Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

Ok, so how does that conceit have any tangible relevance? What makes it different from simply "in a galaxy far, far away"? Is the game an investigation into why humanity was 'brought back'?

 

No. The setting makes no sense and never did.

 

To design a good setting you must understand that to every human conflict there are two different sides with arguments. If you think you are the righteous one and everybody else is wrong, you will only look things on your limited understanding and create cliches of the people that disagree with you making for really boring storylines. I'm reading a collection of adventure for shadowrun, Shadows of Underworld where a gay boy that is oppressed by stupid traditionalist family fall in homo love with an spirit he summoned and there is an human nationalist politician that is supported by a fascist society that literaly wants to kill metahuman babies (what is kinda funny because leftists are the kings of killing babies).

Shadowrun is full of this stuff but most of the time the writers try to not be so annoying preachy, they failed this time, so I deleted the PDF and didn't bothered into continue. So yes, ideology blindness can ruin an story with its tendencies of creating endless boring cliches but how this apply to Torment?

There are the comments of Mr. McCuck but on the game itself I didn't notice any outrageous example of preaching and forcing stuff up to make a point on the game, I didn't pick up Tybir because I found him boring but he was equaly boring to everyone else. I just found outrageous examples of plain bad writing but I don't think if Mr. McCuck liked Trump it would make him a better writer.

 

Nothing really. It's kind of a shit setting. A kaleidoscope of weird with no coherence to it.

You could run a campaign investigating it and make up your own explanation. They have said they won't ever provide a canonical answer for it, just so you can do whatever you want with yours.

 

And another thing...

"What does one life matter" is also a terrible tag-line compared to "What can change the nature of a man".

We are constantly surrounded by examples of how one life can matter, from hiring a good football player to boost a football team's league position to scientists/inventors who come up with things that revolutionise society. Even from a philosophical perspective, it's patently obvious that people consider that their close friends and/or family and/or pet or whatever are lives that 'matter' more than people we've never met. You could argue its a 'question' that has already been answered, in that murder is, almost universally, considered a last resort scenario, or, at least, something that is best not practiced without reason, even in the more psychotic phases of history. If you hear someone utter "what does one life matter", it, almost invariably, means that person is trying to 'excuse' some act that they know is potentially amoral. It's a question that is too loaded from a moral perspective from the outset.

However, the question "what can change the nature of a man" is uniquely ambiguous. While appearing to be loaded from a moral perspective, it is, in fact, so inherently deep that it transcends morals. It's a question that is and always has been unsolved and the further one examines the question the less one is able to answer it coherently. It's like a different tier of complexity, because while all men can conceptualise why one life might matter, no man can fully conceptualise why they need to change their nature, nor in what way, nor even which parts of their nature are even of merit to change.

Again, right from the point of conception, someone should have said "What does one life matter? Sounds a bit cliche and trite to me, can't we come up with something a bit better than that?"

 

It's just a long-winded and overly obtuse way of getting round the 'problem' of being able to say "we can do whatever we want in this setting and you can't nitpick because of that" isn't it. When, ironically, the reality is that it's a really dumb and inane way of solving that 'problem' because it draws more attention to itself because of that than almost any other fantasy setting would.

 

Very much so. "What can change the nature of a man?" immediately suggests answers -- death? love? rebirth? amnesia? regret? massive brain damage? nothing? -- and once you've picked your answer, leads to pretty cool followup questions. What do you mean by "nature of a man" anyway? Is it "nature" if it can change? What do you mean by "a man" in a setting where souls circulate endlessly between death, birth, and life?

"What does one life matter" OTOH is a silly question. A lot? A little? Not at all? Five feet eight inches? WTF does that even mean?

 

Yeah it's an awful catchphrase. Far too vague and ambiguous for anyone to give a shit. And of course they had to pack half of the game with people insecure about whether their life matters or not, which made even worse.

 

It also begs the question "matters to what?". It's a nonsensical question posed without context.

 

Just out of curiosity, are there any VG writers that support Trump, or is the entire profession just one big SJW circle-jerk?

 

It might have worked as a WW1 allegory, but then they would have to change the whole game.
You start as lieutenant on the trenches in the endless war. You go some of the motions of the commanding your troops before they go over the trenches to meet [causal machineguns] of the future war.
Then magchuffing bs happens to player character....

 

Yes, what does one life matter...

...when you have countless immortals running around anyway?

 

>Last pages

Oh boy, we are in for an epic 50 pages, multi-sites shitstorm, embrace yourself people.

 

They're all in California you know.

 

Don't forget HBS up in Seattle :incloosive:

 

Disregarding the fact that your image shows advanced robots (and not humans), I have to agree. Just comparing our civilization to that of 2000 years ago is enough to know that, 2000 years from now, we would be able to see things that today would be considered "magic". One billion years is a ridiculously long amount of time.

 

I've been playing for 11 hours. I've got to the Valley of Dead Heroes. Loving the game now - first few hours were a bit slow but it has picked up since then. Writing is improving, companions are good (I've got Tybir, Erritis and Rhin with me).

I've taken a look at the Kickstarter page to remind myself what was promised. Brian Mitsoda joined the writing team as the 2.75m stretch goal, did he actually do anything?

 

Can the answer be "it doesn't" or did inXile protect the browns from that kind of thinking?

 

Both are terrible catchphrases.

 

Daniel Vavra is a bro, alot of east european writers aren't cucks too, problem is with California, there isn't worst shithole on the universe to live in if you aren't a SJW bot.

 

More like, Magran represents MCA and Durance the Codex.

 

There is no constraint because of SJWness in Torment, it just doesn't come up in the list of issues because so much else is missing. I didn't check Callistage tho, saw her writer in the other thread, perhaps she's really bad in that regard, but everything else is simply bad, not infested with SJWtery.

Look, I agree with you generally, but saying that Tworment specifically was ruined by rapid SJWtery is nothing but a cheap cop out. There is no rampant agenda which could bear the brunt of criticism, the game has deep systemic issues entangled with horrible writing, it couldn't push an agenda even if it wanted to.

 

Me thinks that glorious hunters of hidden political agendas may have an agenda of their own.

 

Damn it my agenda was discovered.