Re: A couple more Environmental Spells.

So here's the thing... a campaign including "deep magic" that has detailed the fundamentals outside of gameplay sufficient to structure resolutions without implying if not relying upon on the fly judgement calls which if truth is considered fair is much more likely to be a formally valid system in function as opposed to subjective judgements which render a system invalid as far as an objectively fair procedure which is invariably in service of a plotline aka story which is an accounting of prior Actions and the resulting resolutions which is in effect what gameplay creates making a pre-written storyline the antithesis of gameplay which obviously isn't fatal to the fun but it's bothersome from My point of view as well as a key cause of campaign cockup and crops up in other genras... video? I'm looking in your direction... Destiny, the most expensive entertainment product generally produced, has ditched the "Darkness" theme as nobody knows what it is at the studio after activison did the run of the flaky creatives after a year or so having gotten the bulk of the concept in rough ascet form as passion for the asceticism becomes more and more problematic from this point when it comes to optimization cuts, parceling out dlc and micro content for marketing, and similar business concerns creators are unlikely to consent to but forget details like descriptions of the protagonists theme and its purpose before pruning the production of the problem results in... well, Destiny frankly.

I really don't get the assumption that story is necessary to game and especially in situations like Destiny where the story didn't exist in large part at launch and ended up undermining the title repeatedly from dropped characters to the whole fallen fail the queens fleet foomfing like a norwegin blue when putting 10k volts through it doesn't in the opening cut sceen after a cliffhanger conclusion to the prior dlc set up. A cut sceen and done and still greater damage to come? Suspension of disbelief doesn't cover misrepresentation in the manner of X Files alluding to a complex conspiracy underpinning the overarching plot when such a thing didn't exist and You wind up with the ending of Lost because storytelling doesn't function by creating new stories on the fly it relies on familiarity with a few forms ah la Booker's 7 plot types with the familiar structure essential in shaping the overall experience. I'm thinking of how recognizable I'd be with no skeleton for some reason but what I'm pointing too is novelity isn't all it'd seem to be when constructing a novel and the medium doesn't have the kind of one to one correspondences with tabel top gaming it holds with other entertainment forms in which the work is presented to a passive audience by active preformance or series of images tones, or abstract symbols ordered in a gestalt by a individual or group with a very different function than that of an audience member however this is far from necessary in the table top gaming medium where most frequently all Players are equal and participate in very non-passive ways meaning structuring a system in which one Player is paramount to all other Players in order to facilitate the pushing of a preconceived narative unaffected by problimatic participants who think "lets play a game" is a totally different offer from "wanna hear a story?" If everybody gets to try sticking their two cents into it whenever they get a thought cross their tiny little brains it'd be a disaster...

I mean I GUESS I could write up adventure scenarios so they'd solo like Death Test in which case I guess I could have a Figure in play with everybody else as long as focus doesn't find its way off the Death Test map and someone needs to give discriptions of what's not there and judge if a Player can do whatever they are attempting or if it would be problematic for the plot that gots to be present like Slartifartbasting a page with rorschach shaped blobs drawn out in jagged lines representing crinkly bits covered coastlines called by some mouthful of consonants not-word the not-ness evocative of fantasy obviously and Mercator not projected to provide any problems once the national boarders and a few rivers and mountain ranges finish up the world... what else would You need?

Shortly thereafter, Kotaku spoke with Smith about the absence of The Darkness from Destiny 2. When asked if the reason why it isn't in the game is because Bungie doesn't yet know what The Darkness is, he replied, "We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue."

Smith went on to reveal that the studio considered grouping all the races together and collectively referring to them as The Darkness, but the team ultimately decided the franchise deserves a better explanation. "We had taken all the races and said, 'Ah, they’ll just be The Darkness.' But that's not what the IP deserves," he said."

Re: A couple more Environmental Spells. - Jack's comments.