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Joke 1: Erfworld has become an exercise in depth-first storytelling. Joke 2: nimby posted:To truly show how Towers use Language and Signs, Balder will have to create a vivid dreamscape people will have to jack into to continue the story. Erfworld has been nothing more than a viral marketing ploy for both Star Citizen and Cyberpunk 2077.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:20
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isndl posted:The majority of main characters end up in jail because even Rob realizes the magic spam is getting bullshit so he has to take magic off the table. Except then they can't do anything so they get some string magic and source-power and then we're right back in bullshit territory again. And string magic and source power ends up being even more ridiculous than what we've seen so far, and it's being done by a bunch of new side characters that we don't really care about that much. Main Paineframe posted:The thing is that heirs have been a big important plot point more than once. For example, it's the reason why Stanley is never allowed to go and help out in Parson's big battles. Aside from Charlie, just about every side that's gotten significant focus has had to deal with the limitations and requirements around heirs and ruler deaths...until now, at least! Yeah, I guess the new cheat for getting around the heir business is supposed to be a huge deal, but holy poo poo does it not even feel like it matters at this point. If it did, then there had to be a much, much less complicated and rule-breaking way to get to this point, if it was supposed to stand out. I'm with the OotS forums, gently caress this drat comic already. I think I'm already in the hate-watch category, which really sucks, because a couple years ago this was a really interesting and fun-to-read story. If he had gone from Portal Park to this standoff with TV and Charlie in a quarter of the time with a quarter of the rule-breaking, he could have had a reasonable climax here with the towers becoming sentient and Caesar's suicide and then a display of the towers' enormous powers. It just went way off the rails at some point.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:49
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If people are just going to hate-watch, I politely request that they make their own thread.
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Oct 23, 2018 17:51
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Main Paineframe posted:
Charlie was locked up in the play room thing/ withdrawal incapacitated.
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Oct 23, 2018 18:19
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Rand Brittain posted:If people are just going to hate-watch, I politely request that they make their own thread. No hate here. I'm still enjoying it and appreciating what it does well, I just don't respect it, and having fun with the struggle to put words to its problems.
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Oct 24, 2018 02:29
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Rand Brittain posted:If people are just going to hate-watch, I politely request that they make their own thread. Yeah, this seems unnecessarily hand-wringy. People can voice their dissatisfaction with a piece of media without making a whole new thread. Sorry if you'll have to scroll past negative posts once in a while.
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Oct 24, 2018 19:59
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Hob_Gadling posted:After this I hope Balder doesn't change his mind and wimp out. We're on the path of breaking down everything, he should instead double down and start to break down the structure of comic next. Maybe have a few voiceover episodes, a video of interpretative dance, a sculpture to represent the latest agreement over psychosurgery over contract over ceasefire over sides that have ceased to exist. Go super saiyan and full meta. Because farting back into kinda sorta wargame-y environment is just not possible anymore, that ship has long since sailed. Hey, now, this isn't Homestuck...
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Oct 25, 2018 04:23
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things get kinda weird when people start saying that they're hatewatching but like only one person said that so i think that might've been a bit premature yeah
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Oct 25, 2018 10:12
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Eh, all it really means to me is that I've been pissed off at where the comic has been going for a while but I refuse to stop reading because I thought it was really good once upon a time and I hope it gets back there again. It's funny to read back through the thread, because opinions started to take a steady downturn around the aftermath of the Portal Park battle, and hell, I defended it. I kept saying that yes, I thought it was dragging on a little bit, but it's just because it's a slow-update web comic, and once you're able to read it all straight through without waiting, it'll just be a quick interlude. And then the "interlude" just kept going and going.  I really hope Balder takes a step back and resets his focus with this upcoming break.
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Oct 25, 2018 14:27
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I like the comic and think there's still a lot to recommend it. Balder has a unique voice and he's clearly passionate about his extremely strange, esoteric subject matter. I think that's cool. I just think some of the recent plot developments are shoddy and have looped around into being untrue to the characters as he's presented them. Also, the setting is becoming increasingly un-anchored from itself and arbitrary, which given how much time has been devoted to expositing its intricate rules, is a problem for reader investment.
