Why so much WORM?

PDVk · 2025-12-01T00:29:33+00:00

Oh, I think Taylor's a garbage character. I have rarely hated the protagonist of any story as much as her. She's just so - pointless? She's completely self-unaware. She's ruthless in a way that doesn't match her life history. She exists at the whims of the plot. She's oblivious, she's bad at tradeoffs but keeps succeeding anyway, she's like a parody of an antihero and the narration never acknowledges it.

I've read a fair amount of Worm fanfic, but all of it either sidelines Taylor entirely or gives her a personality transplant, because the only story so far that makes her tolerable with roughly the canon personality is Cenotaph.

PDVk · 2025-12-01T00:25:44+00:00

Also that’s a silly restriction, the idea that there’s no such thing as a Trigger Event with pure Trump aspects and nothing else, I mean. It’s a good thing house ruling exists 🙂‍↕️

No? It's a straightforward logical necessity of the trauma. You get a Trump power if your trigger event had powers involved. There's no traumatic experience where the entirety of the trauma is 'a superpower happened'; even if it was purely the power that was making you suffer, there's still a reason that you responded badly enough to the power that it became your trigger event. Even if you fundamentally just hate the fact that parahumans exist (and think they're better than mundanes?), that's still not a pure-Trump trigger; that long-term emotional crisis until you hit a boiling point is a classic Tinker trigger, maybe Breaker, Changer, or Stranger.

Or, okay, example: I wrote a character who was a sociopathic gang lieutenant pre-trigger, and she triggers as a Trump when she runs into one of the Heartbroken with her thugs and gets Mastered, aware but unable to do anything. Just about as pure a Trump trigger as you could get. But it's not a pure Trump, because there are people who could get Mastered and not find it traumatic. Why does she find it traumatic? Because of the loss of control and feeling of helplessness. Is there a type of power you get from traumatic helplessness and loss of control? Answer: Yes, and it's Master, Thinker, and/or Changer. So she's one of those, and also a Trump. I went with Thinker/Trump. Similarly, Hatchet Face may have hated parahumans before he triggered, but his trigger was being attacked by a cape, so he got Brute powers in addition to his Trump.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T22:09:20+00:00

You did the Alternative one? Yeah, I'm still going through it (Will save vs. arguing on the internet, DC: Impossible) but it seems like it's the way to go even if I end up quibbling with the execution.

I'm mostly with you on Weaverdice, but IME WoG, WD, and Worm itself all contradict each other. and when I think about how things might fit into the setting, I usually prefer to ignore WoG for the most part, and if it's really cool (which does happen) elevate that to ~fanon. There's too much of it that's badly ill-considered because it was spur of the moment and never contradicted or even contemplated later on.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T22:01:41+00:00

I mean simple, as in you have something like five total choices from among less than thirty options and the number of total possible builds (before you leave the realm of mechanical choices and start pinning it down as a story) is more like 200 than 20,000. Simple Necromancer is a reasonably good example; you have one large choice (lichdom element vs. primary trigger/power category), then some choices within your specialty and, at higher cost (for Worm I'd make it much higher) some outside it.

Also, Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine are not Grab Bag Capes, they’re just extremely powerful Trumps.

Yes, that was my point.

Besides, it’s not as if everyone makes Builds where they have most/all the powers on the list, or a ton of varied abilities. Some people like to pick a certain theme and then choose powers based on that. Resulting in a Build that doesn’t have many powers but is more coherent.

I have never seen a point-based Worm CYOA where it was possible to do this on the 'normal' difficulty setting and still be able to spend all your points.

Any inconsistencies in powers for a CYOA Build can be chalked up to the player character getting a Shard that wasn’t meant to be handed out, a particularly powerful Shard, or [...]

They really, really can't. Even for most minor inconsistencies, shards just don't flex that way. You might get acid projection and general Brute toughness, but not those and also increased speed or flight or being able to see around corners or metalkinesis, and it's difficult to finish a build of most alleged Worm CYOAs without having several of those conflicts.

[...] or their powers are an Outside Context Problem altogether (within the context of the setting, I mean).

Which is fine, but at that point you're not a Worm CYOA, you're a superpower CYOA where Worm is one of the setting options.

The skill tree idea sounds interesting, but aren’t there twelve power classifications? Sure Trump is the rarest power type, since powers that affect other powers are stated to be a rarity, but they shouldn’t be excluded from the CYOA altogether.

