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tithin posted:Prac guide: Oops. Everyone should really stop talking to the Bard. Black got it right the first time. Just try to kill her on sight and minimize interactions.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:41
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Cicero posted:ZeZe yes! Do we know all of Masego's Aspects? I just really want to see him put yet another god-adjacent being in the corner for a time out
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Jun 5, 2019 19:07
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Jade Mage posted:Do we know all of Masego's Aspects? I just really want to see him put yet another god-adjacent being in the corner for a time out I think he's going to steal whatever part of the Dead King that was imbued in him for the ritual, not be able to time out the main self of the Dead King. LLSix posted:Oops. It's a risky gambit from her, though, because even if the Dead King loses access to the information on her by the ritual, Masego and therefor Cat might still have it. And she may have been using Masego as a tool in her opposition to the Dead King, which is guaranteed to piss Cat off.
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Jun 5, 2019 20:06
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Ice Phisherman posted:You're right. I've been sitting on them for too long. I just spent the last day getting my website up to snuff and now all four books are there. I'll begin publishing book five on Mondays and Thursdays until I finish book six to keep a backlog, at which point I'll dump all of book five and use book six as the backlog. After reading Wildbow's comments about backlogs, he's made a big point on multiple occasions about having backlogs and staying constant on their releases in order to help promote a following. I started reading this over the weekend, it's really good! I haven't looked at any of the decisions or character sheet stuff, but I can sort of envision where voting or rolls took place. Thanks for posting it!
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Jun 5, 2019 20:35
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tithin posted:Prac guide: Cicero posted:ZeZe yes! Yeah, I'm real excited for the next chapter.
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Jun 5, 2019 20:59
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So that latest Ward chapter has the subreddit at each other’s throats. People are even arguing in the comments with Wildbow/arguing with him over what the text in Worn said. Ward 14.6 I shouldn’t be surprised at how many people seem to be ok with Amy disfiguring and mindraping an underaged girl who looks like Vicky, but here we are Illuen fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 21:17
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what the gently caress
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Jun 6, 2019 02:13
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Illuen posted:So that latest Ward chapter has the subreddit at each other’s throats. People are even arguing in the comments with Wildbow/arguing with him over what the text in Worn said. I haven't caught up (but read the spoiler anyway lol), but the reader-base is very bizarrely pro-Amy and defends her constantly (and criticizes Victoria for not being nicer to her and forgiving her). To be honest it kinda creeps me out and makes me wonder what these people may have done in their own lives that makes them sympathize so much with the idea of "being forgiven for traumatizing another person." edit: Unrelated, but I really hope we find out what the gently caress Anelace's power is at some point. It's been vaguely hinted at, but all we can really tell is that it seems to be a Thinker power somehow connected to fighting.
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Jun 6, 2019 02:15
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Ytlaya posted:I haven't caught up (but read the spoiler anyway lol), but the reader-base is very bizarrely pro-Amy and defends her constantly (and criticizes Victoria for not being nicer to her and forgiving her). It’s honestly kind of interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wildbow stick himself so firmly on a side of an argument in the subreddit, and yet people are very hostile. A whole lot of people are supporting literal utilitarianism saying that the character in question could maim and torture however many people they want as long as they balance the scales. To be honest, I’m probably getting more heated and giving the arguments more attention than the parahuman subreddit deserves, but it absolutely boggles my mind.
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Jun 6, 2019 02:29
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Amy has, legit, always been the absolute worst thing about the Worm fandom. Note: I don't mean the character herself in Wildbow's own works, I mean how the fandom treats the character and basically excuses everything bad about her.
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Jun 6, 2019 02:57
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PracGuide: So Grey Pilgrim's resurrection is potentially in play. But we also have another resurrection being setup as well (if it wasn't completely subordinated by DK at least). Though that one is admittedly quite the mad science iffieness and it doesn't seem like the technique Hierophant was going with (trying to combine as many memories of Warlock from many people) is very transferable.
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Jun 6, 2019 03:41
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The whole Amy thing weirds me out so much. Like, I found it odd how much support she had post-Worm but kinda saw where people were coming from, but the latest chapter had "Oops, Amy sneezed and squidded + mindraped another blonde chick," Amy very explicitly going around earth Shin mindraping prisoners 1984-style, and WB himself going "Guys, the best simile I can think of for what happened in Worm was Amy the surgeon dragging a patient into a condemned tenement while she fought to get away and all of her friends went 'this is a bad idea', then doing horrible mad science surgery for days while her victim clearly and repeatedly expressed that she did not consent.' ...and then the fandom basically went 'Yeah, but Victoria was asking for it.' I dunno, it's one of those things that's weird and silly enough that I kind of feel dumb for wasting breath being puzzled by it, but yeesh.
