Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
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- The Temple of the Winds
One more Art we need to pick up after the Tournament is done.
...
Unless the Sect gives it to new Inner Sect Disciples. It would make sense to have all your disciples trained in that skill if you want to send them do stuff outside your sect's grounds.
And maybe spark the idea that there's more to Arts that just combat in the thick skull of your facepunchers...
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QiMom is never gonna meet Meizhen is she. She'll die of fright 
- Location
- United Kingdom
It seems more likely that anyone who's our ally/close to us can feel the positive parts of our domain (to varying levels) but only those at 4 dots get a mechanical effect out of it.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Could also simply be TRF kicking in and considering her an ally, but yeah.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Curiosity and interesting! Looking at the first paragraph you've got our Wind and Water mixing together, the bones and rains sounds like our Earth/Mountain/Wood and Water and then the mist and dreamlike haze are how we express our Moon and Darkness. Though I think it might be better to kinda sorta maybe equate parts of it to our arts. In order of appearance, seems to be Frozen Soul Serenade, Argent Mirror, FVM and then PLR.
Also, pfffffffff-ahahahahhaah. Yes, Qingge knows her daughter very well. It truthfully hasn't occurred to her until now, though it likely will shortly. Hmm. I wonder if disguise would apply in making us appear mortal, or if it is impossible for Ling Qi to do right now until she practices at it. Given her autos and what not, mechanically she should succeed. *shrug* Not important right now.
We can probably hold our breath for hours, or days, depending on how much we try. On that side note, there should be Miner's Best Friend Arts which provide fresh air so long as the user has qi, developed by the servant clans who serve the prominent mining families. Earth users in general might actually have such arts, or forgo the need to breathe entirely, if their arts involve submersion in stone and dirt.
And then we have our Home domain sitting up and presenting itself. From the looks it provides a personalized Comfort Bubble. I approve.
Does it have to be an Art? [honest curiosity] I could easily see it as a narrative skill tied to practice, like controlled breathing and facial expressions. Granted this is Xianxia and there may very well be arts which summon barrels of drunken monkeys into your brain so I wouldn't put it past being an Art.
We probably would if we spent a minor with them
Everyone saying that we've wrapped up all the important business without getting to know Qingge some more make me
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Look, let's be honest here. We said hi to her, we are getting Suyin ready to replace Biyu with a paper doll, we have no more need to meet Qingge ever again.We probably would if we spent a minor with them
Everyone saying that we've wrapped up all the important business without getting to know Qingge some more make me
We just need our heir here.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Well I'm pretty sure that the idea of Museic was to prepare Zhengui for meeting the rest of the fam, so that everyone could be together once and for all. Which is pretty cool in my opinion. From there we can hang out regularly, and that was the plan.We probably would if we spent a minor with them
Everyone saying that we've wrapped up all the important business without getting to know Qingge some more make me
Yeah, it's a bad plan though. It's taking for granted that Qingge can be escalated to that exposure of cultivator nonsense, when she's not even comfortable with Ling Qi at a basic level. Qingge also needs prep for that meeting or it's going to be weird and uncomfortable and not what any of us want from it.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Okay? Awkwardness is truthfully not relevant in the long run, everyone involved is either young enough not to care(Biyu), or old enough to figure it out(Qi, Qingge, Zhengui).
Awkward is basically guaranteed to happen regardless and its not truly harmful because they all actually do care for each other, so why worry about it? I'm sure yrsillar can write it fine.
Now real health issues stemming from sticking a mortal near a high level cultivator are actually important, and why we need to introduce the concept of Meizhen and tell Qingge about her before they actually get to meet. Same for Meizhen actually, and asking her if she would like to meet our mother. (I'm fully confident that with warning Meizhen can control her aura enough to make a... at least cold instead of heart stopping impression. Though she may not wish to meet Qingge for her own reasons in which case we decide what to do with that if it actually makes an appearance)
Yeah, so building upon this I would really like the see the overall pacing tightened up a lot. The big problem, as people have noted, is that these days our plots and plans are really long term things. We aren't getting used to the sect week by week any more. Doing everything incrementally is just clunky.
