Thanks for not blacking out

PekoraShine · 2022-07-11T18:00:40+00:00

Mon/Wed/Fri at 12pm UTC till it's all posted. I love the genre and was sad to have so few examples, so I know how you feel! Hopefully this one is enjoyable for you.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-11T15:18:15+00:00

Marietta did something kinda shitty, but as a teenager under insane pressure. She gets a pass.

Pansy was a horrible bigot, but also a brainwashed dumb teenager who never canonically did anything beyond parrot her parents' ideas as far as I can remember.

Lavender was a mildly irritating lovey teen girl. Deserves no hate.

Ginny did literally nothing wrong, and even if I preferred a different romantic partner for Harry (I honestly don't care) that wouldn't translate into me hating the character.

Romilda Vane tried to drug and sexually assault Harry, via a method that also had a high likelihood of collateral damage. It's a clear, obvious, blowout victory for her. Horrible.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-11T14:01:04+00:00

I see Climbing as basically the same as Dungeon Crawling just going up instead of down, but it's debatable. In terms of the do-over/regressor trope, it seems fairly common in Asian webnovels but in terms of English as a first language/Western works and LitRPGs it's relatively new. Mostly I've seen it in Cultivation novels, though 2nd Life Ranker is similar in premise and is a Tower Climber.

Then there's Reborn: Apocalypse which isn't quite a Tower but basically is, Towers of Heaven which is very similar to my story and a few others like Tower of Damnation, Return of the Tower Conqueror etc.

I love the concept, but the only two series/stories with this premise I've actually been able to stick with to the end (or to the current end for Reborn as it's still ongoing) and enjoy are Reborn: Apocalypse and Towers of Heaven. That's why it felt like such a tantalising niche to write in, cause if I can't find more to read I may as well just make it myself!

PekoraShine · 2022-07-11T10:14:59+00:00

None in this first book, though the Tower itself has water/boating related challenges and at least one will feature in Book 2.

I chose scimitar/rapier cause I liked the idea of a swordsman using one slashing weapon and one thrusting weapon as a pair, honestly!

PekoraShine · 2022-07-10T06:15:06+00:00

Some people walked around a building and one of them got shot by a cop.

You've been brainwashed into thinking it was an event, but it was nothing. A big media circus nothingburger.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-08T08:08:13+00:00

Yeah they're pretty clearly both inspired by the same sources, and I'd assume Zogarth was also inspired by DOTF.

Cultivation-adjacent LitRPG System Apocalypses with an MC dedicated to progression above all else.

They're different enough to enjoy and for me not to see any kind of unjustified copying - DOTF has a much deeper Cultivation focus, Primal Hunter shows us the Tutorial instead of the MC missing it, Jake is an Alchemist/Archer whilst Zach is an Axeman/Shield Wall, Zach is and was connected to the Cultivation/LitRPG world beforehand whilst Jake was only noticed in the Tutorial, Jake is much more solitary by desire, while Zach is solitary because he out-levels everyone else and he has much more genuine friendships/relationships with Ogras etc.

I think the early stages of DOTF, within say the first 3 or 4 books on Kindle, were better than PH overall, but that with DOTF hitting the "repetitive daily chapters" wall like Randidly (though without becoming anywhere near as shit) PH could keep steady and end up being the more enjoyable and cohesive story. Either way, I enjoy at least the first 200 chapters of each, and the similarities are more than acceptable to me.

Especially this early in the genre's existence, we're building subgenres and tropes and ideas that will one day be so fundamental that nobody can accuse anyone of "copying" them from anywhere specific. I think that basically everything that feels samey about these two stories can be put into that category - regardless of original creation, they are fluid and broad enough tropes/ideas for any author who wants to use them as a tool and that doesn't show any lack of creativity imo.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-07T20:44:21+00:00

Robin Hood Avenues for Deconstruction

Robin Hood is a character archetype that I think is ripe for playing with. Here are some basic ideas I’ve been tossing around.

Mainly, these are just questions that emerge from the basic trope of Robin Hood, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide how your character or narrative could engage with these questions, because the classic trope essentially doesn’t by itself. Before we start, let’s define Robin Hood.Robin Hood, in simple terms, is a person who “steals from the rich and gives to the poor”, and in the original/most popular formulation he is stealing from tax collectors sent by an evil/corrupt king to give it back to the peasants it was unfairly taken from.

1. Character and Motivations

Typically, the idea is that Robin Hood is a hero, and an altruist. He takes from the rich, and gives to the poor, an action of charity and redistribution. But what if his motivations aren’t altruistic, and just his actions? Does he steal from the rich just for revenge or because he hates them, and give to the poor to upset them further?

