Harold
Arcane
MRY I'm not expecting every single quest to have hard choices, but there should be present where it makes sense and not skewed towards one side or another. Now I know there's the issue of how best to allocate resources when it comes to quest resolutions, but I think it would be best if we avoid the resource allocation discussion altogether when it comes to TToN, for obvious reasons. 
Whilst I agree PST favours WIS/INT/CHA, I strongly disagree on the paladin part. It's more difficult to be evil, due to the afore-mentioned companion attachment yadda yadda yadda, but the game provides plenty of strong arguments why lawfullness + good can end up doing more harm than good: Morte recalling one such incarnation wanting to put him back on the Pillar because that's where he belongs, Vhailor's extremism, Dak'kon being easily fooled into practically becoming TNO's slave, despite all the gitzherai history of overcoming slavery, and I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a few. It's also more difficult to be super LG or hardcore evil due to it running contrary to the game's strong theme of redeeming past wrongs, breaking the cycle of suffering, not making the same practical, but bad-for-the-soul mistakes etc. and MCA's running argument (present in other games) that paladin-type behaviour can lead to short-sightedness, and (unintended) crueler evils down the road, sort of like the crystal-dragon example you mentioned.
I don't think those choices were intended as 2nd playthrough gimmicks, at least, I didn't view them as such, but yes, they are weaker mechanically and stronger narratively, though nowhere near as hard as they could be due to, ironically, the companions being too well written.
Oh, I'll freely admit I haven't read it, though I'm not aping anyone, I'm aware of the structure of the novels. Thing is, does it really make that big of a difference? You know the narrator is unreliable, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, the majority of the book is still centered on this wish-fulfillment story he's telling, exagerated or not, the reader still gets his fix. Now, I'm not judging (well, maybe a little): all sorts of people get their wish fulfillment from different things, watching porn, smoking crack, reading tripe fantasy, whatever gets you off - my problem comes when one of these things tries to pass itself off as more than it is, as having some greater artistic merit. What good is wish fulfillment if it is done within one degree of separation - that lying narrator is saying all this, not the author, yet the bulk of what you're reading is said Mary Sue/Gary Stu doing cool things, is it not? What good does it do that once every 50 pages you get a line that goes 'btw this dude is lying his pants off because he's in pain/dying whatevs'? Is this meant to ellicit even more simpathy from the reader towards the poor guy? Why use such a cheap trick, then? For 2 entire books? Will the 3rd one, to be released as soon as Winds of Winter, I expect, expose the narrator completely for the fraud he is, twist your reading of him completely, or make you cry even more tears as he ultimately dies, the saga ends, and you've read 3 books of cool dude doing cool stuff, but not really, he was just trying to rewrite his wasted life as he was dying, the poor guy? That may be a nice message to communicate, life goes by fast, don't waste it or you'll be swallowed by regrets, but essentially what you as the author have written, and what your readers have read were 2 or 3 books of mostly tripe wish-fulfillment.
(I realise the above may come off as me being a rhetorical smartass, but that's not my intent at all, I'm genuinely curious what people get from this sort of thing, so please illuminate me; also I promise I have a bigger point I'm trying to get to with all this, though nobody asked me for it, but it seems that's the way my bi-polar brian has decided to spend today, so please bear with me a little longer.)
