He does believe Celeste brings a little more to the table than Cardinal can, in that they historically have had a much higher win rate/stability (more skills and memories) and thus more ability to make strategic plays, but that with their own line up suffering from two skills loss members and a normal girl now along with the loss of their best fighters, Cardinal now has them outpowered in sheer combat ability and will only be getting more and more useful.
It's an extremely mutual alliance, as far as he's concerned, and while he doesn't trust Cardinal any more than he trusts any other team, March believes they'll keep to their end as long as it's just as beneficial for them!
Plus their play style ICly is utterly alike in the DO ANYTHING TO SURVIVE, their only real issue is that they've befriended different teams who don't all get along- And that's an issue that could potentially be turned into a strength.
OOCly, I think it's a very good match up of personalities and IC willingness to get along, even if it's likely to end in a glorious leper spiral.
THAT'S PRETTY MUCH HOW LACE SEES IT, TOO, minus the part where she thinks Cardinal has Celeste beat out for combat strength because she habitually assumes everyone else who sees things through a more aggressive lens like she does is probably as strong as she is, and she hasn't talked to the new Celestes enough/at all to realize they're ... squishy. She doesn't trust Celeste either, but they have a concrete, agreed-upon alliance with terms and penalties and she does trust them far enough to keep to the terms, simply because both sides know that would end in mutually assured destruction if they broke it and at least in Celeste's case she doesn't think any of them are that stupid and/or insane. So long as the cost of breaking it is higher than the cost of maintaining it there's no reason for either side to call it off, but - well, as it shows in the current Cardinalpost she's still paranoid enough about it to aim for precautionary measures just in case.
(As a counterpoint she does, however, expect that Copper Rose is that stupid and/or insane, at this point, but when an alliance happens with them she'll still hold them to it anyway.)
Which is why I suspect there will be some interesting shenanigans afoot should it actually come to pass, like it's kinda looking like it might, that Cardinal goes for Mary. Not that Cardinal would see that as endangering their alliance, mind, but idk if Celeste would. If they did ... :'Da
Personally it's some of my favorite CR to watch happening and I wish I were around to do more of it, even though my favorite thing to do right now is tack against it for interesting friction reasons. The patronage issue and the fact that Celeste holds a justified grudge against Fawn vs Cardinal's loathing of Shell will make for some fun happenings somewhere down the road, I hope, but really, codependent alcoholic leperteams forever.
SO HOW ABOUT THAT SUDDEN SWITCH TO MEMORY-LOSS, MARCH
I THINK I'M INSANE. He has gone into total denial over the memory regain because he doesn't know how to cope- Where does it fit into the timeline? Was that when I was blacked out? Am I an amnesiac? Is Dormouse here because she was dead? What happened?????????!!?!??!
he is terrified and confused and mentally breaking down while pretending to be normal externally, and has every intention of denying that happened until he gets more context.
The short answer is that she's not dealing with them.
Legitimately, she's pretty ... terrified + awestruck by her former self. There's a weight of years on her that Lace herself simply doesn't have - the way I inflicted amnesia on her this time was to wipe away all the decades she's been alive, and I actually did do enough back-counting on the math for that to be confident in saying she's at least fifty years old, the first time she appears in canon, and close to sixty when she finally "dies", so she had a pretty long life! Which is something that factors into how she plays without total memory loss, because at the end of her life she's a lot more ... playfully aggressive, and very bored, and even at the point in her life when she's still a claymore she's perceiving everything through a lens of cheerfully pragmatic but oh so very malicious solipsism.
Riful (not Lace) is a power-hungry gravity well where something like empathy should be. And some of that's her natural inclination - she will always be someone who finds it difficult not to be self-serving, even if the option occurs to her - and some of that's, well. The circumstances taking those natural inclinations and cranking them up to Violence Level 11.
