breakingamber

I think it's Drake's turn to respond to Kokichi's weirdness.

Am I being too pushy?

14 minutes ago, Weirdpersonx said:

Right now there isn't anything for Phytomagnet to do? I guess I could have him react, idk that that he'd have much of a reaction. Epoch would've already mostly briefed him on the speech.

Maybe have him investigate what's going on with Kelvin? I dunno, it's up to you.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oc4Haddf2jcUP2Yoe7Y4mDaUcZyriG2_YK3dOBkg9Og/edit

Dammit, Sazedezas hasn't been on for more than a month. Anyone have any way to contact them?

Okay, I hate to both double post and put people on the spot, and I know many of you are busy but...

@Sazedezas: We could use you on the meeting document both to write for Arachnerd and Bloodlight/Nate. The coffee shop scene seems finished, so would either you or @Hemalurgic Headshot post it or revise it or something? Also I'm not sure what's happening with Karabiner, but I assume he's coming in soon? 

@Kidpen, @winter devotion, @kenod, @The Young Pyromancer, @Voidus, @TwiLyghtSansSparkles, @Weirdpersonx: You all have characters either at or watching the meeting. Some of them may want to react or say something to respond to Epoch's question. (Armageddon, Kokichi, Amethyst, Nicroburst, Blank, Viktor, Neverthere, Jade/Nathan, Phytomagnet...)

...Is that everybody? Sorry if I'm being bossy, rude, and/or insensitive.

3 minutes ago, kenod said:

Nice, I personally also read Oots and Xkcd. I personally also like Schlock Mercenary, Gunnerkrigg Court and Godslave.

Hm. Oh right, also Brawl in the Family before it finished.

6 hours ago, kenod said:

Which web comics do you read?

The Order of the Stick, Darths and Droids, xkcd, some other stuff here and there.

On 7/22/2019 at 0:16 AM, MrakeDarshall said:

I've definitely been meaning to get into Practical Guide. It looks fun.

Unfortunately I'm a slower than average reader and my reading list is big.

While I've always prided myself as a faster than average reader, but when you're introduced to the world of web serials and webcomics your reading list tends to grow exponentially. So far I've got about half of Ward, ~1/3 of The Wandering Inn, Twig, Pact,  Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, something in Chinese my mom sent me, the fifth Red Rising book, Bedlam, Armageddon Outta Here, The Legend of Xanth series, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor.

Completely unrelated to the RP (thought that's not exactly new), but I just caught up on A Practical Guide to Evil, and man it's a blast. 

Bit of a dumb question, but who and what do we need right now?

1 hour ago, The Young Pyromancer said:

Jack Slash just wanted to leave his mark on the world, which I can completely understand.  He is one of, if not my, favorite character(s).  Also, his Trigger Event is (for me, different people have different things that they hate) one of the most awful Trigger Events in the entire serial.

The S9 were under Jack's influence, and they didn't necessarily join willingly.  Once you are forcibly recruited, it's not like you can leave.  You have a kill order now.  You are then slowly warped into becoming a better fit for the group.  I have additional reasons to feel sympathetic for various other S9ers.

The clones kind of had personalities of their own, and kind of didn't, so they're weird.  

Teacher is one of the people I don't sympathize with.

Custodian lost a physical body, which would suck, and now works 24/7 with no breaks because either (I don't know if it's ever revealed) it's the right thing to do or because they don't really have a choice.

Bakuda's hopes were crushed because she was framed for breaking the rules.  I hate it when people punish me for something I didn't do.

Oni Lee's mind was slowly degraded through repeatedly cloning himself and then killing the original, so now he has no initiative.  That makes him one of the characters I feel the most for, actually.

***

I have thought this through .  I didn't just say it as one of those throw-out statistics that are closer to a wild guess people give sometimes.

Huh, you really did think this through. I missed several of those details. (also Custodian is just a bastard, according to Ward). What was Jack's trigger event? I must've missed it somehow.

Just now, Kobold King said:

It's sad that it died down, but I also think it's really nice that so many of us are still around and that we all remember the collab so vividly, with several of us exporting our favorites OCs to newer pastures.

I can't say that about every creative writing project I've ever been a part of.

I remember my first day here. It was just as the RP was dying down, and I did a dumb which I won't speak of, and you guys were so nice about it. I made a flat character and tossed him into Salem, I checked back regularly for months, not much happened, and I eventually moved on. I was so happy when I checked back on a whim and saw the beautiful star on the left next to the Question thread as well as an entire new RP somehow.

1 minute ago, Kobold King said:

Me trying to follow a conversation about a superhero web serial I've never read:

 

  Hide contents

 

Bit of a topic change, I know, but have you decided on whether or not you'll be RPing a character and/or who? 

25 minutes ago, The Young Pyromancer said:

Worm has all of about 3-5 characters I don't sympathize with.  If that's not good characterization, I don't know what is.  Sure, the major characters may not be much more characterized than the minor ones, but that is because almost everyone was the main character in one draft or another.

