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Crystalwatcher's Magical Girl Quest!

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[X] Split up. It'll be faster to search the town this way, and hopefully you can find her quickly.

Let's split up, we can do more damage that way. Plus Solid Core can fly if she goes off on her own, which should speed things up considerably.
 
Crystalwatcher said:
Are you sure that's not because I've long since ripped what paltry excuse for a core you had out through your ass already? ( :V )
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He's a Makuta. They're not exactly known for their compassion or capacity for empathy.

Just be careful and make sure he isn't in any position to make long, complicated plans to usurp Gaia and take control of the planet.

:V
 
[x] Search the town together. If you run into Red Knight together, Kat might be able to keep things from coming to blows.

Do not split the party.

There is no reason to upgrade CS for now. We already do crazy amounts of damage. Just keep enough XP in reserve to do it if we need to. Flight speed is useful, but I really doubt we need more of it ATM. Starshine, like CS, should not be upgraded until we need it.

On the other hand, I am very tempted by this, now that we can turn it off.

[] Plan Five APT
-[] Upgrade Purifier Beam to level 20 (540 XP)

But I really think we should save for abilities and the spell we hopefully learn soon, so...

[x] Save it~

I could be convinced to go with Five APT, though.
 
[X] Search the town together. If you run into Red Knight together, Kat might be able to keep things from coming to blows.

[X] Plan Upgrade
-[X] Upgrade Celestial Severance to level 20 (540 XP)
-[X] Upgrade Starshine to level 20 (540 XP)
-[X] Upgrade Flight to level 30 (570 XP)
 
Crystalwatcher said:
She shakes her head. "Nope. Me and my friends are an independent Magical Girl Team!" She puffs up in preteen pride. "We're Team HEART! We defend the weak, and seek justice no matter where we go! We've been a bit split up recently due to our families moving about, but when the Counter Force put out the bulletin asking for volunteers, we decided to help out! There's me, Dream Heart, Wild Heart, and our Leader Candy Heart-" You feel your world almost physically crack when she says the name of the girl that saved you... and died twice for you. "-there's also Raging Heart, but she joined a different team!"
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This should probably have a gut punch. but it really doesn't. Trauma from the blue is sorta meh by now. Like, the baseline is murdering a helpful doctor by mistake or eating the soul of a close friend. When she starts talking about how at least she still has her father figure who's an angelic doctor who never leaves false heaven so he has to be safe I'm just going to roll my eyes.

the trauma train is about two shocking ass pulls past getting an emotional reaction out of me. Well, a sad one, around the heaven vacation I started getting really aggravated when he decides to pour TRAUMA! all over everything. Like, this entire scene is just aggressively unnecessary from a writing perspective. what does it add? did digging up that mess make the story better? does anyone think this development is interesting? does the story get better for having candy hearts corpse dragged across the screen for the third time? has the story been so light-hearted that we needed a somber reminder of the cost of war just now?

I mean, for fuck's sake the recovery arc was a long string of mental breakdowns culimating in the accidental murder of an inoccent. This is a serious issue with this quest, just throwing random TRAUMA at the players isn't interesting, and it means when something traumatic does happen it gets lost in the background noise.
 
No need to spend EXP right now. There shouldn't be anything dangerous here.

If you want to upgrade the power of our stuff, do it right before a training session, not right after a training session.

[x] Save EXP
 
Crystalwatcher said:
It wasn't about the Trauma though.
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then maybe it should not be there. pilling up more and more trauma just reduces the narrative weight of it to styrofoam. Take candy heart for example, that was some heavy shit the first and second time. But it got buried under other piles of TRAUMA and quickly it faded into the background. Writing trauma is not about how many traumatic events you shove in, it's about how it sticks with you. If nothing else really traumatizing had happened to nep after having to kill candy heart, but she had trouble moving past it, with her regret and remorse coloring a lot of her downtime actions that would have a lot of narrative weight. As is we just get a few hundred words of "and another terrible thing happens to you! =P" every update or two.

Frankly, it's well past annoying at this point. If you want to write sadness have the pc deal with her existing backlog of issues, flashbacks nightmares, PTSD or the other things she's mostly not done in response to all this shit. or if that would involve too much of a character shift have her have to come to terms with how she's now inhuman enough that she doesn't feel remorse or regret deeply anymore. just anything but piling more meaningless bits of trauma on top of us for no fucking reason.
 
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random_npc said:
then maybe it should not be there. pilling up more and more trauma just reduces the narrative weight of it to styrofoam. Take candy heart for example, that was some heavy shit the first and second time. But it got buried under other piles of TRAUMA and quickly it faded into the background. Writing trauma is not about how many traumatic events you shove in, it's about how it sticks with you. If nothing else really traumatizing had happened to nep after having to kill candy heart, but she had trouble moving past it, with her regret and remorse coloring a lot of her downtime actions that would have a lot of narrative weight. As is we just get a few hundred words of "and another terrible thing happens to you! =P" every update or two.

