"Gritty" Fantasy

[Illustrious]

AoD is a good game and its qualities have nothing to do with its self-imposes grittiness so usual of slav devs. You can play it 50 times and every time it will feel different, that's its main strength and success, and only for that it deserves a place in the CRPG canon as no other RPG has achieved such roleplaying width. You might dislike things like certain streamlining aspects like teleportation, or the minmaxing approach, but it's still a good game for CPRG autists. Also it's not that hard as long as your build is specialized. Its spinoff Dungeon Rats, however...

[Unformed Golem]

My experience with AoD was very similar to Anthony's, although I played a bit longer -- I was less bothered by the Grittyness than by the necessity to minmax + grind along with the need to compulsively save and reload before every single interaction in case I get REALISTICALLY shanked.

[anthony]

"Age of Decadence" has an interesting history: the (anon) developer used to be an admin on RPGcodex and the entire concept for the game was basically to implement a CRPG that did everything right in accordance with the 'codex communitay's TVTropes r/vexillology moderator-poweruserbase consensus on what the ideal CRPG should be.  Personally I think the effort deserves some respect -- a Very Online forum poster managed to will his vision into reality with at least marginal commercial success and acclaim despite obvious deficiencies in talent.  But, at the end of the day it's still bad.

The RPGcodex detail is interesting. You know I think I heard that way back and then forgot. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a piece of media made by a fan/consumer who tried to nail things down on a practical level. Godard was a critic who became a successful artist. But he wasn't a rule-maker. He was a man who exercised taste as an observer, and then exercised taste as a creator.

The idea of doing something right I find very problematic. The idea of art as a practical craft which can be refined. From that start we're not going anywhere good.

[Unformed Golem]

I've had good experiences with D&D in the past although it attracts deviants.

Since I'm posting again I'd also like to address another point: "why isn't this a VN?" From what I can tell, AoDecadence is a great example of failure here -- text heavy game with generic combat and "choices matter!" with lots of different endings (paragraphs of text). What is the point of grinding stats to read different endings? Western RPGs are heavily simulationist -- D&D for instance evolved from a wargame. "What would happen if a wizard fought a knight", "how can I equip my paladin and friends to defeat the lich", actually running the simulated reality is just as important or more so than a "narrative". This is another reason Gritdom is so bad -- it can basically turn into a schoolmarm lecturing you that wizards aren't real or that you didn't spend enough time digging latrine pits.