WreckedRegent7

[kotori-mochi]

Can't afford art school?

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Proko (Free, mostly teaches anatomy and how to draw people. But does have art talks and teaches the basics.)

Marc Brunet (Free but he does have other classes for a cheap price. Use to work for Blizzard and teaches you everything)

Aaron Rutten (free, tips about art, talks about art programs and the best products for digital art)

BoroCG (free, teaches a verity of art mediums from 3D modeling to digital painting. As well as some tips that can be used across styles)

Jesse J. Jones (free, talks about animating)

Jesus Conde (free, teaches digital painting and has classes in Spanish)

Mohammed Agbadi (free, he gives some advice in some videos and talks about art)

Ross Draws (free, he does have other classes for a good price. Mostly teaching character designs and simple backgrounds.)

SamDoesArts (free, gives good advice and critiques)

Drawfee Show (free, they do give some good advice and great inspiration)

The Art of Aaron Blaise ( useful tips for digital art and animation. Was an animator for Disney. Mostly nature art)

Bobby Chiu ( useful tips and interviews with artist who are in the industry or making a living as artist)

Sinix Design (has some tips on drawing people)

Winged canvas (art school for free on a verity of mediums)

Bob Ross (just a good time, learn how to paint, as well as how too relax when doing art. "there are no mistakes only happy accidents", this channel also provides tips from another artist)

Scott Christian Sava (Inspiration and provides tips and advice)

Pikat (art advice and critiques)

Drawbox (a suggested cheap online art school, made of a community of artist)

Skillshare (A cheap learning site that has art classes ranging from traditional to digital. As well as Animation and tutorials on art programs. All under one price, in the USA it's around $34 a month)

Human anatomy for artist (not a video or teacher but the site is full of awesome refs to practice and get better at anatomy)

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

The "how to draw manga" series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.

"Creating characters with personality" by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.

"Albinus on anatomy" by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.

"Artistic Anatomy" by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.

"Directing the story" by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.

"Animal Anatomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.

"Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations" by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.

"Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand" by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.

"An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist" by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.

Etherington Brothers, they make books and have a free blog with art tips.

📝As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. If you want to go fancy Michaels is always a good place for traditional supplies. They also get in some good sales and discounts. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are usually more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

Clip Studio paint ( you can choose to pay once or sub and get updates. Galaxy, Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, or Chromebook device. )

Procreate ( pay once for $9.99 usd, IPAD & IPHONE ONLY)

Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, animation and more. Free)

PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)

Krita (Free)

mypaint (free)

FireAlpaca (free)

Aseprite ($19.99 usd but has a free trail, for pixel art Windows & macOS)

Drawpile (free and for if you want to draw with others)

IbisPaint (free, phone app ONLY)

Medibang (free, IPAD, Android and PC)

NOTE: Some of these can work on almost any computer like Clip and Sai but others will require a bit stronger computer like Blender. Please check their sites for if your computer is compatible.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

Hope this was helpful and have a great day.

"also apologies for any spelling or grammar errors, I have Dyslexia and it makes my brain go XP when it comes to speech or writing"

[animalphotorefs]

Boosting this in case any of the programs and books suggested are useful.

All the photos on this tumblr ad the animal photo reference site I run is another resource available for artists to use!

As long as you’re not using AI to create your art, you can reference / trace / draw / recombine / make any sort of art you want, with any of the photos, for free.

[reo-speeddragon]

There's also MORPHO, a really good book series on anatomy by Michel Lauricella, with very clear explanations and sketches!

And for pose references, there's @adorkastock who shares a ton of them for free, with different models and props, and her website is amazing <3 you can also buy pose packs from her.

[coffeebeanwriting]

Writing Fight Scenes

Here are a handful of tips on how to write intriguing and strong *no pun intended* fight scenes! 1. Give your character a meaning behind their actions. Are they fighting to survive? Are they the aggressor or the victim? Are they defending someone they love or hunting down someone who hurt them? Makes sure the audience knows why this action scene is important to your character. Unimportant and nonmeaningful actions can be boring!

2. Short sentences. Generally speaking, longer more detailed scenes slow the pace of your novel down. This is because the reader has to take more time to read and absorb all the details. Quicker, brief sentences make the pace move faster because there is less for the audience to read. Most fighting happens quickly and instinctively— without too much thought or anticipation. When things are happening fast, we have less time to take in details.

🏃‍♀️ Fast-paced with minimal details: "He punched me in the cheek, my back molars ripping open my fleshy skin. By the time the next punch came, I was already choking on a mouthful of blood."

🐌 Too many details/thoughts that slow down the action: "His large fist hurled towards me with insane speed. I could hardly believe it. He punched my cheek so hard that my sharp, back molars ripped open my fleshy skin. It hurt so bad, but I couldn't stop the next punch from coming. Blood filled my mouth, the irony taste causing me to choke and for my face to wilt."

3. Use all five senses. When adrenaline is pumping, the body can become hyperaware! Touch and sight are the senses that most people focus on... but don't forget about smell, hearing and, taste. Does your protagonist hear dogs approaching? Do they taste the blood from their busted lip?

