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Neurosis posted:I am quite sure McCrae intended for her to be interpreted in the manner I have described, but he perhaps could have made it clearer through some more time spent with characters who could call her out and provide a counterpoint to her attitude towards the authorities that be. Also, it would be nice if Taylor wasn't so humourless, makes for kind of a drag to read her inner thoughts sometimes. Neurosis posted:I'm actually hoping after Twig he spends some time editing Worm, it's a great ride but it needs some editing here and there and possibly some major changes . Some more time with the Wards would be cool (maybe prune some of the warlord stuff for that). Also, cut out Contessa altogether or rework her power majorly. Btw, following r/parahumans plus spacebattles usually keeps one abreast of most of these things. Also, yeah. Contessa is a narrative crutch. But it should be noted that one of its drawbacks is mental immaturity / lack of development, because any physical or mental need is fulfilled automatically. Hence, her actual agency is low, which is why she defected to Teacher. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jul 17, 2015 |
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Jul 17, 2015 16:58
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Pierson posted:This also stuck out for me more than anything: I think it's possible for Contessa's version of the Path to Victory shard to autopilot her body to perform the precise actions to fulfill victory conditions, either through canon (story) or word of god (Wildbow's posts outside of the story itself). I don't have a reference, but there are some good resource threads (Ack's being a notable one) that do a good job of summarizing info like that on SpaceBattles. If you follow the subreddit you might notice Wildbow enjoys trolling with ambiguous answers from time to time, especially yes or no questions. I think in the end the consensus around that was that it wasn't canon or definitive WoG. That said, an interlude explaining Parian's power is apparently finally in the works, in between Twig, Worm editing work, etc., and that isn't a troll.
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Jul 27, 2015 19:27
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(Non-Wildbow-related content) I just binged on a web serial called Mother of Learning over the last two days. Without spoiling too much, it involves time travel (of sorts), and takes place in what I might call a "rational magical" setting. Highly recommended – it's an easy and enjoyable read. Ongoing.
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Jul 28, 2015 14:46
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Cryophage posted:If the coma thing is true, then it makes sense that TT and Co. would be doing everything in their power to keep her body safe and her survival secret. Disregarding the awful things some very unhinged people might want to do to her in revenge; imagine what could happen if someone like Bonesaw, Valkyrie, or possibly Teacher got their hands on her. But it didn't come out of nowhere, as the possibility is hinted at quite some time beforehand: Snare 13.09 posted:She ran her fingers over my exposed scalp, massaging it, as if she were feeling the shape of my head. “The size, shape and location of the Corona and the Gemma changes from parahuman to parahuman, but it tends to sit between the frontal and the parietal lobe. Beneath the ‘crown’ of the head, if you will. They can’t really lobotomize the Corona in criminals. Some of that’s because the location and shape of the Corona depends on the powers and how they work, and trial and error doesn’t work with the scary bad guys who can melt flesh or breathe lasers.” Also Contessa *is* working with Teacher, and in 30.7 Teacher conveys to Queen Administrator acting as Taylor that using his power would allow for speech, so Contessa talking to Taylor afterwards might be because of that. Also, Dinah and Lisa don't necessarily know she's survived, because 1) Assuming they didn't witness her after her bullet surgery, if they even saw that, who would have told them? and 2) She ends up sequestered in a different, closed-off reality, something Teacher was able to do earlier, too. She isn't necessarily free of consequence especially if Teacher is involved and if Abaddon (entity #3 which caused Eden's death by trading the PtV shard and distracting her) is still out there. Piell posted:Yeah it's not like she saved all humans in existence or anything Pretty sure an autistic Master with total control and perfect tactics on account of near-infinite multitasking is worthy of a kill order, despite having gotten to that point by saving the world. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jul 30, 2015 |
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Jul 30, 2015 17:44
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DarkCrawler posted:Also how is that different from any other war ever? Because there is exactly one person still standing at the end on whom everyone else can assign the majority of their fear and gratitude, so she gets an insane amount of blame and credit, and the parahumans at this point in time surround her, have power, and may be willing to use it. She was dangerous enough to eliminate Scion, and she is no longer in her right mind.
