Ads going up.

[alexandraerin]

As a corollary to my post last night about boosting readership, I've started advertising again after having been mostly absent for a few months.

My experience is that you see the best results if your ads are up in the same place for a while - not everybody will click on them the first time they see them, but if they're a regular presence curiosity might strike or you might get someone who just read their favorite webcomic's latest update and then they go, "Okay, what do I read next?" But if you're too much of a presence, you see diminishing returns as your ads fade into the background and a lot of your potential clickers from the targeted audience have already clicked.

I'm advertising Tales of MU, because, of course, that's the big story with the most readers, but I'm also running a small ad for The 3 Seas in a few places. The story's taking off, Iskondra and Tauri are turning into breakout characters among the people who are reading it... the small and initially erratic updates might have made it hard for people to get into, but now that it's flowing steadily I think it's time it came into its own.

In a happy chain of coincidence, just after I threw some MU ads up on Khaos Komix (one of my favorite webcomics), popelizbet told me that the author had just posted a rec for another writer, and scrolling down through the comments there was somebody throwing in a plug for me. Whee!

Comments

[alicorn24.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this will interest you or not, since my serial doesn't have many readers, but that also makes the Project Wonderful box super-cheap. It overlaps audiences in that it's a milieu-and-character-driven fantasy serial, and although it is not adult we do have gay people etc. http://elcenia.com

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Well, you've been shilled for the only place I could and have not. So short of evaluating my ability to double my monthly donations, I think I've done my part.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Also: Holy bekheezus that's a lot of space for combat. I just started flipping through GURPS Campaigns. I'm rather amazed at the depth and breadth of stuff to cover killing people. A lot of it I wouldn't have even considered having rules dedicated to. I was expecting the Campaigns book to be devoted mostly to how to run a game, but flipping through it (as opposed to reading in-depth) it looks like it's a massive tome of rules to cover every situation that could conceivably come up.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty much what the basic Campaigns book is. Their genre source books go more into the how to run a campaign, though they're more specific: running a fantasy campaign, running a horror campaign, running a mystery campaign, etc.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Having done some flipping through several of the campaign books I'm left wondering why they did this the way they did. Maybe I'm missing something because I haven't taken the time to just sit down and read at length, but it feels like they've gone for a system that's designed with the idea of specialized tools for every occasion, adding in more and more bits and bobs with each book. New advantages, new quirks, new (specific) ways to do things, and so on. Even the explanation of what Fantasy is (and its subgenres) seems very compartmentalized, with very specific definitions that either make it Fantasy or make it Something Else.

That may just be the style of the books, but it makes me bristle a bit at the number of carefully constructed walls around each little compartment. I suppose it's kind of like expecting clay and getting Lego's instead. I can't help but read some of these things like Sealed(Acid) and wonder why they need specifics like that. Couldn't they have simply set up the basic Sealed attribute in such a way that any specific thing can be sealed against, without having to specify each one?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing the specific thing you're referring to is the Acid-Resistance enhancement in TransHuman space. That's not a separate attribute, it's a modifier you apply to the Sealed advantage to negate the corrosive effect of acid, justifying it via your Sealed state.

That's actually a pretty specific interplay of the damage rules for corrosive type damage eroding your Damage Resistance... they didn't define a bunch of separate Sealed-s because acid is the only thing that the Sealed state normally affects that has that kind of separate rule, and they put it in TransHuman Space (and probably other techy books) because they only had so much space in the basic book and it's more likely to be useful in those contexts.

With the basic book, you can take the default Sealed advantage and if you only want protection from acid, protection from gas, protection from vegetable contact irritants, etc., you can do that by taking the Sealed advantage with a limitation.

You're getting clay. What the expansion sourcebooks have are just specific models of what you could sculpt it into, with the math already done for (because you know clay involves math). The Fantasy and even more so the Powers book give all kinds of special cases for the default Advantages and Disadvantages that wouldn't have fit into the main book, but in a lot of cases they're things you could have worked out for yourself: if you want a power that lets you go 2D without being a creature of elemental darkness with all that goes with that, take Shadow Form and pay off the vulnerability to light. If you want to be able to appear as a reflection in a mirror, same advantage, but add a limitation that you can only move across the surface of a mirror.

That's one case where I think they might have been better off to start with a more generic 2D form power and let people modify it into a shadow form or a reflection, but nothing's perfect. The point is that there's a lot of flexibility in what you get in the Characters book, and you can look at the specific examples given in the expansion books as benchmarks for how to put a value on the "resculpts" you make... though the limitations and enhancements section in the Characters book gives a lot to work with there.

EDIT TO ADD:

And in honesty, there are more things like "Shadow Form" where you have to work backwards to get a generic power that you can then modify into other specifics, but they're rare and they're usually a legacy of the third edition source book from which they were derived. The generic "make object appear from thin air" advantage is called Snatcher and it is modeled after people with the mental ability to pull useful objects from the multiverse. In 3rd edition, this was specifically a psionic ability because all non-spell-based teleportation came with psychic baggage. 4th edition, you apply psychic baggage to any abilities that are supposed to be psychic for your character.

GURPS Powers gives appropriate modifiers to strip away the remaining baggage of Snatcher to make it a "produce item from nothing" ability, and makes it something that can be scaled up or down (they give the extreme example of a genie-level conjuring ability that can produce a palace). Even though the majority of campaigns won't even involve this kind of ability, I think it would have been truer to the purpose of GURPS if they'd ditched the Snatching baggage and just had "Produce Object".

[ferwe.livejournal.com]

Personally I'd like some more guidelines to cover social situations, but that's the only place I've ever felt it was inadequate.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

Eh- I've only read through the Lite version, but I think the social rules are pretty decent for establishing how people think of you. From there it's mostly a matter of roleplay, which honestly is a lot more satisfying for me than watching someone play the part of an arrogant ass, and get away with it because his skill was high and his dice were low. I'm debating how exactly to handle that versus someone who's less adept at navigating society than his character is.

[ferwe.livejournal.com]

"someone who's less adept at navigating society than his character is."

:D That's exactly where I'd like a few more guidelines. I haven't been satisfied with anything I've tried. I've also tried playing some "superior social" characters, so I have dealt with the situation both as player and GM.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

My best answer for that situation, at least specifically for GURPS, would be to use awarded points. Start out with the reaction roll based on appearance to get the basic opinion, and then it's pretty well up to the player. You can attempt to RP your way through things, which is preferred, or you can spend a point and either bypass or negate any flubs by making a roll to determine the outcome.

The people who tend to be jerks with high stats will be unwilling to spend the points, while the ones who simply aren't as good can give it a shot (and possibly learn something from the process) and then default to stats if they feel it's necessary or simply aren't comfortable with it.