I would argue though that those character dynamics can be done better if they aren't being done so incrementally though. The biggest and greatest character scenes are things like those with Meizhen that have lots of build up and actual progression behind them. To go back to my example, instead of having ~7 little random scenes with our Mother over every week, I would rather have 2 or 3 more developed scenes spaced out, with Qi doing stuff in between that causes relationship progression and development. Focus on fewer, higher quality, more developed moments than doing everything piece by piece. Get actual story and character progression while having really nice well written scenes rather than a million little minor scenes every update, none of which have the space to breathe properly.
Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
He called a dragon one full rank of cultivation higher than him ugly river eel.
I am not sure about his ability to be mature tbfh.
It's not about @yrsillar's writing. It's about what we're setting him up to write. Good writing doesn't mean things going well for us, and the current course isn't a wise one.
Qingge doesn't really need to be introduced to all of our cultivator friends, but Zhengui is an entirely different matter. First impressions matter, and we're being sloppy.
Getting QiMom to not cringe around us so much is probably goal number one never mind anything else
Hmm. I have to admit some skepticism here.
As a case study, imagine that instead of the current format with ~3 different character scenes per update, we had 3 scenes from the same character in serial. E.g. we might see the fight with the dragon, followed by us making Zhengui promise not to eat anything and playing music to the dragon, followed by Zhengui getting jealous and calling the dragon a "Ugly River Eel". I feel like that wouldn't work at all! There is no increase in cohesiveness of narrative, and in fact it feels like the sense of time/progression is degraded by having the scenes happen in close proximity rather than in separate updates.
Admittedly, part of what you are proposed isn't just clumping character time together, but a wholesale reduction in scene count. So in the above example, instead of having three scenes, we would have one or two. I can maybe get behind that, but I feel like you might be cutting a decent amount of content. Not sure if making the other scenes longer makes up for that.
You're not wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I think that we don't need that many minors to adequately cover the various characters and their arcs over the next two months. Like, we've got a full week this week. Say that we go full tutor + closed door for the next 6 weeks, and then relax in the last week before the tournament. Doing something like what's shown below should easily be able to develop all the characters and their arcs fully. If we need more scenes than this something is probably going wrong. Maybe things come up that can't be managed easily and we have to, say, drop closed door for one week - fine. But we do not need 5 or even 4 minors every week to do this fine. Especially given that Zeqing, Meizhen, Xiulan, and Cai are all people we should be seeing regularly in our majors anyway - and at this point the same should be true of Zhengui.
I'm watching HeroAca season 2 right now, and what's really noticeable is that the pacing is really good. It's tight, there's constant progression and development - and yet at the same time we see plenty of good character moments, and their relationships get fleshed out nicely. Good character interaction and development does not require that many scenes. Or to bring things back to SV, look at Number None. Omicron has managed to flesh out the characters and their relationships amazingly without doing bits and pieces every week like this.
Now, your argument about not pushing Ling Qi's work-life balance even further is fair enough. To be honest, I'd be fine with cutting the on screen minors down to this level and not receiving more majors. But within the system we have right now, I think that this is honestly all we actually need to do the characters well.
His approach would result in th training and cultivation scenes being pushed to background and important character moments being brought to the foreground.
I'm just saying that this is the part of the movie or show where the training montage comes up.
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My problem with this perspective is that you are treating SLs like a checklist. You talk about how we need enough actions to "develop all the characters and their arcs fully" as if the point of our interactions with people is to develop their character arcs. And I'm vehemently against that.
I support minors with our friends because I want Ling Qi to make the time to socialize and relax with them. We have seen it repeatedly stated that Ling Qi is absurdly diligent about her cultivation, to point out where it crowds out everything else. We've seen it even in the latest interlude, where Ling Qingge notices Ling Qi repeatedly looking out at the sun to gauge the time. That diligence is a virtue, yes - but taken in excess it compromises Ling Qi's ability to just live, and I refuse to do that. So I don't care if we could finish our friend's character arcs using merely half our minors, and and I wouldn't even care if further interactions with them wouldn't bring us tangible gains in furthering said friendships. I would still vote for spending as much time with them as we practically can.
- Location
- The Temple of the Winds
I disagree.
Beyond the pure social link effect, minor actions arcs have rewards and some even have on a individual basis. For exemple the working on formations with Suyin.
And yet, somehow many stories (e.g. shounen is perhaps most comparable) manage to show us hard working diligent characters that also spend time with their friends and have good relationships with them while still managing tight pacing and progression.
As I said, I would be fine with cutting the on-screen minors down to something like this, with the writing making it clear that Ling Qi is spending time with her friends and mother in the background as well.
Let's be honest. That shouldn't even be a minor. It should be a major. It is formations training.
It's a hobby. If we were hammering out Rings of Power it'd be a major action but we're just kinda fucking around with them for a half assed idea of something with Precious and it's more spending time with Suyin
That is a writing decision, not a voting decision. If we go closed door, Ling Qi is NOT spending that time with people in the background, period.
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to the stylistic choice if that was something Yrsillar was thinking of doing, but I absolutely oppose the choice of doing less minors which we can actually take by going closed door.
Hmm, thinking about things what if we tried, say, 2 or 3 week turns right now? I think we largely could plan that kind of thing quite well right now. And if we, say, do things like queue up 3 mother actions etc. it gives yrs the freedom to work out how all of those actions build upon each other, and how all of our friend interactions and activities and training interweave over a slightly longer period.
