#silly unkillable main character thing

[semisolidmind]

is it cool if we draw your y/n? (with tags of course :])

sure

realized i didn't have a full flat color ref of them yet, so i colored some older drawings

[talesofourworlds]

POSITIVES & NEGATIVES.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OCs still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

MUSE.

MY MUSE IS: canon / oc / au / slightly canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated. (headcanon heavy)

IS YOUR CHARACTER POPULAR IN THE FANDOM? YES / NO / IDK  / KINDA.

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED HOT™ IN THE FANDOM? YES / NO / IDK / KINDA.

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED STRONG IN THE FANDOM? YES / NO / IDK / KINDA.

ARE THEY UNDERRATED? YES / NO / IDK / KINDA.

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN STORY? YES  / NO. 

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN CHARACTER? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG.

ARE THEY WIDELY KNOWN IN THEIR WORLD? YES / NO.

HOW’S THEIR REPUTATION? GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL (kinda?? people think he's annoying)

HOW STRICTLY DO YOU FOLLOW CANON? 

I try to stick to canon as much as I can, but my Ivar is also pretty headcanon driven at times because canon doesn't give us a ton to work with. He's just such an interesting character to me. Just as interesting as Jude, but even more so since they're like two sides of the same coin. I try to take his views on Jude into account but also try to focus on a bit more than that. Like... boy has a one track mind, but there's more to him than just being hyper focused on Milla or Jude. You know?

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.

My lovely mutuals, I present to you one good boy chosen to be the handmaid of Milla Maxwell!

He's devoted, he's loyal, and he's willing to drop everything in the name of doing his duties. He is a beastcrafter, meaning he can communicate with animals! He dual wields daggers! He's funny!

He's also good with kids and animals. Could be a good babysitter (maybe). Also, he has cool sunglasses! What's not to like?

Also he's (maybe??) near unkillable to some degree? Boy lodged a piece of his own dagger into his head and survived.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).

Okay so let's get this out of the way. Ivar is a dingus supreme. That willingness to drop everything to fulfill his duties? The downside to that is that if he thinks his duty to protect Milla is more important than say, protecting Nia Khera, he will drop the latter in favor of the former. Much to the annoyance of anyone involved.

Ivar can be pretty intense when it comes to how he decides who he doesn't like. Sorry, Jude, but you're the best example here. Boyo was going to try and kill Jude because how dare Milla have someone else that she puts a lot of trust in instead of him. Boyo got so focused on fighting Jude that he allowed Milla to start crawling away to get to her destination on her own.

So, yeah, he's got a short temper. That can lead to him doing dumb things, especially if he thinks it will lead to him one upping someone he doesn't like.

Also, don't let him anywhere near guns. The fact he accidentally fired one while trying to teach Ludger how to use one should be all you need to know.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO RP YOUR MUSE?

I've always really liked Ivar as a character. As stated above, I love the fact that he and Jude basically are two sides of the same coin. The fandom thinks he's annoying and while I can at least see where they're coming from, I think there's a lot more to him than what the fandom sees. He's fascinating to me. I feel like he could have made an interesting addition to the party.

Mostly, though? I just wanted to give him some love. So I grabbed him as one of my many muses. Because he's my silly little guy.

WHAT KEEPS YOUR INSPIRATION GOING?

Just thinking about this dingus is enough sometimes. But also like?? Plotting and chatting with my friends is also a big help. Just having other Tales writers to bounce off of, especially other Xillia muse enjoyers, is just the ticket.

MUN.

DO YOU THINK YOU GIVE YOUR CHARACTER JUSTICE? YES / NO / KINDA.

DO YOU FREQUENTLY WRITE HEADCANONS? YES / NO / KINDA. (I really should write more headcanons!)

DO YOU SOMETIMES WRITE DRABBLES? YES / NO. (not for Ivar specifically, but that might change!)

DO YOU THINK A LOT ABOUT YOUR MUSE DURING THE DAY? YES / NO / KINDA.

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR PORTRAYAL? YES / NO / KINDA.

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR WRITING? YES / NO / KINDA.

ARE YOU A SENSITIVE PERSON? YES / NO / KINDA.

DO YOU ACCEPT CRITICISM WELL ABOUT YOUR PORTRAYAL? 

YES ABSOLUTELY. As long as it's not just 'Lol, your Ivar sucks' and doing nothing to elaborate on how I could improve, then by all means throw your critique at me!

DO YOU LIKE QUESTIONS, WHICH HELP YOU TO EXPLORE YOUR CHARACTER? 

YES, YES, YES!!

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES TO A HEADCANON OF YOURS, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? 

I mean, it depends on the headcanon. Like I headcanon Ivar is very distantly related to the Kresnik Clan based on tiny things I picked up on in my most recent playthrough of Xillia 2. Mostly just in relation to the Maxwell stuff. But I could see people seeing that headcanon and going 'Um?? No, that's dumb' and I would be fine with that. Different interpretations, it's all good.

Now if it was my headcanon that Ivar's got a forehead scar from the aforementioned dagger piece getting lodged in his head that people disagreed with, that would be something I'd like to hear about.

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES WITH YOUR PORTRAYAL, HOW WOULD YOU TAKE IT? 

I mean, honestly? There's always going to be people that don't like how people write canon characters. If someone disagrees with how I write Ivar? That's all good. So I wouldn't be too bothered.

It only would become an issue if someone disagreed with my portrayal and then like... proceeded to be nasty about it. You know?

IF SOMEONE REALLY HATES YOUR CHARACTER, HOW DO YOU TAKE IT?

So far I've not come across anyone who actively hates Ivar, which is good. But I know the fandom is pretty quick to call him annoying which, honestly, I could see as people just jumping to hating him because of how he's presented. Especially in Xillia 1. So if you hate Ivar? That's cool, man. Just let me enjoy my funny little dingus.

