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Cliches you can't stand

"Hate" is too strong a word for how I feel about it, because I understand it's a writing tool like any other, but I've gotten pretty tired of the Masquerade set-up.

You know, that thing where there's a secret fantasy world with an elaborate conspiracy to keep it hidden from our own world and how the protagonists interact with that forms the basis of the story. Like Harry Potter.

I understand why they do it - they want to do a fantasy story more-or-less set in the real world, but they don't want to do a lore-heavy alternate history thing by getting into how the existence of wizards or whatever affects a modern setting - but I think it's way more interesting to set a story in modern times where the fantastical stuff's just out in the open and everyone takes it in stride. (Examples: Kiki's Delivery Service, Steven Universe, most superhero stories).
 
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Mistborn said:
See I've actually seen this work though only once, which is when Ariel first shows up in Spider.
『Origin Taratect LV139 Name Ariel

Status

ＨＰ：９００９８／９００９８（Green）＋９９９９９（Details）
ＭＰ：８７６５５／８７６５５（Blue）＋９９９９９（Details）
ＳＰ：８９８６２／８９８６２（Yellow）（Details）
：８９８５６／８９８５６（Red）＋９９５６７（Details）
Average Offensive Ability：９００２１（Details）
Average Defensive Ability：８９９９７（Details）
Average Magic Ability：８７５０４（Details）
Average Resistance Ability：８７４８９（Details）
Average Speed Ability：８９５１８（Details）

Skill

「Super-speed HP Recovery LV10」 「High-speed MP Recovery LV10」 「Great MP Consumption Down LV10」 「Precise Magic Manipulation LV10」 「Magic God Act LV10」 「Magic Granting LV10」 「Magic Enchantment LV10」 「Great Offensive Magic Power LV10」 「High-speed SP Recovery LV10」 「Great SP Consumption Down LV10」 「Great Enhanced Destruction LV10」 「Great Enhanced Blunt LV10」 「Great Enhanced Slashing LV8」 「Great Enhanced Piercing LV9」 「Great Enhanced Shock LV10」 「Great Enhanced Abnormal Condition LV10」 「War God Spirit LV10」 「Vitality Granting LV10」 「Ability Granting LV10」 「Great Vitality Attack LV10」 「Divine Dragon Power LV10」 「Divine Dragon Barrier LV10」 「Deadly Poison Attack LV10」 「Strong Paralysis Attack LV10」 「Poison Synthesis LV10」 「Medicine Synthesis LV10」 「Thread Genius LV10」 「God-weaving Thread」 「Thread Manipulation LV10」 「Psychokinesis LV10」 「Throw LV10」 「Shoot LV10」 「Space Maneuver LV10」 「Cooperation LV10」 「Strategist LV10」 「Kin Domination LV10」 「Spawning LV10」 「Summon LV10」 「Concentration LV10」 「Super Thought Acceleration LV6」 「Future Vision LV6」 「Parallel Will LV4」 「High-speed Calculation LV10」 「Accuracy LV10」 「Evasion LV10」 「Great Probability Correction LV10」 「Stealth LV10」 「Concealment LV10」 「Silent LV10」 「Odorless LV10」 「Emperor」 「Appraisal LV10」 「Detection LV10」 「Sublimation」 「Heresy Magic LV10」 「Fire Magic LV8」 「Water Magic LV10」 「Water Current Magic LV5」 「Wind Magic LV10」 「Storm Magic LV10」 「Heaven Storm Magic LV10」 「Soil Magic LV10」 「Earth Magic LV10」 「Ground Fissure Magic LV10」 「Thunder Magic LV10」 「Lightning Magic LV8」 「Light Magic LV10」 「Holy Light Magic LV2」 「Shadow Magic LV10」 「Dark Magic LV10」 「Darkness Magic LV10」 「Poison Magic LV10」 「Treatment Magic LV10」 「Space Magic LV2」 「Heavy Magic LV10」 「Abyss Magic LV10」 「Great Demon King LV10」 「Dignity LV5」 「Rage LV9」 「Gluttony」 「Usurpation LV8」 「Rest LV9」 「Decadence LV4」 「Physical Nullity」 「Flame Resistance LV5」 「Water Current Nullity」 「Storm Nullity」 「Earth Nullity」 「Lightning Nullity」 「Holy Light Resistance LV8」 「Darkness Nullity」 「Heavy Nullity」 「Abnormal Condition Nullity」 「Acid Nullity」 「Great Corrosion Resistance LV7」 「Faint Nullity」 「Fear Nullity」 「Great Heresy Resistance LV6」 「Pain Nullity」 「Sense of Pain Nullity」 「Night Vision LV10」 「Thousand Miles Eye LV10」 「Great Enhanced Five Senses LV10」 「Perception Range Expansion LV10」 「Divinity Area Expansion LV3」 「Destiny LV10」 「Heaven Mana LV10」 「Heaven Motion LV10」 「Abundant Sky LV10」 「Fortitude LV10」 「Fortress LV10」 「Heaven Path LV10」 「Heaven Protection LV10」 「Idaten LV10」 「Taboo LV10」

