rowyn

Back in 2015, I was an avid fan of Failbetter Games’s Fallen London. I bought Sunless Sea, another game in the same setting, when it was released. Sunless Sea was intended as a roguelike: when your avatar died, you started the game over from the beginning (though you could inherit some stuff from your last avatar). It had an ‘easy mode’ to avoid permadeath, but discouraged players from trying that.

I played the game for around three hours total, over the course of a few days. By that point, I was bored of re-playing the same content after dying. Rather than switching to the ‘easy mode’, I quit playing after my next death.

About two weeks ago, Vicorva streamed Sunless Sea for one session, and I thought about trying the game again.

A few days later, I fired it up. I thought about playing on default mode again and immediately noped out. I didn’t remember how the ‘easy mode’ worked and didn’t find anything under options, so I searched the web. I came upon this thread on Steam.

To summarize: one respondent said ‘Merciful Mode’ lets you keep a second save (so you can restore from that instead of restarting on death) but that this doesn’t help much because you can still only save when in port. A different respondent outlined how to edit the autosave.json file to give yourself as much money as you want.

I went ‘huh’, then went off to do something else.

I have no tolerance for cheating in a competitive game: if my cheating will make someone else’s game experience worse, clearly I should not cheat.

But in a single-player, non-competitive game like Sunless Sea, what I do only affects me. This is a game that I have owned for 8 years and played for a total of three hours, 8 years ago.I have already tried the normal mode and decided it’s not for me. Whether I decide from here to continue with “don’t play at all” or “cheat”, no one but me benefits or is harmed.

I’ve never actually hacked or even run a mod on a game before, though. When I’ve cheated in single-player games in the past, it’s been via save-scumming or some other exploit of the game mechanics. (Or by looking up solutions online to puzzles I can’t solve or don't have the patience for.)

So a few days ago, I decided to try the ‘edit the autosave’ idea. The thread was from seven years ago and I half-expected it wouldn’t work: I’d corrupt the save or it would have no effect, either because I did it wrong or because Failbetter had changed the save file. But the cheat worked just as described. I also wasn’t sure how much difference having limitless money would make to game play.

I restarted the game and the tutorial went “Wow, you have a lot of money. You should buy a better ship!” So I bought a better ship and some better equipment to put on it and then went zailing.

And then paid the premium to buy more fuel and supplies at the first port I reached because I was low on both.

And then loaded up on both fuel and supplies at the next port because I didn’t need free cargo space for anything in particular.

I zailed about for two hours, exploring and reading the story bits and Doing Things. My expensive ship was tough enough to win the accidental battles I got into.

The game was actually fun.

I haven’t played since, because I don’t spend a lot of time on games anymore and my sister came into town on Saturday night so I spent Sunday with her. (She came for a work conference and is dealing with that today.) But I expect I will play more during my vacation this week. It’s nice to finally get some enjoyment out of this game I got all those years ago.

After I finished Boyfriend Dungeon, I still wanted to play more of it. This prompted me to dig up my Steam code for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! I’d backed MG:SB! at about the same time as Boyfriend Dungeon. MG:SB! had fulfilled a year and a half earlier, and it turned out I’d added my code to Steam already. Now I installed it!

Tone

Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! and Boyfriend Dungeon are similar in some respects: they’re both dating sims with another game type added as the mechanic for advancing to the next romance installment, and neither of them are striving for a realistic/gritty/serious tone. But Boyfriend Dungeon is much more serious than MG:SB. MG:SB! is a goofy lampoon of Victorian England, wealth, wealthy people, gentility, capitalism, business, and imperialism. It is not a serious critique of these things; it is not serious in any respect. It is an absurd fantasy romp.

The game premise is:

You are a wealthy business owner in Victorian England, capably assisted by your servants, Business Maid and Battle Butler. Your company is stolen by your rival. In order to regain it, you must create a new business, forge alliances and relationships with wealthy business owners who will become executives in your new company, and grow your business until you can defeat your rival in Business Combat.

The relationships you forge don’t have to be sexual, but as one might guess from the name, the game offers that option and generally leads you in that direction.

So this concept is full of stuff ranging from “problematic” to “ZOMG NO.” From the “you are doing WHAT with your executive staff” to “business in Victorian England was a dystopian nightmare” to “wait you are sexually harassing your servants too” to the entire loyal-servant-to-rich-person trope. If it were played straight, it would be hard not to find it appalling.

But nothing about it is remotely serious. It’s a goofy fantasy, and it has no pretensions that any of this would be OK in any form of reality. It’s not saying “wouldn’t it be great it ...?” It’s much closer to “wouldn’t it be ridiculous if ...?”

I laughed a lot while playing this game. It’s not great for romance or erotica, but I did find its over-the-top absurdism very entertaining.

Diversity

You get to design your own avatar and also, amusingly, the avatar of Your Rival, one of the game’s antagonists. The character designer lets you pick from six body types, three feminine and three masculine, with builds of slender/average/plump. You don’t pick a gender and all of the character options are available regardless of body type. So you can pick, for example, “thin feminine body in a suit with a beard”. You do pick one of three titles: “sir,” “ma’am,” or “boss.” The game never genders you regardless of the title or body you pick: it refers to you in the second-person or by your chosen title. There’s a reasonable array of skin colors and hair types and suchlike to pick from. You can redesign your own avatar or your rival’s at any time, no cost.