You see, the thing is, Rhin in 2rment is also an unreliable narrator of her own backstory (1trickpony much?). She's an imaginative child that talks to her pet rock, has a big head wound, all this is meant to make you question her veracity. Again, the word-smithing part of it is much more effective than with other companions - Rothfuss achieves, no doubt, with most players, the emotional manipulation that he was aiming for - it's the character development part and what he's trying to communicate through that character that I'm questioning. Even worse than perhaps his novels, in the game she actually is a cool Mary Sue, there's no doubt about it, you can make her a p. powerful cypher... storage-container, I guess?, very early on, and it's already been spoiled to me that she becomes completely OP/broken later on. So while she might seem like a subversion of RPG companion tropes in her first dialogue, is she really? Ultimately, is she not just a more badass Clementine, your very own Arya Stark to pet and be loved by? Does this sort of blatant emotional ego-stroking not bother people? You were a nice guy/gal and decided to take care of this poor orphan, but not really-an orphan (see, that ol' fake degree of separation rearing it's ugly head again) and so you are rewarded with loli love and an OP mechanics-wise companion. I know I've bitched a lot about lack of emotional impact when it comes to the other companions, but going to the other extreme is not really helping. Because to me that reads as: you're being manipulative for the sake of being manipulative, well aren't you just so fucking clever, mister writer?
It does not help that, about a dozen pages or so back, someone linked to a stream where Rothfuss was playing the game, and curiosity got the better of me, and I scrolled through it, and what did my eyes see?, what did my ears hear? Rothfuss tearing up at his own dialogue when he first met Rhin and going 'Oh, Rothfuss, you're an asshole to have written this', and a few minutes later adding 'Yes, I wrote Rhin to break your heart'. Now, I don't know about you, but to me that is absolute classles ham behaviour and why I wish authors (in any field) were forced to play dead, but of course they can't do that if they want to sell their novel/game/movie, they have to blog and stream and go to cons and show forced positivity and dumb down their work to reachmore retards a wider audience, and all that 'going down the toilet stuff' that the Codex has been going on about since its inception, and why it is truly a refuge from modernity. Ugh...
Now, to get back on track to the point I'm so desperately trying to get at, and, there's no doubt in my mind, failing spectacularly to do so, I would like you, whoever you are reading this, to imagine the following scenario: you're playing PST for the first time, having a fucking blast, and when you get to the area where the Smoldering Corpse Bar is located, outside the bar, you see this little kid called Dak'kon, and - Lady bless his little heart - he's fending off a bunch of hive thugs that want to take his lunch money with a toy wooden sword. You save him from the thugs like the hero you are, you take him under your wing, even though he's kinda shit in combat with his stupid little sowrd that gives -5 thaco, but some hours and a few emotionally-manipulative dialogue nodes later, it turns out the little fucker is a time-travelling space-bending alien priest of a long-forgotten race and his sword becomes a +15 thaco mega-enchanted shiny superkatana that slays everything that moves. Imagine further, if you will, that, a few days after PST's release, someone links you to a MCA stream (yes, in this alternate universe, everybody is streaming like it's 1999), and MCA, our beloved senpai and savior, he's crying his eyes out when he meets little Dak'kon and his toy wooden sword, saying he wrote him to break your heart (and that there was this other companion, some ridiculous skull he ultimately decided to cut, because the team felt the comments he made towards female zombies were inappropriate, and everyone in stream chat agrees and they all brofist eachother, happy at the development team's foresight and sound reasoning). Well? Is that a better companion, a better PST, a better MCA, a better alternate reality?