4. Don't' slow down the pace by adding too much detail. Try to keep an ebb and flow in your action scene. When the action is happening, keep the details quick and short— no one has time to think about their next move when in the heat of danger. However, you can balance the scene out by giving your character a chance to breathe and think and observe

5. Research/study. Watch famous fight scenes in movies or anime to see what is realistic and what is exaggerated. Pay attention to the pacing or what keeps you on edge. When does the character get a chance to think or come up with a plan? What makes this action scene so enthralling?

6. Consider what is at stake. Stakes always make a scene more tense. What does your character have to lose and how does this affect their mental state? Does it aid in their energy, or does it distract them from the fight?

7. Develop characters/the plot. Consider how this action scene will either further your character in the plot or set them back. Does this scene give them a lasting injury that follows them throughout the story, or do they lose an ally that they desperately loved? How does this affect them moving forward?

Instagram: coffeebeanwriting

[homestuck-scribbles]

A little Homestuck PSA

As 4/13 is right around the corner I just wanted to remind everyone about the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. As Viz and the death of Flash have been slowly killing the intended Homestuck experience there is still a way to see it how it was meant.

This offline program allows for all the flash to be seen and mini games to be played as intended and helps protect from spoilers. If you are going to start reading Homestuck or are planning to trick some unsuspecting friend into reading please consider using this program!

And - I love new livebloggers! Let me know who you love to watch make this journey.

https://bambosh.github.io/unofficial-homestuck-collection/

THE UNOFFICIAL HOMESTUCK COLLECTION

An offline browser built from the ground up to archive Homestuck and its related works.

[arp1033]

Also! Homestuck has some language that has not aged well (i.e. slurs and unkind terms, especially towards the begining) so someone also made an optional patch that removes that language and replaces it with stuff that still keeps it funny! Not everything gets replaced outside the main comic but I know they are working on it!

https://twitter.com/AltUniverseWash/status/1320759511242649601

[mr-elementle]

I think it's hella cool that this option exists for people that may not be comfortable with the very late 2000s internet language of homestuck, but this post opened my eyes to that fact that homestuck mods can exist, like we can mod homestuck now,

[hemoanemic]

like a video game? brb im doing a homestuck any% run rn. homestuck troll%

[homestuck-scribbles]

Hey all - heads up! They updated to version 2.0.

[homestuck-scribbles]

Looks like the old link doesn’t work now. Try this instead https://homestuck.github.io/

Unofficial Homestuck Collection

[byoldervine]

Motivation For Writing

Getting Off Your Butt:

1. Aestheticise it. Let the light in through the curtains, turn on your fairy lights, lay a blanket over your lap, light some candles, whatever you need to do to feel like a writer. The right vibes can go a long way

2. Picture that one scene. There’s almost always a moment you’re super excited about that basically inspired the whole book. Picture it, play it out in your head in full cinematic fanfare, gush to yourself about how cool it is and how everyone will love it, picture a future fanbase going nuts for it. You might get excited enough to go back to writing

3. Set a word count goal. During NaNoWriMo this year I think I wrote more than I ever have in one go. The thing that kept me coming back was the desire to not fall behind. I ended up with ~45K words after some complications irl caused me to drop off in the final few days, and that’s all just because I was adding up the 1667 a day word count goal and realising where I needed to be at to keep up. I definitely can’t stay as rigid as I did with 1667 words every single day, but seeing that you’re only a few hundred words off of a goal is super motivating - just be sure to set realistic, easy to achieve parameters for just general use, like 1000-2000 words per week. I know 200 words per day is a popular one for people trying to establish a writing routine that can’t dedicate forever to the craft

Maintaining Motivation:

1. Writing sprints. Writing sprints are a godsend for me, I like to set myself up in the living room with Abbie Emmons’ writing sprint video on. The video lasts two hours and is broken up into two parts; 25 minutes to write and 5 minutes for breaks between writing, so four 30 minute sprints overall. Having the timer and countdown with peaceful music and an aesthetic background is both relaxing and encouraging, as well as giving me a specific time for how much longer I have to push through. It’s easier for me to say “Okay, only ten more minutes, then you can take a break” then it is to say “Just keep going, we’re not stopping until I say so” which is too arbitrary for my brain to accept

2. Give yourself a choice. If you’re struggling to keep your focus, come up with a finish line and tell yourself you don’t have to do any more work once you’ve reached that point. Finish the paragraph, go for another five or ten minutes, keep it up until your next scheduled break. Whatever sounds realistic and doable without being overwhelming. And once you’ve met this goal, ask yourself if you still want to stop. With any luck, you’ll have gotten back into the zone and will choose to keep going. Maybe you’ll want to take a quick break but you’ll come back later on. And maybe you’ll decide that now actually is a good stopping point. Just remember that, if you do still want to stop, don’t force yourself to keep going. You can’t strike deals with yourself if you know you won’t keep your word and all you’ll end up doing is burning yourself out, which will lead to even less writing getting done

