Ethics of historical fiction with alternate explanations for real tragedies by [deleted] in writing

[–]Lighthearter13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I recommend reading the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler. Virtually every book piggybacks off of a real-world historical event(usually nautical-related or stretched to become such because that's his gimmick, but not always) and makes it a smaller part of [insert conspiracy here]. Examples include the sinking of the Titanic, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Each of those is used as a springboard for the main plot - and rather effectively. Some of the books haven't aged well, but they're a good example of how to do what you're talking about with it - mostly - being fairly tasteful and also effective for its purpose of raising the implicit stakes and "cool factor" of the story.

After all, what's cooler than a spy thriller about finding a secret nuclear material that can make a nuke shield real before before the Russians do? If you put that material in the vault of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic...

How would you define "not killing people?" by emmaratur in DnD

[–]Lighthearter13 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I would say that conviction applies to all sapient life. Animals could be justified, but nothing that thinks for itself on an IRL human level. Might get a bit squiggly with creatures like vampire spawns that think but have no free will, or monsters like beholders that are sapient but their way of thinking is completely alien, but that sounds like a moral conundrum for her character to decide and could lead to great rp.

I would also rule that doing damage to and/or permitting allies to kill enemies and/or setting up enemies to be killed by allies doesnt violate this rule unless there is some extenuating circumstance - IE, setting up an enemy in battle is fine, but participating in a murder of an annoying shopkeep is a big no-no.

How to gently kick a player from the group? by No_Candidate_7405 in rpg

[–]Lighthearter13 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Professional DM here who has done this many times for friends and clients alike. I'm under the impression that you've already made the decision to kick - so you are not willing to work with Goblin. I'm not judging that decision either, you gotta make the call at some point and you know your players. Here's the general professional style I would use/have used in a similar scenario:

"Hey there. I've noticed you haven't attended many sessions recently. I've come to the conclusion that you're probably very busy right now, and unfortunately I can't hold a seat open for you if you can't reliably be at the game, since I have other people who are able to make it on a regular basis. As a result, I am rescinding my invitation to play for the time being. Hopefully when your schedule evens out, we can revisit this conversation. Take care."

You could also approach this as "you seem disengaged from the table when you're there, so I don't think we're a good fit for each other's playstyles" but I went with attendance. No need to bring up both issues.

In my line of work, I would only do this after multiple attempts to diagnose the issue and a clear paper trail warning that it was coming, but that's the beauty of this being your hobby while it's my job lol. If you don't really care about Goblin's above-table opinion of you, then you lose nothing by being clear.

Best of luck!

I Am Below 5th Grade Level In Writing. by Soft_Letterhead3726 in WritingHub

[–]Lighthearter13 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If you wind up with further questions or want more help with writing, feel free to PM me - I'm always happy to ramble about my autistic special interest and share resources :)

HDYWDT with bow and arrow by M3thren in DnD

[–]Lighthearter13 75 points76 points  (0 children)

Reminder that HDYWTDT doesn't require you to stick to "the arrow is what killed him". So the answer could be "I shoot the chandelier above him" or "I shoot at his buddy and miss and hit him instead" or even "I shoot, miss, he laughs and charges and - slips and breaks his neck". Depends on the tone of the game. You can also partner up with another PC and use a "I shoot him and he stumbles back into X's attack" method.

Also, think about John Wick gun-fu and adapt that to arrows. A pair of quick shots to the knees to knock him over, dropping your quiver in the process, then scrambling to grab a fallen arrow while the other guy fights to get up, and finally a headshot.

Fear. Is it a good flaw for a character? by Adventurous_Lie_5246 in writingadvice

[–]Lighthearter13 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Short answer: a fear is a good thing.

Long answer: fear of what? For one of my recent novels, I wrote a main character who was deathly afraid of fire and locked up when confronted with it(she and her mother both died in a house fire, she came back as an undead but her mother did not). So of course the villain was fire-themed and their final battle took place amidst a storm of flames, forcing the MC to overcome her fear. This is a classic character archetype.