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PEOPLE POINTING OUT YOUR GRAMMATICAL ERRORS? 

YES. YES, PLEASE. That and spelling errors. I like to think I'm pretty thorough with checking my replies, but sometimes I'm not. Please feel free to point out errors. I'm not perfect.

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE EASY GOING AS A MUN?

I think so? For all I know, though, I could be wrong.

tagged by: Stolen from @mathcs tagging: Whoever wants to!

[hms-tardimpala]

I've settled on the three main characters' songs for Schrödinger's wip!! 🥳

(Below the cut to spare the dash of those who aren't interested in my silly ramblings about Schrödinger's wip)

When I write a fic, I like to assign a song to the characters based on vibes/plot/mood. I'm sure a lot of writers do, and to me it feels like a tangible step of working on the fic. It's more productive than staring at the blank page anyway.

Sabaton is a huge creative inspiration for this project, so of course they're Sabaton songs. Power metal warning if you're wearing earphones, I guess.

Castiel

Cas' arc in Schrödinger's wip follows his one in the show, so he's a character who sort of lived in heaven (an upper class, powerful british family) and is thrust into a war that makes him lose his faith in god, the government, authority figures, his father, and humanity at large. He is in doubt, he questions.

This song is from the point of view of a soldier who's just witnessed the death of his brother (in arms or by blood, we don't know). He questions his own presence on the battlefield, and says that he can't take any more but chooses to do his duty and to believe that he's not fighting in vain by the end of the song.

Castiel represents the naive upper-class young men who were raised to be officers and taught romantic notions about war by their fathers and grandfathers, only to be decimated by the thousands early on in the war. I think this stanza is a perfect thesis statement:

Dean

Dean is a dog of war, okay. In canon, he's written as a killing machine, a man who won't die, who endures whatever is thrown his way. He is shown enjoying violence at times and finding a purpose to his life in fighting. So, naturally:

This song is about Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, an officer fighting for the british army who gained a reputation for being a warmonger and surviving several injuries and actions that should have killed him. Here are some quotes by this absolute maniac:

"We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose."

“People imagine the loss of a hand to be far more serious than the loss of an eye, but having tried both I can say sincerely that it is not my experience.”

And of course:

"Frankly, I enjoyed the war…and why do people want peace if the war is so much fun?"

So of course this isn't representative of Dean, I just wanted to give a potential reader of this post a fun historical tidbit. I am very aware that the song doesn't reflect the complexity of Dean's character and doesn't encompass the range of emotions I want to put him through in that story. Sabaton described the song as "playful", and it is! Something Schrödinger's wip is really not, it's fucking somber.

But that's the song that fits him the most and it's not that serious. Thesis statement (sorta):

Sam

If you know me, you know I have a love/hate relationship with Sam, so he's the one I worked on the less for now. In Schrödinger's wip, Sam starts out as your standard gung-ho kid from the period, but the events of the war turn him into a conscientious objector and a bitter anti-war activist.

He feels no duty to his country and does what he has to in order to survive, but resents every minute. His mind is screaming at him non-stop. He's the one who tries to keep track of current events, of the number of dead, the geopolitical landscape. So it seemed fitting to assign him the song that's about the end of the war and how costly it was in human lives. Excerpt:

If you've listened to me ramble about this thing that I'm the only audience for up to this point, thank you, I love you. I can't wait for my brain to allow me to put words on the page. It's gonna be epic!

[diamondjackdaw]

How about Logan?

Buckle up, friends, this one got a little long. (Thank you @impossiblysporadiccreation​ for the ask! Always happy for an excuse to talk about Logan, lol.)

+ FIRST IMPRESSION: Gosh, it’s been so long since I started watching the series; I honestly don’t remember my first impression? Probably something to the tune of “This man is very smart and he wears a necktie; good for him.”

+ IMPRESSION NOW: The one John Mulaney gif that’s just “I’ll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day, I’ll die.”

If you keep up with my blog, it’s probably no shock that Logan is my favorite character in Sanders Sides. I relate to his difficulty with feelings, as well as his high expectations for himself and his fear of not being taken seriously. I love how flawed and human he is as a character; I love the glimpses of vulnerability underneath all the self-assured confidence and (sometimes) arrogance about his own abilities.

tl;dr I love Logan very much, both for his strengths and his flaws, and I’m very excited to see him grow as a character in future episodes. (I have a meta piece that discusses this in more depth if anyone is interested; I wrote it a while ago but I’m still proud of it.)

+ FAVORITE MOMENT: Too many to choose from, but I’ll always love his “That! Is! Why! I! Say! It!” in Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts; he sounds so vindicated and I’m so proud of him.

In the angst category, I’m a sucker for the look of absolute horror on his face after he lashes out at Roman in Learning New Things About Ourselves. It’s one of the few times in the show where we’ve seen him genuinely frightened, and he’s frightened of himself, and I’m not okay.

+ IDEA FOR A STORY: *stares at my mountain of in-progress Google Docs* Okay, so I may need you to be a bit more specific...? /hj

*reaches into the stack and pulls one out at random* Can I interest you in uhhhhhhh a canonverse fic where Janus and Remus invite Logan and Patton over after the events of Putting Others First, but everyone has wildly different motives for being there? Patton wants to prove he can be nice to the “dark sides” (particularly Remus), Logan wants to clear the figurative air and get Thomas’s mental health back on track, Remus just wants chaos, and Janus... well, he’s got an ethically dubious strategy for getting everyone’s issues out in the open. Step One? A friendly icebreaker, with a not-quite-so-friendly twist:

“Janus made his own snakey truth serum!” Remus exclaimed, grin stretching (very literally and very uncomfortably) from ear to ear.

