#I might need to turn my campaign difficulty a little higher? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dndaddyissues · 4 years

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im new to DMing, and while i seem to have gotten the hang of most things well, im super confused when it comes to running battles (especially when theyre my own monsters) how do i balance a battle? how do i tell how many enemies/how much health per enemy = fair for certain amounts of players? is there a chart or resource somewhere you know of, or is it all intuition? (bonus question: how long should normal and boss encounters last irl time wise?) thanks so much!

thanks for sending me this question! this answer is particularly huge… you have been warned.

as usual, here’s the tl;dr:

- for an easy to moderate challenge, have the same (or fewer) number of enemies as there are players;

- for an advanced challenge, outnumber the players;

- lower your enemies’ AC to something that your players can hit 60-70% of the time;

- in exchange, buff your enemies’ HP;

- feel free to fudge hit points whenever you want;

- utilize the “minions” mechanic from 4th edition;

- for boss battles, introduce special bonus actions, reactions, and villain actions;

- combat usually lasts 3-4 rounds: plan accordingly;

- ask yourself: why is this combat happening? what narrative/dramatic and character stakes can i introduce?;

- and have fun!

i want to preface my answer by saying that i don’t enjoy easy combat – unless played for laughs/comedy, or used to foreshadow something plotwise (like a goblin scout’s death alerting the goblin horde at large), i hardly ever throw an easy combat encounter at my party.

so, the following advice is given with challenging the players in mind – either moderately, immensely, or impossibly. i guess i’m just a big sucker for jim murphy/matt colville-style DO OR DIE challenges. otherwise, what’s the point?

another preface: this answer is given in the spirit of avoiding the “slog” – the combat encounter where it feels like baddies and PCs are just stepping up to the plate, whacking at each other, and stepping back down. that’s boring. and boring combat is the worst. sometimes it’s unavoidable – we all have our off days, nothing wrong about that – but the less that it happens, the more fun that everyone has! right?

now, on to the answer itself!

first of all, i’ve already written an answer to an ask a little while back about combat that might be useful to you. click here to read about how to make more action-oriented monsters, especially for boss battles and random encounters that you want to feel significant and deadly.

second of all, here’s the 5e CR encounter calculator i used to use all the time. it’s extremely intuitive and has toggles for number of players, level of players, monster CR/EXP, and how difficult encounters would be rated (easy, medium, hard, deadly).

third of all, i never use that calculator anymore.

over the course of the 2.5 years i’ve spent DMing 5th edition, there are three main things i’ve learned that can drastically increase, or decrease, the difficulty of a combat encounter. they are: # of baddies, armor class, and # of hit points.

regarding # of baddies. due to how the action economy in 5e plays out, the more creatures there are on either side of a combat, the bigger the advantage that side has. it’s just kind of how it works. so, an easy way to bump up the difficulty: throw more monsters at the players than there are players.

the one soft exception is boss battles. personally, i fucking LOVE having just ONE, super badass, super hard to kill, hardcore boss that the party gets to face down during crucial turning points in the campaign. it makes me feel like i’m running fucking Dracula in Netflix’s Castlevania against some lovable and deadly dumbasses. it’s great. it’s fun. it’s thrilling. to make bosses as challenging (and therefore rewarding) as possible, i highly recommend reading the ask i linked earlier in this reply. (click here for the link again.)

now, i say it’s a soft exception because i like giving my bosses minions. i basically utilize the 4th edition (i think?) “minion” mechanic where the AC, bonus to hit, and damage of all minion creatures are the same as regular versions of the creature. the only difference is, they have 1 HP.

this can give the PCs the awesome feeling of wading through waves and waves of minions – say, dozens of zombies, as an evil lich cackles upon their raised stone dais 80 feet away. i don’t utilize this too often because then it can feel tiring to the party. but done sparingly, and with narrative stakes, it can be quite thrilling! (that maxim is also true for basically any kind of combat encounter in D&D.)

regarding armor class. obviously, the higher the armor class, the harder the challenge. if you can’t hit the damn thing obviously you can’t kill it. i personally like to pitch the AC of my enemies a liiittle bit lower, to increase my PCs’ probability of hitting. the exact number of the armor class will depend on your players’ level.

as a super general guide for players at level 3, 10-13 is easy, 14-15 is moderate, 16-17 is challenging (heavily favoring 17), and 18+ is very challenging/almost impossible.

just so you know, i generally set my enemies’ ACs for a level 3 party to be 13 for less important creatures, and 14 for more important creatures. i’d probably set the AC to be 15 or 16 for a mini-boss, and 16 or 17 (if i’m feeling cruel lol) for a boss.

obviously, this scales as your party levels up, finds magical items, and gains special features and boons. i would scale the difficulty by 1 when they hit level 4 and get an ability score improvement, and then by 1 every 2 levels or so.

in other words, at level 4, i’d consider an AC of 11-14 to be easy, 15-16 as moderate, 17-18 as challenging (heavily favoring 18), and 19+ as very challenging/almost impossible. and by the time your party is levels 12-16, AC can often feel like it doesn’t freaking matter anymore because they’ll be able to hit, like, fucking everything. anyway.

there’s some nitty gritty mathematics about this if you like to get granular. this is a good video about dice math, armor class, and calculating advantage mathematically if that sort of thing interests you.

regarding # of hit points. honestly, i fudge this most times. because i like to scale my AC on the lower end, in exchange, i make my creatures fucking FAT. like, i’ll look at their stat block in the monster manual, and add 30-50% to what they already have. sometimes i’ll straight up double or even triple it.

for example, the spectator normally has 39 hit points, but i gave my spectator ~100, because it was a miniboss. i did, however, keep its armor class at 14 because that meant my players, at 3rd level, would be able to hit it 60-70% of the time. this strategy of mine tends to work out, because my players are usually able to dish out a LOT of damage per round. (we have a barb, a fighter, and a warlock in the party lol.)

something i did in the spectator fight, that i wish i didn’t do, was stay faithful to the number of hit points it had. the barbarian ended up killing it with a rather anticlimactic attack. i know for certain that my warlock, which was next in the initiative order, had this SUPER cool and character-relevant attack planned. what i would do differently, is keep the spectator alive just long enough for my warlock to do their cool fucking move, and have that move kill the monster.

and now for the big takeaway. combat, for me, is all about giving my players a chance to shine, be badass, utilize their class abilities, and be creative. just like any other aspect of d&d, such as roleplaying and exploration, combat is an exercise in collaborative storytelling (for me, at least).

i rarely introduce combat that doesn’t tie into an A plot, a B plot, or a side quest that the PCs are chasing. i don’t have anything against random encounters – in fact, i ran some RE’s in the second-most recent session – but what makes combat fun for me as a DM is the fact that it advances story, and potentially deepens the players’ understanding of their character.

so, before you throw your players into a combat situation, ask yourself: why? how can i make this narratively dramatic – and not just a slogfest?

bonus answer: most combat encounters will struggle to last beyond three, maybe four, rounds. especially if there are an equal or fewer baddies to the player characters. however, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. in fact, if combat went on for five, six, seven rounds, it can begin to feel like… well.. a slog.

so make the most out of your three, four rounds, and make each combat encounter unique! how about an environmental challenge? slippery ground, swinging axes, pools of lava, a sudden earthquake, a portcullis dividing the party, water filling the room.

or roleplay/plot-related challenges? maybe there’s a circle of mages attempting to summon a demon that are protected by enchanted suits of armor that the PCs need to hack through. maybe there are hostages. maybe there’s a powerful magical artifact that the baddies and PCs both want, and the challenge in the combat lies in who can most deftly and efficiently maneuver through the clockwork maze protecting the raised dais the item resides upon.

#ask #reply #dnd ideas #dm tips #combat ideas

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hellyeahheroes · 5 years

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Building Amadeus Cho in D&D 5e

I really need to distract myself from how bad elections in my country went, so here is another build. I noticed about every single one I’ve made - Cassandra Cain, Nico Minoru, Virgil Hawkins, Laura Kinney, Emiko Queen - are all “let’s dump strength” builds. So why not do something about it and make someone who is all about Strength? Well, maybe not “all”, let’s make him smart as well. You can probably guess who comes to mind

Let’s start with our goals for this build. First of all, we need to be both strong AND smart, finding a way to show both of them in combat. Second, we need to express somehow Amadeus’ perk for invention and gadgets that aid him. And finally, we need to get knowledge skills to reflect well our status as the 7th Smartest Man on Earth.