Quick nitpick: Jack Slash, Crawler, Winter, Crimson, (most of the rest of the cloned Slaughterhouse 9), Teacher, Custodian, Bakuda, Oni Lee, I kinda guess I probably shouldn't go on...

23 minutes ago, Hemalurgic Headshot said:

@breakingamber Please don't use Trapmaster for the name of your new Epic.... I'm only saying this because I already made an Epic named Trapmaster for this little side thing set up as backstory for a villain that might come into the general RP. 

Yeah, I was leaning towards Downfall anyway.

So, wait, just checking: At this moment, meeting-wise, Epoch is slowing down the entire stadium to trap all his potential competitors. Blank or Kokichi or someone outside is going to notice and shout like a suddenly awake Taya (again I'm willing to delete that post if you'd like Darshall, just wanted to try and move it along while you were away), and chaos happens. Epoch dies, maybe other people die, and the day ends with Pariah loose, time barriers down, and no real leadership in the area. 

In any case, @The Young Pyromancer, @winter devotion: Whaddya say?

25 minutes ago, MrakeDarshall said:

Sensible limits. Pretty hard to counter offensively if they can do stuff like teleport the ground underneath your feet to be on top of you and crush/entomb you, but within the range of epic power levels we already have in the RP. About on par with Orbit in terms of power level, if I had to guess.

Idk, I think it would probably be fine for Tayahound to suffer clothing damage, if it didn't get too descriptive about that.

Hm, now I'm trying to figure out how to destroy the world with a power that puts temporary colored dots on things  I came up with a few ideas:

• Cover all the clouds in black dots. This prevents sunlight from reaching the surface, causing the equivalent of nuclear winter for as long as it lasts.
• Or just cover the ground in black dots. This probably heats the earth up a fair bit, causing mass extinction.
• Why stop there? Blanket the sun in black spots and freeze the earth completely. This would probably succeed in killing all multicellular life.
• Better yet, surround a bunch of the closest stars in white dots and reflect as much light as you can towards earth. Vaporize the earth in a couple hundred light years.
• In the case of an infinite universe, use the properties of Hilbert's Hotel in conjunction with the light-focusing trick detailed above to blow up the entire universe.

Well, that was a fun thought experiment  I'd ask how you would go about using a power like "controlling insects" to achieve cosmic levels of destruction, but well...

I actually had a character that was like that. One with an indescribably lame power that ended up being absurdly potent and destructive because for some reason the proper limitations just weren't there. Not a character that would actually be in this RP of course, due to how broken it would be, but a character that's important in the backstory of one of my other characters.

Yeah, you could probably kill the likes of Steelheart, Prof, and Obliteration with a couple of nuclear warheads, but for all intents and purposes of the books they were invincible except for their weaknesses. Regalia was a nice exception, since she was arguably the most effective epic in the entire series but she had literally no abilities to help with a direct confrontation. I agree that Worm is really, really good at this, and this is part of why I enjoyed Worm  The comparison to Worm is also probably why I am pointing this out as a thing Reckoners could have done better. Reckoners also did some things better than Worm. It's kind of hard not to compare them when they have so much in common in how they approach the superhero genre.

I was referring to the teleportation power, but... yeah. Wow. Didn't think of those. 

Also, bit of a dumb question. @TwylightSansSparkles: Would being covered in multicoloured paint be mildly traumatizing for Jade?

10 minutes ago, MrakeDarshall said:

I rather like this epic. Simple power, lots of uses. Reminds me a little bit of Trickster, but is actually fairly different in practice.

The ability isn't intrinsically overpowered at all. I don't see an issue with it being in the RP.

 

That said, parameters like range, size limitations for teleports, any kind of cooldown or throughput limits on teleports, and degree of fine control over the position of the destination are all pretty important. Virtually any power can either be totally useless or literally earth shattering depending on those sort of boundaries. I would caution that for powers that for powers that are typically controlled with conscious thought on the part of the user, giving it the ability to work fast enough to block bullets is both a very major increase in finesse/control, and an implied major enhancement to reaction time because a normal human can't process a bullet being fired at them fast enough to teleport it away (there are ways you could get around that though, like if they can set conditions to automatically teleport away stuff that gets close to them or something; at least from personal experience I find that clarifying how stuff like that works can flesh out a power a ton and make it more interesting).

This kind of fine control and fast deployment is massively underrated, because anyone willing to think outside of the box can make powers with these traits a great deal more powerful than they would at first appear (and even without this being a consideration, characters have a certain tendency to grow more powerful over time). Something to think about. Personally I try to make my characters use their powers at least somewhat cleverly (Epoch would probably be an exception to this), because I figure the characters themselves would be spending a lot more time thinking about how to use their powers than I would spend thinking about it as an author. However, my willingness to suspend disbelief is definitely not the same as everyone else's, and you may well have different priorities.

 

While it has the potential to be quite strong for the reasons I said above, it also has a logical weakness (cannot redirect organic weapons), in addition to a proper Epic Weakness (happiness is mandatory!), which I really definitely appreciate.