3. Try a new angle. If you can’t be bothered to write anymore, is there anything else you can do for your book? Plotting, editing, worldbuilding, character sheets, one-shots all that sort of thing can still be productive for your book while still being different enough to give your brain a slight respite. It also means less work in that particular area later on

Afterwards:

1. Organise. Clean up your workspace and put everything away so it’s nice and neat for when you come back to it. Or if you don’t need to pack things out the way, set it up in an aesthetically pleasing way so it will tempt you back next time. Let it give you the writer vibe

2. Take care of yourself. Get a drink, have a snack, walk about, stretch your limbs, take a breath, cuddle your pet. Something that gets you away from straining your eyes looking at text for a bit. This is also a good time to reward yourself if positive reinforcement is something you use on yourself. If you always feel shitty after your writing sessions, you won’t want to go back to it

3. Positive reflection. Make sure to tell yourself you did good, even if you didn’t get as much done as you would’ve liked or it isn’t up to a standard of quality you’re aiming for. That can all be fixed later on, and you’re infinitely better off than you would’ve been if you didn’t do it. Be proud of yourself. Tell yourself you’re proud of your hard work and your dedication and your effort. Remind yourself that this is a fun thing you like to do. Marvel over how insane it is that you’ve gotten this far - not many people do - and that you’ve got all this tangible work to prove you’ve accomplished something so many people wish they could pull off. If this isn’t fun overall, there’s no point

[wreckedregent7]

Regent's Ramblings: Arena Thoughts

Welp, Arena's second run in League is about to come to a close, and I've played plenty of it over the past while, and have quite a lot of mixed feelings about the gamemode. And, as though a single soul should care what I think, I'm going to organize my thoughts and vent about it at-length here.

Let's start with some of the stuff we can get out of the way quickly; starting with some of the more neutral mechanical changes. The randomization of the Ring's ending position is nice, and does change up the round-to-round gameplay while discouraging sessile camping playstyles with Champions like Zyra and Heimerdinger. They can still be situationally effective, but no longer an overwhelming pain point.

The once-per-round revives are...meh. They can potentially make for some impactful plays, but more often they flit between a binary of "the enemy has a tank so they're guaranteed to get a revive" or "by the time my revive is available the ring has already covered the pool so we're stuck with a 1v2." I don't think the revives add any reasonably unique benefits to the gamemode, and skew things heavily in favor of tankier Champions, making mages, assassins, and marksmen have a rougher time in a gamemode that already generally disfavors them.

The Hexgates...I do not like. Their ease of use combined with their cooldown can lead to degenerate gameplay strategies of hovering around a hexgate for an easy escape, especially in maps with poor or minimal healing flower placement, and the mechanics are violently inconsistent to the point where I've dodged a perilous situation, only to die immediately after coming out on the other side to a basic attack that somehow ignores the concept of being "untargetable".

For the Champion Cameos; holistically, I don't think they benefit the game mode at all. Champion Cameos range from "extremely rarely impactful" like Sett, to "changes the approach of engagement" like Pyke, to "extremely frustrating and unnecessary gamechangers" like Gwen. The fact that Gwen remains chafes me, but hers isn't impossible to deal with.

The new Cameos, unfortunately, fall on the opposite extremes of that scale; Thresh is...Inoffensive and seldom impactful. Knowledgeable players can use him to add variance to a fight with the escapes/maneuverability he provides, but if that has ever actually changed the outcome of a round, I have not noticed.

Sylas, on the other hand, is objectively the most frustrating cameo to get, bar none. Even playing a Marksman in a Gwen cameo is reasonable; Sylas is just a matter of "whoever gets the CC ult wins unless they play like absolute apes". Playing super well as a high-damaging hypercarry, outmaneuvering your foes? Well FUCK YOU, Sylas just gave you Mundo Ult while the enemy gets Lissandra and Malphite Ult.

Sylas' cameo so singularly swings the outcome of a fight by pure, unadulturated randomness, I hope to god if Riot decides to run Arena a third time, they axe him entirely and never look back.

And now, we get on to Augments; this is quite possibly an unsolvable problem, because on the one hand, the randomization of Augments is core to the gamemode, but on the other hand, the design of Augments is to warp a Champion's playstyle in unique ways, but due to the complete randomization of it, leads to more of an issue of having to play around a bad hand for the majority of cases.

I've played a match where I got terrible augment selections, with the best that I got being minor throughput buffs, while an enemy Riven got decked out from the outset with a broken Augment combo in Slap Around (stacking Adaptive force for Stunning/Knocking enemies Airborne) and Earthwake (every dash is followed by a delayed AoE damage burst).

As well, so many of the newer augments are game-warping now, often resulting in situations that cannot be countered or otherwise lend to an unhealthy game state.

Oppressively high Ability Haste buffs (particularly for basic abilities - ever see a Jax permanently in Counter Strike?), free healing for so many actions, %max health true damage for any ability hit, and the especially annoying Raid Boss, which is simultaneously a noob trap for uncoordinated teams and the singular reason you can't kill that fucking Swain, there's no real strategy to be had - you just luck your way into a god-rolled Augment selection and win without reprisal.