“Thank you, Remus. I definitely wasn’t building toward my own dramatic reveal, so I appreciate you blurting it out with your usual lack of self-restraint.”

“You’re welcome!”

“Actually, ‘truth serum,’ at least as it is commonly represented in fictional media, does not exist,” Logan said. “While there are psychoactive drugs which can lower inhibitions and interfere with cognitive functions, none of them have been demonstrated to consistently produce accurate and honest responses in an interrogation setting.”

“That may be true,” Janus said, “but fortunately for us, we are not constrained by silly little things like scientific accuracy, as evidenced by the fact that Logan is unkillable, I’m part snake, and Remus has a moustache even though Thomas has never in his life been able to successfully grow facial hair.”

“Oh, this?” Remus tugged at the tip of his moustache. “I actually super-glued this to my face when Thomas was in middle school. It’s made of my own —”

“Regardlessss,” Janus hissed, “here in the world of Thomas’s Hollywood-inundated imagination, the synthesis of a so-called ‘truth serum’ is hardly beyond my abilities. So can we stop debating the plausibility of my very elegantly styled plot device, and —”

Abruptly, Remus snatched the fancy cup out of Janus’s hand. “Jan’s right! Enough chit-chat; it’s time for some enhanced interrogation techniques in the name of...” He giggled, high-pitched and screechy in a way that made Patton’s skin crawl. “...friendship.”

+ UNPOPULAR OPINION: Hot take, Logan’s biggest obstacle right now isn’t that the others don’t listen to him, or that they don’t take him seriously; it’s that he’s staked his sense of self on being The One Who Has The Answers and Never Makes Mistakes.

Logan needs people to take him seriously, yes, but he also needs to know that he can be taken seriously without always needing to be serious. He needs to be listened to, but he also needs to know that he’s still loved and valued even when he’s not fixing problems and providing crucial information. Just like Roman, Logan needs the security of unconditional positive regard, so he doesn’t feel like he always has to perform to a certain standard in order to earn appreciation and respect.

(Disclaimer, all of this is my personal opinion, and certainly not the only valid interpretation! This is just my take based on what we’ve seen of his character throughout the series.)

+ FAVORITE RELATIONSHIP: I don’t think I have a favorite, per se, so I’m just gonna do a list of the main Logan ships/dynamics and what I enjoy about them.

Logince: The sheer romance of enemies to lovers. Two incredibly intelligent, passionate people who know exactly how to tear each other apart, but ultimately come to a place where they choose to be gentle, because they understand each other’s fears and insecurities on a fundamental level.

Logicality: Lifelong best friend energy. Like, the epitome of an old married couple, but in a platonic way. (I’m not opposed to shipping them, by any means, but platonic Logicality is my figurative bread and butter.)

Analogical: Introverts who are just? Really comfortable with each other? Not necessarily a super emotive relationship, but it doesn’t have to be, because the cornerstone of their friendship is an unspoken bedrock of trust.

Loceit: Rivals to friends to (maybe?) lovers. Long, heated arguments about philosophy; there’s a lot of posturing and taunting but privately they both love having someone smart enough to debate them in an area of shared interest. Everything about their dynamic screams “my esteemed rival” and I love it.

Intrulogical: Mad science power couple. Enough said.

+ FAVORITE HEADCANON: With regard to memory, Logan seems to be responsible for Thomas’s factual recall, while Patton (as we see in Moving On) handles emotional connections to memories. I like the idea that Logan doesn’t experience those same emotional associations when looking back on the past, which is part of why the whole concept of nostalgia is so foreign to him, and why he struggles with identifying and naming his feelings.

Original Ask Game Here (Send Me A Character!)

[asknueidentified]

Longtime no see.  No this isn’t me returning to RPing, it’s more tabletop nonsense.

I’ve been thinking about running a Pathfinder game using the mythic rules and wanted to see just how far I could torture said rules to get a feel for them.  So I decided to see how close I could come to Utsuho (as a technically legal mythic character rather than a mythic monster, more challenging that way.)

Though it’s still not finished (I still have two feats to select, I need to finish her spell load out, and she still has equipment budget left), this is the result.  I went with mythic rank 9, because rather than trying to figure out the most appropriate mythic rank for this or any of the touhou’s I’d create using this system, I just decided to give them a mythic rank of 1.5x their stage.  Though mythic rank being a 10 point scale, 9/10 is almost unkillable anyway.  Like literally, simply by being a MR9 entity, Utsuho self-resurrects after 24 hours unless very specific conditions are met.

The result is that this incarnation of Utsuho is very much a glass canon.  Having an AC of 33 (which includes the shield spell) is a pitifully low AC for a 20th level character, though standard for a sorcerer, but for a mythic character it’s trivial.  Most mythic melee combatants usually have a main attack bonus of over 40.  And while 220hp is alot in a non mythic standard it’s very little compared to what can be thrown around at this tier.

Ah, but then again, that’s not what Utsuho’s made for.  She’s made for blowing shit the fuck up.  And holy shit can she blow shit up.  One potential routine for her looks like this:

-Turn 1- Swift action:  Spend one mythic power to activate metamastery(quicken spell) allowing Utusho to apply the quicken spell feat to any spell she casts without increasing the spells level.  Thus allowing her to cast most of her spells as swift actions, and more importantly negating the cast time increase spontaneous casters normally suffer when apply metamagic feats to things.

Standard action:  Possibly some defensive magic, possibly teleportation to stay out of reach, the fireworks don’t start until turn two.  Being a glass canon this is obviously a risk.  But I’m going for optimizing blowing shit up.

