Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
The problem is, that intensity and focus, that effort, is not reflected in story in a particularly meaningful way. We occasionally get told snippets of it by other characters, but are never really shown her drive, just the results of it. For a reader catching up (or over on Royal Road eventually) that isn't in the thread in real time, it may as well not exist.
There's a constant tension, an almost maniacal near-panic, in the planmakers creating schedules and meticulously plotting out cultivation timelines and optimal pill efficiencies. We self impose deadlines and are always pushing the limits of every available resource at our disposal. This same tension is *not* seen in-story. The planning culture makes it seem like a race against time, and yet Ling Qi waltzes through seemingly effortlessly.
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- Location
- Canada
I'm not saying he didn't take big risks because he's a coward, I'm saying he just didn't have the opportunity to take them in the first place. You can't say he didn't fuck up and picked up feuds he shouldn't due to his pride in the same sentence. The reasons he had the problems he had weren't because he's a moron, he simply has different priorities than us, that doesn't mean he can magically catch up unless something narratively significant happens though. But yeah I'm not saying he's a failure and we've left him in the dust forever, just that him "shooting right past us" is not something I imagine will happen due to previous events and current circumstances.
- Location
- United States of America
I'm going to note a couple of inconsistencies here. I agree that the "lose first time and then train for a rematch" model is not the only way to approach opponents. However, it seems like it is the only way you are approaching the opponents Ling Qi has been facing. The reference to a back and forth and examples of Ichigo and the Empire Strikes seem to indicate a predeposition to that style of developing an enemy.
Yan Renshu mattered because we decided to deal with him before he could do more damage to us. The fear of what Renshu could do drove his importance to the narrative, not what he actually did. He was the boogie man that did little to harm us but still made us react to him and jump at shadows until it was dealt with. But even then, I think that it is the wrong way to look at Yan Renshu. I wouldn't classify him as an enemy of Ling Qi. I would classify him similarly to Grand Moff Tarkin from the original trilogy. An individual on the opposing side of Luke, who was capable of doing tremendous damage, but was ultimately defeated with very little input from him. He's a side character, an individual who is supporting the main threat.
No, narratively, the main opponent for Ling Qi can only be Sun Liling. Even though Sun Liling was defeated time and time again, she still exuded power and instilled tremendous fear into Ling Qi. The latter 1/4 of Ling Qi's frantic cultivation seems to be driven by Sun Liling. It all revolves around being able to put up a fight against Sun Liling and Meizhen topples that ideal down in our brutal spar. Our ability to fight at the best of our ability was never about Yan Renshu or Ji Rong, it was about Sun Liling because Sun Liling was the person who mattered.
The only personal animus we had towards Ji Rong or Yan Renshu (initially) was that they were members of factions arrayed against the faction we choose to support. Yan Renshu changed that when he attempted to poison Zhengui, but for Ji Rong, there is really no personal animus involved. No incentive to beat him other than that he was in our way. In order to have a satisfying enemy, there needs to be a reason for the fight, a reason for the personal conflict. Sun Liling provides that because she is completely against the friendships we have built and wants to destroy our friend's family. There is a personal, emotional, reason to strive and fight against her. Ji Rong doesn't have that and Yan Renshu didn't have that for Ling Qi until after the last time we fought him.
No, Ji Rong and Yan Renshu just don't feel like enemies for Ling Qi. I feel that is perfectly fine. Not every opposing character in the story needs to be an enemy. The more I think about it, the more I think that Yan Renshu is like Tarkin from "A New Hope." Villainous, but you would be hard pressed to say that he is an enemy of Luke Skywalker. They never interact, and he is used primarily to drive the plot forward. Such is Yan Renshu, an individual who drives the plot forward and brings into conflict the ways that Meizhen and Ling Qi deal with situations. And that is where he derives his most value, for he is the character that is used to explore the disconnect between how Meizhen deals with problems from lower standing individuals and how Ling Qi handles that same exact situation, as well as spark conflict between those two characters about said methods.