The game has 6 male and 6 female romanceable characters; there are no nonbinary characters in the cast. The romanceable characters are all protagonist-sexual (and frankly, no one knows what your gender is anyway). Two of them are POC (with wavy dark hair and brown skin) and the rest are white. There is very little mention of ethnicity or race for any of the cast.

The body types for most of the cast are “conventionally attractive”, although they cover a range within that -- slender, curvy, wiry, muscular. Likewise, they’re all young. The only one who’s fat/old is Sinterklaas, a white man with a white beard and hair. (His canon age is 42. I am So Old, folks.) Yes, he’s basically Santa Claus. When I first saw him, I thought: “... don’t think I want to date Santa but okay.”

By the end of the second date with him, I was like “nope, changed my mind, I am so here for the Santa romance line.” Unexpectedly endearing.

Gameplay

There are three basic elements to the game:

• Dating: After you hire an executive, you can raise your affection with them to unlock “dates”. (Many of the early “dates” are not particularly date-like). There are five different dates, plus initial meetings, with each of twelve different executives. During the dates, you make frequent choices about how to respond. The choices have some short-term effect on how the date goes, but no long-term consequences for the relationship, or impact on the next date. You can also replay dates you already unlocked at any time, and explore different options on them, which is a great touch.
  
• Business: This is a kind of leveling/worker placement game. You assign executives to various tasks. Some of those tasks require skill, and you can assign executives to train those skills up at a cost of money. Your overall goal is to pay back your loans (which gives you stuff) and conquer districts (which also give you stuff) and eventually defeat your rival (which lets you “win” and then repeat the cycle).
  
• Lunch dates: You can take your executives on “lunch dates” to increase affection with them, which involves a variety of simple minigames. The minigames are randomly chosen and the weakest part of the game for me. They are quick and most of them are luck-based.

I was much better at the business game in MG:SB! than I was at the dungeon stomp in BD, to the surprise of no one who knows my game preferences. Despite this, I found the business game too grindy. This is mostly because Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! has a lot more romantic interests than BD (12 versus 7) and partly because it takes longer to advance in ranks. Unlike BD, where you get a big bonus to finishing the other romance lines after you finished one, there’s no change to the rate at which you increase affection in MG:SB!

I should note that I am enormously tempted to play more of MG:SB! even though I finished all the romances and completed what there is of the main storyline. So the business game may be grindy, but it’s still fun too.

Main Storyline

The main storyline -- how your business is stolen, how you get it back, why you need to repeat this cycle -- was absolutely wild for the first two iterations of the cycle. At the end of the third cycle, a brief cutscene implies that when you max all the romances, there will be another significant installment in the main story.

Alas, there isn’t. I do not regret maxing out all the romances, but I was disappointed that the end of that cycle was just another brief scene that didn’t resolve any of the outstanding questions from previous scenes.

I don’t regret maxing out all the romances, but I wanted to warn other players that you should only do this if you want to see the romance lines. The third cycle and the final cycle have a few little bits of main story, but there’s no elaborate main story installments like the first and second cycle had.

DLC

The Kickstarter for Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business unlocked some stretch goals that were not included in the original game. The developer has been working on a DLC that will include that and other additional content. That DLC, “The British Is Coming”, isn’t out yet, but the studio’s twitter account says it’ll be out in October. It’s announced as a free DLC (and will be included with the Kickstarter at a minimum), so I’ll definitely dust off the game and play it again then. Assuming I don’t go through another round of it sooner. >_>

Censor Modes

The standard version has three different censor modes, which really only apply to the gallery pictures and the eventual “nude” versions of the characters you can unlock. But the standard game’s “uncensored” version is still censored. There’s a free DLC called “Max Gentlemen: Sexy Business! Uncensored” which actually removes the censor bars.

None of the game content is what I’d call “porn”. Some of the gallery pictures are suggestive, but for the most part it amounts to “there’s some nude art of the dateable characters if you want to make a point of looking at that.”

Content Warning

I’ve covered most of the things that I might content-warn for under “tone”. But I do want to note that the second cycle of the business game features the antagonist mind-controlling people, including your avatar.

tl;dr

Fun, absurd and goofy, with some mild adult content that you can easily opt out of. I enjoyed the game. It took me about 32 hours to finish all the romances and the last playthrough of the business cycle. Do recommend.

Since Niantic removed the "walk 3km before you can play a round in the Battle League" requirement, I've been playing in the Battle League a lot more often. To my surprise, I enjoy the Battle League even though I'm not usually a big fan of PvP with strangers.

I'm also getting to be moderately good at it. I've won 154 of 269 games played, which is not amazing but I will absolutely take "better than average."

There are three "tiers" in the Battle League, with the Great capping at the lowest combat power of the three (1500), Ultra capping at 2500, and Master League having no cap. I think the theory here was that the Great tier would let people who haven't been playing long and don't have the most powerful Pokemon have a rank where they can compete. In practice, you're not going to have a competitive team unless you've been playing assiduously for a very long time.

