#as a player that's frustrating

[aparticularbandit]

Okay. Gonna make a small complaint here. But like - one of things I really don't like in games is when they give me a choice that isn't a choice. Like, I'm used to it in Pokemon, cool, great, whatever.

But like. When you give me a choice to tell Kirigiri about Sakura or not. I expect to be allowed to tell her when I want to tell her. Instead of being given the exact same dialogue Makoto gave me before I clicked Tell her. Like - even Pokemon usually gives me different flavor text when I pick the answer it doesn't want me to pick.

C'mon, Danganronpa.

If it isn't a choice and there's not any additional info for picking the wrong choice in this situation, then don't give me the choice. It's frustrating either way.

[iatethepomegranate]

If I see one more take about Orym being "secretive" in taking the sword, I swear I might start screaming. The dude walked up to Chet in front of everyone, asked for access to the Bag of Holding, took the sword out (in front of everyone) and left with it. Then he came back with the sword strapped to his back... IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. There was ample time for someone to speak up if they wanted to and Orym, quite frankly, didn't have reason to expect it would be an issue. Laudna may have used the lack of discussion as part of her cycle of justifications for her actions, but that doesn't mean it was 1) the main issue she was actually dealing with or 2) an unsolvable problem that required a rash response even if that had been Laudna's primary issue.

[that-wizard-oki]

The Fanciful Fairy Kei Pack released today!!!! This was a pack idea/theme i pitched at the end of last year, which was incredibly exciting for me!! To celebrate it's release, I wanted to share one of my animations I did for the mount, a cutesy crescent moon with some star friends that follow you along :3 it was the only item I personally got to work on for the pack, all other items/art/anims were done by other artists on our team!

In general been trying to be an advocate for more like... Wizard-y gear, as i feel we've strayed away from that style of gear and i MISS IT :(( I also felt Lolita/kawaii j-fashion in general could really fit into the wizard aesthetic... it also helps that I'm a bit of a fan of the fashion style myself hehe :'D also it was a fun work around so boys can now kind of wear pink thru this pack! And also a dress if they so choose!

Anywho. I know this pack was highly anticipated so I really hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did when i was pitching it!!!! :D

[samanthasgone]

Credit: sportsgirlsclub

Y’all mind if we leave these here?

[oldcardigan]

as someone who LOVES hockey and is used to seeing players vent their frustration through fistfights, it always surprises me when swifties get up in arms over…yelling. that is nothing, this is just sports lmfao the apology afterward is what is rare

[caelanselm]

imagine being the most unluckiest gacha player ever despite the hardwork and effort you've put for months; eagerly saving up your pulls for your favorite character and wishing every night/day for them to come home to you, avoiding other pick-up banners because you're loyal to your favorite character.

the excitement you felt when in a few hours, you'll be meeting them. once the pick-up banners finally updated, you pull for their banner with bated breath but they didn't come home in ten pulls but it's okay—you still have plenty more pulls.

ten turned into twenty turned into thirty turned into fifty into sixty into one hundred.

you decided to stop for a while and your friends sent you messages accompanied with screenshots of them getting your favorite character. envy filled your whole being and sadness crept into your heart, you decide to ignore it and grind more because surely, you will absolutely get them!

as if fate was against you—it is now the last day of your favorite character's banner, you even resort in whaling due to your desperation. your friends managed to snag more pulls of them and your favorite characters always coming home to them.

you pull and pull and pull until your funds gone yet in the end, they did not come home. you stare blankly at the screen until your expression scrunched in sadness with tears streaming down your face and saying—

"i hate you."

with that, you exit the game with a shattered heart and sobs—you know it's not that deep because it's just a game at all, it's not that serious—but your favorite character became your comfort and anchor whenever you feel sad; ranting to them about your day or problems while playing the game as if they're a real person.

sobbing yourself to sleep—you didn't even realize your reality begin to warp.

[northern-passage]

just found one of my favorite pieces of writing advice when it comes to interactive fiction, i think if you've read literally any of my work, it will be pretty obvious how much i use this in my own writing. i actually couldn't remember where i read this for the first time and on a whim i went through my twitter likes and found it in a thread. i'm going to transcribe it for ease of reading, but this is all coming from Alexander Freed (@/AlexanderMFreed on twitter)

he has a website here with other compiled writing advice about branching narratives and game design, though he never posted this there and hasn't really updated recently (but still check it out. there's some specific entries about writing romance, branching and linear & other game writing advice)

original twitter thread here

It's Tuesday night and I feel like teaching some of what I've learned in 15 years of branching narrative video game writing. Let's go in-depth about one incredibly specific subject: neutral / fallthrough / catchall response options!

