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Poll

Who's excited for Warrens' return?

me
- 8 (16%)
me
- 2 (4%)
me
- 5 (10%)
help i'm trapped in a poll i don't know why i'm here i'm so scared someone please help
- 29 (58%)
me
- 6 (12%)

Total Members Voted: 50


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Author Topic: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome ???  (Read 3968763 times)

monk12

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5655 on: June 06, 2013, 12:32:51 pm »

One final addendum to the open letter: sometimes there are long stretches of time when I just feel like everything I make comes out terrible. Usually this is around the same time as other stressful things, but not necessarily. If none of my games are updating much, you can almost definitely attribute it to this (as it's rare a day goes by when I don't try to update, but not as rare that one goes by without updates).

On a somewhat amusing note, when I'm stricken by feelings of GM inadequacy it's usually thoughts along the lines of "dammit I wish this would turn out as awesome as a ffs/lawastooshort/<insert GM here> game!"

You guys sound like your having that problem where you keep making theories without the information supply to keep them steady. This part is especially amusing:
Quote
It seems that being a Willborn has something to do with the Soul. We fight the Willborn inside its corrupted Soul because fighting the outside beast is impossible. If the Soul Stars are, in fact, Souls as it is implied then a Willborn does require the presence of a Soul Star.
Hm.
Illborn are bodies without a soul.
Are Willborn souls without a body?
...just to pick the worst example. Take a breather and a dream?

Shush, increasingly improbable Epileptic Trees is a fun way to pass the time!


On a completely different note, I heartily endorse referring to ourselves as the Twoota community.

Mego

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5656 on: June 06, 2013, 02:36:03 pm »

Hey FFS, would you be willing to tell us if any of the theories for the theorycrafting questions are close?

EmeraldWind

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5657 on: June 06, 2013, 02:45:49 pm »

You know I got a question FFS.

When we provide suggestions you usually put it to a roll, but does the suggestion effect the difficultly of the roll?

For example, say we wanted to convince a character to join our side. If we simply suggested "Try to convince (character) to our side" would that be any different from "Use (specific information we have) to convince (character) to our side"?''
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Toaster

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5658 on: June 06, 2013, 02:54:44 pm »

Hey FFS, would you be willing to tell us if any of the theories for the theorycrafting questions are close?

Pretty sure he's already said no to this.
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freeformschooler

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5659 on: June 06, 2013, 02:58:26 pm »

You know I got a question FFS.

When we provide suggestions you usually put it to a roll, but does the suggestion effect the difficultly of the roll?

For example, say we wanted to convince a character to join our side. If we simply suggested "Try to convince (character) to our side" would that be any different from "Use (specific information we have) to convince (character) to our side"?''

That's a good question. The answer is: rarely if ever. Basically, there are a few difficulties for rolls.

Difficulty 5, difficulty 8, etc.: Generally, my rule for difficulties below ten is "they should automatically succeed." This is any action that could be feasibly messed up but, either due to the circumstances or common sense, it would be far harder to mess up than succeed.
Difficulty 10: the standard difficulty for most actions. The reason I decided on this way way back when (in Luigi Quest) was, for an action requiring some skill with significant consequences, an ordinary person could probably figure it out, but there could be a million factors causing them to mess up instead. This is why there's usually fluff for these rolls (like "you can't get a lock on the moving target" instead of "you miss.").
Difficulty 15: a much rarer difficulty I only use when it's unlikely but not implausible something would work. For example: using Persuasion on a very hesitant yet non-hostile monstrous foe.
Difficulty 20, 25: the only time I ever use these difficulties is when it would be implausible or outright impossible for an action to succeed without some kind of divine intervention. For example: trying to recruit the boss of a dungeon level while also fighting him/her would be difficulty 25. There have only been a couple of these actions succeeded in the game so far, I think.

There's only two scenarios, as it stands, where the players can modify the difficult of an action.
  • You have a distinct situational advantage (for example, Position in combat, but not being in a quiet place while casting a spell)
  • You are skilled in the action. There isn't a specific list of skills - that's why I freely use things like Guard, Persuasion and Perception whenever they seem appropriate. The most common way of doing this, of course, it to find/create items, but once you guys get stat slots, everyone can gain skill in certain types of actions (as dictated by their class).