What this ultimately boils down to is this: what are these writers trying to communicate to the players through all these endlessly tauted 1 bazillion words? Something to do with legacies, I suspect, living a life you won't regret, not being a shitty dad/mom/sire, and it tries to achieve this by putting you in the shoes of what is, essentially, the equivalent of one of the Shadows TNO left behind in PST, and asking you to confront the careless bastard. His dark materials basically, a source that Ziets drew from before in MotB, with far greater success imo, since, up till where I am now (finished Sagus, at the Valley/Necropolis)
- the theme has no emotional punch - except when going for blatant manipulation, i.e. Rhin, the orphans whose house is about to fall from the cliffs -, or is clumsily handled - the ghost woman
- it has very little to no philosophical coherence because there are many stand-alone sidequests that don't really tie in with the main theme, a problem which i think stems from the setting's 'anything that's weird goes' kitchen sink design
- your castoff is a blank/d slate, which on its own, or in a different game, would not be a problem, but you also don't get any companions that are significantly tied to your plight at the beginning and the 2 other castoffs that you meet are: a slaver that, through her very existence contradicts the sense of urgency the main quest tries to instill: she's been happily trading slaves with no fucks to give towards the Sorrow that's supposedly out to get you, and, aside for a fewheadaches tidal surges, shee seems fine; the other is the wasted opportunity known as Matkina. The trope of fellow lost sibling, abandoned by an inattentive father-figure, with whom you form a bond, grow, and learn from eachother would've been interesting, a chance to do an Imoen-type right, but what she comes off as is... edgy quiet badass assassin #72. Her mere should've been the place where the writing sank it's emotional hooks in you and made you care about her, because her function is to be a mirror of what you could be, a way to somewhat circumvent the blank-slate nature of the PC; instead you get something about saving the lives of some proud villagers from her past so you can unscrew her memory. Huh. O...kay, I guess. And you find that the castoff who knows about your broken PSU is in another castle. Well, I'm fucking hooked, I'll tell ya. Plot beat wise, this is supposed to be the place where the game takes it up a notch, you get a small revelation that hooks you further on. In PST the equivalent moment is getting inside your tomb and reading Don't trust the skull. What is this game's Don't trust the skull? It doesn't seem to have one, maybe it's further down the road, I really really hope so, but ending your game's act one on a flat narrative note seems like a very weird decision.
Holy shit, I'm still not done writing? Are you still reading? What fucking point was I trying to get at? Let's wrap this shit up, brain, it's getting late.
Oh, I 'member! That elusive thing the writing/design team is trying to convey to the players, emotions they're trying to instill, questions they want us to ask ourselves. PR says it has something to do with 'What does one life matter?', but I dunno, men. The game so far is too much of a mish mash of disparate things for that to read clearly (and from what other people have been saying in this thread, later on, it jumps to the other extreme, with everybody and their cousin twice-removed talking about muh legacy), the companions could just as well not be there for the most part, and whenever the game tries to engage me emotionally, it does it so blatantly, so without class, it just pisses me off, which isn't the emotion they were going for, I think. So far, what I'm hearing most clearly from what the writing is trying to communicate is that slavery is bad, helping little orphan kids is good, #levylivesmatter, Blue Oyster Cult is the shit and gay pirates can get into fights and break up with their lovers just like straight pirates can. Well, I guess I should be grateful to all the people who contributed all those moneys to the kickstarter, so that I can now learn all these important lessons. Otherwise, I might still be going around punching kids and selling faggots into slavery.
If I were Ravel, the question I'd ask is: What is it, o writer, that you are ultimately a-tryin' to a-say to your readers through your walls o' text?
Whilst I agree PST favours WIS/INT/CHA, I strongly disagree on the paladin part. It's more difficult to be evil, due to the afore-mentioned companion attachment yadda yadda yadda, but the game provides plenty of strong arguments why lawfullness + good can end up doing more harm than good: Morte recalling one such incarnation wanting to put him back on the Pillar because that's where he belongs, Vhailor's extremism, Dak'kon being easily fooled into practically becoming TNO's slave, despite all the gitzherai history of overcoming slavery, and I'm sure I'm forgetting quite a few. It's also more difficult to be super LG or hardcore evil due to it running contrary to the game's strong theme of redeeming past wrongs, breaking the cycle of suffering, not making the same practical, but bad-for-the-soul mistakes etc. and MCA's running argument (present in other games) that paladin-type behaviour can lead to short-sightedness, and (unintended) crueler evils down the road, sort of like the crystal-dragon example you mentioned.
I don't think those choices were intended as 2nd playthrough gimmicks, at least, I didn't view them as such, but yes, they are weaker mechanically and stronger narratively, though nowhere near as hard as they could be due to, ironically, the companions being too well written.
