Just played Deltarune and it reminded me I used to like gaming, and I still can. My Deltarune theory: "Despite everything, it's still you".
Kris isn't being puppeted by Gaster or the player's Soul, that's Kris's soul. Every time he rips his soul out, every time he disagrees with or regrets his own choices, the real him clashes with the front he wants to put on. If you're being controlled by an external force and you can resist its control or remove it at any time, why hide that? Why try so hard to hide that soul unless deep down you know it's still you? Throwing that soul away into a birdcage or the trash or any other vessel is a ritual he does to pretend he's two people and pretend he's a helpless puppet controlled by something evil. "Nobody decides who they are in this world" but he feels unloved and partly responsible for Toriel and Asgore's divorce so he's trying to be less like the prankster he was, and more like his incomplete idea of how a good person talks and acts, even if it means trying to mumble or shout less and sound more like a "speaker". When Kris pulls out that soul and attacks it during the Weird Route, Kris hurts himself because that's his soul. Kris's mind-reading (if she's not just whispering without realizing it) comes from knowing her and how she thinks under pressure, in his head the "evil Kris" who's forcing this on her talks that way and isn't the real Kris. But he is. That time Ralsei asked Kris to think about something else so the audience didn't see what Ralsei said? Misdirection, a red herring, Ralsei is who Kris used to wish he was (and a small part of him still wishes that was him) so he knows more about Kris than he lets on and wanted to talk to who Kris sees as the good side, the real side without the soul's influence, without the mask of perfection.
When Kris acts perfectly normal (mostly) in Noelle's house and resists the urge to activate the annoying toys, Carol says you are welcome here any time, with "you" in red text, and Kris thinks of that as the fake him being welcome here with her conditional approval, while if he gives in to his chaos gremlin urges, she just tells him to turn the toys off like she's used to his antics and exhausted by them. Kris hates the Snowgrave route because trying to make Noelle "Stronger" so she can resist her family's influence and help him rebel and save Dess means repeating the cycle of abuse. He wants her to be strong, stronger than him, but just as he feels the world won't let him be himself, he feels she's not enough the way she is unless she gets stronger by any means necessary. Remember the original animation for that Snowgrave scene where a red heart falls away piece by piece like a rose losing its petals? It was changed to glass to symbolize mindbreak, but the original intent was clearly always to imply not deflowering but that this is costing Kris parts of himself too.
Kris hates this, all of this. He has crippling depression and his mother doesn't seem to notice. He loves Asriel but it's hard not to resent him for being the favourite. There are good moments when he can escape the soul-crushing pressure with his friends, but he hates the role he's been forced into by the prophecy and his life. Kris hates being dragged into the consequences of Carol and Rudy's plan to use the fantasy land escapist power of the Dark World to cure his sickness, a plan that cost them Dess, and Kris hates his role in their plan to drag Dess back so they can regain control of her and drag her back to a place she wanted to escape. Rudy is the Knight, his weapon looks like Dess's bat sometimes because he's the one who taught her Baseball, and Rudy had less influence on Noelle growing up because he was less able to spend time with her outside a hospital bed.
Asgore didn't run over Dess with his truck Bergentruckung, that's a funny joke but there's more to it than that, and the scandal that took his job for looking into Dess's disappearance was probably fake, perhaps something orchestrated by Carol, who is exactly narcissistic enough to completely underestimate "Asgore the harmless goofball" and let him into her house and not realize he's gathering evidence on her and Rudy to clear his name. But he's obsessing over his case at the expense of all else, it did more to destroy his marriage more than the scandal ever did. He thinks if he's enough of a hero he will save the day and fix everything and get his perfectly happy family back and everything will go back to normal. His fantasy of saving the day by trying hard enough alone is as juvenile as his fantasy of fixing his relationship with Toriel by trying hard enough. What matters isn't how willing you are to sacrifice yourself and others, it's bonds and personal growth.