Ji Rong is more of a foil, in my opinion, for Ling Qi than an actual enemy. There is little to no emotional investiture in their fight because there is little reason for them to care about the other. They are simply pawns for opposing sides. However, he does provide a mirror to view Ling Qi against. What would have Ling Qi become if she cared more about personal power and didn't agree to operate under the existing power structures? What if she rebelled against the power structures and tried to do her own thing? In that way, Ji Rong is our polar opposite, which is exemplified in his fighting style, but he is never a narrative opponent of ours.
No, the narrative conflict has been pretty much solely on Sun Liling. From the moment in the Thunderdome where she fought Meizhen to a brutal standstill through the Tournament. Saying that Yan Renshu and Ji Rong were narrative enemies is, I believe, mischaracterizing their role in the narrative. They are not there to be in conflict with Ling Qi, but to drive conflict for Ling Qi in her personal relationships/move along the plot and, in Ji Rong's case, to act as a foil for us as we strive to be better.
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Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh
Let's be honest. We barely tried to do anything to deal with him. There was never much threat shown in story, he was summarily dismissed in the end, and most of the time we preferred to ignore him rather than invest actions in him in any way. IMO Renshu was singularly wasted as a character, but we don't really need to rehash that argument again.
Anyway, saying that Sun was our main antagonist kind of highlights the fundamental problem here, since all of her narrative relationships were focused on Renxiang and Meizhen, and we were also going to be incapable of contesting her really anyway. She's a bad opponent for us. A good background element to drive the plot, sure, but not a good opponent for us (honestly, if Huang Da had been on her side and we'd had to deal with him it would have been much better).
Basically, if you look at the story everyone else had these strong antagonistic relationships, while we, well, just didn't. And yeah, a lot of that is really our fault.
I mean to be honest here the big problem here is that the makeup of the sect and our objective of DOOM really don't lend themselves too well to the give and take nature you want from opponents.
Back in year one OOC we were practically wetting ourselves over the fear of losing a single week's cultivation time like Ji Rong beacuse of the huge deadline that the end of year tournament presented. If we had lost to Sun Liling when we got chased through the mountains people were seriously worried because of how badly the the loss of equipment and time would have crippled us.
I'll also say that personally I feel that if we wanted a tournament arc that had real dramatic tension then the strength of the ducal scions was a mistake, in that the gap between them and everyone else was revealed to be just too huge.* Ji Rong's was cleared relatively easily despite his strength already pushing the bounds of plausabilty for him and then there was an entire sky's worth of space between his strength and the next challenger.
We've got something of a similar problem here in that the time pressure to meet Shenhua's challenge still feels really tight. So if we encounter some sort of big beefgate character at rank 700 or something the challenge system actively incentivises going around them to someone of similar ranking that our skills are more suited to beating, and that generally plays into our time pressure as well. Plus Ling Qi doesn't really have the pride issue that a lot of protaganist have to avenge her defeat. We have too mch pressure on us in terms of a feeling that if we don't build correctly we will fail, yet not enough to make us get into feuds with specific people.
If we want opponents that we can trade blows with in order to overcome then we need @yrsillar to pull down the pressure so that we can take some of those blows without it being the end of the world. Or put up the pressure in the form of imminent death and then justify us not dying and give us a way to rebuild properly in time without it feeling like a cheat. Because Ling Qi is still incredibly dependent on irreplacable lucky finds.
To go back to you example of Ichigo, his nearly getting killed by Byakuya absolutely made a better story, but he then got the benefit of shonen style power ups. He had the safety net of Kisuke to pick him back up and give him a method to not only restore everything he'd lost but acutally increase his power within his incredibly short deadline.
Ling Qi doesn't have that. Cai had made it clear that her resources are limited by Shenhua. If we say, lost our flute, domain weapon and super Cai robe then we woudn't be able to get them back or replace them with equivilent items. So if we want an enemy we can really meaningfully lose to then we need a postition where things we can be meaningfully lost without permantly screwing us over.
