Ask Lemmy

I kinda wonder if it was supposed to be profit-squeeze-monster so give out powerful items to incentivize adventure, squeeze down the unbalance by limiting usage, introduce monster to deplete power.

It's still sort of awkward phrasing that I don't recall being common back in the day, but it makes a kind of sense read that way.

Might be more suited for !rpg@ttrpg.network.

The way I would understand it is the good old You are the chosen ones, and you need to absolutely get XXXX by killing monsters to prevent the doom of ZZZZ

So just a way to make PC use their ressources. It's the kind of stuff which work in old-school RPG were ressource attrititon is a full part of the game. Modern RPG tend to drift away from the fight monsters in dungeon and removed or simplified the ressource management aspect (I love how Blade in the Dark let you declare your equipment on the fly rather than having long discussion about what you bring, save a lot of time for the players)

I've heard of prophet-squeeze-monster, but not as a trope. It's a fairly well known fetish in BDSM circles.

it is a generic style of storytelling where heros / adventurers / PCs are dragged into a quest by some all-knowing-seer / noble / fate.

an example application of this is when a king(prophet) summons the party, tells them "we are currently waging a war against xxx evil, hero bros" and said hero bros party are the hope of the kingdom. party then buffs up and does the training arc(squeeze) for the scripted big bad(monster) showdown.

an obligatory roll to persuade the king is now the meme to challenge classic trope and makes it more fun~

I can't find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich's lair before they may fight.

"Prophet" being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

"Squeeze" where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they're also useful for dealing with the lich's zombie army.

"Monster" where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I've never heard this trope named this way, but it's how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won't be having that fight at full strength.

I'm willing to bet that there was a cultural shift between when that module was written and now. I am willing to bet that the author and all his friends knew what a prophet-squeeze-monster trope is because it was nearly ubiquitous at the time, but then people stopped using it (likely because it was seen as the "obvious" option) and as a result it stopped being a classic trope.

As a comparison, I am working on a novel with a soft magic system. However, I tend to forget that it is a soft magic system when I am explaining it to friends because it has strict rules for how it works, and more importantly i am a huge Tolkien nerd and forget other people dont even know who Morgoth is. At one point, I made the mistake of telling a friend that "its a pretty standard fantasy magic system" which they interpreted as "it works like D&D instead of like Mistborn". They then had to double back and ask me what I thought a "standard magic system" was when I started talking about legal standing and precedent letting my wizards cast spells. To me, this seemed normal because that's how Gandalf does magic. But the current high fantasy landscape has trained people to think of magic as an alternate science where specific inputs get specific outputs, so people tend to instinctively think of soft magic systems as working the same but with less control over the inputs or less reliable outputs.

I think this is an eccentricity, not a reference to a real idea

My guess based on your description would be something good, that after a few uses, goes catastrophically bad. Like a gun that disintegrates the person you shoot (prophet) and each subsequent use after the first (squeeze) gives it a increasing chance to disintegrate itself and the user. (monster)

Fascinating question. I have a couple (uninformed) guesses:

• maybe "prophet" is a mis-transcription of "profit" and it refers to a "profit squeeze" meaning costs increase but results diminish. this is a way of handling the "game unbalance" problem: the technology is there but the cost is so high it doesn't unbalance things. So "profit-squeeze monster" means you just take that to the extreme.
• instead, maybe the last two words go together to make "squeeze monster". You know like those rubber stress toys that you squeeze and part of the monster is an eye or something that bulges out. I seem to remember those being around in the 90s when this article is about. So "prophet / squeeze-monster" refers to two ways of limiting the game unbalance problem: the technology is either used as a "prophet" to just estimate your enemy or something, or its a "squeeze monster" where... uh... I dunno... you disfigure but don't kill the enemy?
• instead, maybe "squeeze monster" is like you pull a trigger but can't control it.... you're a "squeeze monster"?

If I were editing that article/review, I'd change the word "trope" to something like "technique" or "approach", bc "trope" sounds like it should be widespread. I'd guess it's probably a technique that game designers used and talked about to one another and had this term as a shorthand probably bc of some anecdote or cartoon or funny t-shirt that someone had once.