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Overlady: Attack of the Minions (Thread II)

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EarthScorpion said:
Minions are a race of RPG characters, after all, so relatively recently they have discovered the art of the "Crafting System" where you can get weapon damage buffs by attaching nails to things and increased accuracy to strapping a telescope to your weapon.

Attempts to introduce an "underslung wand" for increased firepower have run into the problem that most minions can't do magic, and the ones that can are blues and thus have no power over fire. And the reds just set the wands on fire, which usually then blow up.
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But what about underslung arbalets/muskets?
 
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EarthScorpion said:
For example, on the Disc, if you are the third son of a king and you're going to try to complete a task that has already defeated your two older brothers, it's basically impossible for you to fail. In Overlady, yes, the rule of three means you're more likely to succeed, but if you declare "Oh, come on, I'm the third son. Of course I'm going to succeed", that's basically the best way to guarantee a dramatic cut to the next scene as your manservant tries to pull your impaled corpse down from a wooden spike because it turned out the orcs didn't respect your narrative destiny.
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Haven't read Discworld stories, but otherwise in stories isn't third son successful not because of Destiny or Rules of Narrative...

But that first two sons are arrogant, ignore advice, rude to peoples, overconfident, etc, etc... which causes their death.
Last son for one reason or another bothers to be polite to right peoples, remembers and acts on those peoples advice. Actually has some common sense and decency?
 
Void spirit said:
Haven't read Discworld stories, but otherwise in stories isn't third son successful not because of Destiny or Rules of Narrative...

But that first two sons are arrogant, ignore advice, rude to peoples, overconfident, etc, etc... which causes their death.
Last son for one reason or another bothers to be polite to right peoples, remembers and acts on those peoples advice. Actually has some common sense and decency?
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With Discworld, it'll probably be commonly accepted that son #3 has all the common sense and decency, despite the fact that five minutes of observation by anyone from our universe makes it apparent that really he's just very good at pinning the blame on his older brothers.

With the Tradition, there is a reason the older brothers are jackasses, and it has very little to do with their genetics or upbringing, or more accurately there is a reason they have the genetics or upbringing to make them jackasses. They might also not really be jackasses at all, but be jobbing instead.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
In essence, if narrativium exists in Overlady, it's a very unstable element that decays when people don't handle it with care and can produce plenty of fallout if some idiot starts hitting it together without proper caution. Also, it's spiteful and hates metagaming and powergaming. And stories have an immune system that attack parasites who try to use them to their own ends.
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Ah yes, Quantum Narrativium. It explodes in your face when observed.
 
TheBiggerFish said:
@EarthScorpion Okay, so Lilith Weatherwax, but what about Esme? Now I'm curious.
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I imagine Granny Weatherwax would be fine. She doesn't try to manipulate stories; she manipulates people. "Headology", she calls it.

Unfortunately, since narrative convention wouldn't necessarily force the younger sister of a Bad Witch to become a Good Witch to counterbalance her, it's likely that Granny would be a Bad Witch even greater than Black Aliss.
 
Meneldur said:
It think it's more like The Tradition in Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, rather than Narrativium. The Tradition is an imperative magical force that causes events to play out as they do in legends and fairytales. Each repetition of the events of a certain story makes the story happen more easily and increases the strength of that Traditional path. People who understand the Tradition can use the knowledge to control it, and can even to arrange events to divert the Tradition into another, more agreeable story, but it has to be handled with care, and it still has to happen. For example, when an Evil Witch comes to curse the newborn princess, the assorted Godmothers ensure that she's received the invitation, is treated very graciously, and so forth, so that when the time comes for her curse, she curses the princess that on her 16th birthday she'll wake up with her hair in such a mess that she's stuck to the headboard. However, the Tradition, wanting a classic Sleeping Beauty tragic story, would not be satisfied with such a weak curse, wants to twist it into something like 'the princess will be choked to death by her hair against the headboard and no one will be able to free her'. So the apprentice godmother (kept in reserve for just that reason) makes it into an actual curse, where the princess will be stuck to her bed until someone manages to free her, and of course, there are several limitations on who that someone is and how s/he can free the princess.
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No, not at all. That's missing the point.

