@Jonn_Underwood No problem. Don't take my criticisms too hard; your piece is voyage out, and that's always going to be full of irregularities regardless of how experienced you are as a writer.
@ObliviousSage Tracked down the origin of my group's boing tradition.
When I talk about "voice" I mean a consistent way that you use words and style, so that two paragraphs written in the same voice should be subtly recognizable as the same voice regardless of content.
As a creative fiction writer, you'll find that voice is a valuable tool to develop. It makes your dialogue come alive, and if you're writing in first person (like your current sample) you'll want to learn how to write in different voices depending on who is narrating.
@BESW and if you're anything like me, the voice you write with tends to be influenced by what you're currently reading, so be mindful of stealing voices, too. "This is my voice. There are many like it, but this one is mine..."
Renowned children's author Beverly Cleary wrote an entire novel with a secondary protagonist named "Girl." When she sat down to finally type it out to send to a publisher (this was in the days when writing was done longhand and only final drafts were typed), she still hadn't come up with an actual name for Girl.
At that moment a neighbor shouted "RAMONA!" at someone on the street, and the character was named.
@Jonn_Underwood Some writers are well-known for having a particular voice that people like to read.
Others are respected for their ability to adapt their voice to the needs of their current work.
Either way requires great control to maintain a consistent voice.
@Problematic I do that with my RPG campaigns and my own speech.
@BESW not just speech, for me. After reading Dune, for example, I'm amazed for like a week by water from the faucet (which is kind of a big deal anyway, if you think about it)
And after reading Stephen King's It, I avoid sewer grates for a while...
Well, I gotta run to a meeting, but before I go I should probably say that I'm always impressed by the level of effort that people in this room put into helping people.
Writing is very personal and controversial. There are dozens of different "methods" and "theories," and people can get emotionally invested in the idea that they're using the "right" one.
Implying that the method I'm using to write isn't ideal, or even that it doesn't work for you, could be taken as a challenge to my abilities as a writer or an implication that my writing experience isn't as valuable as yours.
It's similar to the emotion that gets stirred up here when "I prefer Fourth Edition" gets heard as "3.5 sucks and people who play it are stupid."
You may also find that the level of question isn't good for you.
At a quick glance, many of the questions seem to be professional and technical.
The only thing I'd add would be that Dracula could cross running water at high tide, but that's trivial.
> If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset. [...W]hereas he can do as he will within his limit, when he have his earth-home, his coffin-home, his hell-home, the place unhallowed, as we saw when he went to the grave of the suicide at Whitby, still at other time he can only change when the time come. It is said, too, that he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide.
Of course, the whole "sun kills" issue is another weirdness.
The morning dew coated me as the wind brushed across my face causing me to rise from a deep slumber, the sun would be rising on the other side of the mountains soon, although I wouldn’t see the sun until just before noon but that doesn’t matter it is time to continue my journey.
I reluctantly rose out from my fur blankets as the cold nipped my bare skin. As I looked up towards the sky and gazed upon the stars I wondered what,if anything was out there. What those points of light really are.
The morning dew coated me as the wind brushed across my face causing me to rise from a deep slumber, the sun would be rising on the other side of the mountains soon, although I wouldn’t see the sun until just before noon but that doesn’t matter it is time to continue my journey.
I reluctantly rose out from my fur blankets as the cold nipped my bare skin. As I looked up towards the sky and gazed upon the stars I wondered what,if anything was out there. What those points of light really are.
You know what I'm not done I'm using a chain saw right now, hopefully I'll come with something better
Not exactly a firm definition, but I consider a subsystem to be a set of unique rules applicable only to a subcategory of situations or characters which is complicated above and beyond simple exceptionalism.
At what point it moves from exceptionalism to subsystem is unclear. I usually also prefer my subsystems to be applicable to more than a single class.
@Ben-Jamin Consider not actually giving your boss a divine rank, just extra powers and overall greater toughness. Unless it's important he has a divine rank!
Either that or...
> I would like to make sure I place the encounter that is atleast possible to win.
Don't make it a regular hit-him-with-sticks-and-splosions fight where you have to make the guy hit 0hp to win.
Consider instead having the guy busy ascending halfway to godhood, and the players have to destroy a couple of pillar artifacts powering his ascension. The players have to fight through swathes of his subordinates to get to the pillars, fight those subordinates as they destroy the pillar, then fight through more to get to the other pillar.
The almost-a-deity boss will just interfere with the fight with his powers every now and then, creating interesting terrain, auras or other effects on the battlefield, or maybe calling down AoE volleys of starfire or whatever.
Once the players destroy the two pillar-artifacts, you get to choose what happens, like one of the following: He stops ascending and just goes back to normal. He loses power, or all his powers. He's KO'd. He's just had the power of a pseudo-deity flow into his body, and he has just all of a sudden become mortal: he can't contain that, and Bad Things happen (possibly his head explodes, or all of him explodes as that divine power surges free). He is still powerful, but exhausted and defeatable.
I'd probably turn him into a Portal For Nasty Opportunistic Things.