Rudy is dying, and trying to pretend everything's fine, just as he's pretending everything is fine with the family and escaping the hard truths, and the hard but necessary conversations that could fix things or tear the family apart for good. He's dying, he's going to escape from reality that way anyway, he sees no reason to add another tragedy to the pile by taking the risk that talking to Carol about how she treats the family might make things worse. He enables Carol's worst tendencies without realizing it, not because he loves Carol more than his kids, but because he's spineless and thinks if they were as okay with Carol walking over them as he is they'd be happier. The initial Dark World plan was supposed to cure his sickness and plunge the family into a fantasy world where everything is perfect, but it went wrong and it's making Rudy weaker, but not as weak as he pretends to be. Dess fell into a Dark Fountain before it was fully formed, and where she's gone is a darker darkness, darker than dark. Why is he acting now to make more Dark Worlds? He's running out of time. He's dying. And part of him wants to create a perfect world Noelle and Dess can escape to after he's gone and throw his daughters there. "It's for their own good", after all. They'll be safe there, safe and happy, and "they can do anything within that prison". The Dark World is a fantasy land where things make sense in its own twisted wonderland logic. You could argue it's those outside the prison who are trapped in reality. Rudy would. Trapped by the mundane modern world with all that chaos, chaos, the advertisements on TV, the obsession with being a big shot, and the unsolveable mysteries with real monsters behind them. In Rudy’s mind, being trapped in the Dark World isn't not a prison. It’s a gift. Being denied your agency and accountability isn't a prison to Rudy, it's a gift, it's freedom.
Fighting games are incomplete. Judging the winner of a round based solely on remaining health isn't just reductive, it's like deciding a chess game's winner based on material count without considering remaining piece value or positional dominance. Game designers are so afraid of situations where players stall and block and avoid and win by time and the other player cries foul they design increasingly braindead universal (or mostly universal) tools to simplify the neutral state into a binary game of "I pressed neutral skip, the interactive game is now over. Did he predict that and counter to combo me, or am I pressuring and winning and performing practiced blockstrings and combos and mixups without having to interact with my opponent's moves and options and player now?". They're blurring the lines between the early game, mid game, and late game and stacking more regenerating meters, because a game designer thinks "it feels bad to have no resources so let's add more resources that recover in seconds" and "it sucks to look at the life lead and know you can't win so let's add overpowered comeback mechanics".
Tons of sports have ways of quantifying a winner without needing a knockout, let's take inspiration from them.
Life lead can be a factor in who wins a match but even if it's the biggest factor it shouldn't be the only factor. Judge aggression, who was hurting their opponent more often, getting around their foe's guard more often, dominating the match and setting its pace? Judge skill, who was better at predicting and dodging and blocking and reading and backdashing and parrying and countering? Judge strategy, who was better at keeping the foe from their win condition (Like a zoner keeping their foe out and reading options) or dominated them so hard it didn't matter like a superior Sol who gets into Potemkin's face and wins? And who intentionally conditioned their foe like Pavlov's dogs and punished them hard for it? Judge efficiency, who spent their meter and Burst and other resources smarter for the bigger advantage?
Judge technique, who dropped combos less, whiffed moves less, and played with intentionality and wisdom instead of just swinging their weapon at imaginary ghosts?
And in single-player mode, reward the player with more points for excelling in these categories.
If you do something that would make twitter say "Holy shit", you deserve bonus points.
To make this system perfect would be a massive undertaking and a poorly balanced one would ruin the game. But if the game is played online enough, countless uploaded replays can be analyzed by developers and AI to fine-tune parameters for what desirable superior play should and shouldn't look like. Even if it's an alternate game mode, that's better than nothing.
"Archaeology of the Author": when the work is analyzed not just for its literary worth, entertainment value, and intended meaning, but as a representation of the author's psyche, with unlicensed armchair psychologists reconstructing personality, worldview, even childhood trauma from reinterpreted choices and narrative fragments, like rebuilding the face and vocal cords and life story of a long-dead Pharaoh from ruins and corpses.
Rolling 2d6 plus modifiers doesn't work because rolling a natural 1 is impossible unless you house-rule two ones is a one but this makes twos impossible. You're rolling 2-12 not a true 1d12. I had an idea for a TTRPG where you roll 2d6 plus modifiers for every check but the 1s are always -1s and the minimum roll result is 1 before modifiers. Symmetrical? Bell curves? No, scientifically skewed probability results with a longer left tail folded back into one, so one spikes. 1-12 can be rolled, but the average roll is now 6 not 7. The odds of rolling a 1? 8.3%. This would be even more hardcore if we house-ruled that "Four is death" so any rolled result that involves a four or adds up to four is treated as -1 just like 1.