Lots of people have been playing longer than I have, but I have been an avid player for a year and a half.

Last Friday, March 6, I banged my head against the Great League, trying to get in three wins to finish a special research mission in time for a Saturday event. I lost a few games disastrously, did some online research, and put together a new team, which lost somewhat less disastrously. After winning one game out of eight, I ended up whining to Terrycloth to lose a couple of games to me on Saturday morning (Terrycloth is a good friend. ❤️)

I thought that I might have risen to the level of my incompetence: I had made it to rank 8 of the pre-season Battle League, mostly on the strength of my Master team. The Battle League started Season One recently, and reset everyone's ranks. I thought I might do better in the new season.

I did do a little better, but still badly. On Saturday (March 14), I spent much of the morning once again researching the optimal pokemon for the Great League, scrutinizing my existing collection of pokemon, and taking notes to determine the most efficient and effective way to improve my team. I had some advantages:

* I have kept at least one of every pokemon I've ever caught (I have expanded my pokemon storage many many times)
* I tend to catch pokemon indiscriminately -- for xp or stardust or research missions -- so I've built up a lot of candy for most types of pokemon, even though I had no use for the candy stockpiles.
* I have a stockpile of both fast and charged training machines

And I had some disadvantages:

* I have been spending stardust to power up my Team Rocket counters and to purify shadow pokemon, so while I had *some* stardust stockpiled, I didn't have a lot, and I will need some to power up my teams for the Ultra and Master competition stages.
* I have generally retained only the highest or close to highest level pokemon of any given kind

This last is a disadvantage in the Great League, where the highest level pokemon of a given breed might well be too powerful to compete. For instance, I have 4 Swamperts accumulated from a Community Day event, and all of them are far too high in level for the Great League. I do have four low-level Mudkips (which can be evolved into Swampert), because they're shiny and I keep all my shinies. But I don't have enough of their candy to both evolve one and give it a second charged attack.

Being able to give every pokemon on your team two charged attacks is a significant advantage: it gives you versatility, if you can remember how and when to use it.

I read through a few "best pokemon for the Great League" lists, but my favorite was pokemon.gamepress.gg's "Great League Tiers", which ranks several dozen pokemon from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). My first attempt at making a team was "which of the 7 pokemon on this random listicle do I (a) have and (b) are of about the right level or can reasonably reach it?" This team had a serious weakness in that it had two pokemon that were vulnerable to Fight, and two that were vulnerable to Ground. So any team that used either of those had an excellent chance of beating mine, and Fight in particular is popular.

The Gamepress tiers were more exhaustive than any of the listicles, and were complete with write-ups on what moves to use for each pokemon and why. I could have outfitted my one Registeel for use, but went with Probonose instead -- almost as good, and I had plenty of regular candy with which to buy it a second attack. Investing 53 rare candy in the Great League is not appealing.

I am still bitter because I tried to power up an Altaria for use, but I pressed "confirm" on the last power up before it registered that it was going to 1501 instead of 1500: one point too high. 9_9 And it's 400 candy to evolve, which even I do not have to burn on another Altaria. -_-

My current team is Lanturn, Medicham, and Probonose. Lanturn is not ideal; in a perfect world, I'd have a flyer in that position. As it is, both Lanturn and Probonose are vulnerable to ground, so a team that leads with ground generally beats me. I also have some trouble with grass types, because I don't have anyone who's good against grass and one pokemon that's terrible against it.

One of the things I've learned is just how much difference it makes if you know both what your team's strengths and weaknesses are AND recognize the opposing team's pokemon and THEIR strengths and weaknesses. Not even just "this opposing pokemon is type X and weak against Y", but which moves the opposing pokemon will probably be using and even being able to guess which charged move they're using at a given time based on how long it takes them to charge it.

This is not as daunting as it looks, because the most competitive teams all draw on the same 30 or so pokemon, and if someone isn't using one of those pokemon, the pokemon is probably not a serious threat. Also, you can often guess the type of a pokemon by appearance. Sometimes not, though: a lot of players mistake my Lanturn for a pure water type and use electric against it. But Lanturn is a water/electric and is resistant to electric. Recently, someone tripped me up with a Flygon, which looks like a Bug/Flying, and is actually a Dragon/Ground, with the potential for a Rock attack. I did not recover from this mistake.

One particular thing I've noticed is that you rarely want to be the first player to swap out a pokemon. Even when my opening pokemon is bad against the opponent's opener, it's often better to just eat the first loss than to swap. This is because swapping is on a timer: if I swap first, my opponent can swap in response, and then I'm stuck in the new match-up. It's like switching from rock to scissors because your opponent has paper, only to discover your opponent has now switched to rock. You still lose, and your rock still has to face paper later.

It can be worth swapping first if (a) my current pokemon is terrible against my opponent's and (b) BOTH of my other pokemon are good against it.

The corollary here is that if your opponent swaps first, you generally want to swap in response. For one example:

* I open with Lanturn and my opponent opens with Azumarill. Azumarill is NEVER strong against Lanturn, and generally strong against both of my other pokemon.
* My opponent rescues his Azumarill with an Altaria. Altaria is relatively weak against Lanturn. But I should swap my Lanturn for my Probonose ANYWAY, because I don't want my Lanturn to get worn down by Altaria. I still need Lanturn to be healthy and viable against Azumarill when it comes back later in the match.

