After realizing that I could not be trusted to play a reasonable amount of Baldur’s Gate 3, I made the decision to swap my evening video game time back to Spider-Man 2 rather than carry on staying up way too late every single night. It wasn’t a difficult decision, to be honest. I’ve already beaten BG3 and while there’s a lot of fun to be had in the game, I recognize an unhealthy coping mechanism when I see one and that game is one from its character creator to its epilogue (for me, specifically. And, you know, probably other people as well). So, I returned to Spider-Man 2 and my relatively new save file, complete with a lot less podcast listening time than I prefered and fears about being as underwhelmed by the game as so many other people seemed to be. A lot of people have decried the game as being annoyingly short and while that doesn’t necessarily deter me (I love a game that won’t take 100 hours to beat just as much as I love a good game that takes 100 hours to beat), it had me putting off the game so I could savor it longer. Now that I’m back into it, though, I kinda regret putting it off as much as I have since it’s actually my favorite of the trio (Spider-Man: Remastered, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2).
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Mask Time
Reggie twiddled his thumbs, looking around Georgine’s office. She kept things tidy, so there wasn’t much to look at other than the dark computer, a calendar with nothing written on it, and the small notepad she was usually holding.
Uncertain how long he’d be waiting, Reggie leaned forward to see what Georgine had been looking at before a lab tech had asked her to come look at something downstairs.
Upside down and refusing to do more than lean forward, it took him a while to work it out. It was just a to-do list full of notes about phone calls, meeting times, reminders, and a section of rote daily tasks. Just as he was finishing his scan, Georgine’s office door slid open and Reggie glanced up at his manager as she stepped into her office.
“Glad you find my to-do list so engaging.” Georgine arched an immaculate eyebrow at him.
Reggie’s face heated as Georgine walked around to her chair. “Sorry. I was bored.”
“Thank you for waiting.” Georgine flashed him a small, polite smile. “Any questions before we begin?”
“Yeah, what does ‘mask time’ mean?”
Georgine looked down at her to-do list. “It’s a reminder. A mask you heat up and place over your eyes to keep the ducts clean. I use it every night so my eyes don’t get irritated by the dry air in the lab.”
Reggie nodded and launched into the presentation he was supposed to be making. Georgine, attention fixed on him, picked up her notebook, flipped to a new page to take notes, and used the motion to press on the drawer that held her disguise to make sure it hadn’t been disturbed. It would be disastrous if anyone realized that she’d used the company’s prototypes to take down that annoying hero last month.
Adaptation Versus Adoption Across TTRPG Genres
I had the idea for a superhero themed D&D game. The idea originated in an idea on how I could adapt the Monk class and the various subclasses, but many of the various other classes and abilities could be represented as super powers if you give them the right flavor. I’ve been stewing over it in my mind for a while, mostly just as a fun thing to think about when I’m not doing anything else, but I haven’t done any concrete work to develop the idea beyond the conceptual stage. See, as someone who is tangential to many circles on Twitter, I usually get a pretty good grasp of the drama that has taken center-stage at any given moment without getting embroiled in it myself. One of the big, long-running pieces of drama is that games other than D&D exist but the popularity of D&D tends to eclipse them in such a way that, when people want to play non-fantasy games, they tend to work on adapting D&D rather than finding a game that was explicitly made for the type of genre they want to play.
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