Mathematically perfect. 2d6, 1s are -1, minimum result is 1 before modifiers, optional tetraphobia house rule. "2d6, 1s are negative, 1 floor".
The TTRPG should also include a hireling system designed for maximum speed. Fill out results on a simplified character sheet, and purchase from any major city (or any town with a good craftsman) an enchanted puppet who does what the programming says. Like the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12 except instead of being the catalyst that made most people realize the bottom 99% of RPGs suck and are better optimized and automated than actually played, it ensures your party can have a role filled even if nobody wants to play a character that fills it, without dealing with the hassle of having a whole extra character to keep track of. You tell it to heal anyone below x% HP, or do any tracking/lockpicking/utility spells it's programmed to know how to use, or damage any detected enemy if you're in combat prioritizing an enemy you're targeting if you're targeting one, no need to roll dice for the puppet to take random actions or roll damage. Some shops can only offer certain customizability options, some shops might be running out of room for puppets they don't feel like dismantling and say "No new puppets can be built until someone buys one of these". One might even be given to the players as a reward for a quest, perhaps its previous owner died. No changing orders in the middle of a dungeon, no giving or receiving orders or expressing personality, the puppet core when removed from its housing is highly delicate and requires decades of training and highly specialized skills and gigantic expensive proprietary tools only the best shops and most dedicated master craftsmen have to modify. Made from living wood, artificial flesh, or mechanical parts? Depends on the cost. Living Puppet and Robot can be playable races but these are explicitly the magical equivalent of video game NPCs.
Should also include something with one or more Gods directly affecting the game for the sake of the story like in Ryuutama.
"You're supposed to be resting your arm!"
I am. Barely moved that arm once when typing. But I'll go and get some real rest now, I can hear her yelling at me and she's not even here.
Jason Godwyn
Jason Godwyn
Just played Deltarune and it reminded me I used to like gaming, and I still can. My Deltarune theory: "Despite everything, it's still you".
Kris isn't being puppeted by Gaster or the player's Soul, that's Kris's soul. Every time he rips his soul out, every time he disagrees with or regrets his own choices, the real him clashes with the front he wants to put on. If you're being controlled by an external force and you can resist its control or remove it at any time, why hide that? Why try so hard to hide that soul unless deep down you know it's still you? Throwing that soul away into a birdcage or the trash or any other vessel is a ritual he does to pretend he's two people and pretend he's a helpless puppet controlled by something evil. "Nobody decides who they are in this world" but he feels unloved and partly responsible for Toriel and Asgore's divorce so he's trying to be less like the prankster he was, and more like his incomplete idea of how a good person talks and acts, even if it means trying to mumble or shout less and sound more like a "speaker". When Kris pulls out that soul and attacks it during the Weird Route, Kris hurts himself because that's his soul. Kris's mind-reading (if she's not just whispering without realizing it) comes from knowing her and how she thinks under pressure, in his head the "evil Kris" who's forcing this on her talks that way and isn't the real Kris. But he is. That time Ralsei asked Kris to think about something else so the audience didn't see what Ralsei said? Misdirection, a red herring, Ralsei is who Kris used to wish he was (and a small part of him still wishes that was him) so he knows more about Kris than he lets on and wanted to talk to who Kris sees as the good side, the real side without the soul's influence, without the mask of perfection.
When Kris acts perfectly normal (mostly) in Noelle's house and resists the urge to activate the annoying toys, Carol says you are welcome here any time, with "you" in red text, and Kris thinks of that as the fake him being welcome here with her conditional approval, while if he gives in to his chaos gremlin urges, she just tells him to turn the toys off like she's used to his antics and exhausted by them. Kris hates the Snowgrave route because trying to make Noelle "Stronger" so she can resist her family's influence and help him rebel and save Dess means repeating the cycle of abuse. He wants her to be strong, stronger than him, but just as he feels the world won't let him be himself, he feels she's not enough the way she is unless she gets stronger by any means necessary. Remember the original animation for that Snowgrave scene where a red heart falls away piece by piece like a rose losing its petals? It was changed to glass to symbolize mindbreak, but the original intent was clearly always to imply not deflowering but that this is costing Kris parts of himself too.