As with Tulok the Barbarian, who inspired these pots, I will be using standard points array for Ability Scores - 15, 14, 13, 12, 10 and 8. If you want to roll or use different point buy or your DM insists on that, treat these as a guideline

Strength: 14, you were once The Strongest One There Is after all

Dexterity: 12, You are somewhat agile, maybe more than an average Hulk

Constitution: 13, very important for both taking hits and not getting distracted when you do SCIENCE!

Intelligence: 15, you’re 7th Smartest Man on Earth after all

Wisdom: 8, dump it, Amadeus was always known for being really freaking reckless after all.

Charisma: 10, Amadeus has shown he has as much of a chance to woo a girl as to annoy his teammates, you may as well leave this one entirely to the dice

Now for Race, which in D&D terms mean species. Amadeus is currently a superhumanly strong, green-skinned individual with an ability to increase his strength by getting enraged. And you know very well what that means for people who make character builds in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

Seriously tho, Amadeus is a human who got transformed into this green form, but a human none the less. Variant Humans get +1 to two Ability Scores, even out Intelligence and Constitution. For your free skill pick up Religion, first of our Knowledge Skills - you didn’t hang out with Hercules without having that mythological knowledge run off on to you after all. Pick whatever is relevant to the campaign for the bonus language.

For the feat pick War Caster - it gives you an advantage on the Constitution saving throws to maintain concentration on a spell whenever you take damage, lets you perform somatic components even with a weapon or a shield in both hands and you can cast a spell instead of attacking whenever a creature provokes an opportunity attack from you, as long at the spell has a casting time of 1 action.

For Background we will go with Sage, giving us proficiency in History and Nature, two more Knowledge Skills and you also learn two languages of your choice, again, pick whatever’s relevant. You also get the Researcher feature, allowing you to, if you do not know something, at least know where to easily obtain that information.

Now for the Class, let us get us some Brains. And as with Static, we will do a little trick and treat magic as science. Maybe your magic really is your technological inventions? Or maybe you just used your brilliant mind to study it like science? It makes sense really - a scientific mind in a world where magic is a tangible force and all sci-fi elements are nonexistent would study magic with a scientific approach. If only there was a class known for this. 1st Level Wizard gains proficiency with our last knowledge skill, Arcana, and one more - pick Insight, Investigation or Medicine. You get saving throws with Wisdom and Intelligence and proficiency with Daggers, darts, slings, quarterstaffs and light crossbows

Wizard learns Spellcasting. You gain a spellbook containing six 1st-level Wizard spells and each long rest you can prepare a limited number of them that you can cast and you cannot prepare spells of a higher level than your maximum level known. You also get cantrips that you can cast as many times a day as you want but you only know a few of them. Finally, you can spend 2 hours and 50 gp to copy any spell you have found into your spellbook as long as you can cast spells of this level, adding them to a number of spells you can choose from. If your spell requires a spell attack, you make it with modifier equal your Proficiency Bonus + Your Intelligence Modifier and if it requires Saving Throw, you take that number and add 8 to get your Save Difficulty. You also gain Arcane Recovery, which lets you recover some of your spell slots on short rest, but they cannot be of higher combined level than half of your wizard level rounded up.

For Cantrips you get to know 3 and here are some good choices:

Prestidigitation is a multi-use tool that allows you to make all kinds of minor magical effects that last up to 1 hour

Either Booming Blade or Green Flame Blade - each is a spell that lets you make an attack and causes some effect if you hit, either making green fire leap from it to the second target to give it damage equal to your Intelligence Modifier, or deal the target additional 1d8 thunder damage if it willingly moves before end of your next turn. Either of those scales up with your total character level

Shocking Grasp lets you make a melee attack as a part of casting a spell as well, with an advantage if the target is wearing armor, and if you hit they take 1d8 lightning damage (again, scaling with your total level) cannot take reactions until the end of your next turn.

Now for the 1st Level Spells, we get to know six of them even if we can only cast two per long rest.

Fog Cloud lets you create a 20-foot radius sphere centered around you that makes an entire area in it heavily obscured.

Jump lets you triple your jump distance for 1 minute, getting that trademark Hulk jumpIdentify lets you learn all magical properties related to a touched item or what spells are affecting the touched creature

Grease turns an area within 10-foot square from a chosen point into difficult terrain for 1 minute and every creature standing on it or entering it must succeed on a Dexterity Saving Throw or fall prone.

Feather Fall has a casting time of a reaction and lasts for one minute and each from up to five falling creatures within 60-feet range, you included, slows down on falling to 60 feet and if it lands on the ground before the spell ends, it takes no damage

Finally, Find Familiar lets you summon a familiar. There is no dog or wolf on the list but I’m sure a GM can be persuaded into allowing you to have a coyote pup. Familiar acts independent from you but obeys your commands, if it dies you can bring it back by recasting the spell, you can communicate with it telepathically if it is within 100 feet from you and for action see through its eyes and if you cast a touch spell your familiar can deliver it to the target. This has a ton of uses and if done well it will make your puppy a beloved pet of the party.

We will now jump to Barbarian. You get proficiency light and medium armor, simple and martial weapons and shields. As you might have noticed, we do not get tavern brawler to deal better damage on unarmed strike. This is because I remembered that Amadeus was once wielding mace previously belonging to Hercules. I see no reason why not to return to it to give Amadeus more of his classic flavor. Also, it will mesh better with some features we will get than punching with your fist. You can also pick up that huge two-handed hammer he was using as Brawnhammer.

1st Level Barbarians get an ability to Rage, allowing you to enter a state in which you gain an advantage on Strength checks and saving throws, +2 to damage dealt by strength attacks and resistance to bludgeoning, Piercing and Slashing Damage. It lasts for 1 minute, until you’re knocked out or if you ended your turn without attacking any enemy for your turn. You can do it twice between long rests. Sadly, you cannot cast spells or concentrate on those already cast in Rage. This will be a more last line of defense than a common go-to strategy.

You also get Unarmored Defense, allowing you to add your Constitution Modifier to your Armor Class, which helps since Cho isn’t known for wearing armor.

2nd Level Barbarian gets Danger Sense, if you are not blinded, deafened or incapacitated, you have an advantage on Dexterity saving throws against any effect you can see, such as traps or spells. You also gain Reckless Attack, allowing you to gain an advantage on your attack rolls made this turn at the cost of giving your enemies advantage on attack rolls against you until your next turn.

2nd Level Wizard gets a new spell slot to use. You also get to choose an Arcane Tradition. School of Lore Mastery gives us two features. Lore Mastery itself allows you to substitute your Intelligence modifier for Dexterity modifier when you roll for Initiative and doubles your proficiency modifier in all Knowledge Skills you are proficient with. Which are ALL OF THEM! You’re welcome. Spel Secrets meanwhile allows you to, whenever you cast a spell that deals acid, cold, fire, force, lightning, necrotic, radiant, or thunder damage to just declare you change it to another type. Meaning you no longer care for resistance or immunity to damage. ON TOP OF THAT, if a spell requires someone to make a saving throw, it also lets you change whichever Ability they have to roll for. So if you’re fighting a group of Goblins, you don’t make them roll Dexterity but Strength o that Grease.

ALTERNATIVE: School of War Magic allows you to add your Intelligence Modifier to your Initiative rolls with Tactical Wit and with Arcane Deflection you can spend your reaction to give yourself +2 to Armor Class were you be hit by an attack roll or +4 to a saving throw you failed, but you cannot cast spells other than cantrips until end of your next turn.

Okay, we have brains, we have brawl, but Amadeus is both - not just a genius or a Hulk, he is Brawn and he combines these two sides of him. We will let him do that...in a moment

First Level Fighter gets to choose a fighting style. Depending on what you picked up as your weapon choose either Dueling (+2 to damage rolls if you’re using only one weapon in one hand) or Great Weapon Fighting (when you use two-handed or versatile weapon wielded in two hands you can reroll all 1 or 2 on damage rolls but must use the new roll even if it is as bad or worse). You also gain Second Wind, letting you once per short or long rest use a bonus action to regain health points equal 1d10 + your fighter level. This will get us some of that healing factor.

EDIT: if you really want Brawn who fights with his fists then pick a new Fighting Style from Unearthed Arcana on Alternate Class Features - Unarmed Fighting. It changes the damage dealt by your unarmed attacks from flat 2 to 1d6+your STRE modifier, 1d8 if you attack with both hands and grants you an extra 1d4 damage dealt whenever you successfully start a grapple with a creature and whenever you hit a creature you’re already grappling.

Second Level Fighter gains Action Surge - once per short or long rest you can gain an additional action for your round. This means an extra attack or lets you cast a spell and attack in one turn.