Player ownership of the protagonist in choice-based branching narrative games (a la BioWare, Telltale, mobile narrative games, etc) is a vital aspect of the form.

The ability for the audience to shape a Player Character, to develop that character's inner life in their own mind, is unmatched in any other medium.

The Player determines the character's actions and THE MOTIVATIONS for those actions. The character's psychology can literally be as complex as the Player can imagine. However, this works best when there's enough space for the Player to develop those motivations. No game can offer enough options to support every interpretation imaginable; much of the character has to live in the Player's head, without necessarily appearing on the screen.

That's complicated. We're going to unpack it.

Generally, when presenting choices to a Player, we want those choices to be as interesting and compelling as possible.

But compelling, dramatic choices tend to be revealing of character. And no game can support hundreds of options at every choice point for every possible character motivation a Player might imagine.

This sort of narrative CANNOT maintain its integrity if the Player is forced to constantly "rewrite" their characterization of the Player Character on the fly. You want your Player to feel like they have more than enough viable options at any given moment.

At the simplest level of writing, this is where "fallthrough" responses come in.

In the examples above, each moment contains a response which furthers the story but doesn't imply a huge emotional choice for the Player. The Player is asked to choose A or B, agree or disagree, but can sidestep the issue altogether if desired.

These "neutral" responses are vital if both A and B don't appeal to the Player... or if, perhaps, the Player likes A but not the WAY A is being expressed. Milquetoast option C works for anyone; thus, the Player is never forced to break character because of a lack of options.

Questions work well for this sort of neutral option. Tacit agreement and dead silence also serve, in certain sorts of stories--as a Player, I know what's going on in my silent character's head and the game won't contradict it.

The important thing is that I'm never forced to take a path that's outright WRONG for my character. Even if other characters misinterpret the Player Character's motivation, my character's inner life remains internally consistent.

"Neutral" responses aren't the only ways to go, though. Some responses are appropriate for any character because they're tied to the base character concept.

Here, for example (from @/seankmckeever's X-Files), the Player is a marine on a mission. The Player can respond abrasively to her partner's fear or look into the issue (out of compassion or genuine belief), but our fallthrough is actually the TOP response.

There's no version of our marine who would absolutely break character by picking "Stay calm and on mission." It's not blandly neutral; rather, it reinforces aspects of the character we can be sure of and gives the Player an option if nothing else works.

Different sorts of narratives will use different sorts of fallthroughs. A comedy might treat the option to say something funny as a fallthrough, of sorts--it's entertaining and will never violate the characterization the Player has created.

In a quest-driven RPG, a fallthrough response can often boil down to "How do I move to the next step of this quest?"

That said, the strongest moments in a narrative will often have no "fallthrough" response at all. They'll work by creating multiple responses that, by overlapping, cover all reasonable Player Character actions while still leaving room for the Player to ascribe motivation.

[cottoncandyopinions]

Ya know I see a lot of people make the comparison between Dark Souls and Monster Hunter

Insofar as they both force you to fight in a methodical way, taking into account the slowness and weak spots of your weapon, dodging at the right times and reading the enemy, etc.

And like... They're right. At least they certainly seem to be. The games are very different but difficult in a way that you're forced to learn to work with the mechanics and understand you're just some guy

So I guess what I'm wondering is like... How come Monster Hunter clicks perfectly with my brain to the degree of obsession, but I've never been able to get to the point of enjoying a Soulsborne?

[royalarchivist]

Green Gay Ninja's "team full of strong opinionated leaders" ran into a lot of communication issues on Day 1, but nobody has more experience wrangling loud rowdy people than FitMC.

[utilitycaster]

Unpopular opinion: parts of the cr fandom are really dismissive/ reductive of Travis’s characters. It feels like it’s due to Travis being seen as THE cis het man of the group, and by extension his characters must be heteronormative and bad, despite the fact that you could have queer interpretations of his characters. At the very least, Travis’s characters explore masculinity and the different ways it might look. It’s like the people who are all “ew men are gross and shitty” and act like that’s an absolutely normal reaction to a man just existing.

So this is another one in that I agree with the initial statement, but I'm actually not sure re: the reasoning why. I think it's possible but I could not tell you for sure.

