@BESW I liked the idea of forcing you to use your character flaws, and also of developing new traits by having gotten through all your previous ones. That's a fun, easy-to-understand story mechanic,
although it does seem very easy to abuse. There's no random element, so it's pretty easy to get through flaw cards where it doesn't do much/any damage.
I was looking forward to seeing how the playsets came out, but now I have approximately zero time to actually play, sooooo.
I think at first I was relying too much on comparing Storium's trait/flaw mechanics to the Fate system's point economy. Both support periods of crisis and victory, but Storium is less about enforcing dramatic cycles.
Thank you :) With me, at the moment, the primary challenge is actually finding the time to _play_ the cool systems I read about. Until I'm actually playing, I rarely have burning questions :P
Well, I entered Colonypunk in the 200 Word RPG Challenge. The game is a response to playing a session of Dog Eat Dog with locals.
And Surgadores is in the just-barely-playable stages.
I've got notes toward a game inspired by My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, working title "My Little Psyche: Friendship is a Fragile Barrier Holding Back My Seething Neuroses."
I don't know how much play these kind of micro-systems actually get, but they're cool and feel, at minimum, like something one could try out, or draw inspiration from. One-timers are cool, although the more niche you get, the niche-ier players you need.
One-shot systems are great. They don't have to worry about offering a variety of play experiences to keep people engaged over a long campaign, so they can dig deeply into their theme.
And picking them up involves fewer sunk costs (money, time spent learning and making your characters), and less commitment, so it's easier to talk people into trying them.
My group plays free one-shots like Roll For Shoes and Great Ork Gods when we're not feeling up to our main campaign. We tested Surgadores in 45 minutes after our main session one night.
@Standback yes, it's on Medium. SE stopped doing per-site blogs, we asked for one anyway and made a good case for it, and they suggested we do that instead.
So far it's working out reasonably well for us. The collaboration features (multiple editors, multiple authors) are important.
@Standback thanks. :-)
If anybody (preferably a few somebodies) wanted to run a blog for Writers.SE, I think Medium would work well for it. Medium seems to be popular among fiction writers already. I'll happily share what we've learned in doing Worldbuilding's blog, but I'm already running one so I'm not going to take point on a second one. :-)
That wasn't a "we should do this" comment, just an "if people want to we could" comment. It would depend on people being interested in writing for it on an ongoing basis. The weekly writing chats could feed it, but that wouldn't be enough on its own.
Of course, if any of y'all want to write blog posts with any sort of worldbuilding tie-in, that'd be cool too. We have several posts about writing and RPGs. Also some fiction.
@MonicaCellio Her Imperial Radch trilogy is told in first person by a protagonist whose culture and language don't really care about gender. So the narrative text uses "her" exclusively, and when the protagonist is speaking in languages where gender matters, she just guesses.
At first it seems kinda gimmicky.
But as the series progresses, you realise that it's an expression of the work's fundamental themes of the conflict between internal identity and social identity.
The main character is a spaceship's mind in a mortal humanoid body.
The protagonist's struggle to understand what that means about who she is, and her increased empathy for the identity crises of others, is central to the plot.
It's actually less specifically about machine-vs-mortal and more generally about how one's body (or, in the case of ships, bodies) influences and biases one's view of oneself and the world.
Ship AIs in this setting have dozens or hundreds of "bodies" linked together to form a single consciousness. The protagonist, before the series begins, is reduced to a single body.
Oh, I hadn't realized the multiple-bodies aspect was there. This does sound interesting, thanks! Just found the Kindle edition on Amazon but for some reason it's not offering the usual free sample, drat! (That's my usual workflow: send free sample to Kindle, start reading, and then buy from the Kindle to keep reading later.)
I wonder if I'm a victim of random A/B testing at Amazon. I guess I'll bookmark it for later.
You'd think that the ship's disregard for gender is a result of a machine's multi-bodied worldview, but it's not; she inherited the ambivalence from the culture of her organic makers.
So, yeah, the series is very good at presenting common sci-fi tropes and then challenging our assumptions about them.
And it does this in-universe too, as part of the overarching plot is about realising that certain "logical" truths are in fact unchecked assumptions. And the most dangerous assumptions are the ones we have about ourselves.
@MonicaCellio If you like audio books, the reader for this trilogy is quite excellent.
Oh, also, the Imperial Radch gives a look at colonisation that's more nuanced than a lot of sci-fi works ever manage.
I've always liked sci-fi and fantasy stories, but recently I started getting tired of them. So I'm seeking ones that are more... out of the box.
Nnendi Okorafor's Lagoon is another stand-out.
Peter Cline's novels 14 and The Fold are notable for being surprisingly optimistic takes on the Lovecraftian mode, and are pretty well-written, but in terms of new perspectives and challenging ideas they were mostly fun popcorn reading.
I've been trying Victor LaValle, who writes period Mythos novels from the perspective of minorities, but his writing style is difficult for me to chew.
The Overlook Hotel
The Overlook Hotel