Oh, I'll freely admit I haven't read it, though I'm not aping anyone, I'm aware of the structure of the novels. Thing is, does it really make that big of a difference? You know the narrator is unreliable, but, and correct me if I'm wrong, the majority of the book is still centered on this wish-fulfillment story he's telling, exagerated or not, the reader still gets his fix. Now, I'm not judging (well, maybe a little): all sorts of people get their wish fulfillment from different things, watching porn, smoking crack, reading tripe fantasy, whatever gets you off - my problem comes when one of these things tries to pass itself off as more than it is, as having some greater artistic merit. What good is wish fulfillment if it is done within one degree of separation - that lying narrator is saying all this, not the author, yet the bulk of what you're reading is said Mary Sue/Gary Stu doing cool things, is it not? What good does it do that once every 50 pages you get a line that goes 'btw this dude is lying his pants off because he's in pain/dying whatevs'? Is this meant to ellicit even more simpathy from the reader towards the poor guy? Why use such a cheap trick, then? For 2 entire books? Will the 3rd one, to be released as soon as Winds of Winter, I expect, expose the narrator completely for the fraud he is, twist your reading of him completely, or make you cry even more tears as he ultimately dies, the saga ends, and you've read 3 books of cool dude doing cool stuff, but not really, he was just trying to rewrite his wasted life as he was dying, the poor guy? That may be a nice message to communicate, life goes by fast, don't waste it or you'll be swallowed by regrets, but essentially what you as the author have written, and what your readers have read were 2 or 3 books of mostly tripe wish-fulfillment.
(I realise the above may come off as me being a rhetorical smartass, but that's not my intent at all, I'm genuinely curious what people get from this sort of thing, so please illuminate me; also I promise I have a bigger point I'm trying to get to with all this, though nobody asked me for it, but it seems that's the way my bi-polar brian has decided to spend today, so please bear with me a little longer.)
You see, the thing is, Rhin in 2rment is also an unreliable narrator of her own backstory (1trickpony much?). She's an imaginative child that talks to her pet rock, has a big head wound, all this is meant to make you question her veracity. Again, the word-smithing part of it is much more effective than with other companions - Rothfuss achieves, no doubt, with most players, the emotional manipulation that he was aiming for - it's the character development part and what he's trying to communicate through that character that I'm questioning. Even worse than perhaps his novels, in the game she actually is a cool Mary Sue, there's no doubt about it, you can make her a p. powerful cypher... storage-container, I guess?, very early on, and it's already been spoiled to me that she becomes completely OP/broken later on. So while she might seem like a subversion of RPG companion tropes in her first dialogue, is she really? Ultimately, is she not just a more badass Clementine, your very own Arya Stark to pet and be loved by? Does this sort of blatant emotional ego-stroking not bother people? You were a nice guy/gal and decided to take care of this poor orphan, but not really-an orphan (see, that ol' fake degree of separation rearing it's ugly head again) and so you are rewarded with loli love and an OP mechanics-wise companion. I know I've bitched a lot about lack of emotional impact when it comes to the other companions, but going to the other extreme is not really helping. Because to me that reads as: you're being manipulative for the sake of being manipulative, well aren't you just so fucking clever, mister writer?