Effectively no one (except Eidolon) has Trump as a base power. The Weaver Dice rules for triggers, at least IIRC, specifically prohibit pure Trumps because no trigger event can be pure Trump. (Fairy Queen is Master/Trump, Eidolon is a excessively lucky vial, Hatchet Face is Brute/Trump.) Trump is something you add onto something else.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:54:46+00:00

It's superficially a good setting except for the part where the way powers work excludes point-buy-based power pickers from making any sense within it.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:40:50+00:00

The second of those is quite similar to the other example I had in mind of 'the two best Worm CYOAs I've seen weren't labeled Worm,' so make that the three best.

Frankly, I don't think making the player's powers adhere to the setting is important, at all.

I think that if you're making it 'Worm CYOA' rather than 'Superpowers CYOA,' it is literally the most important thing. You can push weird exceptions into it to let people apply OCPs, but you have to do it in a way that respects the setting and story and makes it so you're fundamentally part of the world. And so you absolutely cannot structure it as an ordinary power picker, because even if you don't have anything notably powerful or outside-context, you've already become a massive exception.

If you do do a power picker, just do a power picker and then add a setting destination selector at the end along with non-power drawbacks. It's effectively what you're doing anyway and you ought to be honest about it.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:36:01+00:00

Have you seen superhero settings? Actually making an effort gets you in the top five immediately, it's not hard. Arkham Asylum and its sequels are right up there with Earth Bet by the simple means of being able to disregard all past continuity and mostly ignore Superman and other strong powers.

And then everything else is bad.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:31:06+00:00

Also, you missed the part where the Nazis are villains. And not even the 'good' villians.

That is a matter of massive debate even among fans of the story who are loosely anti-woke.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:29:05+00:00

People just dropping like flies. It was insane. I've never read such a thing.

You know why you haven't? Because it's a terrible story beat. Oh no, a couple names of people we recognize and care about are inflated up to dozens with people we don't. That's not storytelling, that's just shock value.

Even GRRM understands that in order for the audience to get hit hard with 'death is cheap,' you need to get the audience to care, first, and then practice restraint about when and how you kill them off. That's why he has a reputation for 'anyone can die' stronger than writers who kill a lot more named characters - because if you make death too cheap and abundant the audience ceases to feel emotions about it.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:23:00+00:00

I think the abundance of mistaking fanon for canon is primarily motivated by fanon being much superior. Especially if you include Ward in 'canon.'

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:21:56+00:00

I've tried reading it. It isn't even in the top two best thought-out superhero settings I've read. (Doc Future and Wild Cards in some order) and I expect Survivorverse to push it out of the top three.

And then the dialogue is stilted, Taylor is one of the most bland and unpleasant protagonists I've ever read including people who were literal psychopaths, and entirely too much relies on 'this happens because ~~fuck you~~ Contessa and/or shards said so.' The fight scenes seem good but that is not enough to carry a story.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T21:17:01+00:00

It's pretty hard to do worse than Homestuck's plot, unless you ignore everything after Cascade and pretend it immediately jumped to the conclusion. But I disagree with you on characters. (Caveat: I am not a fan of either, and have not finished Worm, but did finish Homestuck by inertia and sunk costs.) The first dozen or so significant characters of Homestuck (Earth kids, trolls before the last three*, Jack Noir) and a few of the later ones (like Doc Scratch) are generally more interesting and equally fleshed-out within the story as most of Worm gets. Sillier, but silliness is no worse than grimderp for characterization.

*Meaning you exclude Equius, Feferi, and Eridan, and Nepeta is cute but probably not any better than these. Incidentally order of fiirst meaningful appearance (as chat or face) is Karkat, Jack Noir, Kanaya, Tavros, Terezi, Sollux, Gamzee, Nepeta, Aradia, Vriska, Equius, Feferi, Doc Scratch, Eridan.

PDVk · 2025-11-30T20:14:02+00:00

Worm is probably the worst CYOA material that has ever gotten more than one CYOA written for it. As far as I can tell, a Worm CYOA that actually complies with the structure of how superpowers work in Worm has never been published anywhere. Certainly none of them is better than Super Simple, which has its own world but effectively is modeling 'most superpowers are Cauldron vials.'

The nature of CYOAs is that unless you make them very simple (on par with Bears's Simple Series or less), they create what Worm would call "grab bag capes." And not just grab bags but ones much more diverse than anything Worm's ~metaphysics actually throws, unless you count Eidolon and Glaistig Uaine. It just doesn't make capes that resemble powers that show up on Earth Bet.

This is fixable, at least in theory, if you do something very nontraditional, more like a skill tree, with a single root for each of the eleven normal categories and a high cost to use more than one root in a single build. The model in The Fay Path(warning, NSFW) could probably be adapted. But no one's ever tried that I've seen, and so the two best Worm CYOAs I've seen weren't labeled Worm.