Also, while it isn't powerful by any means, fuck Nesting Doll. There's no point to this augment besides delaying a win and dragging matches out as long as possible, and it's unnecessary due to the Revival Mechanic.

My only hopes for the next run of Arena are these three, since I know Riot's never going to bother trying to make the gamemode balanced;

Limit Swain's ult duration. He is incredibly difficult to deal with on account of having functionally indefinite healing since it's so difficult to actually escape his ult range.

Get rid of Sylas cameo. There's already enough randomization in the gamemode, we don't need quadruple-layered randomness deciding the outcome of a match, let alone a single round.

Increase Grievous Wounds' effectiveness to match the dramatic healing potential in the gamemode; Trundle and Swain are oppressive to deal with thanks to their absurdly easy healing, some Champions with innate healing on their abilities can just build to become impromptu healers without sacrificing damage, and some Augments provide needlessly strong healing for zero cost. 40% Healcut is not sufficient to counter the amount of healing that can be had in this gamemode.

[cedar-west-deactivated20230408]

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

[mishkatelwarriorgoddess]

Thank you so much for this!

[wreckedregent7]

Regent's Ramblings: Lethality Items Are Overkill

God help me if I can find a reasonable jumping-off point for this conversation, so instead I'm just going to get right the fuck into it.

When it comes to items in League, the vast majority of items typically either help a Champion achieve their main goal (any items with armor, health, and magic resist keep tanks alive, attack damage and attack speed help marksmen and most skirmishers shred foes, etc.) or accentuate their playstyle. (Black Cleaver gives armor shred and mobility for Fighters, Titanic Hydra lets Tanks get some heftier damage from their health stacking, Horizon Focus rewards Mages for accurate, long-range skillshots.)

And Lethality items are in this weird space where they...Do both, and often too much. There are a scant few Lethality items that are actually fine, but the majority of them aren't, being overtuned, covered with any little extra bells and whistles Riot could throw on them, to the point that they often warp gameplay and get poached by Champions who really shouldn't be using them.

Let's start with the most egregious example; Duskblade of Draktharr. It grants Ability Haste, Attack Damage, and a hefty chunk of Lethality. And then you get its unique passives; Ability Damage gets Execute scaling (dealing more damage the lower your target's health is), and if you score a takedown within 3s of dealing damage to the target, you become untargetable for 1 second.

The latter completely removes one of Assassins' major skill tests, which is to escape after making a pick, while the former is just a massive boon to any Champion who scales with AD and deals damage through their abilities. I know I've ranted at length before about Aatrox poaching this item.

But more to the point; while most items try to make a distinction on what they're intended for, Duskblade just, doesn't. It gets to be both an execute tool and an escape tool.

Then you have Umbral Glaive; which, on paper, I think it's a reasonable item. Give Assassins tools to sneak up and help them get the pick they're angling for, but in practice, it's just, so damn extra.

It auto-triggers whenever you come near a ward, and grants you a better Oracle Lens (lasting 8 seconds instead of 6) that lets you one-shot standard wards (two shots if ranged), and two-shot Control Wards.

Buying Umbral Glaive doesn't just help you sneak up on your prey, it gives you effortless vision control for the rest of the match, since not only does it have 2 extra seconds of duration and better ward-killing than Oracle Lens, but it has only a 50s cooldown (affected by Item Haste), compared to Oracle's 160-100s CD.

Axiom Arc is also a cool item in concept; scoring kills cuts the running cooldown of your ultimate ability. Of course, this becomes a problem when 1. Most ultimates on Assassins wind up scaling to a fairly low cooldown to begin with, and 2. The CD cut scales with Lethality, resulting in a lot of Assassins generally being able to daisy-chain their ultimates if they're playing even remotely competently.

Ultimates which can be incredibly strong in a lot of scenarios; daisy-chained executes, teamwide stuns, long-range target access and vision denial, etc., and while I understand that the purpose of that scaling is to pigeon-hole people into stacking Lethality (thus being extra squishy) to compensate for the increase in power, but I feel like that lethality scaling can be dialed back, since as it stands, just having three Lethality Items is enough to guarantee you'll always have your ultimate ready for the next fight.

Eclipse is an especially odd case for Lethality items, being intended for duelists (Skirmishers and lightweight Fighters), and similar to Duskblade, wants to do multiple things that shouldn't be done together. Dealing two separate hits to a foe deals bonus %Max health damage (allowing you immediate health advantage in trades) and a shield (making reprisal less effective). On a 6s cooldown.

Even with less Lethality than other items, Eclipse provides too much without any real give, making it a universatile option for anyone who wants to trade aggressively, since you're getting free %Max health damage and a shield every 6 seconds.

And while I wouldn't necessarily consider it overtuned in the same vein as the others I've mentioned, I find the Collector a strange case where I just don't really know what the intention is with it. It's an execute item, which would seem to favor Assassins, but it provides Crit, making it worth picking up on Marksmen.