Skill point：０

Title
「Human Killer」 「Human Slaughterer」 「Natural Calamity of Human」 「Demon Killer」 「Demon Slaughterer」 「Natural Calamity of Demon」 「Fairy Killer」 「Fairy Slaughterer」 「Natural Calamity of Fairy」 「Monster Killer」 「Monster Slaughterer」 「Natural Calamity of Monster」 「Drake Killer」 「Drake Slaughterer」 「Natural Calamity of Drake」 「Dragon Killer」 「Dragon Slaughterer」 「Merciless」 「Gross Feeder」 「Blood Relative Eater」 「Assassin」 「Poison Technique User」 「Thread User」 「Puppeteer」 「Leading One」 「Conqueror」 「King」 「Ancient Divine Beast」 「Ruler of Gluttony」 「Demon King」』
Sure it's weighed down with a whole lot of text that's essentially meaningless but the sheer heft of it does a good job of selling how dire a threat Ariel is.
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I didn't feel the slightest thing from that. Hell I barely even read a single word of it. All I saw was a giant block of text that made my brain turn itself off and I just skimmed over it completely without paying the slightest bit of attention to it. If the goal is to make me intimidated about how overpowered a new character is then giant blocks of meaningless text is not the way.
 
Mook said:
I didn't feel the slightest thing from that. Hell I barely even read a single word of it. All I saw was a giant block of text that made my brain turn itself off and I just skimmed over it completely without paying the slightest bit of attention to it. If the goal is to make me intimidated about how overpowered a new character is then giant blocks of meaningless text is not the way.
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The text block only has meaning in relation to other similar text blocks, like the one protagonist has, and is comparing that text block to.
 
Valmond said:
The text block only has meaning in relation to other similar text blocks, like the one protagonist has, and is comparing that text block to.
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Nah. A text block with a few stats a handful of special abilities with descriptions can have plenty of meaning on their own without anything to compare them to. Especially since fewer special abilities (fuck [skills]) means that there is actually room to describe what the abilities do on the stat block itself.


When you have a giant fucking wall of text with hundreds of completely pointless and redundant powers then it loses all meaning. When there are a few special abilities they can actually be used to inform us on what kind of character the stat block is attached to. Are they focused on combat, magic, social stuff, etc? If it's short enough that people will actually read it then they can derive meaning from it. If it's a giant fucking block then it stops having meaning because who the fuck is even going to bother reading all those meaningless names attached to meaningless skills that are only there to make conflict meangingless?
 
I tried to read it when I encountered it in the book because I knew that Ariel would be important from the webnovel (and also, you know, demon lord). But I skim the stat blocks because they're just difficult to read.

Edit: And while I think that spider LN has good enough reason for the RPG stuff (unlike most stories that seems to have it just because) the stat blocks are just annoying and difficult to read when they're so big. I don't have the memory to memorize their every skill/ability.
 
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Stat blocks can be used to communicate relevant information through the setting's conventions, but they should probably be done concisely. Like, saying some person has 300 strength or Lv 7 Sword Mastery or some special Title could be okay, or telling us someone's stats when there are five of them and they communicate a character's strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, you probably don't need to give us everyone's stat screens outside of an appendix or give us the MC's stats at the end of each chapter. And if any experienced person has over 30 skills, then it would be best to find a more concise way of communicating everyone's abilities than listing every single one.
 
Plus, those "All everything at max!" just sounds like kind of cheaty bullshit. In the context of a game? OK, in game worlds, time is free, and people can obsessively grind skills. But the person spending the time perfecting their skill chart is probably going to get gacked by an alliance set up by one guy who realized that he could set up a hit squad within the bounded-accuracy limit and exploit the action economy, and spent his time building that instead.

The stat block does not carry, in isolation, what it means for this character to be this way, or how they got that way. And because it's basically referring to an imaginary game system inside the author's head, you don't even get any of the weird synergies you do in real game systems (or real hard sci-fi or fantasy magic systems) where elements suddenly combine in weird and unexpected ways.
 