It's often tempting if your opponent brings out a pokemon that you have the PERFECT counter for to swap to your counter. But if they still have a swap available, they're just gonna swap it out after you swap the counter in. Don't bother.

Anyway, I am still not a Pokemon Go battle expert -- there are a lot of different types and I have nothing like all of the possible interactions and combinations down. But after months of doing Team Rocket battles and now the Battle League, I have a good start on it. It's weird because I found the trainer battles tedious and grindy when they were first introduced. The battle league has gotten to be enough fun for me that when I run out of battles for the day (and this takes a LOT of battles!), I go "Aww".

I am getting bored of my lineup, so I am forcing myself to figure out what my Ultra League lineup will be. Hint: it's gonna be expensive and I need to save my stardust for that instead of trying to beef up my Great League team. :D

4thewords.com is a writing-gamification site. As of October 29, I will have been using it for exactly three years. I can track the length of time because it has a daily streak counting every consecutive day you've logged 444+ words. As of this writing, mine is at 1091. Yes, I have an unbroken streak starting the day I began using the site.

That's not as impressive an accomplishment as it sounds: the site allows you to use a consumable -- "stempos" -- to repair broken streaks or to extend your streak into the future, if you plan a vacation. I used a lot of stempos when Lut was in the hospital in 2017, and I've used them on occasion before or since. Most often I use them when I forget to log words rather than when I write; I do most of my writing offline and then log my words later.

4thewords is now, and always has been, a subscription-supported site. Like many games these days, it has two in-game currencies, one of which, core crystals, is mostly purchased with real money. The subscription cost is therefore a little wonky, because 4thewords runs periodic discounts on crystal packages. There's a 25% discount for Nanowrimo participants, for example (current code is wrimo19), and Nanowrimo winners get a larger discount; I think last year's was 40%? Anyway, if you're paying month-to-month and never buying crystals with a discount, it's $4 a month. If you use the Nanowrimo winner discount code and buy a huge package of crystals up front, it'd be more like $60 for three years.

While my favorite business model for a site is something like Dreamwidth's, where the paying customers are sufficient to support free accounts for those who can't afford it, I much prefer a subscription site to one based on advertising, or pay-to-win games. And 4thewords does offer a free 30-day trial, so you know what you're paying for by the time you give them money.

I've written about this site before, I know, but not in a while, and I wanted to post about it again because I really like te game and want it to do well. I don't always love the choices the 4thewords developers make in terms of gameplay, but in terms of company philosophy and the way the developers interact with their customers, I've always been impressed. It's a tiny company making a niche product -- I think there's one coder, one illustrator, and a few part-time writers -- and they are all good people who care about writing and want to make a tool that will be useful and fun for their customers. And they listen to their customers!

One example: when I started playing the game, you created an avatar. You could pick male or female, and there was a bunch of gendered clothing and hair styles. You couldn't make a male avatar with long hair, for instances.

A few months ago, they re-did some of the art and renamed the body types. Now, instead of "male" and "female", there are body types "1" and "2". All the clothing options are available for both body types, and the only changes are to accommodate the different base shapes. (Although body type 2 still has a tube top around the breasts as unremovable underwear, while body type 1 gets to be shirtless. It's a kid-friendly site, my solution to this would be to put both models in a tube top, but I am not gonna fuss at them over it.) You can save up to three different outfits, and you can change all the options between outfits, including the body type.

What I love about this change is not just that they made it, but that they made it without fuss. A lot of times when gaming companies are told "you could be more inclusive about [X]", developers responds with defensiveness. They don't want to be criticized for choices they made without realizing they were choices. "I didn't INTEND to be biased and that means I'm not and everyone does it this way and why should I change?" And 4thewords went "Oh, yeah, it would be better with some changes and that will take some work, but we'll do it."

Over time, they've added some enby NPCs to the game, too. It's nice. I feel seen.

The site did its "official launch" several months ago (it had been in paid beta for most of the time that I've been playing), and they re-did the whole main story line to be more cohesive and interesting. They run a lot of mini-events for various things -- there's a Love Week around Valentine's Day, and a Tico Week for the Costa Rico Independence Day (the company is based in Costa Rica), and they always do an event for Pride. The biggest event is for Nanowrimo in November, with the Camp Nanowrimo events in April and June being also pretty substantial. So now -- right before Nano -- is a good time to get started, especially if you plan to do Nanowrimo.

They've made a lot of gameplay decisions that I really like, too: the game has a much larger variety of monsters to fight, and a lot more of them that are small and unintimidating. I've written this post on the site and have defeated several monsters with word counts of 100, 300, or 600 today. They added a 10-monster queue, so that you can pick everything you want to fight and not have to think about it while you write. You can also toggle "auto-start next battle" on or off, so that if you want to fight the whole queue in on sitting, you can. And if you want to set up the queue all at once but only do one battle in a writing session, you can do that too.

