A metaphor: I once played in a D&D campaign where a player tried to create an extremely overpowered but technically legal character. His justification was that he would only use the extreme powers in moderation, so it would not be unfair or unbalanced. But why would he ask for such unprecedented powers if he didn't intend to use them?
I actually think that a role playing game is exactly the soft of situation where this is in fact reasonable.
There is a lot of mythology about gods walking among men, hiding their true nature, etc. And more recent examples include the TV show Lucifer.
Someone wanting to roleplay that sort of being is entirely plausible. Without knowing the person's personality (which you presumably did) it's hard to say whether they would have genuinely wanted to do that or if it was an excuse.
Yeah, if you have a huge amount of trust between player and DM that can work. There are both in-game and out-of-game ways to manage issues if they arise: in-game a DM can always limit or restrict something after the fact, out-of-game a problem can spark a conversation and ultimately a D&D game is a set of people who voluntarily get together and play.
(That said, another approach is to have a conversation about "what are you trying to achieve", and find a way for everyone to have the fun they'd like to have without risking something game-breaking.)
As GM, I strongly disagree. Any player who wants a character with "I can overrule the GM but I will do that only occasionally" power is a very big red flag. A D&D game isn't a mythological story or TV show. It's a community told story where one character having an "OP" (over powered) character basically destroys the balance between player and GM as well as between player and player, both of which are extremely important.
To make it clearer, the players and the GM will be struggling against each - in a controlled way, yes, but also a meaningful way. I'm not a super deadly GM but players will be risking death in at least low-key way and so everyone will sooner or later be "using everything they have".
Edit: basically, saying "this rule/power/etc exists but won't have an impact" is more or less saying that the "rules aren't serious", in either the 'Chat Control' or the DM situation. But the very nature of rules is that we wouldn't have them if they weren't serious.
I of course agree that the player should not be able to overrule the GM. I don't think that was the situation here.
If you're playing an off-the-shelf campaign this is problematic. If the GM is creating the game as you go, then a good GM should be able work with the player to make this reasonable. The GM can always use GM-power to prevent a player from doing something, even if it involves a literal hand of God reaching down to stop them.
A conversation with the player beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about this sort of thing would go a long way. Let them know under what circumstances you're willing to allow them to use whatever the power is. Let them know the consequences if they don't follow those rules.
Unlike with ChatControl, a D&D game is a situation where the necessary trust is able to exist.
An example: agree the player character is some trickster djinn sent from another plane to learn to be a human and how to trick people. They have immense cosmic powers of life and death, but as part of being sent over, they can only use the power for immediate comedy. Violations result in the djinn getting yanked back to their plane and disincorporated.
Boom done. Now you have a massively OP character that can only use their power in humorous situations that don't affect the storyline, and if they try to abuse that then that's instant-death.
I personally, as GM, don't like to be the one that kills a character. I want to set up a situation where the situation-and/or-the-rules kills the character.
I've played in games with "the GM kills you" mechanics and it felt juvenile/arbitrary/abusive. Remember, this is a game where every players' character needs to "shine" and similarly needs to know they're being judged with fairness and compassion by the GM (compassion especially along the lines of "understand what I say my character does as something reasonable").
Isn't that what I proposed in my example though? Where a rule is made in advance that if the player abuses their power, they die. due to the canon situation in which that player's character existed?
A player that in good faith wanted to role play such a character, would work with the DM in advance to structure rules well-understood by all parties about exactly what would happen if they abuse their situation.
All the DnD situations can be trivially resolved by good-faith and communication on all sides.
Unlike Chat Control, where good faith cannot be assumed.
While I agree it's a red flag in many cases (power gaming is an issue), I think you already provided an adequate justification for it yourself: ttrpg play is a community told story. While you may want to play a type of game where the DM is always fully in control, I've played at tables where the DM intentionally gives up some of their control to the more experienced players, sharing the load of creating the world. There are even whole systems where this is an intentionally encouraged mechanic! Even giving overpowered stuff isn't fundamentally different from a DM dropping in an overpowered DMPC to help step in when the players need something.
D&D is intentionally a collaborative story, and it shouldn't be out of the question for players to collaborate with the DM. Focusing on "the balance between player and GM" is great for a dungeon-crawl style game (which I would argue is the only thing 5e is actually designed for, and is poor for what most people try to use it for, but that's a whole other rant), but putting too much focus on it in a more roleplay-centered campaign can lead to a very adversarial relationship between players and the DM. If you have great players, you should trust them to collaborate with you, not just opposed to you.
Oh, giving the player power to make a world and otherwise help in GMing process is fine, something I do sometimes. The thing is, a reasonably skilled player can do that without it involving adding power to their character. Indeed, I've seen this device make players less "power-gamey" because it makes them think of the larger picture, they want to interest the other players in their story etc.
But I don't think this really relates to "my character has excess-or-god-like powers but I won't use them" situation. The point isn't the characters can't have more free-form powers that GM interprets sympathetically. The point is if the player has to say their character has special over-the-top-powers, they are creating a rule, not leaving things for free collaboration. I remember in a FATE game in which one player specified has character's aspect that "world's greatest thief" and this both abuse of the FATE system and actual harassment/psychological abuse of another players. I learned the lesson that aspects never should superlatives to them.
I actually did that for a campaign. It wasn't extremely overpowered but I did have some abilities that could have been extremely OP if abused. I don't even think it was really legal as far as RAW was concerned. In the end I was probably one of the least effective characters, but I was able to do some cool things with those powers and we had fun roleplaying it.