Kris hates this, all of this. He has crippling depression and his mother doesn't seem to notice. He loves Asriel but it's hard not to resent him for being the favourite. There are good moments when he can escape the soul-crushing pressure with his friends, but he hates the role he's been forced into by the prophecy and his life. Kris hates being dragged into the consequences of Carol and Rudy's plan to use the fantasy land escapist power of the Dark World to cure his sickness, a plan that cost them Dess, and Kris hates his role in their plan to drag Dess back so they can regain control of her and drag her back to a place she wanted to escape. Rudy is the Knight, his weapon looks like Dess's bat sometimes because he's the one who taught her Baseball, and Rudy had less influence on Noelle growing up because he was less able to spend time with her outside a hospital bed.
Asgore didn't run over Dess with his truck Bergentruckung, that's a funny joke but there's more to it than that, and the scandal that took his job for looking into Dess's disappearance was probably fake, perhaps something orchestrated by Carol, who is exactly narcissistic enough to completely underestimate "Asgore the harmless goofball" and let him into her house and not realize he's gathering evidence on her and Rudy to clear his name. But he's obsessing over his case at the expense of all else, it did more to destroy his marriage more than the scandal ever did. He thinks if he's enough of a hero he will save the day and fix everything and get his perfectly happy family back and everything will go back to normal. His fantasy of saving the day by trying hard enough alone is as juvenile as his fantasy of fixing his relationship with Toriel by trying hard enough. What matters isn't how willing you are to sacrifice yourself and others, it's bonds and personal growth.
Rudy is dying, and trying to pretend everything's fine, just as he's pretending everything is fine with the family and escaping the hard truths, and the hard but necessary conversations that could fix things or tear the family apart for good. He's dying, he's going to escape from reality that way anyway, he sees no reason to add another tragedy to the pile by taking the risk that talking to Carol about how she treats the family might make things worse. He enables Carol's worst tendencies without realizing it, not because he loves Carol more than his kids, but because he's spineless and thinks if they were as okay with Carol walking over them as he is they'd be happier. The initial Dark World plan was supposed to cure his sickness and plunge the family into a fantasy world where everything is perfect, but it went wrong and it's making Rudy weaker, but not as weak as he pretends to be. Dess fell into a Dark Fountain before it was fully formed, and where she's gone is a darker darkness, darker than dark. Why is he acting now to make more Dark Worlds? He's running out of time. He's dying. And part of him wants to create a perfect world Noelle and Dess can escape to after he's gone and throw his daughters there. "It's for their own good", after all. They'll be safe there, safe and happy, and "they can do anything within that prison". The Dark World is a fantasy land where things make sense in its own twisted wonderland logic. You could argue it's those outside the prison who are trapped in reality. Rudy would. Trapped by the mundane modern world with all that chaos, chaos, the advertisements on TV, the obsession with being a big shot, and the unsolveable mysteries with real monsters behind them. In Rudy’s mind, being trapped in the Dark World isn't not a prison. It’s a gift. Being denied your agency and accountability isn't a prison to Rudy, it's a gift, it's freedom.
1 month ago | [YT] | 2
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Jason Godwyn
I have cancer
2 months ago | [YT] | 6
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Jason Godwyn
Fighting games are incomplete. Judging the winner of a round based solely on remaining health isn't just reductive, it's like deciding a chess game's winner based on material count without considering remaining piece value or positional dominance. Game designers are so afraid of situations where players stall and block and avoid and win by time and the other player cries foul they design increasingly braindead universal (or mostly universal) tools to simplify the neutral state into a binary game of "I pressed neutral skip, the interactive game is now over. Did he predict that and counter to combo me, or am I pressuring and winning and performing practiced blockstrings and combos and mixups without having to interact with my opponent's moves and options and player now?". They're blurring the lines between the early game, mid game, and late game and stacking more regenerating meters, because a game designer thinks "it feels bad to have no resources so let's add more resources that recover in seconds" and "it sucks to look at the life lead and know you can't win so let's add overpowered comeback mechanics".
Tons of sports have ways of quantifying a winner without needing a knockout, let's take inspiration from them.
Life lead can be a factor in who wins a match but even if it's the biggest factor it shouldn't be the only factor.
Judge aggression, who was hurting their opponent more often, getting around their foe's guard more often, dominating the match and setting its pace?
Judge skill, who was better at predicting and dodging and blocking and reading and backdashing and parrying and countering?
