Today in Petals and Thorns, no sooner has the party recovered from the loss of their ally Elisha when the Order of the Bear launches a punitive attack on Ramshorn. Joined by many new hirelings, they desperately fight to keep the town from being burnt to cinders.
Meanwhile, in Iron Fang Invasion, the party avenges themselves for the loss of that one guy and finally defeats Scarvinious, securing the people of Phaedar against retaliation. At least until the hobgoblins rebuild that bridge.
Chapter 10
On the third day of work we lost Karachun. It was stupid and banal, but a fact’s a fact – only four of us remained now. And I was the only one to blame for this. And it all started so well…
Dude. Spoilers.
A couple of pages in, and it comes to pass: Danny’s off freelance healing, but it turns out the vein of ore his group is wailing on was at the intersection of multiple rat patrols. Danny runs over to help out, but is unable to keep Karachun alive. His group is down one DPS, but since he’s been able to gear them up with rings to the point of being crazy OP, this doesn’t stop them from killing rats.
Karachun’s presumably respawned back at his copy of the Pryke Mine by now, but if he’s still in the group when they finish their quest, they suspect it’ll complete for him, too. Since they’re making nutcase amounts of Malachite off of their protection services and are way the Hell ahead of schedule, they decide to leave him in and turn in the 100 Malachite.
I’ve written about common game design flaws in LitRPG before. Now I want to talk about common flaws about how a game system is presented. Even LitRPG books that I like are prone to these, which is concerning. I thought Survival Quest was pretty good, but it seems to be the root of this problem (because other LitRPG copy from it a lot): Skills that get unlocked at random when you first use them.
I mentioned during my readthrough of the book that a huge amount of Danny’s success ultimately comes down to having developed the Crafting skill kind of out of nowhere in a fugue state. It allows his jewelcraft skill to punch way above its usual belt level and apparently normally requires a special quest to unlock. While I liked Survival Quest overall, this particular bit aggravated me, in no small part because it became a trend. Whether it’s Danny unlocking crafting through his weird fugue, Jason getting into a tiny and exclusive club of magic users by passing a personality test, or even experienced veterans being taken by surprise by tier two class unlocks in Threadbare, LitRPG is full of people stumbling across special powers totally by accident.
Chapter 8 (cont.)
The last post was half again as long as usual, so we’re picking up in the middle of chapter 8 here. Danny and his orc admin buddy are trying to prevent the regional governor from working out that Danny’s the one who made the chess pawns.
“The figurines were made from Malachite. No Malachite was ever brought into my mine,” replied the orc.
“This is my mine! You hear, you ugly orc mug? Remember: this is my mine, not yours!” shrieked the Governor as he jumped on the chair.
“No Malachite has been brought into your mine. Ever.” replied the orc, unperturbed.
“Then I want to get the item that he created,” a calmer Governor now turned to the orc, ignoring me altogether. “Even if it’s not the chess pieces, I will not allow him to own a Unique Item. Moreover, he should go pack his things – I’m taking him back to my castle. I have no intention of letting a Jeweler capable of making Unique and Legendary Items slip away from me.”
“Prisoner Mahan cannot leave your mine at your behest,” replied the orc, also completely ignoring my presence. “Neither I nor you may break the law. Neither I nor you may take a prisoner’s possessions by force. That is also the law.”
“I’m the law here!” screamed the Regional Governor, breaking off the orc and spraying spittle in all directions. “If Mahan didn’t make the orc chess pieces, he must create all the rest! He must! Only I should possess such things, because with their aid I could open…” The Governor suddenly fell silent, glancing from side to side, got his breath back and went on. “I shall await this man in my castle! Today!”
So apparently this NPC is easily corruptible. Why would you place a guy like this in charge of any kind of critical component of the game economy? I don’t mean in an abstract “think of the NPC farmers!” kind of way, this mine is in charge of supplying copper to the player economy, which is one of the methods that the Corporation profits off of Barliona. Why put an easily corruptible NPC in charge of that?
As of earlier today, this blog has had more likes, views, and visitors in 2018 than it did in 2017. This despite the fact that I blogged for ten months in 2017 and have only had six and a half in 2018. The numbers are still pretty small overall, of course, I’m still just a random guy with a blog not all that different from every other random guy with a blog, but hey, it’s still progress. Thanks to everyone who read for helping make this small achievement happen.