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Oct 25, 2018 14:45
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XkyRauh posted:Hey, now, this isn't Homestuck... Homestuck is a good comparison because, there too, the author has spent a lot of time destroying the readers' investment in the characters by adding an exponential number of new side-characters that hog the spotlight while intentionally wrecking the plot repeatedly.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:22
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Cat Mattress posted:Homestuck is a good comparison because, there too, the author has spent a lot of time destroying the readers' investment in the characters by adding an exponential number of new side-characters that hog the spotlight while intentionally wrecking the plot repeatedly. I've never read Homestuck, but that seems like a pretty good description. And that's what I mean about focus. For the next book, he's gotta figure out which characters are most important to the plot and keep the perspective on them, even rewriting scenes to give them more agency if necessary. If the climax of this book was supposed to be the Towers becoming immensely powerful and rulebreaking, then he needs to define Erfworld's new "normal" and stop himself from breaking that normal every few comics. I mean, it's fine to have plot twists and clever ways of breaking rules, but he has to be able to moderate how many of them are thrown out there. If it's not an important inflection point for the plot, then it probably shouldn't happen. Otherwise it just ends up making the plot seem unstructured.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:31
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Phenotype posted:If the climax of this book was supposed to be the Towers becoming immensely powerful and rulebreaking, then he needs to define Erfworld's new "normal" and stop himself from breaking that normal every few comics. I think breaking everything to the point that nothing can be trusted upon is an interesting development. Everything sort of leads to it, backing out now seems like a bad idea. If the original Erfworld was a hex-based strategy game with a ton of rules and restrictions, this new game starts to resemble Diplomacy quite a bit. Very few things to actually restrict you, it's all in how you deal with players. I'm down with that. That is, if Balder actually planned it to be this way and didn't just write himself into a corner. I'm not sure which just happened.
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Oct 25, 2018 15:59
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Hob_Gadling posted:I think breaking everything to the point that nothing can be trusted upon is an interesting development. Everything sort of leads to it, backing out now seems like a bad idea. If the original Erfworld was a hex-based strategy game with a ton of rules and restrictions, this new game starts to resemble Diplomacy quite a bit. Very few things to actually restrict you, it's all in how you deal with players. I'm down with that. I mean, something like that has been going on for a while now, from the point where Parson made parley into something that could no longer be relied upon. Breaking war probably means breaking everything.
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Oct 25, 2018 16:08
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Hob_Gadling posted:I think breaking everything to the point that nothing can be trusted upon is an interesting development. Everything sort of leads to it, backing out now seems like a bad idea. If the original Erfworld was a hex-based strategy game with a ton of rules and restrictions, this new game starts to resemble Diplomacy quite a bit. Very few things to actually restrict you, it's all in how you deal with players. I'm down with that. It's an interesting development in theory, but as we've just seen, it doesn't actually play that well on the page the way he's been doing it. It's been Calvinball for the last year of updates. If "we broke everything and now nothing can be trusted" is the new normal, then he needs to narrow down his focus on the characters that need to react to it, and establish some logic in the way everything is broken that isn't thrown out five pages later. If the upshot is now that juice is free, then the things that happen next need to be essentially predictable (or at least logical) based on what would happen if these people had free juice. Not that juice is free and that was the only thing that was keeping Hat Magicians under control, and now there's a giant hat that sings people to sleep, but that doesn't matter because this Hat Magician we've never met is friends with Charlie and so he destroys the hat with Carnymancy spells we've never heard of but it rebounds on all the Hat Magicians everywhere because of a contract that he signed, and now all the hats are singing, and there's a secret message in the song that they're singing, and this is all just a tangent to what's happening with Gobwin Knob because it's on the other side of the game board.
