BrokenPromise

Symphony on High

@Vertigo I don't think there's going to be a ton of times where you'll need to communicate with someone 30 stories above you, but fair enough. So long as we're on the same page about using this special in the operation area we can leave it be. just lemme know when you've finished editing her sheet and then she can get summoned to the character tab.

Aaaaaand today is GM update day, so character sheet tryouts are closed until this operation ends. If anyone else is interested in joining, just come back in a few months once downtime starts again.

Symphony on High

@Vertigo Cool character. I'm eager to see them in action, but there's just a few things we need to take care of first.

-Her Instrument special is too strong VS mobs. She could turn a mass of enemies into her personal army really quick, which is a bit beyond what a silver should do. Just tag a "One summon per 6 seconds" on there and it's fine.

Deepen shadows adds +1 to about 4 different stats, might as well just mention it ranks up everything to keep things simple.

Leitmotif needs a range so that it's not infinite. 150 feet-ish is fine. I just don't want her contacting people well outside the mission area. At silver anyway.

Ciri needs a PR. Even if it's just bronze, she does get some starting gear.

Make those changes and you'll have our first Maverick esper! Well, first player controlled one anyway.

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"A’ight, I’ma head out now.”

— Suki Oyama

Three magical girls, all with different reactions.

Bed “Roach” Shaker had the sort of reaction that Suki expected. Ever since the “incident,” she had been making an effort to get closer to Suki. Closer as in distance wise. Suki was a little fuzzy on the details, but she vaguely remembered Nyx instructing them to fight, at which point a transformed Suki took advantage of the fact that Roach hadn’t transformed yet and basically used her magic to seduce her into submission. It was an effective way to defeat her opponent without actually harming them. However, it required Suki to take away Roach’s emblem, wrap her in tentacles, and finish her off with a barrage of kisses. This detail was a little fuzzy, but Suki almost remembered stripping her bra through her sleeve during the brief exchange. It was hard to say. When Suki looked at her collection this morning it wasn’t there. But even without that detail, it was a humiliating way to lose a sparring match, especially as the club’s code enforcer, who should be strong enough to handle any individual club member. Any effects her magic might have had on Roach had long worn off. Needless to say, there was only one reason why Roach would regard her with any kindness after that. She was the type to beat the track club members into shape, and they never did anything to her.

Nyx’s reaction was more of a surprise. Yes, she worded it in a particularly unflattering way, but a flat out rejection would have been a far worse blow to Suki’s plans. Thinking back on it, her relationship with Nyx was almost the opposite of Roach. They seemed to get along fine when they first met, but then after Suki beat Roach during the “incident”, it seemed like it soured her to Suki. Or was it the food she made that day? It was so long ago she couldn’t remember. But Nyx loved blowing apart Endless Eclipse with her ray gun. Suki would have called that night a success. Yet she had regarded her poorly ever since. Had she not beaten Roach fair and square? Did she find her powers repulsive? It was hard to know. Nyx only came to the school when club activities were going on, so it wasn’t like they could talk it out between classes.

Rainbow’s reaction was also expected, but that had less to do with some far off event that shaped their relationship and more to do with her familiarity with Tsubomi. She wasn’t clear on the details, but Tsubomi had a really bad trip and lost the ability to feel her own emotions. It was even weirder when you realized her magic was empathic by nature and was bolstered by being saturated with emotion. It was as tragic as being a deaf musician or a blind painter, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Even her most powerful spells didn’t raise any desire in Tsubomi at all. It was really sad. Suki sometimes wondered if there was some way to break the curse, or restore her emotions. She didn’t even really get how Tsubomi could live like that. If Suki was like that, she wasn’t sure if she would ever do anything.

Expected or not, all of the answers made Suki uncomfortable for one reason or another. Roach’s strange optimism, Nyx’s foreshadowing, and Tsubomi’s attempts to be optimistic.

"Uh, heh, right…” Suki took one last look at her handiwork before folding it up and slipping it into her pocket. "Welp, let’s get a move on! We’ll have to look over the place and see if we notice anything strange.” Was there a reason to come up with definitive plans when you were recruiting dark magical girls? They were all going to do what they wanted anyway.

Except…

Suki took hold of Tubomi’s wrist and ran out the door with her.

---

Hibusa Town was small, and so was its flower shop. It wasn’t any bigger than the average living room. That said, there were plenty of reasons for the inhabitants to buy flowers. The end of the school season, birthdays, weddings, and visits to shrines, the hospital, funerals, and gravestones were always better if you brought flowers. Despite the shop being in a small, outdated building, it managed to do well enough to stay afloat. The interior was almost filled to the brim with flowers. An older woman was taking everything inside in preparation to close for the night. It wouldn’t be long now. The sun was already dipping below the horizon.