Skirmishers seldom build crit unless directly incentivized to (Yasuo and Yone), and Assassins basically never build crit. I would say it's inoffensive, though, as the execute passive is very seldom noticeable - most often if a Collector user is leaving someone below 5% HP, the attack itself takes them to 0, or else their target is a tank.

That tangent aside, I hope I did a reasonable enough job of getting my point across - the better half of Lethality Items are overkill, providing obscenely huge benefit on top of their fairly high AD stat and the flat armor penetration they provide, which all combine to result in a group of items that often get poached by Champions and Classes that they aren't really meant for.

[wildxwired]

How fucking annoying is it when you feel so restless with creative energy but you can’t decide what to do with it and when you finally try to create something it comes out shit so you just give up and sit there being all creatively annoyed and jittery.

[lianabrooks]

1 - Decision Making Fatigue is a thing. --> Make a list of possibilities. --> Use a random number generator to pick something off the list. --> If you hate the idea cross it off and generate a new number. --> Continue until you either find a project or cross off the whole list. --> If you cross off the whole list pick a random short story prompt, write for five minutes, and call it a good work day.

2. Yeah, of course your rough draft sucks. It’s supposed to. --> Let it suck. --> You can fix it in edits. 

3. When you’re stressed you aren’t unbiased about your work. --> Don’t judge your work while your are actively working on it. --> Remember to drink water, take your meds/vitamins, eat something, and get sleep. --> Double-check to make sure the restless creative energy is not displaced emotional worries over something else. If it is, displace with intention and let the worries go into your work. You shouldn’t keep stress in your head, put it on a page, or canvas, or in a carving, or a meal, or something. Get it out and let it go.

4. No work is ever wasted. --> All time spent planning and creating is useful in some way.  --> Failure means you tried, which is good. --> Try again. Fail harder. Fail better. --> Keep going until you like what you’re making.

5. Love yourself enough to allow yourself to not be perfect. --> Seriously.  --> If this is a struggle I highly recommend seeing a doctor or therapist about depression. --> Because you are dang lovable, my friend. You rock. You do great things. I’m proud of you.

[late-to-the-fandom]

[heywriters]

My collection of clothing references for writing. 

[floraone]

Ya know what , I’m adding. Here are more useful references that I use;

[return-of-a-space-cowboy]

This… This is great. I’m keeping this for reference

[atrax-phoneutria-deactivated202]

@yanderepuck

[sprinklesdonut15]

Advice For Making Realistic Characters:

Make them have multiple interests - Your character doesn’t have to fit one aesthetic alone. For example, I like collecting feathers and vintage keys, but also notebooks and squishmallows, none of which are all the same aesthetic

Allow for improper dialogue - We know not to use “and” at the beginning of a sentence, but humans do that anyway. We stutter and catch our breath and forget how to word things properly. We don’t have to be diagnosed with a stutter or speak multiple languages to screw it up now and then

They should all have their own voice - This is mainly for writing in multiple perspectives. Personally it’s hard to give each character their own voice rather than my own. Regardless of the language or era of your story, each character should sound unique, whether they have certain catchphrases or use more slang or talk more formally

Give them all a self-presentation - We all act differently depending on who we’re around, and characters should be this way as well

Give them mindless habits - Possibly for a filler scene or something in the background, but give your character more than just nail biting habits. Allow for a small or simple change (like moving furniture around) where your character still has a habit of doing the old thing (going where the furniture used to be, not being able to find anything after it was moved)

Let them be bored - People are always and I mean always finding ways to entertain themselves. If you’re writing a character that sits still and thinks and doesn’t always have to be doing something, just make sure that it fits their personality. I don’t know a lot of people who can go for long without some form of entertainment.

[wreckedregent7]

Regent's Ramblings: Champions "Bringing Something New" to League

"Good grief he's found his way to the podium again". I have and I'll gladly make it everybody's problem. So, what am I talking about this time? Well, I'm going to rant and rave about a design ethos Riot spoke about some time ago when discussing new Champion releases, which went something along the lines of;

"With new Champion releases, we want to always add something new and unique that's never been done before" - something like that. God help me if I could be bothered to look through all their devlogs to find the exact quote.

So, first of all, it should help to establish a groundwork for how we should regard "new, unique, never-before-seen" mechanics and the like as Riot intends to push with each new Champion. To do that, let's look at the last 11 Champions who were released in League and look at what unique mechanics they bring. Why 11 and not 10? Because shut up. Shut up is why.

Naafiri - Passive minion summoning/command

Milio - Attack range buffs, crowd-control cleansing

K'Sante - Sacrificing durability for offense, cross-wall isolation

Nilah - Ambient healing, shielding, and XP sharing, melee bot lane carry

Bel'Veth - Infinitely scaling Attack Speed, siege form

Renata Glasc - Zombified/Second-Chance, Turn Enemies against each other

Zeri - Basic Attacks = Ability, Q = Basic Attack

Vex - Dash Interrupts

Akshan - Revive on killing marked foe

Gwen - Becoming untargetable to foes outside of her field

Viego - Stealing everything from a Champion except their ult

And of course, there are some other examples further beyond these; Seraphine's double casts, Rell's magnetism on ult and dual modes, Samira's ult having functionally no cooldown and instead being gated by her passive...But this gives a rough idea of the new stuff each Champion brings to the table.

