ShadowDark: A Half-Assed Name For A Half-Assed Game

I saw this Tweet a few days ago:

Oh, if only Geeky--and many others, it seems--read my DoubleDark review first, they could have saved themselves, at the least, pissing away thirty fucking dollars on an incomplete, ill-conceived hack. Ah, well, live, learn, and support people that actually give even the slightest fuck about making something even remotely resembling a complete game, as opposed to attention-starved narcissists who merely pinch out vapidware trash for underserved money, praise, and/or influence.

Now, the amount of races and classes I'd consider to be the bare minimum depends entirely on how they are presented and their overall depth, and while I'm more forgiving of races being on the shallower end content-wise this is beyond pathetic (yet entirely on brand for these sorts of post-modern "games"):

Wow. Good on Kelsey for going the extra millimeter and giving each race all of like three sentences worth of content. You're certainly getting anywhere near your money's worth, here, as I'm so very sure no one else but her could have possibly taken decades' worth of existing material and concepts and water down classic races down to but one benefit. 

Classes aren't much better. Here's the entirely of the fighter:

Yep, one page. And Kelsey can't even be bothered to do anything interesting with it, and I almost can't blame her because her emotionally and intellectually challenged simps not only don't give a fuck (or get one from her, despite their desperate and doomed hopes), but actually defend her laziness and ineptitude:

Not that anyone needs to homebrew an economy, ever, but everyone I've ever played any edition of Dungeons & Dragons with just runs the prices out of the book as is, and the game operates just fine. Fortunately, though naive, or perhaps overly curious about overhyped postmodern trash, Geeky is at the least not a simp:

And he's right. Kelsey is fine lifting material from other games, some of them even decent or at the least complete, but couldn't be bothered here because she doesn't care, and her simple-minded simps don't ask or even expect anything more of her. She's like a retard that people praise for failing to accomplish even the bare minimum because it somehow makes them feel better.

I responded to the thread with a link to my review. Too late for Geeky but maybe I can still save others from buyer's remorse:

I wouldn't call DarkityDarkDark an innovation: it's about a fifth of 5th Edition with random rules lifted from other games and shoehorned in, which is an absurdly low hurdle that anyone can overcome, even when they don't merely just copy an existing game whole-cloth and slap a new name on it. Kelsey couldn't even be bothered to copy-paste good versions of rules, expand on them in any meaningful way, or include most of the necessary rules.

For example, there's no rules for starvation or thirst, or foraging for food, and instead of conditions you barely get two examples. Would it have been so hard to just pull the list from 5E? It's what she basically did for weapons and the mornic Advantage/Disadvantage rules. Maybe she was afraid that she was already cribbing too much from that version.

Instead, you get half-assed rules that are essentially half (at best) of a barely-tweaked, bog standard d20 core, terrible advice, asinine additions like kinda-sorta but not really real-time torches, tables that are as shallow and useless as they are uninspired, monsters that are technically usable but as shallow and uninspired as the tables, and godawful art, all smeared across a 332 page PDF.

For thirty dollars.

You could get a similar-yet-superior experience by rummaging through the d20srd and just ignoring like half of the material, and it wouldn't cost you a dime.

Alternatively, Dungeons & Delvers is over 500 pages, full-color, with reimagined races and classes that actually make sense and have a bunch of options (as opposed to rolling on a barebones table with lackluster modifier increases), and prices for things that aren't weapons, armor, and adventuring gear: you got mounts, vehicles, trade goods, hirelings, livestock, maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting.

The monsters also aren't just D&D monsters without barely any description and "modernized" statblocks, and most of the classic D&D stuff has different lore and/or abilities, so even if the name is familiar its place in the world and behavior probably differs in some way. I guess a downside is that it doesn't use retarded item slots, and we didn't bother nostalgia pandering with a nonsense table of alignment-based class titles.