-Turn 2- Standard action:  Cast meteor swarm, spend a usage o her mythic spell-power ability to cast the mythic version of the spell without spending mythic power.  Burn 3 of 6 charges in the control rod to maximize the meteor swarm.  Meteor swarm now is a line attack that explodes at the end.  Total damage if she concentrates the four meteors: 80 bludgeoning, 240 fire, save DC 33 (+2 from elemental mastery(fire)).

Swift action.  Use quicken spell to repeat the meteors warm trick again. 

2nd standard action: is something still alive?  Spend another point of mythic power to activate Amazing Initiative to gain a second standard action.  While this standard action does prohibit casting spells, it does NOT prohibit using command-word based items... like say that rod that’s loaded with caster level 20 disintegrate.  Add another 40d6 damage to a single target.

-Turn 3, 4, etc- While technically she can repeat Turn 2, with the reservoirs in her control rod and mythic spell-power ability both spent doing so would burn through her own mythic power reserve quickly.

Technically Utsuho can use metamastery with any metamagic feat (one at a time anyway) she knows.  So I can see in slower paced combats (If such even exists in mythic) applying it to empower spell instead of quicken.

I’m quite pleased with the result of this little experiment.  Though I do think this proves that the higher tiers of mythic can get pants on head silly pretty quickly so I might not give them that so quickly.  Still, since mythic rank and character level are not linked... I sort of want to see my players running around as MR10 level 1 characters.

[jojotier]

Is The Narrative Setting Tsukishima Up To be Another Immortal?

This is kind of going off some previous meta I’d written about the time when Tsukishima’s backstory just dropped, but tl;dr- Tsukishima stands in the direct center of Sugimoto and Ogata, who are diametric opposites; his backstory and overall unsociable temperament align more closely with Ogata, but his actions, personality, and deep care for others align more closely with Sugimoto.

Something I wish I’d talked about then was something that all three characters seem to share- they are just incredibly, incredibly hard to kill.

We already know the deal with Sugimoto “let me yell about how immortal I am” Saichi, so let’s focus on Ogata and Tsukishima’s possible “immortality” for a moment.

Ogata is certainly the weakest link, in terms of surviving shit- he hasn’t had nearly the same amount of on-screen near-death experiences that Sugimoto has had, and of his on-screen ones, only one is noteworthy as being a case of truly miraculous survival- when he was tossed off a ravine in the chapter he was introduced. Other near-death experiences he’s had, such as being shot through the chest or the arrow to the eye, were more easily survived- you can more or less survive any number of bullets to the chest, so long as they pass clean through and don’t hit anything important, and once the poison was removed the only thing Ogata has to contend with now is the eye situation. 

Considering the fact that the arrow didn’t seem too deep, I’d estimate that at most, it severed the optic nerve right before it moved into the optic chiasm. If you really want to go farther, it might have lightly scraped some of his prefrontal, but overall in the coming months neuroplasticity will make up for the ten neurons that got scraped and replace them with new, stronger neurons in the neighboring area. Just a mild bit of brain damage, nothing that will drastically change his impulsivity or even make a difference (though that was impaired anyway, no brain trauma required).

That leaves us with Tsukishima, seemingly in the middle between Sugimoto and Ogata. He of course hasn’t been in as many on-screen near-death experiences as Sugimoto, since Sugimoto has been a main character from the get go and Tsukishima has just more or less completed his fade into main cast status from the complete obscurity of his introductory chapter of shooting Wada dead. 

The “quality” of his near-death experiences, though, I would argue, puts Tsukishima as being almost as unkillable as Sugimoto.

He’s survived three separate explosions, all within blast range, and seemingly got out the first two without lasting damage that affect his functioning later. One during the war, another in Yubari, and just now, in 189. 

To really grasp how astronomically unlikely this is, we need to look at the types of injury that result from an explosion, starting with the three main types- “fireball”, wherein someone is caught on fire and engulfed in the blast, leaving them presumably dead; “blast”, caused by the overpressure of the initial combustion that sends a shockwave of energy to blow away anyone too near; and missile, which just means any shrapnel or debris thrown into the fleshy bodies of any unlucky victim within a radius of the initial explosion.

We can disregard the fireball injury, as Tsukishima never suffers from this. While it seems that he’d sustained some missile injuries (during explosion 1 and definitely during explosion 3, judging by the neck wound), missile damage is unpredictable in that there are possibilities of it barely scratching someone- the likelihood of not being hit goes down the closer one is to the blast, but there’s still a likelihood there, if someone is just very, very lucky.

I’d like to focus instead upon the idea of blast damage, since in at least one of the explosions, Tsukishima is so close to the blast that he’s actually sent flying back. This kind of overpressure can have many effects on the human body when the psi (or, how the pressure is measured) is only at 1- for a blast to send a body of about, let’s say, 175 pounds/79kg flying back, it would take 2-4 psi to do it. 2-4 psi is about the equivalent of 70 to 145+ mph wind speeds. That’s enough to, at the very least, damage most modern buildings, and at most, cause some modern residential structures to collapse if blowing for a somewhat sustained duration. While the blast doesn’t last as long as that, those few seconds are the kind of power that’s hitting Tsukishima full force.

And, of course, this is only an estimate- but even at the lowest threshold of 1psi, if someone is close enough to the blast, things such as ruptured eardrums and hemoraging of the lungs can occur. The fact that after the first two explosions Tsukishima hasn’t shown any signs of sustaining permanent hearing loss or temporary respiratory problems is absolutely mindblowing. 

Now, why would Noda choose to use this method to show how hardy Tsukishima is? Why not any other way?

It may seem like an odd, almost over the top choice to put one character through so many explosions- after all, this is supposed to be somewhat “realistic”, and Tsukishima by no accounts fills the role of a dashing Hollywood action blockbuster star. Especially when you compare this to Sugimoto, who seems to be immortal despite his injuries and near-death experiences being a little more down to earth (being shot a lot, for instance), it seems almost silly.

