- on the "Boss? Boss." thing - well, I don't see the awkwardness, but then, I know how it's supposed to sound in my head. It works about as well either way for me, so I'll go with your suggestion.
- puzzlement on the character - part of the style I'm trying to run this with is to vaguely hint at lots of deeper underlying foo. So, really, part of the point is the slow unfolding of character. If the feeling is that you don't know everything you might want to know and are curious, that's good. If the feeling is that something seems to contradict, that's bad, and I'd like to know more detail. If the feeling is that you don't know everything you might want to know and are annoyed - well, I'm not quite sure how to fix that, but I'd be interested in hearing a bit more in-depth on the problem.
- Fate Shield - partially as above, but also goes into some of the deep metaphysics. I actually feel a bit as if my problem was going into too *much* detail here - there's enough that it breaks past the "That's odd. I wonder what's up with that?" feel, but not enough to explain, and I feel like it'd be easier and more in keeping to go with less rather than more. On the other side, this is being told in a fairly character-driven narrative, by a character who pretty much assumes that you know as much about the world as he does, so there's not really *going* to be any in-depth discussions. (Believe me, if I let him turn into exposition boy, there'll be nothing *but* in-depth discussions. I'm sorta like that.)
The actual explanation as follows: (skip past if you don't want to be spoiled).
So, first of all, you have to know about Reality. Reality is basically your ability to insist that the world works like you think it does, rather than like the other guy thinks it does. Dimensions have reality, people have reality, and certain places of power have reality. Planes with more reality tend to breed people with more reality, and people (as always) vary. If you're a spellcaster trying to throw around magic not native to the plane, and the plane has more reality than you do, you won't be able to do much with it If you're a spellcaster throwing magic at someone who doesn't believe in or agree with your particular brand of magic and they have more r-factor than you do, they'll tend to shrug it off (though there's certainly a degree of home-plane advantage here.) Vincent's home plane, Erath, has a fairly high R-factor, due to its importance in transdimensional trade and its habit of luring in, soaking up and destroying demonic invasions. Vincent, in turn, has one ofthe highest R-factors on the plane. He's got the highest in the Force by a fair margin. This is handy, because it means he can soak up hostile magic like there's no tomorrow and laugh about it. It also makes him more generally durable, and, at his level, gives him a small degree of healing factor. If he'd had the intelligence to go with that R-factor, he'd have made a terrifying combat mage. As it is, he managed to scrape a BA in spiritmastery with a lot of hard work and a solid B+ average, and devotes most of his efforts to improving himself in the physical realm. CustSec doesn't mind that one bit.
Now, Reality has another effect. In particular, unusual stuff happens. In this world, however, randomness doesn't happen randomly. Rather, warps and strains in probability form over time more in some places, less in others, untill the pressure gets high enough, something odd happens and they get released. Having someone with a strong R-factor pass by is like poking at them - the chance that the odd thing happens right then, to them, goes way up. A Fate-shield works exactly the opposite way - it shores up the strength of the local probability field so that the stresses don't burst through - at least, not until they get to be too strong for the shield. Since demonic invasions are a little on the unusual side, this meant that the shield over Omega-5 made them happen a lot less frequently - but that the shield was straining under the weight pretty quickly too. By now there's enough of a strain on it that they *can't* just take it down - they don't know what would happen, except that it'd be bad. Thus, they bring in our friend Vincent, to poke a little hole in the shield for a while, and try to drain it off, bit by bit.
So, given that, do you have any suggestions on what more to include as explanations? Maybe a few descriptions to swap around or nomenclatures to change up, so as to make it intuitive enough not to jar? Perhaps a bit to take out so as to reduce the confusion? I'm all ears.
Oh, and did anyone figure out any of this on their own?
- puzzlement on the character - part of the style I'm trying to run this with is to vaguely hint at lots of deeper underlying foo. So, really, part of the point is the slow unfolding of character. If the feeling is that you don't know everything you might want to know and are curious, that's good. If the feeling is that something seems to contradict, that's bad, and I'd like to know more detail. If the feeling is that you don't know everything you might want to know and are annoyed - well, I'm not quite sure how to fix that, but I'd be interested in hearing a bit more in-depth on the problem.
- Fate Shield - partially as above, but also goes into some of the deep metaphysics. I actually feel a bit as if my problem was going into too *much* detail here - there's enough that it breaks past the "That's odd. I wonder what's up with that?" feel, but not enough to explain, and I feel like it'd be easier and more in keeping to go with less rather than more. On the other side, this is being told in a fairly character-driven narrative, by a character who pretty much assumes that you know as much about the world as he does, so there's not really *going* to be any in-depth discussions. (Believe me, if I let him turn into exposition boy, there'll be nothing *but* in-depth discussions. I'm sorta like that.)
The actual explanation as follows: (skip past if you don't want to be spoiled).
So, first of all, you have to know about Reality. Reality is basically your ability to insist that the world works like you think it does, rather than like the other guy thinks it does. Dimensions have reality, people have reality, and certain places of power have reality. Planes with more reality tend to breed people with more reality, and people (as always) vary. If you're a spellcaster trying to throw around magic not native to the plane, and the plane has more reality than you do, you won't be able to do much with it If you're a spellcaster throwing magic at someone who doesn't believe in or agree with your particular brand of magic and they have more r-factor than you do, they'll tend to shrug it off (though there's certainly a degree of home-plane advantage here.) Vincent's home plane, Erath, has a fairly high R-factor, due to its importance in transdimensional trade and its habit of luring in, soaking up and destroying demonic invasions. Vincent, in turn, has one ofthe highest R-factors on the plane. He's got the highest in the Force by a fair margin. This is handy, because it means he can soak up hostile magic like there's no tomorrow and laugh about it. It also makes him more generally durable, and, at his level, gives him a small degree of healing factor. If he'd had the intelligence to go with that R-factor, he'd have made a terrifying combat mage. As it is, he managed to scrape a BA in spiritmastery with a lot of hard work and a solid B+ average, and devotes most of his efforts to improving himself in the physical realm. CustSec doesn't mind that one bit.
Now, Reality has another effect. In particular, unusual stuff happens. In this world, however, randomness doesn't happen randomly. Rather, warps and strains in probability form over time more in some places, less in others, untill the pressure gets high enough, something odd happens and they get released. Having someone with a strong R-factor pass by is like poking at them - the chance that the odd thing happens right then, to them, goes way up. A Fate-shield works exactly the opposite way - it shores up the strength of the local probability field so that the stresses don't burst through - at least, not until they get to be too strong for the shield. Since demonic invasions are a little on the unusual side, this meant that the shield over Omega-5 made them happen a lot less frequently - but that the shield was straining under the weight pretty quickly too. By now there's enough of a strain on it that they *can't* just take it down - they don't know what would happen, except that it'd be bad. Thus, they bring in our friend Vincent, to poke a little hole in the shield for a while, and try to drain it off, bit by bit.
So, given that, do you have any suggestions on what more to include as explanations? Maybe a few descriptions to swap around or nomenclatures to change up, so as to make it intuitive enough not to jar? Perhaps a bit to take out so as to reduce the confusion? I'm all ears.
Oh, and did anyone figure out any of this on their own?