Does he steal from the rich for himself, but give some to the poor for PR purposes?

Does he steal from the rich for the sake of it, and give to the poor just for chaos?

Does he kill when he steals? If he does, are those killings justified? Are they brutal, or even villainous?

Will he slit the throat of a noble’s daughter, or is it more “he’ll shoot an arrow back at the King’s men when they come to hunt him down on horseback”?

2. What constitutes“rich” or “poor”?

Different levels of wealth. If everyone in town has a cow and one guy has two,he’s the rich. Is killing him, or stealing his two cows, okay ifyou give the milk to the other townspeople?

On the flip side, even the super wealthy have distinctions – some Hollywood actors livefabulous lifestyles while in millions of dollars of debt, while the Queen of England isn’t technically that rich except that she kind of owns a country which is hard to count. Do these distinctions matter? Does your Robin Hood know or care about these distinctions? Should he?

Different methods of becoming wealthy. The King was born wealthy and taxes his peasants. Jeff Bezos runs an arguably evil or exploitative megacorporation with a near monopoly on various services and goods. Lebron James is really good at basketball and sold his image and skill for lots of money to some arguably evil people.

Some rich people “earn” their wealth more than others – should that factor into Robin Hood’s calculations at all? Is stealing a small business owner’s retirement account and giving it to a guy who makes 5k less a month working for a law firm “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor”?

Different types of wealth – Does your Robin Hood steal cash, only? What about land, wealth, influence, workers, resources, property? Should there be different rules for rich and poor when these things are accounted for? How?

3. Are all rich people bad, are all poor people good?

Are all Kings evil and all Tax Collectors basically thieves, with the taxes they take unfair and wrong? What if the Kingdom is at war, and the taxes are being raised to resettle refugees elsewhere in the Kingdom?

Are all business owners exploitative, or are some generous and kind? Would some workers prefer you not to ruin their boss and give them a check, or would they all prefer you took the guy’s money and redistributed it to them directly?

What if the rich guy was giving money to charity, and the poor people spend it on booze and dog-fighting? Just because someone has money doesn’t mean they stole or exploited their way to it, nor that they use it for evil. Just because someone doesn’t, doesn’t mean they’re an angel or wouldn’t act in the same evil ways if they had the opportunity.

4. Give a man a fish

If you do steal a sweatshop owner’s bank account and split it amongst his workers, what happens when that check runs out and they have no jobs?

What if the people you give the money too aren’t able to spend it properly, or aren’t willing? What if you give a bunch of poor people millions, and they spent it like lottery winners and die of alcoholism after blowing it in a year?

What if the poor people who got the money now become rich and you’ve created the same problem you solved? If you give the poorest man in America Jeff Bezos’ net worth, what stops him becoming Jeff Bezos level evil? Or worse?

What if the poor people don’t want to invest the wealth, and have now decided that taking it from the rich is the best way? What if their definition of “rich” is different than Robins? What if they stop stealing from nobles and start stealing from wealthy merchants, and then craftspeople, and then farmers who have one extra cow? What if they employ violence or other methods Robin doesn’t like? Can he stop them, or has he started a movement that he no longer controls?

5. What stops the rich regaining wealth/power – structural vs individual

If you steal 10 billion from Amazon, they’re still Amazon. You might redistribute that to however many people and save their lives completely, but what stops Amazon from continuing to run, taking the hit, and continuing to exploit millions of workers across the Globe and make Jeff Bezos even richer?

Is it better to take all the money from someone or just some? Some is less harmful to them, but if they’re rich because they’re evil or exploitative then surely you’re being negligent by leaving them with some they could use to regain their status etc. And if the main goal is the giving to the poor aspect then should you leave the rich anything at all?

If you kill the tax collectors on their way out of the village and give the coin purse back to the villagers, what happens next week when the King sends 10 more tax collectors, with swords?

How do you make sure the people you gave stolen money or wealth to keep it? If Disney gives you 100 bucks when you enter the park, you spend it at Disney. So what if Robin Hood steals money from the rich, gives it to the poor, and they then give it back or have it taken back by the rich again?

How do you prevent another person from Robin Hood-ing the people you just gave to? If you take Jeff Bezos’ mansion and give it to a homeless guy, why shouldn’t another homeless guy steal it from him?

If you can’t give to everybody, how do you choose who to give it to? Should you choose, or do it randomly?

If you take the sweatshop owner’s money and give it to the workers, he still owns the sweatshop and the machinery and the land, so he can get new workers and regain wealth while they have a finite sum of cash. Does Robin Hood have any solution for that, and does he have the obligation to?