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Jul 30, 2015 19:03
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Fellwenner posted:To echo NecroMonster, it doesn't make any sense to put her in a coma. What's the point? Kill her or save her. Her story has ended and shouldn't be held in limbo. I mean, most of this is explained in the story itself (timeskip excepted): 1) The timeskip is specifically planned to be addressed 2) Tattletale's power is more plausible than Coil's or Contessa's at least. And note that shards are connected, not isolated. See: Uber; who has access to all tinker tech trees, or Dragon, who despite being classified a a tinker, isn't fundamentally one (more of a tinkertech thinker). It's brokenly powerful but aside from the Queen Administrator it's also one of the higher-tier shards to begin with. 3) The 'not killing' part is explained by the 'cops and robbers' game as well as history. The unwritten rules are there because the ones who did go around killing innocents either got kill orders and did end up wiping themselves out, or were strong enough to survive, and everyone else got the hint. 4) The government was fully compromised by capes, specifically Cauldron, just not by capes actually holding positions. Since high-powered thinkers were applied to watch stock exchanges among other things for manipulation, actual capes on a micro level would probably be flushed out pretty easily. 5) Cauldron wouldn't openly work with the government, because they wanted control above all else, and the secrecy mattered because the Yangban would work their own angle and sabotage their plans (as they did later in the story). Also, the money for vials was inconsequential except to force the buyers to value them; the favors are how Cauldron was able to manipulate cape situations and also being non-governmental let them resort to extralegal methods of ensuring complians. Also, even then, natural triggers dramatically outpaced Cauldron triggers, and weren't as stable, so again, being out in the open wouldn't accelerate vial distribution much and would rather hamper the ability to sweep the outlier cases under the rug.
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Aug 1, 2015 08:59
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mossyfisk posted:Tattletale's main problem is that her power is inconsistent as hell. Sometimes it's thinking quickly to deduce facts from clues, and sometimes it's blatantly just outright clairvoyance. All in all, it sits at whatever level is necessitated by the direction of the narrative, which is lousy writing. Also explained in-universe: it passively offers insights, but feeding more context and more power into it gives much more info at the expense of thinker headaches, so it's overpowered in proportion to the importance / Lisa's willingness to suffer pain.
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Aug 1, 2015 16:37
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If you're more into sci-fi and haven't already read The Last Angel, I highly recommend it.
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Aug 27, 2015 08:03
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Milky Moor posted:I kind of wish Wildbow would stop with all the online 'word of God' posts. Great story but almost everything he 'explains' makes it worse. Specifically...?