Judge strategy, who was better at keeping the foe from their win condition (Like a zoner keeping their foe out and reading options) or dominated them so hard it didn't matter like a superior Sol who gets into Potemkin's face and wins? And who intentionally conditioned their foe like Pavlov's dogs and punished them hard for it?
Judge efficiency, who spent their meter and Burst and other resources smarter for the bigger advantage?
Judge technique, who dropped combos less, whiffed moves less, and played with intentionality and wisdom instead of just swinging their weapon at imaginary ghosts?
And in single-player mode, reward the player with more points for excelling in these categories.
If you do something that would make twitter say "Holy shit", you deserve bonus points.
To make this system perfect would be a massive undertaking and a poorly balanced one would ruin the game. But if the game is played online enough, countless uploaded replays can be analyzed by developers and AI to fine-tune parameters for what desirable superior play should and shouldn't look like. Even if it's an alternate game mode, that's better than nothing.
2 months ago | [YT] | 3
View 5 replies
Jason Godwyn
"Archaeology of the Author": when the work is analyzed not just for its literary worth, entertainment value, and intended meaning, but as a representation of the author's psyche, with unlicensed armchair psychologists reconstructing personality, worldview, even childhood trauma from reinterpreted choices and narrative fragments, like rebuilding the face and vocal cords and life story of a long-dead Pharaoh from ruins and corpses.
2 months ago | [YT] | 7
View 0 replies
Jason Godwyn
Rolling 2d6 plus modifiers doesn't work because rolling a natural 1 is impossible unless you house-rule two ones is a one but this makes twos impossible. You're rolling 2-12 not a true 1d12. I had an idea for a TTRPG where you roll 2d6 plus modifiers for every check but the 1s are always -1s and the minimum roll result is 1 before modifiers. Symmetrical? Bell curves? No, scientifically skewed probability results with a longer left tail folded back into one, so one spikes. 1-12 can be rolled, but the average roll is now 6 not 7. The odds of rolling a 1? 8.3%. This would be even more hardcore if we house-ruled that "Four is death" so any rolled result that involves a four or adds up to four is treated as -1 just like 1.
Computer, run a simulation.
1: 0.0833
2: 0.0556
3: 0.0556
4: 0.0833
5: 0.1111
6: 0.0833
7: 0.1111
8: 0.1389
9: 0.1111
10: 0.0833
11: 0.0556
12: 0.0278
Expected value: 6
Simulated value: 6.4144
Mathematically perfect. 2d6, 1s are -1, minimum result is 1 before modifiers, optional tetraphobia house rule. "2d6, 1s are negative, 1 floor".
The TTRPG should also include a hireling system designed for maximum speed. Fill out results on a simplified character sheet, and purchase from any major city (or any town with a good craftsman) an enchanted puppet who does what the programming says. Like the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12 except instead of being the catalyst that made most people realize the bottom 99% of RPGs suck and are better optimized and automated than actually played, it ensures your party can have a role filled even if nobody wants to play a character that fills it, without dealing with the hassle of having a whole extra character to keep track of. You tell it to heal anyone below x% HP, or do any tracking/lockpicking/utility spells it's programmed to know how to use, or damage any detected enemy if you're in combat prioritizing an enemy you're targeting if you're targeting one, no need to roll dice for the puppet to take random actions or roll damage. Some shops can only offer certain customizability options, some shops might be running out of room for puppets they don't feel like dismantling and say "No new puppets can be built until someone buys one of these". One might even be given to the players as a reward for a quest, perhaps its previous owner died. No changing orders in the middle of a dungeon, no giving or receiving orders or expressing personality, the puppet core when removed from its housing is highly delicate and requires decades of training and highly specialized skills and gigantic expensive proprietary tools only the best shops and most dedicated master craftsmen have to modify. Made from living wood, artificial flesh, or mechanical parts? Depends on the cost. Living Puppet and Robot can be playable races but these are explicitly the magical equivalent of video game NPCs.
Should also include something with one or more Gods directly affecting the game for the sake of the story like in Ryuutama.
"You're supposed to be resting your arm!"
I am. Barely moved that arm once when typing. But I'll go and get some real rest now, I can hear her yelling at me and she's not even here.
3 months ago | [YT] | 4
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Jason Godwyn
I'M NOT DEAD. just injured. will recover eventually.
3 months ago | [YT] | 6
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Jason Godwyn
I'm making a #FireEmblem fangame.
1 year ago | [YT] | 13
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