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Ytlaya posted:PracGuide Epilogue (or the first part of it anyways) was really good. I kind of felt bad for Hanno when Cat is asking to un-paralyze Hakram. Poor guy has lost a bunch of the heroes he seemed closest to, including the one he loved (even if not exactly romantically), and Catherine is begging him to heal the one member of her party that didn't come out relatively unscathed. There are other good reasons to help Hakram, so it's not exactly a bad choice, though they weren't mentioned (namely the fact that he's the Warlord and fills a very important and hard to replace role as the orc leader). Vivian just losing a hand in exchange for healing Hakram's memory was also a pretty minor cost (especially since magical prosthetics aren't hard to get in this setting). It just kind of stands out given the huge number of other prominent Named who died. The author does explain this. Undo requires the action be unjust and Hanno doesn't believe it's unjust to die willingly for something greater than yourself. This removes all the relevant Named including the Witch.
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Feb 23, 2022 19:00
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I've been reading The Wandering Inn by browser reader mode this whole time so I've been missing skill colors. Always wondered what the characters were talking about when they mentioned them.
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Feb 24, 2022 00:12
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asur posted:The author does explain this. Undo requires the action be unjust and Hanno doesn't believe it's unjust to die willingly for something greater than yourself. This removes all the relevant Named including the Witch. I had no problem with the use of Undo being possible; that made perfect sense. Hakram becoming injured wasn't something "done in exchange" for defeating the Prince, while the Witch deliberately traded her life for being able to defeat the Drakon. I just felt bad for Hanno on a personal level, having just had almost everyone close to him die and then having Cat be like "the people closest to me are mostly fine, except one who is paralyzed, so can you fix him using your ability that can only be used once a day?" I don't really blame Cat, since she knew that her request was extremely brazen, thus the kneeling.
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Feb 24, 2022 00:58
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Ytlaya posted:I had no problem with the use of Undo being possible; that made perfect sense. Hakram becoming injured wasn't something "done in exchange" for defeating the Prince, while the Witch deliberately traded her life for being able to defeat the Drakon. I just felt bad for Hanno on a personal level, having just had almost everyone close to him die and then having Cat be like "the people closest to me are mostly fine, except one who is paralyzed, so can you fix him using your ability that can only be used once a day?" I don't really blame Cat, since she knew that her request was extremely brazen, thus the kneeling. Hanno is a pretty tragic figure and that's why I like him so much. I like that in a story where the heroes are generally antagonists, most of them are still very relatable and you want them to succeed.
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Feb 24, 2022 03:41
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Man, I really should've listened when people said the ending of the Fifth Defiance was bad. It's such a massive cop out that I regret reading it in the first place.
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Feb 24, 2022 04:37
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Tagichatn posted:Man, I really should've listened when people said the ending of the Fifth Defiance was bad. It's such a massive cop out that I regret reading it in the first place. Massive same, what a poo poo ending
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Feb 24, 2022 14:58
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I wonder if the Fifth Defiance started out as a forum game? The concept of person with lots of ghosts advising them is such a perfect metaphor for voting based decision making and also a justification for the oddball decisions voters sometimes make.
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Feb 24, 2022 15:32
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I don't think so. Near the end of story, the author does start up a separate cyoa story set in the same universe.
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Feb 24, 2022 17:32
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Which, IMO, that starting up is right about when the quality started to dip and overall felt like threads were getting dropped and there was a race to the end
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Feb 24, 2022 18:50
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LLSix posted:I wonder if the Fifth Defiance started out as a forum game? The concept of person with lots of ghosts advising them is such a perfect metaphor for voting based decision making and also a justification for the oddball decisions voters sometimes make. i actually spoke with the author (friends with them on discord) they were basically heavily inspired by worm, but also inspired by MSPA style works (they even have reader directed Quests pop up near the end). They just lost most enthusiasm near the end of the work due to the works failure to attract any meaningful audience. still, I consider the work to be a worthwhile read just for how interesting and batshit it got in the middle acts. I kind of love Prevailer as a character just because she reminds me of Snoop from the Wire with super powers and zero impulse control
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Feb 24, 2022 23:56
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It has a lot of extremely interesting ideas. If it got some polish and cut some fat it would be ftw.
