VN Ren'Py Friends in Need [Ch.10 v0.71] [NeonGhosts]

[ImperialD]

So, I think something pretty interesting is happening in regard to the people angry at Guy's apparent lack of preparedness.

Obviously the relationship between the protagonist and the challenge he faces is pretty important to a story. In general we want the protagonist and the challenge he must face to be on roughly the same level, so the hero can believably triumph in the end against the odds, without trivializing the entire story. That's where plenty of young writers fuck it up, by making their hero overqualified for the challenge, or even (in porn games) taking away any challenge whatsoever. The MC is a hunk, a schemer and a silver-tongued bastard with a huge dick, and their opposition is just some "college" bullies and getting to know girls to fuck them. That's a pretty common pitfall.

Which doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it. Picture our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment, something happened here, something bad, and there are a bit too many coincidence piling up... When suddenly our hero comes face to face with a demented serial killer who successfully lured them in their underground compound, noone will hear them scream. Except our "hero" is a honest to God vampire. The kind that's near immune to bullets and has superpowers. And that warps the entire scene, something that would be a nail biter in a Thriller about a mundane detective suddenly becomes comically tragic when the evil demented serial killer traps an undead horror instead of a run-of-the-mill detective. It also works off dramatic irony. We, in this instance the players, know we're playing a vampire and the mundane elements of horror happening still work on us because in real life we're normal humans, so the build-up works, only to be subverted for the punchline, which turns the entire thing into one big farce. It wouldn't work if that was the entire story, but it works great as an early-game scene. By the way, that's from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodline, and I do heartily recommend that game.

I wanted to mention that scene because it highlights a more subtle point, so far I have basically been speaking in terms of "power levels", the hero must be level 15 to tackle a level 17 challenge if you will, but the VtM:B scene I just described also works because of the likeness between the serial killer and the vampire, the "hero". Both are killers, hunters who prey on the unsuspecting, and while this time the vampire was the bigger fish, there are plenty of fish bigger than him in the setting that could get the jump on him. That's the subtle thing when it comes to hero/challenge relationships, they must echo one another on some level. Going back to FiN for a minute, Guy is (as his name implies) an average guy. He is an everyman, a normal, average, random dude you could find anywhere that just happens to win the lottery, be put in an interesting situation, and the story is seeing how he navigates that. Which is the perfect protagonist when the challenge is having friends in need. On Guy's end his challenge is feeling like a purse, like he only has friends when they need something from him, he does not help friends, he loses friends over cash, and the outward challenge is that at the end of the day, Guy can't actually help anyone. He can bankroll people, but he can't fix anything for them, the onus in on the people he meets to fix their own lives. That naturally forces the story to focus on the girls, which is frankly what we're here for and so all that works great. That's the basis, the entire setup for the game, and it works great. But as it develops, there are two problems that get introduced. One is easy enough, Guy is not one character. What is reasonable for Good Guy may not be for Bad Guy (like being unarmed) as the threats they can expect in their daily lives are not actually the same, so there is some dissonance here besides choosing to good or bad option with a girl.

To illustrate the second problem, let's look at a different everyman character, in a very different story. When it comes to being the protagonist of Hellsing, Seras Victoria works just as well (if not better) as Alucard, the main protagonist. The story picks up when Seras is introduced, the challenges introduced are a challenge (in power level) to her, she is ironically the most human member of the main cast while also being the audience surrogate, and we follow her heartaches at her new condition and being forcefully introduced to the masquerade and the main plot. On the surface, you would think Seras could be bland as milk toast and still work just as well, the entire point of her character is out of her depth she is, and she has her vampiric condition tying her to the story. But Miura specifically avoids divorcing her from the rest of the world by introducing deep set traumas in her from way before being turned into a vampire. Hellsing is, at its core, a story about people who are hurt at their core and lashing out against the world, to work as a character in that universe, to avoid breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, to avoid dissociating a protagonist from its own story, you need that relationship between the plot and the hero, that echo. That buried darkness that turns a side character into a main character.