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Oct 25, 2018 16:59
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If everything is broken, then nothing is left. There has to be some rules left or the whole thing just collapses into absolute chaos where everyone's too busy looking over their shoulders for the next inevitable betrayal or twist to actually do anything. You can only have a big chunk of someone's entire army get magicked into defecting to the other side in combat so many times before "having a big army" starts losing its dramatic effect, and I bet we're due for at least one more pretty soon. The next time someone hits someone else in the face with a sword, is the victim going to stand up and proudly reveal that they magically disabled the "swords hurt people" rule forty-three minutes ago? The next time someone sieges a city, are they just going to wave a magic wand and turn off upkeep ration popping, causing the entire city to croak the next turn because Erfworld has no concept of storing food? Breaking down or subverting a rule here and there is neat, especially when it's done by cleverness. But when someone just waves a magic wand that turns off all the rules at once, there's nothing left to rely on because you can no longer expect anything from any given situation. And unfortunately, it's probably just going to get worse. After all, the Carnymancers are still out there, and will probably be playing more of a role from now on. Putting aside all of Charlie's fuckery, the biggest tricks we've seen so far from them involved making units damage-immune or otherwise unkillable in certain situations. Not looking forward to seeing that trick again.
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Oct 25, 2018 17:33
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Hob_Gadling posted:I think breaking everything to the point that nothing can be trusted upon is an interesting development. Nooooooooope.
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Oct 25, 2018 21:07
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Parson started out as a wargaming munchkin, but along the way the DM of the setting turned into a counter-munchkin.
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Oct 25, 2018 23:21
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Main Paineframe posted:If everything is broken, then nothing is left. There has to be some rules left or the whole thing just collapses into absolute chaos where everyone's too busy looking over their shoulders for the next inevitable betrayal or twist to actually do anything. Maybe that's a precondition to lasting peace? And anyway, what's the alternative. About half the survivors are irrelevant (Vinny, Ansom, Princess, Tool, Maggie, whoever the rifle building guy was, whoever the crap golem guy was) and a bunch of them are dead. Most of the stuff that has happened is almost completely irrelevant because towns come and go at snap of fingers, even the strongest defensive position in the known world and stakes are so massive as to be practically irrelevant. What's the difference between half your kingdom and hundred times your kingdoms worth, except that half the kingdom seemed a bigger deal back when Parson was faced with the choice? The funny thing is, both situations were practically game over and yet they ended up not being game over. There's no going back now that the world is full of all sorts of rule-breaking equipment and trickery and towers. At the very least the towers amount to infinite mischief due to the fact that everyone has them, every tower is different and there seems to be no practical limit to what they can do barring themselves refusing to do it. If you can tap into infinite juice and towers are stacked with defensive magic, doesn't that alone make attacks impossible if towers choose so? I see no way back to the simple and charming hex-based wargame that this comic was about when it started, we're way past that now. I'd rather see a manga-style insane power ramp up rather than this all ending in a wet fart. I want to see the equivalent of a sore loser flipping the game board over, pieces flying everywhere. Maybe one more thought. Back in Book One, Parson wanted a game where the players had to essentially cheat to beat him. Well... quote:The next time someone hits someone else in the face with a sword, is the victim going to stand up and proudly reveal that they magically disabled the "swords hurt people" rule forty-three minutes ago? This happened in the summer text story, I think. Was it a magical drink or something like that? Hob_Gadling fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 00:53
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I mean, somebody already made it so nothing could hurt Lady Sylvia and this arguably just made things worse for her side, and possibly also for her.
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Oct 26, 2018 02:23
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:If there ARE NO MORE RULES, then you've ripped out the spine of the comic, and what do you have to fall back on to prop things up? Rich characterization and deep interpersonal relationships? Pithy dialogue? Consistently interesting art? Well, half the comic is about delivering increasingly convoluted puns, so it's still got that option.