Dunno, might just make things more difficult for @yrsillar, but maybe it could work?
Dunno, might just make things more difficult for @yrsillar, but maybe it could work?
I don't see any reason we couldn't go with 2 week turns right now, though 3 seems a touch excessive. Not sure if the end result would be more work for Yrsillar though, or less.
My interpretation of Erebeal's idea is not that Ling spends less time or actions with her friends. Rather that the pacing of the narrative changes and instead of yrsillar writing absolutely every slice of life moment he only writes and shows us important or character defining moments. However, it sounds like this change of quest style, or a similiar concept, is going to be implemented by the QM after the tournment anyways, so i figure any such structual changes might aswell wait till then.
If we're going to cut the screen time of anything it should be the majors, not the minors. "Stats going up" may make for satisfying video gaming but stultifying storytelling. The character interaction in the minors is where the real meat of the story is, not us increasing our power levels.
- Location
- Required Location
Yeah, I always thought that with higher cultivation we would gain some kind of 'no-screentime-action-slots' which had to used be exclusively for cultivation. These actions would either feature in a week update at all or only be hinted at with a sentence or two. This would free up more time to interact and mingle with our peers or go on adventures while keeping up with our training. The IC narrative reasoning would have been cultivators becoming increasingly efficient at everything which cut down training times and action times in general.
This would have increased the amount of actions we have without significantly impacting the amount of screentime we are getting each week.
I get that the GM is planning on changing the pacing later, but honestly the pacing is dragging right now. Like everything is building in anticipation for the tournament, but it's still around 8 in game weeks, and probably at least 12 IRL weeks away. Even if every update is enjoyable in and of itself, the combination of anticipation and slightly slowed update schedule is excruciating, and probably contributes to a lot of ill-tempered interminable build arguments.
It would be a bit more math, but considerably less writing.
We could probably due with cutting screen time for both. TRF+ or FSS+ events are great storytelling, but this is sort of a game/story hybrid, so they can be fun in the sense that power progression is its own reward. But only reading the milestones would be a good compromise.
OTOH, Zhengui or Hannyi acting cute or Meizhen acting haughty to hide a vulnerable core, or Xiulan being angry, but insecure are fun to read, but the umpteenth iteration isn't great storytelling either.
- Location
- Malaysia
A way to simulate that would be for Yrs to permanently take away one or more minor action slots with the understanding that Ling Qi regularly takes some time to touch base with her friends and see that mom's needs are met and so on. It's weird for example that Ling Qi doesn't do anything with Xiulan at all unless the thread specifically votes for it. We could just assume that there's a spa day at least once every couple of weeks or so by default unless something else comes up. Similarly we'd play music for Su Ling, chat with Suyin, have the occasional tea break with Meizhen and so on. These small interactions could be glossed over with a line or two and Yrs wouldn't have to write the full scene every time.
As we all know the update pace has slowed and yet the verbiage for each week's worth of actions has exploded massively. It is honestly crazy how many things Ling Qi can cram into one week these days. Hopefully something like this could help improve the pace and make writing a bit easier for our poor QM.
As we all know the update pace has slowed and yet the verbiage for each week's worth of actions has exploded massively. It is honestly crazy how many things Ling Qi can cram into one week these days. Hopefully something like this could help improve the pace and make writing a bit easier for our poor QM.
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If that's boring us that's our fault for voting for them though. I suppose completely divorcing the minors from mechanical advantages might promote more diversity, if that's a problem.
I'm not saying it's boring, I'm saying it's not great storytelling. almost to the same extent that just reading about training, +1s and stat increases isn't great storytelling either.
Edit: but I agree with @wankongyew that a lot of minors should be happening regardless of whether we vote for them or not.
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Well, if it's not boring then it's not a problem for me.*shrug*
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Yrsillar has already been doing that though. We had that discussion ages ago when we moved to the current system. Its why we mainly only see cultivation when it's attached to actual people etc.
That being said, our current "serious cultivation" plan also has issues in the form of "tutor + mission every week". Grinding all those out week after week means that they also kill the pacing, and it also ruins what made them special and interesting. When we're doing a mission or meeting a cool sempai as something novel it's great. If we're doing every week it becomes less special, and I suspect will start to get old.
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DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
So for the record I'm definitely still enjoying things as they are, and for the sake of consistency I think keeping it like this until Tourney time is probably the right call.
But in terms of what the problem is, if there is a problem at all, I think it's not too many actions/time, it's too many actions/update. At the start of the quest before minors updates often didn't stretch through multiple posts and were pretty contained, because there were a lot less total plot points to hit. Regardless of how much time is spent per turn, I think a reasonable setup might be:
But in terms of what the problem is, if there is a problem at all, I think it's not too many actions/time, it's too many actions/update. At the start of the quest before minors updates often didn't stretch through multiple posts and were pretty contained, because there were a lot less total plot points to hit. Regardless of how much time is spent per turn, I think a reasonable setup might be:
- Two Major Actions
- One Attached Minor Action
- One Free Minor Action (may be attached or not)
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I'm not sure I see it.
Right now, we are getting ~3 "things" happening per story post, with ~3 story points per turn, for a total of ~9 things happening total in a turn. This matches our planning framework, which is 5 majors and 5 minors. If the problem was actions/update, do you imagine that voting on 3 things to do each turn instead of 9 and having 3 turns a week would somehow change/improve matters? I feel like it would leave us basically where we are now, albeit with 3x as many votes that were each 1/3 as long.