dont get me wrong i love rpgs. i play them altogether too much. i know there are ways you can bend the genre’s conventions a bit. for an example and without going a bit too niche, there’s deadfire with it’s story beats that circle around colonialism.

at the end of the day you pick which faction takes over the region that deadfire takes place, from colonial powers to native kings. one thing that even fans of deadfire don’t seem to realize is that for all your influence, you can’t actually create an ideal scenario. every faction comes with the prejudices and contradictions of their cultures. you can sometimes suggest the better path to specific people, but the epilogues never claim that these issues were outright solved.

and still you’re playing what amounts to a prophetic individual. the bridge between the gods and mortals. the world revolves around you as a heavenly superperson and the devs ended up patching in a conversation with one of the gods to make that explicit.