Micamo
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Posts posted by Micamo
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I mean, he's a character driven entirely by his frustration at his sexual impotence, and he deals with that frustration by being a huge misogynistic asshat...
Erm... didn't you pick up on the whole part where he was an incredibly devoted follower of Magran, sacrificing a part of his own soul to make the Godhammer bomb, and afterwards she abandoned him? The fact that the man who has prided himself in never doubting is starting to show cracks: is this a test by Magran, or has she truly abandoned him? He doesn't know, and it scares him, but he's not the sort of person to show fear so he lashes out at others.
The misogyny is, I think, part of who he is and partly magnified by his feeling of having been used then abandoned by a woman, namely Magran. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that he's impotent from though.
Yes, and he followed Magran because her philosophy agreed with him. This is just my interpretation but I believe the sexual impotence (and the internalized rage and self-hatred due to it) came first, and fueled his rage and self-hatred that led to him being able to adopt such a philosophy. After all, giving even horrible people something they can agree with and tells them they are right is the entire point. "There are many gods so that everyone is looked after, no matter who they are or what they have done." It could have come later, but his character makes much more sense to me this way. Either way, that self-hate is his main driving force now.
Also, as for his impotence, another Thaos quote: "You are impotent, and not just from the pox." Though there's subtextual evidence aplenty before this. Read his dialogue and comments again with his inability to have sex in mind and his Milleresque "Whores Whores Whores Whores Whores" obsession makes much more sense. I know too many men in real-life like this.
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Now that is equally bull****.Marginalized people are socialized with an understanding of what makes privileged people tick, but not vice-versa. Women know how men work. Poor people know how rich people work. Black people know how white people work. Natives know how settlers work. Disabled people know how abled people work. The reverse is not true. If you try to write a marginalized identity that you do not have, you will **** it up. If you work really really hard and do your research you can minimize that ****-up, but you can't eliminate it.
There isn't a way "all of those {conveniently pigeonholed group of people} work". People are socialised with the patterns and aspects of behaviour that are relevant to them - at best. They might not even know one of the other group, personally. But what you're writing is a character (err... I hope), not "member of {group X}".
Claiming to have something "special" that no one else understands, might be comforting. It might be a useful thing to say if you want to have more writers of {group Y} writing about same group by claiming that others "get them wrong".
It's still nonsense.
You can't write "a character, not a 'member of {group X}'" because that's not how it works: Identity and group membership are a core part of the self and thus a core part of a character. My disabilities, my queerness, my femininity, are inseparably part of me. There's no magical pure "self" you can get to by stripping those away. If you tried to write a character like me and ignored those things you'd get someone I wouldn't even recognize.
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"The reason women aren't catered to by game developers is because it's all women's fault for not fighting hard enough for it, it's certainly not the developers for going out of their way to exclude them, or my fault for throwing a temper tantrum whenever a developer tries to cater to someone who isn't me."
It's a line I see a lot, and it's 100% bull****.
We can write you, but you can't write us.
What do you mean by that?
Marginalized people are socialized with an understanding of what makes privileged people tick, but not vice-versa. Women know how men work. Poor people know how rich people work. Black people know how white people work. Natives know how settlers work. Disabled people know how abled people work. The reverse is not true. If you try to write a marginalized identity that you do not have, you will **** it up. If you work really really hard and do your research you can minimize that ****-up, but you can't eliminate it.
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I Am Not A Lawyer but generally, authors are advised not to read fanfiction of their own work, because if they do then fanfic authors can sue if official sequels are even broadly similar to the fic, even if the fic author expressly gave permission for the work to be re-used in an official sequel. The law is probably similar with game mechanics, but as far as I know such a thing has not actually been tested in court: The situation might be different though if the developers are openly asking for feedback and ideas and said ideas are being posted with the presumption that it might be used. Basically, we won't find out until someone actually sues someone else and the case goes to court.
If you're genuinely worried, then post it with Creative Commons Attribution Only license, which is the minimum copyright license that's held up in court.
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I want to apologize for the statements I made about the DA2 companions and their bisexuality: I was working off of an erroneous understanding of what the Word of God situation was (that they're straight for everyone except the player) and I should have checked my facts before opening my mouth.
(Smarthphone games not counted)
It ****ing floors me every time I see cis men on the internet wonder why there are no women in their hobbies and then engage in this sort of gatekeeping.
Also: Men like to pretend that there's some sort of special nugget of maleness that women can't possibly understand, and thus that only men can "properly" write men, but this just isn't true. The essence of privilege is the option of ignorance. Men can go through their entire lives without understanding womanhood but women can't survive without an understanding of manhood. Trans people don't get the option of not understanding cis people. We can write you, but you can't write us.