Third Level Fighter gains a Martial Archetype. And this is what we are here for. Eldritch Knight. First, it lets you learn a ritual that creates a bond between yourself and a weapon and you can have two such weapons bonded to you at once. As long as you hold one you cannot be disarmed unless you’re incapacitated and if you are to part from it you can summon it as a bonus action, making it teleport in your hand as long as you’re on the same plane of existence. Teleporting gear he needs into his hands does sound like a very Amadeus thing, gotta say.

But now to the real meat of Eldritch Knight. You get to learn spells as a fighter. As opposed to Wizard spells you know a limited number of them and you spend spell slots to cast them without preparations. Sadly you cannot cast Wizard Spells you know from Eldritch Knight spell slots or vice versa. However, two levels you took will count to determine your number of spell slots. Consult this table using the following guidelines - every 4 levels of Eldritch Knight you take count as 1 level on the table and every level of wizard counts as 1. If the table would give you access to spell slots of a higher level that you should know by normal class progression, you can only use them to cast spell slots of a level you know.

Also, since your casting ability is the same for both classes, your spell attack and save difficulty modifiers are the same.

You learn two Cantrips from a wizard spell list and they work pretty much as the wizard ones.

Thunderclap is a very Hulk thing - make a burst of sound forcing every creature within 5 feet to make Constitution saving throw or take 2d6 (since we are above 5th level) thunder damage. As you can guess, it scales with your total character level.

Lighting Lure forces a target to make Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 10 feet of you and take 2d8 lightning damage if it finds itself within 5 feet of you. And yes, it does too scale with your total level.

You get to know 3 1-st level spells from Wizard Spell list but they must be abjuration or evocation. As you will learn 4th one on the next level I will list all 4

Thunderwave forces every creature within a 15-foot cube from you to make a Constitution saving throw or take 2d8 Thunder Damage and be pushed 10 feet away from you. On a save it remains in position and takes only half of the damage.

Protection from Evil and Good lets you choose one type of creature - aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiend and undead - it is a concentration spell lasting up to 10 minutes and gives that type of creatures disadvantage on attack rolls against you and you cannot be charmed, frightened or possessed by them. This is for next time you run into the Enchantress

Absorb Elements lets you chose damage type you are about to take from acid, cold, fire, lightning or thunder, giving you resistance to that damage. The first time you hit on your next round you deal additional 1d6 damage of that type to the target, +1d6 per spell slot level if you cast it from a higher level

Chromatic Orb lets you make spell attack against the target, dealing it 3d8 (+1d8 for each higher level of spell slot used) of damage of your choice - poison, acid, fire, cold, lighting or thunder.

4th Level Fighter gains an Ability Score improvement, for now we will focus on increasing our Intelligence. 5th Level gives us Extra Attack, letting us make two attacks as a part of the same attack action. 6th Level is another Ability Score Improvement, Round up the Intelligence

7th Level Eldritch Knight gets to learn a new Spell and gains access to 2nd level spell slots. Snilloc’s Snowball Storm makes fury of snowballs explode in a 5-ffot sphere from the chosen target, dealing every creature in range 3d6 cold damage and a half on successful Dexterity saving throw. if you would rather go with the Hulk-lite theme, pick up Shatter instead - works similarly except dealing thunder damage, asking for Constitution save and dealing 3d8 damage instead of 3d6 and imposing disadvantage on the saving throw to creatures made out of inorganic materials.

You also gain a feature - War Magic. Whenever you cast a Cantrip as an action you can now make a single weapon attack as a bonus action.

8th Level Fighter gains another Ability Score Improvement, boost up your Strength. You can learn a new spell and this time it can be one out of any school. Hold Person lets you force a Wisdom saving throw on a target and if they fail then, for your concentration, they become paralyzed until they succeed a next Wisdom save on their round, you break your concentration or 1 minute passes.

9th Level Fighter gains Indomitable, letting you once per long rest reroll one failed saving throw.

10th Level Eldritch Knight learns Eldritch Strike, meaning that now whenever you hit a creature with a weapon attack, it has a disadvantage on the save against the first spell you cast until the end of your next turn. You also learn a new Cantrip and a new Spell and another one on 11th level

Ray of Frost makes you make a spell attack against a single target and if you hit you deal 3d8 (since it scales with a level) cold damage and reduce its speed by 10 feet until the start of your next turn.

Scorching Ray makes you pick up to 3 targets (+1 for each higher level from which you cast) to be hit with 2d6 Fire Damage.

Melf’s Acid Arrow lets you make a spell attack against a target. On a hit, it takes 4d4 acid damage now and 2d4 on the end on its next turn, on a miss it only takes 2d4 acid damage once.

11th Level Fighter also gains the third attack to be done as a part of the same attack action.

12th level Fighter gains an Ability Score improvement, this time increase your Constitution.

On 13th Level you get to use Indomitable twice between long rests, can learn one new spell and gain access to 3rd level spells. You get another one, this one from any school, on 14th level as well, alongside next Ability Score Improvement (which should go to Strength)

Counterspell allows you to interrupt an enemy costing spell. If it is casting a spell of a level equal or lower than that of spell slot you used, it fails immediately. if its level is higher, you counter it if you succeed an Intelligence Check with difficulty equal to 10 + spell level.

Haste is a concentration spell for up to 1 minute, it doubles your (or another target you used it for) speed, gains +2 to AC, advantage on Dexterity Saving Throws and on each of its turns gains one action it can use to make a single weapon attack, dash, disengage, hide or use object. Once it ends target must spend 1 turn doing nothing to regain its strength.

15th Level Eldritch Knight gets to use Arcane Charge, which lets you teleport up to 30 feet as a part of an action you gain by Arcane Surge. Our Capstone is 16th Level Fighter. Final Ability Score Improvement - round up Strength - and final spell to learn - Fireball lets you cause an explosion in a 20-foot radius from the target, dealing every creature in it 8d6 fire damage or half on successful save +1d6 for each higher level of spell slot you used to cast it from.

So here is how I would do Amadeus. School of Lore Mastery Wizard 2/Barbarian 2/Eldritch Knight Fighter 16. :et us see how valid this build is. For one, you are a good tank with multiple ways to reduce damage dealt to you and make up for not wearing armor - protection from good and evil, indomitable, absorb elements, rage (which works with some of these abilities), second wind, Unarmored Defense - and a lot of hit points. You also get a varied array of spells that deal different types of damage and many of them have various utilities attached to them, with added bonus you can fluff them as either gadgets or Hulk abilities, and your wizard levels let you cast them using 5th level slots (see the table again) which actually allows you to deal more damage with them than pure Eldritch Knight. You do not need to worry about having either too many or not spells of one damage type for any given situation with Lore Mastery either. Hell, you could refluff the same spells as different gadgets multiple times. You also have ways to get in more attacks and to make up for relatively poor Dexterity. If you run out of spells you can enter rage and go into full combat. Finally, you have all the knowledge skills to truly be 7th Smartest Man on Earth.

On the downsides, you are a jack of all trades but master of none, lacking real focus. Your array of spells is limited and even though you can learn more via wizard spellbook they’re only gonna be of 1st level. Spells you do know are only of 3rd level at best, meaning their usefulness will be limited. And Rage basically turns off your entire spellcasting and concentration spells, meaning you have to choose which one to use. We didn’t max out Constitution and Dexterity is low, meaning our AC is not as good as it should be. Finally, your Charisma and Wisdom Saves are low, meaning you should expect to be banished to another dimension or mind-controlled to turn against your party a lot.

However, you are a very balanced character who can be useful in many things and has an answer to all kinds of problems. You are brains and Brawl in one green package. Just remember you cannot do everything and you work much better as a part of a team. So don’t your teammates get sick of your ego.

ERRATA: Original build started with levels in Barbarian but it was pointed out to me that you need to take a casting class to take War Caster feat, I have made changes to reflect that.

UPDATE: Changed Wizard School to Lore Mastery, with War as an alternate option.

- Admin

#Amadeus Cho #Hulk #Brawn #Mastermind Excello #Totally Awesome Hulk #Prince of power #Marvel

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chevalierene · 5 years

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The PRxPRince Experience

It’s been nearly five months so it’s high time I finally wrote up my review ^^; In April of this year I had the pleasure to see Machida Nanoka’s directorial debut show, PRxPRince. This show was also the first solo lead for Snow Troupe’s Towaki Sea (Hitoko). As this was the first bow hall show I have seen the theatre is much smaller than the Grand Theatres with no balcony and holds a little over 500 people.

The intimacy of the show is doubled with the cast of 30 people who all get to shine during the show. There are enough additional scenes for everyone in the cast to play important roles and it also showcases a lot of the younger actresses as well.