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Jun 6, 2019 03:44
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Omi no Kami posted:...and then the fandom basically went 'Yeah, but Victoria was asking for it.' Part of the Victoria hate comes from the fact she beat the poo poo out of a thug to the point of needing Amy to heal him in her first real POV chapter. People felt that she went overboard and basically set their opinion of her in stone from that. That or they really really wanted a sister/step sister lesbian romance thing to happen and got mind rape instead and are pissy about it. TLDR: fans are horrible.
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Jun 6, 2019 04:01
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I also feel like maybe because we see in the POV of E88 and Wildbow isn’t great at writing racial tension, the “seriousness” of a neonazi gang isn’t felt by a lot of the fans. Like, the person Vicky beat up had just put a POC in the hospital, and her aunt was murdered by the literal same neonazi gang.
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Jun 6, 2019 04:17
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Illuen posted:It’s honestly kind of interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wildbow stick himself so firmly on a side of an argument in the subreddit, and yet people are very hostile. A whole lot of people are supporting literal utilitarianism saying that the character in question could maim and torture however many people they want as long as they balance the scales. When you're talking about sexual predators, what people imagine most tends to be an unattractive man, not a woman. Remember that Amy built up a ton of credit in Worm by healing people and she got super burnt out. Then later she snapped, went to the birdcage because she threatened to unleash a plague if she wasn't, got tattoos and started talking to her dad, the super criminal. Later she shows little respect for boundaries, gets swept up in the machinations of Goddess and goes on to rule a planet of people who probably don't want to be ruled by superhero overlords. She's sort of a case study in what a sexual predator looks like and doesn't look like in the public eye. How a person can be remorseful and still a terrible person. How people confuse utilitarianism for goodness. Amy is a person on a downward spiral and she's powerful enough to drag others with her. Her sanity is probably a national, international...Dimensional concern due to the sheer scope and destructive potential of her powers. And she's sympathetic enough that people want her to have a better life at the expense of everyone else. Kalas posted:Part of the Victoria hate comes from the fact she beat the poo poo out of a thug to the point of needing Amy to heal him in her first real POV chapter. People felt that she went overboard and basically set their opinion of her in stone from that. People making up their minds and then not changing them much is called the Anchoring Effect. quote:Anchoring bias in decision-making. Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions. People hating her for that first introduction and not changing their minds much after that isn't out of character for human nature. And what we saw of Amy was reeling Victoria in and generally healing people later on. So in Worm, Victoria was portrayed as this spoiled, vain, too powerful person and Amy was portrayed as quiet, withdrawn, burnt out and useful. And then Amy snaps, or perhaps she shows her true colors, and works on Victoria by violating her bodily autonomy without her consent on multiple occasions. To the point that Amy basically made Victoria into a three headed swanlike person that's half made out of dead dogs and cats. Basically a Kronenburg's monster. Then Amy came back AGAIN and changed her back into something recognizable as human. I think that Victoria and Amy's parents refusing to see Amy as a monster is very in-character though. Their minds are stuck in where she was and what she used to do, not what she does now. Admitting that your child is a monster is hard, especially when they abandoned the kid who needed help and turned out good for the one that also needed help, but turned out bad. There are a lot of ugly questions and self-reflection needed to admit fault. And when you admit fault on that one thing, you have to admit fault on so, so much more because you can't maintain the delusion anymore. So it's easier to maintain the delusion. I will say that some of the loudest people saying that Amy have been affected by the anchoring effect. SerCypher posted:I started reading this over the weekend, it's really good! You're welcome! I'm glad that you enjoy it.  I'm going to start posting book five pretty soon. It's finished and in the thread, but I want to maintain a backlog. I figure that I'll post the first third and then roll updates out bi-weekly from there. If people want to get up to date they can do so in the thread. The character sheet/choices aren't on the website at all, though I'm considering putting them up. I will say that I didn't remember the system too well until book three, so some of the first stuff has glaring errors in it, though at least those errors were consistent.
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Jun 6, 2019 04:48
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Ice Phisherman posted:The character sheet/choices aren't on the website at all, though I'm considering putting them up. I will say that I didn't remember the system too well until book three, so some of the first stuff has glaring errors in it, though at least those errors were consistent. As someone who read it on the website, I'm curious- your OP mentioned that apparently the thread picked the characters they wanted to play- are there NPCs in the main story who you created with the intention to be playable if the thread had gone in another direction?
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Jun 6, 2019 07:38
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lurksion posted:PracGuide: i think he's going for the other dad no? that's what the forcing hellstuff together and blowing it up over and over was
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Jun 6, 2019 08:01
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Gonna be honest one of my favourite things about Ward, and I really like Ward don't get me wrong, is the sheer glorious schadenfreude I derive from Amy stans losing their goddamn minds.
