Karalora

I "know" him (we converse a lot on his YT channel)! I made sure to vote for The Dig Site! It's a great throwback to Adventurers as well as a real gem for anyone interested in archaeology, poetry, desert landscapes, or any combination of the above!

If you're not into "that scene," you're probably unaware that TTRPGs come in all different complexity scales. This would not be a DnD or Warhammer-sized venture--it would be simple, whimsical, and--appropriately for LEGO--customizable. I wouldn't have to lay out individual stats for every single possible molded piece--just 20 or so examples of each category, along with guidelines for adding others to your game. I don't figure many people would sit down to play plastic trapezoid adventures and expect the ruleset to be tight and perfectly balanced.

(That's "tabletop roleplaying game," for those who don't know.) So this is an idea that popped into my head the other day. I'd already heard about people using minifigures as gaming miniatures, because of how easy they are to acquire and customize with the parts you need to illustrate your character--if you don't mind your character being a plastic trapezoid, that is!--and I thought, why not cut out the middleman and make a game where you play as a minifigure in a LEGO world? I haven't developed it much (yet), but here are a few salient points: Your character has only three base stats--Head (mental faculties), Torso (physical prowess), and Legs (movement.) There are numerous ways to modify these stats, including skills, bonuses from equipment, etc. Most minifigures will also add some sort of Headgear, which can take two forms. A Hat imparts a bonus to one of your skills depending on the job or role it represents--a construction hardhat boosts your Building skill (very important!), a knight's helmet improves your melee fighting, etc. Alternately, you might have a Hairstyle, which provides boosts in certain social situations--a mohawk helps you fit in with the punk community, a crisp business 'do impresses business-y folk, etc. You can change your Headgear freely as you acquire pieces representing different Hats and Hairstyles. Another important character trait is your Theme, which determines the skills and equipment you can start with (though others can be acquired through play in different "sets"). Sample themes include City, Space, Castle, Pirates, and Ninjago, though these are far from the only possibilities. You can even be from a licensed theme, technically...but there's no particular advantage vs. being from the closest equivalent non-IP theme. The gameplay loop revolves around exploring "sets," fighting brick-built monsters that show up, and scavenging for useful Parts so you can build things to empower your character. This isn't too nitty-gritty--pieces for items are considered either Basic Parts or Specialty Parts, and each item costs a certain number of both. You can also obtain Personal Parts, which include Hats and Hairstyles and other items a minifigure "wears" such as capes and swim fins. And finally, there are Accessories: handheld items that can be used as-is, no assembly required. In order to build a particular item, besides having enough Parts in your inventory, you either need to succeed on a roll with your Building skill (to understand how to put them together), or have Model Instructions for the thing you want to make. Model Instructions are rare treasure, much like scrolls of magic, and each can only be used once (though successfully building anything, via a Building roll or Model Instructions, gives you a bonus to building the same thing in the future). Commonly built items include vehicles and fancy weapons, but even something like a creature can be put together and brought to life. And of course, anything built can be disassembled after use, and the parts returned to your inventory. That's about all I have for now, but I had to share it here!

May Queen, Eostre, Springtime Girl, whatever they choose to call her...let's get a young lady with a wreath of flowers in her hair, chop-chop!

Do we have a standardized image of Eostre? It's my understanding that the only known references to her come from the Venerable Bede, who was not an illustrator. In any case, the "May Queen" I have in mind--with a pastel gown and a wreath of flowers in her hair--could certainly stand in for a springtime goddess.

Sure, the Florist can be a fella. Some of these are gendered but most could be either/or. I imagine we don't have a Watering Can Costume because that's...not really a thing? Little kids dress up as flowers for school pageants sometimes, but I don't think a watering can suit has any role in the culture.

My picks for a springtime-themed CMF: Easter Bunny (as in an anthropomorphic rabbit in a dapper pastel suit) Flower Fairy Robin Suit Guy Female Leprechaun Picnicker Egg Seeker Birdwatcher Florist Kite Flyer Mardi Gras Celebrant May Queen Jack-in-the-Green

1. A Zelda CMF would be so great! But I think it would work best alongside a full theme, where we could get important characters in playsets/display sets and fill out the cast from the CMF. It would take some deft design to portray some of those characters, though, when they go really exaggerated with the designs. 2. My ideal Zelda theme includes both display sets based on scenes and places and items from specific games--your King of Red Lions, your BotW/TotK Stable, your Skyloft Goddess statue--and playsets based more on recurring concepts and elements from across the franchise, than specific locations from individual games. 3. I follow octane thermoplastic on YouTube! We're kind of buddies at this point, since I comment on all his videos and I've submitted a couple mini-builds to fan celebration projects he's done.

To be fair, a Spider-Man minifigure doesn't have to represent Spider-Man. It could represent someone cosplaying Spider-Man! Thank you for this. This so often seems to get lost in online discussions.

N-no? I'm just saying some people like the licensed themes, some don't, and everyone seems to be talking past each other.

"There's no accounting for taste" means that people like what they like and no one can explain why in a way that everyone will accept.

I think if this thread has taught us anything, it's that there's no accounting for taste.

Well, silly, that's because turbans are necessary for scenarios like having Johnny Thunder and Pippin Reed beat up the sultan's guards (they don't have names btw). Without the turbans, how would you know who the bad guys are? But Johnny Thunder isn't about to beat up a women in hijab (she covers her hair in public, clearly she's already being victimized), so she doesn't need to exist.

