prokopetz - Tumblr blog

[prokopetz]

Essential Tumblr experience #137: clicking into an art blog and finding its front page full of twiggy anime boys gazing soulfully into each other's eyes, and realising only too late to save yourself that a. you recognise those outfits, and b. you've never had strong opinions about the source material before, but evidently even you have limits – seriously, shipping SpongeBob SquarePants with that guy?

[prokopetz]

Some people talk about early (i.e., pre-2000) furry webcomics like "ooh, but the weird politics" or "ooh, but the sexual subtext", but honestly the only consistent thing about them that really throws me is the fact that everybody is smiling all the time.

[prokopetz]

Sometimes I feel like indie game developers are taking the wrong lessons away from certain popular titles. Like, if your game's elaborate branching narrative has a dozen different endings, but it's possible to unwittingly screw yourself out of ever being able to access half of them as early as the first hour of play simply by visiting major locations out of the developer-intended order (in what is ostensibly an open world game), and the other half are gated behind NPC interactions where not only do you need to say exactly the right things based on information your character couldn't possibly possess, but the conditions for triggering those conversations in the first place are so fiddly that players literally had to decompile the game's code just to write a reliable walkthrough, that doesn't make your story deep, it just makes it obtuse.

[prokopetz]

Idea: quartet of girls based on the playing card suits with magical girl transformations based on their tarot suit equivalents.

Do it and watch a very specific subset of the Tumblr readership tie themselves into knots trying to figure out how it's secretly a Homestuck reference.

[prokopetz]

Extremely disappointed to learn that there is at the time of this posting only one work on AO3 bearing the tag "Catholic Beast Mode".

[prokopetz]

You explicitly may not abort a spell once you've rolled the dice; this is addressed on page 10 of the PDF version of playlist draft 0.2 (linked above), second-last paragraph. I believe that section also touches on your other concerns.

(You may, of course, stop maintaining a spell which requires concentration immediately after casting it if you don't like what you ended up with, but see the sidebar on page 13.)

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

[prokopetz]

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

[prokopetz]

#the fact that all of these include the characters fucking implies that 'did they fuck' is a separate axis #the most interesting implication of this being that the graph would include 'fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument for why they #should fuck but then they don't fuck' (via @slurpinator-supreme)

I mean, it's not without precedent.

The opposite of fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument that two characters should fuck (and then has them fuck) is not porn-without-plot.

Porn-without-plot is in fact the centre point of the fucking spectrum.

The true opposite of fanfic which frames a meticulous textual argument that two characters should fuck (and then has them fuck) is fanfic which goes to enormous lengths to establish that it would be a terrible idea for two characters to fuck (and then has them fuck).

[prokopetz]

Conventional wisdom is that the best route to girlbosshood is to start out as a girlintern and work one's way up as a girlassociate, girlmanager, and vice-girlboss before finally becoming a girlboss proper. In practice, however, internal promotion within the upper girlranks is limited, and most girlbosses enter the role directly via external hiring, usually due to pre-existing girlconnections. A more fruitful approach is often to enter the industry as an independent girlconsultant and keep an eye out for girlnetworking opportunities.

[prokopetz]

Off the top of your head, is there a particular piece of pedantry you are particularly proud of?

Yes.

[prokopetz]

Gonna make a fluffy, lighthearted dating sim that spawns one of those 25-minute-long "Unique Death Animations" compilations on YouTube.

[prokopetz]

Off the top of your head, is there a particular piece of pedantry you are particularly proud of?

Yes.

[prokopetz]

Okay, but, like, is it good good, or is it "the main character has the same mental illness as me" good?

[prokopetz]

Skyward Sword Link is scrungly in the way that a teenage semi-professional skateboarder circa 1998 is scrungly; it's more a vibe than anything specific you can point to about his appearance or grooming, but you absolutely know it when you see it.

It's pointless arguing about which Link is the scrungliest because they're all the scrungliest, on different axes of scrungle.

Twilight Princess Link is scrungly in a Serious Fantasy Protagonist™ sort of way, his clothes and skin sporting an even coating of grime of no specific origin, forever slightly but noticeably damp, and inexplicably smelling faintly of used motor oil.

Breath of the Wild Link is scrungly in a lives-alone-in-the-woods sort of way: surprisingly well groomed, because Hollywood stereotypes notwithstanding, letting your hygiene slide is not conducive to long term wilderness survival, yet 100% prepared to catch a fish with his bare hands and eat it live and wriggling in front of you.

Wind Waker Link is scrungly in an unsupervised middle schooler sort of way – charming enough from a distance, but you probably don't want to know what he's got in his pockets, and if you touched him your hands would come away greasy. Why is he greasy?

It's scrungle all the way down.

[prokopetz]

It's pointless arguing about which Link is the scrungliest because they're all the scrungliest, on different axes of scrungle.

Twilight Princess Link is scrungly in a Serious Fantasy Protagonist™ sort of way, his clothes and skin sporting an even coating of grime of no specific origin, forever slightly but noticeably damp, and inexplicably smelling faintly of used motor oil.

Breath of the Wild Link is scrungly in a lives-alone-in-the-woods sort of way: surprisingly well groomed, because Hollywood stereotypes notwithstanding, letting your hygiene slide is not conducive to long term wilderness survival, yet 100% prepared to catch a fish with his bare hands and eat it live and wriggling in front of you.

Wind Waker Link is scrungly in an unsupervised middle schooler sort of way – charming enough from a distance, but you probably don't want to know what he's got in his pockets, and if you touched him your hands would come away greasy. Why is he greasy?

It's scrungle all the way down.

[prokopetz]

I've gotta hand it to the Friendsim 2 folks. As far as long-form fan media goes, a sequel to the visual novel spinoff of a webcomic is already playing in hard mode, on top of the unbelievable hassle of keeping a large remote-work team where nobody is getting paid on task, at this point they're a year and a half and eleven volumes deep in spite of getting basically zero exposure, and they're showing no signs of stopping any time soon. There's a non-zero possibility that whoever is PMing this thing literally made a deal with the Devil.

[prokopetz]