It does not help that, about a dozen pages or so back, someone linked to a stream where Rothfuss was playing the game, and curiosity got the better of me, and I scrolled through it, and what did my eyes see?, what did my ears hear? Rothfuss tearing up at his own dialogue when he first met Rhin and going 'Oh, Rothfuss, you're an asshole to have written this', and a few minutes later adding 'Yes, I wrote Rhin to break your heart'. Now, I don't know about you, but to me that is absolute classles ham behaviour and why I wish authors (in any field) were forced to play dead, but of course they can't do that if they want to sell their novel/game/movie, they have to blog and stream and go to cons and show forced positivity and dumb down their work to reach
Now, to get back on track to the point I'm so desperately trying to get at, and, there's no doubt in my mind, failing spectacularly to do so, I would like you, whoever you are reading this, to imagine the following scenario: you're playing PST for the first time, having a fucking blast, and when you get to the area where the Smoldering Corpse Bar is located, outside the bar, you see this little kid called Dak'kon, and - Lady bless his little heart - he's fending off a bunch of hive thugs that want to take his lunch money with a toy wooden sword. You save him from the thugs like the hero you are, you take him under your wing, even though he's kinda shit in combat with his stupid little sowrd that gives -5 thaco, but some hours and a few emotionally-manipulative dialogue nodes later, it turns out the little fucker is a time-travelling space-bending alien priest of a long-forgotten race and his sword becomes a +15 thaco mega-enchanted shiny superkatana that slays everything that moves. Imagine further, if you will, that, a few days after PST's release, someone links you to a MCA stream (yes, in this alternate universe, everybody is streaming like it's 1999), and MCA, our beloved senpai and savior, he's crying his eyes out when he meets little Dak'kon and his toy wooden sword, saying he wrote him to break your heart (and that there was this other companion, some ridiculous skull he ultimately decided to cut, because the team felt the comments he made towards female zombies were inappropriate, and everyone in stream chat agrees and they all brofist eachother, happy at the development team's foresight and sound reasoning). Well? Is that a better companion, a better PST, a better MCA, a better alternate reality?
What this ultimately boils down to is this: what are these writers trying to communicate to the players through all these endlessly tauted 1 bazillion words? Something to do with legacies, I suspect, living a life you won't regret, not being a shitty dad/mom/sire, and it tries to achieve this by putting you in the shoes of what is, essentially, the equivalent of one of the Shadows TNO left behind in PST, and asking you to confront the careless bastard. His dark materials basically, a source that Ziets drew from before in MotB, with far greater success imo, since, up till where I am now (finished Sagus, at the Valley/Necropolis)
- the theme has no emotional punch - except when going for blatant manipulation, i.e. Rhin, the orphans whose house is about to fall from the cliffs -, or is clumsily handled - the ghost woman
- it has very little to no philosophical coherence because there are many stand-alone sidequests that don't really tie in with the main theme, a problem which i think stems from the setting's 'anything that's weird goes' kitchen sink design
- your castoff is a blank/d slate, which on its own, or in a different game, would not be a problem, but you also don't get any companions that are significantly tied to your plight at the beginning and the 2 other castoffs that you meet are: a slaver that, through her very existence contradicts the sense of urgency the main quest tries to instill: she's been happily trading slaves with no fucks to give towards the Sorrow that's supposedly out to get you, and, aside for a few
Holy shit, I'm still not done writing? Are you still reading? What fucking point was I trying to get at? Let's wrap this shit up, brain, it's getting late.
Oh, I 'member! That elusive thing the writing/design team is trying to convey to the players, emotions they're trying to instill, questions they want us to ask ourselves. PR says it has something to do with 'What does one life matter?', but I dunno, men. The game so far is too much of a mish mash of disparate things for that to read clearly (and from what other people have been saying in this thread, later on, it jumps to the other extreme, with everybody and their cousin twice-removed talking about muh legacy), the companions could just as well not be there for the most part, and whenever the game tries to engage me emotionally, it does it so blatantly, so without class, it just pisses me off, which isn't the emotion they were going for, I think. So far, what I'm hearing most clearly from what the writing is trying to communicate is that slavery is bad, helping little orphan kids is good, #levylivesmatter, Blue Oyster Cult is the shit and gay pirates can get into fights and break up with their lovers just like straight pirates can. Well, I guess I should be grateful to all the people who contributed all those moneys to the kickstarter, so that I can now learn all these important lessons. Otherwise, I might still be going around punching kids and selling faggots into slavery.
If I were Ravel, the question I'd ask is: What is it, o writer, that you are ultimately a-tryin' to a-say to your readers through your walls o' text?
Don't worry, the irony is not lost on me.