In a lot of ways, though, it makes sense as a narrative shortcut. Tsukishima hasn’t had the limelight for long, so to have a situation where he “becomes immortal” like Sugimoto down the line, beating truly impossible odds, without any build up would have seemed silly. Sugimoto has had over 100 chapters to explain why and how he could survive a shot from Ogata.

On the other hand, the roles that they maintain have different levels of leniency. While Tsukishima has been in more impossible situations, he’s also not one of the two posterboys of the manga, and thus Noda can get away with a suspension of disbelief for him. Most fans are more preoccupied with the main trio, or Ogata for some reason, to really take notice of how frankly astronomically lucky Tsukishima is.

Sugimoto, on the other hand, has to follow a few more rules so that his role is kept believable despite its mild ridiculousness. He’s one of the two mainest of main characters- as such, our belief in the world of Golden Kamuy as a historical fiction rests primarily upon how Noda can show us that Sugimoto is human, even despite beating high stakes and bad odds time and time again. If Sugimoto were caught in more than one explosion, I believe that we wouldn’t be quite as taken as an audience with his immortality- simply because at that point, it starts looking as if Sugimoto has main character privilege and plot armor, instead of surviving two explosions on his own merit. 

Because of Tsukishima still not being as integral to the plot and story as Sugimoto is, we can suspend our disbelief further- and because we don’t know him as an immortal, there’s still an underlying atmosphere of, “he can still die, one day”. 

Who knows what Noda is gonna do with that?

tl;dr: Tsukishima is one hardy bastard

[excrucian]

Hypothetical Yogscast Campaign: Honeydew

Link to main.

Hello there! Sorry, I didn't see you earlier. What's your name? I believe you're Honeydew, right? And a dwarf from the dwarven colonies underground?

Yup! I'm a male dwarf!

I'm actually a female dwarf but I'm pretending to be a guy because of reasons. Humans can't even tell us apart anyway.

I'm a female dwarf who everyone thinks is male, not just because humans can't tell us apart...

I'm a proud female dwarf!

My sex is yes. As in, I don't understand your human binaries.

I'm actually an elf from the deep forests.

Something else?

In any case, I will presume that you are a male dwarf. Sorry if you're not, but I hope this will be equally applicable for you!

I was told that you are the son of a great dwarven king, who often went out and battled goblins and proudly led his people to glory. He was training you to be his successor, wasn't he? And even though you were the son of a great dwarven king and the prince of the dwarves, you were expected to toil in the mines and to learn how to fight.

That's exactly how it went.

You're wrong. He loved me and didn't expect much of me.

He didn't come back one day, and I had to become the King of the Dwarves at a young age.

I'm the adopted son of the dwarven king! He had no children, and I was already proving my worth.

I'm not even royal. I'm just a regular ol' joe of a dwarf.

Something else?

You had a secret, however. All your life, you yearned for the great outdoors. You wanted to explore, to build things out there, to fight weird things like cows and piggos, anything but the endless dusty halls of the dwarven kingdom! And most of all... well, once, you were taken out on some royal outing or other, and you looked up, and you saw the moon...

One day, I swore, I would get to the moon. The first step was to escape the kingdom, and after that, I had no idea what was going to happen.

That's all wrong. I wanted to escape, but it was because I just didn't fit into the dwarven world. I was scared of leaving! But I had to.

I left reluctantly.

I was exiled for my crimes.

All my people are dead. I'm the last dwarf alive!

Somethign else that wasn’t mentioned!

And I believe you came across a crashed spaceship... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

These are your skills:

Superior Dwarf 2 - You are pretty good at being a dwarf. Mining, being short, quaffing ale, singing rowdy dwarf songs, this skill has it all. Superior Vitality 1 - You can sure take a beating! Mining 2 - You are pretty good at mining, though you usually use Superior Dwarf to go super fast rather than this skill. Crafting 2 - You are decent at crafting. You remember some recipes! Foolhardy 1 - You like rushing in first!

And here are some perks that you have: Adventuring 2 - You are decent at adventuring, which means you don't get terribly lost and you are somewhat brave. Connection (2) Xephos - You are quite close to your friend. Bond (2): I promised myself I would get to the moon. - This is a driving force in your life. You could probably switch this out when you actually get to the moon, though!

For a Mundane character, here are your extra stats: Bond (2): Diggy diggy hole. - You are so driven to dig holes and to sing while doing so that you can invoke this to oppose things that will stop you from diggy diggy hole. Affliction: When I die, I must forget what has happened. - This doesn't seem suspicious at all! Especially when dealing with clones!

For a Miraculous Honeydew, you would be on Spiritual 2 / Become Somebody 1. You are tied to the element of Adventuring, which allows you to sense where adventure is to be found, create a slight sense of Adventure!, command where adventure may be found and summon adventure to you. You're also growing into being an Adventurer, though your failing is that you're easily distractable and fairly silly. You can see where distractions and silliness lie, you can support yourself being an Adventurer and the son of a Dwarven King with miraculous power and you tend to blend in well wherever you go.

You are likely to be advancing either Spiritual or Become Somebody, which are both Frantic arcs. This means that you will be in trouble, but being in trouble is useful! You could also choose to maybe embark on Keeper of Gardens 0, which will give you the ability to create and maintain special places that you can manipulate, which will usually be Honeydew Inc or maybe Yoglabs. This is an Immortal arc, which makes you unkillable. Which is a good thing, for you personally!

Your basic quest is probably something about singing “Diggy Diggy Hole” or sharing some other ancient dwarven wisdom, and your XP emotion is Headdesk, which means whenever you make someone else head-desk, you gain experience points!

[symbianosgames]

Nearly all games need some amount of artificial intelligence — most commonly to give the player non-human opponents. But conversations about good AI in games are still dominated by Façade, Black & White, The Sims, Versu, and F.E.A.R. — all of which came out years ago. 