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Sep 23, 2015 02:14
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Milky Moor posted:Off the top of my head, Dragon not being a Tinker (because she's actually a Thinker), Monarch 16.5 posted:A thought dawned on me. It was a half-formed thought up until the moment I devoted some attention to it. Then it clicked. Tinkers had a knack, a specialty, be it a particular field of work or something they could do with their designs that nobody else could, and I knew Dragon’s. She could intuit and appropriate the designs of other tinkers. quote:the Endbringers having a galaxy's worth of matter making up their physical forms... Interlude 8.x (Bonus Interlude) posted:Exterior skin is hard as aluminum alloy, but flexible, lets him move. 3% deeper in toward core of arms, legs, claws, tail, or .5% in toward core of head, trunk, neck, tissues are hard as steel. 6% in toward core of extremities or 1% toward core of main body/head, tissues strong as tungsten. 9% toward core of extremities, 1.5% toward core of main body, head, tissues strong as boron. 12%-
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Sep 23, 2015 04:24
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Specifically, Dragon does not have access to the canonical tinker technology shard that tinkers get partial access to, but rather a thinker power that, combined with her being a very capable AI, lets her reverse engineer tinker tech. She's PRT rated as a Tinker because PRT ratings indicate appropriate response, not necessarily strict power classifications. The tinker shard typically sabotages the output with some flair to make the design more customized and unstable. Masamune creates factories that are themselves unstable, which can reproduce other tinkers' work more stably, but at lower quality/efficiency. The fact that this is the way it works is hinted at by Leet's tinker power, which in exchange for full access to all the Tinker tech trees, actively sabotages the branches he's already visited. The Dragonslayers weren't able to reverse-engineer Dragon's post-trigger technology, which led Saint to go to Teacher to get his thinker/tinker abilities in order to be able to understand what Dragon was doing afterwards. His being compromised due to his addiction to getting powers (as a side effect of Teacher's power) was actually an important plot point in the story. The suits operating while she was out hunting the S9 were not sapient, also explicitly stated, just intelligent agents with limited reasoning capability other than what she could program in (also at this point she Armsmaster was beginning to unchain her, which was a long ongoing process that sacrificed a lot of her normal functionality, hence her mute-ness). This is also a plot point where Taylor tricks the Azazel (I believe) by coming up with a hypothetical situation in which it couldn't be sure it wasn't hurting Imp, and did not have sufficient reasoning capabilities to see through the ruse. The EMP incident I *think* was Tattletale coming up with a fiction believable enough to threaten Armsmaster and hard to disprove, but I don't remember where I read the argument for that. Scion doesn't "have no choice but to use PtV", but he's not a very creative entity, because his literal role is Warrior, whereas Eden was the one who did all the hard thinking. Note that one of the things that the entities do when they start the cycle is gather data and observe new uses for the shards so they can fine-tune them for the next cycle. He uses PtV because he needed a quick solution he couldn't think of offhand, not because none of his powers were of use. IIRC thinkers at some point are actually called out in the text for typically using their powers as too much of a crutch and losing some measure of personal agency because they let their powers do too much of the thinking they should be doing. Like, every one of your points is addressed somehow or other, mostly from within the text, but your original point of hating Wildbow's expanding on the background is strange, because there's a consistency to it that you just seem really resistant to acknowledging.
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Sep 23, 2015 17:47
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Because she wouldn't have tried to contact Lisette (Kevin Norton's friend, and Scion's-human-buddy successor), who might have been able to shift things at the turning point (see the interlude). Also, probably because Saint could presumably aid with controlling Dragon tech without her pesky restrictions.
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Dec 6, 2015 09:45
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Milky Moor posted:1. That's such a stupid reason. Unbelievably stupid. Somehow Dragon not contacting Lisette would change things when actually contacting Lisette did sweet gently caress all. It's what the #parahumans IRC came up with. And Dinah didn't create prophecies, she created predictions. Lisette failed , but ultimately it was Jack having a conversation which motivated Scion to experiment with the total extermination of all humans in the multiverse. Is that not at least equally stupid? Not that I think it is in either case. Saint yanking Dragon's chain probably helped motivated her to unchain more, quicker. Not to mention, as a power addict, he engineered Teacher's release, who presumably contributed to Scion's downfall, even if he did go rogue immediately after and take Contessa et al. with him. Also what's the spoiler policy in this thread?
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Dec 6, 2015 19:58
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He's actually been editing seriously for some time, and he has talked to professional editors and when talking to them, they have taken machetes to Worm. With awful, awful suggestions.
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Dec 18, 2015 17:53
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thespaceinvader posted:'Professional' is a weird grading given how lovely many professional authors are at writing. Your implied meaning of "professional" is weird. "Professional" means "able to get paid to do it more than a couple of times".
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Dec 18, 2015 20:47
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PM'd. Anyhow, that was one editor that made truly awful edits, but the point stands that Worm doesn't fit easily into a mold, so editing it might be something of a unique challenge. If anyone knows how to source an actually good editor, by all means, please step forward.
