- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
>critical input error
>suspending process, "update"
>consulting help desk
>est. time: ??
>suspending process, "update"
>consulting help desk
>est. time: ??
Dragon Ball: After the End
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
/run HotCoffeeandInspiration.exe
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
>error: invalid input
>malware protection has blocked, "caffeine," from running
>booting hotchocolate.exe
- Location
- Here and there
- Pronouns
- He/Him
and this is why you don't underclock your rolls people. the Prodigy Poptart-toaster 1900X is a powerful beast, but it needs a 50 or higher to function.
- Location
- Somewhere I shouldn't be
I cast 'Fix' to try to resolve the errors and restore normal function.
This is an opposed roll against the opponent's 'Break it' roll. I have a +24 bonus (from my profession and traits).
Edit: Not bad, with a 79 total we should get that toaster back up and running pretty quickly, unless the opposition has a pretty decent set of bonuses!
This is an opposed roll against the opponent's 'Break it' roll. I have a +24 bonus (from my profession and traits).
Edit: Not bad, with a 79 total we should get that toaster back up and running pretty quickly, unless the opposition has a pretty decent set of bonuses!
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
>warning: "hotchocolate.exe" has not been decaffinated!>error: invalid input
>malware protection has blocked, "caffeine," from running
>booting hotchocolate.exe
>run anyway? y/n
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
On the bright side, you get to watch us squirm and panic in the thread while you deal with whatever your troubles are! What more could you ask for to buoy your spirits?
- Location
- Here and there
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We botched the role so bad poptart got writer's block trying to find a way out for us.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
By the way:
Was my omake helpful at all?
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oh, right. No, because you wrote it after I rolled. I'll give that omake a canon, bonus to willpower checks. Want a review?
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Yes!
(Canonical finally! Squee.)
- Location
- Rockford, USA
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Congrats.
Alright, review! It's a good concept. It's focused on a particular idea and digs into it in some depth. That said, it simply doesn't have the length to get past the initial concept. I can see what you're doing, but not how you intend on getting there or what you plan on doing with it. If I were speaking in terms of an essay, I feel like I'm reading the first few sentences after the thesis statement, but the rest of the paper has been ripped off before and after it.
That said, this is a very good basis for a story. Short stories thrive best when built on a single, solid idea as a foundation, and you have here a solid core premise.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You poor, poor entity. No matter what you do to us in this next update, I feel empathy for you.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Entity is a good word for the eldritch abomination that feeds on our suffering and tears.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Well, I had one idea for the background worldbuilding, decided to use the mechanically-incentivized means of posting it, and wrote it up in half an hour while under considerable self-imposed pressure. This is the result - one idea, passably described, which earned a Major Bonus.Congrats.
Alright, review! It's a good concept. It's focused on a particular idea and digs into it in some depth. That said, it simply doesn't have the length to get past the initial concept. I can see what you're doing, but not how you intend on getting there or what you plan on doing with it. If I were speaking in terms of an essay, I feel like I'm reading the first few sentences after the thesis statement, but the rest of the paper has been ripped off before and after it.
That said, this is a very good basis for a story. Short stories thrive best when built on a single, solid idea as a foundation, and you have here a solid core premise.
(I do think this reward system is a little broken, though. As-is, I'm more mechanically incentivized to split my best DB:AE ideas across several micro-Omake than to make a cohesive short story out of several of them. Something to remember for my writing guide.)
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
This is only really a problem when you're dealing with the kind of person who WOULD spam micro-omakes over and over until they get the bonuses they want in an attempt to game the system. Most people don't or wouldn't do that.Well, I had one idea for the background worldbuilding, decided to use the mechanically-incentivized means of posting it, and wrote it up in half an hour while under considerable self-imposed pressure. This is the result - one idea, passably described, which earned a Major Bonus.
(I do think this reward system is a little broken, though. As-is, I'm more mechanically incentivized to split my best DB:AE ideas across several micro-Omake than to make a cohesive short story out of several of them. Something to remember for my writing guide.)
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
I mean, if you think it's a problem the obvious solution would be to impose a minimum length for a bonus, or to say that works below that length only get lesser bonuses.Well, I had one idea for the background worldbuilding, decided to use the mechanically-incentivized means of posting it, and wrote it up in half an hour while under considerable self-imposed pressure. This is the result - one idea, passably described, which earned a Major Bonus.
(I do think this reward system is a little broken, though. As-is, I'm more mechanically incentivized to split my best DB:AE ideas across several micro-Omake than to make a cohesive short story out of several of them. Something to remember for my writing guide.)
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Where is that quote from?
