SPOILER I'm not really feeling the Fruma story line.

It feels very much like someone wanted to write a play about revolution but forgot that the player character exists.

Almost nothing in the arc needed to happen, and the things that did need to happen happened for the wrong reasons. If I vent hard enough and suggest an alternative story line, maybe someone will tell me why I'm dumb.

But on to my point: The literal beginning of the return to Fruma sees you getting arrested.

But why though? You're The Player. Your achievements are too numerous to list, but they include:

Spoiler

Fighting through a zone infected by an Eldritch Horror that spawns yet more Eldritch Horrors.

Killing The Nameless.

Beginning and ending multiple wars nearly unaided.

Fighting Light's fursona and getting the tick off it it, thus ending a millennial Decay.

Single-handedly destroying multiple conspiracies for world domination.

And more.

Now you're being led by a bunch of nobodies into the fortress when your explicit goal is to enter Fruma and not get caught. So why are you not immediately slaughtering them all? Your cue, for some reason, is when the captain steps away for a moment? It's not like you were going to spare them or sneak away because of your heavy conscience, you personally exterminate them like cockroaches and it becomes your first canonical feat in Fruma. You didn't make it through by the skin of your teeth, and if you've got the right build, you literally just had to stand still while they died on their own.

Also, I don't care about Aledar, or Tasim, and I don't know that The Player, Chaotic Good that he is, would necessarily be bothered that Aledar, the guy who tried to sacrifice him because he deemed him expendable. It was only a stroke of luck that despite obviously being vastly weaker than literally anything in that realm, the altar recognized Aledar as having a "powerful soul". But all this said, why is this such a big deal? The Player is empty and a force of nature and all that, but some guy who tries to kill him keeps him up at night now? And he has trouble telling the other guy he hasn't seen in God knows how long about this? Maybe the story team is imagining a whole history that the game just abstracts out, but I don't sense it, so this all comes out of nowhere.

Why do we forget healing magic and potions are a thing?

It goes on:

Spoiler

The Queen literally tells you she's trying to fight the Light and Dark, and the player never once thinks to just offer to help with that, what with his literal experience singlehandedly doing the thing she's assembled a whole team for? This is a serious plot point. They apparently didn't even know you did that. This would have been the natural thing the helpful player would have offered, and it would have done a great job characterizing the Queen.

The Leaves treat you like a source of help for all of two seconds before going back to their sneaking and slithering around, but now with the closest thing they've seen to a god in their whole lives.

We spend time learning about Rex's random grudge that gets resolved as quickly as it comes for no effort on our part.

When we make it to the Roughworks, you whip Zhiraok, and gain, with the right build, you literally just stand still and stare at him awkwardly until he dies.

You're largely ignored as an asset by Syndra even when she sends you somewhere, the Feathers outright reject your magical training, and they all act as though they're one bad guard rotation away from being destroyed.


Syndra upstages Elise in her own tragic story by managing to turn the entire thing into a story about lovers separated by the eeeevil government. And to boot, we don't even bother telling Syndra we literally watched Elise die in front of us. Never mind whether The Player would ever put it together, that's just a missed opportunity. Full stop.

Yusanu acts like selling the player out is somehow a bad thing, which feeds back into everyone failing to see you for what you are: Bare minimum, the guy who personally emptied a fortress AND beat a Sovereign.

The arc after the failed assassination finally admits you may actually be trusted to hold the scissors every so often, but it's too little too late at this point. And by the time you decide you're going to bust people out of jail, they go RIGHT back to underestimating you.

Sui, and really everyone, is eventually able to take on wave after wave of elite soldiers despite Sui mostly only experiencing trauma, and Rex and Zeph being tortured and imprisoned for canonical weeks. They're largely unarmed, unarmored, and one of them isn't even magic, and yet now that they sit down and fight something, it actually goes well.

The plan to capture the citadel was bad, and the transition over to the final fight was confusing. The citadel has resources that could have made great set pieces for the story, but at this point, I'm just going to explain myself by venting with my rewrite.

It's been bugging me immensely. So immensely I've actually sat down and outlined a rewrite just to get it all off my chest. If you've been on board this far, just humor me. Or tell me I'm taking this way too seriously. Either one works:

The Royal Invitation:

Spoiler

When you're invited over to Fruma, everything proceeds as normal, except when the Queen talks to you about the forces, you plainly tell her you're willing to help. She scoffs at your hubris, but then you tell her flat out you've done on your own what she's assembled a team to accomplish. This is obviously a shock , so she asks, and you explain the whole thing with the RoL, just like you do to Two when she asks.