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Feb 25, 2022 04:00
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I just bounced off a serial so dumb, I have to share it. The story pitch is that the MC is stuck in a VRMMO and wants to be an alchemist. So far, so good. Three chapters in we learn that she’s stuck in an ultra-realism server, with no stats or character sheet. She does, however, have an inventory. Just, why? If you want to write a fantasy story, do that. Why make a VRMMO story without stats? 
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Feb 25, 2022 06:36
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Tagichatn posted:Man, I really should've listened when people said the ending of the Fifth Defiance was bad. It's such a massive cop out that I regret reading it in the first place. So I’m reading it and have been planning to drop it cause it’s just getting unbearable. Mind spoiling the ending for me, so I can just quit?
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Feb 25, 2022 06:52
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LLSix posted:I just bounced off a serial so dumb, I have to share it. The story pitch is that the MC is stuck in a VRMMO and wants to be an alchemist. So far, so good. Three chapters in we learn that she’s stuck in an ultra-realism server, with no stats or character sheet. She does, however, have an inventory. Just, why? If you want to write a fantasy story, do that. Why make a VRMMO story without stats? maybe they're gonna get weird with it .hack/sign style
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Feb 25, 2022 06:55
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navyjack posted:So I’m reading it and have been planning to drop it cause it’s just getting unbearable. Mind spoiling the ending for me, so I can just quit? A bunch of stuff happens that doesn't really matter, and then Haunter has a conversation with the Grabby in charge of Remover where said Grabby reveals that it can perfectly predict and manipulate human behaviour, and has orchestrated everything that has happened in the story. It then offers the Jury a choice of 6 lovely things, only one of which has can be prevented, and the story ends without finding out what the Jury picks. It's basically a much worse version of the ending of Mass Effect 3
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Feb 25, 2022 08:23
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Patrick Spens posted:It's basically a much worse version of the ending of Mass Effect 3 lmao, this is one of the most casually damning condemnations of an ending I've heard.
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Feb 25, 2022 08:33
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A big flaming stink posted:i actually spoke with the author (friends with them on discord) they were basically heavily inspired by worm, but also inspired by MSPA style works (they even have reader directed Quests pop up near the end). They just lost most enthusiasm near the end of the work due to the works failure to attract any meaningful audience. That sucks. I know a couple of series that got dropped because the they weren't popular enough, it's always disappointing but I can see how it must be hard on authors that work hard to put out chapters on time and get basically no support.
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Feb 25, 2022 08:39
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LLSix posted:I just bounced off a serial so dumb, I have to share it. The story pitch is that the MC is stuck in a VRMMO and wants to be an alchemist. So far, so good. Three chapters in we learn that she’s stuck in an ultra-realism server, with no stats or character sheet. She does, however, have an inventory. Just, why? If you want to write a fantasy story, do that. Why make a VRMMO story without stats? I don't mind that premise as much and it's in my opinion an interesting take on the concept of VRMMOs. Also the inventory isn't an actual inventory. It's a bag of holding with an inventory style interface and it's limited in how much space it has and only things that can fit within the opening of the bag can be put into it. I suspect the idea is that it was created with the interface.
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Feb 25, 2022 08:58
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https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46799/the-nine-tails-of-alchemy/ The fiction in question. Certain aspects of it wouldn't work if it was a regular fantasy instead of a VRMMO, like the whole thing with people trying to discover how the new game works. Also the super realism is an interesting concept because one of the reasons we don't have games like that is the lack of technological capability for it. We don't even have actual VRMMOs yet. I can easily see how such a game wouldn't be for everyone but some people would absolutely love the experience.