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Just in case anyone else misunderstood, apparently that corpse was just a guy that traveled with him. Fulvano had a habit of splitting up with people in his adventuring party and giving them pieces of his clothes when they go. A pair of gloves to you, a pair of boots to you...
He arrived in Rauatai stark naked and the king had him executed on sight. And so ends the voyage of Fulvano.
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Quadratic growth, actually, and that assumes that statistics scaling will work the same as PoE1.
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Honest truth, I apparently misunderstood the journals and thought Fulvano was that corpse you found in Anslog's Compass that got killed by Xaurips. So I was really confused by "Fulvano's Voyage" being this game's big epic-mega-quest. I thought he was a one-off joke character.
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So taking a single point in a skill to get 1DR that is exclusive with other resting bonuses is the same as dipping into a cipher for example that would grant you 20% flat more damage, more against creatures with high DR, and incredibly powerful utility abilities to boot?
Yes. Once you understand that the system is a coarse point-buy, where your currency is entire character levels, you can see that they're kinda equivalent. The only real difference is the opportunity costs involved: To balance a system like this you need to make sure every level of every class is "worth" the same as every other level of every other class. That means not front-loading all of a class's strongest abilities at the first couple of levels. But once you understand how the system works it's easy to design around this.
Also, you're assuming that Soul Whip will work the same as PoE1. Most likely it'll scale, with the full 33% buff from PoE1 what we'll get at level 20.
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I don't get it. You all must surely know that there's a limit of max 2 classes per character, right? If you're worried about Barbarian/Class2 being the strongest combo, then you realize you can do that with AD&D style multiclassing, right? It's not actually going to fix your supposed issue.
Honestly it seems like the real problem here is some of you don't like the idea of one level dips being possible for conceptual reasons which to me is just... Why? Seriously I don't get the objection to it. You might as well complain that you're "dipping" a single rank of survival skill to get that free bonus DR every time you rest in PoE1. Taking a single level in a class to get that one benefit you care about is no different.
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I identify a lot with "crazy" characters. What I wish I saw more of are characters who know that something is wrong and try to compensate for it, self-correct. Characters who wrestle with a mind they know is a poisoned well, their only weapons for defense against it thoughts and impulses they cannot trust. Sane writers love making mentally ill characters who revel in it, fascinated by their off behavior because they do not understand the pain that comes with it.
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Not to go all Edition Wars here, but it should be pointed out I think that AD&D 2e isn't... bad, it's just designed with a very different set of principles than most modern games. The thing about tabletop RPGs is what determines whether you have fun or not is mostly determined by your chemistry with the other players and the DM. If you don't get along with your group then the best system in the world can't help you. If you get along really well with your group, then you can have a blast playing FATAL. Think of tabletop systems as a lubricant, working with the way your group plays the game to amplify the fun.
The problem with D&D edition wars is each edition from 2e and onward is designed for a very different type of gaming group. The type of group that gets the most mileage out of 2e will rub raw against 3.5/PF and 4e, and vice-versa. All of these group types are valid, the problem is WotC for marketability reasons wants "one edition to rule them all" that appeals to everyone.
It goes without saying that the ruleset for a video game has quite different design demands.
*Also, I think there are better systems than 2e for the group playstyle that game was meant for. I highly recommend ACKS for that, though I'm more a 3.P kinda gal where D&D is concerned.
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I disagree strongly: the strength of SFF is the fantastic gives us a mirror through which to see ourselves. A distorted mirror, but one that lets us notice the things we normally overlook for their familiarity, or stretch them to proportions they can no longer be ignored, or peel back the obscuring skin to show the muscle and bone beneath. The truth of a well crafted fantasy setting is more real, in a sense, than our reality, burning far brighter.
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Honestly I'm mostly interested in seeing how they choose to interpret and implement the idea of romance subplots given it's something they've avoided for a long time. Demanding that they appeal to me in particular is not only likely to muddy the waters of that interpretation, but far as I know, everyone on the writing team is straight, cisgendered, allosexual, sane, and abled. I've seen what happens when writers like that try to write weird queer/MI romance stuff that appeals to me and it's never, ever any good.
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Still my favorite dragons are from Baldur's Gates/d&d because they are not only just big monsters, but more intelligent creature than human beings, like the red dragon firkraag has actually INT of 17 and is a kensai/Mage if I remember correctly
it's just amazing to fight the dragons in bg2 because it's about both counter their brute force, and you have to also worry about their magic power. Think about a dragon who can cast mirror image and stoneskin! We need more caster type dragons in poe2 but I afraid it's against the setting of drakes in the games as dragons in Poe are not smart enough to cast any spells I guess 
I don't quite remember but don't Llengrath's bog dragons in WM2 have spells?
