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Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)

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primemountain said:
I think you're kind of talking past me. Yes many or our friends can not be organized into a single group. That's why I keep bringing up make a group that works. This would also mean recruiting people who are compatible with each other, not trying to manipulate our current friends into all being friends themselves. Does that make more sense for you?

If we had the skills, we would be better able to recognize which groups would, and which would not work. I don't mean it would let us manipulate our current crop into some big happy family. I mean it would let us better find/make such a group out of some of our current friends, and newcomers we pick out.

But again, that would require Ling Qi being a social butterfly, or a leader. She is neither. This should not be such a difficult idea to get across. If Ling Qi had spent less time training music and stealth, and more time training diplomacy, leadership and teamwork, she would now have more and better options socially and just be better at social-fu. That should not be a controversial opinion.
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So you want to make totally new friends and add them to our current friends to make a new group? Why? [honest curiosity]
Besides making new friends of course. Granted, Qi is as we know not the best at the social fu, though she's okay at it.

E: Though looking at it from another direction the question comes up of "what happens to our friends who don't fit?" which needs to be considered.
 
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Yeah. Look at how the typical slice of life anime works - you have a group of friends who do things together. This allows characters and their relationships to all be developed and shown together, and the same time as doing stuff.

In contrast we have like half a dozen separate friends and over half our activities are solo. Inevitably this leads to bloat and lack of coherency. We're simply trying to do too many separate things at once.
 
Arkeus said:
Yet, that makes an utter mess of the pacing.

Cramming more and more and more scenes might be fun to read because Yrs is a good writer, but it still ends up stretched and is now very much passed the point of "Ling Qi need to just live" into "let's take every single good scenes because they are fun individually even though taken as a whole they destroy cohesion and weaken their own themes".

Obviously, you can't have a quest have a really crisp pacing because the format makes it so much harder, but you can at least try to have semi-closed arcs where such pacing exist. We have come to a point with minors where for the most part they don't really show character progression anymore- whether Ling Qi or otherwise- but rather are there to fill the checklist of 'need so many minors every weeks'.

At this point, it should be a given that Ling Qi tries to see her friends when she can during the week anyway.
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From a gameplay perspective I would appreciate an evergreen minor that said something like "spend enough time with your friends that your social links don't decay and you get specific notice of any personal problems they have." Perhaps with the added understanding that the action will morph into firefighting duty if something is going catastrophically wrong in a friend's life. That way we can just leave one minor on "defense" and focus the rest of them on positive development. Right now we have to weigh firefighting against social advancement in an environment of uncertainty in a way that I don't find particularly fun, although YMMV.

I suspect the solution for the pacing would be to leave everything as is mechanically and to allow the QM to pick and choose which scenes actually get written up. This is already happening to a certain extent but a lot of majors and some minors could be compressed down to a sentence or two without losing much from the narrative. We only really need to see moments when the plot advances: important relationship increases, training across major thresholds, and important conversations. The slice of life and routine training/missions could be included when there's room in terms of author attention and wordcount and left out when there's no space.

If it were made explicit that stuff can happen in Ling Qi's life without getting a big write up we could also abandon the fiction of attached minors that fairly routinely gets stretched beyond plausibility as is. Just pick five majors and five minors with the understanding that only 3-5 of them will get dedicated scenes in each update.
 
jacobk said:
From a gameplay perspective I would appreciate an evergreen minor that said something like "spend enough time with your friends that your social links don't decay and you get specific notice of any personal problems they have." Perhaps with the added understanding that the action will morph into firefighting duty if something is going catastrophically wrong in a friend's life. That way we can just leave one minor on "defense" and focus the rest of them on positive development. Right now we have to weigh firefighting against social advancement in an environment of uncertainty in a way that I don't find particularly fun, although YMMV.

I suspect the solution for the pacing would be to leave everything as is mechanically and to allow the QM to pick and choose which scenes actually get written up. This is already happening to a certain extent but a lot of majors and some minors could be compressed down to a sentence or two without losing much from the narrative. We only really need to see moments when the plot advances: important relationship increases, training across major thresholds, and important conversations. The slice of life and routine training/missions could be included when there's room in terms of author attention and wordcount and left out when there's no space.

If it were made explicit that stuff can happen in Ling Qi's life without getting a big write up we could also abandon the fiction of attached minors that fairly routinely gets stretched beyond plausibility as is. Just pick five majors and five minors with the understanding that only 3-5 of them will get dedicated scenes in each update.
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Sort of a guarantee that "stuff is being handled in the background and if it becomes critically relevant, or I find it cute, it comes back to the fore"?
 
primemountain said:
Yeahhh, let's not. We already know when everything is going to change. There is going to be a tournament arc, and then things will start shifting. People are feeling the very strain associated with cultivation, even though we are not reading about endless cultivation scenes. It's something lordsfire noted on SB:

The greatest advantage voters have is that they only have to vote for characters doing the things, while the character actually has to go out and do it.

I understand the feeling, but I don't agree with it. The biggest thing about cultivation superpowers is that it takes time. That is it's whole shtick. Choosing how we spend our time is the most meaningful choice we make. And we have to make it, again, and again, and again.

It's noted that a big reason why many cultivators never make it out of green is that it takes too much time.
It's also noted that many cultivators who do make it out of green grow more and more detached from mortals and mortality.
This is how it happens. You want monthly or yearly turns with only the highlights?

The voters are deciding on how Ling Qi acts. We vote. Do you really want to become as disconnected from the world as so many of the others?
Sometimes it will be a slog. But that's the price for reaching for the Heavens, but still keeping your feet firmly on Earth.

