HarrisPS
485
Related to the cat discussion from the other day, Fay is playtesting Honor Bound today and sent me this (spoilered for mild spoilers and salty language 
)
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AWWW Kill everyone who even tries to touch badly that furry ball. I will grab it and give a chair and paid a salmon meal with chicken broth and prawn dessert.
Anyone else in that place is killeable if opposed to that
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FayI
487
Itās not my fault! I was told to playtest a specific story path so Iām using one of my tabletop characters to help me commit to being a cat hating bastard 
Itās just what he would do!
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Commit genocide Thatās a Wednesday in Maraās book.
Be bad to a cat. I prefer going to genocide everything else
Poor mr Fluffy orange. Bad @FayI you will enter the wicked list 
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Eiwynn
489
Ironically, I feel you contributed to both the kitty discussion and the character discussion we were also having.
It is good to see you in the thread FayI! 
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Just to make sure I understand. This would be for the purpose of helping writers get more eyes on the WIP, so they can get more usable feedback?
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Iām excited to see it; I hope it ends up being helpful. I plan to shift my WiP feedback goals to the ones listed in next monthās thread (though I donāt think Iāll be putting my own forward unless I can get this chapter finished/my demo updated first).
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Vocabulary question, is āstompā a repetitive movement or can you do it just once? (Iām looking for a word for describing a character firing their rocket boots.)
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Itās repetitive. Think of a large dinosaur coming towards you; it stomps its feet as it approaches.
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Glerbh. So whatās the single-time movement of hitting your boot on the ground?
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Either āstompā or āstampā works. Stomp can be singular and stamp can be plural, Iāve just seen āstampā more often as singular and āstompā as repetitive (āShe stamped her foot in frustrationā and āGodzilla stomped toward the cityā).
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Okay, thanks. (Is that why rubber stamps are stamps?)
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One thing I struggled with in making Moonrise, and still struggle with today, is the meeting point between the dev and the player. How much can I ask the player to buy into the adventure of the game? When does it turn into the dreaded railroading? When it is reasonable to say, āokay, if the player wants to play this game at all, they have to say āyesā to thisā? Big questions, and my traditional fiction background does me few favors.
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Eiwynn
499
I believe this answer is determined by your game.
In Patchwerks, the reader must buy into the fact that the protagonist judges lost souls. If the reader doesnāt want to do this, then the story can not go forward.
I do give the reader the agency to refuse to judge any soul they donāt want to, but making that decision leads to an immediate end-game state of āgame overā.
All the other end-game states are things the reader can embrace or reject, buy into or refuse to participate in, but this one thing is the one thing required.
I feel the checkpoint system allows me the confidence to give the reader the ultimate agency to judge or not judge the souls because a game can be restored if the reader was just curious and really still wants to continue the narrative, but if the reader really does not want to do this, then the game, ultimately, is not for them.
Which is hard to acknowledge and to accept, but as true as can be.
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Hazel
500
Not necessarily, especially when it comes to speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction. Coming into a ghost story with the mentality of āghosts arenāt realā is something that a reader chooses to do to themselves. Likewise, reading a middle-grade adventure novel and asking, āwhere are all the grown-ups in this?ā For myself, when Iām reading a romance novel and find myself rooting for the main couple to stay broken up and not patch up their mandatory third-act misunderstanding, I know that itās time to set the book down, because itās just not for me.
Learning to set books down when theyāre not for you is a readerās skill. The writerās skill is to believe that youāre writing as a promise to the readers who want your story, not an apology to the ones who donāt.
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ā¦okay, my impostor syndrome is going haywire here. I took part in a playtest for a RPG my clubmate is writing, and it was my first TTRPG ever, and I had fun, but now Iām feeling like I was the worst player ever and should never show my face again. Except that nobody complained.
Glerbh.
Anyway Iām suddenly having an urge to make a superpower named āGenre Awarenessā that would cause the character to hear a soundtrack all the time (and then do things like āuh oh, main antagonistās theme is playing, ambush incomingā).
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I generally assume the player agrees to two basic assumptions when starting off.
1: That they buy into the basic premise of the game, as described by the marketing blurb - which means they are willing to accept the restrictions and possibilities of the setting and the MCās role within it, so long as theyāre internally consistent.
2: That the player, and thus, the MC, possesses a certain interest in self-preservation, meaning theyāll avoid any action which can be contextualised (based on what the MC knows) as obviously leading to their death (or a game over).
I think both of those are intuitive enough for almost all players to grasp - and if players find themselves lacking options which theyād like to have and are within the bounds set by those two assumptions, itās usually pretty easy to write them in.
Of course, all this relies on setting expectations early, including with the store page blurb.
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JBento
503
One of us! One of us! One of us!
Congratulations, you won the game!
Oh, pretty much everybody feels like this. The feeling will go away when you play again and will return after each playsession for a few sessions, and then it wonāt come back.
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Welcome aboard the Role playing Train!We have dice goblins, Sparkles, broken oaths and poisoning bards
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