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Dec 18, 2015 22:51
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/454gb3/worm_news_editor_applications/ Preliminary shopping around for a Worm TV adaptation Wildbow seeking editors
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Feb 11, 2016 06:19
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Yeah, except those good pro editors haven't materialized (do you really think he wasn't looking?) and the ones that did had some really, really lovely suggestions.
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Feb 11, 2016 11:35
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Nettle Soup posted:It might be this one? Apparently it's the banner on topwebfiction. Maha/Mahasim is the artist officially commissioned for Twig banners, so.
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Jun 17, 2016 10:22
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Ytlaya posted:Worm's biggest strength is probably the fact that the author obviously had a general idea of where he wanted to go with the story from the very beginning.  He's said one of his approaches throughout was to write himself into a corner and struggle to write himself out. Also several characters lived or died by a dice roll during the Endbringer attack, including Taylor.
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Jul 3, 2016 00:03
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The Shortest Path posted:I think Taylor being a boring protagonist actually helped a lot of parts of the story, by being an observational window to everything else going on and all of those actually interesting characters.  Milky Moor posted:Anything post-timeskip in Worm is shaky and the timeskip itself should be excised. Milky Moor posted:Oh, and Armsmaster's whole 'You can't touch me Tattletale, I have psychic shielding' in the museum sticks out like a sore thumb when, later, Worm states that there are no psychic powers (with the exception of the the Simurgh).
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Jul 3, 2016 02:51
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Namarrgon posted:Wildbow mentioned that one of the problems of brute powers is that you usually don't know what your limit is until you're dead. I don't remember what happened in-story, but I always imagined him being squashed underfoot. But likely any form of severe instant trauma would do. I don't think he had (strong) regeneration powers (more likely to work over a time period of days), so if you just keep going at it I wager a normal person could kill him if unopposed. https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/extermination-8-4/#comment-1291 posted:Re: Aegis – Many powers have their drawbacks. The drawback of being nearly impossible to put down/kill is that testing & therefore knowing the limits of such a power is rather difficult, because you don’t know that limit until you’ve surpassed it and died. Milky Moor posted:I want to say that Clockblocker or some other Wards basically say they they were asked to identify the red smear that was Aegis post-Leviathan. https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/queen-18-3/ posted:“It was bad. She took Glory Girl with her, you know. When Gallant died, Vista saw the body. When Aegis was mashed to a literal pulp by Leviathan, to the point that he couldn’t function anymore, when he died, despite his power? I got to see the remains to verify for myself. But Victoria Dallon was still alive and they didn’t let us see. A select few adults and family members got to see her, they carted her off to a parahuman asylum and none of the rest of us got to say goodbye, because the end result was that hosed up.” Milky Moor posted:I don't buy the story that WB would have killed Skitter during the Leviathan fight, but it's a nice thing to say for Internet cred. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worm-quotes-and-wog-repository.294448/page-6#post-16386367 posted:When it came to this arc [Extermination], though, I rolled dice. Barring those who stayed out of the fight, I rolled to see if they lived or died. Just went through the cast as it had formed, to date, and rolled for every participating cape, then worked in their deaths as was possible. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worm-quotes-and-wog-repository.294448/page-6#post-16386367 posted:Stopping Leviathan from attacking the shelter. Getting hit. Slowly blacking out while watching Scion and Rachel arrive to fight Leviathan. Rachel's anger, as people approach, crowding her and Taylor. Civilian pulling off Taylor's mask to administer CPR, while Taylor stares up at Mr. Gladly, who is looking down. The person giving CPR gives up after the first chest compression, as shattered ribs crumble, holds Taylor's hand instead. Mr. Gladly says something.