On your last point, Ling Qi isn't just any character, she's one we are directly controlling. Given the sheer effort that people have put into guiding Ling Qi's progress then if we lose the inevitable question is "what could we have done differently?" and the GM has to be able to point to something and go "oh you messed up here" or "you didn't appreciate all the consequenes of this decision". Unwinnable fights work well in a medium like a story, often they can even work well in fast paced interactive mediums such as a video game. But this is a quest with a much longer timeframe around planning, decision making and updates and we need to always have at least a fair shot at a victory (bearing in mind that running away with your hide intact and similar can be a victory).
TLDR: If we want a narrative exchange of blows then we need to be given a narrative position in which we can take a blow without being KO'd
To be honest that's why the last part of the tournament doesn't do much for me. With Ling Qi's performance in the rest of the tournament, once we cleared the Ji Rong fight with relative ease I thought that Ling Qi's strength was at the point where she was nipping at the ducal scion's heels; vanishingly unlikley to actually beat any of the scions in a straight up fight but more than good enough that they had to take her seriously. Our performance against Liling was decent if not amazing, although we failed to actually achieve our self set objective.
Then the final fight of the tournament between Meizhen and Liling happened and it turned out that we were orders of magnitude away from even scratching the ducal scions. It's a great fight on it's own merits and I'm glad Meizhen won but it really ruined a lot of the sense of Ling Qi's dramatic fight through the tournament when the fourth and fifth strongest people in the tournament were basically ants to the top 3. Whilst we knew full well that they were extremely powerful the feats the scions pulled off were suddenly so much stronger than they had ever actually displayed before it made our efforts to catch up feel rather pointless. Which was all the more irritating becasue we regularly sparred with one of them and even if she noted that she held back it would have been nice and much better forshadowing if we'd actually seen Meizhen pull anything remotely comparible in scale to the feats dispayed in her final fight onscreen.
Then the final fight of the tournament between Meizhen and Liling happened and it turned out that we were orders of magnitude away from even scratching the ducal scions. It's a great fight on it's own merits and I'm glad Meizhen won but it really ruined a lot of the sense of Ling Qi's dramatic fight through the tournament when the fourth and fifth strongest people in the tournament were basically ants to the top 3. Whilst we knew full well that they were extremely powerful the feats the scions pulled off were suddenly so much stronger than they had ever actually displayed before it made our efforts to catch up feel rather pointless. Which was all the more irritating becasue we regularly sparred with one of them and even if she noted that she held back it would have been nice and much better forshadowing if we'd actually seen Meizhen pull anything remotely comparible in scale to the feats dispayed in her final fight onscreen.
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Yeah, I agree with you that the basic quest interaction itself makes a lot of this difficult.
That being said, I'd point out that we have a distinct tendency to overreact to potential loss. Like, we ended up at the tournament with a fairly solid safety margin there, and were arguably overlevelled. We absolutely could have lost to Sun in week 32 - as we were supposed to - and still come out fine at the end of the year.
Similarly, these concerns are one of the reasons I keep pointing out that Renshu successfully poisoning Zhengui would have been great. It would have been a strong blow against us but also wouldn't have stopped us from getting into the Inner Sect, and would have made us going after him so much more meaningful.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, that's basically the biggest problem here.
This isn't a setting that allows for massive comebacks in the face of defeat. It's a 'Realistic' setting in that personal Talent, dedication, and money is what's needed to be strong--and if you get your shit pushed into the dirt, you don't get to make that back.
Defeat can be educational, but as we've seen, the insights gained from defeat don't come anywhere close to paying back what you can actually lose from defeat. We lose our Cai robe? That's our best piece of gear gone and we'll probably never get it back. Lose our flute? Even putting aside the sentimental value, it shuts down virtually all of our offense, and we have to scramble for a replacement before the jackals finish circling us and going for the throat.
