The Thunder Tyrant

The Last Dragon, Bruce Leeroy.* *not an actual dragon, but the only one that comes to mind.

@folie a deux If you mean how do I handle rejections from submission attempts, I can't say -- I haven't had a rejection yet, mostly for lack of submissions as opposed to some talent on my part. I won Writers of the Future on my first submission and that award was what got me an invitation from the editors of Parallel Worlds to put a story into their anthology, so there was no submission process there. Although I've written five novels, the first two were practice. The third and its sequel (the fourth) are probably publishable but I chose to trunk them because some of the issues explored in the books would be better suited if I adapted them to another story. The fifth was an experiment in trying a particular subgenre and I had mixed feelings about the results. My sixth novel is probably going to be the first I send out. That's not as uncommon as it might seem; a lot of authors will write several novels before feeling comfortable with sending their stuff out. Even those who start submitting to agents with their first effort often have to write several novels before selling one. Off the top of my head, Stephen King wrote three or four prior to selling Carrie. Jim Butcher wrote somewhere between two and four. Brandon Sanderson wrote around a dozen novels before selling one, and his first five novels were practice runs that he used to teach himself the craft. A lot of times, we trap ourselves with this idea that we have to walk into this artistic pursuit and hit the ground running, but that's almost never what happens, unless your name is Samuel R. Delaney. Even Isaac Asimov received several rejections before he sold anything worth scratch. That being said, this question does let me delve into an adjacent topic: submission rejection. It's worth noting that, while there might be issues in a manuscript in need of fixing, or a writer's talent is just short of the mark for professional publication, you can never take rejections personally. There's so many factors beyond just the manuscript's quality that it's really out of our hands. I'll list a few, to illustrate: -What does the agent like? Does this book fit into the wheelhouse of what they sell? Do they feel confident representing it? -Does the agent have any books similar in theme, subject matter, or tone already on their desk for consideration? -Has the agent sold a similar book recently? -Does the agent feel that there's a market for the book, whether or not they love it? If you write a vampire book, does the agent think that there's been a dearth of vampire books and so it won't be popular? Or maybe there's been a dearth and that means there's a niche to fill? Has there been an explosion of vampire novels, so it might be a good purchase, or has there been an explosion of vampire novels and, no, maybe the market is too saturated? You can apply these reasons to an editor's decision-making too, when it comes to the purchasing of the rights. What's important to realize is that, while the editors and agents are following the market, they can't really gauge it any better than you or I. They don't have an inside track to what's going to be the big hit or else they'd be engineering bestsellers like clockwork. It's a mixture of experience, professional knowledge, guesswork, and gut feeling. If we're fumbling around in the dark for a book that will sell then agents and editors are navigating by a guttering candle. So, for my rejection process, and for rejection in general, one key thing I take away from it is that it's never personal. I know when I send off that email that there are any number of factors beyond my control that will influence the agent in question. All I can do is write the best book possible, the book that I want to write, and lead with my best foot forward. As for what keeps me going, the most honest answer is twofold. First is that I love writing and I'll write whether or not I'm successful. The second is that failure is a learning tool. If I know why something I wrote didn't work, then I can fix it, or improve the weakness for next time. I'm also adversarial to a fault, so my reflexive response to failure is to work harder. The archetypal example of my attitude is Henry Rollins in this video, Failure doesn't stifle my motivation, it fuels my efforts. I don't know if that can be taught or if it's just the way my psyche is put together. To me, failure is best perceived as a whetstone: we sharpen ourselves on it only through repeated, persistent effort. For further reading, here's Sanderson's own essay detailing his pre-published efforts as an author.