EDIT: As for the "use specific information to convince character to join us" rather than "try to get them to join us," it wouldn't likely make any difference as Ciro or whoever's currently active would likely bring that up anyway, provided they know about it and you aren't metagaming. If you are metagaming, that's not going to help your rolls.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2013, 03:00:00 pm by freeformschooler »
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GreatWyrmGold

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5660 on: June 06, 2013, 03:15:10 pm »

The Soul Star stopped working for a while after each switch, so it's not unlikely that previous cycles would have stuck as someone else for a bit, and that this would have been planned for by whoever set up the cycles. As for whether he's dead or not, it might not be common but that it might happen is an easy logical inference given the abilities of the Soul Star and the fact that we apparently start each cycle with no idea what we're doing. As such, it too should have been accounted for when setting up the cycles.
1. We spent a rather long time in Al's body; then, when it recharged, we switched to another non-Sibling person. That could easily be much longer than typical.
2. I fail to see how this is germane.
For the first, it doesn't really matter whether it's typical, the point is that it's an easily predictable possible effect of putting someone with our Soul Star through a number of cycles where they lose their acquired knowledge and apparently completely change personalities and sometimes gender, so whoever set up the cycles is fairly likely to have expected it. That then implies that it happening is not all that likely to cause "critical plot breach" or they would likely have put something in place to prevent it.
Predictable? Sure. You could also have predicted that Ciro would kill Riltia...but he didn't. Besides, I'm not sure how "predicting" the possibility is germane, but I've also mostly forgotten what the root argument was about.

Quote
I find this doubtful, but time will tell.
I certainly doubt its commonness.
I'm not trying to judge how common it is (that's hard to say without knowing how different previous iterations of us may have been, though the fact that it has been suggested Proxxy changes fairly often implies she would have problems learning from the experience if we do swipe her minions), just how important it actually is overall. Like I said before, anomalies are likely to happen every cycle, so simply that something might be an anomaly does not make it important. In this case, we should be able to gather more information soon.
Never become a cyclical villain who relies on each cycle being the same to ensure that each ends in your victory. A change is an unpredictable thing; it causes more changes. Worse, they have causes, which might easily cause more changes in even less predictable fashions. Oric should be concerned about them.
...Each cycle being the same? Even Cain, stuck in a prison somewhere in the dungeon, knows that things change significantly each cycle even just in the nature and experience of the characters involved, let alone how they interact. The point is that some changes are more important than others, and we don't know or even have much reason to suspect that this change is particularly important, though if it is we may well begin getting clues soon.
Oh, sure, some are more important than others. But none are unimportant, not to Oric, not if he's thinking...um...the way I would if I was an evil overlord in some kind of dungeon.

Quote
and what makes you think that's a quality of the whole Warrens?
I don't, though it does seem likely that a fair amount of it is given the haphazard nature of the first floor and the fact that the second floor is confirmed to switch. However, nothing makes me think the Underside is actually part of the Warrens either, as opposed to something that formed around it naturally (and by naturally I mean due to damage, people trying to dig out, access tunnels and such being made, etc).
The first level didn't change, the second might have been repaired, and then you admit that the Underside would probably not be part of it.
Nice.
The first level didn't change while we were inside it, no, but the largely varied rooms suggests it was at least partially randomly generated, given the fact that other locations appear to have themes.
Of course, it's possible that that was the first level's theme, but hey. The fact that the second completely changed itself around, and based on information given does so periodically, is really more to the point, since it suggests that either the people in charge of the Warrens are capable of mass structural changes, or the dungeon itself can do so. Either way, it suggests the thing is pretty damn sturdy.
As for admitting the Underside would not be part of it, I said that it might not even be an original part of the Warrens themselves, so I'm not sure how you got "the Warrens might be destroyed" out of it.
Randomly generated dungeons are a common enough occurrence in the kind of game TWoOtA (Twoota?) was simply parodying, and aside from the rooms with magma they were pretty much all the same as I recall. Besides, if they were random, I'd guess that that would have more to do with the amount of havoc wreaked* on the first level, or else odd design choices, before I used that to support a theory that the dungeons somehow autorepair.
Anyways, it just occurred to me that the biggest change--replacement of water with pits--could have been done by accident by the monster.
As to how it matters: Even if we assume that the Warrens are safely and firmly in the ground, even if we assume autorepair capability, even if we assume that the destruction of the bedrock on which the Warrens lie won't be affected enough to cause structural issues from a huge worm making Swiss cheese out of it...the Greens, which seem to be a life-support system, are in the Underside. That would evidently spell doom for the entire complex within hours.