This time you get an immediate offer, but she demands you submit yourself to her. You obviously refuse, and you're dismissed, leading to Tasim getting the offer. I don't think you even need to change Two's cutscene here.

Returning/Auburn Forest:

Spoiler

You don't like how you were treated. The Queen was extremely rude, but you couldn't do anything, lest you cause a war between Fruma and Ragni. You need to talk to her without representing the King. So you go back. Everything proceeds normally, except at Fort Torann, you slaughter them all immediately when they threaten to arrest you.

The town nearby is obviously on high alert, since news spread faster than you got there. You have the same problem with the guards, and Zeph offers to help like normal. He rushes you back to the hideout and Rex is right there to receive him. She scolds him for bringing a stranger over, but Zeph insists you're no stranger. She asks him what your name is, and he has to admit he doesn't know. But that he saw you having trouble with the guards and he had to help.

Rex asks who you are, and you explain who you are, where you're from, and why you're there. They're shocked by the revelation that you're from Wynn, and they realize there's only one way you could have gotten in. They ask where your allies are, and you have to explain that you're alone. They reason the reports must have been exaggerated, but you make it clear they weren't. And when they ask how you did it, you show them your spells.

You've now outed yourself as a Cursed.

The two are shaken, but then Rex realizes something: Zeph's been seen with you by the guards. She decides this is way above her pay grade and she says they need to consult Syndra. Syndra realizes the mess Zeph got them in, but then also realizes they have a Person of Mass Destruction in their midst, and he seems affable. She decides to test him personally to see how strong he is, and when she's convinced, she tells you and Zeph to go scrub the reports from today at the record storage before the Sovereign sees them.

You go, you scrub, and you've proven you're not with the Crown.

At this point, you're asked to train the Leaves to use magic. They're all exactly as pleased by the idea as before, but they trust Syndra's judgement.

At this point in the quest line, I would actually set it up so that the player has to complete caves in the area as part of their "training". You meet up with a member of the leaves at the caves, and they "train" with you inside. Whether this means we abstract them out and say they trained, or something more involved, is irrelevant. The point is they did all of this away from the public eye.

By the next quest, they're all practiced up, and they can use magic to varying levels of glee on their parts. Syndra says their group's gotten a lot of support for picking up the Crown's slack, and that thinks they've finally got a chance to make a difference.

The meeting with Zhiraok happens, Zeph feels betrayed, but this time, the conversation is about her efforts as a double agent panning out. Zhiraok is in no position to refuse her request for passports now that the local "resistance" is apparently not only giving up on "resisting", but they're doing part of his work for him. She offers to take them out of his hair and re-create this success in the Roughworks. He agrees. Syndra gets caught, she has to come clean, and she credits the player for giving her the pretense she needed to make the request; she wasn't sure he would go for it if not for their recent efforts.

The Roughworks:

Spoiler

Zhiraok catches on for mysterious reasons (Two's intel, no doubt), and you beat him. Except instead of running with the leaves, you say you're staying, and Syndra tells you to meet up with her at the rendezvous point in a few days.

Zhiraok revives, and he's shocked to find you staring him down menacingly. When he tries to ask what your deal is in his annoying, idiosyncratic way, you tell him you're here to talk to the Queen again. He calls you mad, but given as you just killed him, he's in no position to fight you and die a second time. So he agrees and backs off as you saunter away.

Again: I think the player should be required to finish some caves in the area. The next quest begins, and you've got Syndra practically chomping at the bit for revolution, while the Steel Feathers are more about rescuing the disenfranchised in the district.

Quill and Syndra see you, and she greets you. Quill is incensed that you're causing so much destruction putting the guards on alert and risking them. Syndra points out this is proof that they can fight back and make a real difference.

She suggests you can help, and Quill then assigns you to help gather intel on the guard shifts, since they keep changing due to the destruction (caving) you've engaged in.

You can keep all the bits where you help everyone else in the hideout as normal.

After the first quest is done, you're required to do a loot run before the next one.

The next one is Elise's: You go through the same routine, but now instead of Elise being Syndra's gay lover who got caught up in a big government plot that's just now firing up again by sheer coincidence, she's actually just a normal woman who managed to make it to 50 living in the Roughworks. She says she's been alone up there as long as she can remember, and so she's shocked to have gotten so many letters in the mail all at once. Life in the roughworks has taken its toll on her, and she doesn't recognize any of the names, but the letters all seem quite specific. You help her jog her memory as usual, and now the water authority is coming because they're here to bulldoze the property to make space for more buildings.