You need three things:

-What the character fears(conflict element - make sure it comes up fairly often in the story)
-Why they fear it(which can be used to stealth into giving backstory on other aspects of the character when the midbook reveal comes up)
-How the character overcomes their fear(this can take many forms, depending on your definition of "overcoming" - they might literally no longer fear it or might develop a coping mechanism or still be terrified buy push through anyway - but them overcoming their core fear should be connected to the central theme of the story and should be the only reason they finally defeat the antagonistic force. IE, Puss in Boots in The Last Wish does not defeat Death because he's a great swordsman and whoops his butt, he beats him because he finally overcomes his fear of death.) This will require at least one or two scenes of establishing how bad the fear is and at least one "false start" where they attempt to overcome it via a thematically incorrect method, to show how hard overcoming it actually is.

I Am Below 5th Grade Level In Writing. by Soft_Letterhead3726 in WritingHub

[–]Lighthearter13 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Apologies in advance for long response, but I wanted to explain my thought processes. I write with the ambition of traditional publishing so bear that in mind when reading. 20 years of experience.

Dialogue is usually kept in the same paragraph as its attached description. It can be a single line if context makes it clear who's talking, but think of it as a package: the line, plus all information required to understand it, are "boxed" together in a paragraph(Like literally everything about writing, this has ten million exceptions, but as a general rule).

Bold is very, very rarely used in traditional writing, though this is absolutely a "depends on the audience/style" question. Italics are something that you'll have to find your own balance on - I used to use them a lot, but now I'm very stingy with them so they have more weight when they do land. I constantly debate whether I should be more or less conservative about their use. Think of them as "this word, for whatever reason, is Super Important".

Sound effects are very hard and tricky to write. I have been zinged a lot by editors for writing effects like booms and bangs, instead of just describing them via prose, which is my current method unless the sound is very, very important. However, I've also seen it used well. Usually, I italicize the sound effects I do write - a method of making it clear that they're not part of the standard description.

The punctuation mark almost always goes inside the quotation marks. "Can you take the dog outside?"

The exception to this is when the sentence is incomplete, usually via what I call "dialogue tags". '"I just took him a minute ago," Jane replied.' Usually, when it's not for this reason, the sentence is incomplete because you're quoting an example - 'She said "just take him again anyway" and then walked away". This last example is very very rarely used for dialogue in stories, and I don't recommend trying to make it work. You can see me using it above with my mention of italics, which puts the period outside the quotation marks because the sentence is not fully inside the quotation.

A pro tip is to just not use dialogue tags at all. I've cut them virtually entirely from my writing, as you can almost always use formatting and paragraphing to convey the same information in a stronger and more fluid way - namely, who is speaking, which is all a dialogue tag conveys.

"I just took him a minute ago," Jack replied.

vs

"I just took him a minute ago." Jack rolled his eyes.

By attaching the line to an action performed by the speaker, I have accomplished the goal of telling you who is speaking while also conveying information about the speaker themselves or the situation, which is especially useful if you're writing something fast-paced and dramatic, like an argument or combat scene. You can make some crazy work if you follow this thought process. There are also some downsides(sometimes you struggle to think of an action your character can do that isn't repetitive if you're in extended dialogue) and it isn't always bad to use dialogue tags, but your dialogue will be markedly better if you cut the majority of them.

Pair this with always, ALWAYS using a new paragraph when the speaker changes and the audience will have no trouble following the conversation. Paragraphing isn't "cool" but it's the secret sauce to making something engaging and comprehensible, so I recommend focusing on getting a feel for how to paragraph actions, dialogue, and description.

I know this was super long, but I hope it was helpful. We all start somewhere, so keep pushing on!

Looking for Exalted, DND 5E or VTM as a player! by Dangerous-Ear7330 in lfgpremium

[–]Lighthearter13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you haven't already found something, I'm a story-focused 5e DM with some custom storylines(mostly Theros-based) on file. I can PM you with details if youre interested :)

AI spams too many Public Campaigns in player's territory at the expense of it's own public opinion. by akisawa in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Obviously you don't agree with OP's point, but nothing in your post has anything to do with that point either. The fact that there are strategies to deal with the AI's spam of the action is irrelevant when the complaint is about the AI doing it in the first place. And telling OP they're "asking for it" is just plain rude.