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Feb 25, 2022 09:21
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LLSix posted:I just bounced off a serial so dumb, I have to share it. The story pitch is that the MC is stuck in a VRMMO and wants to be an alchemist. So far, so good. Three chapters in we learn that she’s stuck in an ultra-realism server, with no stats or character sheet. She does, however, have an inventory. Just, why? If you want to write a fantasy story, do that. Why make a VRMMO story without stats? I mean, you might want to do a "you're inside a VR" story without endless barf of blue boxes all over the pages. Matrix is one, for example. Serials-wise, This Used To Be About Dungeons kinda is one.
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Feb 25, 2022 12:36
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I can't get behind the complaints for the Fifth Defiance because endings that leave me wondering is actually you know, what I want out of endings. And this one puts the pedal to the metal in that respect. The problem with Mass Effect was that all the ending choices sucked rear end and meant a lowering of the bar. Diminishing things. Winnowing down the TFD ending to something more pedestrian constitutes such a diminishing of the work, for me, that I genuinely can't understand why anyone would ask for it. I really would like to hear people articulate what they don't like about it, exactly. Was it just too brusque? I guess I can see that
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Feb 25, 2022 14:11
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Megazver posted:I mean, you might want to do a "you're inside a VR" story without endless barf of blue boxes all over the pages. Yeah I actually like the setup in that story the poster rejected. So far it's proving interesting, particularly with stuff like having to worry about transportation of reagents and stuff and the MC amassing a whole lot of tools and also storage shelves and containers and the like because alchemy isn't abstracted out like it is in most games. Also the outside world actually plays some role in the story, in a way that you couldn't get without it being a VRMMO story.
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Feb 25, 2022 14:58
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Ok, so a bit more explanation of my issues with the ending of TFD: The revelation that Remover is the motivating force behind all of the bad things in the story saps all those bad things of any impact and meaning. Prevailer doesn't go round the bend because of a haunting combination of her own trauma, her supervisor's petty spite and her own lack of impulse control, it's because she's being manipulated by an omnipotent monster that knows exactly how to throw her round the bend. It does the same thing for any of the mysteries in the plot or setting, "Hey how is the Fourth Fist throwing of Answerer's predictions?" "Because that thing that controls all the powers in the setting wills it" "How do Zeus and Isis manage to keep a thousand traumatized children with the power of gods from self destructing?" "Because the devil from beyond space and time wills it" All questions have the same answer, which means all questions have a lousy answer. And there's a way in which this all works as some kind of stripped down meditation on The Meaning of Stories with Remover as the stand in for the author, and the Jury as stand in for the reader, but that goes back to what I said about it being a worse version of the ending to Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect has a bunch of things going on, but is very much a series of games about the player making decisions and choices, and then seeing the (sometimes very far reaching and difficult to predict) results of those choices. And then the very end of the series is another choice, that you don't see the results of. The point is that the choices you make in the game aren't important because of which character you save or kill, or what cut scene you see, but because they are a reflection and interrogation of the values that you bring to the game when you make your choices. I kinda like the ending to ME3 to be honest. It works a whole lot worse because a)TFD can't be a story about the reader making choices in the way that Mass Effect is b)The Jury makes a terrible stand in for the reader and c)what the gently caress is TFD trying to say about stories here? The choices presented in the dialogue between Remover and Haunter are, "Authors of fiction where bad things happen are inhuman psychopaths" or, "None of this matters because characters in stories aren't real lol". And uh, not a huge fan of either of those. The ending of TFD is deeply unsatisfying and depressing, which can be fine, because that's clearly what it's going for. But it's also shoddy and rushed and doesn't have anything meaningful to actually say, which is much less fine.