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I'd rather have an eighth companion than four sidekicks. They basically sound like dudes you could get from hiring adventurers except they have a bit of dialogue at the start
Youre gonna get both
Call me a cynic but I highly, highly doubt the campaign will break 3.4M, and that assumes the 8th companion will even be the 3.4M stretch goal. But oh well, 7 companions is good.
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I'd rather have an eighth companion than four sidekicks. They basically sound like dudes you could get from hiring adventurers except they have a bit of dialogue at the start
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Yeah, you need 2 stones to make a spark. That's all you need though, you don't need 4 stones, 6 stones or any other number. 2 is all that is necessary. All the other stones are more or less expendable. You can throw the stones at bears and wolves as much as you want as long as you can pick up two of them afterwards and you're good to go.
...What are you people even talking about? Whatever metaphor this was originally it's been stretched so thin it could be an Elder Scrolls questline.
Also, psst, if I were on the writing team, the game would def. have polyamory as a possibility. Oh yes. I gain power from alt-right fanboy tears.
Fear me.
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What would a redeemed Durance even look like
Why do people have the wish to bring everyone else "back to the light"? Durance just IS. You can make him think a bit, but all in all he won't change. Why should he? He's a ****ed up old veteran. He's already had his great adventure. He already changed and yes, maybe not for the best. Can't you just accept that?
Well, it's not about turning him "back to the light", it's about the fact that Durance has no humanity. I mean, he's a character driven entirely by his frustration at his sexual impotence, and he deals with that frustration by being a huge misogynistic asshat of the sort I have to deal with too much in my real life to have any patience for in a video game. And with that cut content backstory between him and Grieving Mother? If I'd found that out during my first playthrough I'd have said "**** you Durance" and killed him right on the spot. Durance isn't tragic or interesting, he's just pathetic. It's like if Richard ****ing Spencer joined your party.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who insists every character needs to be a jolly good time in an RPG or they get upset. I actually really love dark, deeply flawed, tragic characters. But just piling on the darkness and the flaws is not how you go about good writing.
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Durance is a character that I really liked in the first playthrough but was very unimpressed with in second playthroughs. Really, he's one of those people, appropriate for a preacher I suppose, who's good enough of an orator that he can make his 100% nonsense philosophy sound profound and fascinating. But, once you know what his real deal is, listening to his spiel a second time makes it really obvious that he was always bull**** and I just couldn't see it past his well-written prose. And honestly, it's just kinda frustrating because I mostly can't say the things in response to his nonsense that I *want* to say. Except for a couple of key points, it's a one-sided "push button, hear exposition."
GM... *could* have been a fantastic character in another game. I strongly suspect most of her dialogue was written early in the process when the *premise* of the story was known but not much else. Given how strongly she's tied to the hollowborn crises, her presence in the story simply makes no thematic sense given how that whole thing turns out. She asks questions of the Watcher that the story not only never answers, but never even brings up again outside of her conversations. Honestly? I liked her a lot first playthrough but in hindsight I would have cut her out, were it not for promises they made of companion counts back during the campaign.
DoC was GREAT. Not only is her performance amazing, but she's my favorite companion over all. She's a pretty terrible person but unlike Durance:
- She's completely unapologetic and doesn't try to justify herself with fancy-but-empty rhetoric.
- She was turned into the person she is by a clearly definable life event. I'm pretty sure Durance sprang up from the ground already a massive ****.
- She shows signs that she could be a decent person again, if she were to get a second chance. She wouldn't take it even if she got it though, and that's what makes her so tragic. Durance... when Durance gets the truth revealed to him, he isn't redeemed. He just turns his hatred and his bluster skyward. What would a redeemed Durance even look like?
Anyway, as some of you may remember, I was pretty loud and proud about Pillars 1 being more Torment-influenced and less Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale. I still think that could have been a great game but what we got is pretty good. And honestly, the parts where Pillars 1 *did* take Torment influence turned out to be its weakest parts. A second iteration where they focus on the strong stuff (which means tossing out the Torment influences) would be a better idea than trying to head in a darker and more surreal direction.
Tides of Numenera looks even better than the the original Ps:T though, so I'll be getting my fill of that sort of thing soon anyway.
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Dragon Age 2 doesn't really count: The four love-interests aren't really bisexual, they're player-sexual. Whatever gender you happen to be is the one they're interested in. Well, except Isabella. Issy def. likes girls whether you are one or not. Fallout 4 does the same thing. I actually really hate it when games take this approach. It's a way to have your representation cookies from shippers and not put in the work of actually writing the characters to be different from you.
Also Bioware, especially Neu Bioware, has this weird problem where they keep making these soft butch lesbian characters and then asserting no, in fact, this person is 100% straight. Some writer at bioware is one of those guys who keeps going to bars where all the women wear flannel shirts and have short pink hair and has no idea why he keeps getting turned down. I mean, Morrigan? Jack? Cassandra? How else do you explain this?