Trying to act as if life is a story in Overlady gets the story subverted for comedy. That's the entire point of what I was saying. If you don't anger the evil witch, it's more likely that she'll appreciate the cakes, and wind up striking it up with the queen and by the time the princess is a teenager, the evil witch is on the royal council and the nation is using evil witch curses as a weapon against its foes.

Or, you know, the king has the foresight to hire some heroes when the witch shows up to curse his daughter, and so the evil witch gets stabbed to death and looted by some wandering heroes.

Stories aren't reliable in Overlady. That's the whole point. Acting as if you can rely on them - like the metagaming fuckery of the Traditions you describe - means the world just goes and subverts your expectations.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Minions are a race of RPG characters, after all, so relatively recently they have discovered the art of the "Crafting System" where you can get weapon damage buffs by attaching nails to things and increased accuracy to strapping a telescope to your weapon.

Attempts to introduce an "underslung wand" for increased firepower have run into the problem that most minions can't do magic, and the ones that can are blues and thus have no power over fire. And the reds just set the wands on fire, which usually then blow up.
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So what about those black super-minions?
 
Arcus said:
They're clearly minion-kind's suicide bombers.

It's a much more effective tactic when Blues can just revive the blorted mess of your corpse afterwards.
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Not sure. Aren't they supposed to be smart or something? Would be wasteful to use them that way...

Explosions are just some kind of failure in creating minions so far.
 
GreatGreyShrike said:
If metagame fuckery is always punished, does that ultimately mean that they can use meta-meta-game-fuckery? How deep does the recursion go, and what happens in case of conflict between types and levels of metagame fuckery?

For example, say you want someone to fail and die. So you persuade them to do something because, you explain to them, narrativium will make them come through successful and victorious; and you secretly want them to fail and die, and you know that if they rely on narrativium, they will die or at least fail in a funny way. So you are relying on the metagame fuckery to make them fail for humorous reasons - indulging in meta-metagame-fuckery; if this is inevitably punished, maybe it would be by having the metagame fuckery actually succeed this time, so maybe the only way to succeed with metagame fuckery is to first have someone inimical to you persuade you of metagame fuckery? ... Maybe you can recuse this a level, and explain the meta-meta-game-fuckery scheme to some other evil plotter - will you then be punished for meta-meta-meta-game-fuckery?

I wonder how many levels of meta-fuckery we could get?
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Eh, anyone who tried to experiment with this probably meta their doom.
 
Arcus said:
They're clearly minion-kind's suicide bombers.

It's a much more effective tactic when Blues can just revive the blorted mess of your corpse afterwards.
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I was under the impression that Reds were the minion suicide bombers. As they're the only minions who can be trusted to not lose their ignition source and are reasonably resistant to explosions.
 
xeivous said:
I was under the impression that Reds were the minion suicide bombers. As they're the only minions who can be trusted to not lose their ignition source and are reasonably resistant to explosions.
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Oh yeah, we already had air dropped smart bombards for precise assassination strikes.

Well, relatively precise. I don't think minions really understand the concept of collateral damage.
 
Yeah, trying to meta-game yourself a victory in a heroic story seems like a great way to get turned into the punchline of someone else's comedy.
 