One of my favorite little changes is the "pasting in words" behavior. There's now a setting you can change for whether words you paste in always add to your wordcount, or never add to it, or ask each time if you want to add it. This is great if you want to add a story you wrote a long time ago to the site without having it mess up your stats on the site. Since I paste all of my writing into the site, I have left it on "always add to word count". But I've thought about adding things I wrote years ago, and this will be a nice feature if I decide to do so.

Just so this doesn't read like 4thewords advertising copy, I will mention a gameplay decision I do not love.

Shortly after I started playing in 2016, 4thewords added a "wardrobe", with customization options for your avatar. This was with separate from the "inventory", which included miscellaneous crafting bits as well as weapons and armor that affect your combat stats but not your avatar appearance. As with other games that have a separate "inventory" and "wardrobe", the inventory was gameplay-only and had no impact on appearance, and the wardrobe was appearance-only and had no impact on gameplay.

In April 2019, for the CampNano event, they added monsters that you could only fight if you had particular wardrobe items equipped.

Not inventory items. Wardrobe. The appearance-only stuff that had never before affected gameplay.

Why. Why would you do that. The whole point to having two separate sets of items you have to manage is because they do DIFFERENT THINGS. If you're going to have both of them affect gameplay why are they separate? Just. ARGH.

They have stood by this decision and certain monsters in some areas continue to require you to go to your wardrobe and equip appearance items so that you can play the game. I still don't understand. Bleargh.

However, it's a pretty minor thing; I haven't even gone to the areas with wardrobe requirements in the months I've been playing since they were added. And it only bothers me because it's a nonsensical mechanic to add; it's not that it makes the game harder or easier.

Overall, if you like writing, I definitely recommend 4thewords.com. It gives that little bit of extra incentive to write, and that never hurts. I have a referral code: LBQFV83845. If you use a referral code (anybody's code, doesn't need to be mine) when you sign up, you get 44 core crystals, enough to pay for a month of subscription (in addition to the free trial). Right now, they're running a special where you get an extra 14 days of subscription time, which means it'll carry you through until the end of November so you'll be able to use your Nano winner code to buy more crystals before the free time runs out. :D (I remember being very annoyed that I had to buy $4 worth of crystals without a discount so that I could keep my streak in 2016.) Full disclosure: I get bennies for people using my referral codes, too -- right now, 66 core crystals and 14 extra days of subscription time. But I didn't write a 1500 word post to get freebies. I wrote it because it's a great game and I want other people to enjoy it too. And also for the developers to do well and keep it going. n_n

Oh, and to defeat a bunch of monsters in 4thewords.  That too. 

I mean, it's called "4thewords" not "4thedeathlessprose". Every word counts!

 

When Pokemon GO came out two years ago, I didn't download it. This was only because I had an ancient phone at the time and Pokemon GO wouldn't run on it. I wanted to play it -- everyone else I knew was. Even my co-workers were all playing. But I didn't want to play it badly enough to (a) get a new phone that (b) wouldn't have a physical keyboard.

 

But my old phone was only getting older and all the apps that it used to run fine were being constantly "upgraded" so that they now barely ran at all.  I put a new phone on my wishlist in December, and my brother bought one for me.

 

And I still didn't get Pokemon GO, because by then no one seemed to be playing it anymore.

 

But after friends-and-gifts were added to the game, I noticed people had started talking about it again.

 

Yesterday was a lovely day for July in my area, which meant it was warm and too humid but not ridiculously so.  I didn't feel like dragging my bike out of the garage and up the hill, but on the way home from writing at the library, I stopped at a tiny park. I intended to walk its tiny loop trail four or five times -- maybe twenty minutes -- on the theory that some exercise was better than none.  And, as long as I was walking anyway, I decided I might as well download Pokemon Go finally, and see if I liked it.

 

I'd walked the loop four times by the time the game finished downloading.  It let me catch a squirtle, then told me to go to a pokestop. There was one three or four blocks away, at a little church.  "Oh, that's not far," I thought.  I went past it all the time when I biked to the library.

 

I set off for it, and promptly realized that "not far" on a bike is very different from "not far" when walking.  But I got there, and spun the stop, and headed back to my car, satisfied that the game had indeed gotten me to do more walking than I would have otherwise. And also discovered that my car was parked next to a pokestop.  There were a bunch more pokestops in the area but I was hot and sweaty and wanted to take a shower, so I stopped playing.  Even though I noticed when stopping to get a burger for Lut that there were like a half-dozen pokestops ringing the stadium near my house.

 

This morning, while on the phone with a friend, I walked over to the stadium. There I discovered that almost all of its pokestops were fenced in and behind a locked gate.  Well, phooey.  Also, it started to rain.  I walked home, lazed around for a bit, and then set out for Panera to do some writing.  

 

And also to find out what pokestops were around the area.

 

I spent about 90 minutes writing, and got in around 1250 words. Then I decided to reward myself by walking over to the two nearest pokestops: one was next door to Panera, and the other maybe half a kilometer away.

 

And then there kept being another pokestop that was "just a little ways further" so I kept walking. And caught pokemon. And walked. And caught more pokemon.

 

Four kilometers and an hour and a half later, I finally got back to the car. My feet hate me now. I had a bunch of errands to run, and one of them took me near two different pokestops so ... you know.