Additionally, many minors are essentially things like cultivation - we are doing them in service to a greater plan. Like, take Zhengui. Personally, when I vote for Zhengui training every week it's not because I really want to see Zhengui social scenes, no matter how well written they are. It's because I want Zhengui to be training every week so he can be strong for the tournament. Just like with how @yrsillar manages our cultivation these days, every tiny step doesn't need to be written out in detail. Significant milestones, sure. But if we're training Zhengui every week for the next 8 weeks or something I feel that we only actually need to see maybe two significant scenes with him to show his and our progress and relationship. This also makes those scenes more impactful and meaningful than if we're getting mini-scenes every week, and is what you'd expect in a story that wasn't being tied down by the quest structure.
The same is true of Sixiang. Like, we needed the first couple of scenes to be shown as they were to get a picture of her. But past this, do we really need to have multiple paragraphs written up every week or so of "Ling Qi plays music with her". Now, I don't know exactly how yrsillar is planning her storyline, and maybe significant things are going to happen this week - but my impression of the minor is that there isn't anything in particular going on, and that mostly there are just a bunch of actions we need to put into her until we've unlocked narrative progression on her storyline (whatever it is). If that's the case, then I feel that a lot of that could probably be kept largely to the background until it's actually time for something narratively significant to happen, or time to show significant character/relationship advancement.
Equally, our mother. I certainly believe that Ling Qi should be seeing her mother every week. Does that mean we should be reading about it every week? Not really. Again, out of the next 8 weeks I would say that I only really want to see maybe 2 or 3 scenes, with time in between where Ling Qi has been seeing her mother and their relationship has been progressing. We just don't need to see every step along the way.
Now, those are really the major minor chains we have right now. There's also our new responsibilities to Cai of course, and that is important to give page time and development to. That was something I felt that yrsillar handled very well in our Cai minor last week with the mentions of the work we did for her, which was nicely balanced with talking with her and training.
Now, what about the others? Honestly, our friends should be fine at this point. As long as we're regularly seeing Xiulan and Meizhen for training, it should be assumed that they are not going to suddenly melt down out of stress. We've already done a lot of character stuff with them. Outside of this week's "talk with Meizhen now that we've joined Cai", I don't see any reason to have minors with them until, like, Week 51. Then we can have poignant character moments before the tournament, be all "ganbare" and talk about how we want hold back if we have to face each other etc. in proper shounen fashion or whatever. I don't really see what more drama over the issues we've already essentially dealt with is going to add to the story at this point though. Drama and emotional stress in the tournament itself, sure, but not before then. At this point all of us should be focusing on training anyway. We should all be entering tournament training montages.
And, to be fair, this state of affairs is not entirely yrsillar's fault. While he does keep making minors look super attractive in order to perpetuate the minor system and force us to make hard choices, we're the ones that keep falling for it and going "all off these are important!". And honestly, now, as we come into the final stretch, we should just get over that. Most of them are not actually important. There are only a few key minor chains that need to happen (Sixiang, Mother, arguably Cai to show our new state of affairs). Zhengui training should be lumped into cultivation training - when are we going to start working on practicals with him like we did with Golden Fields back in the day? Everything else? Not actually important other than the odd one-off like Zeqing events. We should be able to trust at this point that our friends and relationships are not going to melt down if we don't see them regularly. We're all focusing on the tournament now. It's fine. When you reduce it to that level, we see that we don't actually need a full minor loadout every week. That's the "if we're keeping the current system we should just bite the bullet and go into closed door" argument anyway.
But yeah, overall I would say: less distraction for the sake of making hard minor choices, and more of a focus on fleshing out the big meaningful scenes of narrative/character progression which yrsillar has done so well in the past rather than getting bogged down in week by week minutiae. And we should really focus more on training and the tournament at this point.
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Maybe if we pushed Qingge to 4 dots relationship and got her our domain bonus it would cancel out Meizhens domain? Couldn't hurt.
Also 100% on explaining how cultivation works, especially Meizhens domain and bloodline so mom doesn't think she's a spirit monster thing.
Also 100% on explaining how cultivation works, especially Meizhens domain and bloodline so mom doesn't think she's a spirit monster thing.
BungieONI
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Huh, might work. Don't see why we shouldn't because you're right, it really couldn't hurt. Yeah... Meizhen is uh... well quite frankly we got really lucky our strange strange and stubborn mind was able to handle it. Not her fault but hey, gotta get other people use to her so need to revist the fact that she is fucking oh my god why in Graceful!Snekgirl form.
- Location
- The Temple of the Winds
Even if it isn't an Art it's still probably something we need to spend Major Actions to train, so mechanically roughtly equivalent (minus meridians).
Personnaly, i'd prefer if it were an Art, if only to show that Arts cover more than just combat. I think the world needs Social Arts, Crafting Arts, Binding Arts and others.