@jaistlyn So, there's two major approaches to getting your work published: independent and traditional publishing. I'll start with the latter because, while there's more people involved and more money being moved around, it's simpler from the author's perspective. In traditional publishing, you usually work with an agent. Agents serve two functions: as gatekeepers and as advocates for authors. Agents are the go-between; you polish your novel as best you can and send it to an agent, if they like your work they'll agree to represent you. Standard agreement is that they get 15% of advances/royalties in exchange for that representation. The agent takes your manuscript and sends it out to editors at publishing houses in an effort to pitch and sell your work to them. This is where the gatekeeping effect comes in: if your work is sent to an editor by an agent, that represents (supposedly) a requisite amount of quality because an agent wouldn't represent an author they didn't think capable of writing fiction that'll sell. Let's say your agent pitches the book to the head editor at TOR and they really like it. That's where the agent's other function kicks in, because now the editor and agent are going to haggle over the cost of the book's rights. A traditional publishing house will always want the English e-book and print rights* to your book and it's becoming more common for them to want the audio rights, too. They leave you the IP rights -- that is, the setting, characters, and story are still yours, and if someone wants to make a film or video game, they have to work with you and your agent, not the publishing house. Because the agent's 15% is predicated on how much you get, the agent will usually work to get you the best deal possible. Let's say the editor agrees -- and there's no guarantee that they will, even if they love your work, but let's say they do. You agree to an advance of 20,000 dollars and a 12% royalty rate. They give you 20,000 upfront (in three payments, spaced out according to checkpoints in the book's production) and then if you can make 20,000 dollars worth of sales** you'll receive 12% of every sale thereafter. Exceeding your advance in sales is called "earning out." Your agent takes 15% off of all of it but that's fine; the boiler-plate offer from publishers is usually 5,000 dollars and 10-12% rights so they got you a decent deal. The editor slots your book into their house's publishing schedule; the timeline varies but let's say they set your publication date at 18 months out from the agreement. The editor or one of the editors on their team will take your novel and start working in edits with you. They, along with a proofreader, will take you through successive edits to tighten your book up. Developmental editing (character and story), line editing (grammar, tone, sentence structure), and then finally proofreading; during proofreading they'll create mock-up copies of your books ("proofs") and you'll go through them line by line to try and catch any spelling or typographical errors. During this time, the publishing house has lined up the cover art of your book and their PR department has set up any promotional material or activities they've budgeted for you. Generally, you have no say over the cover art unless it's egregiously abhorrent to you. The book goes through the editing process and all the attendant work of putting together the proofs, compiling an ebook version, and the myriad of things going on in the background of a publishing house that we aren't privy to, like the interactions between publishers and distributors, wherein distributors (bookstores) decide how many copies of your book they want to stock. As the 18 months come close the end, the publishing house will put together some advanced reading copies -- ARCs for short, which usually come without art or the final front pieces (table of contents, forewords, etc). The publishing house will send these out to reviewers, news sites, or as parts of promotional giveaway. You can usually request ARCs and they'll give you some to hand out if you want to do your own PR or request reviews from specific sources. Once the eighteen months are up and the publication schedule has rolled over to your month and date, the book goes on sale. Copies are shipped to various outlets and distributors, put onto shelves, and put on Amazon and other digital retailers. You have about two years to earn out that advance they gave you if you want to see any royalties. More importantly, you have two years to earn out that advance if you want to get another deal from that publishing house, because they're giving you the advance on the pretense you'll make the money back for them and then some. The bigger the advance, the more weight they'll put behind you, but the bigger the pressure to match it in sales. Failure to earn out doesn't kill your career but it's not good, either. This explanation is a bit lengthy, but it's not really complicated, just stressful. You write the best book you can, hone it to a razor's edge. Ship it out to agents. If you get represented, the agent sends it to editors. If it gets an offer, the agent does the haggling and you sign the paperwork if you're amenable to the offer. After that, you work with the editors to get your book in its best shape and the publisher does everything else. To shorten the explanation of self-publishing: you take all the things the publisher does and you do it yourself at your own cost. You pay an editor to work on your book. You pay for cover art. You pay for marketing. You format the manuscript (or pay someone else to do it) for ebook and print publication and set up a print on demand with your printer of choice. You're almost certainly not going to see your book in a store because you don't have any relationship with a distributor or retailer, but you can put it up for sale in every format on the Kindle store, Apple store, Kobo, and so on. The downside? You're covering the costs of production, you won't have the same market penetration in fandom or in distribution, and you won't get the same industry pedigree. The upside? Instead of a 12% of the profits, you get 60-70%. In traditional, your 10 dollar book will net you 1.20. In indie, it'll net you 6 or 7 dollars. Your rate of production is also much faster. The fastest self-published authors I know can write, edit, and prep a book for sale in two months or less, compared to the 12-24 month time period of traditional publishing. For short fiction, you generally just find a market that buys your kind of fiction and follow their submission guidelines. Let's say I write some literary weird fantasy piece, maybe 5,000 words. My choice of market would probably be Clarkesworld or Beneath Ceaseless Skies. So I go to their website, check their submission guidelines. Format the story, shoot it to them. If they like it, they'll shoot me a contract. I sign, they send me my money (standard SFWA payrate is .08 cents a word, so 400 dollars) and then publish the story. Agents don't get involved in short fiction sales because it doesn't net them much of a profit since there's no royalties 99% of the time and the advance is usually between 100 and 800 dollars. *By "print rights" I specifically mean first print rights. So if you publish the whole book on your blog or on Medium, or via self-publishing, then you've voided your first print rights. It's extremely rare for someone to do this and still sell the print rights of their book. I can think of two or three indie authors who managed it, but it's a freakish outlier. Foreign language rights (every other language beyond English) is usually something you retain and that your agent will sell if they can. A literary agency often has someone dedicated to foreign rights sales. **This 20,000 isn't earned at retail price, it's earned at your royalty rate. If your book costs $10.00 and you get $1.00 in royalties, you'd have to sell 20,000 copies to earn out, not 2,000. That should cover most of the process of having your work published, without getting too deep into the details. It's more stressful than complex, a bit of a crapshoot, and most of the intricacies are handled off-stage by other people, many of whom you'll never see or interact with.