Those games are hardly the only examples we can draw from in envisioning artificial intelligence systems. We reached out to several developers for their input on more recent games making innovative and instructive uses of AI.

The following list of games are all notable for the interesting, clever, and/or novel ways in which they use AI, and all are well worth a closer look if you're eager to let a little algorithmic thinking improve your game design. The underlying ideas they explore point toward the exciting and diverse future artificial intelligence could have. 

(For more along these lines, be sure to check out Gamasutra's lists on instructive uses of procedural generation and crafting systems.) 

The Division's enemy AI has had a mixed reception — at one moment they'll stand out in the open, completely unprotected, then the next they'll sneak around the back and give you a surprise bonk on the head. Its attempts to step up from the highs set by F.E.A.R. a decade ago are well worth closer examination, but the real star of The Division's AI routines is its path finding for changing cover. 

Like in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, players can scan for cover, but here they can also hold down the cover button and their character will automatically run to the new spot. Essentially, this means that movement between covers is automated so that the player can concentrate on tactics. And since the path is shown on-screen ahead of time (it's drawn in a thin white line), the player can see exactly how they'll get there — which further helps in sorting out tactics because they can guess how long it'll take to make the automated dash. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can drive mechanics that help the player get around faster and more effectively, which leaves them with extra mental bandwidth to process the important stuff, like who to shoot and how.

Since its inception in 2005, the Forza series has favored a learning neural network to traditional AI design for controlling non-human drivers. This Drivatar system watches you play and imitates your driving style — kind of like an amalgam of dozens of time trial ghosts.

In the most recent iterations the Drivatar system is hooked in to Microsoft's cloud services, where it can pull in AI racers based on other human players as well as crunch greater amounts of data from each player. Now your AI opponents mimic other players from around the globe — their silly mistakes, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses — which makes for a more unpredictable experience. 

The good side of this is that AI drivers learn to do all sorts of complex maneuvers and each exhibit a distinct racing style, which makes them seem more human. Unfortunately it also means that even with the difficulty maxed out, racing sim purists have a tougher time finding non-human opponents to practice against — because few drivatars actually drive anything like a professional race car driver. 

TAKEAWAY: Learning AI that mimics real people can make enemies and opponents seem more human, but you still need to keep in mind that most people who aren't professionals in the game's closest real-life equivalent will behave nothing at all like the real professionals.

First-person shooters normally showcase enemy AI that's just smart enough to challenge the player as they go around shooting everything that moves. The player is a predator, and the hordes of lookalike bad guys scurrying around the screen are the prey. But Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph reverses that convention. The free-roaming alien is the one in a position of strength, and the player — stripped of her power — gets to feel what it's like to be hunted. You carry a gun, but to use it is to draw the all-powerful, unkillable Xenomorph to you. (A flamethrower eventually complicates the situation and gives the player some power back, but even then the alien remains the hunter.) 

The alien may just be following the behavior trees and routines coded into its digital being (which becomes all-too obvious if you try to outsmart the Xenomorph or otherwise test its limits), but it's hard to predict where and when it might appear nearby. That unpredictability combines with the alien's sensing capabilities — it has keen hearing — and some sort of director system that drives the alien to always be somewhere in the player's general vicinity. The result is a tense, terrifying experience that pushes players to hide in lockers for minutes at a time and to constantly look around for the hunter lurking in the corridors and vents. 

TAKEAWAY: An enemy AI designed to relentlessly hunt the player as they roam about the game world can offer an unpredictable and tension-building element to the level design.

The Ice-Bound Concordance may seem at first glance to be an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, but its story of KRIS, an AI simulacrum of an author, is not built of branching paths. Rather, the player and AI combine pre-written (barring some variables) fragments of story text to piece together a novel. This is done through interactions both in the game — dialogue trees, player interventions in KRIS's creative process, symbol and event choices for the plot — and outside of it, through the pages the player shows KRIS from an actual, physical companion book that the AI's not supposed to see. The developers call their AI-heavy take on CYOA a combinatorial narrative system. 

Where many older attempts to put algorithms in charge of a game's story — such as Façade and Versu — have focused on social interactions, Ice-Bound looks inward to tell a more literary tale — or rather many tales. It can handle tens of thousands or more permutations of a literary framework that consists of many narrative fragments and a complex set of rules for how these might be activated and deactivated. The AI and player (and the designers who crafted the narrative fragments) thereby become collaborators in the storytelling process, with the AI's goal being to ensure the player gets a dramatically-satisfying story. 

TAKEAWAY: You can use AI to tell a dramatically-satisfying story — even if it's literary in nature — that's dynamically shaped by and molded to player choices in a more organic way than traditional branching paths.

Tower defense (and offense) game City Conquest is unusual in that its biggest use of artificial intelligence came in the design process itself. Here AI became a tool not for expanding or refining the player's moment-to-moment experience but for evolving the actual design — to improve game balance and to (hopefully) engineer a more enjoyable overall experience by measuring how well the design at each iteration met its goals. 

The AI wasn't handling the design modifications, mind you. Designer Paul Tozour wrote a genetic algorithm that acted as a kind of automated, virtual playtesting team that could evolve into expert players and in the process identify dominant strategies and minor elements that needed tuning. By looking at how both these machine players and human players approached the game, Tozour found flaws big and small and gained lots of data to help him tune the game's parameters. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can help you make your game better before it's even out by playtesting to find dominant strategies.

Jonathan Blow wanted walking in The Witness to be as smooth and unobtrusive an experience as possible. If players got caught on edges or tapped in walls, or if they could traverse terrain in one direction but not the other, it would pull them out of the world. It'd break the immersion, and immersion was paramount to the game's vision. To ensure this didn't happen, he asked programmer Casey Muratori to improve the player movement code. Muratori responded by writing an algorithm that tests for collisions. 