Lace, on the other hand, comes to her memories by way of actually being Sword, from Aather, and thus getting ICly mindfucked into empathy. Which means she has ... fffeeelings about horrible things, especially if it's hr job to do them, and a gut sense of "hurting others is bad because I wouldn't want that to be me" that Riful herself never had. Which is a fascinating arc to play out for me - because there's really no way she won't still end up at the same place since ... I'm not playing her for a goddamned redemption arc, I'm playing a fall, it'll just take some more interesting turns getting there. There's a lot of self-hate - her initial reaction to eating Gin's arm was an internal one of revulsion, that she quickly suppressed in favor of being cheerfully homicidal for her own sanity's sake. Getting her second memory was such a shock to her - the casually remorseless way Sword tormented Echo simply because she found her interesting/attractive was legitimately 180 degrees from how she saw things, she frightened herself. I mean she also hungered for the same confidence and power and ability to inspire fear in others, so she's perfectly willing to - and instinctively kind of built to - slip into that mindset to defend herself/get what she wants, but she found herself disgusting and is afraid. SHE IS A KID WHO WANTS TO BE LIKED AND THAT ... THING DOESN'T ACT LIKE HER AT ALL.
What if she really is a monster who deserves to die. She can tell herself she's not, here, but what if her memories prove it to be a lie. What will she do. So she's avoiding her memories completely in favor of doing her own thing and defying herself. Who I was doesn't define me! Nyah! I'll be my own kind of awful person! Which will, ultimately, be hard to tell the difference from the old kind, short of actually looking at how they perceive it inside their own heads, because even amnesiac Riful is a creature of frightening willpower who will keep on keeping on and bull in a china shop her way through her own potential morality to get power, whatever reason she has for getting it.
There's a game I was thinking about seeing if someone could help me work out a plausible way to run/what portrait I could use to run it that is basically a HIDEOUSLY AWFUL GAME built in v opposite directions to what's been done for trauma lately, I think - instead of how most traumagames have been death death reveal awful secrets death that I've seen so far anyway, a traumagame built around the idea of "a death of a thousand cuts".
A list of locations on the body, one knife per person, and "partner" teams - either swapped out between each round or kept the same, I haven't decided which would work better - sitting on opposite sides of a containing room, watching each other. The knives in little piles in the middle of the room. The list is like a deck of cards, each round each team member is dealt a part or selection of parts listed in descending value order (again, not sure which), for example "ear 20 pts toe 15 pts hand 10 pts" if the scoring method was what I went with. (I would be using the scoring method OOCly either way, actually.) None of the parts listed will be intended to result in a lethal blow until the last round, when options like heart and stomach and neck get added to the list. The larger the damaged area (or potentially fatal) the less it will be worth. It's not a game built primarily around murder, it's about the buildup of little violences/seeing where the threshold is for people's ragequit button or if they even have one, is it really better for them if they're rewarded for being "less" nasty but more targeted in their application? So I am also thinking of completely leaving the point totals out ICly except at the beginning and end of a round, but dropping enough hints - like, Try not to kill each other this time ..., idk - ICly via the portrait dialogue that attentive characters will pick up on it.
Carrying out an action gets the team whatever the option's point total is, having an action carried out on the team subtracts the value of that option from the team's total. Failing to carry out an action nets a penalty. The penalty applies even if it's because the opposite team resists their action long enough for the round to end, and teams will be allowed to resist when the action is made. They can also simply go over and kill the other team if they like but they will not earn any points for it and unless they also carry out their actions beforehand they will take a penalty for failing to complete their actions if so.
As I see it right now it would be a four round game, probably over a long weekend, so either starting the first round on Thursday with a big finish on Sunday or ... something. The first round has no penalty for refusal/failure, it's just a chance for teams to get a taste of what the game is going to be plus a chance to puzzle over the post-round point total and how that matches what they did in the round. The second round is like - suddenly you itch all over but no points are taken away - so, another chance to clue in to how the game works, maybe. The third round they get hit with whatever option's on their card (or the lowest-point-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total, and the fourth round a randomly-selected teammate of theirs gets hit with whatever option's on the card (or highest-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total.
Scoring would be ... idk. Everyone's point totals at the end would get tallied but I like scores to be more than just "who did the best murderjob" so ... whoever has the highest percentage difference between points earned versus points taken in either direction. In other words if a team loses more points than they earned they win, if they earned more points than they lost, they win. If someone's scores in both give and take categories are equal and they cancel each other out, that's also a win condition. The team who picked the highest-scoring options most often would win too (if either of these options overlaps with the ones above then it goes to the next team down on the list, obviously), the team who picked the lowest-scoring options most often would win too. I would ... like to have more creative options, if only because the appeal of a game like this is in the effect it has on the characters and having these be the win conditions feels a lot like it isn't rewarding the dynamics enough and is ... simply choosing the lazy option. But I'm bad at working out the scoring aspect of this stuff to begin with.
