AdmiralTigerclaw
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Sleeping with the Girls pt 2
06-28-2011, 04:06 PM
Because he said to make a new thread about it.
So anyway, when I said 'tips' I didn't mean on the Senshi. I was speaking about what I was consciously thinking about when I was writing the fight.
I'll summarize, and you can ask about anything in detail.
1: The fight does not exist in a vacuum. People WILL react to it.
2: The environment is a character, treat it like one.
3: Write assuming the fighters are smart and everyone is trying to win.
4: Keep track of all threads of combat that aren't being seen as if it were a tabletop game. (IE: Everyone is doing something.)
Number four can be a bit daunting when you're applying number three to it and have more than four or five people going. Because even if you don't see it, the people in the background are still trying to win. A lot of fights I've seen in fiction: Movies, Books, whatever... seem to be centered around duels/superduels. Where in the fight you're watching is important, and all the rest of the fight is treated as 'background effects' at best. It does not take into the account that Joe Random can snipe the main character at any time, and in fact, would be attempting to do so at any given oportunity.
As a result, the fight you watch isn't a battle, but a collection of duels with 'battle effects' going on around them. After you've seen it enough times, you come to notice it and just get bored with the same old formula.
Of course, it's understandable because quite frankly. Writing an honest to Washu BATTLE is... Rather hard. For the battle in this latest chapter I released, I only had eight combatants, but spent a month just figuring out who goes where and does what. And that's before adding in reactions to the environment. For that, I actually used google Earth to pull a map, trace distances, and get the location of buildings. And the entire time I was writing, we had a running discussion as to what the local response would be like in Tokyo. And just as a hint... The response is coming, it just hasn't arrived yet.
In contrast, the superduels are exceedingly easy. As people can just keep track of two people (or sets of two people independently) and handwave anything else that goes on offscreen.
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And as the first response is going to be police & EMS, well they're most likely still stuck in traffic.
As for the mention over at SB that your vehicle needs a new timing belt and possibly a new/refurbed water pump or seals, got me thinking on just How Hard Could It Be to do it yourself, as I swear I've seen how-tos in Popular Mechanics - back in the day. Until I saw prices for the tool sets needed to do a 'proper job' (AUD$130-$400) and read the Haynes manual for the 'Rolla - the tools I have now are required, just need a decent jack or engine hoist. Then I read more. It's fiddly, can take hours and there's the possibility of grenading the engine if you get it wrong. So absolutely not something I'd be doing on my only car without some practice, I wonder how much a junkyard would charge me for one (an engine) to play with.
Meh, anyway according to the Haynes manual, my 'Rolla uses a timing chain, so the only belt I've to worry about is the serpentine accessory one.
--Rod.H
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And as the first response is going to be police & EMS, well they're most likely still stuck in traffic.
As for the mention over at SB that your vehicle needs a new timing belt and possibly a new/refurbed water pump or seals, got me thinking on just How Hard Could It Be to do it yourself, as I swear I've seen how-tos in Popular Mechanics - back in the day. Until I saw prices for the tool sets needed to do a 'proper job' (AUD$130-$400) and read the Haynes manual for the 'Rolla - the tools I have now are required, just need a decent jack or engine hoist. Then I read more. It's fiddly, can take hours and there's the possibility of grenading the engine if you get it wrong. So absolutely not something I'd be doing on my only car without some practice, I wonder how much a junkyard would charge me for one (an engine) to play with.
Meh, anyway according to the Haynes manual, my 'Rolla uses a timing chain, so the only belt I've to worry about is the serpentine accessory one.
--Rod.H
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The tendency to treat the protagonist's battle as the 'important' one and turn the rest into background haze is pretty common, actually. So much so, in fact, that the Mekton Zeta game system made a direct reference to it in their gaming mechanic section, in how a GM could structure their combats so that you could have the titanic space battles without overloading the players with essentially irrelevant detail. Sort of like how if you examine Macross Frontier, the space combats are really only about half a dozen important people, with the rest being really glossy explosions and laser fire in the background.
Anime like Bubblegum Crisis and Tekkaman Blade try to step away from this convention by actually reducing the combat to a handful of people, or by staging events so that the combat occurs in a relatively confined place. Most of the combat sequences either take place in wide open areas (in space in Tekkaman Blade, or in the uninhabited desert,) or in combats involving a set number of enemy combatants (usually two or three in Bubblegum Crisis, with five being the most they face in one go, as a rule.)