Back to FiN, I think that what the people pissed off at Guy for being chronically unprepared and laid back, is that he has none of that buried darkness, he has no dangerous spark and the story has evolved to kind of requiring him to have one. The story has slowly picked up in threat level. Guy is introducing a criminal (I forget off the top of my head what he did) in his life by introducing the guy's family into his life. We have a crazed ex-boyfriend on the loose who seems to be in the middle of a psychotic break, there is something deeply wrong about the guy who transformed Nicki into something deeply personal and the guy seems unsettling and rich enough to enter the story with a bang, and now we're introducing some actual, active career criminals into the mix.

This ends up dissociating Guy from the story, to the point that Guy stops looking like an everyman to some people, with some players even expecting a normal random dude to be more prepared than that when getting stuck in the situation Guy finds himself in. Not everyone though, but that's also a thing, real people react to danger in different ways, what's normal and expected for one person is alien to the other (like the whole discussion about getting a gun). When exposed to a dangerous situation, Guy can't be the everyman, he can't be any random dude, he has to be one specific dude and some people will find the main character, their avatar, not reacting the way the player would expect anyone to do (shortsighted as it is) infuriating, and I believe that this is what we're seeing with some players here. As well as players finding the protagonist lacking because the story calls out for an echo of something dangerous inside Guy, to tie him in to the world he is currently wading through, to spark the interest of the players into the darkness and secrets of the Guy they're playing as, who seems drawn to dangerous situations like it echoes something in him. And if there is nothing, if that echo is left unanswered, Guy will end up seeming lacking.

tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.

wow this is one hell of a dissertation on the subject

 

[Anteron]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

 

[armond]

So, I think something pretty interesting is happening in regard to the people angry at Guy's apparent lack of preparedness.

Obviously the relationship between the protagonist and the challenge he faces is pretty important to a story. In general we want the protagonist and the challenge he must face to be on roughly the same level, so the hero can believably triumph in the end against the odds, without trivializing the entire story. That's where plenty of young writers fuck it up, by making their hero overqualified for the challenge, or even (in porn games) taking away any challenge whatsoever. The MC is a hunk, a schemer and a silver-tongued bastard with a huge dick, and their opposition is just some "college" bullies and getting to know girls to fuck them. That's a pretty common pitfall.

Which doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it. Picture our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment, something happened here, something bad, and there are a bit too many coincidence piling up... When suddenly our hero comes face to face with a demented serial killer who successfully lured them in their underground compound, noone will hear them scream. Except our "hero" is a honest to God vampire. The kind that's near immune to bullets and has superpowers. And that warps the entire scene, something that would be a nail biter in a Thriller about a mundane detective suddenly becomes comically tragic when the evil demented serial killer traps an undead horror instead of a run-of-the-mill detective. It also works off dramatic irony. We, in this instance the players, know we're playing a vampire and the mundane elements of horror happening still work on us because in real life we're normal humans, so the build-up works, only to be subverted for the punchline, which turns the entire thing into one big farce. It wouldn't work if that was the entire story, but it works great as an early-game scene. By the way, that's from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodline, and I do heartily recommend that game.

I wanted to mention that scene because it highlights a more subtle point, so far I have basically been speaking in terms of "power levels", the hero must be level 15 to tackle a level 17 challenge if you will, but the VtM:B scene I just described also works because of the likeness between the serial killer and the vampire, the "hero". Both are killers, hunters who prey on the unsuspecting, and while this time the vampire was the bigger fish, there are plenty of fish bigger than him in the setting that could get the jump on him. That's the subtle thing when it comes to hero/challenge relationships, they must echo one another on some level. Going back to FiN for a minute, Guy is (as his name implies) an average guy. He is an everyman, a normal, average, random dude you could find anywhere that just happens to win the lottery, be put in an interesting situation, and the story is seeing how he navigates that. Which is the perfect protagonist when the challenge is having friends in need. On Guy's end his challenge is feeling like a purse, like he only has friends when they need something from him, he does not help friends, he loses friends over cash, and the outward challenge is that at the end of the day, Guy can't actually help anyone. He can bankroll people, but he can't fix anything for them, the onus in on the people he meets to fix their own lives. That naturally forces the story to focus on the girls, which is frankly what we're here for and so all that works great. That's the basis, the entire setup for the game, and it works great. But as it develops, there are two problems that get introduced. One is easy enough, Guy is not one character. What is reasonable for Good Guy may not be for Bad Guy (like being unarmed) as the threats they can expect in their daily lives are not actually the same, so there is some dissonance here besides choosing to good or bad option with a girl.