Chapter 7
Danny’s received a clue from Alt that he needs to be trying to make a chain, not a ring, in order to complete his quest, as Alt informs him that most regional governors have a chain of some kind, which he knows from his time “before imprisonment” (read: on his secret illegal main toon). I assume this means a chain necklace. He trades some new +2 rings to Alt to get him to paint a design on the sheets that makes them look all pretty, and then tries to carve the sheets into chain links that match the pattern. This goes poorly, and soon he’s wrecked five out of the twenty sheets Kart made for him. He estimates he needs fifteen links to make the chain, so one more mistake and it’s over (Kart is, for some reason, forbidden from making more copper sheets). He’s tried to force the sheets to want to be chain links the way the stone wanted to be a rose before he fugue-carved it, which has worked on some other stones, but it’s not working.
That’s when Kart comes to give him a consolation talk:
“You know, Mahan,” Kart said as he sat next to me. He looked at the sheets laid out on the table in the shape of a chain with the Rose at its head and continued: “I think that you should not stress so much over this. Even if you don’t manage to get this done, the last month had shown me that it is possible to live in the mine not just by using other people, but by your own efforts. When I leave prison I plan to try my hand at blacksmithing. You wouldn’t believe how much I came to enjoy swinging the hammer and seeing a result on the other end. Here at the mine we have a good chance to train ourselves up in this, so if we don’t manage to complete the quest tomorrow, it’s not the end of the world. Life will go on. You’ll continue making the rings and when you reach the limit of your current professions, you’ll start to level up in Smithing and Leatherworking. So you should not see being unable to complete the quest as losing. You have to look at the bigger picture and not just single out certain details, even the really painful ones.”
I know a “sudden ‘aha!'” moment when I see one. Clearly Danny’s problem is that he was trying to force individual sheets to want to be individual links, when he should be trying to force all of them to form a complete chain.
At that moment I sensed that Kart had given me an enormous clue, but what was it?
I mean, I sensed the same thing, but that’s because I know this is a book and I could recognize the structure of the scene. Kart’s not an NPC. If the narrative needs him to set up a trope like this, it really shouldn’t be calling attention to how obviously he’s doing it. Also, it’d be nice if it was less obvious about it.
Continue reading “Survival Quest: Waiting For The Other Foot To Fall”
I watch a lot of video game content on YouTube and I’m pretty sure I’ve never talked about it before, so let’s list off some good ones now.
Mark Brown runs relatively short videos about specific game design topics. He doesn’t have a specific theme, but if you play all and put his channel on shuffle, you’ll get a lot of interesting ideas thrown at you. Since his videos are usually under twenty minutes, he’s great for listening to as a quick cooldown between doing one task and another without accidentally losing the entire afternoon. Provided you remember to turn auto-play off.
Raycevick mainly covers shooters, a genre I don’t play much of. He usually does long analyses of specific games or series’, and apparently was one of those stereotypical fifteen year old Halo/Call of Duty fanboys before growing up and becoming smart. This gives him a unique perspective and ability to explain what these kinds of games do right.
Joseph Anderson was originally that guy that reviewed Souls games but later broke out into other games and genres. He’s reviewed everything from Subnautica to Super Mario Odyssey, although in fairness Odyssey did have that one Dark Souls level out of nowhere. Like Raycevick, he mainly reviews single games in extreme detail. His upload schedule is slower, but I find his encounter-by-encounter reviews of games like Bloodborne to be helpful for figuring out how to design my tabletop encounters. Obviously, a lot of the things he discusses don’t map 1:1 to a turn-based game and efforts to make Dark Souls RPGs usually end in failure for not understanding that, but there are some things that do translate well.
Summoning Salt holds some kind of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out speedrun world record. In celebration of achieving that record, he made a video about the world record progression from the game’s release to the moment he took the throne, and his YouTube channel has been about speedrun histories ever since. He shares Joseph Anderson’s glacial upload pace, but I found his archive fun to binge.