All bias aside, PRxPRince is a fantastic show and is possibly my favorite Takarazuka show that I have seen yet. With the combined powers of Machida sensei’s writing and Hitoko’s sensual charm onstage they somehow created a show that is both very fun and extremely lethal. Before the show premiered just from the interviews it was evident that Machida sensei knew exactly what she was doing. She had been a fan of Takarazuka for a number of years and it shows in the final result.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

The show opens with the three ministers of Pecchieno, the Genovia-like country in which the story takes place, who are trying to figure out a way to get the country out of financial difficulties. Caspar (Kanou Yuuri) and Elias (Ichika Ao) have very different views on how to go about this dilemma with Caspar being very old-fashioned and Elias being a Millennial and very social media savvy. Damian (Yume Maoto) is kind of the moderator between them and the one who ends up suggesting the ultimate way to solve the country’s issues (which will be revealed later on).

The next scene is a PR campaign video that introduces Victor (Hitoko), the oldest prince of Pecchieno as well as his two younger brothers, Valentin (Aya Ouka) and Valtteri (Ayami Sera). The opening song “Welcome to Pecchieno” is one of the catchiest songs in the show and gets reprised later on, inevitably becoming an earworm for anyone who hears it. What should be noted about the opening is that Victor’s glasses are removed before the start of the PR campaign video so Hitoko’s blue contact lenses and smooth blonde hair are on full display. And it is truly devastating! (Sidenote: I had no idea that the intro song actually introduces the rest of the cast who come onstage briefly until my last time seeing the show because I had my opera glasses focused on Hitoko for the other 6).

The next time we see Victor he is dressed in a parka, tennis shoes, a lab coat, and has large round glasses and messy hair. Victor is the leader of a group of scientists whose goal it is to find a solution to the polluting problems from the neighboring country (though this plotline might have changed since the director’s talk cause there was probably something I missed but I tried my best to follow along with the laboratory scenes). Elle (Jun Hana) is one of the scientists who really likes Victor and Victor really likes her. They are very adorable and awkward together. They are also both incredibly intelligent. Elle is seen as very smart but also fierce and is not one you want to mess with (she does Karate poses).

During another PR campaign tactic the princes are literally being mobbed by fangirls (listed as Fangirl 1-6 in the program) in order to promote tourism. At one point during a struggle Victor’s glasses fall off and he falls to the ground. He then emits a very unsumire moan. Suddenly, the lights change to a vivid bright green and music starts. Victor lifts up his head but his entire demeanor has changed. It is revealed during this song that this is in fact Christopher and he is searching for his goddess. The awkward prince Victor is replaced by Christopher, a very handsome, cocky, and aggressive version who makes every girl around him fall to the ground in delight. This reveal was so secret during the press for PRxPRince before I saw the show that I knew that Hitoko would be both extremely kawaii and extremely ikemen but I didn’t realize that Victor would change into a completely different person!

Through a flashback scene told by Alice (Sahana Mako), the family’s nurse, it is revealed that because Victor was just TOO BEAUTIFUL and maids had to flee the room because they just couldn’t handle it, a hypnotist is brought in to put a spell on Victor that allows his ikemen side to stay hidden when he has the glasses on. However, the side effect is that when the glasses get removed his ikemen side is so extra and over the top that he is literally a completely different person. In the show there are two songs that feature Victor and his Shadow which is the other side of him. The Shadow (Houka Haruna) is distant for the first song and represents Christopher behind him in the background. The second song is started by Christopher and the Shadow comes out wearing glasses. In the middle of the song the Shadow puts the glasses on Christopher. When he turns around he is once again Victor. The glasses are then removed completely and they have a duet dance together. The transitions from one to the other are incredible and it shows off Hitoko’s acting skills in the best possible way. It isn’t just the glasses that make the change. As Victor, Hitoko speaks and sings in a higher register that is closer to her natural speaking voice, she stutters more, her posture is often bent forward, has more outbursts and exclamations and is also portrayed as very sensitive. As Christopher, Hitoko is in full dangerous otokoyaku-killing mode; her speaking and singing voice is deeper, her posture is straight, she is more confident, aggressive, and controlling. Christopher also speaks in a very old-fashioned way and gives off an air as otherworldly in many ways. Another neat thing is that Victor addresses himself as “Boku” and addresses Elle as “Elle-san”. Christopher uses “Ore” when referring to himself and just says “Elle”.

Elle faces a crisis at one point when Christopher tries to make a move and she slaps him. She immediately panics when she thinks that she has hurt Victor though and tries to figure out what happened to her sweet awkward boyfriend. Her and Victor sing a duet towards the audience in separate rooms. The song is later reprised after Victor admits that he likes Elle and they sing it to each other in a very tender moment. Jun Hana has a very Disney princess vibe to her which is exemplified whenever she’s around Hitoko who has an equally Disney prince vibe. They are characters who could literally be in a shoujo manga. While Jun Hana does not have the strongest singing voice per se, she makes it work here.

Victor’s brothers, Valentin and Valterri are also rather amusing to watch. I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed watching Aya’s performance as Valentin. She was VERY extra. Valentin is a true narcissist and has long flowing locks. He also tends to play with the ends of his hair and is the MOST dramatic person I have ever seen. He pines after a girl he once knew called Diana and throughout the show tries to pursue a girl of the same name played by Seina Nozomi who he’s convinced is the same one he once loved. Valterri is the youngest brother and is obsessed with working out. He’s very impulsive and doesn’t really think things through which gets him in trouble later on (Victor and Valentin silently scold him at one point which is funny since both of them are using big gestures on the side of the stage while other characters are talking). He is also head over heels in love with Marie (Irodori Michiru), the sister of the rival country’s ruler, Queen Lily (Ai Sumire). Ayami Sera did a really good job at playing the bratty younger brother who just wants to have fun. This was probably her biggest role to date so far too so she got to show off her singing as well.

Speaking of Ai Sumire I need to talk about her because she was one of the most phenomenal parts of this show! She is portrayed as a campy villain with a very extra evil laugh. But DANG the girl has the most powerful voice and even gets the only vocal song in the finale! Catch me singing “IKEMEN! I-KE-MEN!” constantly. Lily is almost always surrounded by her posse made up of Rose (Shouno Chio) who is more or less her secretary who always carries an iPad with her to let Queen Lily know about the latest thing that their neighboring country is up to and Garrett (Kiraha Reo) who is Lily’s erm...really hot boytoy/bodyguard? What was quite surprising for me the first time I saw it was that Garrett does not speak AT ALL in the show. He whispers behind his hands to Lily but other than that he is completely silent and yet, the way that Kiraha (Kari) presents herself onstage even without saying a word is mesmerizing to watch. She just emits the most brooding otokoyaku energy that is mostly reserved for kuroenbis in revues. Garrett smokes, casually checks his watch, and performs a tango with Lily and I cannot stop LOOKING AT HIM ONSTAGE! Even when other characters are talking onstage if Garrett is there (save for when Victor is present) my eyes would float over to him just to watch him stare into the ether and make the slowest and most deliberate of gestures.

Of course, no true royal comedy would happen without the king and queen themselves. King Anselm (Souno Haruto) and Queen Beatrice (Maisaki Rin) are the parents of the V3 (the campaign name for the three hot princes). King Anselm is very attached to everything he owns especially his expensive collection of various artifacts. Queen Beatrice is just trying to have a nice time and wants everyone to be happy again. They are also IMMENSELY in love and get very lovey-dovey in front of their boys who are all grossed out by their displays of affection. Given that the two actresses are also classmates they play off of each other really well and have a very nice relationship that is enhanced through that. They play an important role to the story and Maisaki Rin (Hime) even gets a moment of adlibbing.

One of the great things about PRxPRince was actually the amount of adlibs that were included with each performance. There are several moments in the script where adlibs occur for each performance, similar in the way of the adlibs in shows like Lupin III and Bakumatsu Taiyouden occur. Even though you can tell these adlibs are planned out somewhat in advance it’s nice to see the actresses work with things that are also on the spot sometimes since not everything is completely planned out. Some were funnier than others but that’s all part of the fun of the show and just finding a good balance with the audience. Personally I loved the adlibs even though I couldn’t understand some of them sometimes. Other things that were adlibbed were little gestures here and there that the characters would do that were different with each performance. One of my favorites was watching Kari scold Michiru at one point and one performance Kari leaned over Michiru so much that Michiru’s tiara had bounced back onto her head as she came up. The adlibs definitely made each performance I saw unique and lots of fun especially when the show was in the middle of Japan’s naming for the new era and suddenly 平成 (Heisei) and 令和 (Reiwa) adlibs were added to the mix.

