Quinn Angstrom
I'm high on painkillers and displeased with life, so let's talk about RPGs or something
BF
what would a Umineko JRPG look like
✶ 天才的なIDOL様！
undertale probably
Dragomorph
probably more like corpse party or one of those "games that use the rpg engine but don't really act like an rpg" sorta deals
Quinn Angstrom
I think a slightly more coherent question might be "what would a When They Cry JRPG look like", since Umineko is so aggressively tied to its genres and mediums thematically
Quinn Angstrom
but... probably a lot like Undertale yeah
Quinn Angstrom
Undertale and Umineko have a lot in common
Quinn Angstrom
in that they're both works in genres where a lot of senseless violence happens and is usually kinda glossed over
Quinn Angstrom
and are about the story stopping to go "hey wait, what about these guys"
Quinn Angstrom
and also both star a scenery-chewing supervillain that's actually a front for a tragic figure trying to hide the pain they suffered at the hands of others
Quinn Angstrom
In another kind of RPG talk
Dragomorph
one possibility is that it has two parts per chapter: one where you make various choices that lead to various endings, and then one where they try to make sense of the way your choices played out
Quinn Angstrom
I just realized that in all of my Gming experience
Quinn Angstrom
I don't think I've ever had a Good Dog NPC
Quinn Angstrom
it's hard to imagine a WTC JRPG just because for all their super weird shit
Quinn Angstrom
the series tends to ultimately be very grounded in reality
Quinn Angstrom
the villains in WTC are never eldritch supergods, they're things like
Quinn Angstrom
abusive dads
Rama
You can do both
Rama
Actually that's the plot of FFX isn't it
Quinn Angstrom
true
Dragomorph
the WOFF guys commented that one of the things with Final Fantasy games is that they all start with really personal stories
Dragomorph
and then
Dragomorph
suddenly
Dragomorph
GIANT SPACE GOD
Dragomorph
so in other words it's not that out of place
Quinn Angstrom
Umineko is kind of the reverse
Quinn Angstrom
where shit gets increasingly fantastical with the witches and laser truth court battles and demon fistfights and shit
Quinn Angstrom
but then you eventually peel it all away and uncover the raw painful truth hiding inside it
Rama
A better comparison might be the Earthbound/Mother games which keep themes of family and personal connections intimately tied into their eldritch spacegod timetravel apocalypse shit
Quinn Angstrom
yeah
Rama
And coincidentally, what is Undertale but a Mother game that I've actually played?
Quinn Angstrom
the ostensible big bad of Umineko is an evil cackling omnipotent god-witch with a legion of demons at her command, but the actual big bad is the idea that life is too complicated to have easily-identifiable big bads be the cause of everything
Rama
Doesn't stop multiple people from trying to be that witch though
Quinn Angstrom
Umineko is Complicated
Rogal Dorn
Bad dads
Rama
Alright my question
Quinn Angstrom
really most of Umineko comes back eventually to one VERY bad dad
Rama
How do you actually organize all these online tabletops in such a way that you don't spend your entire life planning them?
Quinn Angstrom
1. have enough momentum from past games and enough easily-understood premises that a lot of people sign up
Quinn Angstrom
2. Ask each person to list which days they are consistently available
Quinn Angstrom
3. Cross-reference to find a slot where I can wedge in four or five people
Quinn Angstrom
4. Do that
Rama
I meant less the logistics (although those are also difficult) and more when do you find time to plot and turn your plotting into characters and settings in roll20?
Rama
And how do you contain that time so you can indulge in your other fifteen hobbies and a dev job?
Quinn Angstrom
The plotting part of my brain is active while I'm doing other things
Quinn Angstrom
by the time I post signup sfor a game I've already sort of figured out half of what's going to happen
Rama
I think the difficulty I have is that I come up with like. Specific moments that happen at the beginning and end of a story and have nothing to put between them.
Rama
Which works better in an RPG than any other medium but still gets me burnt out.