To illustrate the second problem, let's look at a different everyman character, in a very different story. When it comes to being the protagonist of Hellsing, Seras Victoria works just as well (if not better) as Alucard, the main protagonist. The story picks up when Seras is introduced, the challenges introduced are a challenge (in power level) to her, she is ironically the most human member of the main cast while also being the audience surrogate, and we follow her heartaches at her new condition and being forcefully introduced to the masquerade and the main plot. On the surface, you would think Seras could be bland as milk toast and still work just as well, the entire point of her character is out of her depth she is, and she has her vampiric condition tying her to the story. But Miura specifically avoids divorcing her from the rest of the world by introducing deep set traumas in her from way before being turned into a vampire. Hellsing is, at its core, a story about people who are hurt at their core and lashing out against the world, to work as a character in that universe, to avoid breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, to avoid dissociating a protagonist from its own story, you need that relationship between the plot and the hero, that echo. That buried darkness that turns a side character into a main character.

Back to FiN, I think that what the people pissed off at Guy for being chronically unprepared and laid back, is that he has none of that buried darkness, he has no dangerous spark and the story has evolved to kind of requiring him to have one. The story has slowly picked up in threat level. Guy is introducing a criminal (I forget off the top of my head what he did) in his life by introducing the guy's family into his life. We have a crazed ex-boyfriend on the loose who seems to be in the middle of a psychotic break, there is something deeply wrong about the guy who transformed Nicki into something deeply personal and the guy seems unsettling and rich enough to enter the story with a bang, and now we're introducing some actual, active career criminals into the mix.

This ends up dissociating Guy from the story, to the point that Guy stops looking like an everyman to some people, with some players even expecting a normal random dude to be more prepared than that when getting stuck in the situation Guy finds himself in. Not everyone though, but that's also a thing, real people react to danger in different ways, what's normal and expected for one person is alien to the other (like the whole discussion about getting a gun). When exposed to a dangerous situation, Guy can't be the everyman, he can't be any random dude, he has to be one specific dude and some people will find the main character, their avatar, not reacting the way the player would expect anyone to do (shortsighted as it is) infuriating, and I believe that this is what we're seeing with some players here. As well as players finding the protagonist lacking because the story calls out for an echo of something dangerous inside Guy, to tie him in to the world he is currently wading through, to spark the interest of the players into the darkness and secrets of the Guy they're playing as, who seems drawn to dangerous situations like it echoes something in him. And if there is nothing, if that echo is left unanswered, Guy will end up seeming lacking.

tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.

That's all reasonable, I don't see guy as the type to have a gun as he has a game room. My argument is that it would be easy for him to get a gun if he wanted one.

 

[Dessolos]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

well you don't speak for everyone. I personally don't play for the porn aspect at all. I play for the character building then the story. So having no challenge or obstacles to over come is a bit boring to me. Now maybe if I considered this game a pure porn visual novel instead of something that is a bit in the middle then id agree with this.

 

[yossa999]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

There should be everything that the porn game's author decides to put there. Take it or leave it, but it's the dev who drives that car. If this ride doesn't suit you, choose another, there are plenty out there.

 

[BadMoonZ]

*snip*

tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.

Well reasoned out. And bonus points for referring to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, my favourite game of all time.