As the ministers figure out the next part in the V3 PR campaign Damian suggests that they host a ball in order to find eligible matches for the princes. A lot of stuff goes down in Act 2 during the ball including Marie showing off her pet bug to literally everyone within range, Elle finding said bug and actually communicating with it, Garrett and Rose playing musical instruments, Valentin doing a slow baywatch walk, and Victor expressing his true feelings towards Elle. At the very end of the show Victor and Elle actually go into the audience to do high-touches with those lucky to be on the aisle seats (alas, I was not one of them). One of the best moments was from the final performance when Top Stars Nozomi Fuuto and Maya Kiho were in the audience and I was able to see Hitoko shake both of their hands in a very sincere gesture since she was so happy both of them could make it to the show.

I talked a bit about the music before but OH MY GOD this show’s music is incredible! It’s very catchy and pleasing to the ear. A lot of the songs are slightly reminiscent of older Takarazuka shows but are also not too old-fashioned sounding. A lot of brass and strings are used in the songs which is very enjoyable. The finale takes it one step further though and incorporates electric guitar.

Yes, I am going to spend an entire paragraph just on the finale because it deserves to be talked about. After the happy ending of the show intense rock music is played as the curtain rises to three figures: Ai Sumire, Kari, and Shouno Chio. A rock version of “Lily’s Song” is played and it is THE BEST THING EVER! After my first viewing I always looked forward to the finale because it starts off super strong and doesn’t disappoint. Ai Sumire is the only one who gets to sing in the finale which is appropriate considering her voice is amazing and is one of the best singers in Yukigumi imo (Daikiho aside, of course). After the villainous trio have their number Hitoko sneakily walks onstage to stand on a platform. She is dressed in a dark blue coat with gold trim and a silk wine red shirt on beneath it. Her blonde wig stays on for the entire time. An instrumental rendition of “Two souls” is played as she descends the stairs, dancing fluidly and gracefully like a swan and takes front and center. The “fuu!” that emits from her lips is enough to make the audience shatter into 1000 pieces. They have fallen under their prince’s spell with the lure of Hitoko’s sanpakugan (this was so effective I was unable to watch this part of the finale with the opera glasses because it was THAT powerful). The rest of the otokoyaku join her shortly afterwards in a dance which evolves into an instrumental “Diana” as Hitoko takes off to change into her next costume while Ayana leads. After the otokoyaku dance they scatter and the musumeyaku all appear in lovely pink dresses. Hitoko has changed into a Prince Charming white military uniform and dances in the center, surrounded by beautiful women, which honestly, the dream. A shift in the music starts and one by one the ladies leave the stage until there is one remaining. But even SHE isn’t the goddess that our prince seeks. Jun Hana makes her way onto a small platform in a gold ball gown similar in style to Belle’s from Beauty and the Beast. When Hitoko turns around and sees her it’s like a wave of happiness rolls through them both and they have a classic waltz set to an instrumental version of “Someday My Prince Will Come” from Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is canonically one of the purest moments in the entire show even though the entire time I watched it I prayed that Hitoko would not trip over Jun Hana’s massive ballgown. The only mishap I saw was on the first day when while twirling Jun Hana to the side she slipped ever so slightly but managed to catch herself gracefully. After their intimate dance they exit together and the curtain call rolls.

This show brought together so many hearts and it was so refreshing to see Yukigumi do a comedy bow hall since it has not been done since the early 2000s. I love this show more than I have loved any Takarazuka show and I feel blessed that I was able to see it live as many times as I did and to be able to share this wonderful experience with others.

#PRxPRince #Yukigumi #Takarazuka #Towaki Sea #Jun Hana #review #Omg this took forever to write up #Congrats if you made it to the end of my rambling #This show means the world to me so thank you for reading

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tinycartridge · 5 years

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Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me. I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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#caroline delbert #original #infinity #sunless sea #her story #telling lies #cultist simulator #sam barlow #alexis kennedy #immortal rogue

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moviegroovies · 5 years

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oh god after last time i really did think i was done but i must have unlocked some new level of hell because here we go, here we go, lost boys hcs PART 3!!!!

so ummmmm michael... is sort of dumb.

like, ok, specifically??? i think he’s got a higher than average emotional intelligence, but he’s just one of those kids who’s bad at school. there’s some hints of this in the movie: when michael is telling sam that he can’t tell lucy about the vampirism thing, sam’s line is that it’s “not like getting a D in school, mike!”, implying that hiding that kind of thing is something the two of them have been over before, and a deleted subplot has him repeatedly insisting to lucy that he’s going to drop out of school to get a job and help her pay for things.

tbh i think he’s got that classic “child of divorce” thing going on. he feels like a burden on sparse resources and can’t stand the thought of wasting his days in school, where he doesn’t even want to be. he wants to help his mom! he gets a job for he so he can do that! what a good, sweet boy!!!

hmmm. dyslexic michael, anyone? like, i was going to say that he was particularly vexed by math & science, but the more i think about it, the more i’m leaning toward him maybe just being disinterested in those subjects, even though they’re the ones he’s better at, while english and history (but particularly english) really piss him off because studying takes so goddamn long.

so he gets like, C+/B- in math and science, consistent C- in history, and wavers C- to D+ or even lower in english.

he’s so polite to his teachers that they help him when they can though, especially because they know he’s trying so hard, but he’s just not entirely gifted at this sort of stuff.

the worst is when he has to keep his grades up to stay eligible for sports--that pressure just makes everything seem so much worse.

i think michael plays some of everything. he’s like, some kind of guard on the football team, not particularly their star player or anything, but i think he’s also got a starter position on the basketball team, and he is the star pitcher on the baseball team.

physical stuff just comes easier to him than academic stuff, you know?

his high school girlfriend was a cheerleader, but they weren’t that serious. she was a kind of preppy girl, a little vapid, and it felt to michael like they only really dated because they were supposed to. breaking up with her kind of led to michael’s attraction to star; he saw her on the boardwalk and she looked like she dressed for herself and she was outwardly enjoying her time at the concert--plus, you know, she’s really pretty.

he hates to admit it, but michael’s favorite classes in school were the home ec classes that his guidance counselor suggested he take. he took shop first, which was okay, but really, what he liked to do the most was the cooking and sewing shit. when he joins the lost boys, he kind of “takes over” these roles from star (who had been pressured into acting the mother for all these assholes who could be her great grandfathers, easily), and it turns out that he’s a lot better at that stuff than she is.

guess he was always kind of training to be david’s bitch after all.

the guys stop ribbing on him once he shows them how he can fix their clothes and shit, though. goddamn assholes.

michael’s main circle of friends in highschool was made up of other jocks, and like with his girlfriend, they weren’t super close. he often got excluded from stuff because he would insist he couldn’t do something or other on account of his mom needing him home that night, or he would get pissed at them for making fun of sam.

michael said family comes first, fuckers!

he did drink and smoke and shit like that back in phoenix when he knew he wouldn’t be missed at home, though. he’s not a goody two shoes, really, he just didn’t want to make things harder than they were for his mom.

one day he did come home drunk, and he’ll never forget how upset lucy looked. he still doesn’t feel like he’s made that up to her. ouch.

one of the guys michael hung out with, probably the closest michael had to a “best friend” was a dude named declan who he’d known since elementary school. declan as the only one of the jock guys who didn’t really hold it against him when he’d skip out on stuff, and the only one he ever even thought about telling the divorce shit to, although in the end, he chickened out of actually doing it.

like i said, they weren’t best friends or anything, but they could have been, y’know?

one of the less nice dudes in his group (probs one michael got in fights with often) started dating michael’s girlfriend about a week after he moved. michael wasn’t really pissed by the time he found out about that; he had way bigger problems to worry about by then.

there was a guy that michael saw around who was kind of a beatnik loner outcast and almost definitely a fag. he liked shakespeare and oscar wilde and probably drew pretty things in the margins of his notebook, and the guys that michael hung out with trashed on him pretty much constantly. michael himself, however, had kind of a thing for the guy: he thought he was cool and would ask when he could to see what he was working on.

you know how michael acted around star at the very beginning of their association? that’s pretty much how he was around this dude. local bi disaster is bi.

the guy (i was going to say fuck it and name him after the guy who i’m sort of basing him on from peggy sue got married, but guess what my fucking luck is, that dude’s name is michael. jfc. let’s call him charlie) thought michael was just there to make fun of him like the others did, but he eventually, he might have come around to trusting that mike really was just interested in his art.