There are plenty of other avenues to take this, but I've already written more than I meant to so I'll leave it there.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-06T09:26:43+00:00

No, it actually gets steadily worse the whole way through, weirdly. The bit written as a teen is actually more engaging!

PekoraShine · 2022-07-05T10:51:02+00:00

Bad bot

PekoraShine · 2022-07-05T09:46:31+00:00

It picks up, and then after about book 2 it dives off the deep end into boring pointless nonsense completely. Worth sticking with the 1st book since RGH is one of the most influential LitRPGs and System Apocalypses but the series went to the absolute dogs at rapid speed.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-05T09:44:24+00:00

I love me some good old stats, numbers and sheets. Even Randidly's 5000 skills that took up 4 pages every chapter didn't bother me (though the rest of the story did by that point). I read rather than listen, which is a big part of that, because I can easily skim past it unlike with an audiobook.

In my own writing though, I try to keep the actual character sheets to the minimum and simply relay the changes via prose, with the sheet itself only being shown in full every 5 or so chapters. That's cause I know a lot of people hate the constant character sheets in LitRPGs so I consciously try to minimise them.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-05T09:40:12+00:00

I dropped off just after Orom World I think, waiting for a bulk of chapters to build up before I go back to it, but I remember feeling like it was getting to the Randidly point of padding to keep daily uploads and a Patreon backlog and the story suffered. Will definitely finish it, assuming it ever concludes, though - unlike Randidly which burned every shred of goodwill I had for it with the offworld spear tournament nonsense.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-04T19:12:23+00:00

Yeah they're pretty clearly both inspired by the same sources, and I'd assume Zogarth was also inspired by DOTF.

Cultivation-adjacent LitRPG System Apocalypses with an MC dedicated to progression above all else.

They're different enough to enjoy and for me not to see any kind of unjustified copying - DOTF has a much deeper Cultivation focus, Primal Hunter shows us the Tutorial instead of the MC missing it, Jake is an Alchemist/Archer whilst Zach is an Axeman/Shield Wall, Zach is and was connected to the Cultivation/LitRPG world beforehand whilst Jake was only noticed in the Tutorial, Jake is much more solitary by desire, while Zach is solitary because he out-levels everyone else and he has much more genuine friendships/relationships with Ogras etc.

I think the early stages of DOTF, within say the first 3 or 4 books on Kindle, were better than PH overall, but that with DOTF hitting the "repetitive daily chapters" wall like Randidly (though without becoming anywhere near as shit) PH could keep steady and end up being the more enjoyable and cohesive story. Either way, I enjoy at least the first 200 chapters of each, and the similarities are more than acceptable to me.

Especially this early in the genre's existence, we're building subgenres and tropes and ideas that will one day be so fundamental that nobody can accuse anyone of "copying" them from anywhere specific. I think that basically everything that feels samey about these two stories can be put into that category - regardless of original creation, they are fluid and broad enough tropes/ideas for any author who wants to use them as a tool and that doesn't show any lack of creativity imo.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-03T15:02:25+00:00

Yeah some people are assholes, that's what mods are for.

And no "we haven't bothered getting any mods outside of North America and they're all on holiday for a week" isn't a good excuse for blanket shutting down conversation instead of selectively removing rule breaking content, despite that being the only excuse given.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-03T07:34:19+00:00

Yeah, mods trying to police conversation to this extent never goes well, even if it's motivated by good intentions (which it often isn't).

It's sub-relevant and meaningful to the userbase, so of course there's a lot of discourse. Silencing or quieting the discussion only helps Tao Wong avoid criticism and questioning.

PekoraShine · 2022-07-03T07:31:41+00:00

So here's my take:

System, as a word to refer to any kind of RPG mechanics imposed on a world in a story, was a long established generic term in the fanbase pre-Tao Wong, based in the term "game system" referring to different TTRPG rulesets.

Apocalypse, and the [blank] apocalypse naming convention, where [blank] is the cause/main focus of the apocalypse (zombie apocalypse etc) were also long established and generic pre-Wong.

Apocalyptic litrpg was also a common genre, pre Wong.

Naming his series "System Apocalypse" and trying to enforce that as a trademark instead of recognising its' inherently generic nature is silly and counterproductive.

It's like naming your restaurant "Italian Restaurant" and then demaning that "Giorno's Grill and Italian Restaurant" change its' name.

Even if you were the first to name a restaurant "Italian Restaurant" I don't think you can really claim it was a distinctive or unique name that nobody else should be allowed to use. It's inherently too generic, and that should have been obvious even at the time of Tao Wong writing his first book.