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Jul 6, 2016 02:53
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One early version was a series of five plot lines which intersected at Golden Morning, of which Aegis' storyline was one.https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/3hkj2w/aegis_power_and_plot_possibilities/cu8b9q6 posted:In the comment section I talk about how the story evolved. At the very beginning I wrote from the perspective of 'Runechild', my aim to write a 'is it magic or is it something else' story with a novice 'magic' superhero. Runechild fights a serial killer who is visited by an alien spirit that communicates with him directly and gives him superpowers.
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Jul 6, 2016 03:42
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Mad Hamish posted:Someone once speculated that she got a Thinker shard at some point as well, which allowed her to come up with some of the weirder bug stuff. Uh, speculation? Isn't it established that her first trigger was total insect control; her subsequent second trigger unlocked the multitasking ability to be able to individually command everything in her control?
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Jul 11, 2016 16:58
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Namarrgon posted:Yeah I know it is weak criticism. Hanging out too much on the worm reddit makes me irrationally angry I guess. Heh. That's nothing. Try hanging out in the IRC channel sometime. Wittgen posted:Taylor getting a secondary power to make her creative with her bugs feels pretty dumb to me. It would undermine her personality. Taylor is incredibly goal oriented and resourceful. She does everything she can with what she has to do what she feels she needs to do. No extra powers required for that. Also worth noting that QA is one of the noble shards, that is, one of the valuable shards passed out because Scion was a stupid, depressed fuckup who lost control of some vital powers. She's able to control and intuitively understand others' powers in Golden Morning, not to mention hack Doormaker so she could be in range everywhere, and manages to process even the Clairvoyant's sensory input.
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Jul 11, 2016 20:59
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NinjaDebugger posted:My general theory is that Glaistig Uaine's shard is Scion's copy of the shard the counterpart would be using to collect things at the end of the cycle. Common theory, not sure if confirmed (on mobile, can't check logs). Imp's memory erasure shard being responsible for the trigger vision memory erasures is either strongly suspected or canonical.
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Jul 12, 2016 16:32
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah; Taylor can more or less automatically win against pretty much anyone who isn't either tough enough to withstand insect bites (and somehow keep them out of their nose/mouth/eyes) or capable of instantly killing all insects that approach them (and I'm pretty sure a minority of heroes/villains have abilities that fit either of those criteria). Taylor is depicted as pretty versatile and capable, and her opponents tend to think they can take her before they fall, so it'd be weird narratively to contradict that.
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Jul 13, 2016 04:03
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Ytlaya posted:It makes her bolts capable of penetrating anything regardless of defense/protection, but that's only situationally powerful and dependent upon the enemy being someone she can hit with her arbalest in the first place. It's also not useful against groups of enemies. Ytlaya posted:Were you joking about Parian? Parian's stuff is capable of temporarily tanking strong opponents like Endbringers, but from what we've seen it doesn't seem like they'd be difficult for heroes/villains to contend with. Foil even mentions how she felt she could easily avoid Parian's creations if they attacked, and she doesn't even have the ability to fly or superhuman strength/speed. Wildbow has stated that with the right application of her power, she could go up against an Endbringer
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Jul 13, 2016 06:51
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I was referred to some good online web fiction lately that isn't Worm, The Last Angel, or Mother of Learning. A Practical Guide to Evil: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/ Pretty good read, check it out.
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Jul 14, 2016 04:27
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Ytlaya posted:Oh, forgot about Bakuda. I dunno about you but if my coworker was a former criminal who murdered the Pope, even once it was revealed publicly that the Pope was actually incredibly evil, I'd still keep my distance, even if they were kinda likable. Now replace the Pope with Alexandria, and there you go With Taylor's intensity the only person she appeared to bond strongly with post-defection was Golem, because of their shared goal of eliminating Jack. With the Undersiders she was self-destructing and they were the ones who stepped up to be there for her. Of course she'll trust that they'll have her back more easily and more intensely. Milky Moor posted:I think it comes down to: Heroes are pretty much capes who are beholden to an organization that's officially accountable to the government. (Note: Wards are accountable to the Youth Guard, and also I don't think are required to graduate to the Protectorate) Rogues are unaligned neutral capes Villains are pretty much right, but it's also worth noting that participation in Endbringer fights buys a lot of slack with the Protectorate, so long as the villains aren't directly killing civilians.