Frankly, it's well past annoying at this point. If you want to write sadness have the pc deal with her existing backlog of issues, flashbacks nightmares, PTSD or the other things she's mostly not done in response to all this shit. or if that would involve too much of a character shift have her have to come to terms with how she's now inhuman enough that she doesn't feel remorse or regret deeply anymore. just anything but piling more meaningless bits of trauma on top of us for no fucking reason.
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In other words, character growth and development requested.
 
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[X] Search the town together. If you run into Red Knight together, Kat might be able to keep things from coming to blows.

[x] Save EXP
 
random_npc said:
This should probably have a gut punch. but it really doesn't. Trauma from the blue is sorta meh by now. Like, the baseline is murdering a helpful doctor by mistake or eating the soul of a close friend. When she starts talking about how at least she still has her father figure who's an angelic doctor who never leaves false heaven so he has to be safe I'm just going to roll my eyes.

the trauma train is about two shocking ass pulls past getting an emotional reaction out of me. Well, a sad one, around the heaven vacation I started getting really aggravated when he decides to pour TRAUMA! all over everything. Like, this entire scene is just aggressively unnecessary from a writing perspective. what does it add? did digging up that mess make the story better? does anyone think this development is interesting? does the story get better for having candy hearts corpse dragged across the screen for the third time? has the story been so light-hearted that we needed a somber reminder of the cost of war just now?

I mean, for fuck's sake the recovery arc was a long string of mental breakdowns culimating in the accidental murder of an inoccent. This is a serious issue with this quest, just throwing random TRAUMA at the players isn't interesting, and it means when something traumatic does happen it gets lost in the background noise.
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random_npc said:
then maybe it should not be there. pilling up more and more trauma just reduces the narrative weight of it to styrofoam. Take candy heart for example, that was some heavy shit the first and second time. But it got buried under other piles of TRAUMA and quickly it faded into the background. Writing trauma is not about how many traumatic events you shove in, it's about how it sticks with you. If nothing else really traumatizing had happened to nep after having to kill candy heart, but she had trouble moving past it, with her regret and remorse coloring a lot of her downtime actions that would have a lot of narrative weight. As is we just get a few hundred words of "and another terrible thing happens to you! =P" every update or two.

Frankly, it's well past annoying at this point. If you want to write sadness have the pc deal with her existing backlog of issues, flashbacks nightmares, PTSD or the other things she's mostly not done in response to all this shit. or if that would involve too much of a character shift have her have to come to terms with how she's now inhuman enough that she doesn't feel remorse or regret deeply anymore. just anything but piling more meaningless bits of trauma on top of us for no fucking reason.
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Except this wasn't out of the blue, but the pre-planned consequences of earlier events and voting. If Fable Heart had not been one of the MG's selected to be met, it would not have happened, and if Nepgear hadn't ended up killing Candy Heart(which only just barely occurred as a result, if the dice roll has been 2 lower she'd have survived), then the meeting would have also been different(either pretty much the same, just with no guilt on Nepgears part, or her thanking Nepgear profusely, depending on if she'd heard about what happened from Candy yet).

Lots of the "traumatic" stuff could have been avoided, but the actions necessary to do so didn't happen, so they happened.

Additionally, this is setup for later stuff. Whether that stuff will end up being important or minor will, of course, be left up to the choices made.

Note: you make good arguments and points, you're just incorrect about this being a "trauma for the case of trauma" bit.
 
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random_npc said:
then maybe it should not be there. pilling up more and more trauma just reduces the narrative weight of it to styrofoam. Take candy heart for example, that was some heavy shit the first and second time. But it got buried under other piles of TRAUMA and quickly it faded into the background. Writing trauma is not about how many traumatic events you shove in, it's about how it sticks with you. If nothing else really traumatizing had happened to nep after having to kill candy heart, but she had trouble moving past it, with her regret and remorse coloring a lot of her downtime actions that would have a lot of narrative weight. As is we just get a few hundred words of "and another terrible thing happens to you! =P" every update or two.

Frankly, it's well past annoying at this point. If you want to write sadness have the pc deal with her existing backlog of issues, flashbacks nightmares, PTSD or the other things she's mostly not done in response to all this shit. or if that would involve too much of a character shift have her have to come to terms with how she's now inhuman enough that she doesn't feel remorse or regret deeply anymore. just anything but piling more meaningless bits of trauma on top of us for no fucking reason.
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Okay okay hold up. While I acknowledge you have a valid point on trauma saturation sapping its narrative weight, what the fuck are you expecting Nepgear to do when she meets a teammate of one of the girls who's death's stuck with her the most? Because it looks like you're suggesting she not care because you didn't care, which uh... yeah. No.
 
