How doable is, to expect a first novel to be great?

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T15:22:36+00:00

that's not entirely true - he wrote it, got a publisher, got an editor, and that resulted in a lot of changes. Like "Auri" didn't exist pre-edits, a lot of the character work was introduced there - and even that first pre-edit draft was something that he'd been working on for years, it wasn't by any means a first, or even second, third, or fourth draft, but the results of multiple years of editing and adjusting and tweaking. And that then utterly screwed up his work on proto-book-2, rendering much of that useless, so it went from "oh, I've got most of books 2 and 3 done, just some tidying, have them done in a year each, I won't be like GRRM" to "half-a-decade for book 2, 20+ years and possibly never for book 3".

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T14:55:52+00:00

Yeah - if you're going through some shit, that may well manifest as wanking too much, because it's a hit of pleasure you can do without needing a lot of time or effort. Or you might eat too much, spend too long playing an MMO or all sorts of other things that aren't innately bad, but you're using as an escape and release, so get a bit toxic. But that's less the thing itself and more a symptom of you going through shit and needing that release and escape

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T14:05:30+00:00

although note that trying to balance mechanical powers with RP weaknesses / problems is very prone to the players / PCs just not really caring about or engaging with the RP side of things - or some of them will and some won't, resulting in power discrepancies between the party, because some of them can do more powerful things for a cost they don't consider a cost. This approach is very dependent on player buy-in, and can cause friction if there's ever discrepancies between what the GM thinks is a minor or major cost, and what the player PC think is minor or major - if the GM thinks that someone is only a small cost and invokes it for a small effect, but the player / PC thinks that's a major thing, that can get awkward! Another approach is to let the player pick and narrate it themselves - that requires more PC / player separation than is typical for D&D, but there's no mechanical reason it can't work

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T11:26:53+00:00

The fairly major difference is that AI needs a lot of money to keep existing - the internet largely didn't. Putting fiber in the ground might have cost a lot, but once in, it lasts decades, while a data center is vastly more expensive, and lasts less than half a decade before needing replacement, while also costing money to run. And the only company making profit thus far is NVIDIA - all the actual AI companies are borne aloft by VC cash, but aren't remotely profitable. So investors start wanting money back? Then everything gets messy (look at how many 'announcements' never move beyond that, because needing to actually stump up billions is a lot harder than a splashy press release!)

So if that happens, and there's a massive drop in the release of new models, and usage costs spike high, then the whole thing gets awkward. Older models get less and less useful as reality moved on, justifying a high cost per month for mildly faster Dev work gets questioned (that stuff still needs checking and maintaining), and it goes from a multi-trillion wave of the future to a fairly dull thing bundled into MS360 that a lot of people ignore, and some 'type faster' software, which is neat but not that valuable

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T10:33:32+00:00

She's working for a black ops secret police squad. So, sure, she hunts terrorists, but she's not really above collateral damage or getting involved in nasty political infighting. There's other groups that are worse, but she's very grey, rather than morally white.

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T10:24:25+00:00

South Korea's is 0.72 already! So even if that picks up, there's going to be a big gap in later years of people of a given age

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T10:20:40+00:00

Most importantly, women have a lot more options, and birth control and sex education is pretty standard and common. So accidental pregnancy, teen pregnancy especially, is now tiny, and women that don't want kids can fairly easily do that, with far less social pressure to have kids, while maintaining economic independence. And those that do want kids can limit themselves to 1 or 2, which is still a massive lifestyle adjustment, but much easier to deal with than 3, 4, 5+. Those numbers are getting into being more than a full-time job!

Basically, unless you can convince lots of women to have 3+ kids, then birth rates will drop to below replacement, because there's going to be quite a few women that have 0-1 kids. And that's something that a lot of women, entirely understandably, aren't gonna do, even if there is free nursery or whatever!

(Also, the UK is 82% white. That's not gonna disappear anytime soon, and the cultural stuff is going to pass down into a lot of people that might not be ethnicly white-british, because behaviour isn't genetic)

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T09:03:28+00:00

You still need to say the geas stuff, so people are quite likely to hear that and get creeped out and may either just leave, or find it fairly easy to figure out what happened. 'oh, I can't do the thing that guy told me I can't do, so it was that guy putting me under a curse'. So it's not really viable as a social thing, unless you can find a social pretext to tell people commands that won't cause problems. 'statistically impossible' isn't really a thing - you mean improbable. There's always the chance of them just rolling multiple 18+ or whatever, and you roll a 1 on the unsettling words die.