In my view, up until the drug den update the game has mostly been a slice of life. Even with the dark path it's been fairly laid-back and chill, mostly focussed on MC and the girls. Mostly it's been a case of x girl has external problem y and MC can choose to help z1 or take advantage z2, with some variations inbetween. But now it's been put into a crime thriller with antagonists which seem incompatable with the previous formula. Risa doesn't have a problem MC can choose to fix, she has given him a problem. Even if the problem becomes something that can be wrapped up reasonably quickly (in the sense of a few chapters of story, not actual time) you can't go back. The tone and feeling of the AVN is different now.

 

[CatGamergrill]

Most awaited game since my Life is similar

 

[ImperialD]

Most awaited game since my Life is similar

so your saying your might be a part time rapist ?

 

[7_lJzWy3XxoEyow7]

Most awaited game since my Life is similar

So ... and what path did you chose?

 

[Dr.Slime]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

Who lied to you about this being a porn game?
It's an AVN which is mean = Adult Visual Novel.
Means it's a game that has an adult aspect to it, could be blackmail ,rape kidnap , killing , porn or anything in between .

 

[NeonGhosts]

Yeah, I understand that, that's why I started this convo with how writers have to take some liberties to make their stories intresting. Even if I expect Guy to know better in some situations I still prefer him over any of the thousands of 15 years old goblinoids that plague avns
Don't take my criticism or others too seriously because most of us love the game the way it is. It's just the usual bitching and fan theories after any release.

I understand, and I try to take this stuff in stride. But, most of this stuff doesn't feel like engagement with the story. Like, this chapter gave people some interesting stuff (I think) to speculate on, and theorize on. Cherry, Lucien, Pepper, Markus, Carl, Trevor, Kara.. There's stuff there to interrogate and question character motives and such.

But instead, people want to nit-pick about why I didn't write an entirely different story. It feels like the Cinema Sins brand of media engagement, where people just want to, "Gotcha!" the author.

Like God damn, so many people, even fans, have a fetish for thumbing your eyes about your own story. "Why this" "why that" "why not this" "why not that", isn't that the author's prerogative? Most books or movies or video games or w/e that I try, I put my trust into the authors and just wait and see where they go with it; sit back and relax and just enjoy the journey. I mean, none of these plots people are bitching about have even gotten to the midpoint yet, have they?

This is really the thing. Like.. I've been doing this shit for two years now, and still every decision I make gets second-guessed, and people demand detailed responses to explain myself. Should I just spoil the next several chapters? Oh, but then my explanations wouldn't actually cover every single path and iteration of the game, so people would still nitpick little details left unexplained.

Like, someone was questioning, several pages back, why I'd suddenly introduce Lucien in Chapter 8. Rewind to Ashe's short story, and oh hey, I actually set up him, and his motivation, in June of 2023! Shit, it's like I actually consider some of this stuff!

Or hey! Remember when Guy was talking to Maya like four chapters ago, and he explained a good guy is only as good as their bad guy? Shit, maybe I was foreshadowing something! Who can say!

I'm not saying it's perfect. The game's a work-in-progress, and sometimes I make errors and need to back up and nudge dialogue or events back into place. But, a lot of the stuff people want to pick at, is just stuff that hasn't been explained yet.

Well reasoned out. And bonus points for referring to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, my favourite game of all time.

In my view, up until the drug den update the game has mostly been a slice of life. Even with the dark path it's been fairly laid-back and chill, mostly focussed on MC and the girls. Mostly it's been a case of x girl has external problem y and MC can choose to help z1 or take advantage z2, with some variations inbetween. But now it's been put into a crime thriller with antagonists which seem incompatable with the previous formula. Risa doesn't have a problem MC can choose to fix, she has given him a problem. Even if the problem becomes something that can be wrapped up reasonably quickly (in the sense of a few chapters of story, not actual time) you can't go back. The tone and feeling of the AVN is different now.

