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You’re looking for opinions? I got opinions.
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The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
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Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
Me reading the wheel of time:
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The Chosen One ✓ the main male characters, but definitely Rand
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage ✓Moiraine
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess. ✓Nynaeve
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold. ✓Mat
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes. ✓All the prophecies
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements. ✓The forsaken all having distinct methods to get to the top
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology. ✓The one power
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Elves ✓Warders
All that said, I’m still enjoying the series thus far.
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Now I want to read a fantasy comedy where someone trying to make cookies from an ancient recipe is whisked off on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, but they just want snickerdoodles dammit.
as a reward they get one magical wish and they wish for snickerdoodles
That sounds amazing. OMG I would so read that
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Yep!
This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…
But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.
There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.
The Wandering Inn handles this well, where to hit large milestones you need not just xp but self development.
Is The Wandering Inn this one https://wanderinginn.com/ ? Can’t find anything else .
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Elves and Dwarves done like every other Elf and Dwarf. Especially when they go out of their way to give the Dwarf that overdone Irish/Scottish accent written out in damn near unreadable text.
Also when the worldbuilding and plot basically is “here’s some not so thinly veiled racism between groups who will set that aside to fight a common enemy.” Series ends on a high note, but you know this world will fall into disarray again cause people suck, so like, what was the point.
The main character is given so much buff.
I still looking fiction where main character is ordinary person.
- No godly fast learning/growthing speed.
- No extraordinary willpower that train day and night with bare minimum on food and housing
- No hack-like device/weapon/…
So far I’ve discovered in this thread:
-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.All good here? Great.
Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.
That’s just lemmy being too god damn stupid to differentiate between “this is my preference” and “this is bad”, as usual.
“I don’t like dragons”: preference.
“I don’t like Mary Sue characters”: bad writing.
That’s not Lemmy. That’s people
I’m used to a bit of a better caliber of people…from reddit, which is sad
Just finished watching The 100 on Netflix. The writing was pretty terrible.
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Literally every bad action performed by a character (up to and including genocide) was justified as “I had no choice”. They should have called it, “The no choice show”. I would have loved to have seen a counter in the corner of the screen that ticked up every time that was said, which was at least once per episode.
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Seconds before any kind of solution that would have solved major problems was enacted, a character (different each time)- previously rational, but now for some reason completely chaotic- would jump in and destroy the McGuffin and fuck everyone over because it was in their personal interest. Every single fucking time, even in the final episode. It’s no longer a plot twist, it’s just lazy AF writing. It also meant that the characters had no consistency or predictability of motive, which meant their believability went down the toilet.
I’m going to stop there but believe me, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
That show was proof that Netflix will greenlight just about anything.
The motto of corporations is: money over quality & people
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“I am not [well known character archetype]”
does literally everything possible to follow that archetype
cough cough one piece cough cough
More than 17 apostrophes on the first page with every name of a person, place, or thing having one.
Ah yes, H’taln’k from J’briom-4, flying his Zal’t M’lort class Winger to the Mont Bronl’n port with the day’s haul of Sea Crom’t. Oh won’t his mabs’k be pleased with this delivery.
Also kennings. No, you do not sound mysterious using “younglings” instead of children.
Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.
Attack spell =
- 1 second cast time
- 1 damage to defence spell
- 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
- Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
- cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
- .5 second cast
- Can absorb 100 hits
- low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?
Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