@supernal I think there's value to having an author website, although that value has definitely waned with the rise of modern social media tools like Twitter. There's a few key reasons to keep a website around, though: -It's a form of social media that you have absolute control over. This, for my money, is the most valuable aspect of an author website. -It acts as a locus for a lot of publishing-adjacent material: conference/convention schedules, mailing lists, announcements, things like that. Mailing list is probably the big one here, though once upon a time several authors had fan-forums attached to their websites. -It allows for long-form writing and interaction that most social media platforms can't handle or don't handle with any particular proficiency. Facebook allows you to post stuff at length, but it's still a less-than-ideal blogging platform. -Easy way to draw together disparate projects if you work across multiple mediums. For example, if you have short stories published by an online magazine (say, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and Galaxy's Edge) then those won't come up on Amazon but you can list them on your website with direct links. If you write for games, film, or television, you're not likely to get top-billing on Amazon or a news-site, but you can direct people to your work on your website. So, still valuable, but the exact degree of value is going to depend on the individual author. A website still rates highly for me because I like writing long-form discussions and interactions and I want to work across different mediums, so being able to cohere those different projects in a single place is especially useful.

@Vansin I use a "launchpad" approach to prewriting. I'll world-build, character sketch, and outline until I feel like I have a sufficient mass of material, and then I start writing whether or not my outline is complete. If it is, great; if it isn't, I'll work off of what I have from that foundation and then complete the outline when the shape of the story reveals itself to me. My "complete" outlines are basically bullet-lists of scenes: a couple of sentences to describe each scene/story beat and nothing else. I can't quantify "sufficient mass" except that I know it when it happens because I'll lose interest in things like world-building and start thinking more about how I want to shape my prose. For short stories, I'll sketch an outline just to have my thoughts on paper and then go from there. I do all of my prewriting work in notebooks, even if I draft on a computer. It lets me write while at work and I tend to do a lot of visualization work (circling, line drawing, marginalia, etc). I've tried testing some of the prewriting methods other authors suggest -- like Ingermahson's snowflake approach -- but they never offer as much as working through my thoughts and ideas and letting the story take shape naturally. They might be more beneficial to writers who want to outline methodically, though, so I don't discount them.

