party leader's mother is creepy in isolation, but when it comes up four times in one session because the table it's on only has like twelve entries it's a running gag.
The way it's sometimes described in Canadian educational material is that moose are quite literally Ice Age megafauna that didn't get the memo that they're supposed to be extinct. You should be mentally grouping them with woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, not wolves and deer.