For TouhouTracer: Your picture's caption is misleading, I can't click to look inside. Is there a FAQ about Nobilis to help players avoid totaly boneheaded decisions that would be reasonable except that we're playing Nobilis, or will you be interpreting the source enough to help us avoid those?

Srsly, I'm flying by the seat of my pants trying to improvise a plan for how to make ground in this war with the Excrusians. My improvised short-term plan so far is to make friends, organize, and try to calm down the war between light/heaven and dark/hell while we work on the real threat to both of us.

About Plastic: I was hoping that the primordial god of plastic had chosen an appropriately tough-minded individual for the post of immortal ass-kicker despite her being a preteen girl. Anybody who wants to help me figure out what we actually should be doing PLEASE DO. All I can figure is that we just gained an allied civilian target until such time as she gets through immortal orientation and basic training, and then decides to sign on with our blue team hopefully. I don't like this plan much because she can decide she'd rather join one of the other teams instead or just be taken out by one of the red teams while they come up with a decent distraction. Also, time spent training and protecting her is time not spent working on all the other things we should be doing. If people can come up with better ideas, that would be awesome.

what if we used our power over time to accelerate time in plastics home relative to to the outside and spend some time with her teaching her and influencing her to our way of thinking? She could then face her adversary with relative years of experience.

I like that idea a lot more than trying to do timeline cut'n'paste but there's only so much we can teach her ourselves. We know shit about her patron and only guesses what her powers are, so we'd be doing a lot of trial and error.
It mostly depends on what that would cost us and how doable it is I think. If we can spend an hour on helping her mature into a fit and ready twenty-something ready to rock her own counter-ambush on whoever's coming that would be pretty sweet.

But right now we're in our own office and it's probably even easier to do that here. Surely we've got a cool traditional-looking martial arts hall to use for our initial Reeves versus Fishburne fight? Our off-duty personnel could get a morale boost from optional attendance, and since they'll probably all run out of more than standby work by the end of the first few months that will give a fair bit of free time for our training agendas.
Yeah, I want to know what the costs and problems of this plan are.

Messing around with rates of time in your home is indeed fairly easy.
You could also just go back in time with her, as long as you don't go out of your way to make paradoxes, you can travel in time for quite cheep.

And that way you don't have to plan how much to distort time by, though going back to far might be mildly dangerous for Plastic, as traveling to before your Estate existed is usually fine, but not always.

oooh... take her back in time 10 years, have her spend 10 training with you in your domain. (And being influenced by your morals, she is a child after all)

Then bring the 10 years older and more experienced her to the point 1 second after you took her back in time from her home.

Nah, paradox of being in two places at once probably isn't worth it, but inviting a friend or three over to spend an hour training her for a decade sounds pretty damn awesome. She will need help from people who do know about the issues of a god for a patron to do the best to grasp hold of all of her new situation.
However, since we're in my private world right now there's probably no real worry about us leaving one second after we arrived.

>>361875
I don't think being two places at once counts as a paradox.

Yeah, the only paradox you have to worry about is changing something that you already know has happened.

(Well if you really try you can probably make other paradoxes like a period of time that doesn't change anything, or an eventless interval, or embedding bad forms of set theory (probably actually arithmetic, its more similar to time) in the structure of time.)

Oh that makes things so much simpler.
So yeah, uh, how does aging work for us now that we aren't exactly human anymore, is Plastic always going to be a preteen girl now?

Anonymous 2012/05/01(Tue)16:29 No. 52122 ID: fa537b
File 133591497350.jpg - (303.15KB , 720x477 , plastic_lasts_forever.jpg )

Well..some nobles age normally, some (such as our-self) more or less have control over their aging, and others are stuck.

Given that plastics are known both for being moldable and enduring she can learn to to be ageless, and to shape her self into the age she wants.

Okay, huh... that gets complicated.

Another question that is important: How does combat generally work in this world? You mentioned that it generally takes more than one nuke to get things on the level of Time here but I'm curious about stories like how Time survived/won his last few fights.

Okay. Give me a day to write up a few.

Once, the Warmain Marozia Carolin sought to corrupt the dream that was Fission. She succeed, driving the Power of Fission to suicide, and robing you of a beloved comrade, the new Fission was a very different sort, a snide and laughing businessman who loves people best when they choose the wrong, and delights in making life just a little too hard.

In revenge Time sought the Warmain out and challenged her too a duel. By teleporting her into the sun.
In revenge she cursed my teleport, causing it to render the fabric of space broken and confused, shards of solar fire rained down upon the city she had been fighting in, as if lightning struck again and again.