A Sometimes Food fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Jun 6, 2019 |
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Jun 6, 2019 08:02
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Omi no Kami posted:As someone who read it on the website, I'm curious- your OP mentioned that apparently the thread picked the characters they wanted to play- are there NPCs in the main story who you created with the intention to be playable if the thread had gone in another direction? In the first few days the main character was going to be Julian, a teacher. I scrapped that idea as less interesting than the three I eventually settled on. The main characters all have sheets. The secondary cast is about 50/50. If one of the main cast dies or is incapacitated in some way and their book comes up, I have a secondary character prepped for that. The original three characters were meant to be chosen from with the intention of picking one for a novelette. So very little was planned at the start. I didn't expect to have a rotating cast. It was possible that we would've stuck with one character, Fuzzy, and that I would have ended it probably around book three. Rotating cast succeeded by one vote as I recall. So that's why the story lasted as long as it did. The more that a character has contact with the story in terms of rolling dice, the more likely I am to stat them out. However, that character needs to use more than one set of skills. So for example, Joyce, a secondary character who is something of a social operator, he rolls social rolls almost exclusively. So I haven't statted out his character. It's just not necessary. Saanvi, a different secondary character whose skillset came more into play, got a full statting out because more of her skils were used. I tend to define characters by defining them suboptimally. They're regular, normal people not meant for combat, being a face, a master decker (hacker) or an infiltrator. Most people have pretty varied skillsets and might be good at one or two skills. So the more suboptimally they are, the more normal they are. On the other hand, when I stat out the shadowrunners in the story, they're statted out as if they're not really people, but created for a purpose of doing one or two things really, really well. Their personalities reflect that attention to what earns them money and their inattention to almost everything else. The main characters interact with what's primarily a street level campaign and the encounters are reflective of that. The dice pools vary between extremely poor at 4 to professional at 12, but rarely higher. Someone from a normal shadowrunner campaign is a serious problem, like they've come down from another league. So 12-20 dice pool is pretty common and maybe a few of the characters could brush up against that for a while, but not very long. And prime would just mop the floor with them at 20+ dice pool. The thing is, the metaplot is a mix of normal shadowrunner and prime while the teens are mostly street and the low end of shadowrunner tier. The thread largely builds characters suboptimally which I appreciate. Shadowrun doesn't have levels, like in D&D, but each character is built individually buy purchasing stat points and skills and cyberware and magic and stuff. So by becoming more well rounded instead of hyper-specialized, the street level part is prolonged because narratively that makes sense because the main characters at the moment are between sixteen and seventeen years old. They're talented, but still young. And so I use the secondary cast to push the metaplot, but the actions of the main characters influence the behavior of those secondary characters, which influences the metaplot. And I make a point to make that influence believable and the fact that they keep influencing it also believable. I try to keep the plot pretty tight and try to show as little of my hand as possible to preserve the sense of mystery. And I enjoy books that you can read more than once. There have been more than one plot points where I re-contextualize some point of plot or a character or a place that makes you understand the story in a new way. A couple months ago I dropped one point that I'd been sitting on for over a year and the thread went nuts. And in retrospect everything is there. I put everything in plain sight, but tend to play on peoples' preconceptions and hope that I'm clever enough that most people don't get it until I drop the confirmation. And I have a few more in the works for the book I'm currently writing, though I didn't plan one of them and one is older than the previously mentioned event. My writing is tight, or at least I try to keep it that way, but I try to keep it understandable enough that you can follow the story without knowing all of the intricacies. If you want to dig into the whats and whys, you can and the complexity is there for you. If you don't want the complexity, I try to write in a way that you don't need to understand everything to enjoy it. I've written five books and one novelette so far, and I have to say that it was the novelette, 2.5, when I started taking the story very seriously. Or maybe near the end of book two. And that's okay, because book one was written simply as an introduction to people who aren't familiar with cyberpunk or Shadowrun. So to explain about directions in general, the story goes in the direction I chose that it goes right up until the thread makes a choice that jars me out of what I expect or the dice do something I don't expect. And then the story changes. So while the story has a plot and I sort of know where I'm heading, the answer to your question about direction is that I'm heading in a general direction, but even that can change, and that much of what's written is improv and interpretation of thread decisions and dice. Not just in the moment, but from basically the first post. The thread did a ton to establish characters and what they're motivated by and what they desire and what they don't like or aren't like and how that changes. So I roll all of the thread's decisions forward and all of the dice rolling forward. Blake Island is a continuing culmination of the thread's choices and what I attempt to cobble together in terms of plot. Not that it's a bad plot. I happen to like it. But I have to be flexible and I've spent days or even weeks thinking about how thread choices recontextualize my plot and how to make the next post good if not great, and how to stick the landing when I end this or that book. The story isn't on rails, but it does have general guidelines that are set widely enough apart that I can poke it in a direction and it tends (not always) to go in that direction. And the voters for the story take it seriously enough that they don't intentionally blow up the story for laughs, but want to see what happens next instead. I'm not really doing anything new, but I am developing my own unique style in real time for people to see: It's tabletop dice rolling, improvisational story telling, CYOA style thread posting, poster contribution and plain old novelist/web serial writing. It makes the story strange at times, but with that strangeness comes a wildness that I enjoy. It's harder to predict what happens because I'm not the only person with my hand on the narrative wheel. There's also all of the contributors for the thread and the dice, and I try to do co-equal sharing in terms of story. The answer is that the thread is constantly going in a new direction, but one that I can usually predict. U-turns are rare, which is helpful, but normally the thread choices and dice rolls provide deviations and so that's why I'm able to have a plot at all. And I don't try to wrest control from the thread if they do something unexpected, but draw on their ideas and creativity to improve my writing, which they do provide and I do use it and appreciate it. No rails, but guidelines, things I won't do, but so far the people in the thread seem to be on the same page as me and so I haven't struck against those guidelines. Just some minor grazes and I'll remind the thread about my limits or maybe where a certain line of thinking would lead the story and why I wouldn't want to write about that. Or they'll ask me where I'm going and I'll consider and then course correct. So the story is highly collaborative. Sorry if that went long. It's difficult to explain my writing style. There's no word for it that sums it up. Nothing new exactly, but highly experimental at the same time. Heading in a general direction, but no one direction, and I'm 100% willing to blow up my plot because I don't want to pick winners and losers, but leave a lot to chance.
