Bay 12 Games Forum

Question: Why do you run so many games at once, then?

Hm, maybe you'll need to fall back on some advanced items known as dice...

How should abilities be determined?

Also, Character Sheet Under Construction!

You simply announce a Coalition in big Script in the IC-Thread as in:

The PCP and the Reichsfront announce that they will form a Coalition for the 1936 Elections.

Quote from the GM. Made me think an IC post was needed for the Coalition to be formed, because...well...

in the IC-Thread

(Also, I'd like to note that I'm annoyed that I dithered...I might have been able to do something...)

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 05, 2013, 06:49:54 am

Re: "Hitting Betweenford on the Head":
That could have had a lot of effects, from angering Betweenford ("Did you just hit me with your Soul Star?" "My what?") to destroying the Astral Influx ("Everyone knows Soul Stars are fragile!" "What are fragile?").

Considering that FFS felt the need to double-check if we really wanted to do that, I'd lean more towards the stranger, more story-relevant results. Getting Betweenford to murder us all could count, but I'm leaning more towards breaking it or switching to him or something bizarre like that.

That consideration shifts it towards the second idea noted, since destruction of a Soul Star couldn't be good for Ciro...

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 05, 2013, 06:49:54 am

Re: "Changes":
How about when Al brought us back to life? Or Riltia turning into an Illborn? Or recruiting an upper minion of a Sibling? Or Yaos?...
And when the people in charge are noting anomalies, something weird is going on...

Chief mentioned that Al makes something of a habit of reviving people; there's no particular reason to suspect Ciro couldn't be among them.

When did Chief mention this, and why would this matter to the people in charge?

The voice mentioned Riltia would have "learned this trick in a few more levels anyway" or similar, and even if not, remember that it was done on purpose by (who we presume to be) one of the Siblings. Unless there was something absolutely and utterly bizarre about the circumstances under which she died, there's no reason to think her revival was any more peculiar.

Except that she turned into an Illborn.

When did we recruit the upper minion of a Sibling? You mean Al? Al appears to be something of a free agent even if he is in league with them. If you mean Riltia, again, the circumstances weren't bizarre, there's no reason to assume the effect was. Especially since, again, they then decided to rez her specifically because her part wasn't done yet. That doesn't sound like an anomaly to me.

Cherish. She's Proxxy's assistant. Between job title and the fact that Cherish wasn't randomly patrolling an unimportant sector* of corridor, it's fair to say she's well in the upper half of Proxxy's minions.

Yaos is indeed an anomaly, but we haven't seen any causes or effects of that beyond being strange. We and presumably the Warrens are in pretty much identical shape to where we'd have been if he hadn't shown up.

That we've seen...Whatever was going on, it seemed that Yaos was toying with the way the Warrens worked (presumably not on purpose).

Finally, "anomaly" does not mean "everything has gone to hell." Not finding any anomalies can count as an anomaly, for instance, because it's just bizarre that an experiment or survey or game would go completely smoothly and predictably. The Siblings talking about anomalies means they've found things they didn't expect or don't understand, not necessarily that the whole thing has gone off the rails in any appreciable sense.

I had said only that the anomalies were things which weren't expected. Hence, the anomalies would not be once-a-cycle things.

Quote from: monk12 on June 05, 2013, 12:12:32 pm

What I mean is, if Al wasn't in the party he probably wouldn't even be around to switch to. Without his backup, Ciro might have the sense to not aggro the searchbots, or at least run away when they prove to be extremely powerful. I think the divergence is the fact that we switched perspective to Al and then died so we couldn't switch back, which lead to Al leaving the village with Cherish and Riltia (in most cycles, we probably just meet up with Riltia at the village) which then led to that whole bizniz outside the Greens.

Again though, what makes you say switching to Al was different in a practical sense, not just a narrative one? Mightn't everything have occurred exactly like it did, only we didn't see it and so just sort of skipped to the part where we woke back up in the Greens, Al there, Cherish and Riltia suspiciously missing?