I used to, again, think this was people carrying through Campaign 1 elements well beyond the point where C1 had ended, and so Grog having an intelligence of 6 was being applied to Travis; and this definitely does come through to an extent when people treat Fjord (objectively as smart as Beau without her circlet) as stupid or act shocked that Chetney is the brains of Bells Hells or that he can play a Cerrit, Fjord, or Nathaniel. However, again, I think this is one of those opinions that pops up among people who weren't around for Campaign 1 (or early enough in C2 to be exposed to it regularly) so I don't know if that's the case anymore. It could still be - it could be that Approved Fandom Opinions get passed down even when the logic behind them has long since been lost; that's a really common thing in institutional memory. But I can't say for sure.

I also have in the past credited it to, as you said, people assuming his characters are the cishet guys and then writing them off. That's still possible - I've seen both Fjord and Chetney called "token straight" despite considerable evidence of bisexuality, and they also paradoxically are both commonly headcanoned as trans while still getting called "token straight," which sort of ties into a post I would need to find from someone else from quite some time ago about which cast members are granted agency by the fandom in their choices vs. which are assumed to be the victims of circumstance. And I do think that there are people in fandom who have decided men are icky or whatever, and I used to think this came from a place of bigotry and a slide towards t*rf ideology but I now do genuinely think it's just idiots who don't grant interiority to characters outside their own limited understanding.

But I think it's also useful to consider a few things, most of which I've brought up before:

Travis is extremely offline. He is not here to entertain your headcanons; he has been politely but openly dismissive of some (imo, really fucking dumb) fanon/fan theories. I think the cast frequently talks about how it's their table, and I think that's valid and correct, but Travis is one of the players who lives it the most. He is playing this game with his friends, and he'd like it to be a good story, but if you don't like it, he is not here to make you like it. I think that really fucks with the parasocial connections some people desire with the cast.

Travis's characters tend to examine masculinity as a performance but also the general performance of the self, and the fact that you cannot in the end control how you are perceived entirely, and I think that really unsettles people who have equated presentation with reality and are again, looking for external validation of the self.

Travis can play it big but he's often extremely subtle, especially with his more serious characters, and he's not as easily quotable out of context as some others at the table. I think because he is a lot more naturalistic than dramatic at times (Chetney notwithstanding) and isn't as pithy and quotable in his characters as many of Taliesin's PCs are, and a lot of the strength is in the delivery, he gets overlooked despite being very good with words on the fly.

And finally: this would be a whole post on its own but people are still very foolishly wed to this idea that pressing the big red button in D&D is Wild and Chaotic and haha Big ADHD Man when it's actually how you play D&D if you're not a coward; the button is where the story is stored, and a lot of Travis's strength is that he is extremely good at understanding what the GM wants and supporting it with sufficient grace that it's only visible if you know what you're fucking doing.

[eric-the-bmo]

Actually: it frustrates me how with characters that have high intelligence or charisma, the player of said character is expected to also be able to be clever or charismatic or what-have-you in the moment. I wish I could elaborate my thoughts on this but alas, I cannot.

[zeroistic]

as much as i want the Players to win (because of how much they’ve been fucked over by pb&j), I also want to see pb&j as the sole survivors. what kind of peaceful ending do you get when it is only your team left? i want them to live with their actions of making other players ban themselves for them. If they want to win, they should deal with consequences, and hold their empty victory in a deserted server. Because ultimately, it’s not a server of gods bending to the will of mere mortals, it is the players scrapping together pyrrhic victories, living with all the bad that the conflict has brought to them, like it has alway been. no one wins a conflict without sacrifice, but pb&j don’t see that: they are trying to have a complete and utter victory. They can’t just flip a switch to revert everything to how they want it — they need to preserve it and make an effort to actually achieve the goal that they want, not just pvping the shit out of the other team. Part of their goal IS in fact get rid of the other team bc they want to ban people, but the main objective would be that they actually HELP the other players on the server, not getting them to ban themselves for fighting them better. Along their way of obsessively trying to get rid of the Players and their violent ending, they have been pursuing a violent ending, perhaps even better than the Players, with them getting other to ban themselves. They complain about the moral debates, yet their entire purpose is because of the morals they claim to have (even though they are VERY contradictory), with the conflicting ideas of peace and violence. So when the Players bring up that they have been going against their morals (by getting others to ban themselves), they immediately shut it down, because… they are right. Because if they don’t deny it, they are forced to recognize they are no different to the Players, perhaps even more ruthless being tunnel visioned on a side goal.