Honestly, if there's one criticism I would have for the Reckoners novels, it's that there weren't really enough good logical weaknesses. Epics have their Weakness, yes, and I get that those are totally a good plot point, but with respect to how the power itself works, those weaknesses are basically arbitrary. Being able to figure out a power and that it has certain blind spots is a lot more interesting, in my opinion. You're physically indestructible? Sure, but you still need to eat drink and breathe, and you're just as vulnerable to powers that attack your mind, and if you don't have super strength as well than somebody will probably just restrain you. Everybody around you is mentally incapable of harming you? Cool, but there's a sniper just outside of your range, or maybe handcuffing you to a bench doesn't quite count as harming you, or maybe somebody hurts you on *accident*. No power is unbeatable, and it's about what you do with the powers.

Hm, thanks for the feedback. I didn't consider that it was kind of an inverse of Trickster's power when I wrote it, but that's basically what it is, come to think of it.

As for hard limits, I was thinking mostly reasonable sight range, so maybe about a mile, though he does actually have to be able to see and distinguish something a mile away to be able to teleport it. His control over the exact shape of the teleport is iffy at best, and he mostly uses squares and ellipsoids, and other pretty simple shapes. He could use a more complicated shape (like teleporting only a plastic bag without moving the stuff inside of it or something like that) but it would probably take more concentration and/or time. Size I haven't set a hard limit on just in case I want to try something stupid, but I'd say he can easily teleport things the size of a pretty big couch without breaking a sweat and an entire building is probably beyond him. 

As for teleporting bullets and other very fast things, I agree there's probably about two ways to go with that: enhanced reflexes or automatic teleportation of anything too close to him. I was leaning towards the first one because that lets him block things travelling way too quickly that he can't otherwise simply zap away. Also, that solves the (very) minor dilemmas of what happens when he's asleep/unconscious and what prevents him from teleporting his own clothes off (speaking of which, if the RP ever gets moving quickly enough for Tayahound to happen, will we be able to burn his/her (?) clothes off or would that not be family-friendly?).

Also, I agree that just about any reality-manipulating power can be used creatively to be extremely powerful. Even a relatively lame power like putting temporary coloured dots on things can be used to great effect blinding people and as a form of lousy illusion (and defeating Green Lanterns) This power could be used to literally destroy the world without limits, and is enough to thoroughly inconvenience even the most powerful of Epics if used to its full potential.

Finally, I disagree somewhat on the logical weakness part. (I'm going to assume I don't need to spoiler this.) Most of the High Epics probably could've been taken down by Epics which could capitalize on their weaknesses. Regalia was just as fragile as any human. While mind-control Epics seem to be relatively uncommon in the Reckonerverse, illusionists without easily-exploitable weaknesses (and probably even some with) probably could've misled and trapped Prof, though his forcefields are tough to deal with. Steelheart... alright I don't really have an answer to him. He's ridiculous. Same with Obliteration, though the bomb thing could've worked maybe possibly. Alright maybe I don't actually have a point here but still... shoot. I will say that Worm is a lot better with this because most heroes don't have literal weaknesses like they do in the Reckonerverse and largely the things exploited to beat nigh-invincible enemies are psychological weaknesses and the element of surprise.

Alright, I can't stand it any longer. I should probably wait until you guys decide to release it, buuut... argh argh argh!

On the plus side, I came up with two Epics I would kinda like to roleplay, one more than the other.

Actually I'll post the second one later. I'm feeling a bit tired. Would this character be too powerful in this setting? The idea was that he'd be an Epic who acts like Backtrack around  strong Epics, but also like... some jerk around maples. 

3 hours ago, kenod said:

should we add character viewpoints even if they don't really speak up during the meeting?

I would, but I'm not really in the meeting. Mostly I'm just waiting for the day to finish.

EDIT: I'm looking at the meeting doc, and the question Epoch has posed is a good one: Who gets what? I think we might need a link to the map for that, and here it is: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=z88z64ULbJzQ.keX1oRs5VZbs

On 6/22/2019 at 1:01 PM, The Young Pyromancer said:

Did you read the comments?

That boosts it to a nine, at least.

I did read the comments when the chapter was confusing or I didn't know who the viewpoint character was in an interlude or something along those lines. 

Well that was nice. Pretty good read.

If I had to rate it, I'd give it a solid 8.5 out of 10. Very nice, quite long, might want to reread it later.

It's definitely interesting enough to make me want to check out wildbow's other work, so I'll be back in a month.

I'm enjoying it! See you in a couple days! Maybe. I haven't checked the length.

2 hours ago, The Young Pyromancer said:

Have you read Worm?

No. What's the author's name?

20 hours ago, Sazedezas said:

Yeah, we can do that. My musical has been optioned for the spring performance instead of the fall one, so I've got a tiny bit more time on my hands and it should be enough for this RP.

Do you have a script I could look at? I am somewhat interested in reading things, and I don't know what to read now that I've gone through most of the Urban Fantasy Literature TVTropes page.

32 minutes ago, winter devotion said:

So, what now?

Alright, this made me laugh so hard. Unfortunately, I was TAing for a speech class while someone was speeching just after a particularly bad stumble, so now I'm sitting outside in the hall for a minute or two.