(no subject)

Yesterday I opened Wrath of the Righteous Inevitable Excess to fiddle with character builds while I ate lunch
then realised it was late evening and I'd only rebuilt the team
and then discovered it don't really work like I wanted it to.

I meant to quit around that point but somehow stayed playing until about 2 in the morning.

Not awesome. And I don't even like Inevitable Excess.

... the builds on the internet are pants though, they make glass canons that only care about killing things fast, their saves are garbage, I had characters actually running away, that hasn't happened to me for... since lowest levels I guess.

The buffs you can use by then help but if you miss even one then oops guess we're running now. And it shouldn't do that. They can be so much more resilient than that.

Also by the time you've applied all the buffs you *need* the mythic extended versions because it takes minutes to put them all on.
... mythic extended will have 24 hour buffs, which is great fun, just tedious to reapply.

The Woljif builds that only focus on stab damage are... I feel like apologising to tiny digital simulated Woljif, that guy deserves so much better. Like sure he is killing things real good, but he started out a guy with interests, and now he's a guy with mutagens and knives. Yes it's handy that alchemical bonuses stack with the belts everyone has by now, but there's more to life, you know?

20th level is less fun than it seems though because of the stacking problems. Like yes we can apply All The Buffs Forever, but we probably have a belt that does that anyway. And boots. And other items that are basically non optional by then. So we're wearing optimised gear and casting optimised spells just to keep the fights about the same difficult as they were to start with.

It's the boringest way to do magic.

Also though, once you're level 20 there are not enough little squares to keep your spells in, even before you add metamagic. With metamagic? You have to clear the spell bar and start again, this time Selective or Bolster Empower Maximized or Extended or Completely Normal Spells.
... the game advantage of redoing every single spell as Completely Normal is outweighed by the time it takes. It's all in the spellbooks with the metamagic applied but I haven't sorted out half the clicky squares of it.

I will grant that trying to play an arcanist oracle mystic theurge makes this problem gigantimous
and, also, that that build still doesn't work in any useful way
and, also, that I chose Trickster forgetting I couldn't go back and do Legend later, so I didn't even have the levels to get to 9th spells
but still, you can have so many more different spells than fit on the controls
and the mythic spells don't help that problem.



It wasn't a very interesting day to play, don't know why I am trying to interest the internet.


TLDR: I spent many hours doing the sort of button clicking that it turns out would work better as a spreadsheet
and getting frustrated at the interface.

... but I still kind of want to go back in and try the Legend build instead...

Martha Wells, City of Bones and Witch King

These books didn't click with me. I like Murderbot but the fantasy worlds are doing different things. Things with gender complexities and queer people and a baseline assumption brown people exist, but, they did not click with me.

Also one of the ways they're the same is something I've read a lot of in a row lately: figure out who the bad guys are by, like, surviving them. Just the basic Captain America with his shield out detection method. Although usually there's more than one set of people trying to kill the protagonist, which keeps it lively.

I finished City of Bones against my better judgement, because the thing I thought was probably going to suck all the way through indeed did. And it is an older book, but. There's this guy they meet. And the protag takes one look in their eyes. One. And 'sees' they are 'mad'.

I kept waiting the whole rest of the book for someone to interrogate what mad even flipping means in the context, but they do not. There are magic users that can go mad. Oh look a mad one. That's... not great.
( Read more... )

So, not really tempted to reread this one.

It has other stuff going on, world building, non human characters, things forgotten or lost in translation with Consequences, interesting bits.
And if it's trying to say some characters stop listening when the label mad is applied, A+ achieved.
I just felt like I'd tripped over a giant stone in the middle of the story and it never picked it up.


Witch King was a bit more interesting. In a magic system literally powered by pain and death the main character decides the moral line is not using other people's pain. ( Read more... )

It has a lot of interesting, uses of magic where the show not tell on why we're not doing that is working pretty well, flashbacks to context that is only just out of most people's living memory yet fading fast, and the interaction between history and myth making is interesting.
But when I stopped reading it I stopped thinking about it until I was writing this just now.

Just didn't click for me.



I think part of the problem is whenever I like I can go back to listening new Doctor Who with the same characters I've been listening since... my whole life, come to think. It doesn't have to be a particularly deep individual story to still feel richer and more engaging with that all going on.

So take my reviews of not Doctor Who with a pinch of salt.