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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

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IncendiaryDevice

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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?"
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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billion years

To be fair, they are aware of that absuridty; one of the central conceits of the setting is that humans mysteriously reappeared in the Ninth World a few thousand years ago. Nobody knows how long they were gone or who or what brought them back, but several of the predecessor civilisations were nonhuman.

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'?

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.

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.
 

Prime Junta

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

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?
 

IHaveHugeNick

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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.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
"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?
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....
 

Sigourn

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There's no end of stuff that call's bullshit on the whole concept of a billion years into the future.

As soon as I heard the game was set a billion years into the future I knew it was going to be horseshit. Even sci-fi doesn't bother going that far for its fantasy because once you go that far its inconceivable what humanity would be like.

And inconceivable means... inconceivable.

The idea that everyone is the same is probably more correct than not, but not from racial melding, but from the fact that humanity would likely gradually transform from being carbon/water based to something more ephemeral:

A.I.+counsel.jpg


And the only reason that writer ^ put them in human shape is so that the viewer has something they can conceive..

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.
 

Deleted member 7219

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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?
 

Roguey

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"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?

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

DeepOcean

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if Mr. McCuck liked Trump it would make him a better writer.

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

Parabalus

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- You can hire people, or choose a setting, based on your political agenda, instead of how talented and interesting they are.
But that's not the case here, they had the same names/"talent", which is why they got money thrown at them.
- Narrative cRPGs are essentially about choice and consequences, role-play; but this is impossible if you can’t tolerate certain moral choices and points of view. The result is that your choices in a political correct cRPG will be unnaturally constrained by political points of views.

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.
 

Grampy_Bone

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I think you guys are misunderstanding Colin's statement about that Aligern portrait being "too white". Looking at the concept arts, it indicates that characters such as Aligern and Tybir do have brown/black skin color. Of course it would not be ok to change the characters' basic features in a portrait. It's like drawing a blond Durance portrait.
Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.

Didn't realize the guy was such a hipster douche. Explains a lot.
 

Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.


English isn't my first language and I have to say the game actually helped me learn a lot of new (probably unnecessary) words, but at the same time, I think that the overly descriptive style and supposedly "philosophical" vocabulary were brought into the game to mask the non-sense, superficial writing.

Btw folks, I'm not the video creator, I'm not that smart to make it :deadhorse:
 
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