His algorithm hopped in to replace the player and explored the entire island. As it walked it created nodes and displayed lines atop the ground that connected these. White lines meant walkable, red not walkable. (It could explore areas close to boundaries at higher density, too.) If the state changed — say, a door opened — it could go back and pick up from that point and continue to the area beyond. And from seeing the results the dev team could find problems with the movement code or with level geometry that needed refinement. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can do the grunt work for you in finding all the nasty problems that could frustrate players simply trying to explore your game's world.

Several years on, the AI Director used in the two Left 4 Dead games remains a fascinating system for controlling the flow of a cooperative multiplayer game. The Director handles typical AI tasks such as enemy movement and human player proxies in a satisfying, believable manner. But what really makes it interesting is the higher-level impact it has on every session. 

The Director's main job is to manage the pacing. It builds up the intensity to a peak, then eases off, then builds up again, and repeats this throughout the session as players edge closer to the exit. It does this by modeling stress levels in players (affected by things like close versus long-range combat, ammo and health levels, zombies in proximity), then adjusting how the zombies attack — where they come from, how many of them attack, which types attack, and who they focus their attack on. 

AI Directors have since been used to great effect in many other games, such as the post-Left 4 Dead Far Cry games, Evolve, and Rocksmith 2014 — which used its director to handle musical accompaniment to your live guitar play in the game's session mode. But Left 4 Dead remains the best example to study. 

TAKEAWAY: Every player is different, and by having an that AI alters the flow and intensity of gameplay to fit their moment-to-moment needs you can ensure that everybody gets a satisfying, challenging experience.

As these examples show, artificial intelligence can be used in games in myriad ways. It could be a testing tool to make your code or design more robust and to make the final game more fun, or it could make non-player characters seem smart even as they continue to be dumb — just by exhibiting some rudimentary learning strategies or adaptability. 

AI can be the unseen hand directing the whole show or the bullet sponges and companion characters right there with the player. AI can guide players or mislead them, help them or hinder them. It can make the bad guys act like they're genuinely cooperating to kill or maim the player, or it can turn a single enemy into a terrifying hunter. AI can mimic, imitate, learn, forget, teach, and collaborate. 

It's just algorithms, so it'll do whatever you want it to. You only need to think of creative ways to leverage its powers to entice, bewilder, muddle, aid, hinder, process, and share. Don't think so much about AI in terms of enemies that are just barely smart enough to slow the player down. Rather, imagine how it could elevate the experience in some small or big way.  

Thanks to Jonathan Tremblay, David Churchill, and Anne Sullivan for their help with putting this article together, and to Tommy Thompson for his AI and Games YouTube channel — which provided further guidance.

[symbianosgames]

Nearly all games need some amount of artificial intelligence — most commonly to give the player non-human opponents. But conversations about good AI in games are still dominated by Façade, Black & White, The Sims, Versu, and F.E.A.R. — all of which came out years ago. 

Those games are hardly the only examples we can draw from in envisioning artificial intelligence systems. We reached out to several developers for their input on more recent games making innovative and instructive uses of AI.

The following list of games are all notable for the interesting, clever, and/or novel ways in which they use AI, and all are well worth a closer look if you're eager to let a little algorithmic thinking improve your game design. The underlying ideas they explore point toward the exciting and diverse future artificial intelligence could have. 

(For more along these lines, be sure to check out Gamasutra's lists on instructive uses of procedural generation and crafting systems.) 

The Division's enemy AI has had a mixed reception — at one moment they'll stand out in the open, completely unprotected, then the next they'll sneak around the back and give you a surprise bonk on the head. Its attempts to step up from the highs set by F.E.A.R. a decade ago are well worth closer examination, but the real star of The Division's AI routines is its path finding for changing cover. 

Like in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, players can scan for cover, but here they can also hold down the cover button and their character will automatically run to the new spot. Essentially, this means that movement between covers is automated so that the player can concentrate on tactics. And since the path is shown on-screen ahead of time (it's drawn in a thin white line), the player can see exactly how they'll get there — which further helps in sorting out tactics because they can guess how long it'll take to make the automated dash. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can drive mechanics that help the player get around faster and more effectively, which leaves them with extra mental bandwidth to process the important stuff, like who to shoot and how.

Since its inception in 2005, the Forza series has favored a learning neural network to traditional AI design for controlling non-human drivers. This Drivatar system watches you play and imitates your driving style — kind of like an amalgam of dozens of time trial ghosts.

In the most recent iterations the Drivatar system is hooked in to Microsoft's cloud services, where it can pull in AI racers based on other human players as well as crunch greater amounts of data from each player. Now your AI opponents mimic other players from around the globe — their silly mistakes, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses — which makes for a more unpredictable experience. 

The good side of this is that AI drivers learn to do all sorts of complex maneuvers and each exhibit a distinct racing style, which makes them seem more human. Unfortunately it also means that even with the difficulty maxed out, racing sim purists have a tougher time finding non-human opponents to practice against — because few drivatars actually drive anything like a professional race car driver. 

TAKEAWAY: Learning AI that mimics real people can make enemies and opponents seem more human, but you still need to keep in mind that most people who aren't professionals in the game's closest real-life equivalent will behave nothing at all like the real professionals.

First-person shooters normally showcase enemy AI that's just smart enough to challenge the player as they go around shooting everything that moves. The player is a predator, and the hordes of lookalike bad guys scurrying around the screen are the prey. But Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph reverses that convention. The free-roaming alien is the one in a position of strength, and the player — stripped of her power — gets to feel what it's like to be hunted. You carry a gun, but to use it is to draw the all-powerful, unkillable Xenomorph to you. (A flamethrower eventually complicates the situation and gives the player some power back, but even then the alien remains the hunter.) 

