It’s almost fascinating. They are like living Reddit memes. I have a feeling they have only started playing because of critical role. In the cyberpunk episode, they outright said they hatre role-playing games with a leveling system.
I do sadly think they genuinely did play DnD before this, though how often is very debatable. It is clear that the big reason they went hard into this is purely because of Stranger Things doing the DnD memberberries rather than CR.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaQUge_EK58That explains everything. The cyberpunk episode starts with them bitching about self-driving cars and the lack of walkable cities in America. They ended up bashing Mike Pondsmith personally for being all style over substance and inventing the modern edge lord. The biggest issue they have with cyberpunk is the game is too apolitical and too dark. The goal of the game is to get rich for dying. That's too depressing to play with friends over 13 years old.
Actually retarded, since Cyberpunk actually has a well designed system in spite of Pondsmith's limitations. It's pretty easy to make a character, combat flows rather well and quickly, and it does a great job at being high lethal while still being fair. Mainly because it cuts both ways and you do have ways to blunt the effects since armor no-sells that shit so long as you don't take damage. I genuinely like it a lot as a system.
Also it again shows that they utterly lack creativity and have shit takes. They can easily make Cyberpunk political if they have a GM worth a shit; it's anti-corporate, it's anti-consoomerist, and it talks about alienation from the self and points out how shit mental healthcare can be. Oh wait, they're journoscum; they're corpo puppets and consoooom. Found the actual reason they fucking hate it then.
I wish I really knew more about them. Telling God Himself "Na man, we're cool with what we've got, don't need any divine knowledge" is based in its own way. And yes, they're the Dark Elves not because they're evil but because they rejected the light of Valinor.
The various Total War mods have them chilling in Rhovania guzzling down wine by the keg when they aren't out there kicking ass, so if that's what rejecting God's light does to an elf sign me the fuck up.
We know that they were a third of all elves originally, and that some of them were captured by Morgoth to aid in his attempts to create something himself; Orcs. The closest you'd probably see to Avari culture would likely be the Forest Realm of Mirkwood to some degree, and even then this isn't right given that it's clearly an attempt to recreate Doriath, similar to how Lothlorien also tries to mimic it.
Anyways, I've read more into One Ring, and I have more complaints.
So I've skimmed through most of their books, and too many of their adventure hooks specifically uses canon characters to hand them off to you. Not kidding on that, since you get handed hooks by Dain Ironfoot, Balin, Bilbo, and quite a few others. I kind of just don't like this, since it makes the setting feel smaller.
Their adventures also have a bad habit of having too much shit happen at the same time; literally in less than five years you have to fucking fight two Dragons if you live in Erebor or Dale. What the actual fuck.
As for the playable races, it's all Free Peoples, with the odd exception of the Dunlendings. While I applaud the decision to include the Dunmen, I don't actually like how they're statted worse than the others specifically because they're more inclined to evil. I also very much detest that they make them and the Bree-folk, but they do NOT do one for the Fisherfolk of Enedwaith OR the Hillmen of Rhudaur. Also no Druadan? For SHAME.
My biggest complaint is that they oversell HARD their own insanity system. I genuinely dislike this mechanic, since the temptations and ills of the Lord of the Rings is due to the One Ring and the inner evils of the characters. Holy shit, stop trying to be like Call of Cthulhu here. They also have their own take on corruption via Shadow Points, which I could understand, but it really does show that they literally have no interest in you playing evil people. I'm not even inclined to play evil characters, but sometimes you just want to play a Goblin of Mount Gram and you want to get revenge on the Tooks of Tuckborough.
Lastly I'm going to be frank: I kind of dislike their hyperfocus on the Wilderlands. They don't really do enough with them, like covering the ruins of the Eotheod that existed in the northern Anduin. They don't really do the Grey Mountains, nor do they have segments on the south Anduin or even fucking Dorwinion. I genuinely think they pale in quality compared to MERP on the setting, despite it being a hell of a lot more readable and less filled with "just instantly know what the fuck this culture is".