Quinn Angstrom
for Valor games, I have a prett concrete process
Quinn Angstrom
of like
Quinn Angstrom
Step 1. What's the overall shape of the story
Quinn Angstrom
Step 2: What is each Season about
Quinn Angstrom
Step 3: What's the Big Twist
Quinn Angstrom
Step 4: What characters do I need to facilitate 2/3
Quinn Angstrom
Step 5: What's some shit I haven't gotten a chance to do yet that sounds radical
Quinn Angstrom
like, let's go into a harder example with VPK, which failed for a lot of reasons including being too complicated and in a terrible timeslot but still
Quinn Angstrom
VPK starts with a plurk ramble I do about how to do Persona mechanics in Valor
Quinn Angstrom
so then I have my basic premise of "The shape is the same basic shape as Persona 4, but with the whole party on board from day 1"
Quinn Angstrom
I have six party members, and the big appeal point is gonna be the Shadow Fights
Quinn Angstrom
So, I have four Seasons to run
Quinn Angstrom
so each of the first three Seasons will be one section of the dungeon, two PC Shadow fights, and one big boss at the end
Quinn Angstrom
then Season 4 will go off the rails with crazy endgame shit
Quinn Angstrom
planning with Void, we have "Discord" as a theme, and a boss who is a god trying to sow discord in humanity
Quinn Angstrom
he goes big (evil nobunaga cults and the police and shit), I go small (a single nasty crime done by one person to one other person, and the Umineko-esque spiraling out of control of distorted emotions that comes from the unfair aftermath)
Quinn Angstrom
so then, from there, I need to keep the story moving with a single central mystery for a full 20 levels
Quinn Angstrom
so season 1 is the introductory arc
Quinn Angstrom
then seasons 2/3 both have 'fake' villains to direct the story (Shadow Chiyoko, Gog)
Quinn Angstrom
so then S1 is introducing the setting/mystery, S2 is digging into a fakeout culprit that reveals more about the case but ultimately is a dead end
Quinn Angstrom
S3 digs deeper into the metaphysical mysteries as Dajjal's machinations come more into focus
Quinn Angstrom
and S4 is the uncovering of the truth
Quinn Angstrom
so that's step 2 cleared
Quinn Angstrom
then I need to come up with a big fat pile of NPCs
Quinn Angstrom
first I need two people - the Culprit (Nao), and the person who wronged the Culprit (Ken)
Quinn Angstrom
Nao's actions are then taken to maximize Ken's torment, via targeting people closer and closer to him to let him know that justice is coming for him
Quinn Angstrom
so, I expand the net with some more people involved in the incident - Nao and Ken's dads, the doctor who kept Nao's injuries hidden, the detective who uncovered Ken's crimes, et cetera
Quinn Angstrom
to be the victims that Nao targets throughout the game
Quinn Angstrom
then I need a Velvet Room cast for exposition and shadow shit, which gives us Igor, Priscilla, Jezebel, and Plato
Quinn Angstrom
then from there, I need to come up with a ton of side characters, but Persona has a built in framework for that
Quinn Angstrom
so I take the characters I've made so far, and the backstory characters for some of the PCs
Quinn Angstrom
slap Arcana on them
Quinn Angstrom
and see what I have left to fill out
Quinn Angstrom
and create characters for each Arcana from there
Quinn Angstrom
and give each a basic personality, a role, and at least one hidden depth layer in case the party pries into them
Quinn Angstrom
and flesh them out further as the PCs reveal who they're interested in
Quinn Angstrom
so then I have a plot structure, a cast, and a set of enemies
Awe
/furiously taking notes here
Quinn Angstrom
from there it's a matter of trying to measure out how much of the mystery I can dole out each season
Quinn Angstrom
that bieng one of the hardest parts - if I was doing it over, I'd structure it more like P5, and have a different mini-mystery each Season
Quinn Angstrom
instead of one monolithic dungeon/mystery
Quinn Angstrom
from there it's just a matter of statting a million things, which is easy now that the API exists
Rama
Yeah that definitely helps
Quinn Angstrom
so that's, in a nutshell
Quinn Angstrom
the Profgame Planning Process
Rama
Makes sense. Get the overall shape of the game, figure out what's Essential, make that, and branch out from there
Quinn Angstrom
yeah
Awe
I'm still working on my desktop one, by the by, I'll probably peek at how you handled skills/etc. in the character sheet for inspiration
Awe
As for my own plans for a VP3... I definitely have A Culprit in mind
Quinn Angstrom
the culprit... is me
Awe
and a theme, but now is likely the wrong time and place to reveal that
Love Snake Kaja
I probably should follow an actual process like this sometime. I tend to kind of wing it most of the time.
Rama
I'm probably going to at least attempt some kind of Homestuck RPG and I feel like I can probably do a lot less planning there and a lot more letting players flail around and reacting to it.
Quinn Angstrom
my style is but one of many
Rama
Yeah that particular level of planning is necessary for a mystery game I think, but probably not all genres
Awe
I certainly do want something less mystery in its execution
penis bacon
I recently (like in the last few hours) bounced off your tumblr into reading prokopetz's stuff and am curious enough to ask which definition of "dungeon" do you find easiest to work with?
Quinn Angstrom
my style lands osmewhere between 2 and 3
Quinn Angstrom
oxycodone is powerful stuff once it kicks in
Quinn Angstrom
I can't feel gravity
penis bacon
mmmmaybe you should lie down
Quinn Angstrom
I'm okay
Quinn Angstrom
not going anywhere, that's for sure
Rama
Well when you're safe from floating off
Rama
I'm going to ask something more directly related to this horrible meme comic's control of my brain and ask if you think it'd be possible or reasonable to do Valorstuck
Rama
Like what hacks are required there
Rama
I ask mainly because I'm only familiar enough with two non-setting-dependent RPGs to run them comfortably and M&M would be even worse really
Rama
Lacking a clearly defined narrative structure and power curve as it does
Quinn Angstrom
it's been a long time since I read homestuck, but I don't see why not
Quinn Angstrom
the main thing I'd have to do is, like
Quinn Angstrom
go through all the mechanics and values on the character sheet
Quinn Angstrom
and determine which ones do or don't exist on the in-universe Sburb level
Rama
Honestly rename some shit and I think Valor maps pretty well into the in-universe mechanics. You'd more need to add stuff like magic items/alchemization and the ability to get killed almost instantaneously in a hilariously anticlimactic way.
Rama
And maybe sylladices but honestly fuck those.
Quinn Angstrom
a stricter death threshold + multiple lives could be workable
Rama
Call it maybe dead at -Increment and then put in a timer for corpsesmooch/quest bed shenanigans.
Rama
Valor and Homestuck both seem to try to emulate a more exciting version of JRPG mechanics, Homestuck's just also got a lot of weird crap.
Rama
And again people die a lot
Rama
And the bulk of the comic by word count and panel is people talking about random shit and annoying each other on the internet
Quinn Angstrom
Homestuck's more memorable fights are Very Anime
Rama
Yeah the animated fights particularly are like 50% DBZ and 50% Final Fantasy
Rama
With a lot of random Capcom fighting game in the final boss rush for some reason
Rogal Dorn
Metal valor solid?