LostDeviljho said:
Okay okay hold up. While I acknowledge you have a valid point on trauma saturation sapping its narrative weight, what the fuck are you expecting Nepgear to do when she meets a teammate of one of the girls who's death's stuck with her the most? Because it looks like you're suggesting she not care because you didn't care, which uh... yeah. No.
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why should it have more weight than that doctor she spread across her hospital room? Nep has seen enough heavy shit that the fact that she only spent like a day or two moping hints that she legitimately doesn't process traumatic events like a normal human anymore. It makes sense, she's made for mass death so her new body came with the mental rewiring to burn away a city and be fine afterward.


that said, I had forgotten we voted to visit her, which does raise the question of what the fuck where were thinking when we voted for that? but aside from that maybe instead of using the chance to pile more TRAUMA crystal could have developed existing events. like fable knows what happened with candy heart and nep talks it out with her, instead of using it for another dose of "and then something terrible happens to you =P"
 
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random_npc said:
why should it have more weight than that doctor she spread across her hospital room? Nep has seen enough heavy shit that the fact that she only spent like a day or two moping hints that she legitimately doesn't process traumatic events like a normal human anymore. It makes sense, she's made for mass death so her new body came with the mental rewiring to burn away a city and be fine afterward.


that said, I had forgotten we voted to visit her, which does raise the question of what the fuck where were thinking when we voted for that?
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The doctor does matter to her.

This is like going and unexpectedly running into that doctor's best friend who doesn't know that Nepgear killed the doctor.
 
justinkal said:
The doctor does matter to her.
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no he doesn't. she barely mentioned or thought about him since she killed him. She barely thinks about or mentions most of the unending cascade of terrible things that happen to her. which is kind of my point. Nep never process or struggles with traumatic events, she just is sad for a bit then takes the next one on the chin.

It's to the point where they all just blend together and lose all sense of narrative importance. maybe it's setting something up, maybe it's the "cost" of not doing something we didn't have time to do, but who the fuck cares about those bits if they barely spike above the background levels of terrible things happening to the pc? You can only put in so many traumatic events before they stop mattering, and we are well past that point. If crystal has any important ones planned out that's too bad, because they are going to fall flat.
 
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random_npc said:
no he doesn't. she barely mentioned or thought about him since she killed him. She barely thinks about or mentions most of the unending cascade of terrible things that happen to her. which is kind of my point. Nep never process or struggles with traumatic events, she just is sad for a bit then takes the next one on the chin.

It's to the point where they all just blend together and lose all sense of narrative importance. maybe it's setting something up, maybe it's the "cost" of not doing something we didn't have time to do, but who the fuck cares about those bits if they barly spike above the background levels of terrible things happening to the pc? You can only put in so many trmatic events before they stop mattering, and we are well past that point. If crystal has an important ones planned out that's too bad, because they are going to fall flat.
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She's had a ton of bad stuff happen to her in a very short amount of time. Kinda needs to repress shit to remain sane. That's what you do when you're in a war zone.

Having bad memories get forcibly dragged to the surface gets ugly.
 
justinkal said:
She's had a ton of bad stuff happen to her in a very short amount of time. Kinda needs to repress shit to remain sane. That's what you do when you're in a war zone.

Having bad memories get forcibly dragged to the surface gets ugly.
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its been almost a month of life-altering levels of trauma every few days. she's sane and is mostly fine unless something brings it up. she's not repressing, she's not barely keeping it together, she's in a better headspace than people who have only one traumatic event in their life. Either it gets retconned that she has totally been one day of inactivity from breaking down, or her next bit of character growth is coming to terms that her mind works differently now.
 
random_npc said:
This should probably have a gut punch. but it really doesn't. Trauma from the blue is sorta meh by now. Like, the baseline is murdering a helpful doctor by mistake or eating the soul of a close friend. When she starts talking about how at least she still has her father figure who's an angelic doctor who never leaves false heaven so he has to be safe I'm just going to roll my eyes.

the trauma train is about two shocking ass pulls past getting an emotional reaction out of me. Well, a sad one, around the heaven vacation I started getting really aggravated when he decides to pour TRAUMA! all over everything. Like, this entire scene is just aggressively unnecessary from a writing perspective. what does it add? did digging up that mess make the story better? does anyone think this development is interesting? does the story get better for having candy hearts corpse dragged across the screen for the third time? has the story been so light-hearted that we needed a somber reminder of the cost of war just now?