maybe they made out or something before charlie eventually pushed back against him because he didn’t want to get fucking murdered by michael’s friends for making him queer if they got caught

michael always felt like he should have pushed harder to have some sort of relationship with charlie, but once he moves to santa carla, there’s no use in thinking about it anymore.

unlike michael, sam did have a close circle of friends at school, even though he wasn’t as classically “popular” as his brother.

it was probs this reason that made him take the move a lot harder than his brother did.

sam, also unlike michael, was/is really good at school. he’s super skilled at memorizing dates & facts (just look at him rattle off semi-obscure superman trivia lol), and pretty talented at writing to boot. he doesn’t like math as much, but if he works at it, it comes to him pretty quickly.

gifted kid perks™

being that everything came easy to sam, and that he didn’t do any sports like michael did, he had a lot of downtime to read books and comics, keep up w/ pop culture, and hang out with his nerdy friends who liked to do the same. he was even in a d&d group

his character was an elf rogue.

it’s about gay rights

re: sports, it’s not that sam couldn’t be athletic, just that he didn’t ever really want to be. he used to do little league to be like michael and as a concession to his father, but really, he was always put in the outfield, and at the end of the day he would just rather read or watch tv than stand out in the hot sun playing this game he didn’t care about.

when they were little, michael trained himself to get better at reading so that he could read stuff to sam when their parents were fighting or their mom was away. he remembered how his parents (in better times) had read to him, and he knew it made sam feel better, so he put aside his difficulties and discomfort to read to his brother before bed.

the easiest things to read for him were comic books (he had some batmans and supermans and even a few wonder womans, although it wasn’t all superhero stuff. he also had richie rich and, of course, archies), which kind of sparked sam’s love for them--they were something he shared with his brother. <3

i’m thinking sam’s nerd club was the prototypical “mostly boys who never talked to a girl in their lives” type thing, but at the same time i’d like to imagine that at least one of them had a pretty brash (and nerdy) sister who pushed her way into the club, winning their respect by doing what sam did to frog brothers, only with star wars lore.

also, i’m kind of picturing a shy girl from their school who sam takes under his wing when she’s getting bullied, only to find out that she’s really into that stuff too.

she’s part of their d&d campaign; she plays a badass orc barbarian woman and consistently has the best luck with the dice.

the girl is almost definitely a lesbian, but sam asks her to homecoming and stuff like that so that they’ll both have dates; they’re basically each other’s beards.

Gay Rights.

one of the only ways michael could ever really relate to his dad was when they played baseball and the dad taught him Sports™ things, so sam not being at all interested in that stuff made him kind of a disappointment. even still (or maybe for that reason), michael was always the mama’s boy, while sam spent a long time desperate for his dad’s approval.

maybe bc michael and lucy tried really hard to protect him from just how shitty their dad really was, to be honest.

speaking of michael and sam’s dad, i’ve been doing a lot of thinking about him, and now i’ve got Opinions.

contrary to what i guess is the general fandom consensus (at least from what i’ve seen? but my scope might not be that big regarding this character, so if i’m wrong, i’m wrong lol) regarding the dad, i can’t see him being particularly abusive physically.

however, given how sweet and agreeable lucy is, i get a sense that there must have been something REALLY insurmountable in their relationship to make her decide that divorce was the only option. the way i see it, michael and sam’s father started as one of those anti-establishment punks who eventually grew up and just... snapped back the other way entirely to end up as the establishment himself.

main justification for this is that scene w/ michael and star; he doesn’t just refer to his mother being an ex-hippie, he refers to his folks. plus, i mean, there must have been something about the man that endeared him to lucy, right?

so, over the course of their marriage, the guy goes from being a radical dreamer type with maybe some kind punk rock aspirations to being like.... reagan’s “moral majority.”

he starts totally stomping down his old dreams and, in the process, mocking lucy for holding onto anything from their past (you know how she told sam part of the reason she divorced him was that “he never believed in the closet monster”? that was a symptom tbh). i imagine that this, in itself, was soul crushing, but what was really the last straw was when he started in on michael and sam: getting mad and telling michael that he wasn’t going to make it in the MLB and that he had to get his shitty grades up if he wanted to amount to anything (only making him hate school even more lbr), and openly disliking sam’s rejection of sports and stuff in favor of his comic books and MTV.

before the end, i think michael got in a lot of fights with his dad when he’d make passive-aggressive comments at sam for not being enough of a man.

who made you the fucking authority on that, huh?

if he was ever actually physically violent with anyone, it was probably michael during these fights, or mayyyybe even lucy when she’d step in.

eventually, something just tips lucy’s goddamn scales, and she snaps and goes out right then and there to file for divorce. they never saw the point in signing a prenup or anything back then, y’know, so without really fighting for it, lucy wasn’t going to get anything in the divorce.

she doesn’t. they leave arizona with just about the clothes on their backs.

if anyone actually fought against the divorce proceedings, honestly i think it was the dad. he had this idea of his respectable nuclear family, and, even though he was basically an emotionally neglectful POS to his sons, he hated the idea of his wallstreet suit-type coworkers coming to know that his home life was anything less than perfect.

as a last ditch effort, he probably tried to win lucy back at the very last minute, even twisting her arm in an attempt to get her to stay for the boys’ sake, but he clearly no longer knows what attracted her to him in the first place, and the “effort” just makes her sad.

in her mind, she’s already gone by then, you know?

finally, he just ives up and signs the divorce papers. for a hot second it really fucks him up; he goes in to work unshaven and haggard, he’s back to eating like a bachelor, his heart isn’t in what he’s doing. this isn’t about grief over losing his family, though, is the shitty thing. not really. instead, he’s just dealing with uncertainty over how to remake his image.

unfortunately, that’s about as much karma as their dad gets. by the time lucy, sam, and michael are gone for good, he finds it’s easiest to just pretend that they never happened. lucy didn’t demand it, but he sends the occasional bare bones childcare check in the mail and feels like he’s the goddamn father of the year or something, and meanwhile, he remarries a woman that’s both younger and more conservative than lucy, sooner or later fathering a son with her.

lucy isn’t cruel; she doesn’t want the boys to be totally cut off from their father, and even though they both pretty clearly sided with her in the divorce she offers him visitation rights and partial custody (saying that they could stay with him at least every summer and for whatever other holidays he wanted), but he mostly rejects this.

when the boys try to call him to ask, he gives them a noncommittal answer about them maybe visiting next summer, after they’ve all gotten settled in.

they pretty much stop calling after that.

remember how i said michael has an above-average emotional intelligence? he’s definitely the one who helps lucy through the divorce the most. he picks up on the signals she sends about when she needs help and when she needs space, and chides sam for pushing her too hard every now and then.

sam, on the other hand, is definitely a good kid who cares about his mom a lot, but he’s a little more selfish and has a harder time acting like he’s got no problem leaving phoenix for her. the only real fights the two of them get into before all the vampire mess are centered around sam not being sympathetic enough to lucy and michael getting onto him for it.

i think that their dad might end up being a much better father and husband for his new family, and when the eventually visit him long enough to realize this, michael and sam... aren’t sure what to think.

like, they’re glad he’s not repeating the same mistakes he made before, but it’s not fair, is it? to see your little half-brother get the father you always wanted but never got.

their new stepmom is a sweet lady, though. she really does want to try and welcome sam and michael into the family. sam, michael, and their dad all try, but in the end they find it uncomfortable, and the boys know it’s just a facade on all sides to make her happy.

everyone is a little bit relieved when the boys just give up and go back to santa carla.

when michael meets the lost boys (& subsequently learns about dwayne’s past with jasper and, you know, the total boner david has for him, and oh yeah, the fact that these guys are kind of universally gay asf), his only experience with gay shit had been his closeted fumbling with charlie and like, negative stereotypes from media, so he’s kind of amazed by these totally queer dudes who just... take no shit.

like, he gets challenged to a motorcycle race and their leader doesn’t back down at all from the fight michael tries to incite, they take him back to drink and hang out in a semi-nasty man cave. these dudes aren’t what he expects from fags at all (they’re not sissies, and that’s kind of the end of his knowledge about the gay community at that time lol), and he just doesn’t... know what to think about them.

he kind of wants to be them.

like, you know how immediately after seeing them for the first time, michael buys himself a leather jacket and goes to get his ear pierced? there’s a reason for that, babes!

in other news, michael is a cancer and there’s nothing y’all can do about it.

i mean, i have Evidence behind my theory but also i’m just right.

but like, going back to that scene with michael and star again, when he’s introducing himself, you know how he tells her that he was nearly named moonbeam or moonchild or something like that? well, another name for cancers that i’ve seen is moonchildren, after the way cancer is ruled by the moon (and bc the term “cancer” itself has some... other connotations).

in conclusion, lucy really was That Bitch sgdfhghdh

#the lost boys #michael emerson #sam emerson #text post #headcanons #sdfhgh the other ones of these i did i tried to spread shit out between the characters more but here i am #just absolutely MICHAEL POSTING ON MAIN #wait this isn't main #that's alright then #god it's just that. i love him?#also i have no idea where the absolute swarm of ocs that turned up in this post came from but they just kind of... felt right. yknow?#me: gets into the lost boys #me: i hope this doesn't... awaken anything in me

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hub-pub-bub · 5 years

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Whether you’re currently writing a book, querying agents or on submission to publishers, allow me to share this small-but-important truth: There’s an editor out there right now—sorting stacks of pitch letters, book proposals and manuscripts, thumbing through literary agent submissions, reading selections of the manuscripts she requested from authors directly—who is seeking to buy a book similar to yours.