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Jun 6, 2019 10:39
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violent sex idiot posted:i think he's going for the other dad no? that's what the forcing hellstuff together and blowing it up over and over was I was always under the impression it was this, and after checking his extra chapter Papa refers to devil dad and I'm pretty sure that's what he said in whichever one of the recent ones it was.
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Jun 6, 2019 11:30
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Whats the shadow run stuff referenced here? Can I read it anywhere?
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Jun 6, 2019 13:10
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Affi posted:Whats the shadow run stuff referenced here? Can I read it anywhere? Shadowrun is an existing cyberpunk intellectual property. Blake Island is my story based in that world from a former professional author, who is me. I posted descriptions of what it is further back so I'll just post the links. Thread - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3835049 Website - https://blakeisland.wordpress.com/ Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jun 6, 2019 |
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Jun 6, 2019 16:36
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Thanks for that detailed drilldown on your process, it's interesting to see how you approached it... for some reason, while reading I assumed that Christina had been one of the people you considered making a PC, since her background would make for a good entry point to the same corporate intrigue plots as Kenji if people were less interested in him. And yeah, Blake Island is good stuff- it looks at the setting from an interesting angle that avoids most of the cliches Shadowrun fiction risks, and is simultaneously mythos-lite enough that even if you have no familiarity with or interest in the setting, the story still stands on its own merits. ^^
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Jun 6, 2019 16:58
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Omi no Kami posted:Thanks for that detailed drilldown on your process, it's interesting to see how you approached it... for some reason, while reading I assumed that Christina had been one of the people you considered making a PC, since her background would make for a good entry point to the same corporate intrigue plots as Kenji if people were less interested in him. Marie/Christina is someone who does participate in corporate intrigue plots, but they're short and high intensity. Her subplot is not the focus of the story, but I keep her around for when I want her to muck about in the corporate world because that's not the world of Fuzzy, Kenji and Julie. I don't play her character much because she's something of a boogeyman, or boogeywoman I guess and I want to preserve that feeling that she can come out at any time and ruin everything. From the thread I've heard people say that they yelled, "Oh, gently caress, no! loving Marie!" and I want to preserve that feeling for as long as possible by not wearing her out. I think that Marie would be a seriously interesting protagonist for her own story, but it's not one I'm interested in writing at this time. Corporate intrigue is less something that the teens involve themselves in knowingly, but that filters down and drops on them like a meteor. You know, like regular people. What changes this from a normal corporate intrigue story is that they can toss that meteor back after it lands and occasionally it hits something important, though they rarely see the effects. Also that there are no faceless suits and CEO's devoid of personality, but people, with complexities. The faceless stuff is trope laziness, and one of my favorite moments was when this high powered police commissioner, Sasha's dad, gets drunk and intimidates Fuzzy, but then his daughter yells at him and he goes to bed to get further yelled at by his wife. And he turns into this high power police commissioner to this drunk, older man who's afraid for his daughter and dealing with it in a negative way. The evil that these executives is certainly banal and disconnected and very real, but all of those "empty suits" are filled with people. These people rely on their general anonymity from the public to get away with what they do. By making them people, I remind the reader that the people that do evil in the corporate world can be torn down. Anyway, short, high intensity conflicts are how I've written Marie so far and it works really well. As for mythos-lite, yeah, that's important. Shadowrun is absolutely full of the dumb that I love, but the plots about corporate maneuvering and dragons don't interest me unless it changes the life of ordinary people and those ordinary people can cause problems for them in return. poo poo flows downhill, but you can still punch upwards, and that's what I want out of the story and wish to convey. I've seen it happen. Not in the corporate world, but in politics. Punching upwards can be effective. The fact that you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening. Behind the scenes someone powerful is swearing and angry and in those moments they make mistakes. There's a lot to fill in with the lore already and I'd prefer to work with and recontextualize that lore. So for example I'm very interested in dealing with the Salish (A Northwestern Native American tribe) in a respectful way by approaching their culture and how they ended up owning most of their lands again in the lore rather than hand waving it and saying "Magic Natives". Because "Magic Natives" is treating Native Americans like they're more in tune with nature and wise and is like saying that all Asians are good at math. It's a stereotype. A positive one, but still racist. More that they're the first to find magic due to historical pressures of the time and that the lack of a hard counter meant that they were able to carve out their slice of the world. It turns out that bullets bounce off a powerful enough spirit and that's if they can hit them. A wind spirit that you can summon for 3000 nuyen can streak into the sky and destroy an 89.2 million Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning, and the magic users could produce more spirits than the old US government could produce planes and the planes were not meant