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Feb 25, 2022 16:46
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Ramblepost: I don't blame authors for wanting to abstract inventory, either entirely or partially. Writing a main character who uses a spear, I have to constantly think about things like 'Can he fit here with it, can he sit down with it on his back, where does he put it when doing X' to the point that I gave him an extra hands power to just make shuffling weapons easier and let him grab cliffs ect. Same with eventually giving him a storage ring... I kept imaging my MC using a cloaking cape over his backpack and it being something like a hunchbacked predator. Which now that I've typed that maybe I should have put someone calling him out on that in the story... Hmm. I actually like de-gamifying all the stuff around the edges, part of why TUTBAD is one of my favorite stories. The idea that exploring you only have so much carrying capacity, both with weight and storage, where you can put things like weapons and potions on a person that they can be grabbed fast enough to use, as well as problems with transporting, say, a stack of paintings, which are bulky AND fragile. TUTBAD in particular has a defined policy with how the characters secure a site first then collect loot and assess what's worth carrying out and what's not worth it, but how about a situation where there's respawning or some other pressure factor where you can't completely make a space safe? The way a character thinks about the stuff they are carrying is a chance to show off their personality: Do they try to take a little too much? Do they complain about the weight or bear it quietly? Does the person who seems sloppy and careless at first glance somehow get a huge object into a house without scraping any walls or doors? Same with actually selling stuff: The adventurers guild exists so that the writer doesn't have to think about who's buying 6000 tons of wolf meat or 500 orc's teeth... but in a modern society there's only so many people buying silver or gold or bulletproof armor. If you discovered a secret dungeon that you could pull out powerful items from... how would you sell them in the modern world? The utility of a flaming sword is that it's cool looking, not that it's useful in day to day life, nor is it more useful then a normal sword if you are not fighting something that's so tough it needs to be cut and burned to help put it down faster. You would need connections with someone who can find a client who wants what your selling, or people who also know about magic dungeons and thus are competitions for selling your item supply, or at best people who are bartering with you to try to fill out gear they have too much of for things they want or need... The further economy question includes things like infinite or respawning resource dungeons, which I feel was sort of covered by the Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter 'Long Earth' series where people figure out how to very easily and cheaply step sideways into a nearly unlimited supply of empty worlds. Not a major spoiler, but the moment people can just step sideways to get land or find natural resources, it messes up a world economy based on scarcity. Would there be a push to explore the actual world if there were dungeons in exploration age countries that could sustain settlers? Possibly, assuming you can't just find spices in the dungeon. That leads me to think about the whole JRPG set up where there's an open dungeon that anyone can just waltz into... 'Why yes, come into the diamond mine in the middle of the city where peasants can become stronger and more dangerous then a battleship!'. Most stories now have some limit that accounts for this, but the cynic in me thinks that if there's any scarcity of dungeon entrances, then societies would make them fortified and monopolize on them as much as possible. If walking into a dungeon you get your own green field and forest with critters to hunt for food, water, and some trade goods... you might have a titanic first floor that's dotted with tent cities or just flat out real ones. I kinda think that could be the basis for the start of a "sort of isekai" story... you have a group who started a compound in some distant part of a dungeon floor in an instanced dungeon and you have a teen stroll out who's been fighting dungeon monsters in the middle of doing chores for years... But yes! Inventory! VRMMO and other stories where the system gives someone a lot of storage is an 'out' in that if your character needs 200 feet of rope, a line 50 chapters earlier where they spent 50 gold to buy everything they might ever need for an adventure ten times over means, as a writer, you don't have to wring your hands about it nor include mules... but I like the image of a group carrying big backpacks laden with little tools and trinkets and weapons walking through the wilderness. It I think explains a lot of cliches because we grew up watching action stories and anime where people are leaping between trains and grabbing onto ledges and having sword duels on a rocket about to launch a nuke at wherever... all those things require agility, and so characters often carry as little as possible. Reading about a world creates a problem when you have a desire to make that action happen, and a lot of the LITRPG cliches mentioned above are there to get people to the life-and-death drama while skipping the details (storage rings/a guild who buys everything/dungeon is open to everyone).