The Sailor Moon mechanic was always based on the idea that Beryl was never at full combat strength. She couldn't afford to launch the entire Dark Kingdom at her enemies, because she couldn't power them all up and sustain them for the entire fight. And the energy she could split off for her generals was carefully hoarded, and had to last them for the long haul. Which was why they kept trying to steal energy from others. They were essentially trying to refuel the war machine. And since every one of the soldier critters required the general expend energy to empower it, losing them was a blow to their overall reserves.
In that scene, Kunzite pretty much has to win with what he has. Which also explains why he's not getting any more support, even though Beryl has to know that the Senshi are tossing the rules for clandestine warfare out the window in an attempt to ace the general. This is about to become obviously, visibly public. And that's not good for Beryl in the long run, as her reserves aren't up to the kind of firepower an 'awakened' world can bring to bear on them if they figured out how to. So Kunzite is on his own, in an attempt to limit the damage.
From how it unfolded, it seemed like there were really only two main groups in that combat. The first was obviously the protagonist. Everything unfolded from his own mind in a stream-of-consciousness point of view. The combat off-screen was actually a little hard to follow, and it wasn't very easy to see what was going on, but from a first-person dialog point of view, that's actually very reasonable. The combat felt a little like Call of Duty, where you have a fight taking place around you, with people calling out instructions to either side, and other explosions in the distance, which resolve into more firefights the closer you get. The brain-fart moments when he mentally tried to tally up the situation, or realize something he'd forgotten to set up beforehand, served to break up the action and separate one combat sequence from the next one, without taking the reader out of the fight, which was nice. It gave the reader a chance to deal with the previous scene and get ready to handle the next one, while in a few cases introducing humor. The bit where the protagonist relates to Sailor Moon by comparing her to a Final Fantasy character was a hoot. 
I'm not sure if the pocket nuke is enough to take out Kunzite. Certainly not at full power, possibly with so many other things going wrong for him at that point, and with his power reduced, maybe even likely. But 'escalation' always has repercussions. The flash of the nuke in Tokyo will blind anyone for miles who was looking at the blast zone, and given how it was put together, there's going to be thousands of people who were blinded by that thing. Even assuming Sailor Moon can pull off some kind of wide-area healing miracle, the fact that someone in that fight was willing to use a tactical nuke to win will get NATO forces swarming into Tokyo faster than you can say "Fallout, anyone?"
The most intelligent thing for the Dark Kingdom to do in that case is to use a mind-controlling general at that point, take control of the NATO forces, and use them to institute a coordinated hunt for the Senshi, with orders to kill. Were I running the other side, it's the first solution I'd try to bring about, seeing as how the NATO nations have been kind enough to provide all that firepower, with so little understanding of the kind of things Beryl can do to them.
That's just my take, but it would be a concern, I think.
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On another note, it occurred to me after I wrote it what really defined that combat. When you read it, the combat plays out in the mind like a war movie. Lots of explosions, frantic shaky-cam movement focused on a handful of protagonists at any one time, and plenty of haze of battle. Think Band of Brothers for a good example of where I'm going with that.
A lot of the combat I write I often do up while listening to soundtrack appropriate to the genre. So a lot of BGC music while writing Dead Bang (inserts shameless plug here,) for instance. But that also means it shades the combat somewhat, creating a combat sequence that is meant to play to music. The combat sequence in that fanfic however doesn't really lend itself to music, because it's not that kind of firefight. It's meant to be more realistic.
To write something like that, I'd probably watch a couple episodes of Band of Brothers just to get myself in the proper frame of mind to structure the visuals and sound effects the correct way.
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You know I just realized, at the rate mister walker was pumping off shells during the battle it must have really bitten a hole in his special ammo supply or at least through a chunk of the backlash shells. Does anyone recall how much ammo he has on hand?
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I'd have to go back and count, but I remember wondering how many shells he had on that bandolier he was toting around. There has to be a practical limit.
Unless the thing feeds into what sounded like a pocket dimension. What he pulled the nuke round out of sounded like one, anyway. Maybe the bandolier is really about fifty feet long, and whenever he runs low, he just pulls on the bandolier to advance it another couple of feet? 
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AdmiralTigerclaw
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The bandolier is that double-strap from volume one. I can hold about 40 shells total.
Washu gave me about thirty and thirty.
Knowing me, I distrobuted them in a twenty-twenty split.
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speaking of pocket dimentions... why does he never use the portable hole as a weapon? can he just open it up and swing it around lopping things in half, or does it only cut on opening? if the latter, i can see the problem of getting a general to hold still while you whip this out, but if the former, is it just that he keeps forgetting? plot necessity?