The quest ends with Elise not remembering anyone, but making peace with the fact that even though she may not remember any of these people, she's clearly not alone, and loved dearly. She passes away as usual, and you can read the pile of letters. A single one has a name that pops out to you: Syndra. It doesn't matter what it says or what they were to each other, the point is that Syndra was a chapter in her life that ended years ago, and now she's just a faded memory. A precious one, but a faded one.

Once you start the next quest, the eviction goes through as normal, Zeph takes a page from your book and decides to use his newfound powers to fight the solders, and we get the same conflict as in the main story, except Quill is eminently concerned with retaliation from the Constables. They were spotted, they killed a whole team in broad daylight, and it was right next to the access to their hideout.

Except...nothing happens. Jiro comes in and updates Quill on the situation up top: Half the district is on fire, and the other is dry kindling. You've caused so much mayhem with your wanton pillaging, murdering, and trespassing that all the recent shift changes were the guards organizing to protect the remaining locations. In fact, they blame literally everything that's happening on you specifically, even things the resistance obviously did.

They stopped scheduling new evictions and the only ones happening now were already scheduled ahead of time.

Quill is speechless, but Syndra takes charge and tells you to meet up with members of the resistance near/at ransacked buildings to help retrieve info, resources, etc. Now you get your stealth sections for good reason: You're the wildcard, and you're preserving plausible deniability by not being directly linked to anyone. Zhiraok knows better, of course, but this isn't his district.

Yusanu's mole arc can still work out, except this time he sells you out right then and there when asked. Soosu asks him to give you up and he gives her the honest answer: You showed up, you decided you were going to "help" by destroying everything despite their repeated admonishments, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop you. That the number of targets is clearly shrinking, that it's only a matter of time before he storms her residence, and if she gathers up her forces, she may be able to mount a defense by the time you gets around to it.

He's caught being the mole, as usual, but he explains that you showed him there was something he could do to resist. He believes you can take on Soosu's army on your own, and telling her it's you proves he's loyal without putting what he's been doing with her in jeopardy. While she was busy fighting you, he was going to steal something she's been having him help with for months.

So you get your big fight with Soosu's army, where you're really supposed to hold out for a certain amount of time. You destroy golems, but Soosu just makes more in their place. Once the timer is up, you retreat, Soosu gets to say she's done her job, and you slink away "defeated".

You don't need to change much for a bit. Syndra insists she wants to be the one to strike at the Queen, she tests herself, and right as she says she'll be counting on you to help with the assassination, you drop the nuke: You're just here to talk.

Syndra's been convinced up until now you've been helping them with their revolution because you're a believer, but you're just Chaotic Good Player. You saw people who were defenseless, so you taught them magic. They needed training, and so you taught them the same way you learned. You came to Fruma to talk, but there was a fortress in your way. Zeph got seen with you, and so you want to scrub that off the record before it goes anywhere. Zhiraok somehow finds out anyway and tries to stop you? You didn't even think it was worth your time to kill him; that was all Syndra. You just wanted him to pass a message along to the Queen.

You taught them magic? Sure. It's easy. You helped them make their weapons? Of course you did. You destroyed Crown infrastructure and killed guards? We're Chaotic Good Player: Pillaging is what we do. You doubled down after you protected them in the eviction incident? Well you're happy to help. And loot is loot either way. You helped with the sneaking in the aftermath? Yeah. Again: Happy to help your friends. Etc.

None of this means you're joining the revolution to overthrow the Crown and kill the Queen.

Syndra insists they can't back down now. Not after all the work they've done, and they're doing this with or without you.

The Festival:

Spoiler

Everything goes through as usual, except after Syndra's executed, you show up and try to talk to the Queen again. She's obviously incensed that you'd do all of this just to "talk" again, and so she wants to make you an example too. You have yoru first fight wit hthe queen. It can look much like the fight with Syndra, except as her health goes down, her resistances increase, and he attacks and teleports faster and faster. Once you hit a threshold, she flies high up into the sky outside of your reach and starts bombarding you. You're supposed to lose this fight. Once the ray hits you, the cutscene triggers, and you lose before trying to escape. Zhiraok tries to fight you again now that you're weakened (ideally actually suffering from heavy debuffs in game), but Soosu turns coat as usual and you escape.