 

I am running low on pokeballs now, despite hitting All The Pokestops and leveling like five times in the game. ;__;

 

Tomorrow I will bike to work, which should be much more effective for spinning pokestops, even if it's not good for hatching eggs.

 

I have no idea how combat works in the game. I tried fighting at one of the gyms just to see what combat looked like, and that did not really help any.  I really expected a lot more hand-holding than the game gave me.  c_c

 

Anyway, after I'd been sitting around the house for a while, I found myself thinking that there's a pokestop just across the street and I should really go spin it to replenish my dwindling pokeball supply.  

 

My feet and calves did not approve of this idea.

 

I ended up doing it anyway. c_c  But the pokestop gave me NOTHING, so I flounced back to my house and closed the app. HMPH.

 

Anyway, all of this is to say that I remain weirdly excited by Pokemon GO despite the comparative lack of any real gameplay, and I expect this will encourage me to range away from my usual bike routes so that I can find and hit more pokestops.

 

Also, if anyone wants to add me as a friend, my trainer code is [reacts ] and I don't seem to be running low on gifts to hand out yet. :D

Update: I have acquired a number of total strangers I've never even spoken to as Pokemon friends, so I took my trainer code offline. Message me if you'd like to add me. I am happy to have more Pokemon friends, just I want to know who they are. XD

"Isn't that a job for Security?" Smoke took a sip from her drink, a beverage of carbonated water and unsweetened yogurt, flavored by salt. Corydalis had tried it before and found it to sour, but Smoke gave every sign of enjoying it.

Corydalis leaned back in his chair, half-smiling. "Ultimately, yes. But the nobility is accustomed to attention from the top of the chain of command. If they're upset about some problem, they come to me first."

"You don't discourage that?" She watched him over the rim of her glass, head tilted in curiosity.

He waggled the fingers of one hand and reached for his own glass. His was a fruity concoction adorned by a trio of grapes impaled on a wooden skewer. "It's complicated. I dislike it when a lord pressures my people to appease him with immediate results, or delivers an angry diatribe accusing them of incompetence. If a noble has some minor inconvenience, I trust them to tell it to the nearest flunky, if only because a flunky will be close at hand. But if the noble is truly upset, enough to find 'whomever's in charge', I'd rather they complained to me than my head of security. I'm not going to spend the rest of the day rattled because Lord Sky called me the head monkey at a zoo in the care of thieving pigeons and lackwit squirrels."

Smoke laughed. "Did he really call you that?"

Corydalis grinned back. "I regret to say he was rather more vulgar and rather less inventive than that."

"But someone did?" she asked. "Or have you had occasion to deploy that one yourself?"

"Ook ook," he said, with calm aplomb, and Smoke chuckled again. He liked the way she looked laughing, unselfconscious, the fine grey fur around her blue eyes crinkling with her amusement. Corydalis glanced away, pretending to admire a colorful gold-framed landscape on the restaurant wall.

"I suppose mysterious disappearing and reappearing papers are not likely to be connected to your ant problem," Smoke conceded.

"Probably not. Although the ants could have gotten into a locked room, granted. Do carpenter ants eat paper?"

She shook her head, smiling. "They don't actually eat wood, even. They dig homes and tunnels in it to hollow out living spaces."

"So much for that possibility. I know the fleas definitely don't eat paper. Not that it would explain the reappearance of the pages in any case. Security assures me that an enchanter would have to have broken the door, or at least the lock, to get inside. They haven't given up on the puzzle yet, but I don't believe they've made any progress on it. I don't suppose you've any insights?" Corydalis returned his gaze to her face, careful to remain leaning back and his posture casual. He was well aware of how easy it was for an individual of his size and position to intimidate others.

Curry This smelled delicious even before they stepped inside, the scent of cumin, coriander, pepper and other spices hanging in the air. Smoke breathed it in, with a growing confidence that the food here would not be bland. Corydalis and she were overdressed for the atmosphere here. The staff wore simple off-shoulder dresses, or tunics with trousers, and the other patrons were dressed either as if they'd come from work, or in similarly casual attire. Heads turned their way as they waited to be seated. Smoke couldn't help thinking that Corydalis would draw eyes no matter what he was wearing, though.

If the draka noticed, he showed no sign of discomfort with the attention. His eyes were on her. "You look like you've come home."

"I love curry," she admitted. "My father made curries all the time when I was growing up. Coconut milk and chicken curry is my first comfort food."


"I hope Courthall is not driving you to comfort eating already."

Smoke laughed. "No, not at all. The exact nature of the problem is a conundrum, but I like puzzles. And all the people have been helpful and solicitous. Especially Blackwood and Licorice." The maitre'd led them to one of the tables near the center of the room. The restaurant was busy enough that the ones along the walls were all full.

"Ah, I am glad to hear it." He gave a slight shake of his head, smiling again. "I admit, I have had a private and rather irrational fear that you might find Courthall as difficult as your predecessor."

"Not at all! Blackwood not only flew me all the way back to Courthall himself, but he offered to guide me around on arrival. He showed me where the old gatherer was, and took me to the top of the House of Chambers so I could plant my own. Licorice was kind enough to show me about the rest of the building. She's the one who showed me the kitchen, where I discovered you had carpenter ants."

