ugh

[kindkit]

I have managed to feel worse now, at the end of my weekend, than I did at the start. Go me?

I think my bad cold may have turned into bronchitis, because my chest feels tight and sore and it's hard to breathe deeply, and also I feel SO TIRED. On the other hand, I'm not coughing and I don't have a fever.

In my weakened state, my willpower failed me and I re-downloaded Best Fiends. I had it once before, but I deleted it after two days because I couldn't do anything else but play. We'll see how that goes. I've spent a lot of the afternoon playing, but it's not like I could have been doing much else.

I also started listening to the Rusty Quill Gaming podcast. I'm not sure yet if I enjoy it or not, apart from my fondness for those participants who are also voice actors in The Magnus Archives. But it is a thing to occupy my brain while I lie in bed feeling terrible.

Am now attempting to cook dinner.

Comments

[kindkit]

Belated and very quick response: one of my objections to plotting is that it feels mechanical to me. What RQG is making me think about is, basically, leaning into that, accepting that it is mechanical but that doesn't make it bad storytelling. The opposite, in fact.

I don't know why, thinking about it now, this was such a mental stumbling block for me. I very much believe in fiction as a craft, not as divine inspiration, but somehow I never connected that to plotting.

It's also potentially helpful for me to think of plot as a plan that can be affected by character choices (because sometimes things taken unexpected turns) rather than as "on page 83 they will have arrived at the spooky warehouse."

[rydra_wong]

It occurs to me that you've got an interesting potential mental model in terms of the game world/Alex/the author offering the characters a series of potential plot hooks and choices, but the characters themselves deciding how they react.

And there's obviously a huge amount that Alex has planned and prepared in advance -- he knows what's going on with the Simulacrum, the weird weather, the Harlequins, there's stuff that's paying off seasons after it was set up, etc. -- but the characters have huge freedom to wander around within that world,

[rydra_wong]

One of the things that also really interests me about RQG is that they're using a system which is infamously "crunchy" and mechanics-heavy, but they're using all of it as fuel for story.