BungieONI
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By Binding Arts I believe you mean stuff like arts which project paralysis or otherwise can be used as forms of restraint?
I do know there has been speculation that Renxiang's backlighting is part of a Social Art. I've made some of that speculation now that I think about it. I definitely want some more, like you do. Mostly because it is freaking cool, but also because it's relevant to our future barony.
E: Truthfully I would not be surprised at all if the Zheng have a "Get themselves Sauced" Art for proper celebratory revels.
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- Location
- The Temple of the Winds
Lets just keep Meizhen for last, shall we ?
Lets start with sweet Suyin, then go for formal Ma Sisters, tomboy Su Ling next, cool noble Han Jian aftewards (he is our first almost!friend), following by not!cool Xiulan ( this is our boss CRX ?), and lastly by "walking down the street I make babies cry and birds fall from the sky" Meizhen...
I was thinking
I support the complete opposite stance to Erebeal's, and that is that I consider the minors (and the character interactions within them) the single most interesting aspect of this quest, and the strongest example of Yrs' writing skill.
I value more the characters dynamics, and slice of life parts, than almost any other thing in this quest.
I don't want to skip scenes with Meizhen or Zhengui or whoever, nor do I want them to be mostly background filler.
I consider Ling Qi's interactions with various characters perhaps the most important part of Ling Qi's journey, and honestly I am all about the journey, and not the destination.
I value more the characters dynamics, and slice of life parts, than almost any other thing in this quest.
I don't want to skip scenes with Meizhen or Zhengui or whoever, nor do I want them to be mostly background filler.
I consider Ling Qi's interactions with various characters perhaps the most important part of Ling Qi's journey, and honestly I am all about the journey, and not the destination.
- Location
- United Kingdom
Even if we don't actually introduce them just yet we should probably get around to mentioning to our friends that our mother is here. Considering our talk with Cai it's likely word has already spread that she's arrived, though it's possible that even if it'd be better for Mum if we introduce our commoner friends first then work our way up there could still be some friction for leaving Meizhen/Xiulan to last.
EDIT: We can get some leeway with regards to waiting on introducing anyone else except Zhengui to her considering the culture shock she's going through, but that doesn't really help when it comes to the order we introduce our friends in.
EDIT: We can get some leeway with regards to waiting on introducing anyone else except Zhengui to her considering the culture shock she's going through, but that doesn't really help when it comes to the order we introduce our friends in.
I think that's generally just folded into Cultivation Arts.
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Confirmed. The reason for having the Zhengui action and not the Qingge action was so that we could spend a minor with Qingge introducing her to our adopted little brother, and not just spend the time aimlessly figuring out what to do (which the current minor description suggested).
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To be fair there's an argument to be made for learning how to spend time with our Mother even when there's no overarching goal to said meeting (i.e. first meeting after years apart, introducing Zhengui/assorted friends etc).
BungieONI
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As far as I can tell that's how it is. Now, there's an alternative method of binding which is Spirit Trapping, which uses formations which Elder Su discussed near the beginning of the quest, its in the informational tab.
I guess there could be an art form variation of Spirit Trapping (Again this is Xianxia) but it'd need to be hideously expensive in order to function.
I vehemently disagree. Yes, we should trust our friends not to explode in one way or another just because we don't have a regular action with them every other week. They are their own people, and have their own webs or relationships - they can live without us.
But the basis for our relationships REALLY shouldn't be "if we don't interact with this person, terrible things will happen". It should be "we like this person, and want to spend time with them". I want to continue spending time with all of our friends, and think it is important for Ling Qi to keep doing so. As it is, us planning to take tutoring actions already means that the number of minor actions we can assign each week is reduced to 4 from 5, on top of us losing another 4 minors over the next two months from SLP weeks. Being well socialized is its own reward, and I'm completely unwilling to vote for a course of action that pushes Ling Qi's work/life balance even further towards the work side.
Furthermore, the argument for not having more social interactions isn't supported by the rest of the case you are making. If you don't like the narrative way such interactions are written, fine - it is a cogent opinion and you've made some good points on the subject. But the solution to such woes is NOT to just stop taking minors. That solves something you think is an OOC issue, but screws up what Ling Qi is doing IC. As an analogy, if you don't like the description of TRF training, the solution is not to have Ling Qi stop training TRF; sure, it would solve your problem, but it would be very much against Ling Qi's preferences and priorities.
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