Quote:My comment about nukes was connected to Boskonians. (I can't see any law-abiding fan other than Noah being crazy enough to want a supply of nukes. The Professor may also be crazy, but not that way.) Boskonians aren't big on obeying laws - it's part of the definition - so they're going to grab some fissionables from somewhere if that's what it takes to win. (That "somewhere" is probably the 'Danes, which would add to 'Dane paranoia against Fen. We don't seem to have 'Dane vs. Fen hatred in the setting yet, and I'd rather not have a channel for someone to introduce it.) If "getting nukes" isn't what it takes to win, then they won't see any need to get nukes, so they won't bother, and space travel becomes slightly safer by default.
Also, it's "wavium-reinforced hulls (which pretty much everyone is using *anyway*) and nukes (if they can get them) and weapons improvised out of initially non-weapon things."
Quote:Which is wonderful - it evokes Age of Sail ship-to-ship combat, rather than the "WWII plane-to-plane dogfight" style of combat that almost everybody who commented seems to dislike. Being a minor Aubrey-and-Maturin-stories fan, I think this is a wonderful way to go. However, being a minor Aubrey-and-Maturin-stories fan, I think we still need some way to do effective broadsides before boarding. "Weapons improvised out of initially non-weapon things" aren't going to crack a 'wavium hull if 'wavium is a perfect defence, which means no broadsides. This limits story possibilities for no apparent reason other than "somebody doesn't appear to like Age of Sail stories".
I believe one of our discussions came up with the consensus that an awful lot of raider combat would be in the form of boarding parties and hull-cutters.
("Boarding parties and hull-cutters" also implies StarCrash-style "boarding torpedoes", but you have to take the bad with the good...)
Quote:The best advice I can give to anybody who critiques someone else's stories (in FenSpace or elsewhere) is to remember they're talking to another person, with preferences that probably don't match the critiquer's. If the critiquer comes down heavy-handed at the start and tells the writer "do it this way" instead of asking the writer "why did you do it that way?", the writer is going to ask himself "who died and made him Haruhi?", with all the negative connotations that the question usually implies. If a critiquer gets a reputation for being too heavy-handed, then people will start ignoring him out-of-hand.
If I'm coming across as requiring slapstick, I'll admit that I'm doing it wrong. I'd ask for advice on how to do it properly, except that this discussion thread may well obsolete the whole process pretty quickly.
Quote:Actually, they had the flaws to begin with - they just didn't apply to the first vignette I wrote. "Show, don't tell", and there simply wasn't room to show everything at the very beginning. (I still haven't shown all of the characters' flaws... One that should be obvious is a second-order collalary of Rule 4: The AIs are all pacifists; Sora's just more blatant about it than the others. Even Yoriko, the best shot of the bunch, only shoots targets and drones unless she has no other choice. And now that I've mentioned that here, I should go update their character writeups. Again.)
It is at least the case that the flaws you eventually came up with work just fine to my eyes.
So... generalities, instead of specifics. I believe I've already made clear that I'm against Rule 5, since I believe it's a setting-breaker.
I'm not really happy with Rule 2 - the idea of 'wavium making something ripple and move a la a morphing T-1000 while the 'wavium does its thing is Just Too Cool A Visual to throw away, in my opinion - but I can see the setting justification for it.
Rule 4, as mentioned above, has a second-order effect of no armies of 'wavium-powered killbots. This is a Good Thing, in my humble opinion.
Rule 6, about biomods, currently finishes "and you can't get rid of it, barring major reconstructive surgery - and sometimes not even then." I strongly suggest deleting "- and sometimes not even then"; it's amazing the lengths some people will go to in order to get rid of a body modification they don't want any more, and we shouldn't prohibit that. (The only exception I can see to this is if the biomod included regenerative abilities, which so far haven't been shown anywhere in the setting.)
Rule 8, as written, has already been broken at least three times - once in the story about slavers grabbing people and reliably biomodding them into catgirls, once with a set of four pre-programmed AI robots (Edit: Fair disclosure to newcomers - this was my plot point), and once with a desired gender-change. Only one of those three cases was contested, if I recall correctly, and after discussion it was allowed to stand.
Rule 10, as written, doesn't seem to apply to solid-state 'wavium as it has been depicted since Day One.
Rule 12 - If the writer doesn't get to declare his own characters' 'wavium quirks, who does?
Rule 14's okay by me - it fits the "Age of Sail in Space" motif that "boarding parties and hull-cutters" evokes. As long as there is a way to get around it in dire emergencies (and those emergencies are limited to one per writer), that is...
Overall, I'd suggest throwing away the idea of balancing quirks. That idea was okay when there was a possibility of turning this into an RPG, but it just gets in the way of storytelling. Perhaps, instead, we could have this:
- Rule X: Don't create ubermenschen - that's boring, and nobody wants to read a boring story. Don't load your characters up with crippling flaws, either - that's also boring. Strive for a balance: characters with some Nifty Abilities and some Nifty Disabilities are far more interesting than the "one-trick ponies" are.
This will require re-writing almost all of the other rules, though, so it's a big change.
-Rob Kelk
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012