I can’t promise that my enjoyment of Spoiler Warning isn’t because I first started watching it when I was about 19 or 20 and had never seen or heard this kind of analysis before (except in written form, when members of that show’s cast blogged about it in a similar way). Assuming my rose-colored glasses haven’t totally impaired my judgement, though, Spoiler Warning is a let’s play series (peppered with some other stuff, especially as time went on) in which the hosts are mainly thoughtful, analytical types. Although sometimes that thoughtful analysis is used for evil.
Chapter 6
This chapter opens up by informing us that leveling up in a crafting profession is less like cocaine and more like some kind of psychedelics:
the world suddenly stopped. A strange feeling came over me: Kart stood nearby, ladling molten copper from the smelting pot, and it froze in the air, barely touching the ingot mold. Walking around Kart and marveling at this effect, I noticed that a point of light began to form somewhere in my chest and shine out through my robe. The shining started to grow and increase in brightness, while a pleasant warmth started to spread through my body. In a few moments the light became so bright that I almost shut my eyes. When it had filled the whole of the smithy, there was a flash of light, and for a few moments I shone like the sun.
Despite the level he got out of it, Danny isn’t actually making much progress on making rings. The end of the day is also when he reveals his true colors as a racist:
My first day of ring-making ended in my complete capitulation, but it did have one positive point: Kart made Rat-skin coats, trousers and boots for us. Even if these clothes gave no stat bonuses, the total increase in armor from 6 to 13, as well as the look of the outfits, made us feel a lot more safe and comfortable. At least now I no longer resembled a zebra.
That’s right, Danny’s one of those anti-zebra bigots, because we aren’t all sick of seeing those guys on Twitter and YouTube already.
Video three of the GM’s Guide is up, in which I have figured out how to adjust volume in Lightworks so that things are no longer ridiculously quiet all the time. Why is the default so low?
And also a new episode of Iron Fang Invasion, in which our “heroes” face a setback while chasing down the leader of the hobgoblin hunters searching for their terror cell heroic rebellion.
Chapter 4
It is the next day, and Kart explains to Danny what’s up with the Meanness stat, or at least as far as he knows:
“I don’t know for certain, but from what others told me, in the mine Meanness is used only because it’s the easiest thing to level up in: mix some sand into someone’s food and you get a level. Just to give you a rough idea. But this stat mainly comes into full play outside the mine. After all, not everyone wants to become some great, dragon-slaying hero. Many choose to play the dark side of the game and become thieves and assassins. That’s where this stat comes in handy. But, as I said, I don’t know exactly what it gives you.”
You have to spend one of your limited stat slots to get an alignment? Everyone here in the mine is in it for the cyber-crack, sure, but that seems really annoying for the main game world, especially since the secondary stats can be things like marksmanship that directly contribute to actual combat capability. Maybe you can get sweet faction rewards from Team Meanies if you get it high enough? Whatever it was, it wasn’t prominent enough for Danny to have noticed while leveling his Hunter up to 87 or whatever it was he had before his toon got reset for his sentence. He barely seems to be aware of how any build but his own works, though, so it doesn’t seem like he did a whole lot of player interaction in the first place.
Kart gets a Chattiness level out of the conversation:
Suddenly Kart started to tremble, fell on his bed and became surrounded by a faint glow. This didn’t last long and soon Kart sat up and turned to me, looking rather pleased.
So Danny’s patient ears are the hooker’s ass off which Kart has snorted his latest line of coke. And he goes to work on his next hit immediately:
“I read that the habit of gaining pleasure gives rise to Addiction among the prisoners, which on release is treated in rehabilitation centers. Everyone gets sent there once they finish their terms — it’s compulsory.
So this isn’t just me snarking. This is actually the game stimulating dopamine centers like an actual addictive drug. It’s pretty much literally virtual cocaine. Who added this feature? And why? The pain settings were added by a vindictive plutocrat and standardized because fuck it, why not, but who decided to also get them addicted to cyber-coke? I don’t see how it could get them further addicted to the game, when Kart later describes that the addicts are unable to level fast enough to avoid becoming manic or depressed and burning out, which is an addiction so crippling that it’d just impede their ability to keep their heads above water and so continue to be a source of long term revenue.
Chamomile Has A Blog 