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Jul 20, 2016 04:40
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Milky Moor posted:Well, yeah - Worm's fan base is built entirely around Reddit and the Spacebattles forums.
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Jul 29, 2016 02:05
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His last post there was over a year and a half ago. He left. Also, really? In a story where the big bad was literally an extradimensional being which consumed every possible version of a planet for fuel, who they killed by punching through dimensions with what was essentially every doomsday weapon combined to annihilate all of that mass...your problem is that the Endbringers' material composition were outlandish? What?
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Jul 30, 2016 04:18
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Weaverdice is run on #weaverdice on irc.parahumans.net. GMs present in a couple of different timezones. Ask for details there to get started. It's got a trigger generator, involves collaborative power generation which is explicitly and purposefully involuntary (i.e. others debate what your power should be), and a stats system that kinda punishes munchkinning.
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Aug 3, 2016 08:36
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Dzhay posted:What is it about Worm that provokes so much discussion/lovely internet arguments? Even now, years after it ended.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:14
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Pavlov posted:The western tradition of web based literature is mostly fanfiction based right?  what
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Aug 14, 2016 00:29
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I've been reading original fiction online for years (in bursts) and friends who I met after they'd read Worm weren't fanfiction people until after they'd read it. Ditto for a number of my friends who I knew before they read it. I wasn't either, and read close to no fanfiction for nearly two decades despite being neck deep in the environment, and the media, and the fandoms that typically spawn the most fanfiction. Guess I'm an outlier. Doctor w-rw-rw- fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 09:11
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Note also that the PRT goes light on containment for all but the worst - villains with some resources are virtually guaranteed to break out of lightly-secured prison. In the "bad old days" things were a bit more violent, but the unwritten rules came about to rig the game with, essentially, Tattletale's cops-and-robbers game, because villains greatly outnumber heroes and are needed for Endbringer battles. The leniency with which villains are treated is to incentivize them to attend; villains who don't get less leniency; villains who do also get the protection of the Endbringer truce, and they also self-police to an extent to maintain the status quo. Villains who kill with their powers, especially capes, are not treated as well. Slight exception - Lung gets away with it because he is so hard to catch, and his lieutenants and gang members are doing a lot of the violence (well, and he contributes a lot to Endbringer battles). Pretty sure most of this is stated in story.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:40
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IMO she loses, but she always needs to control the situation such that she doesn't see it that way, like it's part of a bigger game. Fighting Lung: saved the Undersiders, gained rep as a villain Tried to infiltrate the Undersiders: got screwed into villainy by Armsmaster Fought the S9: Brian got scarred for life Attacking Mayor Christner - saddled with guilt Coil arc: Loses her innocence completely Surrendering to the PRT - loses control / kills even more / is actually kinda villainous as she flips to heroism. Arguably Taylor 'dies' metaphorically, and Skitter is all that's left. Like, she has an angle in all of those, but she takes her losses and adapts with whatever resources and opportunities she has on hand, because that's what the QA shard does.
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Oct 11, 2016 05:00
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Autonomous Monster posted:I have this niggling feeling that an epub version was mentioned somewhere, at some point, but I can't find it signposted anywhere on the site, sorry. Autonomous Monster posted:You might be able to auto-generate one yourself; I think there was a script or something that did that for Worm?
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Nov 16, 2016 09:03
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Katreus posted:I could still be right in the broader strokes! You could too! Given the latest chapter anyway. Foundling having to play off her clumsier than usual instincts as drama was pretty amusing, especially the catch an arrow with her hand. Heh. FYI, the author confirmed that as of now she is not the Squire.
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Nov 24, 2016 08:11
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