Criminal elements have been a part of the game since literally Chapter One. Like, literally the very first installment of the game, when Nicki hinted towards a predatory loanshark bothering her and Brent. I could sit here and explain how every girl's plotline brushes up against drugs and coercive sex work, but I'll spare myself.

tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.

I appreciate the thought you put into this comment, but I can't hit every point. So, I'll take the broad strokes. I think Guy has shown, over the course of the story, to be a little bit of a man-of-action. It depends on how people want to play him, but he's a bit of a risk-taker that'll go shadow a famous photographer on a lark. He'll walk down dark alleys. He'll confront people like Markus, Jamie, or Erik that he views as bullying people or disrespecting him. In this chapter, we see him get a gun shoved in his face, and he doesn't have a strong reaction to it. I don't think he's entirely unprepared for challenges.

Now, to speak broadly to the idea that this current challenge is at odds with the overall tone of the story, or Guy's ability to meet it.. I've never been shy about taking a lot of inspiration from comic books. One thing about comics, is that they tend to give the hero challenges that are strongly correlated to their expertise.

This is a world where sex, money, desperation, and exploitation is the main focal point. So, why would our hero not have an enemy whose main trade is sexually exploiting desperate people for money?

 

[kaczy091]

Nicki always runs the dominant route? Can this be prevented or can it come back to us if we still have the dominant route?

 

[Varrilete]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

STOP generalizing. I do like a challenge in my porn game, I want to earn that fap fap, my cum is gold and it should be hard to pump it out, it needs a challenge,

 

[Machete]

TBH there really shouldn't be a challenge in a porn game. It's not why people play.

I disagree. Even a porn game is funnier and more enticing if it has a good story and good stories require conflict.
Otherwise the game is a sequence of girls who go to MC and say "OMG! I love you so much!" And after a bunch of rather all similar scenes they are like "OMG! You fucked me so good!". And they all wear black and yellow. And they go to college. And he plays basketball... but i'm getting too specific

 

[atrebor68]

So, I think something pretty interesting is happening in regard to the people angry at Guy's apparent lack of preparedness.

Obviously the relationship between the protagonist and the challenge he faces is pretty important to a story. In general we want the protagonist and the challenge he must face to be on roughly the same level, so the hero can believably triumph in the end against the odds, without trivializing the entire story. That's where plenty of young writers fuck it up, by making their hero overqualified for the challenge, or even (in porn games) taking away any challenge whatsoever. The MC is a hunk, a schemer and a silver-tongued bastard with a huge dick, and their opposition is just some "college" bullies and getting to know girls to fuck them. That's a pretty common pitfall.

Which doesn't mean that you can't have fun with it. Picture our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment, something happened here, something bad, and there are a bit too many coincidence piling up... When suddenly our hero comes face to face with a demented serial killer who successfully lured them in their underground compound, noone will hear them scream. Except our "hero" is a honest to God vampire. The kind that's near immune to bullets and has superpowers. And that warps the entire scene, something that would be a nail biter in a Thriller about a mundane detective suddenly becomes comically tragic when the evil demented serial killer traps an undead horror instead of a run-of-the-mill detective. It also works off dramatic irony. We, in this instance the players, know we're playing a vampire and the mundane elements of horror happening still work on us because in real life we're normal humans, so the build-up works, only to be subverted for the punchline, which turns the entire thing into one big farce. It wouldn't work if that was the entire story, but it works great as an early-game scene. By the way, that's from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodline, and I do heartily recommend that game.

