DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=Luthan
Can someone explain to me the riddle in the water cave? I know there are some explanations at the previous pages but they don't help much.

I found myself enough information to explain the 0005 and the 0017 but I don't understand what the different parts of 1098 mean(which I need to build decode the other pic which is the key).

It's possible to decode the system without the 1098 figure, but it might help to know that that figure is actually a mistake.

It wasn't the note that I didn't pay enough attention to when I got temporarily stuck there. The note is obviously important, and I scrutinized it extensively. What I didn't notice, and what I think most players are less likely to notice (I've received a PM from one player who had the same problem,) is what the note corresponds to, because that is hidden in plain sight.

author=unity
While you may be right that setting this sort of story in a "common" world is more powerful, I disagree about your opinion on "an unexistent world that doesn't connect." Games often have an element of escapism, where you can be a hero that does great things. Is it too escapist to want to live in a world that doesn't judge you based on the gender of the person you love?

And games and stories are full of things that "don't exist." It baffles me when someone says "Yeah, I can't this game seriously. It's not the dragons and magic and fantasy, it's the fact that so many characters are bisexual." (This is something actually said about the Dragon Age series.) What? I don't understand this mindset at all.

Getting the audience to accept a deviation from reality along one metric doesn't give you a carte blanche to get them to accept deviations along any other metric as long as they're of lesser magnitude. People are especially sensitive to differences between what people are like in the story and what they're like in real life.

If you write a story which contains humans, dragons, elves, and magic, where all humans in the world speak one language, the genre of fantasy has already clustered together an audience who're willing to accept the deviations of dragons, elves, and magic. And the conventions of console roleplaying games have clustered together an audience who're mostly willing to accept the "one world language" deviation, so most fantasy RPG players won't take issue with this. But some fantasy fans are going to see this as fundamentally selling short the diversity of human culture. To a reader who already accepts the "one world language" deviation, this might seem silly; "you've already accepted that this world contains dragons, elves and magic! It's not so unrealistic compared to that!" But these are separate issues which different audience members have different sensitivity to. If you were to write a story which contained humans, dragons, elves, magic, and ran on porno-logic, where practically all interactions between people are inevitably driven towards sex, a lot of audience members would object, and "but dragons!" would obviously be a silly excuse.

That someone isn't prepared to buy a particular deviation from reality in a story doesn't necessarily mean they would disapprove of that deviation in real life. Lots of people are put off by stories which they feel smack too strongly of wish fulfillment. And to go back to my own example from before, the one world language trope bugs me (although I generally put up with it out of necessity,) but I would totally be in favor of all humans speaking one language in real life.

author=unity
Real-world stories of gay individuals are powerful and great, but not everyone wants to deal with the phobia, angst, and prejudice of real world views all the time, especially when we sit down to play games. Some of us want to sit back and play a game that doesn't remind us that the real world has a lot of views on sexuality that are messed up.

But at the same time, some people will be happy with a story that portrays gay people in a real-world context, but not stories where everyone is totally accepting, and this doesn't mean that there's something wrong with their preferences.

author=Aegix_Drakan
1) Keep it simple. Complexity will some on its own. Try to keep things as simple and easy to follow as possible and you'll ensure your game doesn't turn into a super-complicated mess.

2) If you're doing a relationship in your game, for the love of all things holy, KEEP. IT. SUBTLE. Relationships in real life don't have nonstop declarations of love (at least, not unless you're in the first week). Relationships are usually more of a "friendship Plus romance" thing in my experience. It's never 100% romance and feelings all the time.

Write a solid friendship and you'll have the perfect baseline for a relationship to layer on top of it.

3) When writing scenes out, subtle is usually best. Only go over the top when you MEAN it. Only when it will REALLY make a scene "work" and subtle isn't enough. Otherwise, subtle is best. I'm totally serious with this. With too much over the top, you get Dragon Ball Z, and then no one takes the story seriously anymore and you'll need to constantly raise the stakes to ludicrous levels. That's bad writing.

4) Avoid prophesies unless you're doing something really really clever with it. It's a crappy cliche for a reason.

1: I think that some writers really shoot themselves in the foot aiming for complexity, but some writers really overdo simplicity as well. I think it's generally good to aim for some singularly interesting ideas- I've seen way too many amateur games that round off to "basically this game is a cliche but I hope it'll be fun anyway," but make sure that the progression of events is logical and coherent.

If I'm ever stuck working out a plot, the technique I've found most useful for working out the path ahead is to ask "what's the most obvious consequence of the events I've already set up here?" I think it's important to tackle this with your real-world reasoning skills, not genre savvy, otherwise you're just likely to end up with cliche. But looking at a situation you've already set up and simply asking what makes sense to happen sometimes leads to some powerful and surprising results (often surprising to the audience because they don't know as much about the situation as you do, sometimes surprising to the writer because sensible outcomes can deviate a lot from literary convention.)

2: This avoids one pitfall; having characters who're immediately and vocally in love for no clear reason doesn't make for very interesting relationships. But I think there's another pitfall which a whole lot of stories also fall into, and that's making "romantic" relationships that only consist of subtle hints that two characters are attracted to each other, which may progress suddenly to dramatic declarations of love, or flash forward to some point where the characters are happily together, without showing the relationship in any intervening space at any point. Some writers suffer from an inability to write subtlety in relationships, and some suffer from a refusal to write relationships that progress beyond subtlety. My advice would be "always keep in mind how your characters feel about each other as people, and why they feel that way. Don't let your character relationships be dictated by roles, where A treats B in a certain way because A is the Love Interest and has to show that kind of attention."

4: Total, unreserved agreement.


For the OP: Rather than having someone offer up story suggestions wholecloth based on the elements you've already described, I think you'd be better off describing what you want to accomplish with this story- what kind of tone, themes and such you have in mind, and asking for story advice. You're more likely to get a story you'll be satisfied with, and learn more in the process.

I'm glad if it's of any help to you. Good luck with your game.