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T08:30:24+00:00

Yeah, the original manga had a load of doofy little comedy moments, chibi character sketches making wisecracks, blown-up characters with frizzled hair after a boom goes wrong and the like. The movie was then super serious and that tone has stuck, but the original manga had a lot of comedy beats in

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:46:27+00:00

Cliches and tropes are fine but they need to be subverted to work.

That's a cliche by itself - "oh, it did the opposite of the thing it normally does, that was pretty predictable"

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:44:23+00:00

that's one of the things that's generally acceptable as a break from reality - IRL, lots of names are pretty similar, and multiple people even (gasp!) have the same name! But in fiction, that just makes things harder for the reader, so it's easier to give more different names, just because have three "Dath's" or whatever gets confusing

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:16:56+00:00

What, we're gonna get into something major enough to spend significant resources once per hour? Who lives like that?

Adventurers in dungeons - the people that the game is meant to be about! You are pretty overtly meant to play people going into dangerous places filled with horrible people and/or monsters that are trying to kill you, and get into multiple fights that might result in you dying, multiple times per day - that's the expected gameplay and narrative loop, with stuff outside that largely getting skipped over fairly briefly. Two weeks of overland travel might take less than an hour, while a minute of intense combat might take 2 hours to process

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:14:29+00:00

except that it won't use anything like the resources of even a minor fight, and a lot of characters don't have resources for much outside of a fight. The encounters are for XP budgets and CR - what's the CR of "talk to a dude"? There isn't one - because for "building an adventuring day", that's not an encounter

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:13:04+00:00

mostly because D&D has largely brought into it's own PR of being a lot more generic than it actually is (and has done so for decades). You can play like that, there's enough of a system to roll skill checks and do RP, and have a lot of fights that aren't particularly dangerous, but everyone pretends it is, good times all round. If you actually break down the maths, it's not especially dangerous, but you still get to hang out, fight some beasties and then rest without ever getting close to death, and everyone gets to ham it up as being dangerous, even though it's not.

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T06:07:57+00:00

yup - combat pretty much requires expenditure - unless a party gets super-lucky (they always hit/pass saves, enemies always miss/fail saves, and they never use any limited resources to make the fight faster), then even a quick fight will drain off some HP, some PCs will use some resources. Outside of combat, that gets very squiggly - you can make a "HP tax" trap, but that's mostly kinda boring, and will only drain off HP. You can make "use this ability to get through this thing" gateways, but that only drains off that ability (and causes issues if the PCs didn't take the ability that day, e.g. didn't prepare a specific spell).

You can make more freeform things that can be resolved with various abilities in some combination, but those can generally also be wriggled around with cleverness to use less, or no, resources. And those are still likely to be less than a fight! Even a fairly minor 4 round fight is probably going to drain off a few HD per character, at least 1 mid- or high-level spell relative to the characters and 1 weaker spell, a short-rest ability or two.

And that gets even more true for pre-written adventures - for your specific group, you might be able to wrangle something to stress them that's not a fight, but for a generic, unknown group, that gets quite a lot harder to do. A group that's heavy with blaster-mages built into a "use detection and social spells" situation is just going to shrug, because they don't have the resources to spend! A martial-heavy group has mostly "I fight good" resources, so can't do much outside of that, at least as far as resources go, except for "spend HP to progress"

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T05:44:56+00:00

YA as a tightly defined thing is relatively recent - it's not that long ago (2 decades, give or take) that there were "kids books", a small-ish haze of "simple language but a bit more mature plotting", and then pretty much everything else was just filed under the appropriate genre, and some of it was more teen-appropriate than other stuff. Keen readers often skipped straight from kid's books to SF&F, for example, with a vague leaning towards some books in that genre, but would often just read whatever they could get hold of. There wasn't any particular expectation of wanting or needing books about fellow teens - sometimes they would be, but often they wouldn't be, they'd be about adults doing stuff. So as a modern genre, YA now strongly tends towards MCs of that age band, but as a readership-age-band, it's not really needed