for dog-fighting with magical beings. Like how iron age cultures rolled over bronze, gunpowder over iron, magic found the military industrial complex and rolled over that too. The Salish are no more magic than the next culture, they just found magic first and it turns out that it's pretty powerful. They were forced to look for answers in a dark time and found magic just as it was coming to be. So their culture is different in some ways and holds some different values, not inherently magical. Or not more than anyone else. This is my own headcannon, not Shadowrun lore. Or if it is, not very well explained. So what people default to is that magic natives took over the Western United States because they're magic natives. So what I'm going to be attempting in the next few books is to make the lore make sense in a way that isn't low-key racist while also diving into what's particularly interesting about Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest. Not just the Salish, but mostly the Salish as they're the most numerous and closest to Seattle in Shadowrun lore. I was reading a book on the Salish recently and it summed up culture pretty well. A little boy asks his grandmother what makes his culture special while they clean horse clams together for dinner and she says, "What makes our culture special is that we are from here. Other cultures, they are from elsewhere." And it's very simple, but there's stuff to unpack there. There's the implication of being tied to the land. That land has a shape to it and is inhabited with things that shape the Salish in return. Their history is there too and that history and being on that land gives them a sense of identity. Probably some other stuff that I'm missing as well. These are the kind of rabbit holes I go down to make the lore make sense and I might eventually dedicate a paragraph, maybe two to explaining it to keep it from becoming cumbersome. I love Shadowrun, but it's in desperate need of an update for the times. And I don't expect much if any of this to filter down into a game whose primary sellers make page after page of weapons and damage tables instead of dumping more lore. Also I'm talking about high level concepts for a game in which disposable mercenaries do crime. But that's okay. I enjoy writing it and people seem to enjoy reading it. So I keep writing. Not as much lately, but I've been on vacation and I'm refreshed and working on the next update. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jun 6, 2019 |
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Jun 6, 2019 17:42
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Ice Phisherman posted:Shadowrun stuff I love shadowrun so much. If anyone is interested in the setting I highly recommend the Dragonfall and Hong Kong games from HBS. As much as I'm looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077, Shadowrun has this aesthetic that is in a class all of it's own. The mash up of magic and corporatism is just so fun. Magical Fallout and eviromental disasters, dragons running for president, the Magical Empire of Japan, goblin rock and metahuman racial tensions. It's just really great lol.
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Jun 6, 2019 21:50
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SerCypher posted:I love shadowrun so much. If anyone is interested in the setting I highly recommend the Dragonfall and Hong Kong games from HBS. A dragon running for the presidency, winning it and then getting assassinated. Then his death opens up an astral rift in the Watergate hotel because Shadowrun is loving bonkers. What I think is most interesting about Shadowrun is actually the racial tension. In most fiction, authors drop in elves and dwarves and orcs and such into their story without much thought. The fantasy races are badly implemented, meaning that they don't really have a narrative function beyond the fact that they're recognizable. In Shadowrun, the fantasy races are born into the world within a few decades of one another and the humans react so badly that there are worldwide race riots after they get the vote. So the bad implementation is the point. It's a solid lens to view race relations and I do that. In Shadowrun, there's a split between what's called Pink Mohawk and Black Trenchcoat. Pink Mohawk is the absolute bonkers nature of car chases, explosions, evil spirits terrorizing people like a Ghostbusters movie and people who are so chromed out with illegal cyberware that they hum like a refrigerator that can also kill you. If it's cool and violent, you do it. And the cooler and more violent it is, the more Pink Mohawk it is. Black Trenchcoat is more in the line of cloak and dagger, stealth, secrecy, operations that go off just as planned. Think something more along the lines of Ghost in the Shell, which is where Shadowrun 4th and 5th edition took a lot of cues from. And if you're not familiar with that, imagine a future police procedural, but with cybernetics and in Japan and weird poo poo happens because the future is weird. I started with Black Trenchcoat because that's the part of Shadowrun I grew up with. In the story, as the social order breaks down at an unacceptable rate (more than it's already broken down), I'm flirting more and more with the idea of going Pink Mohawk as the world grows bad and weird once more. And this is somewhat of a reflection of the current times because the world at large isn't pretending to be serious anymore. It's bad and weird, and continuing to pretend to take it seriously is a delusion by people who desperately want to cling to normalcy that never actually existed. The mask is off and only continues to exist if you tune into people telling you that no, no, it's totally on. We're all very serious here. At the same time, the characters are not emotionless sociopaths, so actually killing people is something they try to avoid doing. This causes conflict with the genre as this particular flavor of cyberpunk is literally doing crimes for money in the future. Not wasting people is harder than just wasting them, but if they start murdering people that's a serious problem for their emotional well-being and probably their legal well-being too. Pink Mohawk is fun as gently caress though.  I do really suggest Shadowrun by HBS though. Even though it's not as highly rated, I prefer Hong Kong over Dragonfall, though that's because I have a fondness for Hong Kong in general.