More typical Xianxia settings actually can have the PC get their shit pushed in to show off how high the heavens are, because then you can introduce a convenient Lucky Chance afterwards that lets them make good their losses and then some. That kind of thing doesn't exist in the yrsillarverse. Yes, cheats exist--but they're not something you can get your hands on until you're already a big player. Even Shenhua--the ur-Cheatmeister was Indigo when she found her game breaking exploit.
In a very real sense, what we've noticed here is that outside of rubber-banding because of Plot (AKA: Ji Rong and him still being able to push our shit in if we couldn't bring a gang into a supposed one-on-one fight despite him losing the better part of two months total over the course of the year in Cultivation and consistently being on the losing side), once someone starts to lose, they tend to keep losing until all of their foes have decisively outdistanced them or they just give up on competing. This more accurately models real life, where Lucky Chances don't tend to descend from on high to make a Loser into a Winner.
And Ling Qi cannot survive becoming a Loser, she has no Clan to fall back on, the Cai won't go to bat for her for anything short of obvious and gross malfeasance beyond our ability to impact--and worse, she was a winner for a while, if not the big winner, so any setback risks starting a cascade collapse of everything as all the people who are annoyed that she outstaged them are going to take advantage of any sign of weakness to get their own licks in.
So yeah, setbacks are something we can--and do suffer on occasion. But a straight up crushing defeat? No, not in this setting. Even GG is basically going to get fucked if we can't provide enough support, and he's no slouch either, and he only lost once when it mattered. We are his safety net saving throw, and even then--we have to be sneaky about it.
TL;DR: The problem with "Ling Qi always tends to win is" is a natural consequence of a living, breathing setting that's trying to tell a coherent story. Because the moment Ling Qi loses, there's an uncomfortably high possibility that she'll keep losing, because she's an upstart who doesn't have the backing to catch her if she stumbles. This isn't a Xianxia setting with an infinite number of god-tier cheats left behind by overpowered monsters that a plucky protagonist can stumble into to make up for an initial start of being a loser. And most people here aren't following this story in hopes of hearing "And then your plucky protagonist got encircled by the jackals and picked apart, bit by bit until they were reduced to a husk of their former self."
Except the Anti Victory Party, but they're a silly bunch of words.
This isn't a setting that allows for massive comebacks in the face of defeat. It's a 'Realistic' setting in that personal Talent, dedication, and money is what's needed to be strong--and if you get your shit pushed into the dirt, you don't get to make that back.
Defeat can be educational, but as we've seen, the insights gained from defeat don't come anywhere close to paying back what you can actually lose from defeat. We lose our Cai robe? That's our best piece of gear gone and we'll probably never get it back. Lose our flute? Even putting aside the sentimental value, it shuts down virtually all of our offense, and we have to scramble for a replacement before the jackals finish circling us and going for the throat.
More typical Xianxia settings actually can have the PC get their shit pushed in to show off how high the heavens are, because then you can introduce a convenient Lucky Chance afterwards that lets them make good their losses and then some. That kind of thing doesn't exist in the yrsillarverse. Yes, cheats exist--but they're not something you can get your hands on until you're already a big player. Even Shenhua--the ur-Cheatmeister was Indigo when she found her game breaking exploit.
In a very real sense, what we've noticed here is that outside of rubber-banding because of Plot (AKA: Ji Rong and him still being able to push our shit in if we couldn't bring a gang into a supposed one-on-one fight despite him losing the better part of two months total over the course of the year in Cultivation and consistently being on the losing side), once someone starts to lose, they tend to keep losing until all of their foes have decisively outdistanced them or they just give up on competing. This more accurately models real life, where Lucky Chances don't tend to descend from on high to make a Loser into a Winner.
And Ling Qi cannot survive becoming a Loser, she has no Clan to fall back on, the Cai won't go to bat for her for anything short of obvious and gross malfeasance beyond our ability to impact--and worse, she was a winner for a while, if not the big winner, so any setback risks starting a cascade collapse of everything as all the people who are annoyed that she outstaged them are going to take advantage of any sign of weakness to get their own licks in.