So, what's there to complain about here? Well. A lot. Some of these "new mechanics" shake up the norms in certain Champion classes in ways that aren't fundamentally healthy.

K'Sante, for example, trades the high durability and low average damage output Vanguard Tanks are typically known for and gets some downright silly dueling power in exchange - making him more of a potent melee threat than most Fighters.

Akshan is a Marksman/Skirmisher hybrid, whose main gimmicks are high sustained damage at range, but he also comes bundled in with one of the most powerful "fuck yous" in the game in the form of being able to revive teammates. And don't worry, I have a lot more to say about that that has to be saved for its own post.

And in other cases - as with Naafiri, who almost toes the line between Skirmisher and Assassin, Viego, who changes classes five times every teamfight, and Zeri, who frankly doesn't know what she wants to do - breaking the mold can often wind up with Champions who don't have cohesive identities or fit with their own playstyle that much.

Now, I'm not going to say that the design ethos is an inherently bad one - after all, it wouldn't be a good idea to just make every Skirmisher Tryndamere or every tank Leona, but I would argue instead that it's the scale of operation that's the problem.

If the design ethos is "have every Champion bring something new to the table", then inevitably the game gets bogged down in a power-creeping arms race to constantly have some new, Champion-defining, game-warping mechanic that needs to be extensively worked over to be remotely balanced. I'm looking at you, Akshan and Renata.

However, if we pare things down to a more granular scale, the ethos can actually be beneficial. "What can we bring to this role", or "what does this Class do, and how can we make a new spin on it?"

An example where that's done positively is with Nilah; a melee Skirmisher designed to be a bot-lane carry, in lieu of a more traditional Marksman. Riot has in the past been very eager to invite unusual bot lane combos - even suggesting the Wind Brothers, Yasuo and Yone, when Yone was released, and though melee Champions sometimes flex into bot lane, it's often an off-meta strategy that requires more specific coordination to play out.

Thus, designing Nilah, as a melee Skirmisher, specifically for bot lane play, makes sense and is beneficial to the game's health for diversifying play in that role and class. Her unique mechanics - Heal/Shield/XP Share - are a lot lighter than many other recent examples, possibly because her role as a melee bot laner is already unique enough as it is.

In point of fact, the Champions who I think execute well with their unique mechanics all work on that smaller scale;

Nilah, for the above mentioned.

Milio, for providing unique niche benefits as an Enchanter Support.

Bel'Veth, for enhancing a style of Skirmisher gameplay while also incentivizing a different approach to ganking as a Jungler with objective control.

Viego, for rewarding high-level, multiple-Champion game knowledge and execution with more success in teamfights, especially when your opponents lack in raw power.

Of course, even designing new things within the smaller scope of per-role and per-class has the possibility of screwing up - just look at Yuumi for an easy example - an Enchanter who can attach to an ally, which, while interesting in concept, is horrifically flawed in reality.

I don't expect Riot to consider switching off of their "everything has to be new and unique" mindset, but I can guarantee a great many Champions released under that ethos will suffer from Camille Syndrome (being overpowered at launch and requiring aggressive hammering down to get balanced), and the few that are genuinely good will be those that, in their design, ask the question;

"How can we put a new spin on this Class", or "What do we not often see in this role, and can afford to invite to it?"

Not to say that all of those would be good, but it is a solid basis of design that has produced more solid examples than bad ones.

[wreckedregent7]

Regent’s Ramblings - The Osteo Striga is Overpowered

Holy fucking shit Regent’s yammering about something that isn’t League of Legends! Is it a blue moon out tonight? Obviously if it were I’d have a positive winrate, but here we are.

Destiny 2 is a weird game for me to talk about, especially right now with the current story shenanigans, but I wanna talk about balance real quick, and something that isn’t really balanced. A weapon given pretty prominently in the Witch Queen expansion, the Osteo Striga is a really cool, unique SMG that is just, really hard to avoid running, and even harder to consider Vaulting for any length of time.

So, why is this weapon “overpowered”? Well, to put it simply, the only thing it doesn’t do well is crack shields with Match Game. But, keeping it to shorthand when I could go into excruciating detail isn’t my style, so, let’s talk weapon archetypes and encounter design.

Guardians have a pretty expansive arsenal of weapons, each with their own unique perks - depending on if you need precision, spread, crowd control, long range, short range, midrange, etc.; there is a weapon for your unique need.