There were a few buildings around, many of which were taller than the flower shop. It was located at the edge of town near a three-way intersection, so there were ample places to watch from. Everyone knew that a magical girl’s favorite place to run was along rooftops, so that was where Suki decided to wait. They just had to stay out of the dragon girl’s assumed path so that she didn’t get spooked.

"Feels like it’s been months since we did something together, heh!” Did Tsubomi even enjoy small talk? Did it make her tired? Suki had always avoided asking. "Did you want to do something later? I mean, we never played that arcade game. We should do that if you’re not busy after this.”

PC Gaming Beginner.

Try this

Gaming laptops are always expensive and never perform as well as their desktop counterparts. Expect to pay extra for the novelty of carrying around your computer. Also keep an eye out for other features you may want, like blue tooth comparability and built in wireless. Most stuff like that can be added on by buying a dongle, but it can be kind of a hassle if you use certain features daily.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Lith Now I want to see how many hours you've logged fishing.

A World of Magic Roleplay Interest Check!

Is this still open?

Gush about your favorite characters!

@hanzo I'm not sure what's more remarkable, that you came to a month old topic to edit your favorite character, or that I chose to drop by on a whim.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

I've certainly played more card games than roguelike deck builders. But, Deep Sky Derelicts, Slay The Spire and Hand Of Fate (all have deck building elements.) And I very briefly tried Roguebook recently. Do not recommend.

@SleepingSilence

Shit, I haven't played any of those.

(But maybe the mods you played it with, make the actual deckbuilding part more substantive.)

It does, but if you don't like rougelites, you aren't going to like it. Especially on the harder difficulties. I like that you aren't always going to get an epic run, and the caveat to that is that sometimes you're not going to win when you have every challenge in the game activated at the same time.

Also, to reiterate, it's not a true mod. It's an expansion game mode that can't be played until you beat the base game.

I think Inscryption has plenty of elements that help it stand out. (That ARG puzzle sh*t that it included, certainly helped market it through FOMO.) But you can experience it's art style and music (its general aesthetics that make it unique) in a Let's Play. Least in my two cents.

I still don't get the appeal of ARGs, or watching other people play videogames. I did that as a teen and 5 minutes in I had to ask for the controller or go do something else.

How many deck builders (or meta games) have you played / how would Inscryption rank amongst them?

Aside from the card games windows ships with, virtually every digital card game I've played has been some type of deck builder. I struggle to name a lot of them because the bulk of what I played was on kongregate just when people were starting to figure out that micro-transactions were a really easy way to make money on a low effort project. Most of these games were just dumbed down versions of "magic the gathering" or "insert other popular card game here." The best ones were fun, the worst ones were whaling farms that required cash to make any real progress. Hearthstones was better than all of them, but it lacked single player options. Shadowverse was awesome, but it did what Hearthstone decided to do and has seasonal cards to keep people playing. I'm sure I've played others, but it's been too long and I can't think of them. Unless a game is absolutely amazing, I tend to forget about it after I played it a year or so ago. My steam library scares me.

But now that I have my steam library up, looks like I also played Card City Nights. I've also played a lot of triple triad in FF14 & 8, if mini games count.

This might surprise you to hear, but "meta games" don't do a whole lot for me. Yes, undertale was a fine game, but that's despite the meta stuff rather than because of it. Most of the time it comes off as an attempt to be silly, or to make a story feel more important than it really is. "Hey guys, this game you're playing is a game!" "Wow, really? I had no idea! Here I thought I was really murdering/getting murdered, but it's all a game! I should have known!" Inscryption dodges this bullet by being just a few layers deep and never truly goes full meta, even if you think it does early/mid game.

Inscryption is a difficult game to compare to other games because of the way it carries itself. It's not a true meta game, advancing through the main story requires you to step back away from the card game, it just does a lot of things very differently. How many card games even bother to have stuff like stories in them beyond some lore for window dressing? It's also not the sort of game you can really play pvp like so many others. It's very much you against a dungeon master that plays by different rules than you do. If I had to judge it based on games like it, I'd have to give it a solid 1/1.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@SleepingSilence my condolences for your time spent in Remnant 2.

Haven’t heard of that one. But the youtuber sphere seems to like that game (and its sequel) a lot too.