So yeah, setbacks are something we can--and do suffer on occasion. But a straight up crushing defeat? No, not in this setting. Even GG is basically going to get fucked if we can't provide enough support, and he's no slouch either, and he only lost once when it mattered. We are his safety net saving throw, and even then--we have to be sneaky about it.
TL;DR: The problem with "Ling Qi always tends to win is" is a natural consequence of a living, breathing setting that's trying to tell a coherent story. Because the moment Ling Qi loses, there's an uncomfortably high possibility that she'll keep losing, because she's an upstart who doesn't have the backing to catch her if she stumbles. This isn't a Xianxia setting with an infinite number of god-tier cheats left behind by overpowered monsters that a plucky protagonist can stumble into to make up for an initial start of being a loser. And most people here aren't following this story in hopes of hearing "And then your plucky protagonist got encircled by the jackals and picked apart, bit by bit until they were reduced to a husk of their former self."
Except the Anti Victory Party, but they're a silly bunch of words.
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Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Free will and the presence of 'dice' (mechanical or otherwise) really puts any idea of a consistent 'narrative storytelling' to the sword, because the voters can decide not to take the risk, whether by avoiding or preempting, and the dice can turn a significant challenge into a milk run, or a walk in the park into a tomb of horrors. There's just too much potential chaos to get a more traditional form of pacing or meaningful weight.
A GM or QM has to roll with the punches, and do the best they can with how things turn out. Think a good campaign of D&D.
A GM or QM has to roll with the punches, and do the best they can with how things turn out. Think a good campaign of D&D.
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The problem with doing this is that there is a sharp disconnect between what we know about the mechanics OOC and what is known about the mechanics IC.
We don't know if Ling Qi has any idea how 'close' or 'far' she is from reaching the next level of Cultivation, an Art, a skill or an attribute. We know that she knows that, of her 'core arts', she can only improve upon SCS at this time, and that she can't get any better at dodging.
We also know that none of the exact numbers are actually visible, except in the most nebulous of ways. No numbers, just 'talented' or 'untalented' or 'average talent' or 'peak of Red/Yellow/Green, etc'. Enough to discern where someone sits with a given attribute or skill and whether that skill or attribute has been uncapped, but not enough to know in more precise detail. Similarly, no exact knowledge of how much various stones, drugs, or sites work to improve Cultivation, just a vague idea of potency and what they effect.
I do believe that the thread's scramble for resources and optimization should be present in the narrative. I just don't know how to do it in a way that makes sense organically, rather than something shoved in.
This is why yrs got rid of the dice.
Also, Number None would beg to differ
minimap_op
plsnerf
- Location
- Lower Lefthand Corner
Basically a lot of Narrative vs Simulation arguments. FoD and now ToD have leaned heavily more simulation and people who like and prefer that not being happy that such a thing is being treated like a flaw and being a bit defensive as a result.
Jensaarai
Sing Victory Everlasting
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I edited it to better imply that I wasn't talking about actual "dWhatever" dice.This is why yrs got rid of the dice.
Also, Number None would beg to differ
And NN still probably has some sort of system for determining success or failure.
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Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
I'm going to argue that we didn't need a rival. This is why I pointed out Kang Zihao there. The tournament opted to go Peasant CRX vs Peasant Sun for the Ling Qi vs Ji Rong fight, but I really believe that narratively "Ling Qi has now caught up to the High Noble Scions' by fighting Kang Zihao would have been a great act closure.Thank you!
And yes, Huang Da is a shame. As was noted before, he could have been a fantastic enemy for Ling Qi, creating a strongly visceral sense of opposition that would make beating him feel meaningful to the character. One of the issues going into the tournament was that we kinda try to avoid getting into unnecessary trouble, and didn't really have any rivals or nemeses to create emotionally powerful fights. We had little social interaction and conflict with our opponents outside of a bit of shit-talk at the start of the fight (compare to, say, the tournament arc in Hero Academia where the conflicts between contestants were built up and made meaningful to the characters in much more detail). Everyone else had much more meaningful fights than us. Gan losing was a good move to build stakes and make our fight with Ji Rong matter more, but it could only go so far.