Not entirely apropos of nothing, I'm peeking my head back into Valucre for a short time to offer up this AMA for folks who are interested in writing or publishing -- whether you've considered pursuing the idea seriously or just find yourself curious about the inner workings. @supernal and I have talked about the topic on occasion, but with the publication of my most recent credit in this anthology I wanted to give people the opportunity to ask questions about writing as a profession and the attendant ups, downs, and quandaries of publishing. Which is an awkward segue into the question: why ask me when you can probably find answers from writers who are household names on Youtube, or Reddit? The answer is because I'm not one of those famous authors. I'm published as a professional (per SFWA standards) and I've won an award (Writers of the Future), but I'm still in the nascent stages of my career. The period that a lot of authors reminisce about is still part of my immediate frame of reference. Besides that, having come into the field much more recently, I'm much more aware of the ongoing changes in the publishing industry regarding things like independent/self-publishing versus traditional. Authors who have been established for ten or fifteen years predate the self-publishing explosion that came with Amazon's Kindle store and many of them have little interest in the most recent social media platforms (Twitch, Youtube, the gram). I'm also one of the only authors I know to transition from freeform roleplay to professional publication, so I know very well the strengths and weaknesses that freeform roleplay gives to a writer. In as short a biography as possible: I started roleplaying in 2006 and stopped in 2012, returned in 2015 and went on break again in 2017. I started writing with the goal of making it my career in 2014 after earning a history degree in 2013. I won Writers of the Future in 2017 and made my second pro-rate sale in 2019. I've written five novels (and going on six), so give or take one a year. I've written maybe two dozen short stories, which explains why I only have two credits with that medium: award or no, I don't write much short fiction. I've shared tables of contents with Brandon Sanderson*, Jim Butcher, Larry Niven, Tim Powers, Kevin J. Anderson, and others; I've also had the chance to talk directly with a lot of these authors (and more besides) about their own processes and approaches. I'm going to try and make regular checks on the site from now until Sunday and answer any/all questions I can. I might try to stretch my time a bit longer than that, but right now I'm somewhere between 3/5ths and 2/3rds into the rough draft of a novel, so after that I'll have to crawl back into the word-mines and get to work again. I'll try to answer every question; my only request is that you don't ask for critiques. At some point in the future I might offer to do critiques or beta-reads, but I don't have the time to do so now and it wouldn't be fair to anyone who asked. This AMA is "1.0" because I hope to have more iterations -- 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and so on -- as I have more of my work published and claw and climb my way into something resembling a writing career. With a little luck, each successive AMA can chart the path I've taken into and through the industry for the community's edification. Ideally, it'll end with X.0, wherein I retire as a strange and reclusive hermit. (*Just because I have the image on hand: here's a picture of Brandon Sanderson getting my autograph at the Writers of the Future award ceremony. I'm inordinately proud of having that picture, even if I had to let someone dress my hair and knot a tie around my neck for it.)

This anthology probably constitutes aetherpunk. Final Fantasy VI is also aetherpunk, imo. I'd say it's less steampunk + magic, and more steampunk + magic as a concrete force that can be harnessed and interfaced with. Magic in steampunk is usually more of an occult affair -- something along the lines of Theosophy or Lovecraft. In contrast, aetherpunk would see magic utilized as much as technology, either in combination (Final Fantasy VI) or in contrast (Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura). I don't think aetherpunk is really treated as distinct from steampunk, although in a lot of applications it really could be. For my money, I'd break them down as: 1. Steampunk generally uses the supernatural akin to how Gaiman does -- mystical, occult, and generally left as a mystery that slowly alters the story and dislocates it from reality. 2. Aetherpunk uses the supernatural more like Brandon Sanderson -- systemic, definable, and usable, as an accepted part of the world that is broadly known. The fact that they aren't treated as distinct probably comes from the fact that aetherpunk isn't really common. Magic is almost always occult or esoteric in settings where the technology is approaching or exceeding the modern world, and aetherpunk is a small slice of an already small spectrum. As for roleplay: I most enjoy fighting, slice of life and adventure -- my ideal roleplay milieu is basically a shounen anime.