Mistwoods:

Spoiler

You're still hurt (debuffed), so you ask Sui to heal you. She says you're in horrible shape and she can't fix something that bad. You tell her to try anyway. All she manages to do is lighten the load a bit, and she grows gloomier at her powerlessness. You go ahead and leave Ysanu hostage, then attack the sites as usual, except Sui never discovers her ice power or anything. She tries and tries, but she fails to actually help in any meaningful way. This all culminates in the showdown with Gikyo, where she manifests enough power to kill a weakened Sovereign. After that you take her aside and actually train her. You tell her to blast a tree with everything she's got. She does. It's annihilated. You tell her to heal it with everything she's got. She again says she can't do that; there's barely any tree left to heal. You push her to try anyway. She resolves herself and it grows back stronger than ever.

This time you tell her to attack you. She's scared, but you assure her you're more than powerful enough to survive. So she hits you. You tell her to hit you harder. So she does. Harder. Harder. You tell her to hit you with EVERYTHING, but she's exasperated, saying that she's already giving it everything she's got. But you know better.

Maybe you get mean. You tell her that the basis of magic is belief. She's already special even by Wynn standards, so maybe she'd just rather not believe she can do anything because she'd have to be responsible for what she doesn't do. She didn't even want to join the resistance in the first place; maybe she'd rather Mora died than actually lift a finger to do anything.

She's incensed, you tell her if she's that mad, she can stop pussyfooting around and hit you with EVERYTHING. She's about to say something, but she's interrupted. At that moment your ult meter fills, you're prompted to use it, and you show her what "EVERYTHING" actually looks like. It shocks her out of it for a moment, and she understands the mission.

She finally channels it all into you and what comes out is a powerful ice attack freezing everything in front of her and taking a good chunk off of you with it.

She realizes what you just did and is upset that she's been able to do all this the whole time but just...didn't.

You tell her you're not done, and you need to get her a wand and some armor. The difference between doing magic bare handed and armed is obviously immense, and it's time she take responsibility for what she is.

Rex and Zeph are canonically imprisoned for "weeks", so I say more caves to "train Sui" and start the rescue arc.

The Rescue:

Spoiler

She's got a wand, and it's suddenly more convincing to see her actually storm Majin's and rescue everyone. You're the distraction, and they abuse the fact that you're so willing to "talk" to stop you from destroying the place. Majin's willing to just let them go as usual, since, again, he has no personal reason to keep them. Though he and Two still try to get a grapple on your motivations for even being there, but every time they ask a question, you double down on "I just want to talk". They point out you already did, and the Queen turned you down specifically. That if you wanted to "talk", pillaging her kingdom is the exact opposite way to manage it. You try moving on to how oppressive the Queen is, but everyone can see you're just coming up with excuses after the fact.

Majin, spiteful as he is, points out the real reason: You were snubbed and thrown out, and you didn't like it. And the fact that the whole thing was about the Light and Dark gave you the perfect excuse to tell yourself you had to be involved. Now that you've found out you're too weak make her submit, you're in too deep to stop. Everything else is just window dressing. You have no response.

They tell you they've got everything they need and send you off.

The finale:

Spoiler

The plan for the castle is more comprehensive than "Well we can sneak in through the tunnels if you distract them." Yusanu and Sui have been working on getting the weaver working. Since she admitted to seeing the threads, they've made progress in figuring out how the weaver works, and how to disable the Queen's resistances. They ask the you the crucial question: Are you on board with killing her? You've already lost overwhelmingly, you're wanted by the kingdom, and if you flee, Wynn may be in danger. You have no choice. So the plan continues: They're going to infiltrate the castle while you and the gang cause a scene at the festival.

Everything proceeds as normal. Rex and Zeph are both magical now, and Sui is fully armed and trained, so them actually succeeding when they decide to fight the guards sounds less ridiculous than it does normally. Same for when Rex sits around stalling Tasim.

You're all supposed to take out Majin and engage the Queen. You kill Majin and draw guards from the citadel while they take over a spot. The citadel has a large, anti-air tower. They're going to take it over to blast the Queen out of the air air after stripping her of her resistances during your fight. Everything proceeds as normal, you fight Tasim, the Queen finally appears, but this time she starts the fight with her finishing combo, rather than trying to poke at you on the ground like last time. She's stripped of her resistances, and blasted by the tower, which weakens her enough for you to be a threat to her in your final conflict.

Sui holds back the tide with Tasim's help, and she can actually heal Rex, rather than counting on Zhiraok's amulet thing to revive her for some inexplicable reason.

And this concludes my TED talk. I hope someone explains why this is all dumb now.

 

...
Is media literacy dead?

 

hello. im here to do just that

Nope. You're very much aided.

Orphion would utterly kill you if he had any interest in fighting you. In fact, during the Nexus of Light, you do not meaningfully hurt Orphion at all-- all you're doing is knocking the parasite off of him. You are simply not equipped to actually fight him.