Assuming Al would have revived us? I like the theory that the Astral Influx lets Ciro send some fragment of his (/her) soul to live in some other person. It neatly explains why perspective shifts, and also can help explain why Ciro died so conveniently soon after the switch (without that bit, Ciro's power dropped a bit, which let the monster finish him).
Besides, what he said was Al joining the party, which brings the "Would he have revived us?" question to the forefront.

Quote from: monk12 on June 05, 2013, 12:12:32 pm

Riltia dying and being manipulated into some superpowered Illborn, for starters. We know that was weird, we got a cutscene explaining so! As GWG said, I'm assuming that each cycle isn't identical, it just follows the same pattern, so when the people in charge note an anomaly severe enough to threaten the cycle, it's probably pretty damn weird.

I don't entirely recall the cutscene, but I do recall one of them mentioning that "No fear, another few levels and she'd have learned this trick on her own!" or similar. Plus, again, nothing about her death seemed massively strange, so it's hard to figure out why reviving her would be.

...Because she turned into a giant, Warrens-smashing, murderous worm-thing?

And again, "anomaly" doesn't mean "serious problem that's never happened before," it just means thing you weren't expecting or don't understand. Did they explicitly mention "threatening the cycle" somewhere?

Regardless, if Riltia turning into the Illborn wasn't something that frequently happened, it would be a dangerous anomaly, because giant destructive murderous monsters are dangerous.

Quote from: monk12 on June 05, 2013, 12:12:32 pm

I think Emerald is right on this one. FFS confirmed that Illborn are beings without Soul Charge, which makes Willborn a subset of Illborn (since we know Yaos became Willborn by the same mechanism Illborn are created.) The biggest difference between Yaos and, say, Slog, is that he has his Soul Star.

Maybe. This would still raise a lot of questions, though.
For one thing, I don't think we understand what happened to Yaos well enough to say it's the same as Illborn creation. We know running out of soul charge looked like it was involved, but that's like saying it looked like running out of HP was involved with Riltia's transformation.

That's based on the theory that the Willborn are basically a subset of or else related to the Illborn, for obvious reasons (including that, otherwise, we'd have no idea what Willborn are because someone didn't pay attention to my requests...)
Glare through the Fourth Wall at Ciro
Ahem.

For another, there's the whole "Two great souls destined to fight" or similar aspect. Was that a cause, effect, or neither of Yaos running out of charge, transforming, or being there at all? We're not sure.

We are guessing, grasping at straws to try and make the Mona Lisa. This is what we've got so far.

Then there's the questions this raises about just what Soul Stars are and signify. This would seem to make them more significant than we thought, but we still don't know who gets one and why, or why they'd interact with a lack of soul charge to transform you into a horrible monster.

We're still not even sure what Soul Stars are. We've seen so few, with such a wide array of abilities...

Finally, this raises the question of how Willborn come about normally. Yaos was an oddity, in that his Soul Star's powers and/or his intrusion into the Warrens seemed to sap soul charge. How would anyone else become a Willborn via this system? Just sort of not kill anything or have any life-changing experiences for a while and then go all Final Form in the middle of nowhere? Spend it all attempting alternate battle types and then turn into yet another alternate battle type?

This goes back to your "What is a Willborn" question (or at least the one you indirectly raised).

Quote from: monk12 on June 05, 2013, 12:12:32 pm

She was in the revival tube with us. I don't think anyone futzed with her body, but it wasn't there when we went back to shove Slog in there.

Do we know that for a fact? I recall a theory that we absorbed her blood and/or femininity, but not any actual clues as to where she went or why her resurrection failed. Do we even know for a fact that it failed, or just assuming based on Sibling Chatter and her lack of presence?

I'm guessing that the fact that she didn't come back to life is pretty indicative of failure to bring her back to life.
And, hm, new theory...Milli was menstruating when she died.

I guess we could have just oversouled Riltia back to normal whereas Yaos we had to invade the soul of to battle "normally," but that still raises the question of what exactly oversoul did or can do, and whether that was included when Ciro mentioned that you "can't fight them."

Solution: OVERSOUL FOR SCIENCE!

We're missing a Roosevelt in there somewhere.

That man needs to be included somewhere.

Which Roosevelt?

((Not desperate, but...the ball was pitched over the plate, might as well take a swing.))