"With a splrtrch, he turns inside out as Cthulhu and a wave of rainbow-colored bubbles emerge impossibly from his body."
But then, I'm fond of Evil Overlord List item #22: No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
2
Violating this precept in my campaigns inevitably results in Bad Things.
@LitheOhm Your vamp question now has one of the most awesome answers in my recent memory.
Once as a Str-dumped cloistered cleric I somehow managed to grab the villain's MacGuffin device right out of his hands while he was monologuing. Then we ran.
The first-session appearance of the villain is a) a clever illusion; b) a body double; or c) a decoy sent out by the actual villain to mislead the party.
I think some misunderstanding of randomness was in there as well. After touting how unlikely it was that our gods would come visit us after prayer (1/100) I was the one who got the roll.
haha. Did you have him make a fort save vs. space herpes?
I stared him straight in the eyes, shook out my (at the time shoulder length) hair, put on a sultry but world-weary smile, and flirted him into submission.
Ironically my character was the evil one in the party. I'll never forget the look on his face. Bane: "Serve me and all the power in the world shall be yours." Megalomaniac: "As you wish my liege." (Without skipping a beat). Him: (look that said wtf? more strongly than any I had viewed on him previously)
By the time they were heading up the stairs, he was very happy to accept my offer that we leave them at the door and move on to see what another PC was doing.
Our loss of the MacGuffin was supposed to be a secret. A puny level 1 sorceror is very squishy. We met a wizard with a really nice staff in the bar. A good one. After speaking arcane jargon to affirm he was reading sorcy's mind, my char thought about the MacGuffin and everything involved.
Everyone else got frustrated. My character got teleported out of town and berated for his perceived incompetence. Then he was "offered" said awesome magical staff. I'd call it a win.
@BESW same here! Insert any plot hook >>here<<, please.
It would be interesting to let them obtain the ring, and have to use it to track down the Bad Guy; the tradeoff being what BESW described: the bad guy finds out their plans every time they get closer to him.
@Problematic I expected them to do something like that, but instead they disintegrated that sucker the first chance they got.
I have a history of savvy players who chuck the tainted artifact into the river.
....I also have a history of savvy players whose characters nonetheless stick around to fish the tainted artifact out of the river before catching up to the party.
@BESW: I had a character like that, Akat. Akat's master brought her back to life every time the party killed her, but he never repaired any more damage than necessary.
first time they killed her with an axe, so the next time they confront the nefarious villain who's been manipulating the king, he says, "Oh, this is my advisor, Akat the Risen" and she pulls back her hood so they can see the horrific scar across her face
Reluctant minions and unreasonably devoted but non-insane minions are both fun.
In my most recent campaign I had Davith the Wicked.
He was a lonely man who used necromancy to make friends.
In various incarnations he would summon undead and/or dominate party members.
The party killed him handily the first time they met, but he was raised as a vampire by a lich villain.
When they next met him, he was guarding a delicate machine for the lich. They threw him into it, creating a hole in space/time into which he was sucked.
The last time he showed up, Davith the Wicked was little more than a ghost who dominated one of the PCs and used his powers to force them all to fight each other.
On reflection, the idea of "making friends" is a common theme in my campaigns. Humph.
@JonathanHobbs Collodi wrote Pinocchio. In Skin Horse, he built something called the Little House. The Little House is a children's book (childrens' books are a major theme of Skin Horse) by a woman named Virginia Lee Burton. A major secondary character in Skin Horse is named Virginia Lee.
Skin Horse's Virginia Lee is a non-mad scientist who back-engineers mad science.
If Collodi built a mad-science-fueled Thing, and Virginia Lee's name is a reference to the book after which the Thing is named, and Lee's specialty is already un-mad-ing mad science for the private military sector...
@BESW World Born Dead has plenty of toys without. I was mistaken about his blackguard, too - the nightwing construct does not gain the benefit of being a fiendish servant
We've got a wide range of system experience represented here, it's pretty cool. I have the most experience with D&D 3.5 and 4e, but I'm currently happily getting into FATE.
I'm fairly new to RPGs, and don't have a regular game. I occasionally play D&D Encounters and Pathfinder Society. I'm in a Dungeon World PbP game that's just started, and loving it. Reading Fate Core atm, too, in anticipation of Atomic Robo.
I played in a few games (2 Pathfinder & 2 D&D Next) that died when the GM vanished. I think rules-light is the way to go, and this Dungeon World game is running much more smoothly. Partly because there's no rigid turn structure, I guess. I play at RPoL.net.
Happily, DFRPG doesn't need to have much to do with the books if you don't want them to. So long as you like a semi-tongue-in-cheek urban fantasy, it's great and flexible.
When you say you're "fairly new" to RPGs, may I ask what you mean by that?
I've been playing for coming on ten years, and there are people who look at me as if I've been playing forever, and others who see me as a newcomer to the media.
I have adblocking, scriptblocking, and flashblocking, a couple security programs to scan files and such with (incoming flash drives are considered hostile and dealt with accordingly), but that's about it.