I'll work through this piecemeal as needed. For reference, I consider T1 as analogous to debate. I define it as a thought game of dialectic storytelling, where each player strives to propose a narrative with the information at-hand that is convincing to the other player, either in material information or in construction. T1 provides most of the same options that a debate does: we can refute, concede, counter-point, or some mixture thereof on a point-by-point basis. In that way, I think of T1 as being assertion-driven -- any given in-character post is a collection of interlocking assertions that contribute to an overall narrative goal. T1 is a chimeric hobby that grabs greedily at elements of debate, storytelling, and gaming. I find the resulting beast to be enjoyable when approached maturely but not everyone does. It doesn't stand in opposition to my assertion at all. To reiterate with a quote: My actual assertion isn't that "the beauty of T1 is that it is cooperative" nor is it even that "T1 promotes cooperation." My assertion is that T1 requires cooperation on a fundamental level in order to function as a thought game, and that assertion is true. Without some acknowledgment of each other's posts, we cannot have a T1 match, we can only post "past" each other. People who fail to cooperate tend to crash and burn as fighters. Look at the worst offenders in any community, and it will often be people who resolutely refuse to cooperate with their opponents. The fact that some people can and some people cannot cooperate doesn't speak to whether or not T1 requires cooperation, it speaks to the fact that some people fail to understand the game they're playing and play poorly. I will say that T1 does promote cooperation because it requires it, but it has a low threshold. So while this doesn't really oppose my assertion, you could argue that T1 doesn't promote cooperation as much as it should because, as you said, we've both seen people fail spectacularly to cooperate. I'd also agree with that sentiment, which is why it's something I've been working on intermittently over the years. Is that a flaw in the system? Yes, only in the sense that like all games, it suffers from two things: a point at which it breaks down, and a point at which it can be exploited. Do I think that it makes the system untenable? No, because I have found with repeated success that instituting extraneous measures tends to reduce the impact of the flaw. I don't consider people being in contention to be a problem; what I consider to be the problem is that people often express these points of contention in ways that are immature, toxic, and demeaning. This isn't intrinsic to T1. People will, if they feel it benefits them, behave poorly. That's true for any system, sport, or game. It's a personal and cultural issue that has to be addressed. You might think that the flaw does make the system untenable for any number of reasons. The barrier for exploitation isn't high enough. There isn't a sufficient means of reducing ambiguity. It requires cooperation but doesn't sufficiently promote it. These are perfectly valid opinions, I just don't share them. Any system has flaws but I don't find T1's flaws to be fatal. The fact that you can take the same actions in T1 and in NFS doesn't mean that NFS is the same kind of game or that it will appeal to the same people. As I described earlier, T1 promotes player choice via character behavior. NFS promotes player choice through prose writing. These aren't mutually exclusive but they are different from a gamification perspective, for lack of a better term. In T1, the elements of the "game" are whether or not my character behaves in a fashion that is going to be successful on a post by post basis. In NFS, the "game" is whether or not my writing is deemed better. T1's "game" is precluded entirely by the fact that the fights are have predetermined resolutions. In T1, the goal is to try and win the conflict, whereas in NFS the goal is to achieve the narrative goal, whether or not you win the conflict. These are two different games. In T1, whether my character throws a hook or a cross is contextually important to the assertions my opponent and I have laid out and my subsequent success or failure. In NFS, whether my character throw a hook or a cross is immaterial because the conflict's end will be the same, what's important is whether or not I wrote it well in the judge's opinion. I don't see how NFS can "engulf the potential" of T1 when it the metrics for success and what "success" even means are entirely different. That doesn't make it any less valuable of a system. I think a lot of people would enjoy playing under the NFS ruleset, but I think they would enjoy it for reasons that are wholly separate from why people enjoy T1. You're free to try and pitch NFS as a replacement for T1, but I think they're too different for that. I want to reiterate that when I say "NFS does something different" or "NFS won't replace T1" that these aren't criticisms. They're praise. I think the fact that NFS has different metrics and a different goal is good. Even though I enjoy T1, I've often felt that there needed to be a system that was geared differently to allow players who don't want to do T1 to still involve themselves in conflict-driven roleplay and to be rewarded for it. People can always agree beforehand to fight outcomes for narrative purposes, there usually hasn't been a reward at the end, separate from the outcome of the conflict. By disassociating a narrative reward from the conclusion of the conflict, you hand people the means of more readily impacting a story whether they win or lose. That could be an acceptable argument, but as I've said before, I consider that behavior to be social and personal, rather than intrinsic to the system. I'm not sure that NFS eliminates it, either. Rather, I think it avoids the expression of that behavior that's commonly found in T1 and might have it crop up in another guise. 1. The method of competition is different, as described above, and while it's valid, it may not be the form of competition that is going to appeal to the same people in the same way. 2. Your individual actions, strategies, and the quality of your ideas aren't what lead you to victory. First, by T1's metrics victory is already determined. Second, by NFS's metrics these things are only measured in one category. In NFS, the validity of strategy and individual action aren't the determinant factors for victory, it's the entertainment, creativity, fairness, and cunning. Cunning is where we score individual actions and strategies, but it only accounts for 3/16 of one's score, Numerically, these factors contribute minimally. It might be that creativity also takes these things into account, but the description of the category speaks more to writing of individual actions, rather than the strategic/tactical/logical merits thereof. Including logic as a category could help round that out, though, or mentioning that creativity accounts for more than enjoyment from reading. 