I wanted to mention that scene because it highlights a more subtle point, so far I have basically been speaking in terms of "power levels", the hero must be level 15 to tackle a level 17 challenge if you will, but the VtM:B scene I just described also works because of the likeness between the serial killer and the vampire, the "hero". Both are killers, hunters who prey on the unsuspecting, and while this time the vampire was the bigger fish, there are plenty of fish bigger than him in the setting that could get the jump on him. That's the subtle thing when it comes to hero/challenge relationships, they must echo one another on some level. Going back to FiN for a minute, Guy is (as his name implies) an average guy. He is an everyman, a normal, average, random dude you could find anywhere that just happens to win the lottery, be put in an interesting situation, and the story is seeing how he navigates that. Which is the perfect protagonist when the challenge is having friends in need. On Guy's end his challenge is feeling like a purse, like he only has friends when they need something from him, he does not help friends, he loses friends over cash, and the outward challenge is that at the end of the day, Guy can't actually help anyone. He can bankroll people, but he can't fix anything for them, the onus in on the people he meets to fix their own lives. That naturally forces the story to focus on the girls, which is frankly what we're here for and so all that works great. That's the basis, the entire setup for the game, and it works great. But as it develops, there are two problems that get introduced. One is easy enough, Guy is not one character. What is reasonable for Good Guy may not be for Bad Guy (like being unarmed) as the threats they can expect in their daily lives are not actually the same, so there is some dissonance here besides choosing to good or bad option with a girl.

To illustrate the second problem, let's look at a different everyman character, in a very different story. When it comes to being the protagonist of Hellsing, Seras Victoria works just as well (if not better) as Alucard, the main protagonist. The story picks up when Seras is introduced, the challenges introduced are a challenge (in power level) to her, she is ironically the most human member of the main cast while also being the audience surrogate, and we follow her heartaches at her new condition and being forcefully introduced to the masquerade and the main plot. On the surface, you would think Seras could be bland as milk toast and still work just as well, the entire point of her character is out of her depth she is, and she has her vampiric condition tying her to the story. But Miura specifically avoids divorcing her from the rest of the world by introducing deep set traumas in her from way before being turned into a vampire. Hellsing is, at its core, a story about people who are hurt at their core and lashing out against the world, to work as a character in that universe, to avoid breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, to avoid dissociating a protagonist from its own story, you need that relationship between the plot and the hero, that echo. That buried darkness that turns a side character into a main character.

Back to FiN, I think that what the people pissed off at Guy for being chronically unprepared and laid back, is that he has none of that buried darkness, he has no dangerous spark and the story has evolved to kind of requiring him to have one. The story has slowly picked up in threat level. Guy is introducing a criminal (I forget off the top of my head what he did) in his life by introducing the guy's family into his life. We have a crazed ex-boyfriend on the loose who seems to be in the middle of a psychotic break, there is something deeply wrong about the guy who transformed Nicki into something deeply personal and the guy seems unsettling and rich enough to enter the story with a bang, and now we're introducing some actual, active career criminals into the mix.

This ends up dissociating Guy from the story, to the point that Guy stops looking like an everyman to some people, with some players even expecting a normal random dude to be more prepared than that when getting stuck in the situation Guy finds himself in. Not everyone though, but that's also a thing, real people react to danger in different ways, what's normal and expected for one person is alien to the other (like the whole discussion about getting a gun). When exposed to a dangerous situation, Guy can't be the everyman, he can't be any random dude, he has to be one specific dude and some people will find the main character, their avatar, not reacting the way the player would expect anyone to do (shortsighted as it is) infuriating, and I believe that this is what we're seeing with some players here. As well as players finding the protagonist lacking because the story calls out for an echo of something dangerous inside Guy, to tie him in to the world he is currently wading through, to spark the interest of the players into the darkness and secrets of the Guy they're playing as, who seems drawn to dangerous situations like it echoes something in him. And if there is nothing, if that echo is left unanswered, Guy will end up seeming lacking.

tl;dr If you're introducing some danger in the story, you need to have some danger in Guy's heart beyond Bad Guy being an asshole.

Please can someone shrink the talk ?