"Excellent! Ah, excellent that they took good care of you, that is. I remain unenthusiastic about the carpenter ants." He gave her another wry smile, and Smoke giggled. Corydalis hesitated a moment, then asked, "What department is Licorice in?"

"Maintenance."

Blond eyebrows drew together over gold eyes. "Hmm. Did she say what division?"

"No. She was fixing a problem with the hatch at the top of the Four's globe when we met," Smoke offered. "Why?"

"No reason. It's a large campus; I fear I don't know every employee." He said it apologetically, with the air of someone who thought he ought to know everyone. Or perhaps someone who had thought he did know everyone. Corydalis glanced down at his menu.

"Mmm." Smoke curled one arm up to touch Master Corydalis's forearm. She hadn't meant to mock-faint into his lap: she'd been aiming for his shoulder and missed. Now that she was here, she hadn't quite figured out how to leave. He had a very comfortable lap. Lying in it was probably taking too much advantage of the casual atmosphere. "No, you sound like you have everything under control. Although, wait, I am a concerned about my apprentices, who will be arriving tomorrow. I normally have them run errands for me and do independent work, but I'm not sure that's advisable given the atmosphere. Could I -- I don't know -- get a local assistant? Someone who know their way around and could keep my boys from stepping into any hornets' nests?"

"Certainly that can be arranged." Master Corydalis was still smiling at her, with that devastating smile he'd employed at their first meeting. His legs shifted under her. He had a very  comfortable lap. Those long legs and strong arms provided plenty of support.

"Thank you, sir. You're very kind." I can't get up now, Smoke told herself. That'd make it look like I flopped against him just to extract a promise or something. I need to make getting up look natural. "How far is it from Courthall to the Trade District, do you know? I've not gotten my bearings in Hallston yet."

"Not far. Two miles or so, perhaps. The address you gave for Curry This might be two and a half. We're in the Crown District now."

"Oh, are we?" Smoke straightened; the draka gracefully assisted her, as if strange people fell into his lap all the time. Maybe they did. She gazed out the floater window on her left, away from him, and watched the Crown District. It had a lot of ancient mansions and manor houses. To Smoke's eye, they were over-ornamented and sprawling. She liked the height and grandeur and cleaner lines of Crescent Bay's skyline better. As residences for a single family, they were imposing. She couldn't imagine the army of maids needed just for dusting. "Are we going to pass the Palace?"

"Not exactly. You'll be able to glimpse it on the right, when we reach Candid Street. But we'll be several blocks shy of it. We could ask the driver to detour, if you like."

Smoke turned to look past him. He'd obligingly leaned back so she could see out his window.

Smoke watched him, ears tilted in a listening pose. "What are the details, if I may ask?"

Next to her in the floater, Corydalis grimaced. On the one hand, gossip did not become a person in his position, and on the other, the details might be relevant to Smoke's work. "It's hard to decide where to begin. You know the stereotype of corruption, where lawmakers hire their friends and relatives to do work instead of hiring the person best suited to the job?" At her nod, he continued, "It is rarely so simple as that stereotype. Sometimes one befriends people because one admires how well they do their job. Or one's relation offers the best rate for a contract. Or some other objective measure shows them the most qualified."

He gestured with one hand to wave that aside. "But you get the idea. It is difficult to pick apart relationships or be assured of true objectivity.

"Windbreak Enchantments was first hired by the government .fifty-seven years ago. Their work was, at the time, considered good. When Courthall's were the only buildings in that part of the city to survive the Hallston Inferno forty years ago, Windbreak's reputation improved to impeccable. They started trying to convince us to switch to a new style of wards -- more costly upfront, but cheaper to maintain -- thirty-five years ago. Twenty-eight years ago, when my predecessor and the general opinion of the day concluded the new method well-established and sound, we made the switch. Around that time, the company accepted an apprentice, Rain. Rain's older brother is now Representative Kite. He was mayor of Hallston at the time. One of W.E.'s masters, Berry, married Ash, the brother of the Duchess of Deeplakes.

"Since then, Windbreak Enchantment's founder has retired. Four partners, including now-Master Rain and Master Berry, ran the firm for several years. Then Rain left under acrimonious circumstances, the details of which do not reflect well on either side. Rain founded her own enchantment firm, Pouring Magic. Representative Kite has tried, several times, by various means, to place the contract for Courthall with Pouring Magic. The Duchess of Deeplakes was adamant about maintaining the contract with W.E. The manuevering between the two has become the source of its own feud."

Corydalis took a deep breath. "Two years ago, the maintenance department started having communication issues with W. E. Our department claimed they weren't keeping agreed appointments, their department claimed the appointments didn't exist or were at another time. They said Courthall wasn't taking necessary steps, our side said we'd never been told to do so, etcetera. We changed the contacts on both sides, things settled for a couple of months, then got worse. Pouring Magic has been courting my people in maintenance, to convince them we should switch. The Duchess of Deeplakes found out and accused Pouring Magic of sabotage. Not of the wards, mind you -- at the time we didn't have any problems with the wards themselves." Corydalis spread his hands. "But of the ruining the professional relationship, by stealing or forging correspondence between us. Courthall security conducted an investigation and found no evidence of this. But by the time we did start having issues with the wards, the atmosphere was thoroughly poisoned. Windbreak Enchantments is convinced of bad faith on our part, and most of my subordinates are convinced of bad faith on theirs. I went to Crescent Bay to find you, Master Smoke, because the local situation is simply impossible. And I didn't ask you to report to maintenance because they are justifiably embittered by months of dealing with fleas, rats, ants, and enchanters who insist all three are directly or indirectly their fault. Moreover, I don't want to bring the weight of the duchess's disapproval down on them, and likely you, in addition to everything else. So. That is how I end up with you as my direct report." He smiled wryly. "Are you sorry you asked yet?"