Bundling weapon categories (not counting weapon archetypes, that’s its own can of worms) into simple paradigms, you kinda get something like this;

Short Range - Sidearms, SMGs, Shotguns, Swords, Fusion Rifles

Mid Range - Auto Rifles, Hand Cannons, Special Grenade Launchers, Heavy Grenade Launchers, Glaives, Machine Guns

Long Range - Rocket Launchers, Combat Bows, Scout Rifles, Pulse Rifles, Sniper Rifles, Linear Fusion Rifles

Precision - Sidearms, Hand Cannons, Combat Bows, Sniper Rifles, Scout Rifles, Pulse Rifles, Linear Fusion Rifles

Crowd Control - Special Grenade Launchers, Heavy Grenade Launchers, Machine Guns, Rocket Launchers

Sustained Damage - Machine Guns, SMGs, Auto Rifles, Scout Rifles, Hand Cannons

Burst Damage - Rocket Launchers, Sidearms, Special Grenade Launchers, Heavy Grenade Launchers, Glaives, Combat Bows, Pulse Rifles, Sniper Rifles, Linear Fusion Rifles

And these are just rough paradigms for each weapon type - but the general idea is that each weapon has a pretty solid niche. Auto Rifles are good for extended fights, HMGs and explosive weapons are good for clearing large groups of enemies, snipers and 4FRs are good for bursting down big targets, etc.

Now, to take a moment to talk about encounter design; a lot of encounters in most activities (aspirational or otherwise) tends to orient around a basic principle; flood an arena with chaff enemies (either melees, basic infantry, or a mix of the two), perch snipers or other pesky long-range attackers on the periphery, and maybe toss in a heavy unit or two to distract the Guardian from their main task.

Some encounters don’t require that much in the way of chaff enemies (look at any encounter in the Duality Dungeon; Cabal basic infantry are tanky enough that just 6 of them can be tough to chew through), but nevertheless, the problem isn’t typically with the quantity, but persistence. More adds will spawn in to keep you under pressure, and the more bodies you have shooting at you at a time, the more difficult any single task is going to become - god forbid you have a boss to dodge as well.

In this regard, you often have to kit yourself out very carefully; you want synergies within your subclass build, but you also want to be able to perform in the specific content. Cabal Commanders have Solar shields, better pack a Solar Weapon; War Hounds flood the room, I should bring an SMG or a crowd control weapon. I wanna do damage to the boss, gotta bring my 4FR.

But what if one weapon tackled multiple problems at a time, all without any real effort required? What if you had good sustained damage, crowd control, and damage mitigation rolled into one weapon?

Osteo Striga does exactly that.

Its bullets track targets roughly within your aim, and multiple consecutive hits on a target poison it. Deal multiple Precision Hits or kill something with it, and it does a small burst that poisons nearby enemies. If an enemy dies to the poison...You refill ammo from your reserves, and even overflow to quite a substantial amount.

So you can fire it haphazardly into a crowd of enemies, and the bullets will reliably hit. You’ll poison a few, maybe get in those precision hits, the whole group is poisoned now, and hey, you’ve got 110~ rounds in the magazine now, and have breathing room to assess your plan.

And because the poison deals damage over time, you can weave Osteo into your damage rotation on a boss - trigger poison, swap off to your main damage weapon, swap back, poison, swap off...And your damage becomes much more consistent.

And add onto that the general ubiquity of Overload Rounds on Auto Rifles and SMGs through the Artifact Mods - I don’t think I’ve seen a single season where Overload SMG/Auto wasn’t on the table - and you now have consistent damage, reliable add clear, AND the ability to lower an enemy’s damage output with casual spray-and-pray.

In the context of PVE content, the only reason you’d opt not to take Osteo Striga is if Overloading Champions aren’t on the table for the activity you jump into - and even then, unless you’re going solo (or have some other means to deal with multiple Champions at once), Osteo might still be your best general tool.

And it’s pretty telling that the only thing that can come close to competing with Osteo Striga in terms of damage and crowd control effectiveness is Witherhoard with Breach/Weakened Clear. And between the two, seeker bullets are much more broadly reliable than a puddle of Taken gunk, which leaves Witherhoard only capable of reliably competing for boss damage, as it’s even easier to work into a damage rotation thanks to its innate auto-loading holster, and that you can just plunk a target with it and resume your damage.

And the big problem is, I really don’t know what could be done about Osteo Striga to make it less egregious. Making it an Energy Weapon only risks exacerbating the problem, since a lot of Subclass builds involve synergy with same-element weapons. Similarly, adding Anti-Barrier or Unstoppable traits would only remove one facet of the problem.

I think the only thing that can really be done is to change something about the poison burst (either remove the on-death effect or the Precision hit effect; I think on-death would be better to prune) and also place a bit more of a strict cap on how many bullets you can stockpile from getting poison kills. Just something to tone down the extreme versatility of the weapon.

If you happen to play Destiny 2 and read this (I pray god you play D2 anyway, dunno who would want to read a bunch of nonsense about a game they don’t play), I am curious if any of y’all agree. Osteo Striga, to me, just feels way too powerful in any PVE context to ever not use.

