Talk:Monster Girl Quest: NG+ (Ecstasy)/@comment-26047404-20150127061507/@comment-26047404-20150131220059

If we were playing a game and you would wanted to dual wield and I was the gamemaster, I would encourage it. You'd get penalties, but I would encourage the diversity and reward you for not trying to min-max. You can dual wield, but it's under the understanding that you'll always be at a disadvantage.

I'm not saying that you can't do this stuff; I'm saying that it's an inferior strategy over every other martial strategy physically.

I went into excrutiating detail why dual wielding doesn't give martial advantages. I ended up trying to explain the same things in different ways because this is a difficult concept for someone who is used to seeing this common flaw in popular modern culture and games. You get so used to it; you see people in a movie do this stuff, and your game characters do it in video games, and it looks like it works, so it feels like proof... And it becomes a fetish for some people.

The feats you are talking about shouldn't be standard feats. They should magical powers. They're supernatural. And then if you can effectively reduce the weight of your weapon, you still be better off with one weapon. I've explained in many ways why this is true. It would be fine to have a power like that. But that's different from saying, "Hey, this physically operates this way."

It sounds to me like I've convinced you that it's an impractical way of fighting. I don't think you need to feel aggressed upon.

About the only thing I think you benefit from would be realizing is that dual wielding does not double the number of attacks you can make. This isn't about fantasy vs. reality. This wouldn't work in a fantasy world either unless you had some very specific superpower. To really benefit from multiple weapons just physically, you'd have to have tentacles or tails or something. Biped humanoids aren't really built to benefit from it. Superhuman speed or strength or training doesn't change this. Fiction is not something where anything goes. Fiction is where you change the rules up, but fiction does have rules. The more detail you put into a fantasy; the more those rules constrain that fantasy. In a D&D fantasy world, sword physics are supposed to work generally the same as reality. You still have gravity. You have force. Humans have the same body structure. If you have a fantasy world where it inaccurately models the rules it is supposed to work by, then it is flawed. It ruins immersion, because it shouts out, "This doesn't even make sense within the reality it is supposed to operate in."

D&D doesn't say that 'this is really cool so it works' like an anime themed game world where cliches make you more powerful, like being cuter and smaller makes you stronger. D&D goes under the assumption that it's relatively accurate to model dual wielding that way. And that is a flaw, because that is untrue. In fact, the opposite is true.

If a game uses dual wielding in it and you get advantages that don't make any sense from it, it will harm immersion because it doesn't make sense within the constraints of its own rules. Good writing and world design mean that you take these things into consideration. You may create a world that is inconsistent with reality, but it has to be consistent within itself. The internal consistency of a fiction is a large factor in whether something is poorly designed or poorly written.

That is why I applauded Ecstasy for making this decision, because it isn't often that I see people understand or reject this common and flawed cliche. I was pleasantly surprised.