They just couldn't believe that something so foul and brainless could be perpetrated in the name of their beloved role-playing game. I had a vivid memory of myself at age 12, spending hours with my dorky friends at a store called Gamesmanship, poring over graphs built out of hexagons, clear plastic 20-sided dice and the latest dungeon modules. We argued over bags of holding, the price of horses and whether one should roll for damage points when a character had gotten drunk. It wasn't always innocent fun. I subsequently turned to science fiction and fantasy for my epic adventure fixes.
Characters are good or evil, lawful or chaotic.
They can be fighters or magic users, clerics or thieves. When players and DMs get used to archetype-based adventures, it affects their expectations about other kinds of narratives. They want characters that conform to type and whose abilities and actions can therefore be logically extrapolated. The only crime there is that we will read and watch bad stories. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.