So, in a sense, your future editor is out there thinking about you.

Picture this person for a moment: Perhaps she’s an associate editor for a mid-level imprint, working her way up at a growing publishing company. She majored in creative writing or English literature or journalism in college, where she developed a passion for Jane Austen or Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion or Anne Lamott. Whoever her muse, she knows good writing when she sees it. She wrote articles for the school newspaper or poems for the literary journal, nabbed a good internship after college and she’s worked hard ever since to finally land her dream job—acquiring and editing books full time and getting paid for it!

The 7 Deadly Sins of Novelists (According to Editors)

Now she fills the role of champion for her authors and books. She pitches the books she discovers to her own internal publishing team, during which she makes a case for both the editorial and business side for acquiring said manuscripts.

Her boss expects her to acquire a handful of new books every year, and though she’s still learning and growing into the job, in part, her performance is tied to the performance of her selections. If she acquires and takes a huge financial risk on a book and it bombs a year later, it reflects on her directly. Of course, like anyone in a new position, she needs time to grow and, sure, she might have more seasoned editors guiding her through this journey. But eventually, given a couple of years, her acquisitions become hers to own.

Does all of this create a little pressure on our friendly associate editor? You bet.

Every editor’s list of acquisitions is viewed (especially by management) as their own personal business within the greater publishing company, complete with its own profit and loss statement (P and L). As a result, each individual book might get more or less scrutiny depending on how it fits into the greater scheme. The worse the editor’s books perform, the harder time she’ll have convincing her team to take risks on her projects in the future.

When you’re writing a book, preparing a proposal or query (for publishers or literary agents, because agents make decisions based on whether they think a publisher will be interested), it’s important to think about your future editor. He is a human being, just like you, and every day he is facing the very real difficulties of the changing market, the shifting retail landscape and his own internal company pressures. He, like many editors in this business, hopes to come across something special—a work of unique power or appeal or finesse or authority—that makes him feel like he did in college when he read Jack Kerouac.

As someone who once sat in the editor’s chair at publishers large and small, I know those simultaneous pressures and hopes firsthand. My first publishing job was as a junior editor acquiring and editing 10–12 books a year for a small, family-owned press. To be honest, for a long time I had no idea what I was doing—but I worked hard and soaked up every lesson I could. Despite my inexperience, over the course of several fairly successful years, I found myself the publisher of that small imprint: hustling to make budgets; publishing competitive, influential books; learning the fast-changing worlds of marketing and publicity; and managing a team that shared my goals.

1. Do Your Homework

Every category and genre of publishing is governed by unspoken rules. In the world of traditional trade book publishing, fiction and nonfiction aren’t the same. For instance, most editors sign nonfiction book deals based on one to two chapters. But for fiction, and especially with first-time novelists, editors typically need to read the full manuscript before a deal is done.

If you’re submitting the next high-concept business book to an experienced agent, or an editor at a business imprint, make sure you’ve done your research. Do you know what other books the literary agent has represented, or the editor has acquired in the recent past? Has that press recently published a book like yours?

Immerse yourself in books similar to your own. Read in the category, but also study the jacket, the acknowledgements page, the author’s blog and their previous books. Conduct industry research on publishing houses, editors and literary agents through sites like Publishers Weekly. Attend a conference, watch lectures on YouTube. Read relevant articles, essays and blog posts.

To know a category is to know the world in which your future editor lives every day.

2. Use Concise Communication

The volume of reading material that accrues on the desks of editors and literary agents is immense. These folks read mountains of content every day, sifting through stacks of submissions for eye-catching queries.

Which is why yours should get right to the point—in such a way that compels them to read more. Don’t belabor your initial synopsis or write a three-page email. If in doubt, the fewer words the better. Share a little about yourself, but only the most relevant points.

Most important: Any sample writing you include should read fast and clean. Editors aren’t looking for reasons to reject, per se, but when inundated, it’s far too easy to dismiss a submission for little things like spelling errors, awkward phrasing or poor formatting.

3. Sign With an Agent

Inking a contract with a good literary agent can help avoid some of the above issues. When on submission to publishers, agents almost always get a faster read than unsolicited queries—especially in certain categories. There are several reasons why this is the case. First, most literary agents take the time to build relationships (and a level of trust) with acquisition editors in the genres they work within. Second, because publishing professionals have such limited time, agents effectively serve as a filter, siphoning in projects with higher-caliber content. Plus, most have also taken the time to work with their authors to develop and shape their book concepts, which adds additional value for the publisher.

I’ve also had countless conversations with authors who published their books agentless, and suddenly found themselves in a strange new world with no idea how to navigate it. Their books released to the world and their lofty publishing dreams slowly wilted as they made mistakes, agreed to bad contractual terms, blindly trusted editors, or neglected their marketing and publicity campaigns. The best literary agents act as a trusted guide, thinking through these details long before a deal ever comes to fruition.

4. Grow Your Platform

Here’s a fact of life in modern publishing: Attracting (and holding) attention is difficult in any medium, especially in a world of social media, streaming television and unlimited self-publishing. As a result, presses look for projects with a built-in audience. It’s thus through a platform that authors can do just that.

I define platform as any outward-facing method a writer uses to attract a readership prior to publishing—which will, in theory, translate to that readership purchasing the writer’s book. It can manifest as anything from a YouTube channel, podcast, blog or Twitter following to an email newsletter or college classroom.

Think of your writing as a business, and take the initiative to build your influence via a robust platform, which will only increase your chances of publishing.

5. Forge a Relationship

Once you sign a book deal, you’ll be assigned a “champion.” More often than not, that person is an acquisitions editor or developmental editor, but it may also be the marketing manager or the publisher herself. While every press is different, often that person is your point of contact throughout the publishing process—from beginning to end.

Whoever your point person, be intentional in building that relationship. If possible, meet your champion face-to-face, or at least set up regular phone calls. Get to know her. This small investment of time and effort on your part can pay off big in the long run.

I’ve seen authors send a nice handwritten note after a meeting or a phone call, thanking the participants for their time. And sometimes I’ve seen those simple thank yous tacked to the wall of an editor’s office years later. A small, kind act goes a long way, and when you need a favor down the road, your champion will remember you.

Guide to Literary Agents 2019

6. Remember to Engage

Shift your thinking about the publishing process: Turning in your manuscript is not the end, but the beginning. The more engaged you are at each subsequent stage, the better chance your book has of making an impact in the market. Writing a terrific manuscript is step one, but you must also help to market, publicize and sell.

Seek to be included in the key publishing decisions along the way, including the final title, cover design, marketing and publicity strategy and so on. Believe it or not, each of these things is regularly decided without the author’s input—but by becoming a part of these decisions, you can bring your vision to the table.

7. Be Your Book’s CMO

Remember: You are your book’s Chief Marketing Officer. You are its first and last advocate. Be clear that this book is still your baby, while remaining cordial and professional.

Consider setting aside some of your advance (if you received one) to help market your book when the time comes. Thinking that far ahead is tough, but every bit of marketing is important: strong Book 1 sales pave the way for Book 2.

If you know your publisher’s marketing strategy (presuming you’ve stayed engaged in the process), then you can supplement it. For example, if the publisher focuses on store placement, ads in industry magazines, focused banner ads and a book tour, then perhaps you invest in hiring a freelance publicist to line up TV, radio or print interviews.

Once you’ve garnered a book deal, it’s easy to sit back and let the professionals handle everything for you. But resist, for your own sake (and the sake of your book). Your book is your baby. When it gets out into the world, you’re the best one to teach it how to walk.