Thoughts ...?
ALSO IS MARCH AN OC OR DOES HE ACTUALLY COME FROM SOMEWHERE
I'd play it! Though I"m hopeless at mechanics so don't ask me for help, my idea of mechanics is puns and hey someone else do my maths for me okok.
MARCH IS AN OC he's from my Download Wonderland Cyberpunk Verse 'v' way back when a bunch of my friends designed OCs for the main cast for it, which is why he has castmates to be apped.
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He does believe Celeste brings a little more to the table than Cardinal can, in that they historically have had a much higher win rate/stability (more skills and memories) and thus more ability to make strategic plays, but that with their own line up suffering from two skills loss members and a normal girl now along with the loss of their best fighters, Cardinal now has them outpowered in sheer combat ability and will only be getting more and more useful.
It's an extremely mutual alliance, as far as he's concerned, and while he doesn't trust Cardinal any more than he trusts any other team, March believes they'll keep to their end as long as it's just as beneficial for them!
Plus their play style ICly is utterly alike in the DO ANYTHING TO SURVIVE, their only real issue is that they've befriended different teams who don't all get along- And that's an issue that could potentially be turned into a strength.
OOCly, I think it's a very good match up of personalities and IC willingness to get along, even if it's likely to end in a glorious leper spiral.
Reverse!
no subject
(As a counterpoint she does, however, expect that Copper Rose is that stupid and/or insane, at this point, but when an alliance happens with them she'll still hold them to it anyway.)
Which is why I suspect there will be some interesting shenanigans afoot should it actually come to pass, like it's kinda looking like it might, that Cardinal goes for Mary. Not that Cardinal would see that as endangering their alliance, mind, but idk if Celeste would. If they did ... :'Da
Personally it's some of my favorite CR to watch happening and I wish I were around to do more of it, even though my favorite thing to do right now is tack against it for interesting friction reasons. The patronage issue and the fact that Celeste holds a justified grudge against Fawn vs Cardinal's loathing of Shell will make for some fun happenings somewhere down the road, I hope, but really, codependent alcoholic leperteams forever.
SO HOW ABOUT THAT SUDDEN SWITCH TO MEMORY-LOSS, MARCH
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he is terrified and confused and mentally breaking down while pretending to be normal externally, and has every intention of denying that happened until he gets more context.
How's Lace dealing with her memory regains?
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Legitimately, she's pretty ... terrified + awestruck by her former self. There's a weight of years on her that Lace herself simply doesn't have - the way I inflicted amnesia on her this time was to wipe away all the decades she's been alive, and I actually did do enough back-counting on the math for that to be confident in saying she's at least fifty years old, the first time she appears in canon, and close to sixty when she finally "dies", so she had a pretty long life! Which is something that factors into how she plays without total memory loss, because at the end of her life she's a lot more ... playfully aggressive, and very bored, and even at the point in her life when she's still a claymore she's perceiving everything through a lens of cheerfully pragmatic but oh so very malicious solipsism.
Riful (not Lace) is a power-hungry gravity well where something like empathy should be. And some of that's her natural inclination - she will always be someone who finds it difficult not to be self-serving, even if the option occurs to her - and some of that's, well. The circumstances taking those natural inclinations and cranking them up to Violence Level 11.
Lace, on the other hand, comes to her memories by way of actually being Sword, from Aather, and thus getting ICly mindfucked into empathy. Which means she has ... fffeeelings about horrible things, especially if it's hr job to do them, and a gut sense of "hurting others is bad because I wouldn't want that to be me" that Riful herself never had. Which is a fascinating arc to play out for me - because there's really no way she won't still end up at the same place since ... I'm not playing her for a goddamned redemption arc, I'm playing a fall, it'll just take some more interesting turns getting there. There's a lot of self-hate - her initial reaction to eating Gin's arm was an internal one of revulsion, that she quickly suppressed in favor of being cheerfully homicidal for her own sanity's sake. Getting her second memory was such a shock to her - the casually remorseless way Sword tormented Echo simply because she found her interesting/attractive was legitimately 180 degrees from how she saw things, she frightened herself. I mean she also hungered for the same confidence and power and ability to inspire fear in others, so she's perfectly willing to - and instinctively kind of built to - slip into that mindset to defend herself/get what she wants, but she found herself disgusting and is afraid. SHE IS A KID WHO WANTS TO BE LIKED AND THAT ... THING DOESN'T ACT LIKE HER AT ALL.