We need to interact with people we don't like more
As pointed, Ji Rong was the 'rival fight' except that for Ling Qi herself he wasn't a rival. For questers he was a measuring stick of "Also beginning from 0 so let's see if we did as well as another character that was constantly punched down", but all the investment came from questers themselves rather than any narrative arc.
Also, Ji Rong is why I think that while losing stuff would have been painful as fuck, I disagree with @Alectai that one extreme loss is enough to screw us over forever. Because Ji Rong had multiple enormous loss from which even one should have meant 'now is back to Huang Da level', but the opposite happened, with each loss opening doors for him and somehow propelling his strength to another level.
In a way, it seems like Ji Rong plays by normal Xianxia rules while Ling Qi plays by 'realistic' ones, but maybe if we had a loss Ling Qi would have been playing by normal Xianxia rules. I am glad we didn't have a loss.
When you say 'Narrative vs Simulation', what do you actually mean?
Because as far as I'm concerned, 'Simulation' is a method of handling background events - specifically, a 'high-resolution' method that keeps track of just about everything even vaguely important with a high degree of fidelity.
This is not the method used by yrsillar to keep track of everything going on in the background. He prefers a more 'low-resolution' approach, in which everything 'out of sight' is pretty much 'out of mind' until it becomes relevant, and that's fine - it's my preferred style of QMing.
'Narrative', on the other hand, describes what's going on on-screen - what we see in updates.
So what are your definitions?
Maybe. The problem with Kang though was that he hadn't really been relevant to us for like 30 weeks by then. If we'd had a bit more interaction with him and him looking down on us that would work better.
Instead, by the time of the tournament I think it more felt like we'd already clearly surpassed him and he was just loser so there wasn't anything to prove.
Yeah, see, I disagree. I think that that's largely in the thread's heads, and that we could totally recover from losses. The problem is that the thread blows up over things like that and can't handle it.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Wasn't it later brought up that Ji Rong was straight up rubberbanded so he would be a worthy fight? He didn't 'Get special opportunities', so much as his stats were arbitrarily set to be "Capable of pushing your shit in if you don't play your cards extremely well, and might pull it off even if you do everything right".
But yeah, that's a definite problem there. Especially since we have no reason to believe that kind of thing is something we can expect, since pretty much all of our backers have been fairly hands-off in general. If we had reason to expect that if we fell down, our backer would shower new toys on us so we were stronger when we got up, I suspect there'd be a lot less screaming terror and desire to optimize in the thread.
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I'm pretty sure everyone's progression ended up being pushed up because we progressed way faster than yrsillar anticipated.
DeAnno
Sometimes words have two meanings
Interesting that you bring this up
Ji Rong thematic scene said:
Ji Rong, typical Xanxia protagonist. A string of bigtime victories and defeats, full of plucky dialog, with a doomed infatuation to add spice.
Ling Qi. Thoughtless, Whimsical, Cunning, Resolved. Stereotypical Dark Chick villain, complete with Darkness meridians and Domain Weapon. She doesn't ever lose, she just retreats. She dunks on Ji Rong so often people can't even remember all the times it's happened. She even shut the book on very her own storybook romance.
Ling Qi is the hero of Forge of Destiny, the Quest. But Ji Rong is the hero of Forge of Destiny, the Novel, and Ling Qi is his unfairly competent rival.
EDIT: Ling Qi is Drusilla the Mad, just add fangs.
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I feel like a lot of the thread's horrified reaction to the idea of failure goes back to the wonderful object lesson we got in thunderdome, taking the form of Li Suyin's eye.*
I mean dodge about with peadantry over the real meaning of crippling all you like (the sect certainly does) but no-one but us and Su Ling even expressed any sort of vague disapproval of the fact that someone was willing to literally gouge out someone's eye whilst they were essentially helpless on the ground over a couple of dozen red stones until Suyin started getting more powerful. If we hadn't been there to provide her some emotional support she would have crashed out of the sect and still been crippled.
