With thanks to @rosenstead.bsky.social and @amrk.bsky.social, whose discussions on here with me help crystallise this article.

@thepig993.bsky.social and @snufkinlib.bsky.social you might also find this interesting.

I express my ideas through the model of the 'Oxford Lib Dem', my addition to the existing 'Devon Lib Dem' and 'Twickenham Lib Dem' voter models.

Fundamentally I think the Lib Dems have an appeal to struggling white collar urban professionals, if only they become more positive about housebuilding.

You've got me bang to rights there! 😁

You're not the first person to argue that!

Plus the combat was really deep, you had six possible classes across the two protagonists and the option to multiclass.

And all enemies also had class restrictions like the player, a type of symmetrical, grounded combat design I love.

I've played it through twice, and still not tried every class.

Oh my god someone else played that game!

I genuinely love it, one of my favourite games of all time. Also the best *finished* piece of media set in the ASOIAF universe.

But yeah the combat was an interesting twist on DA:O with the melee focus and differing weapon bonuses against armour types.

DA:O is the game that got me to fall in love with RTwP, A combat system that I've seen done in maybe 10 other games and done well in maybe 3 others lol. Still my favourite RPG combat system tho.

DA: Inquisition, Game of Thrones RPG and Of Orcs and Men and the only other games that did it well IMO.

I do think most Brits have a concept of what authoritarianism is, mostly borrowed (however inaccurately) from 20th century Germany & the Soviet Union.

Whether that fits your definition of 'it' I dont know, but, for example, the fear of a 'papers please' society does come up a lot around Digital ID.

(In that it is genuinely unusual for a society to have not had a military coup or civil war for 400 years, and and to have an unbroken majoritarian democratic tradition since the 18th century. Not that it genuinely couldn't happen here, of course it could)

Take the digital ID debate, where nobody talked about rights, but everyone talked about governmental power.

There is a deep strain of anti-authoritarian feeling in the UK, tempered by a genuine belief that Britain is special and 'it couldn't happen here", partially justified by the last 400 years.

I actually disagree with this quite a bit, the median Brit absolutely understands rights, they just don't understand them in a constitutional sense.

It's more of a common sense-esque 'wait, you can't do that!' gut sense of wrongness than an appeal to constitutional authority.

I'm interested in your thoughts on why this change would be the right thing to do?

I genuinely think that the game would be a lot better as part of an existing franchise, as it's clear that the devs had no real ideas for the story and world beyond reheating Beserk and Tolkien.

A Warhammer Fantasy game with Dragon's Dogma style combat would sell like hot cakes, is what I'm saying.

Aha! Another Todd In The Shadows fan!

He's one of the few YouTubers I started watching aged 12 and stuck with ever since. Trainwreckords is probably my favourite series of his, but I watch pretty much everything he puts out.