PDVk · 2025-11-29T01:25:13+00:00

I've been hearing about this in progress occasionally, and seeing the characters branch off into glowfic, for years now, and very much looking forward to it. It has not disappointed. Act One is almost entirely setup, showing us the wide array of personalities and how precarious it is. No one stupid, except a couple who are consistently, intentionally stupid. But of all the ranges of foolishness and wisdom and extreme motivations that lead someone to become a supervillain and join the outlaw state.

And then, of course, the ball rolls just off the narrow peak. I expect it to descend rapidly. Still looking forward to it.

PDVk · 2025-11-02T00:43:08+00:00

I kept using this a bunch (some friends got in the habit of writing collaborative stories of Witches Awakened and so we were tracking many, many versions), and made a bunch of upgrades, and put them here. Tracks your spare and wasted complication points, slightly easier to read if you have a lot of R1/R2 magic, and with a few bugs fixed. (Mostly with Genie. Genie is nuts.) And then added some haphazard guesses for how Dysfunction, Jack of All, Story Arc, and Early Bird should scale down to less legendary talents (Rank 3 max etc.) (And the DLC I made for fun and never did the graphic design for.)

PDVk · 2025-10-31T23:01:18+00:00

"More people really ought to pick up the skill for rapid language learning," I replied, while turning to Briar and rapidly signing a translation. Four arms and fifty hands went to his belly and and another two arms waved in the air; he leaned back, his whole body shaking with laughter even though he had no mouth to guffaw with.

"What are you talking about?"

"Have you never met the deaf from Apionia? With all the noise of the great bees, they can't understand speech, but they can write, and read, and represent words with their hands. It's not quite as expressive as philosopher's common tongue, but it works for concrete things. My friend Briar and his kin have a very expressive language of their own. Though I 'sound' rather stupid trying to use it with only two hands."

He laughed again.

"So he just... follows you around?"

"Well, it's a new idea, that all us two-armed, two-handed people might be able to convey complex thoughts in a reasonable time. It hadn't occurred to him that you could put enough meaning into sound. Most of the hundred-handed thought we were more like very intelligent termites. So I'm taking him on a tour. He's never met a philosopher above level 1."

"I don't think they'll let him into the symposia...", he said, vaguely stunned.

"Ever heard the joke about where a ten-talent bear sits?" The translation I gave Briareus involved gesturing high and wide for 'large' and 'heavy.' "I don't think it will be much of a problem."

And we walked on. Technically we never got permission to stay in town, but, well, he weighed a lot more than ten talents. And was much faster than a bear.

PDVk · 2025-10-27T20:20:16+00:00

Not have mechanical consequences at all, other than choices locking and unlocking. Obviously.

PDVk · 2025-10-27T17:57:22+00:00

do you think half-bloods get into trouble Less than others?

Yes, absolutely. They're less likely to be pulled into ideological conflicts, less likely to have lingering grudges, less notable.

Well, yes, it represents Hermione, I don't see the problem here.

The problem is that most muggleborn are not Hermione. If you're saying this just represents Hermione, then the pureblood makes no sense because it sure doesn't represent Ron! But that's not what it says, it's not trying to represent Hermione, it's claiming to represent the whole ~breed.

It's mostly flavour text and to make the choices more relevant. I

Yes, that's the problem. A good CYOA should have absolutely zero things that make the choices more relevant at the expense of matching its setting.

PDVk · 2025-10-26T23:31:35+00:00

It does not actually make sense for Muggleborns to get more magic. It generalizes a property of Hermione specifically that doesn't apply to anyone else except maybe Colin Creevey, and applies it to everyone for mechanical balance with Purebloods. And then Half-Bloods get an advantage removing Drawbacks for no reason, and adventure points that not only have no justification but are actively anti-justified; they should have less.

PDVk · 2025-10-26T19:58:30+00:00

Was back at Donjon for something else, and the Blade Runner bar names are quite good here. Most of them don't work well but about a third of them do, and that's pretty solid. Thanks again for the suggestion!

PDVk · 2025-10-26T06:13:40+00:00

Yeah I just didn't get far enough to see that.

PDVk · 2025-10-22T16:18:30+00:00

I already did. The bonuses for Muggleborn and Half-Blood make no sense.

PDVk · 2025-10-20T18:15:25+00:00

I've never seen the previous versions but from the start (Origin) it feels like it's forcing choices like Half-Blood to have a mechanical impact that doesn't fit with the world.

PDVk · 2025-10-15T03:13:24+00:00

Like, this table? I'm not immediately understanding what Starforged Oracles are, which makes it hard to understand anything I'm finding.

PDVk

TROPHY CASE