If they all gank you at once, then you don't stand much of a chance. Plus it'd be hard to break out if there's someone stabbing you repeatedly while youre attempting to do so.

The player isn't he, nor is the player Chaotic Good.

Builds are not canon, and whether you're able to do this gameplay wise or not is irrelevant

they are not

The player has done less for the world when it comes to balance than the Queen, nor has the player aided Orphion or defeated the Eye entirely on their own.

Except they do, and it's brought up later in the storyline.

Her Majesty is the closest thing they've seen to a God, because she is a God.

Because her character arc isn't just her grudge. This is such an absurdly shallow reading of a character, but with the entirety of this post taken into consideration, I'm really not surprised it was a reading you seemingly had.

Because they've been told all their lives, and seemingly with evidence, that Magic is destructive. This is like your layman being scared of nuclear energy; they think its all radiation and atomic explosions and reactor meltdowns, because thats the narrative theyve ben fed. Even though they actively use nucelar energy (or in the case of resistance groups, sometimes have members who are Cursed) they're still very cautious of magic.

how the fuck can you call it an upstaging, as if Syndra isn't Elise's partner????? THAT IS LITERALLY THE OTHER PERSON AFFECTED????

 

Wait you're the person who made one of the most baffling Wynncraft suggestions (removing mob drops) a few years ago, refused to see anyone else's point of view, and then implied that the people who disagreed with you couldn't speak English lmao

 

This completely ignores the point that Two's interjection is getting at.

Incredibly quick character development to force all the characters who are opposed to magic to suddenly be willing to use it, including Syndra. There is a reason it was written to be something they slowly accept (especially as circumstances increasingly call for it) instead of just going "ah!! free power!!"

Making the caves mandatory would be pretty lame, as the player has likely already completed them on their own in the process of levelling up

This is a stupid plan from the player. People would notice you standing over a Sovereign's corpse and you would have a platoon of Wings on your ass, potentially worse, and you would get arrested or likely die. The player is strong, yes, but not strong enough to deal with more than one Sovereign at once, or a planned ambush. The player does so well against the army because they are constantly on upper footing, using guerilla tactics and surprise instead of just walking into their death. The one time that they make an incredibly risky move is by confronting the Queen by turning themselves in, which has the insurance of the player knowing the Queen would rather negotiate with them than kill them outright.

There is also nothing stopping Zhiroak from going at you again. He'd be exhausted, but it would be uncharacteristic for him to suddenly decide that you're worth negotiating with because you managed to beat him once-- especially when each death makes him stronger. The player, at this moment, does not know the cause of him reviving, and could not reasonably prevent it without taking all his shit, which the player also has no reason to do.

This completely changes the tone of what is Objectively (if you take the wynncraft's community vote as Objective) the best quest in the game into something incredibly generic with no real plot progression. If you remove Elise regaining her memories, then the quest is just talking to a demented old woman and then she dies, and you learn about Syndra's name at the very end. It is fucking criminal that you'd take such a great quest and turn it into the equivalent of cardboard or unseasoned porridge.

The player is not strong enough to cause this much havoc.

Soosu would just tear you apart. She can literally disassemble and reassemble matter. There is a reason we do not have the player fight her.

Also Soosu is already very displeased with her position and how her life is going. It would be a huge waste of her character to have her just be another direct antagonist. You seem to completely gloss over the fact that Yusano works with Soosu and in exchange Soosu... gives the Steel Feather that train station. She knows they exist, but she actively aids them. She already doesn't view the queen favorably, and her neglect of the region is due to a general apathy for everything that she's slumped into.

Again, the player is not Chaotic Good. They will gladly do things that are morally reprehensible or selfish or "evil" for the sake of their own personal gain. The player often steals for no reason other than their personal accumulation of wealth.

I don't actually mind a Queen fight earlier on, because it would help show to the player that they don't really stand much of a chance against her at this point, and makes it clear that it's going to require some careful planning and stacking circumstances in their favor if they intend to defeat her later on.

When Sui eventually cracks, its because of loss and pressure. Taking this and putting it on the player just... does not feel narratively satisfying at all. Nor does it have the same stress that losing your maternal figure and brother has.

Part of Sui's character is that she does not need a Foci to cast magic. This is acknowledged multiple times, and finally given a name by Two at the end of Apotheosis, who refers to her as a 'natural born manaweaver'.

This is a genuinely awful reason for the player to do all the shit they do in Fruma.

________________________________

it genuinely feels like youre larping and didnt actually do the questline and just know the vague story beats. i would not be surprised if this was ragebait and i fell for it.