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Feb 25, 2022 17:24
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Kaja Rainbow posted:https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46799/the-nine-tails-of-alchemy/ I got bored with the story pretty fast, but yeah, it's a story that would have to be very different to not be a VRMMO. At least in the part I read the real-world stuff was what drove the plot, not anything that happened in game.
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Feb 25, 2022 21:35
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Megazver posted:I mean, you might want to do a "you're inside a VR" story without endless barf of blue boxes all over the pages. If it's a Matrix thing, where the tension between the real and unreal is a central plot point, then fair enough.
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Feb 25, 2022 23:23
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Megazver posted:I mean, you might want to do a "you're inside a VR" story without endless barf of blue boxes all over the pages. MDA is essentially this with magic VR I like the sort of narrative conceits and plot beats that a tangible stat system creates, but I also watched enough DBZ to know the dangers of making the numbers explicit and audience-facing. Thus, implied stats, also a lot of the real world/other world interaction stuff mentioned in other posts. ...But I'm also a huge list of examples of what not to write if you want to "make it," so consider this as potential anti-advice. Blue boxes sell, baby, people love stats show em da numbers
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Feb 26, 2022 02:18
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Plorkyeran posted:I bet you all can guess which story's author wrote this: Oh wow, it was Beware Of Chicken by Casualfarmer Vol 2 Epilouge. I did not see that coming. It is the most wholesome, friendly of the books I'm following on RoyalRoad. It was planned as smut?
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Feb 26, 2022 02:32
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End of Prac guide. a comparatively happy one.
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Feb 26, 2022 02:44
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And so pgte ends with a massive injection of pure fanservice straight into our veins. And EE once again falsely declaring the longest chapter in the series 
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Feb 26, 2022 04:52
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After so many years of reading about Cat's adventures, this is the ending I wanted. Honestly, I was expecting something more bittersweet, but a timeskip montage that ends with a bunch of friends sailing off into the sunrise was better IMO. Also, Cat buying a bar where she used to brawl was a nice touch. Narmi fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 04:58
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Really great epilogue lol. I like how the world has changed so fundamentally it's basically a different setting. It really is a new Age, the age of d&d style fantasy and not epic LotR style stuff.
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Feb 26, 2022 06:46
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The patreon chapters were just made public.
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Feb 26, 2022 17:55
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dis astranagant posted:The patreon chapters were just made public.
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Feb 26, 2022 19:56
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That was a great conclusion. Although it took a while to finally get to Keter, everything from there to the end was real good.
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Feb 26, 2022 20:39
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This week's patron Katalepsis chapter was extremely entertaining for a chapter where absolutely nothing actually happened.
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Feb 27, 2022 04:07
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TWI Patreon the entire chapter could have been a single word, and it would have been a 10/10 chapter
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Feb 27, 2022 05:44
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Plorkyeran posted:This week's patron Katalepsis chapter was extremely entertaining for a chapter where absolutely nothing actually happened. I shall take that as a compliment! Thank you! Seriously though, I always get really concerned whenever a chapter turns out like this, super-decompressed and such, even when the needs of the narrative and characterisation demand it. But then I publish it and the patrons really enjoy it, so I guess I must be doing something right!
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Feb 27, 2022 17:17
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Kaja Rainbow posted:https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46799/the-nine-tails-of-alchemy/ I gave this a shot and it was decent? I mean it's not going to be declared a masterpiece, but for a web serial I had no issues with it. It's a VRMMO story about a murder victim stuck in a game while her body is technically alive on life support that just doesn't use litrpg stats but has spatial storage items and there's nothing really wrong with that. OTOH why the author thought it was fun to give us thousands of words about the MC going stall to stall in a market buying basic equipment for an alchemy lab I have no idea, but they seem to have gotten better and learned they can skip over the boring parts later. I don't know if I'll continue now that I'm caught up but it was a decent enough way to pass the time. Bremen fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 18:38
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It was a very good chapter. Maybe they should have introduced Tenny separately but it's an easy mistake to make.
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