The Gaming Den

Well, except going back to Earth has been set up as the lose condition. Popping back and forth doesn't seem likely or really possible, nor does turning his gamer group into a heist squad after however much time has passed.

erik wrote:

Voss wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Not really, I couldn't get past the stupid baby talk.

Do you mean the word substitution with *boop* instead of shit or fuck? That goes away, and isn't really a big deal.

Probably even moreso the Erf=Earth, Dwagon=Dragon, Spidew=Spider, etc.

Personally, I think that the baby talk works best. Erfworld is an extremely simple, but also extremely deep wargame designed for young children. As such, it's heavily sanitized and kiddified. The juxtaposition between the childlike names and euphemisms and the actual death and court intrigue is what makes it so horrifying.

Voss wrote:Well, except going back to Earth has been set up as the lose condition. Popping back and forth doesn't seem likely or really possible, nor does turning his gamer group into a heist squad after however much time has passed.

A of the last update Parson appeared in, he's almost certainly going back to Earth. That's been set up hard, and if it doesn't happen it will be quite disappointing.

SlyJohnny wrote:

Hicks wrote:Remember when Erf World updated with actual comics about a miniature war game instead of 2 pictures with 17 paragraphs of cryptic naval gazing?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. He just seems so unable to cut the wheat from the chaff in terms of what's interesting and relevant and what isn't. The way Thinkamancers view the world is just different enough that he feels he has to spend pages and pages explaining it, but not interesting enough that anyone actually cares, and at the end of the day it's just an elaborate lead in to their one line or contribution to the plot. I feel like their motives could be made clearer to the audience without having to spell out every fragmentary half-moment that ever led to them making a particular decision.

I can honestly get into some of the Thinkamancer updates, not all of them, but some. The problem seems to be a rather massive amount of set-up, every single eye dotted and t-crossed, every motivation explained, no plot holes. The pages dedicated to internal character thoughts are, I think, better than the pages upon pages dedicated to set-up. Because character-driven navel gazing pages at least tell you something new. The setup pages tell you things that could have been explained in one panel.


On the other foot, I'm really digging Kill Six Billion Demons, even if Allison is turning into a sociopath, she's just having so much fun doing it. Like, all of her party members are just trying desperately not to die, and she's smiling, having fun.

A of the last update Parson appeared in, he's almost certainly going back to Earth. That's been set up hard, and if it doesn't happen it will be quite disappointing.

It's been set up as someone's (well, several people's) goal, yes.
It's also been established that Erfworld stomps on people really damn hard when they try to fuck with the story before conditions are met. And Charlie ain't dead.

I expect nothing but a grotesque/hilarious comedy of errors that ends badly for the conspiracy of casters, or it works out exactly the way Hamster thinks it will.

The setup for the gambit has a couple lines at the end. Roger faked the information, but didn't know what numbers he was hiding. Odds are pretty good that they were around the same value as the fake he displayed.

On the other foot, I'm really digging Kill Six Billion Demons, even if Allison is turning into a sociopath, she's just having so much fun doing it. Like, all of her party members are just trying desperately not to die, and she's smiling, having fun.

If she was, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately the author is pulling 'personality traits are mental constructs which have their own identity so it isn't really her' bullshit.

First time that one really disappointed me.



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Unlike Agents of Shield, which had its new season premiere. I was enjoying it til the 'big reveal' at the end of the first half. Fucking

time travel

Welp, nothing here matters. The theory they came up with while running around would have been far more interesting, and used the exact same sets and actors.

Happening on the back of the Matrix Hiatus where nothing mattered, this seems a bad decision. I thought the point of the show was to flesh out the world around the MCU movies?

Hey remember how Erfworld had got their fanboys to mine cryptocurrency to pay new homes for the author and extra staff that somehow make the comic update even slower?

Turns out the bitcoin they gambled in has been only sinking and sinking and now the author's again begging for even more money plus saying the updates will be even slower than before. And abandon all hope of seeing protagonist Hamster doing anything ever again in the near future since they've lost completely track of the plot so they'll be back to sidestories.

The comic's so dead it's spontaneously animated as an undead slowly shambling to drain the money/life of those that come too near.

Oi, thus comic is awesome: http://danielscreations.com/ola/comics/first.html

Updates are slooooo..... maybe on hiatus? W/e, I never heard of it before so I got to binge 600+ pages of Order of the Stick, but actually, ya kno, really good.

Hicks wrote: Updates are slooooo..... maybe on hiatus?

The copyright on the site only goes through 2016.

So there was this old 40k parody webcomic called Turn Signals on a Land Raider which was pretty funny as it followed the Pointy Sticks chapter that were aware they were just miniatures being used for gaming (like once they defeat a chaos force with superior painting and stats by drawing a young unsupervised kid to the table that messes up the shinier chaos models), making fun of both the fluff and rules. It had died years ago around 5th edition when the author tried to monetize it only to be slapped by a lawsuit from GW.

But turns out GW reached some kind of agreement and TSOALR now getting fresh updates right in the actual 40k site!

Hicks wrote:Oi, thus comic is awesome: http://danielscreations.com/ola/comics/first.html

Updates are slooooo..... maybe on hiatus? W/e, I never heard of it before so I got to binge 600+ pages of Order of the Stick, but actually, ya kno, really good.

Gone through all of those. It was very OotS at first, but soon went off and did it's own thing.