They also stuck Time, but as each one did he simply pulled his uninjured self forward, repairing any wounds, almost before they happened.

She clawed her self back though those rips in time and space, her clothes and body glowing from the heat, her lungs breathing out corona gases.

In that moment, Time copied his knife a few dozen times, throwing each one at her. And then did the same thing from a dozen different angles.

She let them pass though her, harmlessly, as if they were but images or dreams.

Time reached out and pulled his estate from her trying to feezze her inplace, she let him.

Ms. Carolin frozen eyes flashed, and Time felt some dread enchantment wind around his being.

He fought it but could not tell what it was, until he returned home and found his chancel full of the dead and dying. His past, the there memory of his existence had been rendered mememic poison, a sirens song of glorious despair.

to be continued.

So how permanent are those curses exactly?

Fairly. Time periods dont mean much to you.

Any way I have a horrorble headache, and work, so no update today.

This dead?
It looked a bit like you were biting off more than you could chew, if so we can retire it and you can work on your next concept.

Bah. Hard to decide.

Honestly, the summery of past combat was harder then the main quest to write.

I about 50% want to keep going with this, 50% back up and start over.

Feelings?
------

In panic you asked the Serpent of Time to help you.
He eat your past casting you into a timeless void, where you fill out bureaucratic form and create a mortal past for your to use as a soul.
-------

Funny story: I considered doing a Nobilis quest, but decided to focus on other priorities (though I considered starting it up if you abandoned this). I'll offer my own thoughts. I think someone completely fresh to the whole godhood thing might make for an easier viewpoint for people to get into. Nobilis is an exotic enough setting that a little easing into things wouldn't hurt.

Yep. That was in fact my plan..but I forgot..

I think I also was dividing up work closer to a rpg then is good for a quest.

A quest writer has more responsibility for the pc then a dm does, if that makes any sense.

Still should I continue this quest, or start a new one?

>>362321

It makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen a quest runner has to take care of all of the details in such a way that the players don't have any fat paragraphs of rules to work through or other barriers to participation. They should be able to make a good suggestion or otherwise say something helpful, useful or funny after having read most of the current thread without having to poke at all the details in a discussion thread or know fat stacks of source material. Even whether or not you should require them to know most of the history in previous chapter threads is a gray area with pros and cons. From what I've seen it's mostly pros though as long as it isn't hard mandatory: If you really need to know this you should get on the IRC channel and ask other people for help figuring that out because it's beyond my knowledge.
Another quest that has this problem of too much upfront knowledge requirement which is currently running, but in a less bad way, is the Magical Girl Quest that's more than half about Magic: The Gathering geekery and the rest a fairly normal quest. It gets away with it, mostly, because lots of people know Magic The Gathering. Note the early missteps because the author was speaking in Magic codewords and the uninitiated didn't know what it meant.
http://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/395339.html
http://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/406304.html
http://tgchan.org/kusaba/questdis/res/361540.html

If you want to see examples of quests that succeeded I'd actually point at either Kara Quest, or Dorf Quest. Kara Quest seemed to get most of its details just right without making major missteps. In contrast, Dorf Quest stumbled a bit but the mistakes are minor and good to learn from.
If you're already familiar with both then I apologize for underestimating your familiarity with questing... but considering how much more stuff your quest demands of players than these two did I think it's an understandable mistake to make on my part.

http://tgchan.org/wiki/Kara_Quest
http://tgchan.org/wiki/Dorf_Quest

>>362326
About ending it:
I have to say I found what I participated in interesting but it looks like it was too hard to keep up. Frankly, the whole setting looks too complicated for questing if it involves over a hundred possibly interacted-with characters to keep track of; if you have more than a dozen, or two at most, you'd better have a clear division of bit-characters for the ones that aren't important. When the world itself is a complicated political scenario and any one character may make the difference that's just too hard. Too hard to write, too hard to follow. Especially when that over two-dozen all have different freaky powers to consider.

> Frankly, the whole setting looks too complicated for questing if it involves over a hundred possibly interacted-with characters to keep track of; if you have more than a dozen, or two at most, you'd better have a clear division of bit-characters for the ones that aren't important. When the world itself is a complicated political scenario and any one character may make the difference that's just too hard. Too hard to write, too hard to follow. Especially when that over two-dozen all have different freaky powers to consider.

I am having trouble parsing this. Does this mean no quest can take place in a city? I don't think that's what you meant, but it would seem to imply it.

I have glanced at both, but didn't read them.

Dorf quest looked kind of dumb honestly, does it get better?

