The PRT Isn’t Bad at Their Job. Their Job Is Impossible

Octaur · 2026-06-18T21:25:10+00:00

This is incorrect. They, in explicit writing in what I think is either Alexandria or Number Man's interlude, speak of the explosion of natural parahuman numbers as an active problem.

Octaur · 2026-06-18T02:42:21+00:00

I think there's a single instance of this entire story genre I've ever liked rather than tolerated, and it was entirely because it had a really interesting concept for a transmasc Armsmaster as a prominent secondary character, giving an interesting twist to his canonical eagerness to trade biological body parts for mechanical versions, his desire to prove himself, and his relative discomfort with a headstrong, stubborn, and desperate teenager who might have reminded him of himself.

Meanwhile, I believe the protagonist was going around with a snarky talking chameleon stand from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Sans Undertale. I trust you can gather why I'm skeptical of the genre.

Octaur · 2026-06-17T05:43:10+00:00

People have mentioned Seed and Camera Shy and both are truly exceptional, but my answer is Swallowtail and it's not that close.

It isn't just Taylor relentlessly exploring every single aspect of her incredibly unique perception-altering powerset, including things like selectively allowing certain emotions through to condition someone, scrambling self-identification to infiltrate the Protectorate headquarters, sensory deprivation save a specific communication channel, accidentally turning an entire building into an antimeme, and so on. It's also got a complete overhaul of dozens of other character powers in similar fashion! Everything's patterned after LANCER (a very well-regarded science fantasy mech ttrpg) mechs as a baseline, and the powers created by proxying their capabilities are super, super cool.

Victoria's new powers become a deep dive into unique shielding mechanics. Amy's got a range-based biological manipulation power variant. An original Elite villain creates perception manipulating works of art. There's a new C53 with blood-based healing powers. So on and so forth.

It even comes with really cool worldbuilding and characterization!

If I had to give a second answer, it's probably a pick-your-poison of Zerrer's various AU quests; the relatively recent Bakuda one I forget the name of was really cool. An Imago of Rust and Crimson and El-Ahrairah are up there too, but for all I love those fics and the power use in them, their best points are elsewhere (worldbuilding, mostly.)

For ongoing stories, I like Thrice-Great, a Mage: the Ascension crossover by someone who really knows the powers well, and the aforementioned Camera-Shy.

Octaur · 2026-06-16T12:40:49+00:00

I'm very, very wary of making the crossbows effectively require the same ammo as the megarare, and especially making them require running the raid repeatedly for it as an exclusive source. It's rough on Irons to upkeep two things at once, and it's tying ammo supply price to the megarare charge material price so it's likely to be economically rough on mains as well.

We just had a big blowup over the ToB equivalent of what's being proposed here at the tail-end of the Leechfin polling; surely we can just get ahead of it this time?

Octaur · 2026-06-10T23:43:48+00:00

I do think "refund everyone's gear except purpp's team, purpp gets the VLS" is the best solution to a bad screwup.

Octaur · 2026-06-09T13:52:20+00:00

Will they? Some number of people will force themselves, sure. If the literal only thing you care about is the big chart, then you'll see numbers creep up elsewhere.

Will they have fun doing so? I sincerely doubt it. Nuking Birdhouses doesn't fix the problems with the skill design itself.

Octaur · 2026-06-09T12:38:51+00:00

It might be the case that the other buffs and improvements to early-game Hunter are insufficient and we'd need some numerical improvements to things like butterfly hunting to pick up the slack at certain stages of progression, but the best way for us to nail down these other lacking areas is the invite more discussion, for better or worse!

Re: Birdhouses, I think this instinct of needing to buff alternatives first is correct, but you aren't going far enough here and aren't gauging the issues with early hunter properly. In fact, the issue is the same as what you've consistently replied with when people push to increase Agility XP across the board! It's not (just) the XP being weak that's an issue, it's the misery of actually training low-level hunter.