3. NFS may eliminate the aspects, but that doesn't mean it eliminates the behavior. There are people who want their ego stroked, or who want to have the power fantasy of winning. If someone wins the coin toss, they can still run roughshod over their opponent and bully them. If someone loses the coin toss, they can still make the fight a nightmare for the other person, If Jim and John agree to have a match and the coin toss goes in Jim's favor, what does John do if Jim (intentionally or otherwise) plays in a way that is utterly nonsensical and shouldn't work? If none of his attacks and defenses make any particular sense, or if he just decides to take the anime protagonist "nothin' personnel, kid" path to winning? All of these things are utterly toxic and unenjoyable situations to play through. Can John go to the judge? What if Jim just doesn't care about the narrative goal and only wants to win the fight? What if a player feels wronged and disagrees with the judge's sentiments on writing? I think there is still potential for hostile and argumentative behavior here, it's just less so. I think it still has the potential to attract people who will be exploitative and toxic. Personally, I think those kinds of situations will be rare in NFS. I think the most likely form of toxicity you're going to suffer from is thin skinned writers who feel as though their egos weren't stroked enough. You may have the occasional player who sees a coin-toss win as an excuse to put their opponent over a barrel and give them no credit, though. I saw it happen in that SW:G system I referenced. Someone would win the coin-toss and proceed to make their character look like an action-hero badass without much thought to the other player's character. It wasn't overly common though, and the system generally worked for conflict resolution. I don't see any reason why NFS will suffer more than that system did, but it might be something to watch for. It's not a question of validity, it's a question of gameplay: what are the metrics of play and what is the goal? Under NFS, your descriptions are weighted more than my tactical considerations. In T1, the reverse is true. Under the NFS rules, the condition for victory in T1 is already established, so someone who is strictly interested in that win condition and its related metrics won't find their approach validated much at all in NFS. Not that it needs to validate their approach, in my opinion. T1 also doesn't require one player to disparage the other either, and under any system you can have toxic players who will disparage their opponents or the judges if they feel that they're not getting what they want. That's just human behavior. I've seen it in every hobby I've participated in, whether physical, intellectual, or otherwise. People get toxic about "You moved my dumbbells, bro" at the gym -- it's, unfortunately, not a wholly controllable attribute. Or, rather, it's not something we can control systemically. It's something we control communally via moderation and behavior modelling. Almost all rules are arbitrary in this hobby, including yours. The only core tenet to freeform roleplay is that the players take turns posting the actions of their characters. Beyond that, it's basically the an open-ended, minimal source-code. You can and should create whatever additional rules and limits of play that you think will generate a desired result. Preps aren't intrinsic to T1, for example. Never have been. They're a community preference here and in a handful of other communities and that's it. Nothing is set in stone; everything comes down to communal and personal preference and people ought to create rules to get what they want out of their time in the hobby. Freeform roleplay is very much like game design. We can homebrew or create almost any variation of rules and methodologies to suit our needs. There's no reason why we shouldn't. Freeform roleplay and all its myriad iterations are very much a "Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it" affair, to quote Lemmy. T1 doesn't preclude rules regarding player behavior. I don't balk at the idea of needing a system to tell someone how to behave, I balk at the idea that because T1 doesn't have one in its basic format, it somehow cannot be amended to include one. Keep in mind that because a system doesn't have something does not mean that it cannot. People have house-ruled tabletop games since time immemorial, every ruleset I know off the top of my head, including NFS, is essentially a home-brew in an effort to enhance the experience or manage player expectations in freeform play. I don't find T1 to be mutually exclusive to rules on player behavior, whether it be a code of OOC conduct or expectations regarding how one approaches competition. It's not that I don't think speed limits are unneeded, it's more that I don't believe their absence disallows us from setting them ourselves. This has long been a criticism of mine regarding the community on Gaia: we lacked the ability and/or the will to introduce boundaries or any sort of behavioral moderation and it was a long-standing detriment to the health of the community. I've seen it happen in other communities on Discord and abroad, too. When the administrators or moderators are too lax, inevitably the bad apples sour the good ones and people start leaving. It may have to do with the average player age being so low that there's not really many people in a position to take charge or institute codes of conduct. This is true, but not what I quoted. What you said was: And that, especially in the bold, is an opinion. As far as I'm concerned, the key matter in achieving victory has nothing to do with bullying your opponent, nor is having a more powerful character the predominant method of ensuring that you win. You're correct in that people wouldn't need to worry about power