Well, the person who had the stat block was thousands of years old, and second only to gods in power.
And had been alive since before the system was set up (it was artificially made by the gods.
 
Why would that necessarily give him that much of a stat block to matter? I mean, I guess if you're immortal you can take up and then abandon a lot of hobbies, but...

Actually, that'd almost be funny. A giant stat block, but half of it is from the immortal character taking up cheese-making in their spare time, or that decade they were a professional mime.
 
The Laurent said:
Why would that necessarily give him that much of a stat block to matter? I mean, I guess if you're immortal you can take up and then abandon a lot of hobbies, but...

Actually, that'd almost be funny. A giant stat block, but half of it is from the immortal character taking up cheese-making in their spare time, or that decade they were a professional mime.
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What if it's a system with levelled enemies tho

 
The point is that they have had time to accumulate skills overtime, instead of just mindlesly grinding.
Also the mother of a whole species of monsters, who all obey them, so someone just figuring out action economy is not going to really matter.

The point, in the context of the story, was simply to quickly make clear that they could not be defeated simply through direct combat.
 
Mook said:
When you have a giant fucking wall of text with hundreds of completely pointless and redundant powers then it loses all meaning.
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You can't make that judgement at all. You just indicated that you didn't care about the information so you wouldn't be able to evaluate whether any of it is useless or not.

Simply reading the text even if you're not connected to it by the story would tell you that there aren't any "redundant abilities" in there. If it makes your eyes glaze over then there's nothing anyone can do, but at the same time you can't make judgements without actually looking at the thing you're talking about.

Or put another way. The critique that this information looks unappealing and confusing from the outside is valid and understandable. There is a degree of connection to the story that helps with processing it. The critique that it's pointless and dumb because you don't understand it and don't want to take the time to is not valid and makes no sense.
 
FortePlus said:
You can't make that judgement at all. You just indicated that you didn't care about the information so you wouldn't be able to evaluate whether any of it is useless or not.

Simply reading the text even if you're not connected to it by the story would tell you that there aren't any "redundant abilities" in there. If it makes your eyes glaze over then there's nothing anyone can do, but at the same time you can't make judgements without actually looking at the thing you're talking about.

Or put another way. The critique that this information looks unappealing and confusing from the outside is valid and understandable. There is a degree of connection to the story that helps with processing it. The critique that it's pointless and dumb because you don't understand it and don't want to take the time to is not valid and makes no sense.
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But is what it takes the time to show you worth it? There are a lot of stories that intentionally make the readers jump through a lot of hoops for very little payoff.
 
FortePlus said:
You can't make that judgement at all. You just indicated that you didn't care about the information so you wouldn't be able to evaluate whether any of it is useless or not.

Simply reading the text even if you're not connected to it by the story would tell you that there aren't any "redundant abilities" in there. If it makes your eyes glaze over then there's nothing anyone can do, but at the same time you can't make judgements without actually looking at the thing you're talking about.

Or put another way. The critique that this information looks unappealing and confusing from the outside is valid and understandable. There is a degree of connection to the story that helps with processing it. The critique that it's pointless and dumb because you don't understand it and don't want to take the time to is not valid and makes no sense.
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What's the difference between 「Pain Nullity」and 「Sense of Pain Nullity」 ?
 
Robert Liguori said:
What's the difference between 「Pain Nullity」and 「Sense of Pain Nullity」 ?
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Not familiar with the source material, but I'd assume the first is for ignoring actual pain from physical injuries, while the second would be for say, magically enforced pain that doesn't actually hurt the target, but makes them feel pain. Things like Butcher's pain vision from Worm, or Genjutsu from Naruto would probably fall under the second category.
 
The Laurent said:
But is what it takes the time to show you worth it? There are a lot of stories that intentionally make the readers jump through a lot of hoops for very little payoff.
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I can accept that for too many stories it's a waste of time, but we can also just look at them and say "yeah this is garbage" and articulate that. Gamer-type systems tend to fall under this.

But that requires you to like, look at what you're critiquing for at least a little while.

Robert Liguori said:
What's the difference between 「Pain Nullity」and 「Sense of Pain Nullity」 ?
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It's been a while since I've read, I don't even remember where I stopped. The second one should be referring to anything that simulates pain as opposed to the first which refers to physical pain. There are divisions between abilities like that, small things that don't seem to matter but do within the story.
 