I mean, for fuck's sake the recovery arc was a long string of mental breakdowns culimating in the accidental murder of an inoccent. This is a serious issue with this quest, just throwing random TRAUMA at the players isn't interesting, and it means when something traumatic does happen it gets lost in the background noise.
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I dunno man, it works for me.
 
...Y'know Random it's very hard to construct a response that adequately addresses the subject without being unnecessarily aggressive because your posts are just leaving me somewhere between perplexed and annoyed.

Like, for fuck's sake you're complaining about it being trauma out of nowhere for no reason, and then turning right around to complain how none of the trauma ever sticks or has lasting consequences when this is an example of it sticking and having lasting consequences.

Candy's deaths made an impression on Nepear, they're traumatic events that stuck. Even now it's probably only ranked under the deaths of Truth and Sega as far as impact goes. And yet here, when that memory is called upon and those emotions are brought to the surface, you complain about how it's "trauma out of nowhere".

The comparison to the angel Doctor is a false equivalence, because unlike Candy Nepgear had never met him, never interacted with him before, there was no emotional weight to his death, for her, other than the immediate shock and horror of "oh no someone died". Hell, just look at the readerbase: none of you gave a shit about him either. I'd be genuinely surprised if most of you remembered his name. In contrast Candy's death stuck. People remember Candy. Nepgear remembers Candy.
 
LostDeviljho said:
...Y'know Random it's very hard to construct a response that adequately addresses the subject without being unnecessarily aggressive because your posts are just leaving me somewhere between perplexed and annoyed.

Like, for fuck's sake you're complaining about it being trauma out of nowhere for no reason, and then turning right around to complain how none of the trauma ever sticks or has lasting consequences when this is an example of it sticking and having lasting consequences.

Candy's deaths made an impression on Nepear, they're traumatic events that stuck. Even now it's probably only ranked under the deaths of Truth and Sega as far as impact goes. And yet here, when that memory is called upon and those emotions are brought to the surface, you complain about how it's "trauma out of nowhere".

The comparison to the angel Doctor is a false equivalence, because unlike Candy Nepgear had never met him, never interacted with him before, there was no emotional weight to his death, for her, other than the immediate shock and horror of "oh no someone died". Hell, just look at the readerbase: none of you gave a shit about him either. I'd be genuinely surprised if most of you remembered his name. In contrast Candy's death stuck. People remember Candy. Nepgear remembers Candy.
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this is what, the second time it's come up after her death? and if you call a pointless "and she wants to introduce you to the child you murdered!" developing it rather than just a few more bits of trauma for the heap we have different standards. Developing it would have been talking about it, or nepgear trying to come with to terms with it anything but just pointlessly twisting the knife.

people only remember candhyeart because when she died the second time traumatic events still had some fucking weight behind them. The angel doctor should have been a big deal. Nep straight up killed a civilian horrifically at point blank range. but by that point, it was just fucking Tuesday, nothing special. If the order we murdered those two were swapped we'd care about the doctor and just be glad we only killed a weak girl before finding out that the reanimated could be saved.


It's not really even about the hearts, it's about the pattern here. horrifically traumatic events every few updates has been a running theme since the start of the quest, and frankly we are about one "vacation" arc past where they come off as anything but empty and cheap to me.
 
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RIP Liam (or was that Laic?), and Candy Heart, and Fable Heart (somehow? How did Nep kill her again? I don't remember any votes or discussion about killing Fable.), and Nixon, Jessica, those dudes that got liquidized by Magical Girl Sixth Heaven, old-commander that got murked by Goddess Grey...

I'm a bit curious what the purpose is in bringing Magical Girls into planning. As a guess it's part debriefing for the independents that mustered up combined with disseminating useful info. Since Solid Core has useful experience she gets to share it with the class.

And it gives Team GEAR timeslots to act without Solid Core hanging over their shoulders.

I'm surprised Tony is still alive. Sounds like he's a bit surprised he's alive too. Probably has something to do with the trauma that opened up Warped Mirror's super. :V We really should have seen it coming that Mirror would be a traumaball.
 
random_npc said:
this is what, the second time it's come up after her death? and if you call a pointless "and she wants to introduce you to the child you murdered!" developing it rather than just a few more bits of trauma for the heap we have different standards. Developing it would have been talking about it, or nepgear trying to come with to terms with it anything but just pointlessly twisting the knife.
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And now that we've actually met her, having a more in-depth interaction with her is actually a valid option for the players to choose. I know that's what I intend to do once we return to base. "Meet new people" options have unfortunately never been and never will be much more than a quick "hi bye", as much as I'd like longer conversations with some of them.
 
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