IMO that's a little different since many of them also buying the utility of appearances, which be flaunted at entirely legal speeds or even while parked.
In contrast, an expensive speedy car disguised as a cheap slow one would be much more suspicious.
Allow me to introduce you to sleepers which are somewhat expensive cars disguised as cheap pieces of shit. Most I've been in are absolutely terrifying but seem like lots of fun.
Based on how often I find myself watching laden work vans pass vehicles that can easily "do better" this, or something like it, is likely a common reason for purchase
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I believe the Autobahn still carries the legal requirement to drive at a safe speed at all times. Pedal to the floor racing is not often safe speeds for a public road.
I mean, every person who purchases a car does so, at least implicitly. The very act of obtaining a driving license contains an (often explicit) promise to abide by the rules of the road.
You’re conflating two things and ignoring the thrust of the point: nobody buys a fast car to drive it slowly. Maybe some people do, the vast majority do not.
If promises about licenses meant a damn, we wouldn’t have speeding cameras.
AI is not immune to accusations of political bias, as we've seen recently from Grok.
A while back there was a story going around that licensors were replacing human translators with AI to prevent political bias. It seems clear that the real reason they're doing this is to save time and money. Having used Japanese AI translation casually, it's definitely not accurate enough for professional use. Even the unofficial manga scanlators who use it will apologize profusely and use it only as a last resort when a human translator isn't available.
As accusations of translator bias go, other than the Dragon Maid debacle, the big one at that time was the Zombie Land Saga, where they were accused of changing the script to Hoshikawa Lily transgender. What they failed to notice is that the character was always transgender - Hoshikawa Lily being a stage name, her birth name is revealed in one episode to be Masao, a male name.
There are some instances of dubious translations that fail to accurately convey the author's intent, but at the same time, part of what we're seeing is just pushback to increased LGBT representation and feminist themes in anime. Translators are sometimes being blamed for inserting modern or western values into works that already reflected those values.
The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.
Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.
When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.
Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.
It’s a great question actually, and the answer has mostly to do with Romanization. Japanese and English are sufficiently structurally different, that even the sentence length won’t necessarily be one to one (eg subject and object inverted).
Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.
That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.
And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.
So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.
- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).
- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)
> furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel
One of my favourite things that clearly makes sense and sounds natural in Japanese but obviously doesn't translate well to English is "that person".
Every now and then you'll see some line of dialogue in an anime where someone says "Oh no, if this mark is showing up then we could see the return of _that person_." - which appears to be a way to refer to someone in the third person who the speaker knows but the listener doesn't - a linguistic "he who shall not be named", or "at least he who I'm not naming at this specific moment".
Some of the issues you often run into with Japanese subtitles are:
* Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
* Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
* Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.
I should mention that I have used tools like alass[1] to re-time subtitles between languages before (including retiming Japanese subtitles to match English ones) so this is not an unreasonable idea on its face, but those tools mostly work with already existing subtitle tracks that have correct timings. My experience is that if you have tracks with very different timings (as opposed to chunks of subtitles with fairly fixed offsets) you start getting rubbish results.
Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era.
The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?
This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.
Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.
It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.
I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series
Somewhat related is the situation with Shingeki no Kyojin / Attack on Titan. "Attack on Titan" was the manga author's chosen English title, except the story does not take place on the moon of Titan but is instead about giants attacking a human settlement. The Japanese title could be interpreted as "Attack of Titans" so everyone assumed "Attack on Titan" was just Engrish for that, and why CommieSubs' fan translation for example went with "The Eotena Onslaught". [1]
Years later it turned out some of the giants had classes / types and the title was a reference to the Attack type of giant. Thus the English title would've been better as "The Attack Titan", and indeed the Japanese title could also have been interpreted as that, though it's only obvious in hindsight. The Japanese title was likely deliberately intended to have the double-meaning "Attack of Titans" and "The Attack Titan", though this double-meaning cannot be conveyed in English, and in fact we're now stuck due to inertia with a third English rendering that is completely disconnected from either meaning.
Most fans I saw called it by the Japanese title, Shingeki no Kyojin. You could almost tell whether someone watched the official licensed translation or not, based on what they called the series.
Actually, another quirk is the German lyric in the first season's opening theme. Crunchyroll doesn't usually translate opening or ending lyrics, but translating the lyrics was standard practice in the fansub era, so the. However, they misheard the lyric as "Sie sind das Essen und wir sind die Jäger" - "You are the food and we are the hunters" - as if the line is spoken by the Titans (perhaps the English-speaking audience is primed to the Germans being the bad guys in movies). The actual lyric was revealed in official Japanese sources as spoken from the perspective of the humans: "Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!" - "Are we the food? No, we are the hunters!" However, the incorrect lyric persists among fans because the second opening theme superceded the first before the error was widely noted in the English speaking anime community.
Perhaps this is going to go like in the UK, where Palestine Action was proscribed, with the secondary effect that anyone who expresses support for Palestine Action is designated a terrorist even if they're not formally a member.
Commodore's strategy was to sell an entry-level computer as cheaply as possible, whereas the Amiga's initial selling point is that it was cutting-edge but still somewhat affordable. If you want to see what Commodore's answer to the Amiga would have been, look at the Atari ST: cheaper, still using the 68000, but lacking the advanced features which made the Amiga special.
