Recently got back in touch with a younger friend of mine, an online friend whom I’ve also adopted as my child. We hadn’t talked in a while aside from my occasional comments on their Insta posts, but the love’s always there. I told them about my writing, and they wanted to see it so I fixed up what I have so far of Precious Metals, a few tiny writerly edits but mostly just checking the coding for it to be playable. So, progress! Hopefully this kind of motivation can kick me into gear to keep working on it.
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Squeezing in some replies before the thread closes:
Re: Hand-to-Hand Combat (Truly, thank you again for all your suggestions)
Unfortunately, same problems as ‘Brawling’ for me.
‘Fighting’ could work, but I was hoping for something less unadorned, if that makes sense?
Sorry for being so difficult!
‘Close Quarters’ alone seems like it might be confusing – I’m not sure I’d know what the stat meant just from the name. ‘Dueling’ conjures images of pistols for me.
‘Sparring’ absolutely has the right feel, but it’s got the wrong meaning. The stat covers sparring (writing a sparring scene right now), but it’s main use case is incapacitating or killing people with expeditious prejudice.
Well, I think you might’ve cracked it – ‘Combatives’ checks every box I was looking for, minus possibly including firearms.
Based on cursory research, the US Army seems to use the term in exactly the way I want to, to refer to hand-to-hand combat, but historical uses of the term i.e., “WWII combatives” emphasize point shooting as a core part of combatives training. Other sources stress the importance of training point shooting alongside combatives.
But, hey, I’ll take it. ‘Marksmanship’ is fighting with guns and ‘Combatives’ is fighting without guns will hopefully be an intuitive split for most people.
If any pedants take issue with point shooting falling under ‘Marksmanship’, I suppose I can link them to this thread and challenge them to come up with a better word under the circumstances.
Might as well keep ‘Motoring’ too, as long as I’m saying to heck with pedantry.
Honestly, if past forum polls are to be believed, most players will appreciate these kinds of texture choices. Players like me who are crotchety about it are more loud than numerous, I think.
I also like cooking and food in general, so I quite enjoy reading descriptions of food and drink, especially when they show off the setting. My problem is it all sounds good to me, so I feel like I have no basis to pick between say, roast blargroot mélange in white-wine zorrberry reduction or Einchindrian salad with smoked higglebeans and it slows down the game.
I’d prefer if the author “railroaded” me into eating whether they were most excited to describe.
If I have to choose, I appreciate it when the options are contextualized. E.g.,:
- Higglebeans are notoriously difficult to eat with perfect etiquette, so I go with the salad to show off my impeccable manners
- Blargroot is the national vegetable of Blargistan, so I go with the mélange to demonstrate my respect for Blargrian culture
But again, crotchety minority.
Reply to Havenstone
In my opinion, one of the main appeals of interactive pastiche is getting to decide how closely you want to hew to the source material. Are you recreating it, just with you/your character in the driver’s seat? Are you reimagining it, playing in the possibility space the source material creates? I think an otherwise completely pointless texture choice becomes more meaningful when it serves as an (ongoing) expression of where you are on that spectrum. Choice of Gourds is not ordinarily interesting, but in a Cinderella pastiche it might be fun to go to the ball in a zucchini carriage.
I don’t know if that’d be considered non-trivial.
In addition, my plan was to offer two choices: tea-hating black-coffee-only drinker, or coffee-hating black-tea-with-cream-and-sugar-only drinker. Your rival is whichever you didn’t pick. You and your rival can troll each other by bringing the other person his disfavored beverage. If you become friendly rivals, you can exchange favored beverages, or keep trolling in a friendly way. If he’s alive at the end, you can give each other coffee/tea makers as a symbol of your friendship.
But I’m not sure it’s worth the squeeze if it feels like a non-sequitur and everyone is sitting there scratching their heads.
Duly counted; thank you for your data point. Without a hint of motivated reasoning, I’ll interpret it as a point in favor of me being right and not me explaining things badly.
The salience gap between the favored alcohol choice and the favored hot beverage choice is really funny to me. I’d be, quite rightly, shot for not including the former in an interactive pastiche, but almost no one would get the latter. Does that help ring any bells?
What’s the most famous alcoholic drink in fiction – in all of literature, cinema, television?
I’d argue it’s the vodka[1] martini popularized by James Bond. It’s utterly inescapable in spy media or frankly, any time someone dresses up in a tuxedo. If you only know three things about Bond, one of them is his favorite alcoholic drink.
Second question: what’s Bond’s favorite hot beverage?
Answer: coffee, black and he was particular about it.
In the Flemming novels, Bond detested tea, to the point he was a complete asshole[2] to anyone who tried to serve him tea. He called it mud and considered it a proximate cause of the decline of the British Empire.
This aspect of his character is mostly lost in the film adaptations, though you can occasionally see Bond’s coffee-drinking habits. When meeting with Sanchez, Bond has his coffee[3] without sugar or cream. There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment in The Living Daylights where Bond is drinking coffee with Saunders and he clearly thinks it’s not up to snuff (link, spoilers for The Living Daylights). Probably not a coincidence it happened during Dalton’s run; he was the only Bond actor to have read all the novels, I believe.
There are probably more examples from the Eon films, but I’m still in the middle of rewatching them all. (In a convenient stroke of luck, US Netflix just put them all back up.)
I think it’s a bit of a shame none of the films or the many, many parodies have picked up the coffee thing, perhaps they also came to the conclusion it’s too obscure.
There’s something compellingly ironic about the quintessential British gentleman despising the quintessential British beverage.
Hope everyone had a good January; see you all in the February thread.
or gin ↩︎
though Flemming Bond was kind of just an asshole in general ↩︎
While you could argue they’re drinking tea, given the context of the characters/location I think it makes much more sense for it to be coffee. Folger’s apparently thought so too, because they made a commercial including the scene. ↩︎
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Seems like the mod forgot to lock this thread.
No need to lock it if people just stop posting on it…