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Jun 6, 2019 23:06
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Ice Phisherman posted:
I feel people think Dragonfall is better than HK mostly because it came before it. If HK came out before DF, people would say it was the superior one. They're both good. Skip Shadowrun: Returns, though.
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Jun 6, 2019 23:47
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Ice Phisherman posted:
This is very interesting to read, since I imagine it's somewhat similar to the process the guy who writes Forge/Threads of Destiny uses. I've often thought "this guy must put a ridiculous amount of thought into his characters/setting in order to keep things consistent and interesting" and it seems like my assumption about the requirements for crafting that sort of player-choice-driven story was pretty accurate. That story has a similar situation where certain characters were possible "player characters," and you can tell which ones fit certain templates that the audience had to choose from at the beginning (TBH I kind of wish the audience had gone with a female version of Han Jian's general character "template"). It's interesting to think about how things could have gone if different choices had been made. On the topic of "CYOA/quest"-style serials, do you have any that you recommend? I think that the basic format of a CYOA story with stats and dice rolls happening behind the scenes is super cool, but it seems like it requires a lot of skill and effort on the part of the writer and most other quests I tried to read weren't very good. Omi no Kami posted:The whole Amy thing weirds me out so much. Like, I found it odd how much support she had post-Worm but kinda saw where people were coming from, but the latest chapter had "Oops, Amy sneezed and squidded + mindraped another blonde chick," Amy very explicitly going around earth Shin mindraping prisoners 1984-style, and WB himself going "Guys, the best simile I can think of for what happened in Worm was Amy the surgeon dragging a patient into a condemned tenement while she fought to get away and all of her friends went 'this is a bad idea', then doing horrible mad science surgery for days while her victim clearly and repeatedly expressed that she did not consent.' The fandom seems to rely heavily on "but Victoria also mindraped* Amy," which (even if it was the case - I'm not sure if this is actually canon) is something Victoria had zero awareness of. More broadly it makes me think of the mindset of people who treat others badly in relationships or families and are so self-centered in that mindset that they feel like the other person still owes them forgiveness if they stop being bad (or guys who think women somehow owe them kindness if their romantic advances are rejected). There are a lot of people like this IRL, which is why the responses in the fandom kind of weird me out, since I feel like it's indicative of a mindset that likely has (or has had) actual consequences in these peoples' real lives. * I dislike this term, but it kind of uniquely applies to what Amy did
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Jun 7, 2019 03:21
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about writing
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I truly, utterly despise every single aspect of the term "mindrape."
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Jun 7, 2019 03:34
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Ytlaya posted:This is very interesting to read, since I imagine it's somewhat similar to the process the guy who writes Forge/Threads of Destiny uses. I've often thought "this guy must put a ridiculous amount of thought into his characters/setting in order to keep things consistent and interesting" and it seems like my assumption about the requirements for crafting that sort of player-choice-driven story was pretty accurate. Thank you. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. quote:That story has a similar situation where certain characters were possible "player characters," and you can tell which ones fit certain templates that the audience had to choose from at the beginning (TBH I kind of wish the audience had gone with a female version of Han Jian's general character "template"). It's interesting to think about how things could have gone if different choices had been made. Honestly if it went differently, say if we only stuck with one character, I don't think I would've stuck with the story as long as I have. quote:On the topic of "CYOA/quest"-style serials, do you have any that you recommend? Other than Worm and Ward? None really. I've been following WB's stuff since about 2014, 2015, and because there's an audiobook project, that's probably what keeps me hooked. I listen to his stuff while driving or when I'm well enough to work out. quote:I think that the basic format of a CYOA story with stats and dice rolls happening behind the scenes is super cool, but it seems like it requires a lot of skill and effort on the part of the writer and most other quests I tried to read weren't very good. It really does take a ton of skill and effort and time. There will be times where I have writer's block and will just stop. And trying to force it almost always leads to problems. Whether that's substandard writing or getting narratively stuck. So I'll wait for days, weeks or up to a month before continuing because I want to put forth a good story first. If it doesn't feel right, I don't type. This means that my pace can be slow at times, but I do put out something that I'm satisfied with. And the audience participation/dice rolling helps me from