 

wtf.
Edit: Wait so I actually went through his post history and this is probably rage bait so... *Holds control+delete except wtf it doesn't work on newlines so I'll just hold delete*

 

Maybe you skimmed the wall of text, but I pointed out that you succeeded in killing the tick. This is exactly the level of feat the Queen intended to carry out with a whole team. The player did it alone. Whether he could also kill Orphion is irrelevant.

Going deeper into the fortress doesn't make them gank you less. You're at the train station. You have a small handful of opponents right in front of you. The worst possible position, even if we pretend for a moment "a bunch of mooks gank you" is a big enough threat to the player by now, is to literally let them arrest you, surround you, then drag you the the courtyard of their fortified position before trying to break out the moment a single individual steps away from your immediate surroundings.

Loots and pillages, takes down the forces of evil, doesn't respect property rights, has been known to interrupt serious adventures with the fate of countless lives at stake for whimsical asides like asking the king of the dwarves what his favorite color is, will enable the illegal poaching of endangered animals to get a passport...

Are you sure we're thinking of the same guy?

I don't know why you're responding to this as if it's the source of the problem.

Literally described as both. The player's whole thing is how empty they are, to the point where there are no memories to even extract, despite the mage's ability to find a history for everyone else. Then the player is frequently acknowledged to do the impossible with frightening ease repeatedly over the story. "Nuh uh" isn't a counter to that.

What? The RoL raid with Orphion is canonically a solo feat. And so is killing the eye. Getting there may not be a solo feat, but that's why cooperating with the Queen is important. Otherwise the player can just cross the Dern portal. It's not like he doesn't know where it is.

They don't. It's literally described as a blind spot, and it's such a big point that they put aside their hostility to you to ask you, in great detail, about the incident.

I forget the festival is a yearly thing.

The point is that you're being ignored as an asset outright here. He can train everyone, including their existing "Cursed". That Quill specifically isn't interested in turning his group into a magical army is incidental to the fact that nobody considers that you personally are equivalent to one. You'll notice the bit ends with "They all act like they're one bad guard rotation away from being destroyed". They have no reason to believe you can be overwhelmed given your literal first canonical act was to empty a fortress singlehandedly, and your entry into the district involved you beating the Sovereign in open combat.They also have no reason to believe you'd bail the moment someone started sniffing around.

Because nothing in this story, tragic as it already is without the tie to the resistance, happens for any reason other than "That lady you knew decades ago crossed the wrong people."

Which is...

Sounds like this "training" would be a great opportunity for people to actually let you know how they feel about this, given that Syndra is fully on board with you joining and teaching them even in the original canon.

If you completed them already, it sound like you don't need to do them again and just miss out on a handful of extra interactions if you choose not to. "Making Feathers Fly I a requirement for Feathers Fly II is lame. What if you already did it?"

You keep saying "the player isn't strong enough to X", but again, the literal first canonical act is to empty a fort, and now the player just beat a Sovereign. Either the latter feat is more impressive, or the former is. If the Sovereign goes down, but a bunch of guards, having somehow made the hours-long trip from the citadel to the Roughworks to arrest you in time, can destroy you, then what does this say about the Sovereigns?

If the fortress is the easier one, but then the Wings can still beat you, why even bother with Sovereigns?

And what "upper footing"? Your literal first act is to get arrested and attack them at the worst strategic moment possible.

I'm not suggesting Zhiraok suddenly decides you need to be negotiated with, I'm suggesting he knows he can't just revive infinitely to wear the player down, and he can at least take a report of this threat directly to the Queen and try again later. As he does.

As it stands, the Roughworks are painted as this horrid place to live, but what you see when you explore are criminals, belligerent, paranoid workers, the occasional crooked guard, thieves, and addicts everywhere. In my mind, Elise can work as the pure example of "you do everything right, and all you can look forward to is premature aging and an eviction when you're inconvenient." The plot line wants to sell the Crown as oppressive here too, as if factory work is inherently evil, tyrannical, and degrading. "Oh, we make stuff for other people to buy!" Yeah, that's how factories work. I don't know that you're forced to live in the Roughworks if you want to leave, so this is your own choice.

But the choice doesn't have a happy ending, oppressive government or none.

He is. And he does. The game just pretends you don't spend ages zipping around town at high speeds, breaking into every factory you see, killing every angry worker, every cross Constable, and stealing everything that isn't bolted down.

Right. Hence the golem army fight. There's a reason I don't have her fight the player: Canon.

She doesn't care, she's got people breathing down her throat, and regardless of how it all works, having a golem army ready to do the work for her sounds way easier than stepping out herself to deal with a problem she doesn't even want on her lap.