If your game falls apart because your players were optimizing, you're doing it wrong. (If your game falls apart because your players weren't optimizing, you're also doing it wrong.) The trick is to get the rules set up so that optimizing players have fun making the game better, not discourage them from their hobby.
No no no - I like short sweet things. The problem is that the current system doesn't incentivize quality half so much as quantity.
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AGG:Rise, a quest by Sage. Pit mentioned that the numbers get "absurdly high", so I posted the latest case of escalation.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Within the core mechanics of a game, the underlined passage holds very true.
When you're talking about stuff like "the customs by which we compute the roleplaying bonuses at the end of a session," not so much. Because these... call them 'peripheral rules' are often by definition a set of ad hoc, informal practices created to smooth gameplay and incentivize desired behavior. Such peripheral rules can often be identified by the fact that they get changed or invented on the fly during play, or that they are allow extreme amounts of gamemaster freedom of choice as to how they are implemented.
...
These rules aren't designed to be optimized; that is not their purpose. They are not the rules of "the game" as an abstract entity that comes in a box you buy from the store. They're the rules of "the game" as in the specific social process by which the machinery of the game in the box turns time and snacks into fun.
These rules aren't meant to be mechanically optimized for. They're simply designed to cope with foreseeable use cases. Sort of like the rule "It's Susie's turn to take out the trash on Saturday," which is a good rule in most use cases, but breaks down if Susie is deathly ill or out of town. That doesn't make it a bad rule, it just means that being a literal-minded inflexible idiot about interpreting the rule is a bad idea. It's a bad choice, and an idiotic choice, to say "well, Susie's out of town, guess no one takes out trash today" or "hey, let's shame Susie into climbing out of her sickbed and hobbling out in a walker to take out the trash."
Because peripheral rules are designed for a fundamentally different purpose than core rules, attempts to optimize such informal rules predictably lead to negative results. As such, a persistent attempt to do so beyond the norms tolerated within the subculture of game-players involved should be viewed as willful disruption of the game environment.
Deliberately stepping outside the foreseeable use cases, specifically to exploit the peripheral rules, is a rather transparent abuse of the shared resources of a social system. By creating perverse results undesired by the people who implement the peripheral rules, they incentivize the people in charge to abolish the peripheral rules, which is bad for everyone.
It's a form of the tragedy of the commons.
Sort of like how nobody likes the guy who says "wait, we have all-you-can-eat ice cream at work on Fridays, but nobody said all you can eat in one sitting," and 'cleverly' takes home a five gallon tub of ice cream one day. Yeah, even if he's allowed to walk out the door with the 'free' ice cream, the most likely result is that the boss stops providing free ice cream ever again. Because the benefit to the other employers doesn't ustify having That One Guy (and probably others like him) endlessly jerking off about having 'lifehacked' their way into getting a couple of months' supply of ice cream for free every week.
...
So basically, if you start writing 100-word omakes as a deliberate attempt to game the omake system, don't be surprised if you get undesired results. Like "Poptart invents a new category of omake bonus that's so tiny it's not actually worth using," or "Poptart gets irritated that people are trying to manipulate Poptart, and stops giving out the bonuses at all."
Because while core rules are usually about numbers, peripheral rules are about people, and to understand people you need to apply theory of mind to their decision-making process, not just talk about the numbers.
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- Location
- Italy
i'm surprised. over 8 millions? Last i watched it was still in the thousands range! I imagine Song is now capable of cutting stars? Or can he simply cut full universes?
Without spoiling anything for those interested to see it, the main character there goes from around human level to stronger than the Christian God. MUCH stronger.
Admittedly there are good reasons for it, but still!
I stopped somewhere in the middle of agg rise 2, , though i know a bit of what happen next because i skimmed some random chapters up to the first parts of agg 4.
side note, i liked CORE more.
Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere
For context, the setting is High School DxD. God there is at a much lower power level than omnipotent.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
I think you mean 'optimize by using the peripheral rules', not 'optimize the rules themselves' - I was trying to point out a way to do the latter!
That's not the only form of redress it incentivizes, but I do take your point. (That said, your ice cream example is kind of flawed - depending on the employee culture, how long it will actually last him, and how many buckets there are, it might well be the expected means of dealing with leftovers!)
On the other hand, I'm not trying to break the system. I'm trying to get it patched, because I'm an instinctive optimizer and that trait is currently in conflict with my desire to write the best stories I can manage. A far more common form of redress is just talking it out with That One Guy, after all.
HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Ah, that's a very important point. 'The Christian God' is either incredibly vague or absurdly reductive as a generic term, whereas 'The entity known as God in High School DxD' is much, much less so. (Also, you won't offend people half so easily.)