no matter who wins the physical war, who is left standing on the server in the end, both sides will have proven that there can only be violence, that lifesteal can never end in peace because of the lengths the server members will go to win their physical battles. PB&J can’t even stick by their own ideals to win the war, and instead give in to the gritty cruel nature of the server to be able to gain advantages, which is fine, except for the fact that one of their main goals is… to NOT have people banned? (esp because both sides keep saying that the war is between people who WANT everyone banned and those who DON’T, and yet those who don’t keep getting others banned… And, they are the ones that started it first, thus making the Players also plan on doing it… so which side has honor and morals again?)

it is also interesting when pb&j say that they don’t really have a ‘reward’ for winning, but they quite literally did that to themselves. LS has gods and exploiters, but it still is up to the players to forge their own victories, and relying their entire victory (of bringing everyone back when they ‘win’) on gods is kind of… eh. YOU make your victory, and if that victory includes banning people for another edge in pvp, then so be it (you, after all chose this, without any prompting or getting the ideas from the Players. it is naturally a place that brings the worst and cruel out of people.)

pb&j are also made up mostly of new players (and ash who is new to the whole ‘heroes’ thing), and they don’t seem to understand that a victory of their morals and being on the ‘good’ side requires sacrifice. They seem very bent on getting a clean, holistic victory, but when you fight those who want to ban everyone, you can’t get that (and pb&j have already been doing that to themselves by getting others banned, but they want a full revival to have their ‘perfect victory’). pbj are new: they don’t really see the suffering and pain previous ‘heroes’ (aka zam most of the time) had to go through, and ash is new to the whole ‘good person’ thing: he is used to complete and utter victories and power that compromise and sacrifice (something not really a problem in his godly endeavors) are a cost of pursuing their goal.

their goal for the server is unattainable, and they proved it themselves with their obsession of beating the other team

[shadowslocked]

The worst part about CC!Bad pulling away from the political lore is that he was genuinely so excited for it. Bad WANTED to start beef with Forever, he was practically kicking his feet and giggling about it last stream. He was teasing the chat about wanting angst, and the drama of miscommunications and not understanding each other, and in general was really looking forward to it

And now he's decided to drop this lore thread because of the fandom

It hasn't even been that long since his stream ended.

I hope he sleeps on it and reconsiders, at least decides to do a more lighthearted conflict with Q!Forever, maybe something more petty so he's not just completely abandoning his character's morals but man this just sucks

[chumbyy]

cuckoo, far from your home strange is your song to the tree where you've flown

[cementcornfield]

Ugh I can’t stand how chiefs fans are making fun of jamarr and calling him a diva (among other names) when Travis literally screamed in his coach’s face during the Super Bowl and has been ejected from a game before for disrespecting the ref.

tbh i don't mind chiefs fans shit talking ja'marr, they have every reason to hate him. he's embarrassed their team plenty and has done more than his share of shit talking. let them have their fun (although i agree it's def hypocritical after that travis moment that i guess no one ever wants to talk about!)

what upsets me SO much though is seeing our own fans turn on him. calling him selfish for the hold-in, blaming him for the contract debacle, saying he's overrated, saying we should trade him and keep tee (when they were all saying the exact opposite when tee requested a trade TWICE a few months ago 🙄). and i do understand that ja'marr was in the wrong for this penalty, but getting ridiculous penalties against the chiefs is kind of just what he does! like it cannot be emphasized enough how much that man hates the chiefs lmao.

ja'marr has been STRUGGLING these past few months and it's obvious how much of a toll this has taken on him. i'm not at all surprised things boiled over to a tipping point when he thought he was tackled in a particularly dangerous way (whether he was right or wrong, he DID believe it). right now he's taking a huge risk being out on the field at all without any real guarantees for the future. that shit is scary, it's scary betting on yourself even when you do believe in yourself 100%. people play better when they feel secure, when they feel valued, and the front office did everything they could this offseason to make him feel the opposite.

i'm really hoping he can have a big game this monday. supposedly the commanders defense is Not Good, so that should help us! (i just hope it isn't a trap game for us. but the fact that we're 0-2 i think will make the guys take it seriously.) winning helps cure all ails for competitors like ja'marr, and i believe we've got a lot of that ahead of us!

[44hive]

vini doesn’t have to be mature about the racial abuse he faces. he doesn’t have to be strong about being a constant victim of racism. vinicius doesn’t owe shit to nobody when he’s being hurt and abused every single day. enough with the “vini has to-“ he doesn’t!