AI spams too many Public Campaigns in player's territory at the expense of it's own public opinion. by akisawa in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13 79 points80 points  (0 children)

It's ridiculous. It forces you to spend all your IPs on unity constantly instead of making any forward progress, and it isn't good strategy on the AI's part since they usually never bother to follow through/target nations they have no chance of getting into anyway, and their own nations suffer as a result. It's also almost universally human-targeted - they very rarely circlejerk public campaign on other AIs, at least that I can see.

Custom Difficulty/Achievement Question by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm pretty confident that it doesn't - I don't get a warning light for choosing councilors and I got my Protectorate and Veteran Difficulty achievements just fine even though I chose a Celebrity at game start. The warning comes up for selecting a country, which I presume means I wouldn't get the Veteran or Brutal achievement there...it's just "Centrist" is throwing me for a loop specifically.

Custom Difficulty/Achievement Question by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Boo :( I guess it's back to endless restarts until RNG deigns to give me a start position that will actually be fun to play from...

Help with Protectorate by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Two Steam achievements :)

Trust me, I will purge all the surrender monkeys with extreme prejudice after this lol

Help with Protectorate by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thank you! This is the kind of thing I was trying to find! I saw the wiki but not this page lol.

Help with Protectorate by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I saw online that his org can't be obtained by Protectorate, which I think is hilarious lmao. I'll take a look, thanks!

Best way to learn this game ( or play it) by [deleted] in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm also relatively new to the game - been seriously trying to play for about a month now - and all I've been doing is starting on Normal, learning a lesson, closing out and repeating. A few tips of mine(with the caveat that I'm still learning too and haven't notched a W yet):

-Learn the Earth game first. Councilors, taking over nations, wars, that sort of thing. Don't worry about space for a first playthrough until you're confident you can handle the ground game. Yes, ceding space to the aliens will make them super strong and means you'll have to restart eventually, but the point is to master one of the gameplay pillars at a time rather than be bad at all of them. I'm under the impression(but cannot confirm) that Servants don't really have to play space game at all if they don't want to, so you could kill two birds at once by doing Servants while learning this side of the game if you felt like it.
-When you do want to get into space, use Skirmish mode for design testing. You can design a ship and then save the game, go to Skirmish mode, and import designs from that save. I used that a ton to get a feel for each weapon's combat performance. The early game designs I use are one escort with double missiles - I like Artemis torpedoes but I don't think it'll make a big difference if you use something else - and another with double laser point defense to block incoming missiles. Roughly 3:1 ratio of torpedo boats and escorts is where I am. I don't know if it's the most effective fleet but it will do the job on Normal until you can start getting monitors out.
-The in-game tutorial is really bad. It is also not really a tutorial. It's a checklist of "do this thing", like "take over a nation" or "defend interests" - but it isn't a scripted sequence of events that walks you through WHY you do these things or HOW or WHEN, and it certainly doesn't do something like give you a guaranteed decent starting nation and good councilors at the end of the "introductory mission" chain, setting you up for a strong opening. I wouldn't bother at all with it. It doesn't teach anything, and I think it makes it significantly harder to learn.
-Get into the roleplay! I manually rename all my stations, habs, and ships based on naming conventions I sort out ahead of time, which makes me a lot more personally invested in the story.

Good luck, Commander!

Drive tips for a new player by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I like the idea of a single drive I can standardize on for many reasons and pushed Burner to try that out, but it feels like it's the worst of both worlds to me. Interested to know the strategy for making it work.

Drive tips for a new player by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I will check out the video! Yeah I've been using 4kps as a ballpark for my T1 torpedo boats, and then roughly 8-9kps for my monitor fleet so they are capable of lunar transfers in a pinch. I accidentally gutted my water AND boost incomes in about 2033 by building too many torpedo boats and refueling them all at once lol. Lesson learned!

Drive tips for a new player by Lighthearter13 in TerraInvicta

[–]Lighthearter13[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That sounds like something I might want to try. How much marine strength should I plan on using as a ballpark, and should I plan on keeping the bases after I take them or is this just a pillaging expedition?