 

[Varrilete]

Please can someone shrink the talk ?

ask chatgpt to summarize
I have nothing better to do so:

Part1

1. Protagonist-Challenge Balance:
   • In storytelling, it’s essential for the protagonist’s abilities and the challenges they face to be balanced. Overqualified heroes or trivial challenges can weaken the narrative.
   • Young writers sometimes make their heroes too powerful or remove all challenges (even in adult games).
   • A common pitfall is having a hero who excels in every aspect (e.g., a hunk, schemer, silver-tongued, well-endowed) facing minor opposition (such as college bullies).
2. Subverting Expectations:
   • Subverting expectations can create memorable moments. For example, imagine a detective searching for a missing person who unexpectedly confronts a demented serial killer.
   • The twist: The detective is an honest-to-God vampire, immune to bullets and possessing superpowers.
   • This subverts the thriller genre, turning a tense situation into comically tragic irony.
3. Echoing Hero and Challenge:
   • Hero and challenge should echo each other on some level.
   • In “Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines,” the vampire and serial killer both prey on the unsuspecting, creating a parallel dynamic.
4. Guy in “FiN”:
   • Guy, an average guy, wins the lottery and faces the challenge of having friends in need.
   • He can’t directly fix their problems but can provide financial support.
   • The story focuses on the girls, aligning with the game’s premise.
5. Dissonance and Character Variation:
   • Guy’s character varies (Good Guy vs. Bad Guy), affecting what’s reasonable for him.
   • Threats differ based on character alignment, leading to dissonance in choices with girls.

Part2

1. Seras Victoria in “Hellsing”:
   • Seras Victoria, an everyman character, works well as the protagonist in “Hellsing.”
   • Challenges introduced to her are a power-level challenge.
   • Despite her vampiric condition, she remains relatable due to deep-set traumas from her past.
   • The story avoids divorcing her from the world by maintaining a relationship between plot and hero.
2. Guy in “FiN”:
   • Some players are frustrated with Guy’s chronic unpreparedness and laid-back attitude.
   • The story’s threat level has increased, introducing criminals and dangerous situations.
   • Guy lacks the buried darkness or dangerous spark that would tie him more closely to the evolving plot.
   • Real people react differently to danger, and some players find Guy’s reactions infuriating.
   • The story calls for an echo of danger within Guy, but if it remains absent, he may seem lacking.

Feel free to ask if you’d like further elaboration or have additional thoughts!

 

[Maviarab]

Please can someone shrink the talk ?

You're on a forum. Wrong place to be kid if you don't want to read shit

Jus' sayin'.

 

[Varrilete]

You're on a forum. Wrong place to be kid if you don't want to read shit

Jus' sayin'.

I dont agree, one thing is to read 2, 3 paragraphs and other is 80

 

[yossa999]

Please can someone shrink the talk ?

The text discusses the importance of having a protagonist and challenge on a similar level in a story, using examples from various games and characters. It highlights how the protagonist's background and personality should echo the challenges they face in order to create a compelling narrative. The text then applies this idea to the game FiN, where some players are frustrated with the protagonist Guy's lack of preparedness and apparent lack of darkness within his character as the story escalates in threat level. The lack of a dangerous spark within Guy's character is leaving some players feeling disconnected from the story and wanting more depth from the protagonist.

 

[atrebor68]

You're on a forum. Wrong place to be kid if you don't want to read shit

Jus' sayin'.

Good communication involves short and meaningful phrases:

In a story, it’s important that the protagonist and the challenge they face are on a similar level. Often, young writers make the mistake of making their hero overqualified for the challenge or even removing any difficulty altogether. For example, an attractive and skilled protagonist dealing with college bullies and flirting with girls might be unconvincing. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with this dynamic.

Imagine our hero searching for a missing person, picking up clues in a creepy environment. Suddenly, they come face to face with a demented serial killer who has lured them into an underground lair. But here’s the twist: our “hero” is an immortal vampire, nearly immune to bullets and possessing superpowers. This completely changes the scene, turning what would be a nail-biting thriller for a regular detective into something comically tragic. It also plays off dramatic irony: we, the players, know we’re dealing with a vampire, yet the horror elements still work on us because in real life, we’re just normal humans. This subverts expectations and turns the whole situation into a darkly humorous farce. While this approach might work well early in the story, it wouldn’t sustain the entire narrative.