What if she really is a monster who deserves to die. She can tell herself she's not, here, but what if her memories prove it to be a lie. What will she do. So she's avoiding her memories completely in favor of doing her own thing and defying herself. Who I was doesn't define me! Nyah! I'll be my own kind of awful person! Which will, ultimately, be hard to tell the difference from the old kind, short of actually looking at how they perceive it inside their own heads, because even amnesiac Riful is a creature of frightening willpower who will keep on keeping on and bull in a china shop her way through her own potential morality to get power, whatever reason she has for getting it.
MARCH. DID YOU BREAK YOURSELF AGAIN.
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WHAT SORT OF GAMES WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE
no subject
A list of locations on the body, one knife per person, and "partner" teams - either swapped out between each round or kept the same, I haven't decided which would work better - sitting on opposite sides of a containing room, watching each other. The knives in little piles in the middle of the room. The list is like a deck of cards, each round each team member is dealt a part or selection of parts listed in descending value order (again, not sure which), for example "ear 20 pts toe 15 pts hand 10 pts" if the scoring method was what I went with. (I would be using the scoring method OOCly either way, actually.) None of the parts listed will be intended to result in a lethal blow until the last round, when options like heart and stomach and neck get added to the list. The larger the damaged area (or potentially fatal) the less it will be worth. It's not a game built primarily around murder, it's about the buildup of little violences/seeing where the threshold is for people's ragequit button or if they even have one, is it really better for them if they're rewarded for being "less" nasty but more targeted in their application? So I am also thinking of completely leaving the point totals out ICly except at the beginning and end of a round, but dropping enough hints - like, Try not to kill each other this time ..., idk - ICly via the portrait dialogue that attentive characters will pick up on it.
Carrying out an action gets the team whatever the option's point total is, having an action carried out on the team subtracts the value of that option from the team's total. Failing to carry out an action nets a penalty. The penalty applies even if it's because the opposite team resists their action long enough for the round to end, and teams will be allowed to resist when the action is made. They can also simply go over and kill the other team if they like but they will not earn any points for it and unless they also carry out their actions beforehand they will take a penalty for failing to complete their actions if so.
As I see it right now it would be a four round game, probably over a long weekend, so either starting the first round on Thursday with a big finish on Sunday or ... something. The first round has no penalty for refusal/failure, it's just a chance for teams to get a taste of what the game is going to be plus a chance to puzzle over the post-round point total and how that matches what they did in the round. The second round is like - suddenly you itch all over but no points are taken away - so, another chance to clue in to how the game works, maybe. The third round they get hit with whatever option's on their card (or the lowest-point-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total, and the fourth round a randomly-selected teammate of theirs gets hit with whatever option's on the card (or highest-value selection) and lose the equivalent point total.
Scoring would be ... idk. Everyone's point totals at the end would get tallied but I like scores to be more than just "who did the best murderjob" so ... whoever has the highest percentage difference between points earned versus points taken in either direction. In other words if a team loses more points than they earned they win, if they earned more points than they lost, they win. If someone's scores in both give and take categories are equal and they cancel each other out, that's also a win condition. The team who picked the highest-scoring options most often would win too (if either of these options overlaps with the ones above then it goes to the next team down on the list, obviously), the team who picked the lowest-scoring options most often would win too. I would ... like to have more creative options, if only because the appeal of a game like this is in the effect it has on the characters and having these be the win conditions feels a lot like it isn't rewarding the dynamics enough and is ... simply choosing the lazy option. But I'm bad at working out the scoring aspect of this stuff to begin with.
Thoughts ...?
ALSO IS MARCH AN OC OR DOES HE ACTUALLY COME FROM SOMEWHERE
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MARCH IS AN OC he's from my Download Wonderland Cyberpunk Verse 'v' way back when a bunch of my friends designed OCs for the main cast for it, which is why he has castmates to be apped.
I AM OUT OF QUESTIONS I THINK