>>362373
>I am having trouble parsing this. Does this mean no quest can take place in a city?
Depends.
Is every single person in that city meaningful to the plot in some direct way? Is every single person in the city going to intereact with the character socially or politically?
Then no, a quest cannot happen in a city.
You are not a supercomputer, you cannot render that many different variables at once into literary format. Any attempt to do so will become unintelligable gibberish at best, or spending a full novel of 200,000 words to describe one hour of time at worst.
>Dorf quest looked kind of dumb honestly, does it get better?
Yes, but not in the deep and complex way you may be looking for.
Dorf Quest is the prime example of a well done quest: very few variables to handle makes it easy to render into literary format with minimal data loss, the inclusion of a drawing with each update increases the immersion and producing fast translation of ideas from author to reader with high-speed bandwidth and minimal encoding, the story was kept simple with one to two goals at a time, and any chracters who were not main characters were left in the background.

Summary: A good quest is one that does not cause the reader frustration because of the author's ineffective or innaccurate communication of the quest's narrative of events..

Okay. I think I see what you mean.

Though honestly I don't think I could do that sort of fast paced/simple quest and have fun.

hmm...I might not like the same quests you do.

On the other hand I might not be good enough to do the kind of quest I would like.

Gah..if I think about this too much I'll just give up on it as not worth the efort.

Which is stupid as the whole point is to be something hard.

>>362379
>Though honestly I don't think I could do that sort of fast paced/simple quest and have fun.
The fun in these quests is the implementation of clever humour, witty dialogue, interactive challenges with risk to the protagonist,and the experience of communally interacting with other human beings in a positive way.

It is enjoyable because it is fun.
Fun = (Interactivity + Challenge + Humour)x(Community + Speed of Updates) + Complexity^Artwork^Quality

You don't have to do a Dorf/Kara Quest like quest. But it's helpful to simplify things down to where it's more accessible. Often, detailed mechanical info can be omitted, even if you're using them behind the scenes. Lunar Quest would be a decent example of a quest that changes a tabletop RPG system around for the sake of the quest format. Or look at Surya Quest which pretty much presented zero info on mechanisms. A combat was resolved using Eclipse Phase mechanisms without presenting a single number to the audience.

Lots of other quests not directly based on tabletop systems use a similar stat system to them as a general guide to what they can do. Kara Quest did that, for one. Note how simple its presentation of its stats was. The front end should be easy to get into, even if the back end (i.e. the stuff managed by the quest author) is more complex.

For example, the Nobilis stats (Aspect/Domain/Persona/Treasure) can take a lot of wrapping your head around. They work in a fairly nonstandard way. It's best not to infodump on those and just give a general idea of what you can do with them. Speaking of which, I found it curious that you started the quest protagonist off with really low stats, lower than what a standard Nobilis PC would have. I guess you were planning for growth, but that's a lot of growth to do.

Now I find myself wanting to start up that quest after all, but I don't want to cut in on what you're doing. It's just that thinking about how I'd do something makes me want to try it. Sort of an impulse thing.

Time is a 25 point character, but has 16 points in gifts.

>>364280
Well, okay then.

Sorry, if that came of as defensive/pendanty . . .I was fairly tired, still am actually.

Okay, I am planning a new quest..but hmm. Do I need a plot?

I still dont feel like I get the objection about toomany people..

>>364311
No, it was a perfectly fine explanation.

I think that "too many people" complaint might've been about introducing too much too fast, essentially. As for a plot, you mainly just need a goal (or problem) or two for the protagonist to start out with. You can introduce more later on.

> I think that "too many people" complaint might've been about introducing too much too fast, essentially. As for a plot, you mainly just need a goal (or problem) or two for the protagonist to start out with. You can introduce more later on.

That makes sense.

Okay I think I will start to night.

There's another way to put the too many people concept that maybe you'll understand more fully: How hard your quest is to follow is an exponent of how many details the players have to keep track of.
If there's no stats but yes a fair number of developed, reoccurring characters with their own character development and agendas, that can work as long as we don't go into the Russian novel problem of too many names to remember at once.
If there's complicated stats and economics/strategy at work then the characterization and personalities should be kept light and supplemental to figuring out what's going on.
Highly developed sociopolitical combat and strategy settings are difficult not just for you because we have to keep track of the overall map, the overall alignments, the specific alignment exceptions and personality clash/infighting issues, and we haven't even gotten to what they're using to fight, who their minions are, who the neutrals are, why they're fighting, what the spoils are, and maintaining an understanding of who knows what and how they act on that knowledge.

Nothing tonight because _Avengers_!