#293 words

[authorangelita]

My awesome niece gave me The OC: The Oral History book for Christmas, so I've been revisiting The OC for the last week or so, and it's giving me Foster Mac feels.

Here's a snippet from the next Foster Mac fic:

Jack was sitting in the chair to his left, just as he had the night that Mac had eaten spaghetti with them.  Was that just last week?  It felt like a lifetime ago.

[flowerslut]

Sasusaku #11

some traveling ss for you

He’s angry. That’s the one thing that’s clear when she watches Sasuke stalk toward her, with a fist clenched at his side and now-black eyes hard as stone.

She’d been watching him from afar, sitting amidst various injured shinobi, as he scanned the crowd with his sole sharingan, no doubt looking for her distinguishable pink hair. And when his mismatched eyes finally fell upon her that was the only thought that flew through her mind.

 He’s angry.

It makes sense to her. After all, she’d ignored him and ran off toward where the explosions had sounded despite his command for her to stay put. She was seven months pregnant and had been consistently weak from sickness since the beginning.

But knowing that there were certainly casualties forced her away from her spot–hidden in an alley between buildings of this dangerous city–and toward the chaos. She’d been running low on both energy and chakra for her entire pregnancy but she knew that even a little bit of help could make the difference between the life and death of someone in trouble.

She isn’t even able to rise and greet him. She’d used up the little bit of chakra that she had to spare within minutes of arriving at the sight of the supposed bombings, and the girl whose arm she’d repaired was now the one looking after her.

But as soon as Sasuke is within arms reach of her, he startles her by dropping to his knees. And as his arm wraps around her waist, pulling her large belly against him, he kisses her passionately. When Sakura feels his shaking hand grip the fabric of her shirt tightly, she immediately understands without him needing to say it.

‘I thought I lost you.’

send me prompts!

[oldtumblhurgoyf]

6. What do you think design can best do to make the game accessible to newer players?

Make sure it's as fun as possible.

The best way to learn Magic is to playit and to play it a lot. They will only do that if it's fun. Am I stating the obvious here? It may be taken for granted by players that a game should be fun, but designers can't afford to. They have to trudge through the un-fun iterations to get to the good stuff the players will play and love. But if the game is already tremendously complex (as Magic is), it needs to be apparent from the first game, the first few turns, that it will be a fun experience. This is truest for a player who is taking their first ever turns in a Magic game. That experience will determine if they buy boosters and play again or throw their cards away. It tells them if it's worth it to invest the time and effort in learning the game.

For that reason it cannot be understated that design has to make sure Magic is, above all else, a really fun experience. That means watching complexity so that new players aren't more overwhelmed than they need to be (that first experience is always overwhelming in some ways). It means making as much as possible easy to grok so that the harder stuff can take more attention without distracting from the basics they are still trying to learn. New World Order helps this a lot. But NWO can't tell you if a mechanic or cycle of cards are fun. And that's what it comes down to. Is this fun enough for me to claw my way through the rules until I understand them enough to play the game? The best design is the most enjoyable, funnest design.

[oldtumblhurgoyf]

9. You are forced to move counterspelling out of blue. What color do you move it to and why?

I would shift it to white. White has already seen soft counterspells in the form of Mana Tithe. It is the color of defense, rules, and answers.

Mechanically, giving counterspells to any of the other, more offensive colors (black can steal life and force discard, red will hit you right in the face, and green's creatures can overwhelm you), is a huge problem. Any of those colors can then pretty much insure their threats get through as long as they can keep the mana up to respond to anything with their own (in color) counterspell. While white can do this for its own threats, its own threats won't take the form of direct life loss/damage or the biggest, most efficient creatures in the game.

Counterspells don't feel very red or green. Both of those colors deal with threats after they are on the board. Black can preemptively handle some threats with library or hand manipulation, but as the color that is willing to do almost anything and use anything as a resource to get what it wants, it feels dangerous to also give it counterspelling. Meanwhile a counterspell in white is sort of like Voidstone Gargoyle on an instant.

Any color aside from blue and white with hard counterspells in color is likely too dominant (assuming development continues to price them like Cancel for 1CC). Unlike blue, white would also be hindered by its lack of draw, meaning it is less likely to be able to find a counterspell or have it on hand and ready. There will be windows of opportunity for white's opponents, even more so than with blue's counterspells. Counterspells fit the mechanical identity of white and play into the color's strengths (responding to threats) without mitigating its weaknesses (draw).