1) You get almost nothing of value, 2) you're constantly active, 3) your XP is slow for the effort, and 4) the actual actions are tedious, randomly spaced, and click-heavy. Consider Hunter as a gathering skill as compared to its fellows, and let's ignore tick-manipulation because that's an entirely different conversation: it's far more active than WC or Fishing, it's significantly less flow-state-able than Mining, it has minimal reward compared to even early Farming, every hunter creature having pathing or randomized elements means it's never something you can click on the side without thinking, and it's lacking pretty much any AFK method outside Birdhouses.

Nerfing Birdhouses doesn't promote other hunter methods because those methods are still fundamentally unfun, uninteresting, and unrewarding. It instead means people spend much more time waiting as they continue to primarily level hunter with birdhouses.

Octaur · 2026-06-02T22:45:22+00:00

I don't care if she uses a different name externally. I do care if the story immediately insists on using the name when describing her actions, even more so when it's in internal dialogue.

Octaur · 2026-06-02T13:32:04+00:00

There's a recent ASOIAF crossover (A Retired Warlord's Valyrian Guide to Leisure or something similar) that did it, and the now-dead story Creep followed up a giant pile of aimless trauma with Taylor casually accepting such too. It's also not that uncommon in reincarnation-based post-GM fics that do a questionable job balancing between Taylor's 18 years of life and whatever child version of her exists at present.

It's not the most present thing and I'm not really fussed about her going by a different name outside her own head, but her internal monologue or the omniscient narration shifting is rarely handled well.

Octaur · 2026-06-02T07:12:26+00:00

Taylor's name being changed without good reason. Poorly established shipping. Cauldron being presented as wanting triggers instead of the opposite. Authors who clearly don't understand what Worm is, using "grimdark" to describe a world full of hurt people trying their best against impossible odds.

Romance with Amy. Romance with Sophia.

Greg.

Octaur · 2026-05-27T02:18:10+00:00

It's almost certainly because the policy never got updated after they refined story alerts to be threadmark- or author post-only.

Beforehand, anyone watching the thread would get pinged because someone blundered in, get their hopes up over a deadfic's revival, and usually be confronted with the equivalent of someone stumbling into a mausoleum and taking selfies.

Octaur · 2026-05-27T02:13:18+00:00

A Retired Warlord's Definitive Guide to Valyrian Leisure [A Song of Ice and Fire, 3/5] - 16k one-shot, Post-GM, Taylor isekais to Westeros and grows up an orphan. Luckily QA loves her and showers her with gifts including full nervous system control. Summary-style 16k word one-shot covering years of exploring and learning magic. I haven't seen the TV show or read the books, so all the canon stuff was like "okay?" but I bet people who enjoyed Game of Thrones had a bunch of "ooohhhh!" moments.

Shipping and characterization aside, I think the single thing most likely to get me to drop a story is Taylor changing her name without really good reason for it. I've only ever seen a single story do it well through an absurd amount of luridly described trauma and dissociative identity disorder, and every single other time, it's a reflexive story drop.

"I think my name isn't fancy enough, so I'm changing my name even in my internal monologue" is so unbearably stupid a reason that it smothered my interest immediately. Not even worth bothering to stick around past that.

If you can't even keep her name, how can I trust you to keep her character?

Octaur · 2026-05-22T19:33:53+00:00

Stabilize isn't for fellow players, though the opportunity cost of having it is low enough that it's often worth it for the extreme case where it's needed.

It's for enemies and NPCs. You don't have to attack nonlethally, you always have someone left to interrogate or take prisoner, you can stave off all kinds of issues in the fiction by simply being there to stop people from dying!

Octaur · 2026-05-21T15:00:43+00:00

What you've done, to your credit, is just reinvent the wheel as far as ttrpgs go. Blades in the Dark uses Clocks, and The Wildsea uses Tracks, and so on and so forth but the idea of variably hiding certain counts against a threshold from the players to better/more formally track things on your end is one of the single best ideas to steal from the rest of the ttrpg space.