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Oct 26, 2018 02:37
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nimby posted:Parson started out as a wargaming munchkin, but along the way the DM of the setting turned into a counter-munchkin. He started out as a munchkin DM specifically setting up impossible scenarios hoping his players would surprise him and was then dropped into a scenario suspiciously resembling exactly what he had created, but from the players' perspective. It has been heavily implied that the game of Erfworld is rigged (the Carnymancers certainly seem to think so, and they'd probably know) and doesn't have qualms about railroading. And a lot of the cheats are things that have been going on for ages (the entire Magic Kingdom, nearly everything Charlie does) that are just now getting blown wide open. I do think they need to start dropping more clear hints about where exactly they're going with this, though. There's been interesting hints that the Tutelaries are basically tutorial NPCs that had gone dormant long ago and have been brought back by accident and later on purpose to begin re-enforcing the norms of Erfworld, but found there's no going back.
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Oct 26, 2018 11:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:He started out as a munchkin DM specifically setting up impossible scenarios hoping his players would surprise him and was then dropped into a scenario suspiciously resembling exactly what he had created, but from the players' perspective. It has been heavily implied that the game of Erfworld is rigged (the Carnymancers certainly seem to think so, and they'd probably know) and doesn't have qualms about railroading. And a lot of the cheats are things that have been going on for ages (the entire Magic Kingdom, nearly everything Charlie does) that are just now getting blown wide open. See this is the thing I hate about Hue Hue, because... at first the Towers seems very much like the arbitration of the world, you can't cheat them, they can't cheat you, they will keep you honest. But Hue Hue, after a tonne of pages about how they have to trick him, was also running his own racket? I don't hate Erfworld but I feel cheated by this.
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Oct 26, 2018 12:36
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Onmi posted:See this is the thing I hate about Hue Hue, because... at first the Towers seems very much like the arbitration of the world, you can't cheat them, they can't cheat you, they will keep you honest. But Hue Hue, after a tonne of pages about how they have to trick him, was also running his own racket? I don't hate Erfworld but I feel cheated by this. I feel like the idea that the Towers were there "to keep people honest" was very much a fan creation. From the beginning, the Tutelaries have been extremely, uh... partisan? No, that isn't the word. My point is, they're all just as eccentric and demanding as the actual lunatics living in them, rather than acting as any kind of stabilizing factor.
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Oct 26, 2018 12:39
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If the towers' boundless power isn't tempered by a sense of fair play and responsibility, then they become boring as characters. It's been Huehue's character so far that, while he loves his side, he is also extremely into keeping things fair and dealing honourably, just like Jed and Shirley. So this current contradiction of that, with the justification being "Benjamin's gambit tricked me into doing something unlawful so now I am terrible and might as well be fully unlawful in the service of my side", feels forced - and the fact that it has a positive result for the protagonists instead of a negative one is a weird skewing of a time-tested tragic arc that reads as off too. Like, normally characters deceiving their friends and tricking them into doing things against their principles, resulting in a mental breakdown, would not end in a victory for the heroes. But here it does, and it doesn't read like an interesting subversion so much as a random escalation.
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Oct 26, 2018 12:45
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We don't even know what the consequences of Huehue's action actually are, yet. (Shirley seems to think they're going to be pretty bad.) My point is more that the towers care about fair play, but none of them agree on what fair play actually is, which makes it unlikely that they were designed as an intentional balancing mechanism. Like a lot of things in Erfworld, they're theoretically overpowered, but fail to overpower everything because their power is in the hands of flawed people who do dumb things. Shirley was able to wipe out Charlie's critical need for a Dirtamancer to fix his broken tower... and then immediately made everything worse for Charlie by shutting the entire side down.