It's easy to fly away. Much harder to grow so you reach both.
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I disagree, possibly because I have a lower opinion of Lordsfire's quest on SB than you do. I mean, the writing is fine on the micro scale, on the macro scale, there's only so many time I can read some version of "Your little brother skinned his knee and is now crying, what do you do? [] Write-in" before I drop the quest out of frustration.

I mean, a good writer or director can make a reader feel the stress, adrenaline, and pain of a boxing match without physically punching the readers or viewers in the face. She can make a viewer feel the tedium and repetition that a soldier waiting for combat feels without actually boring the viewer. She can make a reader feel the grind of a lawyer staying up all night, pouring over case law, without making the reader read thousands of pages of case law as well.

By the same token, a good writer can convey the anticipation of approaching a major competition, the stress of thinking you're good enough to make it, but not being sure, and the tedium of cultivation without actually making us wait 1.5-2 weeks IRL for every week that goes by in game for another 8 in-game weeks for the thing we've been building up to.
 
Klaus said:
Getting a useful domain weapon is effectively getting an extra action in combat. Trying to train our Domain through art cultivation looks like it's going to come up short, but we do have another option:

The harder the fight the more Domain exp we get. We haven't had a real fight since we got our sword, so we don't know exactly how much experience. Sparring may give a couple of points but that's far from a real battle. I suspect that the benefits from live combats are drastically greater than the benefits from safely cultivating. Meizhen certainly seemed to think that getting our Domain weapon ready in time was possible, and she isn't even as good at spreadsheeting her cultivation numbers as we are.
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One other point here is that if we get our domain training up in the 190s then it's possible that the first few rounds of the tournament will push it across the threshold. We won't get to fill the bonus slots but we would at least get the dice bonus to our flying sword for the classic xianxia protagonist mid fight power up.

On a separate note, Ling Qi has got to be the absolute last person any of the mid/late yellow competitors want to draw in the tournament. At least if you get smacked down by Sun/CRX/Bai you can take some solace in the fact that you lost to the rising star in a major clan. Ling Qi presents the same Bai Meizhen combo of crazy defense + brutal spiritual attack, but with none of the name recognition.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Note that we won't be filling those extra slots anyways - we aren't completing more than 1-2 Green arts before end-of-year, and we don't want to indiscriminately slot everything we complete.
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Isn't our current status 0 slots, with a single dot giving us three slots to fill? My phrasing in the OP was awkward but what I meant was to refer to "slots that grant bonuses."

I though there was an outside chance that if combat xp is generous and/or we can dedicate training actions to domain xp then we could get a dot with a week to spare and then nab a power up. After rereading the domain rules I see I misunderstood--I thought you got the option to fill a slot whenever you leveled an art. I didn't realize it was on completion only.
 
Klaus said:
Yeah, I think SCS and FVM should be earmarked as two of our slots, and they definitely won't be finished by the end of the year.
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Hmm. It just occurred to me, but the obvious things to get from SCS and FVM as domain bonuses will be tied into whatever their capstones are as sort of off shoots of the main capstone.

Hm. Not sure what those could actually be honestly, but considering the Yin natures and very "immaterial" natures of both arts, I don't expect anything particularly overt and explody.
 
Even if we got every Art we currently own (soft) capped at Green we wouldn't want to fill our domain slots with those.
I could see an argument for filling them with SCS or FVM (maaaybe TRF), but honestly i'd rather wait and see if we could get some sort of SCS+ or FVM+ first.
 
Or better yet, ask for advice on this domain business. Ling Qi needs a narrative mentor to tell us what the QM thinks we should be doing.
 
PrimalShadow said:
Um... no. You don't get to just wish things into a state you find convenient. You can't say "Ling Qi is going closed door, BUT she is still spending an appropriate amount of time with all her friends." When you make a tradeoff, you can't just arbitrarily decide that the downside off it doesn't count.
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Sorry, I guess I was being confusing. Ling Qi should try to see her friends when she can anyway doesn't mean "there is no downside". The downside is, well, not spending an excessive amount with any one friend. So it will be hi/how are you while doing things she is already doing, not "I am going to dedicated 7 hours of my times to seeing you".

Minors are the latter. "Saying hi to Meizhen and drinking tea in the morning together" is the former.
 
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Ballad of the Forgotten Vale
Third Quarter: Autumn

Rain falls heavy
from darkened sky
swollen river rushes by,
past, over, old levee.

Flooded the river plain,
struck low golden grain,
hills struggle to contain,
natures wrath played in refrain.

Heavy patter suffocates animal cries,
Darkening the forest with phantoms
Both real and imagined, lies,
Singing summer's death anthems.

Fallen leaves, blood red and gold
Carpet the churned up muddy earth,
Their death feeding, giving birth,
To new life, once death has come for old.

Endless is the cycle,
What rises must fall,
And from death comes life.
Nor beast or plant is idle,
Dedicated to service all,
To departed, man and wife.

Endless is the cycle,
What rises must fall,
And from death comes life.
Nor beast or plant is idle,
Dedicated to service all,
To departed, man and wife.​
 
Orkus Majorkus said:
Too bad we'll never know cuz he only tells his friends :(
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We'll almost certainly see him in the Inner Sect(He really shouldn't fail the production track). I see no reason not to socialize with him. The biggest issue is us not sharing very many interests. Though that can be rectified by Ling Qi picking up a reading hobby. Which, while normally it would just be a hobby, it can incidentally likely help with her New Moon cultivaton stuff by telling her where to start looking for secrets now that I actually think about it.

E: second up, if we do take tutoring, we'd be well served by honoring the mother moon for our third Moon Quest and I know some have expressed interest in it with regards to it helping us help Zhengui.
 
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