The alien may just be following the behavior trees and routines coded into its digital being (which becomes all-too obvious if you try to outsmart the Xenomorph or otherwise test its limits), but it's hard to predict where and when it might appear nearby. That unpredictability combines with the alien's sensing capabilities — it has keen hearing — and some sort of director system that drives the alien to always be somewhere in the player's general vicinity. The result is a tense, terrifying experience that pushes players to hide in lockers for minutes at a time and to constantly look around for the hunter lurking in the corridors and vents. 

TAKEAWAY: An enemy AI designed to relentlessly hunt the player as they roam about the game world can offer an unpredictable and tension-building element to the level design.

The Ice-Bound Concordance may seem at first glance to be an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure game, but its story of KRIS, an AI simulacrum of an author, is not built of branching paths. Rather, the player and AI combine pre-written (barring some variables) fragments of story text to piece together a novel. This is done through interactions both in the game — dialogue trees, player interventions in KRIS's creative process, symbol and event choices for the plot — and outside of it, through the pages the player shows KRIS from an actual, physical companion book that the AI's not supposed to see. The developers call their AI-heavy take on CYOA a combinatorial narrative system. 

Where many older attempts to put algorithms in charge of a game's story — such as Façade and Versu — have focused on social interactions, Ice-Bound looks inward to tell a more literary tale — or rather many tales. It can handle tens of thousands or more permutations of a literary framework that consists of many narrative fragments and a complex set of rules for how these might be activated and deactivated. The AI and player (and the designers who crafted the narrative fragments) thereby become collaborators in the storytelling process, with the AI's goal being to ensure the player gets a dramatically-satisfying story. 

TAKEAWAY: You can use AI to tell a dramatically-satisfying story — even if it's literary in nature — that's dynamically shaped by and molded to player choices in a more organic way than traditional branching paths.

Tower defense (and offense) game City Conquest is unusual in that its biggest use of artificial intelligence came in the design process itself. Here AI became a tool not for expanding or refining the player's moment-to-moment experience but for evolving the actual design — to improve game balance and to (hopefully) engineer a more enjoyable overall experience by measuring how well the design at each iteration met its goals. 

The AI wasn't handling the design modifications, mind you. Designer Paul Tozour wrote a genetic algorithm that acted as a kind of automated, virtual playtesting team that could evolve into expert players and in the process identify dominant strategies and minor elements that needed tuning. By looking at how both these machine players and human players approached the game, Tozour found flaws big and small and gained lots of data to help him tune the game's parameters. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can help you make your game better before it's even out by playtesting to find dominant strategies.

Jonathan Blow wanted walking in The Witness to be as smooth and unobtrusive an experience as possible. If players got caught on edges or tapped in walls, or if they could traverse terrain in one direction but not the other, it would pull them out of the world. It'd break the immersion, and immersion was paramount to the game's vision. To ensure this didn't happen, he asked programmer Casey Muratori to improve the player movement code. Muratori responded by writing an algorithm that tests for collisions. 

His algorithm hopped in to replace the player and explored the entire island. As it walked it created nodes and displayed lines atop the ground that connected these. White lines meant walkable, red not walkable. (It could explore areas close to boundaries at higher density, too.) If the state changed — say, a door opened — it could go back and pick up from that point and continue to the area beyond. And from seeing the results the dev team could find problems with the movement code or with level geometry that needed refinement. 

TAKEAWAY: AI can do the grunt work for you in finding all the nasty problems that could frustrate players simply trying to explore your game's world.

Several years on, the AI Director used in the two Left 4 Dead games remains a fascinating system for controlling the flow of a cooperative multiplayer game. The Director handles typical AI tasks such as enemy movement and human player proxies in a satisfying, believable manner. But what really makes it interesting is the higher-level impact it has on every session. 

The Director's main job is to manage the pacing. It builds up the intensity to a peak, then eases off, then builds up again, and repeats this throughout the session as players edge closer to the exit. It does this by modeling stress levels in players (affected by things like close versus long-range combat, ammo and health levels, zombies in proximity), then adjusting how the zombies attack — where they come from, how many of them attack, which types attack, and who they focus their attack on. 

AI Directors have since been used to great effect in many other games, such as the post-Left 4 Dead Far Cry games, Evolve, and Rocksmith 2014 — which used its director to handle musical accompaniment to your live guitar play in the game's session mode. But Left 4 Dead remains the best example to study. 

TAKEAWAY: Every player is different, and by having an that AI alters the flow and intensity of gameplay to fit their moment-to-moment needs you can ensure that everybody gets a satisfying, challenging experience.

As these examples show, artificial intelligence can be used in games in myriad ways. It could be a testing tool to make your code or design more robust and to make the final game more fun, or it could make non-player characters seem smart even as they continue to be dumb — just by exhibiting some rudimentary learning strategies or adaptability. 

AI can be the unseen hand directing the whole show or the bullet sponges and companion characters right there with the player. AI can guide players or mislead them, help them or hinder them. It can make the bad guys act like they're genuinely cooperating to kill or maim the player, or it can turn a single enemy into a terrifying hunter. AI can mimic, imitate, learn, forget, teach, and collaborate. 

It's just algorithms, so it'll do whatever you want it to. You only need to think of creative ways to leverage its powers to entice, bewilder, muddle, aid, hinder, process, and share. Don't think so much about AI in terms of enemies that are just barely smart enough to slow the player down. Rather, imagine how it could elevate the experience in some small or big way.  

Thanks to Jonathan Tremblay, David Churchill, and Anne Sullivan for their help with putting this article together, and to Tommy Thompson for his AI and Games YouTube channel — which provided further guidance.