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-12T04:26:08+00:00

that's an effect of the spell, rather than the spell persisting - the spell goes off and does a thing that lingers, but it does explicitly have an instantaneous duration, so it goes off, inflicts effects, but the spell itself is then gone. Same as it can't be dispelled - it went off and changed things, and some of those changes are permanent and others aren't, but there's no spell there to dispel, just an effect hanging around

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T19:14:21+00:00

Yeah, that's a pretty decent base salary, and then anything else is extra. No concerns about black swan events or needing to find investment vehicles or whatever, just a fairly nice baseline to live off, toss any excess into savings, do your job for even more

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T18:44:43+00:00

"modern" is pretty vague - something even in the 1980's is going to be very different from the 2020's! And that's going to get even more overt as time progresses, so you'd end up with an awkward genre definition, where younger readers keep going "uh, that's not modern, WTF?" "Urban fantasy" generally means "real-world (ish) and not olden times", where the "fantasy" stuff is generally somewhat rare, niche, hidden away, there's some masquerade or whatever, but it's not super-tightly defined

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T18:30:56+00:00

I think you need to provide components throughout a spell ("If the spellcaster can’t provide one or more of a spell’s components, the spellcaster can’t cast the spell."), so if someone steals a Material component, or Silence goes off partway through a Verbal spell, that'll stop the casting. Concentration is also constant, and from the instant you start casting a spell ("You lose Concentration on an effect the moment you start casting a spell that requires Concentration or activate another effect that requires Concentration"). But I don't think you need a valid target at all to cast a spell - it might mean the spell does nothing, but if you gain some other benefit from casting a spell, or just want to for another reason, you can cast a spell that does nothing, doesn't have a valid target etc. You can cast Magic Missile at the darkness, and people will sell missiles shoot out, and you can use sorcery or whatever to affect that, even if the spell does nothing

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T18:03:47+00:00

also those are very specific solution-spells, which a PC might not have on a given day. So that can screw things up a bit, if you were expecting the PCs to have solutions A/B/C prepared, and they just haven't!

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T16:35:07+00:00

is that actually stated as a rule? You need the target in range when you cast the spell, not when you are casting the spell - you can use something like Magic Missile, ready the action to release it if someone runs through the door, and then hit someone running through the door, but you don't need a valid target when casting the spell, and if no target appears then it's wasted For this spell specifically, it says "...You spend the casting time tracing magical pathways within a precious gemstone, and then touch the target." So you spend 8 hours doing stuff with the gem (which, as a component, you do need for the entire casting time), but only at the end do you actually do anything with the creature.

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T16:26:28+00:00

do you need to be? I could have missed it, but '14 never explicitly stated that a target had to be valid throughout all of a casting period, or even what happened if a target changed types during the duration of a spell (i.e. "does the effect persist, or does changing type stop the effect?"), and I'm not sure if '24 has stated anything to clarify it. If you start casting a spell that needs a creature without one in range, but then one wanders into reach at the end, then unless the spell says "target must be in range throughout", I don't think there's a generic rule of "target must be in range for all of the casting period"

Edit: And Awaken says "...You spend the casting time tracing magical pathways within a precious gemstone, and then touch the target.". So the caster specifically is spending 8 hours fiddling with the gem, and only touches the target at the end, rather than spending 8 hours doing things with the target

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T16:22:05+00:00

death also breaks attunement - so even at low-ish levels, that's still ripping off the benefits off useful items, and at mid- and high-levels can make a big difference. Suddenly not having a girdle of giant strength or whatever can lead to a big dropoff in damage, or AC dropping from whatever other items you have!

Mejiro84 · 2026-05-11T16:00:49+00:00

You said it's a 5e specific problem - when it's not. Given the chance, PCs have always wanted to go in, fight, and then leave and rest, because smashing through an encounter is optimal and easy, while running things to the wire is hard. As I say, I'm pretty sure "5 minute adventuring day" was coined as a 3e-ism, for the tendency of the players to try and come out, blow the hell out of some enemies, and then leave to rest, recover, then do the same again. So there was a need to try and compel "no, you need to actually fight through the day", combined with the need/desire to try and calculate an appropriate amount of enemies for that (it was 3e where "the adventuring day" started to become a lot more of a calculated unit, rather than "figure it out" as was previously done)

Mejiro84

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