scale in NFS, but beyond that -- that bullying your opponent, or playing a powerful character are what really matter -- is an opinion and not one I agree with. NFS may account for balancing, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other functional methods of doing so. This is true, and per the post I linked in my prior one, it's one I agree with. However. . . Was the part I was more aiming for and it is an opinion. I apologize for not specifying, but I didn't want to chop up the quote too much. Again, you may divest yourself of this notion to whatever degree you find preferable, but we are not of one mind on the matter. I don't consider two people disagreeing with one another to be inherently toxic. I think it's a matter of course in any hobby. People debate about item builds in MOBAs. They disagree about dice rolls and whether a spell should be utilized RAW or RAI in tabletop games. The disagreement isn't toxic, what's toxic is how people choose to express their contention. The why (egotism, power-tripping, poor sportsmanship) and how (denigration, disrespect, bullying) are what make a person's disagreement toxic. I don't find those problematic hows and whys to be intrinsic to T1 in the least. I find them to be qualities of individuals and of communities that either allow these individuals to thrive through omission of behavioral moderation or promote that sort of behavior as being worthwhile. It has nothing at all to do with T1 in particular and everything to do with the quality of person involved. It isn't true, if by "it" we mean the implication that a specific mode of behavior is intrinsic to T1 rather than to individuals. You might feel otherwise, but I don't. Again, I think NFS is a good system. I think it provides a platform for people to resolve conflict in a way that is meaningful and allows them to contribute to stories beyond simply winning or losing a fight. I think it has its purpose and that it excels at that. I don't think, however, that its purpose is to replace T1 or to provide the same core experience of T1, and I don't find that most of the assertions about T1 in this thread are a) useful or b) true. I recently discussed some ideas for a roleplay setting/community with a few people, and one of the key things I decided on was that I wanted a coherent, tightly-focused project if I ever launched it. That means that I have to turn some demographics away. It means that what I offer might not appeal to them as other offerings will. The same is absolutely true for NFS. What I'm getting at in eliding these opinions or experiences away with my own is setting aside all of the things that Narrative Fighting isn't and getting at what it is, which is an entirely distinct, separate approach with its own independent goals that really has nothing at all to do with T1. I'm also illustrating a variation of the worst case scenario: when you pitch this to people off or on Valucre, they might spend more time arguing your opinions about T1 than considering the validity of your system and what benefits they could reap from using it. I'm not suggesting that T1 is some sacred cow that ought not to be criticized, but I do think a critique of T1 should be separate from NFS in order to keep discourse-happy people like me more on task. I've pitched a few different rules and ideas to players over the past couple of years and found that a narrow focus tends to work best. You might lose some people who are more interested in T1, but I don't think any critique of T1 would change their minds to begin with, so why bother arguing with them? It's easier to pitch a product by telling them what it is by telling them what it isn't. I can put together a list of roleplay Discords if you want to try and pitch NFS to people. Not to prove anything right or wrong, but because I think getting it out in front of people and letting them play under the rules is the best way to gauge their response. You already have this thread and Gaia is dead, but Discord abounds.

I return again, to post another unnecessarily long essay on a topic! I'll break this down into a series if questions and answers because I think said questions are important in determining the what this system ought to do versus what it can do. The two don't necessarily coincide. 1. Do I think this system works? Yes. I think it's a viable tool for conflict resolution in general roleplay. The system works. It provides a basis for two players to amenably resolve character conflict. This is ideal for a whole host of reasons, least of all being that it simplifies things enormously. I used a similar system back in 2006-2009 in Star Wars: Galaxies. Some people, myself included, did freeform combat, but there was a dice-rolling system created to allow people write out their fights, rather than using the in-game PVP/duel function, which was flashy but didn't exactly contribute much to roleplaying atmosphere. The system differed somewhat, in that both players rolled dice/flipped coins at each turn. I wrote my post and we both rolled die. If I won, your subsequent post had to accept the attack. If I lost, you got to block/dodge successfully. Whatever ending action you took, if it was an attack, we rolled again. There were other variations, some of which rolled more or less often, but most variations worked. Purely in the context of providing a platform for play, NFS is perfectly fine. It or something similar ought to be the primary method of conflict resolution among players who aren't strictly interested playing out combat move by move. Because this system is largely reliant on a pre-decided outcome (or a series of pre-decided outcomes, if one were to use the SW:G system), it isn't necessary to detail one's posts to the degree often found in turnbased combat. I've written at length on the fact that roleplaying, especially turnbased combat, tends to warp a post's rhythm and pacing to the detriment of its prose. In some ways, NFS is conducive to smoother, easier writing. Not better, but easier and faster