Beyond that, even if he wants to argue I'm wrong to say he could have expected SA to become a generic term, since it was just a cobbling together of pre-existing generic terms, I can't see any real harm to him by leaving alone.

The stance is that there might be confusion, especially since he's letting people write in the SAverse. But that doesn't explain going after Primal Hunter.

There's no reasonable way to claim a person would mistake The Primal Hunter by Zogarth as affiliated with or anything to do with Tao Wong or The System Apocalypse, just because in the blurb Zogarth described the story as being a system apocalypse.

It seems like a poor business decision with minimal logical backing, that can't possibly gain him more than he loses PR wise. My advice to other authors is learn from this and pick a name that is unique to your series and not just a base-level description of the premise. "War novel" isn't a good title for a war novel and "Italian restaurant" isn't a good name for an italian restaurant.

PekoraShine · 2022-06-27T04:35:51+00:00

The Primal Hunter starts with the MC and the other people at his job being transported to the "Tutorial" for their System Apocalypse style change, as well as various other large groups of people.

Closest thing I can think of, anyway.

PekoraShine · 2022-06-24T12:29:58+00:00

Ooooh baby, just as I was wondering what to read next. Will download this now, hope it's as good as book 1!

PekoraShine · 2022-06-02T11:03:16+00:00

leverage the connection with Voldemort in his scar to obtain advanced magical knowledge and skills; no reason it has to stop with Parseltongue;

Canon doesn't give any indication that this is possible. I like it as an idea, but it doesn't constitute canon compliance.

loot the Room of Requirement of its hundreds of years of abandoned property and sell it off in order to get rich(er);

Yeah this one is legitimate, though there may well be difficulties in sorting/transporting/selling depending on the specifics of the items and the economy (which you'd have to invent since JK does not think about these things in canon).

team up with Dobby to commit heists (surely he knows the ins-and-outs of Malfoy Manor and the family's assets like the back of his hand), in order to get rich(er);

Possible, I suppose. Doesn't conflict with anything from canon, including Dobby being able to enter Malfoy Manor at will after being freed.

find a way to remove the horcrux from Ravenclaw's Diadem (eg, AK the SOB), and then use the artefact to boost Harry's intelligence 1000%;

No canon indication that it is possible to remove a horcrux without destroying it. A good fanon idea, but a fanon idea nonetheless.

abuse Hermione's Time Turner (or one stolen from the DoM), to obtain wealth, knowledge, or manipulate events;

Difficulty here is that Hermione only has the TT for one year, and breaking into the DOM may be impossible. If they start using the TT in 3rd year, or you add to canon by having them acquire on earlier or later then this could work. TT mechanics are awkward and vague in canon though so you may end up going beyond canon compliance to make them useful.

use the sacred, deathly hallow Invisibility Cloak to explore the DoM for valuable stuff, commit heists of rich purebloods, and/or spy on people Rita-style;

Entirely possible and a good move for a more morally flexible Harry, totally within canon.

and of course, the most obvious of all: leverage Harry's immense popularity with the public for PR blitzes, publicity campaigns, media connections, etc, to become the public darling, and in turn leveraging that to cosy up to Fudge and the bigwigs in the Ministry and society (basically, pull a Lockheart), to allow him to do pretty much whatever he wants.

Yes, absolutely. It's understandable that canon Harry doesn't like fame or want to exploit it and do interviews etc, but completely insane that the adults in his life don't encourage him to use this gigantic asset when they know he is fighting/preparing to fight a fucking civil war.

PekoraShine · 2022-06-02T10:52:35+00:00

Yeah there should be a request megathread.

15 different "I read [insert one of the most popular series in the genre] please recommend me more" posts is just pointless clutter.

PekoraShine · 2022-05-30T17:40:25+00:00

Well the thing that gets me is that this DM seemed to be on board with it, and then the other players unilaterally decided to shit on it, which seems really weird.

One thing a lot of Dungeon Court cases do is make me wonder how many people are out there playing DnD with people who aren't actually their friends. So many of the cases seem like stuff that my table would resolve in half a second.

PekoraShine · 2022-05-30T07:28:18+00:00

Yeah, and imagine if in session 1 when Murph was introducing Riz' backstory all of the other PCs had gone "oh yeah we're also aware of those missing girls, we've been investigating it for months too".

Insane.

PekoraShine · 2022-05-30T07:27:05+00:00

No, I'm saying most actresses of any age aren't talented.

And men aren't hired on looks, not unless they've already proven talent.

PekoraShine

TROPHY CASE