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I thought it was fear of screwing up in either:
1) hurting himself
2) reaching maximum entropy (large things at high velocity also don't make opening it any fun)
[possibly] 3) getting blood/other bodily fluids over everything you own isn't fun
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Well he usually has both his hands full of shotgun in combat. Walker did note that he could have used it to slice the rooftop door one or two chapters ago but totally forgot about it.
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AdmiralTigerclaw
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It wasn't used as a weapon because while it is the sharpest blade in existence, it's awkward to handle.
to open it, I have to reach across, press my 'watch', and then it's like a giang floating wristblade buzzsaw. It's got no range, and is at a difficult to handle angle. Better used for a surprise attack.
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Ah. So in other words, the protagonist need to get Washu to modify it so that it can be launched on a tether, and pulled back to the watch.
Rygar, anyone?
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DRAG0NFLIGHT Wrote:Ah. So in other words, the protagonist need to get Washu to modify it so that it can be launched on a tether, and pulled back to the watch.
Rygar, anyone? Speaking as someone who has brained himself on a foam mace-and-chain in Ampgard, I would like to say that having floating wormhole with the indefinably sharp event horizon on a chain or tether would be classified as a Bad Idea of the First Degree.
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Well, it would need some kind of safety on it, of course. It's the kind of thing that you'd drop on Washu, state your concerns, and see what comes out of it.
Another image that comes to mind is the old Star Trek disk guns. Except each one is a micro-even horizon created just for the single use.
Hmm. If magic existed, would I qualify as a Mad Inventor?
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Consider that she wouldn't give Our Hero a hood for his suit so that he'd stay out of trouble. (Fat lot of good that did, but still...) Why would she weaponize something she's already given him?
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Heh. I just have this image of him running around now with one of those plastic disk guns, and horrifying the enemy with what it's loaded with.
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Heh, you could also apply that to the current nerf guns. I'm certain Washuu can come up with something 'interesting ' to replace the foam darts. I know I've thought up something to do with 'em for Fenspace.
Also Admiral, a gig at Samsung, nice just don't let 'em talk ya into being their Apple sacrifice....
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Some brilliant personage over at space battles had the idea of there actually being a Mesquite tree on Jurai. And she's flowering. And when she overhears Walker's comment about Mesquite to Ayeka, she becomes absolutely smitten.
Do the math. 
AdmiralTigerclaw
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Well, it's more someone thought about a Yandere Treeship coming after me because of the comment. I added the Mesquite bit because it tied in nicely enough.
It's more of a joke/omake at this point then slated for story usage.
And this morning I was browsing scooter songs and found a theme tune that fit such a ship perfectly.
A first generation royal tree? That's scary and awesome at the same time...
Mesquite Tree: A Juraian badass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUW7xE1n ... dded#at=85
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The grit 10 universe wouldn't happen to be Ace Combat? Perhaps not as it's not a pure anime but does have anime cutscenes and the possibility of VW beetle sized super-computers what with the size of some the superweapons. I just can't identify an appropriate character for Walker to pop-up against.
Although a series with an female AI character.......
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Admiral at one point mentioned on the SB forums something about 10,000 pieces of armor plating, which comes directly from Neon Genesis Evangelion. And as for who, given how his tastes apparently run, who do you think?
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I still think that solution's the easy way out, which is why I'm looking for other possibilities. Then again over on SB the whole Crystal Tokyo thing sparked up again ('I think that posters' a Sailor Pluto something....') distracting everyone from the mystery world X......
10k armor pieces from that setting? Wasn't their tech level essentially battleship armor mounted on the you-know-what's? And didn't really do that well against the monster-of-the-day either :S
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A sneak peak at the next chapter of SWTG, courtesy of ATC: Quote:I lost all sense of direction as my breath left my lungs unexpectedly.
The ground become the sky, the sky became the ground. I felt something
strike my head and back and then world came to a sudden halt around me.
For just a moment, I forgot to breathe before I realized I was staring
face up at the sky. There was yelling, and snarling, and my body
refused to move.
‘Wiggle your big toe’ flitted through my mind in an instant before I
managed to blink and suck in a lung full of air, getting my focus back.
I... I ‘m alive. I’m conscious. I can feel my legs. And I feel...
Pain.
Yes, I believe those are all positive checkmarks. Well, all but that last one. My chest was on fire or something.
There was a scrabbling sound next to my ear and a pop before something began pulling at my head... Or my helmet. Something...
‘-alk to me... TALK TO ME!”
A hand quickly found the base of my helmet and began working to open the facemask.
Thoughts? (^_^)
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