Still think OotS is a lot better, and much easier to follow, but OLA wasn't bad. Shame it suddenly ended. Especially as the very last panel was someone tossing a coin to decide what to do next, will never know the result.

I need to get better at telling stories that end like this.

Oh, so Misfile has finished. Some of "meh" ending, and one I've seen used for another comic that ended up about gender swapping that ended recently, IIRC. The ending was abrupt as well, all of a sudden they jumped from slice of life to the ending (with "this magic thing sucks but some bits are nice") without particularly building up beforehands.

Especially because most of the ending was "here's a bunch of words about what we did and why, instead of drawing those things in the comic."

Thinking about this more...you know the epilogue to Harry Potter, where it's some years into the future and there's talk about stuff and you don't care because anything important was resolved in the finale?

It's like that, except I want more talk about stuff because most characters didn't even know there was a finale going on and their arcs or whatever weren't resolved when it happened.

Still, have to either end it or drag it on forever.

I think Erfworld has broke some new record on being dead.

The author nuked the whole site down, forums, fanfiction, wiki, everything (except the store).

And then went around asking the owners of other webcomics to shut down any erfworld discussions and had the comic removed from gitp too.

Twitter dead too.

But if you were a subscribber and sucked the author enough for them to remember you, you get to join his new private club or something (if you keep giving him money that is). If you didn't get in already despite being a subscriber, you can contact the author and if you please him enough you can get in it seems.

Also only people who got in the new private club get hear the reasons for all of the above.

Finally "there may be more comic updates but they'll be paid only".

Erfworld has been circling the drain of non-updates for longer than I can readily recall. Two years? Four? More? Like, how long has it been since there was a direct update on Parson and that whole Toolist crusade thing, and not a seemingly endless line of weird text digressions on distant, unrelated characters/sides?

It used to be such a cool, promising comic, too. Looong ago. That's a pity. And weird. But, honestly, not surprising.

I'd check in every couple weeks to see if they made a non-prologue update always to my disappointment. I stopped reading the prologue posts a long time ago. My biweekly checkup was just now and came to the Den to see if there was a deeper explanation.

Some casual googling suggests that it’s related to some legitimately tragic personal situations.

Some deeper search suggests it was a pretty messed up situation.

Basically Rob and Linda Balder had a 24 year old son that died recently after getting in jail for raping a 13 year old.

Wowsers. That is, uh, one heck of an obituary. Like, totally normal up until you get to the part where it's like "btw sometimes the guy who rapes a 13-year old girl is also the victim." That takes some intensely motivated reasoning. I guess I can't blame them for not wanting to remember their son as a child rapist.

Mord wrote:Wowsers. That is, uh, one heck of an obituary. Like, totally normal up until you get to the part where it's like "btw sometimes the guy who rapes a 13-year old girl is also the victim." That takes some intensely motivated reasoning.

Like a lawyer, they have to come up with some defence and they don't have many good options. You get some strange and terrible arguments that way.

EDIT: Oh, they still have archives up, they've just shut it down everywhere else.

Mord wrote:Wowsers. That is, uh, one heck of an obituary. Like, totally normal up until you get to the part where it's like "btw sometimes the guy who rapes a 13-year old girl is also the victim." That takes some intensely motivated reasoning. I guess I can't blame them for not wanting to remember their son as a child rapist.

Especially when it's fairly common that the 24-year-old didn't just come up with the idea on their own, and it's somewhat likely they had the same thing happen to him when he was younger.

It doesn't help that one of the subplots of the webcomic was that Hamster is a big dude in a world populated mostly by smaller people with childlike proportions that explicitly fuck and can't get pregnant and there was even a point when one of the characters asks why Hamster hasn't fucked anybody in Erfworld yet and from there goes "consent for sex? Whot's that? Silly Hamster, you can just order those under your position to do anything you want."

Out of like 1500 pages, that's part of like maybe 3 (Maggie and Janis bring it up).

It looks very dead as a good and on schedule webcomic, pretty dead overall. Not sure where the hax for all sides plot line could have been going, can't really see much interesting that's easily predictable happening. And we never saw like a third of the magic disciplines in action.

-Wanda and Jillian BDSM sessions were there from the start.
-Wanda fucking Stanley to manipulate him (kinda retconned since later Stanley just goes "spend as little time near the crazy necro as possible")
-Hippiemancies will use sex as a weapon and probably drug/poison you while they're at it.
-Charlie hires out his archons as whores for anything if you pay enough (up to and including snuff) and all but 1 archon still love him fanatically and the author still tried to make us feel sympathetic for the man who treats the girls who love him as expendable objects.

Also yeah shame we never saw any of 1/3 the magic disciplines. And another 1/3 we barey saw anything. Thinkmancy got most of the screentime, closely followed by foolmancy and then dirtmancy. Dollmancy got some attention too as the story went on, hippiemancy and predictmancy were becoming relevant, healomancy mostly scrolls.

I believe Wanda didn't cast any croakmancy at all after book 1, and for all we know the whole school is a 1-trick poney (reanimate corpses and absolutely nothing else).

Uh, I don't remember any of that shit. Did Erfworld go kinda nuts since the last time I read it?

I broke off reading midway through book 2 when text updates started devouring the story, and also recognize almost nothing of what's under discussion. Apparently shit got crazy?