to work with. NFS provides a benefit of ease-of-play. 2. Do I think that it is competitive? Yes, but not in a way that allows it to act as an alternative to some variant of T1. T1 and NFS have completely different contexts for what it means to be competitive. In T1, the metric for competition is player choice via character behavior. The metric in NFS is based on writing. They're fundamentally different, and I think that means they will appeal to different mindsets. In my experience, people enjoy T1 because it gives their choices weight, much in the way that people feel a weight of choice when they lay down a Go stone or a chess piece. By deciding the outcome of the match beforehand, that lessens the impact of individual choices. One could argue that it moves the weight away from micro-choices ("What spell does my character cast?" or "How does he swing his sword?") and puts them on more macro-choices ("Should my character pursue this confrontation?") and that's fine. Simply put, I don't think NFS can be an alternative to T1 because it isn't made to provide the same experience. They're two entirely different contexts. Someone could enjoy both, but NFS couldn't replace T1 in function. This isn't a criticism or a flaw because I think that catering to a broader range of philosophies and desires is beneficial. The fact is, people shouldn't have to do T1 if they don't enjoy it. 3. Do I think T1 is inherently unworkable? No, and I've discussed at length in my last lengthy post on the topic. Most of the claims made in this thread along these lines, such as and not limited to these -- -- simply aren't factual, and to mirror your last point: if you weren't attempting to weight your own experience over those of other players, you would be forced to admit that none of these statements are prima facie regarding T1. I see no reason to lend your experiences more credence than my own, least of all because you insist upon it. You've had poor experiences with T1, and while I'm sorry that you've dealt largely with negative situations in the hobby, your experiences and mine differ markedly. I'm not going to treat your experiences as being more objective than my own. Whatever issues you've had were unfortunate, but I'm not going to pretend I suffered through them with you. To wit: none of the above match the dominant tone of my experience in T1. In matches where someone has put my character in a precarious or disadvantageous situation, I have rarely felt that they were being unfair; most often I've felt that they made a tactical or creative stroke that worked well and I acknowledged it. In fact, I have only ever felt that way once in twelve years. I have occasionally found myself in situations where a community was hostile or a player attempted to leverage communal weight against me, but that's more of a social issue than a gameplay flaw. I have seen rules to that effect, and mechanisms by which to enforce them. I have found it not only possible, but wholly plausible to balance characters in freeform because the phrase "freeform" is a reference to the lack of an independent operator for conflict resolution, rather than a lack of rules or limits as implied elsewhere in this thread. Overall, I've enjoyed T1 under a variety of rulesets, some moreso than others. I haven't been very active since 2012, but I still gravitate towards it, when I have time. Because I've discussed it previously, I won't rehash what I think needs to be done to fix T1, but I will provide a relevant counterpoint to what's been said in this thread: the overwhelming majority of the issues brought up are, in my experience, communal or personal, not mechanical. Toxicity and poor sportsmanship are not qualities that arise from the game itself, but rather, from particular pools of people who engage in it. I'm not sure that T1 attracts more toxic people than other competitive (or cooperative-competitive) endeavors, but if it does, I suspect it's probably because of the predominant age-group. I keep track of T1 in a loose sense; I'm on a few Discords and I have a couple of phone apps. I have the rough measure of probably a few thousand players. For my money, the most common ages are between fifteen and twenty-three, and without a strict officiating body, it tends to propagate a Wild West sentiment where people behave however they like. Does any of this mean I don't like the NFS idea? Not at all. Like I said earlier, I think it can be enormously beneficial -- not as an alternative to T1, but for people who don't want to do T1 at all. I don't think it's going to scratch the same itch or appeal to the same demographic as T1. I also don't consider that to be a flaw. The fact is, everyone comes to this hobby for a different reason. Some people want to play a game through text with others. Some want to tell stories. Some want a little of column A and a little of column B. I think this system has merit and can cater to roleplayers who enjoy what it's offering. Instead of pitching NFS as a replacement for T1, you should sell it as what it is: a system catering to a different mindset entirely. Honestly? Don't even market as competitive. Market it as creative and let the ball roll. I take full credit for him. I was the straw that broke the camel's back in 2011. Which brings me back to the topic of maturity or lack thereof in the age group that coheres around T1: I was twenty-one, and when I was twenty-one, I was neither terribly mature nor terribly nice. I was mostly just terrible. I don't think I was drawn to roleplay or turnbased fighting because of those sterling qualities, nor do I think it gave me a platform to put them on display. It just so happens that it's most often a young player's hobby and young players, without guidance or moderation, tend to err on the side of being less-than-well-behaved. Is RFS going to fix any of the issues of T1? No, I really doubt it. It's going to provide a vehicle of play for people who don't want to do T1 though, and that's just as valuable, as far as I'm concerned.