You guys sound like your having that problem where you keep making theories without the information supply to keep them steady. This part is especially amusing:
Quote
It seems that being a Willborn has something to do with the Soul. We fight the Willborn inside its corrupted Soul because fighting the outside beast is impossible. If the Soul Stars are, in fact, Souls as it is implied then a Willborn does require the presence of a Soul Star.
Hm.
Illborn are bodies without a soul.
Are Willborn souls without a body?
...just to pick the worst example. Take a breather and a dream?
We found the only known Willborn in a Soul Duel, which doesn't seem to have taken place in the physical world. And it's worth considering--simple is always more likely than complex, caeteris paribus.

(P.S. This is at least better than what often happens when Bay12 is deprived of updates...)
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Twi

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5661 on: June 06, 2013, 03:20:50 pm »

Oh god this was epic but now I need to read it all again because I'm pretty sure I missed something.

Curse you, forgetting to check topic often! :P

To make up for my forgetfulness, have a cryptic suggestion. (Well, not actually that cryptic, but much more cryptic than a suggestion ought to be, anyways.)
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GreatWyrmGold

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5662 on: June 06, 2013, 03:22:04 pm »

Wait, the inventor's name was Hero? Awesome.
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Twi

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5663 on: June 06, 2013, 03:23:50 pm »

Yeah, the Greeks are pretty cool like that.

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Xanmyral

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5664 on: June 06, 2013, 04:00:31 pm »

FFS, question! Mostly just for amusement, what was the hardest difficulty we succeeded, and what was it for?

Mego

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5665 on: June 06, 2013, 04:19:28 pm »

FFS, question! Mostly just for amusement, what was the hardest difficulty we succeeded, and what was it for?

I'm guessing probably recruiting Al.

Xanmyral

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5666 on: June 06, 2013, 04:25:22 pm »

My money is on the backflippy-disarming-slashy death we did to Polaris.

EmeraldWind

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5667 on: June 06, 2013, 05:12:53 pm »

My question...
There's only two scenarios, as it stands, where the players can modify the difficult of an action.
  • You have a distinct situational advantage (for example, Position in combat, but not being in a quiet place while casting a spell)
  • You are skilled in the action. There isn't a specific list of skills - that's why I freely use things like Guard, Persuasion and Perception whenever they seem appropriate. The most common way of doing this, of course, it to find/create items, but once you guys get stat slots, everyone can gain skill in certain types of actions (as dictated by their class).

EDIT: As for the "use specific information to convince character to join us" rather than "try to get them to join us," it wouldn't likely make any difference as Ciro or whoever's currently active would likely bring that up anyway, provided they know about it and you aren't metagaming. If you are metagaming, that's not going to help your rolls.

I was mostly wondering as we are getting close to dealing with Proxxy. We (the players) know from the Sinful Intermission that convincing her to our side is likely to be hard due to her loyalty to Oric, but Ciro would probably assume that Proxxy is loyal as default (so that's not really meta-gaming as we would have assumed the loyalty as well). We (Ciro and the players) have some information due to our successful attempts to eavesdrop on Betweenford and the Blue Chick that Ciro could potentially use to gain Proxxy's cooperation. But I was curious if that kind of specifically angled attempt would actually have anymore of an effect than a general attempt.

But I also wanted to ask in a more general sense because similar situations could come up and knowing whether or not it has an effect is useful. 
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monk12

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5668 on: June 06, 2013, 05:28:43 pm »

Which information were we going to use to recruit Proxxy?

EmeraldWind

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Re: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome: Let's Get Al Back
« Reply #5669 on: June 06, 2013, 06:03:40 pm »

Which information were we going to use to recruit Proxxy?

We say that we overheard the Blue Chick and Betweenford talking about Oric losing power soon.

Her loyalty to Oric might play in our favor if we share the information. She might be willing to work with us if she thinks we can help her help Oric.
At the very least we can bring about a truce.
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