Could the combination of golems and a motivated Soosu kill you? Probably. But she'd have to chase you down. And that's work. You already went out of your way to come to her and her "ambush".

Honestly just spitballing there.

But "I lost people" isn't character growth, it's just trauma. You need something to actually get her to gain experience. As it stands, she's never seriously fought anything, and she's about to jump head first into taking on an army. A deliberate moment where you tell her that "yeah, you can heal things worse than a sore shoulder, Sui. And it's about time you actually hit something for real. Get to it already." is needed here. I don't think she actually manages to even stabilize anyone despite the existence of healing potions (which even come up in your last talk with Anathema), and healing magic (whose element Sui is literally named after).

Yes. The point isn't that she needs it to cast anything, it's that it empowers her. I can break down my own door with my bare hands; a sledgehammer still helps. The player can do plenty with just the bare minimum foci. You get more and more powerful equipment because naked ability isn't enough in this world to become the strongest.

Compared to chasing down a "friend" that chose to stay of his own free will? Not really that much dumber. It just stops the story from pretending anyone cares about Tasim.

 

Well, I guess I'm gonna jump in anyway. You. Did. Not. Kill. The. Parasite. You fight Orphion with the parasite. You get the tick off Orphion and then he goes and rests or regenerates or whatever. You may weaken the parasite, but you do not kill it. You fighting the parasite does not kill it, it stalls, giving time for orphion to rest/regenerate, or it weakens the parasite so that Orphion's remaining strength can kill it, or both. But you do not kill it, he does. That much is certain. As for the player doing it alone, I'm not 100% sure about this, but Lari does tell you to "find people just as strong as you are to rescue Orphion in my place". Does that make the fact that you have other players canonical? Hell if I know, but given that she suggested it it is possible. Idk, if I cared, I'd ask in Questions. Even if the players aren't canonical, you still team up with Orphion. It is not your blade that vanquishes the parasite, but the power of light incarnate. Do with this what you will.

 

Fair. So scrub "killed" from the equation. You entered the RoL, singlehandedly fought and weakened a dark beast, then moved on to the Silent Expanse, killed everything in your path that was canonically able to destroy an entire team of "powerful souls", then moved on to fight the Eyeball and The Nameless.

"People just as strong as you" is obviously meant to be the other NPCs in the game, while other Players are just abstractions. So you did these two things entirely solo.

 

Raid are multiplayer :P

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On a side note this is the most absurd metaphor I have seen in a while and I'm unsure whether to be amused or distressed.

 

They were bested with cunning, not force. Elphaba was subjected to hallucinations (at least that's what Aledar said), and lured into a trap. Lucio, though not under hallucinations had less caution than the situation warrented and so was tricked by an illusion and quickly ferried away. Aledar was caught by surprise. No one expects a god-damned wyrm (or maybe it actually was a worm, I don't remember) to drop from the ceiling and eat you. And sure we entered as well and were fine, but he stayed in their for god knows how long. That's why aledar needed to be carted to Lutho. As for the remainder of the journey, I don't think he was healed all the way. i feel like by Lutho, he was sure it would have to be him sacrificed, or atleast that's the vibe I got. The toxins in the Wastes did little to help that. We made it through not because we were necesarily of more powerful soul but because A) Narritive Satisfaction and B) dumb luck.

There are few other NPCs that know about the realm of light. The evil cannot be concealed by the power of the elves. The time of Elves is over. Who can we look to while they're gone. The Fruman Sovereigns? They force others to toil away in their isolation, seeking control. They care nothing for the trouble of others. It is in players that we must place our hope.

 

Spoiler

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Ok, now you're reaching. I gave you the parasite thing because you know what, maybe we literally couldn't kill it. Maybe we could, but the story never let us answer the question. Fine.

Here? The player was attacked just as hard as anyone else, and he makes it through alive with the clear acknowledgement that he's stronger than anyone else by far. And to boot, he proves Aledar right by beating The Eye and The Nameless. On top of that, we know it wasn't a lucky shot since, by Death's rules, they could all make it back if they could just kill the thing that killed them.

"The player didn't canonically face the exact same danger as everyone else that died so he survived" isn't a defense.

 

Yes, but when we were attacked, we were attacked. It wasn't a trick, nor was it a surprise capture. They may have surprise attacked us, but never captured or rendered us unfit to fight. But I digress, I'm done, 'good day'.

 

Here before Deus: those rules are the reason that quest isn't typically considered canon.

 

(As a disclaimer i have not completed the majority of Fruma and frankly don't ever intend to do so until an update comes out that requires it.)