Not all women who wear hijab (or various other head coverings) are Muslim, and not all Muslim women wear hijab. It's not inherently a religious article of clothing, and many/most of the women who wear it do so out of choice, because to them, it's just normal. And I think that's really what the crux of the matter is--to the anti-hijab folks, it's not normal, it's a scary Muslim costume, and they feel on some gut level that if there are hijabi minifigures then LEGO is being taken over by Muslims or something.

It's in poor taste to raise such a lament in the context of marginalized people wishing for representation. "You don't need minifigures that look/dress like you, you just need to use your imagination." Really? I mean...really?

They can be intimidating in that way. My own personal experience as a rather tepid MOC-er is that there isn't a good, established way to transition between building sets from the instructions and designing your own creations from scratch. Most of the "building advice" I've seen tends to start from the assumption that the person reading is already an accomplishing MOC-er and just needs some fresh ideas for interesting parts usage or broad aesthetics. What I would love is some kind of "Master Builder Kit" that included a bunch of different parts and instead of instructions for a model, a "textbook" of sorts with demonstrative lessons for practice with those parts. But that's an entirely separate issue from licensed vs. unlicensed.

They don't remotely need to go that far. I see women in hijab probably every time I'm in a public place with high foot traffic, like a big shopping center. It's just how some people dress on the daily.

Whose creativity is the issue here? The designers' or the end users'? Because there is nothing preventing anyone from picking up a LEGO set in any theme, licensed or unlicensed, and experimenting like mad with the pieces.

The "need for it" is so that hijabi girls and women can have representation in LEGO. As for the religious connotations...only partially. It's my understanding that it's more cultural than religious and while there is significant overlap, if a Christian-style wedding ceremony with the white gown and veil can be uncoupled from its religious origins enough to include in a City LEGO set, there's no excuse for excluding minifigures in hijab. It's a style of dress for many millions of women around the world. Now, if the issue is that they're having trouble figuring out how to design one, that's quite a bit more understandable. Among other concerns already raised, there are multiple ways of wrapping a hijab for a variety of looks. To be really authentic, the piece(s) would have to be produced in a variety of solid colors as well as printed patterns (florals and so on), which would increase production costs. I think it would be worth it for the representation, but I can see why they might be dragging their feet for now.

I think @SpacePolice89 was saying he doesn't think much of the current unlicensed themes vs. the ones from the 80s and 90s, largely for just that reason. idk, it seems to me that some people use words like "creativity," "imagination," and "originality" not as useful descriptions but as shibboleths. What makes a theme "good" or "bad" largely comes down to matters of taste, so they invoke these terms to imply that their tastes are objectively superior. We're all just supposed to roll over and accept that the classic themes promoted creativity while current ones don't--an actual argument to that effect is not made. And I say this as someone who is uninterested in most of the licensed themes, mainly because so many of them are things I'm bored with in general and tired of hearing about in pop culture. Star Wars and the MCU and Harry Potter and jeez, even Disney these days, can all take a long walk off a short pier as far as I'm concerned. But that's not a LEGO-specific complaint.

I am less certain of this, if only because I'm on Rebrickable, where you very often get people posting alternate builds of licensed sets that have nothing to do with the original, and on the flipside, sometimes the alt-builds of unlicensed sets are minor variations on the original. And really...what is the difference between the play encouraged by a Classic Space-style set and the play encouraged by a SW set? Both sets have an "intended" build to be made from the parts, and instructions showing how to put together that intended build. The main difference, from what I can tell, is that the minifigures in the SW set have pre-assigned names.

That only tracks if you assume that licensed themes don't encourage creativity and imagination. And there's probably an argument to be made there, but you have to actually make it. I'm as disturbed as anyone by the fact that big-budget cinematic media has appropriated so much of people's imaginative function these days, but I don't think it necessarily follows that the flights of imagination that follow someone's experience of a popular action move are necessarily inferior to the flights of imagination they might take in response to something less specifically labeled, like a toy spaceship. An existing film or TV series can be a powerful springboard for the imagination; it gives people somewhere to start. [quote]I was mostly thinking about minifig themes but the Red Fox is also very different from licensed themes in a good way. It is a 3 in 1 set and with no Hollywood connections and is a nice model of a fox. If it was a licensed set it would be named something like Hank the Fox and have a laser gun and a purple hat and a backstory and be part of a superhero franchise and cost 35-40 euros more.[/quote] I'm with you on the price point thing, but I fail to see why a model of a fox character from a movie is somehow worse than a model of a wild fox, in terms of inspiring the people who build it. Maybe you wouldn't be as inspired by hypothetical "Hank the Fox," but...I feel compelled to point out that you made him up. You combined the concept of the existing Red Fox with the overall phenomenon of licensed themes and made up something new out of it. Even if it's coming from a place of disdain, the licensed themes got you to use your imagination!

What a strange claim. Do you also think animal models like the Kingfisher and Red Fox are killing creativity and imagination? Those, after all, are also just copies of things that already exist, rather than original designs.

We might be talking past each other a bit. I just thought one reason the classic themes were discontinued might be that the company decided they had done about all they could with them, and/or new generations of designers were eager to develop their own ideas instead of just working with past concepts.