You’ve devoted hours, days, months—even years— to writing and editing your novel or nonfiction book. With all that time invested, it’s natural to want recognition for your hard work and dedication. Take your writing one step further and tackle the publishing process. When you enroll in this online course, you’ll learn the details of the query letter format and how to write a query letter that catches the attention of agents and publishers. Learn more and register.

#writing #writers #authors #editors #publishing

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thedeadflag · 5 years

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Hey, pretty soon I'll be playing a friend of mine is gonna be DMing Tyranny Of Dragons for me and a couple of friends, and I can't decide whether I should play a Monk (probably Open Hand, maybe Kensei) or a Ranger (either Beastmaster or Horizon Walker), 'cause I've never played either of those classes, nor has anyone at the tables I've played. Can you tell me a little about your experiences with these classes?

The Ranger has been one of my favourite classes throughout the editions of D&D in terms of flavour, and I’ve had some fun with monks as well. In 5th edition, both took a fair bit of a hit in utility (individual and within group dynamics) and power at pretty much all ranges. The Ranger was propped back up a little bit in Unearthed Arcana in the revised ranger archetype, but both are still largely considered at best middle of the road classes, and at worst, the lowest tier of classes in the game in utility and character.

That’s not to say they can’t be fun and have a lot of flavour, and still find use. If you’ve watched Critical Role, you can see Vex and Beau weren’t useless by any stretch. No class is junk in 5e due to the improved parity compared to some past editions. So power and utility aside, if you feel drawn to any class/subclass, and you want to dive into its particular brand of flavour, then I say go for it. I would gauge the rest of the party’s makeup in making your decision, because group synergy is important, but you have to make yourself happy, too, right?

Anywho, I’ll break down my take on both.

When it comes to Monks, I like Open Hand the best. If you want to have a Monk-style gameplay with weapons, then Mystic or Fighter are probably better options with some more flair and utility involved than Kensei imo, but if that’s the route you want to take, it’d be alright. However, Open Hand has quivering palm, which is pretty incredible late game as far as damage and flexible timing from a single person through 3 ki pts and an action. If you do ever reach level 17, I would recommend multiclassing after that if you’re allowed, since the rest of the Monk’s class progression is kind of junk in comparison, and it could use some much needed utility from 3 levels of another class. Anywho, I like open hand not just for the flavor of being a class that’s capable of being an unarmed beast in battle, but also because of the way it can work in alignment with fighters who can also control the battlefield, like any fighter with a sentinel/polearm master. The ability to shove an enemy up to 15ft with one of your flurry attacks, launching them into the range of a fighter who gets a free opp attack against them and can from then on lock down their movement with a successful hit? That can be an excellent tag team. The Monk isn’t excellent for utility, but the Open Hand technique is probably the best at providing utility in combat among all the monk disciplines. Like, another option after hitting with flurry of blows is to steal all reactions for the opponent until the end of your next turn. This can be especially helpful against casters, as stealing reactions = preventing counterspells. And Monks can get a lot of attacks = lots of attempts to disrupt concentration of enemy casters, so the open hand monk is especially helpful at being a designated mage wrecker with having the mobility to reach casters and the ability to destabilize them. It’s arguably the one thing (aside from unarmed damage) that (this one kind of) monks do better than just about anyone else, arguably.

Now, to Rangers.

Honestly, I don’t like beast-focused Rangers. I think they’re a lot of work in order to get the mechanical payoff most other classes can achieve without a lot of thought or effort. Generally, any class that can let me focus more on flavour and RP is one I’m going to prefer, and beast master’s just…unwieldy. A lot of people say the class is junk, and if you run it without getting into the headspace for optimizing, it’s probably going to be more of a frustrating experience than you’d have hoped for. With BMs, you’re managing not just your character, but your companion, and you have to keep up with the different mechanics of both, you need to be 100% on top of choices made while leveling up, you need to have a strong understanding of battlefield control and your companion’s capabilities from the get go, and you really ought to be the kind of player who is happy to take a backseat to everyone else in and out of combat because the way you’ll shine is by helping everyone else do what they do with a little bit higher odds of success than otherwise. Personally, I like playing that sort of character, but I can do all of that with other classes a lot easier, and usually better, so this isn’t the kind of archetype I’d choose for a character myself. If you really want to, and think it’s cool, go for it, though.

The first thing I’d do is ask if you can use the UA revised ranger instead of the PHB ranger if you’re going the beast route (it’s “beast conclave” archetype in UA). If your DM allows that and insists you choose your companion from the list provided here, take the wolf (pack tactics is v helpful, same with 40ft speed and being able to send enemies prone after attacking) or ape (climb 30ft, melee/ranged ability, good stat baselines).

The second thing you’ll need is to lock down a quality companion, and that can take a bit of wheeling and dealing with your DM to let you use one of the supplementary books as a source, which is especially necessary if you’re not able to use the revised ranger class from UA. You do not want a hawk, mastiff, or panther, the PHB offers some shit examples out of the gate (panther and hawk are only conditionally good if you’re only ever going to have your companion rushing around the map using the ‘help’ action, or scouting to some extent, and the latter becomes less useful and reliable the higher level you become). Don’t choose a CR 0 companion, or one under ¼. If you absolutely must use a hawk for character flavor, then a blood hawk that at least has pack tactics would be a must. But if you are hoping for a companion that can do damage, look for something with certain damage if it hits, like added poison damage. Look for good AC if you want a tank. Look for versatility in mobility and senses. Look for special abilities (the boar having a relentless ability where it’ll go back to 1HP if it falls below 0; the wolf spider has web walk and web sense which can really help with casters using web if players don’t want to wade into the difficult terrain or are having difficulty finding enemies caught in the web; etc.)

But yeah, beast-focused rangers will be best when they’re spamming the help action with their beasts, using their beasts to get enemies out of cover, using their beasts to help control the field and give others advantage/take advantage, etc. You need to be quick mentally to know what you want to do with your character and your companion each time your turn comes around (most DMs, myself included, aren’t going to let you have as much time as you need to figure out what you want to do on both fronts, so if you can’t juggle two characters at once without losing a step, it might not be the archetype for you). This type of ranger requires you to know exactly what you want to be able to accomplish for yourself and your party right out of the gate, so you’ll want to gauge what your party members will be specializing in, what they want to be able to do, and see if there’s a way to shape your ranger to aid in that, particularly in choosing a beast that can be the most effective in ensuring that. Group cohesion is the name of the game with this form of ranger, so you’ll want to consider race selection a part of this process, too. I’ve had one player bomb hard as a BM and re-roll a different ranger, and I’ve had a friend who ran one who was the group’s unsung hero a lot of the time during their campaign. If you’re looking at Vex from CR as inspiration, keep in mind she had an excellent set of stats from lvl 9 onwards, and plenty of magical weapons to make up for much of any class shortcomings as characters scale up…look at how often Trinket was useful (very rarely) and understand that the bear was essentially just flavour for most of the campaign, and Vex would have been considerable underpowered compared to the rest of the party if not for some considerable DM intervention in ways that make things a lot trickier for DMs (adding magical weapons/items can easily unbalance a campaign, and it’s a matter of experience in knowing how to dole them out without throwing balance aside…Matt Mercer’s comfortable handing out flying carpets and multiple +2AC items and superpowered magical weapons by level 9, I wouldn’t give them out before level 14 or 15 and it would really only be if a player was severely struggling and refused to re-roll a more appropriate character while dying or nearly dying most combats). Other classes and archetypes have features and abilities that scale as you level, some earn specific spells as they level up that others can’t get, etc., but with beast conclave rangers, it’s their beast that slightly improves in a few meaningful ways. So if you’re going that route, you need to commit to a great beasts that’s a great fit for you and your party, and you need to commit to making the absolute most out of them and knowing how to make the most out of them.

Horizon Walker’s a simpler archetype that has some badass spells, but the flavour for the class can be a bit…strange in some adventures. It might not fit well with Tyranny of Dragons, I’m not sure how much planar travel’s involved in that adventure. Which might not be a problem for the DM, or you. I still prefer the UA ranger conclaves, but out of the PHB ones, this one’s probably the best of the bunch, even if it’s mostly going to lean towards being a melee build (which, again, check your party comp to see if that’s something that is workable).

Anywho, those are my late night D&D ramblings. You can take my words with a grain of salt if you’d like, and as always the rule of cool applies…if you think it’s cool and you really want to go with something, go for it and I hope the DM will find a way to help you make it work, but yeah, these classes can be a bit of an uphill battle, though I suppose potentially a rewarding challenge if that’s what you’re looking for.

Best of luck with the campaign, I’m sure you’ll have fun!

#d&d #long post #Anons

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