being paralyzed by choice or picking favorites. Failure happens. Not often because the characters are usually more powerful than street level shadowrun gaming, but aren't optimized for a standard campaign. What you don't see on the website are the outlines. Some of which I erase, some of which I keep, some of which I provide detail, some of which I don't. And if you dig you'll find my thoughts and notes in them as I plan on what to write. I think that between what I post and what I erase, I'm typing one letter of outlines for every two of story. So it's very time and labor intensive, but once I really start writing, the process tends to be very smooth with a minimum of stops. quote:The fandom seems to rely heavily on "but Victoria also mindraped* Amy," which (even if it was the case - I'm not sure if this is actually canon) is something Victoria had zero awareness of. Forgiveness is a tricky thing. In the technical sense, you can't be forgiven. It isn't possible. What someone expressing forgiveness does is allow you to better forgive yourself. I personally see forgiving others, so much as that is possible, as freeing yourself from the transgressor. They no longer occupy head space in your brain, or less than before anyway. Forgiveness isn't owed, it can't be earned, it is not transaction, it can be expressed to another person, but in the end you can only forgive yourself or let your negative feelings no longer dominate you, which I suppose amounts to forgiveness for another person when you notify them of that. Amy's transgressions were horrible and you could sort of understand why she acted why she did early on. However, she repeatedly ignored consent over and over again and wants to be close to Victoria despite her lack of consent. People remember Amy being relatable and kind, but now she's basically a sympathetic monster on an increasingly horrible downward spiral. Or maybe she was always like that and her personality is being revealed. Personally, I don't really care because the outcome is largely the same. Amy is Victoria's family, and family knows how to hurt you the most, and Amy repeatedly hurts Victoria the most because of her romantic feelings for her adopted sister. Personally I think that Victoria forgiving Amy would be cathartic. Not for Amy, but Victoria. It means that she will have mastered her feelings over what happened and can live with the horror more effectively. However, forgiveness does not mean trust, and Amy should still be told to stay away or Victoria will rip off her head. "You meant well, but you're flawed because we're all flawed. You did some hosed up things to me, but it was in part to save my life. I hate what happened to me, but I don't hate you anymore, because I don't want you living rent free in my head any longer. So I forgive you, but I'll never trust you again and I'll certainly never think of you as my sister ever again. And now that I've forgiven you, you're dead to me. So gently caress off forever." In tabletop terms, there's a term for a character like Amy. I like to think of her as a tragic monster. At one point she may have been good and was portrayed as such, and there is good in her, but all she does recently is evil. All she did since the Echidna fight was evil or necessary, depending on the moment. If we started with Amy mindraping her sister, people would hate her. But because we started much earlier than that, and we saw a slip in behavior turn tragic, trying to save her sister turned her into a Kronenburg, you can understand what she does and why. The tragic monster is the person you or others make excuses for. They prey on your feelings. They remind you of better times. And slowly, bit by bit, as they slip further into darkness, people hold fast to their excuses rather than drawing firm lines in the sand about what is right or wrong. Instead, what's right and wrong depends on first impressions and personality. Their morality is flexible, not fixed. Not to speak of moral absolutism, that's different. I mean that if they draw a line in the sand and someone steps over it, they'll make excuses and seek to understand rather than engage in conflict over the transgression. Amy is a loving monster. It doesn't matter if she feels bad about what she does, because she keeps doing monstrous things. Remorse doesn't matter unless its corrective. Guilt doesn't matter unless it creates limits. And if you can't distinguish between a tragic monster and a regular monster by their outcomes, then they're equally monstrous. There's just more than one path to the mountaintop. And Amy takes the path of rationalizing her evils rather than owning them. She still ends up in the same place, the outcomes indistinguishable from a monster. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Jun 7, 2019 |
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Jun 7, 2019 03:58
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quote:Amy is a loving monster. It doesn't matter if she feels bad about what she does, because she keeps doing monstrous things. Remorse doesn't matter unless its corrective. Guilt doesn't matter unless it creates limits. And if you can't distinguish between a tragic monster and a regular monster by their outcomes, then they're equally monstrous. There's just more than one path to the mountaintop. And Amy takes the path of rationalizing her evils rather than owning them. She still ends up in the same place, the outcomes indistinguishable from a monster. I feel like replacing Amy with Taylor in this should tell people all you need to know about people being so defensive of her. Between this and the Browbeat thing, I really sometimes feel like Ward is written to take shots at the fandom.
