I am more worried about "Having a clear concept is too simple so let's not worry about character themes and do something all over the place", myself.
There is nothing
simple about the various concepts that
@Thor's Twin or
@BungieONI are talking about, after all. Being
limited in concept to me is part of actually trying to see the character and where they are moving, rather than saying "more things means it's more complicated".
No, more things don't mean it's multifaceted and complicated, more things usually mean "Not wanting to do any decisions".
This is quite on point to be honest.
Also,
@Sampatrick, while I do want to make them fit to Home, that is not all I want to do which is clearly laid out in my posts where I go into the idea that I want them to work together with our arts.
I think this summarizes one of the things that seemed most off to me. Ling Qi's successes have been in far more than combat.
Ling Qi did not bring Yan Renshu low through combat. She did not ruin Sun Liling's faction through combat. Nor did she do so through anything that could even vaguely be shoehorned into being a "support bard".
For that matter, the discussion about divination being diverted into "bardic curses" is increasingly farcical the more I think about it. "I lay a curse on you" is related to Ling Qi in the sense that she uses debuffs, but "I know all your secrets" is something Ling Qi gets cultivation bonuses for, is expected to do as her job, and has already done to great effect. An Art to do it better fits both her character and her role, on top of the cultivation benefits it brings. It might not help in an in-your-face fight with no preparation, but we will be facing those very rarely outside the artificial environment of the tournament - and elsewhere, knowing what we'll be facing before we face it should be entirely worth it for both us and CRX.
Trying to pigeonhole Ling Qi into the "archetype" of a support bard - and the more I think about it, the more pigonholing seems the correct term - would mean discarding a large part of her character progression and achievements to date. Being a support bard is a thing Ling Qi does, but it's not all that she does, and it's not all that she should be doing.
Yes, this will mean that not all of the arts Ling Qi has will be directly usable in every situation. No, I do not consider this a bad thing - and if CRX or Meizhen do bring the same Art suite to every situation, I'll eat my hat.
As for the domain benefits of the arts, I don't consider that nearly as much of a problem as you do. Domain lessons are personalized to Ling Qi - if an Art teaches a lesson Ling Qi can learn, it will fit in Ling Qi's domain. We may not want to slot it, but it will be slottable and it will fit the version of Ling Qi's "Home" theme that exists at the time the art is mastered.. We will need to pick domain perks that synergize, but the fact that the perks all seem to be buffs/auras of a sort means that we may be able to stack the effects of two Arts even if we never use the Arts themselves at the same time.
Again using Meizhen as an example, she has a Domain theme of "Terror" and a set of Earth arts - you know, "the element of acceptance and community". I would be very surprised if she was unable to integrate the two into a single, solid Domain. (Especially since she started training Earth arts before her breakthrough - she was training Earth in Week 17, and broke through Week 20.)
I'm going to need to sleep soon, waking up early tomorrow to go on a long drive, so I'll respond and try to wrap this up.
Yeah, Ling Qi's successes have been in far more than combat. And that is because she is a more complicated person in how she solves problems than is described with just the simplistic term of support bard that I use. This is abundantly clear, and comes from her abilities to troubleshoot. I also don't want to get rid of these examples or abilities, because I like seeing her sneak around. When I am stating "support bard is good" I am not saying "We need to be the center of the battlefield singing and murdering folks". Such a thing is a relatively boring character best used for one offs.
My motives with the divination art were to; refute veekie's idea that total Divination is a fit, and trim it down to past Divination using the perspective of how Ling Qi is often remembered doing things. And it was not in support or against actually attaining a divination art, as that is a separate topic which can draw on this one. Nor was it me taking a position that I didn't like those spy related bits. I wouldn't mind having more and look forward to the entertainment spying we'll be doing, I find it pretty cool to think about.
To clear up the bardic curses thing, I wasn't speaking of juju weird magic, I was speaking of it as it was used historically by fili IRL who satirized higher status individuals and cursed them by exposing their shames and secrets. That's all. It'd be cool if we could transmit information via whispering music or some such, but that's just a bonus when the point is to be able to find information.
Considering how well AM's lesson has been showing itself, basically not at all, I'm somewhat doubtful of the
usefulness of lessons from the Argent Arts. Which I know isn't exactly the same as "will they generate lessons that actually fit", but I'm pointing it out for context to show the situation is more nuanced. As to whether they will generate lessons that fit, I figure they will fit, for a while. To explain, there are two facets here; each lesson we learn pushes the Domain in a certain direction and interacts with the other ones, building up on them. And each lesson restricts what we can add to the Domain, according to the domain tutorial in the first thread.
Each dot of domain gives the cultivator three 'slots' in addition to a baseline of two which can be used to gain bonuses when completing certain arts in addition to improving or expanding abilities which are already locked in. Abilities chosen to fill these slots are PERMANENT, and cannot be changed without significant effort and certain rare resources, abilities which complement or stack with one another will be more potent than more scattered bonuses.
Not all arts grant domain abilities on mastery. No art which completes before the third realm will do so, and even among those that do, only ones which fit the user may grant bonuses. At the beginning, with a mostly 'blank' domain most third realm arts will offer these bonuses, but as you progress, choice will become narrower.
Arts will stop providing lessons we can slot as time progresses. Unless of course this is what you meant by "can learn".
We know one Domain lesson out of a possible eight more. They may not all be buffs/auras, we don't have a good idea of the spread that yrsillar is going to want to give us, if there is one.
From Bai Meizhen: Victory she talks about how Earth didn't really help her relationship with her father. I bring it up because I think it possible that whatever lesson she learned from that art, if she has mastered it, might not have actually been accepted by her or has become minor in some fashion in the face of her Bai arts.
Okay, I think this bit is basically what lies at the heart of our disagreement. Let's talk about Frozen Soul Serenade, which is basically the farthest from 'homelike' as is possible in our arts. FSS is basically cold, lonely death, and the end of all things. Nonetheless, it is an extremely useful art, and Ling Qi will most likely master it. I feel confident that should she choose to domain it, it will have something relevant to our domain, without us having to struggle too hard about it. If it has nothing relevant to our domain, we probably won't be able to domain it at all, but we're early enough in our cultivation cycle that we can domain pretty much anything right now.
That said, learning an art is one thing, domaining it is another. Learning only arts that one wants to domain seems far too restrictive.
Something to note here is that I said "people" and not "I" or "Myself" as a specific distancing maneuver, because I don't agree about not slotting FSS because it isn't very home-like. I was transmitting what other people have said which I thought was relevant. I agree that it isn't home-like, but want to slot it anyway because I think it's helpful, I think it's insights on music and the relationship it has provided with our mentor are all important. I also agree that it can probably fit into our domain, though it would be an example of one which we might have had a push to modify if we got it much later, post Green Foundation for example.
A large part of the reason I want to select stuff that is close already and which we can confidently slot is because of time saving, because of Shenhua's task. If that wasn't the case and we could leisurely meander for a bit I'd be a lot less vociferous about the topic.
Anyway, with that, I am going to bed. Night folks.
