Even in fantasy settings where they let fifteen-year-olds run around with magic swords and vanquish ancient evils, they generally don’t let them vote…because they don’t know much about anything.
While Anthem continues to seize the initiative here, the “where is Ismene?” twist comes, I think, from all those years I spent running tabletop role-playing games. The planning phases for those games often ran like this:
1) the party grasps the situation in a vague and incomplete way
2) they come up with a needlessly convoluted plan to “draw their enemies out of hiding” or some such nonsense, often involving rope traps and/or stuffing their hats and capes with straw and leaving them to be shot at by bandits.
3) the game master gets bored of the increasingly inaccurate planning and just has a bunch of ogres kick the doors in to get the plot moving again
It’s a pattern I very rarely see in planned fiction, for something that’s a staple of interactive fantasy.
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