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Jun 7, 2019 04:25
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Ytlaya posted:On the topic of "CYOA/quest"-style serials, do you have any that you recommend? I think that the basic format of a CYOA story with stats and dice rolls happening behind the scenes is super cool, but it seems like it requires a lot of skill and effort on the part of the writer and most other quests I tried to read weren't very good. Now You Feel Like Number None (Bleach) has already been recced - great fights and great romance in an area of Bleach not often explored. Otherwise, I'm a big fan of Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest (original), which despite its horrendous name, is a fantastic take on the battle academy and mecha genre from the perspective of a traumatized child soldier, Panopticon (Old World of Darkness) for old spies, conspiracies, and disruptive phone calls, and To Be A Master (Pokemon / Your Name) for probably the best system (and correspondingly, great fights) I've seen for Pokemon battles, interesting musings on Pokemon mythology, and great duo protagonists.
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Jun 7, 2019 06:57
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One thing I find kind of implausible that I think you're just supposed to ignore is the whole fact that Goddess was able to take over her planet in the first place. That one guy described them considering it a victory if only 30 people died in the process of killing a parahuman, but the vast majority of parahumans are extremely vulnerable to regular guns and IIRC there are at least 10,000 people for every parahuman (and I think more than that). It's true that there are some parahumans who are basically invulnerable to all normal weapons, but they make up a minority of parahumans and they can't be everywhere at once.Milkfred E. Moore posted:I feel like replacing Amy with Taylor in this should tell people all you need to know about people being so defensive of her. Between this and the Browbeat thing, I really sometimes feel like Ward is written to take shots at the fandom. What Browbeat thing? Ice Phisherman posted:Personally I think that Victoria forgiving Amy would be cathartic. Not for Amy, but Victoria. It means that she will have mastered her feelings over what happened and can live with the horror more effectively. However, forgiveness does not mean trust, and Amy should still be told to stay away or Victoria will rip off her head. "You meant well, but you're flawed because we're all flawed. You did some hosed up things to me, but it was in part to save my life. I hate what happened to me, but I don't hate you anymore, because I don't want you living rent free in my head any longer. So I forgive you, but I'll never trust you again and I'll certainly never think of you as my sister ever again. And now that I've forgiven you, you're dead to me. So gently caress off forever." I feel like you're using a different definition of forgiveness here than most people are when they talk about this in the comments, etc. I think that the forgiveness other people are talking about is more a sort of "reconciliation," where someone repairs their relationship with the person they're forgiving. But as for the forgiveness you mention, I'm a little unclear as to how someone can simultaneously forgive someone and still never trust them again. Like, the latter kinda implies that you have not really improved your evaluation of that person and still believe that they are capable of doing the same sort of harm again. It seems like what you're describing is more just "recovering," which can happen independently of forgiveness (that is, Victoria can become healthier mentally/emotionally and rarely think about Amy without forgiving her).
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Jun 7, 2019 07:09
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Ytlaya posted:One thing I find kind of implausible that I think you're just supposed to ignore is the whole fact that Goddess was able to take over her planet in the first place. That one guy described them considering it a victory if only 30 people died in the process of killing a parahuman, but the vast majority of parahumans are extremely vulnerable to regular guns and IIRC there are at least 10,000 people for every parahuman (and I think more than that). It's true that there are some parahumans who are basically invulnerable to all normal weapons, but they make up a minority of parahumans and they can't be everywhere at once.. i think wildbow wanted to make it clear that parahumans aren't invincible which is why almost all of them have no defensive powers, but then for some reason non-parahuman crime apparently doesnt exist. if people hated parahumans as much as the story claims youd think there'd be a lot more people sniping parahumans, especially because even ultra powerful ones like Taylor and Tattletale aren't omniscient. Like nobody ever thought to put IEDs in the neighborhoods where they hang out or something. it's just weird that the setting's back story makes a big deal out of that one guy dying in a sports riot when hes basically the only one to ever be killed by normals
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Jun 7, 2019 08:34
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Man, gently caress the Wandering Bard.
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Jun 7, 2019 09:14
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SerSpook posted:Man, gently caress the Wandering Bard. I was talking about this with Korgan, and man alive, she needs a shank.
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Jun 7, 2019 09:31
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The Dead King is going to.
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Jun 7, 2019 09:32
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I'm pretty sure the Bard did that more because of Masego's goals and his whole schtick of dissecting miracles and whatnot too. Not because he's Evil and a Villain, there are way more worthy people to be targeted for those reasons... like Tyrant. Or Catherine herself. He had the chance to pull back the curtain and figure out what's really going on.
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Jun 7, 2019 10:14
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Ytlaya posted:What Browbeat thing? Wildbow made a series of edits to Worm recently. What they were was to kill Browbeat during Leviathan's attack on Brockton Bay and remove all mention of him afterward. I think it affected about a dozen chapters. The reasoning is that he may have gotten tired of a fandom meme that every new character is actually Browbeat in disguise or something.
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Jun 7, 2019 12:02
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PracGuide: So that's names lost for Cat, Vivienne and Akua, magic lost for Masego, and presumably Archer is going to lose something when she gets resurrected. That leaves Hakram as possibly the only Named left in the Woe, which makes me assume that isn't lasting long for him either.
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Jun 7, 2019 16:11
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