I haven't tried the sequel. 2d games that go 3d tend to lose a lot of their speed, or rather, there's more information to take in visually and they can't be played as fast. But I can only beat the original when I play it on co-op, which is weird because friendly fire is always on and everyone says it's objectively the hardest way to play it. So uh, yea, might check it out when I can beat the original on my own.

It really, really has nothing to do with my liking of the genre. Inscryption is more specifically a "deck builder" game anyway. And not every card game is a deck builder. (And very few deck builders are anything like Inscryption.)

What are some deck builders that you've played?

Yes, a bad concept is a bad concept in every genre. I agree. (So whether or not I got to the point where that scripted loss happened. I would’ve and it wouldn’t feel fun. And I’ve seen several different let’s plays of this game. It’s not RNG. If you play Inscryption. You will get guaranteed failed runs.)

Most times when you play a game, you want to make progress. So when you play and actively lose progress instead. It can feel like a tedious experience.

Welcome to roguelite/like games, enjoy your stay.

And I can't stress how unimportant your first few runs are. what you do off the card table is a lot more important, until it's not of course.

Unless you’re mistaken, or I suffered a glitch. I did not get to keep my rewards for solving the puzzles between runs. I lost those cards when I lost my run. So that is *not* my experience playing Inscryption.

The cards you unlock in the puzzle box are largely irrelevant for progression, and are more added to the current game and can be found again in later runs. The talking cards and items for getting the talking cards that you get will always be in your hand on a fresh run and are the only thing that's essential for progression. By puzzles, I meant all of them, like the coo-coo clock. I forget exactly which ones are required for the talking cards, but none of that stuff resets between runs for the most part.

reddit

My third eye has opened.

So because I wasn’t really enjoying it. (And my reward for solving the game’s puzzles were cards that I lost forever due to unfair odds.) I chose not to stick around.

You didn't lose them forever. You can get them again in another run. You'd know that if you played more than a handful of runs. But it doesn't sound like you enjoyed it, so you probably shouldn't. I'd find a nice metroidvania to snuggle up to, or something in the vein of "Dust: An Elysian Tail."

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"I got the message, Tsubomi!”

— Suki Oyama

One by one, they piled in.

Typically, Suki would wait for a few people to show up before making an entrance. It was the best way to ensure that she was never alone with Bedshaker. But this was difficult to do when you were the one calling the meeting. She could hear her on the other side of the door, but the time to change her hiding spot had long passed, and she was quickly noticed. But maybe if she just ignored her, someone else would arrive before long.

And while Suki was right, it wasn’t exactly the person she was hoping to find. Nyx would probably just watch Bedshaker pound her to dust if anything happened. She was surrounded now, and it didn’t seem like being silent would be a winning strategy for much longer.

"Uh, well, actually…” Suki’s head twitched. Tsubomi had just taken a seat not too far away from the table. Salvation! She scurried out from under the table like a crab.When she stood up, her spine made an audible crack. "Oh hi Tsubomi! I guess that’s everyone for now?” Of course it was, everyone else had other things to tend to. "But to answer your question, Nyxia Torrentia: Neon Tempest of the Ultraviolet Rainbow, the answer to your question is both!”

Suki pulled a page out from between two books and slapped it down on the table. It had originally been the cover of a teen fashion magazine, but parts of other photos had been glued over it to frankenstein a portrait of some sort. "We’ve been hearing about a new magical girl for a while now, but nobody’s actually seen her. You know how Boss Baby is, they tend to leave well enough alone if they don’t directly threaten the Detention Club. But I asked around and got a few details about a ‘spirit’ running across some rooftops. She’s got wild red hair, uh, red eyes, uh, a tight dress, uh, and her uh…” Suki patted her chest. "She’s pretty top heavy. Some guys told me she was bigger than Roach. And had a bunch of dragons coming out of her back. I tried to make a picture of her by clipping out pictures from magazines, and the people who saw her said it sort of looked like her!”

Suki gestured towards the picture she made. It was difficult to determine how accurate it was without knowing what the woman in question looked like, but there might have been other issues with it. But that would be for every girl observing the picture to decide for themselves.

Artistic rendition of the mysterious magical girl

"I took some liberties with the outfit, since everyone described it differently. B-But a lot of people see her in the same spot!” Suki shot a smile at everyone. "They usually see her jumping over the flower shop juuuuuuust as the sun sets. The Miseria don’t come out until total darkness, so we should have plenty of time to investigate this before our nightly hunt starts. Wadaya think guys? Sounds interesting, right?” Suki looked at everyone to gauge their reactions.