One last thing: Cishet people always assume that if there's more than one queer person in a story, it's overrepresentation.
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The point is that the politics in game, must reflect the world that has been crafted. Only taking inspiration from our own world. When writing character relationships you don't narrate them with them with your own language. You use the language of the characters, their backgrounds, their lived experiences. Because it's hard to map that language directly from the political realm of Eora to our world it doesn't make sense to try to label what type a relationship is and what the character's identity is. It's better to show a relationship unfolding with the language that would be natural to the in-game characters.
It doesn't mean you can't reflect hardships, discrimination, pride in one's identity anything else that can be associated with non-traditional relationships and identities. But you can do so with language that is general. You as the writer deliberately choose to use the more powerful literary tool of describing what something is like, rather than letting labels do the heavy lifting. Or more specifically, you write the characters to describe what something is, instead of resorting to labels. The in-game characters have a very different world in which they live. This is what I mean by just let things be. Don't try to label Pallegina, it doesn't make sense. She is whatever she is. There should be an intuition, but not explicit exposition. If Obsidian wants to invoke labels they can, and I would consider it bad writing form. If the don't, it also doesn't make sense for the consumer to impose anything on the characters that isn't there. To reiterate, the player should intuit what something is instead of being told it. So this is what I mean by let things be. The relationship is what it is.
All of the above is just good writing sense in general, and should be applied to relationships whether they are tradition or not.
So, it sounds to me like your problem isn't necessarily with having identities represented, it's just with those identities being explicitly named. I both agree and disagree. While "show don't tell" is generally a good idea, when dealing with marginalized identities sometimes not explicitly naming a thing can be more harmful. I'm going to use autism as an example.
You see, a thing allistic (non-autistic) writers like to do, that seems to be growing in popularity, is to give a character some autistic traits to exploit for whatever reason, but then never actually explicitly name the character as an autistic. There are several names for these characters in the autism community but I like the name "autistish."
Autistish characters are often used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and the absence of the label is deliberate. This is so the writer can say "well, it's not harmful
to autistic people, because they aren't actually autistic." (Sheldon Cooper, anyone?) The problem is allistic audiences see the coded traits and mentally categorize that person as an autistic. So, in their minds, it reinforces the harmful stereotypes. ("Autistic people have no empathy", "Autistic people aren't fully human", "Autistic people are permanent children incapable of self-determination", the list goes on.)
Now, some autistic people like and appreciate autistish characters sometimes, but me personally, when I encounter one I'm always immediately suspicious. Why did the author feel the need to cover their ass by not explicitly naming the character's neurodivergence? When is the shoe going to drop? How many more pages/minutes is it going to take before I'm implicitly called a monster?
If it's "well, this is a fantasy setting, they wouldn't even know what autism is" that you're worried about, there's actually an extremely simple solution: Explicitly state the character is autistic in out-of-world official materials, for example marketing blurbs. Done. Doing this doesn't preclude you from using narrative subtlety to explore the full depth of the autistic experience. (Not that I think allistic writers should be writing stories about the autistic experience for the consumption of allistic audiences at all, but that's an entirely different can of worms.)
EDIT: Furthermore, you can't avoid identity politics. If you try, it just means you're engaging in the identity politics on the side of the majority.
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Problem is "just letting things be" in your writing means you create a world that reflects only your own lived experience. What comes naturally to a heterosexual cisgendered able-bodied man won't resemble my reality at all. If you don't care about anyone unlike yourself being part of your audience then that's cool I guess, but escaping this and including people unlike yourself takes deliberate, conscious effort.Just have relationships, regardless of what sort of combination of individuals it involves. Avoid trying to define what "flavor" of relationship it is. Just let things be and show how they for, why the work, or why they don't. It's not only the best way, but it's the only way. This is a post-traditional world, but unfortunately many people don't know how to write relationships without tossing around identity labels. Just let things be.
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Hahaha that's a funny joke. NB people are the best.But always still man or woman.
Seriously though I read Pallegina as demi or perhaps agender. She (in the absence of Pallegina speaking up on pronouns, I'll gonna use the same ones the game uses) seems to wear femininity grudingly, like an old mask she's never bothered, or dared, to try taking off.
it's just amazing to fight the dragons in bg2 because it's about both counter their brute force, and you have to also worry about their magic power. Think about a dragon who can cast mirror image and stoneskin! We need more caster type dragons in poe2 but I afraid it's against the setting of drakes in the games as dragons in Poe are not smart enough to cast any spells I guess 
Random roll ability scores
in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
Why stop there?
Make all your level-up decisions randomized.
Make all your dialogue choices randomized.
Make all your in-combat actions randomized.