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mayordomoGoliat said:
We could end up with a Rivera family generational alignment flip flop due to the whole pressure of parents vs natural impulses or due to narrativanium. I miss El Tigre.
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We do already have elements of that in the story. Louise's father was a rare white sheep of the family and the Tristan royal family has been noted to swing between Good and Evil. However I'm not so sure that a flipping of alignment is going to only take a generation after Evil has taken root so deeply. Louise and Henriette seem like they'd be, in Evil language, worse parents than their own. Though Henriette's father did quite a bit for her, so he's probably a gold standard.
 
xeivous said:
We do already have elements of that in the story. Louise's father was a rare white sheep of the family and the Tristan royal family has been noted to swing between Good and Evil. However I'm not so sure that a flipping of alignment is going to only take a generation after Evil has taken root so deeply. Louise and Henriette seem like they'd be, in Evil language, worse parents than their own. Though Henriette's father did quite a bit for her, so he's probably a gold standard.
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Or maybe they both end up transcending both good and evil and end up as the first force of Neutral Practicality in the world.

Nah, probably not.
 
EarthScorpion said:
The core difference that a lot of readers seem not to have twigged onto is that in Overlady, acting like you're a character in a story gets you killed. The world of Overlady actively punishes metagaming and overconfidence.

For example, on the Disc, if you are the third son of a king and you're going to try to complete a task that has already defeated your two older brothers, it's basically impossible for you to fail. In Overlady, yes, the rule of three means you're more likely to succeed, but if you declare "Oh, come on, I'm the third son. Of course I'm going to succeed", that's basically the best way to guarantee a dramatic cut to the next scene as your manservant tries to pull your impaled corpse down from a wooden spike because it turned out the orcs didn't respect your narrative destiny.

Lilith Weatherwax would have been fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked in Overlady, because she's basically poking the world and daring it to not subvert any of her stories even though it'd be hilarious for, for example, the handsome prince to actually really enjoy the company of one of the stepsisters and find Cinderella to be vapid and dull.

In essence, if narrativium exists in Overlady, it's a very unstable element that decays when people don't handle it with care and can produce plenty of fallout if some idiot starts hitting it together without proper caution. Also, it's spiteful and hates metagaming and powergaming. And stories have an immune system that attack parasites who try to use them to their own ends.

It's basically the minion rule, applied to the whole setting. Minions are only funny when you're not near to them. When you're up close, they're murderous kleptomaniac goblins who have very little regards for their own life and not only will kill you, but will also steal all your clothes and weapons and dress up as you and leave your desecrated corpse behind them - if they don't eat you. Treating minions as if they're a joke just means you get hit over the head by a stolen statue with nails glued onto it.
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EarthScorpion said:
No, not at all. That's missing the point.

Trying to act as if life is a story in Overlady gets the story subverted for comedy. That's the entire point of what I was saying. If you don't anger the evil witch, it's more likely that she'll appreciate the cakes, and wind up striking it up with the queen and by the time the princess is a teenager, the evil witch is on the royal council and the nation is using evil witch curses as a weapon against its foes.

Or, you know, the king has the foresight to hire some heroes when the witch shows up to curse his daughter, and so the evil witch gets stabbed to death and looted by some wandering heroes.

Stories aren't reliable in Overlady. That's the whole point. Acting as if you can rely on them - like the metagaming fuckery of the Traditions you describe - means the world just goes and subverts your expectations.
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I can't help but feel Guiche and Montmorency should be dead, like, 50 times over by now.
 
mayordomoGoliat said:
We could end up with a Rivera family generational alignment flip flop due to the whole pressure of parents vs natural impulses or due to narrativanium. I miss El Tigre.
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Actually there wouldn't be that much conflict since both kind of presures would be to do evil and the end result was always about ending with a member of Louise family in the throne or at least pulling the strings. The only reason the family was so loyal to the Royal Family was just because the perfect heir had not been born yet.
 
Pinklestia said:
Actually there wouldn't be that much conflict since both kind of presures would be to do evil and the end result was always about ending with a member of Louise family in the throne or at least pulling the strings. The only reason the family was so loyal to the Royal Family was just because the perfect heir had not been born yet.
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Is Louise not the perfect heir?

Except for that whole pesky undying loyalty to Henrietta thing.
 
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