Yan Renshu's current condition is another beautiful example of exactly how much shit people can get away with doing to people below them in social status and power.
Maybe if Cai Shenhua were more willing to exert influence on our behalf, we'd be a bit more sanguine. But as it stands Meizhen's inevitable vengance on our behalf is not really the level of comfortable support that I'd be happy trusting to keep all the jackals away.
I mean dodge about with peadantry over the real meaning of crippling all you like (the sect certainly does) but no-one but us and Su Ling even expressed any sort of vague disapproval of the fact that someone was willing to literally gouge out someone's eye whilst they were essentially helpless on the ground over a couple of dozen red stones until Suyin started getting more powerful. If we hadn't been there to provide her some emotional support she would have crashed out of the sect and still been crippled.
Yan Renshu's current condition is another beautiful example of exactly how much shit people can get away with doing to people below them in social status and power.
Maybe if Cai Shenhua were more willing to exert influence on our behalf, we'd be a bit more sanguine. But as it stands Meizhen's inevitable vengance on our behalf is not really the level of comfortable support that I'd be happy trusting to keep all the jackals away.
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She fight JR twice. Once was with a large gang of hardy boys from ambush.
The other wasnt really "dunking on" since she needed to be hospitalized immediately after.
JR isn't really a good protag.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
As I understand it, the difference is how much the QM will poke at events to make them turn out the way they want. That is, you have background events that are 'out of mind' but when they do become relevant you ask the question 'what actually happened back there?'
A Narrative approach would be to figure out what plausible sequence of events creates the situation that helps you make a compelling narrative.
A Simulationist approach would be to figure out what would likely have happened if you were paying attention, through some method of reasoning (ranging from extensive calculation to gut feeling estimation).
Neither one is pure evil and what tends to happen is some mix of the two; striking the right balance between the two is what's important. Too much of a narrative approach (retroactively asserting events that suit your ends) can lead to the world feeling contrived and harming immersion, while too much of a simulation approach (calculating forwards the most plausible events) makes it hard for you to create a compelling narrative.
But then, I'm not the guy who said that in the first place, so that's just how I look at it.
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Honestly I tend to read close to the opposite. In formal social situations Ling Qi is spacey and apathetic and in combat she's casual and detached. We occasionally read her commenting about cultivation and I don't recall her having any particular feelings about it.
Yeah, considering people were expressing concern about salt over something as simple as being given an offensive art, I kinda dread to see how people would react to a defeat with consequences similar to what e.g. Ji Rong or Li Suyin faced.
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minimap_op
plsnerf
- Location
- Lower Lefthand Corner
I'm a bit out of it right now(neighbors partying every day this fucking week fucking up my sleep) so I'm not sure I'm describing this correctly, but basically a sliding stylistic scale of whether the world reacts more based on motives and capabilities of characters interacting semi-realistically given the rules of the setting or whether it's more based on the story's themes and tone. What you describe to me would be far on the simulation side sure, but I don't think you have to go that far to qualify. Saying the quest has leaned Simulation may be going a bit far come to think of it, but I think in compared to something like Number None it certainly does, and the issues being talked about have seemed to me largely of whether things should lean more Narrative in design.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
To be honest, I don't think it would be as bad as you're thinking.
It'd still be pretty bad, of course, but beyond the initial reactions ("Well frick") and the accusations of a mistake in the proceedings ("But how did he know that would work?!") focus would rapidly shift to damage control and how best to repair our plans and goals. I've seen it before.
The highest tensions come when people dig in their heels about planning, since it's a lot easier to argue against hypotheticals than it is to argue against what actually happened.
e: that said, the amount of salt accusations of a mistake can generate is almost boundless. If we suffer a major loss and it really truly looks like by any reasonable measure it shouldn't have happened, people will come out of the woodworks to add their salt to the pile. This too I've seen before.
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