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Oct 26, 2018 13:07
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Hob_Gadling posted:This happened in the summer text story, I think. Was it a magical drink or something like that? In the Digdoug story, they hired a Carnymancer who cast a spell to make the ruler immune to any ranged hits for one turn, shielding them from both arrows and ranged magic such as Archon Shockamancy. The guy still got croaked, but we were never actually told how - Digdoug got KOed after getting rid of the enemy warlord's sword, and he was already a barbarian by the time he woke up. The Carnymancer guessed that Charlie probably captured him, held onto him for a bit, and then croaked him later, but we don't know for sure. Rand Brittain posted:I mean, somebody already made it so nothing could hurt Lady Sylvia and this arguably just made things worse for her side, and possibly also for her. Well, yeah, it's fine if it's applied to a minor side character or something. But imagine if Charlie did something like that to, say, Jillian. It'd probably be a lot more annoying! Heck, maybe he already did. Stanley did say that the only time the Arkenhammer's Shockamancy has ever missed its target was when he pointed it at Jillian herself. And it's never quite been clear exactly what Charlie did to her or exactly why he's been so obsessed with her.
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Oct 26, 2018 14:34
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isndl posted:Well, half the comic is about delivering increasingly convoluted puns, so it's still got that option. If that's what you're after, then check out my sick elephant!
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Oct 26, 2018 14:37
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Current update didn't do much but drat do I like Templeton. He is my favorite of the towers.
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Oct 27, 2018 19:43
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Hmm, Marie seems to be perfectly fine so nothing odd going on with the decrypted outside of GK I guess. I question she could even do with Duncan's body at this stage but whatever. I wonder if Jillian isn't just gonna die of a plain rear end stress induced heart attack. Can you even do that on Erf?
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Oct 27, 2018 23:09
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god I remember when the mere presence of Jillian was the worst thing in this comic. more innocent times. she’s still the worst character by a country mile, but not the worst problem.
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Oct 31, 2018 04:00
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:god I remember when the mere presence of Jillian was the worst thing in this comic. more innocent times. she’s still the worst character by a country mile, but not the worst problem. Prediction: Skyy Appletini will quickly outstay her welcome and steal Jillian's belt in that particular competition. She's been kinda fun so far, but it gave me a really bad feeling to see Balder go all "isn't she so cool, heh? Do you agree she's super cool and badass yet? Should I make even more characters fawn all over her for no reason until you agree she's cool and badass?"
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Nov 1, 2018 12:10
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NihilCredo posted:Prediction: Skyy Appletini will quickly outstay her welcome and steal Jillian's belt in that particular competition. She's been kinda fun so far, but it gave me a really bad feeling to see Balder go all "isn't she so cool, heh? Do you agree she's super cool and badass yet? Should I make even more characters fawn all over her for no reason until you agree she's cool and badass?" now that you’ve said this it’s almost 100% certain
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Nov 1, 2018 13:19
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Today's update boils down to Shirley stating she needs to order Bill to escape. Oh, and a short recap on a ton of stuff we either have heard before or actively saw.
Erev fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Nov 3, 2018 |
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Nov 3, 2018 23:46
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Shirley is the best temple because I can actually understand what she says.
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Nov 4, 2018 01:46
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And now for something completely different.
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Nov 10, 2018 15:46
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I dunno about you guys, but I'm excited about getting to know an until now unknown side based on a gimmick, with a plethora of different and unique individuals who's every move will drive the story forward.
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Nov 10, 2018 16:12
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Dammit, everybody spent months begging for something different to happen on a different turn, and dammit, that's exactly what you're gonna get!
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Nov 10, 2018 16:14
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Well, I guess that massive pile of cliffhangers the characters we like are currently involved in are going to be left aside for a while while the story pivots to something so new and unrelated it might as well be a backer story.
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Nov 10, 2018 16:36
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Main Paineframe posted:Well, I guess that massive pile of cliffhangers the characters we like are currently involved in are going to be left aside for a while while the story pivots to something so new and unrelated it might as well be a backer story. To be fair, that ever growing pile of 'cliffhangers' (I have a hard time even calling them that anymore) wasn't ever really resolving anyways. But, yeah, hopefully this will be a short three shot so we can be done with it. I want to see if we can get to one thousand pages per turn....
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Nov 10, 2018 18:10
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