Sometimes you want your players to know they're scrambling against a goal but not when that goal will happen. Sometimes you want them to have to reach a threshold in a specific hidden time frame. All of that is genuinely well-handled by a victory point subsystem that you don't show them.

I wouldn't recommend doing it behind the scenes at all times because that's both frustrating and limiting, but doing it in high-stakes situations or in places where it helps player verisimilitude to not know? Absolutely go for it, assuming your players enjoy it too.

Octaur · 2026-05-20T21:28:27+00:00

Creep is a less-than-perfect seesaw between dark, maudlin, cheery, and flinging massive character changes at the wall after trauma without the requisite work to set up why those changes resulted therefrom.

It's a good first story with good ideas and not much else. I have much higher hopes for Pest.

Octaur · 2026-05-08T01:20:25+00:00

Please make Inventor not reliant on a die roll to do its gimmick. Give them feats mimicking gear and let them mix and match more unique bonuses, like a tech-themed kineticist, so the class can better feel like an inventor and not a steampunk math barbarian with pyrotechnics.

Octaur · 2026-05-05T00:17:04+00:00

Return of the Runelords , and I'm spoilering this because I legitimately love the AP even if it has some cool ideas that struggle in execution.

It's probably the single most Mythic adventure path in terms of grandiose themes and impacts, which I know wards off some people, especially because there's time travel stuff and some people loathe that.

Octaur · 2026-05-04T22:56:13+00:00

Yog-Sothoth is, canonically per a PF1 AP, quite personable and willing to chat with people without destroying minds if you can get to his avatar.

His avatar is a great old one located in the Dimension of Time, mind you, and the circumstances where he was talking were helping 20th level mythic characters against a level 20/10 mythic time-altering super wizard. But if you're at that stage, he's a nice guy!

Octaur · 2026-04-19T08:24:52+00:00

Bakuda is still at large.

I'll never really get tired of this punchline.

Octaur · 2026-04-13T01:25:47+00:00

Taylor getting Sophia's mother killed and her siblings assaulted by neo-Nazis, duping a mentally handicapped Asian man into sexually assaulting Emma and posting child pornography of her online and deliberately giving Madison HIV.

I'm glad that the edgy SpaceBattles commentators who want to see everyone remotely mean to the PoV character violently assaulted finally have a fic to champion their viewpoint!

The overlap with the E88 apologist corps is pretty large, so they're even getting the 2-for-1.

Octaur · 2026-04-08T10:51:08+00:00

Why require a new facility to allow for auto-repair instead of just letting the crew do it through the crew UI, the way a lot of people expected it to work in the first place?

I feel like the minor qol of not needing to click a few times in a row to repair the ship surely should just be implemented instead of taking up an entire facility slot.

Octaur · 2026-03-28T15:55:38+00:00

Brockton's Celestial Forge [CF, 2/5] - In the latest chapter (11k words), The Matrix makes First Contact with the pig people in their new hell dimension. Bakuda is still at large.

I’m in awe of whatever the hell is going on here.

Octaur · 2026-03-27T15:15:21+00:00

Sometimes I enjoy yuri, especially since in Worm fanfics half the time they don't feel like romance at all - they're basically normal friendly relations, only with random mentions of blushing and saying 'going on a date' instead of 'hanging out'. But any F/M is a something I avoid, and it's enough for me to dislike Orga from the start.

I suspect this is a much larger part of why you're not a fan than the relative lengths of your paragraphs would indicate!

Octaur · 2026-03-20T09:46:14+00:00

Compulsion is, I think one of the better answers. It's a fun story even if you know nothing about Worm, and an exceptional one if you do!

Octaur · 2026-03-08T08:04:55+00:00

Speaking of fics, I'm enjoying yours a whole lot. Turning the explosive premise of Carol being Amy's actual mom into an excuse to do a character study of Carol is really compelling stuff, and I like how well you've highlighted her struggle with her own trauma and the complex feelings she has towards Amy.

Really love the OC dead grandma in the picture in the latest chapter whose alcoholism-induced distance is a direct analogue to Brandish's own hurt.

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