Talking about using Discord for an RPG reminded me of how the media in which I play a game shapes the game. Every medium has its own strength and weaknesses. For example:

Face-to-face: In-person games have great advantages in speed. It's much faster when you can see and hear players clearly. You can use physical props readily: miniatures, dice, and game boards are easy to use in-person. But there are disadvantages to face-to-face: there's no built-in, automatic record of game play. You have to schedule a time and you can only play with the people who show up. During play, the GM either has to prepare for a variety of different player choices, or limit player choice, or be good at improvising. I find game play less immersive in person: it's hard for a GM to play multiple NPCs at once who are presenting different perspectives or arguing with each other. It's also hard for a player to convincingly play characters who are very unlike the player.

Video or voice-based games: I have little experience with these, and what I do is mostly "this is an inferior version of face-to-face." The only advantage I know of over face-to-face is "you don't have to physically get people in the same room". If there are others, they've eluded me.

Online scheduled games: My own experience with this is mostly on MUCKs, but it's played similarly for me on other text-based chat clients. This style approximates face-to-face in that participants all show up at a scheduled time, all play and respond to each other in real time, and stop playing at the end of the session. The advantages of this style: it's easy and natural for the GM to switch between characters, and participants can easily be characters who are nothing like themselves. The GM still needs to prepare/improvise, but usually has a little more time to think between actions, because play is slower. Disadvantages: play is slower (everything has to be typed). There are "virtual tabletop" tools out there; I don't know if these come close to the ease of setup of real props now, because I haven't tried them in years.

Online unscheduled synchronous games: This is the MUCK style of "you show up when you want to roleplay and play with whoever's there". I have never found this to be a very satisfying model of roleplay, because it's hard to tell a story when you don't know who will be involved in it or for how long. Sometimes this encourages burnout -- people who are hyperinvolved and always on and always playing until they flame out after a few months. But I've known other people who made it work. The main advantage over scheduled is in the name: you don't have to schedule play.

Email or forum-based games: These play fairly similarly in my experience. Participants play by posting to the email group or forum. Play is asynchronous: you send a post to the group and you get responses hours or days later. Email is good for games that are driven by conversation or player actions that don't require die rolls. They are terrible for games with a lot of combat or anything else that requires die-rolling. It's good in that you don't have to schedule a time for it, and bad in that it can result in burnout -- people can't look away from the game for fear it will get away from them.

Discord is an interesting medium for a game because a Discord chat group has a persistent history. MUCKs and many chat clients only show you the activity while you are connected to them. Discord will let you scroll back to the start of the chat, if you want.

Discord can be set up to give notifications, or not, so it's easy to see if a chat is active or to ignore it.

For various reasons, my own preferred play is unscheduled and asynchronous. I am generally okay with responding in a time frame of "several hours" and run into issues when it's "a few minutes".

And I am thinking: how do you structure a story so that it best accommodates my style of play? For example, I know that if I want to play a combat-heavy dungeon stomp, I'm best off doing that face-to-face.

But if I want to have a game where:
* Play is unscheduled and unsynchronous
* Participants are involved at varying levels of commitment: some people respond quickly, some respond slowly

What kind of features built into the story will best enable that?

One thing that I discovered while playing with Bard Bloom was that telepathy among the PCs was extremely useful for keeping a game active. All the players could talk to each other without the GM needing to be involved in the conversation, even if the party was presently split up.

Splitting up the party had advantages in forum/email play that it doesn't have in most other forms of play: it allows the GM to interact with each player on that player's priorities, without them getting trampled over by players who respond more quickly. This requires a pretty active GM. In theory, you could get this same effect in Discord by splitting the party between different chat channels. I'm not sure how well it would work in practice.

Mostly, I am thinking about story features like "telepathy": things you can set up so there's an in-character explanation for something that is useful/needed due to out-of-character reasons. What if there's a story explanation for why characters are more or less active at different point in the story, for OOC reasons? One of my friends used to play a game where the characters all had a curse that sometimes one or more of them would turn into a gemstone, and the other characters would have to protect them. The "curse" took effect if the player was absent that week. This isn't a very compelling storytelling hook by itself, but it's the kind of thing I'm thinking about. What if the game took place on an astral plane, and characters act at different speeds depending on arbitrary factors (that amount OOCly to "how available were various participants?") How do you structure this so that players don't feel like they're disadvantaged if they're not around as much?

Anyway, I am kind of stuck on what kind of stories lend themselves best to the format, and what kind of system. So I wanted to write this out and see what other people thought. :)