From the admittedly limited amount i have seen of Fruma i agree that our canonical motivation makes little to no sense. We, as the player character, are a force of chaos, generally good chaos but chaos nonetheless. The fact that we get kicked out without getting an explanation, or some other form of satisfaction from the Frumans, is quite literally the exact type of thing that would activate our chaos gene. We would absolutely break into Fruma for the sole reason that we got "unfairly" kicked out. The player character has shown little to no regard for the rules of society as long as it satisfies a sense of: Adventure, Objective Good, or Spite.


Frankly, we barely knew Tasim, and while you can certainly use the argument of "the player thinks that something bad happened to Tasim and wants to save him" (or some such similar idea), The fact is we aren't attached to Tasim. Canonically we did a very bad thing in Time Valley, albeit accidentally, and then fucked off regardless. The point I'm trying to make is that canonically we have barely any reason to force our way into Fruma besides us being a chaotic nuisance.

Also, the idea that the player character would be so guilt-ridden from the death of a "friend" (Aledar) that we knew for probably no more than 2 weeks, seemingly several years ago, also seems a bit ridiculous.



As for the quests themselves, personally, I found them to be... Disappointing? Granted, this is probably my expectations spoiling the end result a bit, but even then. The quests seem to be continuing on the path of us being that chaotic force of good, who does whatever they want when they want with almost no regard to the consequences. If Tasim were actually our primary objective, we would not be gallivanting around in the manner that we are.

I'm not going to comment further on the quests as I haven't gone past the midpoint of the Roughworks, but from my view, the canonical justifications and reasonings are a bit disjointed from the reality of how the PC acts. Now, I understand that writing a character that can essentially function as a Self-Insert and then making an actual cohesive narrative around their justifications and desires is hard. But it has come to a point of the PC having a definable character. It's not like the PC is a mystery anymore. For the most part, you can't even decide for yourself on a justification of why they act anymore since they have dialogue and enough reference from other quests that you have a good idea of who the character actually is without actually being told much about them.



From a writing perspective i feel like you are in a pretty deep hole where unless you make drastic changes to the storyline pre-Fruma, you are going to have the perpetual issue of trying to balance the objective nature and character of the PC and the idea of what the PC is actually supposed to be in the eyes of the writing team.


Just my thoughts on it. Don't expect anything to change, but some of the choices with the quests and the internal narrative definitely made me feel very disjointed from who the PC actually is. I feel that the writing for Fruma has been done from the eyes of people that have a definitive ideal of what the character is, even though it's in my eyes not aligned with the reality of the character.

 

Honestly, I think some of the problems with this quest line could have been solved by just putting it before the Silent Expanse, since at least then you don't have one-man showdowns with the forces of Dern under your belt. Which means earthly threats still register for you. Then they dial back the whole thing with literally wiping out the entire fortress from a the worst tactical position possible, and instead they have you slip out after a limited scrap.

I think it's for the best you stopped going through the quest line. It has grueling xp requirements for what amounts to a movie your character watches from up close; one where the rules of the world are suspended regularly to pay off dramatic beats that can't actually happen in the setting as it is.

 

The xp reqs are fine, i don't mind sitting in bat cave for a bit. The problem is that the actions the player takes just don't align at all with what the inner narrative of the story was trying to achieve. As far as I'm concerned the Fruma storyline after about half of the Queen's Recruit relies on you ignoring a good chunk of quests which the player goes on for the questline to make narrative sense. And frankly I'm just not going to ignore quests that actually expand on the PC. Quests are there for a reason, if they stop making narrative sense then they should be removed.

Also yeah the War of Realms storyline really doesn't help the feeling of detachment that the Fruman storyline brings.

 

Oh my God that's actually so funny. If I hadn't used up all my laughing juice 20 minutes ago I would be CACKLING

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This is somewhat baffling as the refusal to acknowledge that Wynn is an iterative agglomeration of contributions over years of time. Of course quests aren't going to make sense a few years later, just look at Maxie's character! It's not a good thing by any means, but with the way Wynn is structured it is nigh unavoidable.

 

What's baffling to me is the passive aggression towards a guy who's just asking for a moment of consistency from new content that's had time and a whole team to come up with a way to make the story line work without flatly contradicting what's come before. The player's got a personality. It's a far cry from whatever this is, regardless of what you think about the topic of the thread.

 

Oh my god that's so funny too I cannot tell if this is serious or not. Also passive aggression? Do you know what that is? XD as funny as this is I do think I'm gonna stop responding, have fun over here for the next however long.