FortePlus said:
You can't make that judgement at all. You just indicated that you didn't care about the information so you wouldn't be able to evaluate whether any of it is useless or not.
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I absolutely can make that judgement. The reason I don't give a crap about all that information is because it's a pointlessly big statblock filled with pointless bullshit. And let's be real, there is absolutely no way any story is actually going to make proper use of even a fraction of a fraction of all those "skills" because to do so the story would need to so long and boring that it would take until the heat death of the universe to finish reading it.



aattss said:
Stat blocks can be used to communicate relevant information through the setting's conventions, but they should probably be done concisely. Like, saying some person has 300 strength or Lv 7 Sword Mastery or some special Title could be okay, or telling us someone's stats when there are five of them and they communicate a character's strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, you probably don't need to give us everyone's stat screens outside of an appendix or give us the MC's stats at the end of each chapter. And if any experienced person has over 30 skills, then it would be best to find a more concise way of communicating everyone's abilities than listing every single one.
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Hot take: The vast majority of skills don't need to be [skills]. Way too many of these shitty statblock bloat Isekai basically go [holy shit! You managed to wipe your ass with toilet paper after taking a shit! Your achievement has unlocked the [Asswiping Skill]. The higher your level the better you will be at wiping your ass with toilet paper! Isn't this great?]
 
Mook said:
I absolutely can make that judgement. The reason I don't give a crap about all that information is because it's a pointlessly big statblock filled with pointless bullshit. And let's be real, there is absolutely no way any story is actually going to make proper use of even a fraction of a fraction of all those "skills" because to do so the story would need to so long and boring that it would take until the heat death of the universe to finish reading it
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So you don't know what you're on about. Okay, glad we cleared that up. No need to respond further, we're done.
 
Mook said:
I absolutely can make that judgement. The reason I don't give a crap about all that information is because it's a pointlessly big statblock filled with pointless bullshit. And let's be real, there is absolutely no way any story is actually going to make proper use of even a fraction of a fraction of all those "skills" because to do so the story would need to so long and boring that it would take until the heat death of the universe to finish reading it.
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Within the context of Spider the fact that Ariel's statblock is so bloated is in itself meaningful. That Ariel has almost all of the skills available within the system and all of the titles that can be gained by killing things says a lot about how long she's been around and what she's been doing during that time.
 
FortePlus said:
It's been a while since I've read, I don't even remember where I stopped. The second one should be referring to anything that simulates pain as opposed to the first which refers to physical pain. There are divisions between abilities like that, small things that don't seem to matter but do within the story.
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Man, if that's a real distinction, I hope that someone in the universe discovers some Baldur-esque bullshit way to con the game system into making simulated fire and uses it to kind-of barbeque their enemies, bypassing all their immunities. Or maybe someone finds a way to sneak a cutscene weapon out of the cutscene and uses it to actually-kill people dead or something.

Now, I could totally see a story where the system tried, to the best extent possible, to play fair, and as a result of there being a bunch of weird corner cases anyone who was decades old, let alone centuries, lived alone in a paranoia-fortress, because they saw what happened to all of the would-be Lord Britishes and recognized that in a weird world full of edge cases, there is no insurance that your hit points will work reliably, let alone your list of poorly-defined skills.

We have loads of examples of what happens when you put yourself in a game world (with permadeath? Not sure.) and set yourself in opposition to a large number of dedicated players. It does not go well for you, and the fact that the world needs to distinguish between [Pain] and [Sense of Pain] should be a sign of "This is a bloated mess of a system in which you think you can be immune to something and you absolutely aren't and get wrecked."

The cliche isn't bad in itself, it's that it's using the character sheet as a prop of characterization rather than actually thinking through what hundreds of thousands of battles on a permadeath server in a chaotic, unpredictable environment actually looks like.
 
Also, that's the kind of character sheet that would get made fun of if it was in literally any Tabletop system or video game. Or maybe I just don't play the right video games?
 
Mistborn said:
Within the context of Spider the fact that Ariel's statblock is so bloated is in itself meaningful. That Ariel has almost all of the skills available within the system and all of the titles that can be gained by killing things says a lot about how long she's been around and what she's been doing during that time.
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And I'm saying that using bloated statblocks to convey meaning is really fucking stupid. Here's how you can achieve better results for less effort:

Stats:
[insert overpowered values here]

Skills:
[Overpowered Ability A (ex: immortality)]
[Overpowered Ability B (ex: master of all Skills)]


Character being super overpowered conveyed in a sharp and succinct fashion that tells you everything you need to know without needing to waste several excel spreadsheets on it.
 
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