[wreckedregent7]

Regent’s Ramblings - Kalista Deserves a GPU

Alternate title; “Kalista Deserves a Kit Rework”, because by god does Riot like making a bunch of special terms for basic things. You have VGU, GPU, ASU, Mid-scope Update (which I think is the term they actually use for GPUs now), but that’s beside the point.

Kalista, in concept, is fucking awesome. Kalista, in-game, is fucking awful. One of the legendary trio who is always in a weird balance state due to high-tier play (beside Ryze and Azir), Kalista executes on very little of her thematic in gameplay, and her gameplay is clunky, doesn’t work well with itself, and generally is just done better by most other Champions.

Now, let’s talk about the thematic aspect first; Kalista is the Spear of Vengeance, a unique shade from the Shadow Isles who some people, in their dying breaths, utter a bargain to - their souls in exchange for righteous retribution against their betrayers. Kalista then takes their soul, merging it with herself, and ruthlessly hunts down and kills the betrayer.

How does this dark bargain manifest in-game? Kalista forces a champion to bind to her for the rest of the game, and the only interaction that has is that if she and her bound ally attack the same target, Kalista does bonus %max health magic damage, and Kalista can use her ultimate to yank her Support out of any situation, and her Support can then launch themselves in any direction, potentially knocking enemies airborne if they collide with any.

Which, I’ll be fair to Riot on this, Kalista is a product of her time, and she is really fucking old by now - and nine years ago, mixing character thematic with gameplay wasn’t really high on Riot’s priority list.

Now, about the rest of her kit; it is confused, to say the least. Let’s start with her Martial Poise; your attacks have more pronounced windup, and when you attack (or cast Q), you can move during the windup to perform a short hop. Really cool kiting/advancing tool!

Except, Riot apparently doesn’t want it to be used for kiting, as moving away from where you’re throwing reduces the distance you hop. Which leaves you two main reasons to use Martial Poise - to chase, or to skirt around your target, in a tactic I’ll just call “orbiting”. But...With how Kalista’s kit on the whole works, you don’t want to use it to chase, either.

Comparing her to a Marksman who does want to chase and stay at close range; Graves has things that encourage you to chase your enemies down - his damage is spread across pellets, so the closer you are, the more damage you do. His dash grants him stacking Armor and Magic Resist, which get better the more aggressively you hound after your foes. Graves can disorient his opponents with his smoke screen blind and slow, giving him an easier time closing the gap on his target to do his big burst damage.

Whereas Kalista...Has weak damage, and relies on her bound teammate helping her or racking up multiple spears in one target with her Rend to deal respectable damage, has nothing to increase her defenses to encourage an aggressive, rushdown playstyle, and her only crowd control effects are the knockup from her ult (which similarly, requires a bound ally) and the slow from her Rend (which is designed to execute targets, which means you don’t ever want to see the slow.)

So you’re stuck using your passive to orbit around your prey, instead of chasing them down or kiting them to hell, but even that has downsides, as you can either run yourself into a corner where you can’t readily escape, or open yourself up to ambush due to poor positioning.

But hey, Kalista has a tool for dealing with the possibility of an ambush! She can send out her Sentinels like Ashe, except they’re way fucking worse. Sure, it has the same recharge rate as Hawkshot, but it doesn’t have half the range, for some reason has a longer cooldown between casts if you do have charges, and is eminently less effective at revealing anything.

So, let’s start by looking at Hawkshot; Global range, has a 5-second cooldown between casts, 90-50s recharge time, constantly reveals the area along its flight path every half-second, potentially spotting out roving Champions, and upon reaching its destination, creates a 1000-unit radius bubble that reveals anything except Stealthed units in the area.

Now let’s look at Sentinel; 1400-unit minimum range (so, effectively, from the middle of bottom lane out to around the river bush), 5000-unit maximum range (enough to reach around bottom-side Blue or Red buff), has a 30-second cooldown between casts, 90-50s recharge time, and has a cone of vision in front of it, will travel to the point you designated, then back to the nearest point from where you cast it, and back to the original point for three total laps. Afterwards, it disappears.

If it sees an enemy Champion, it will ping their location and chase after them for 4 seconds and then die. It has 2 points of health, and does not respond to taking damage. If an enemy Champion kills it, it gives them 10 gold.

And this is ignoring how clunky it is - sometimes it can take abnormally short patrol paths, make three laps in all of 15 seconds, and disappear well before the enemy Jungler even enters that side of the jungle, let alone approaches the Sentinel’s patrol path.

Ashe has a vision tool that gives her usable information about enemy positions or potential activity; Kalista has a vision tool that, at best, might get ignored by enemies as they move around it and deny you any information on their position, making it useless - and at worst, gives the enemy 10 gold.

But so what - Kalista’s an ADC Marksman/Skirmisher, she’s meant to lay on continuous damage at range and harry her foes.

Meant to.

The main problems being that the majority of her damage distribution is skewed towards her Rend and her W passive - sure, her Pierce starts doing respectable damage from Rank 3 onwards, but that still doesn’t help the problem by much.

Most of her damage is going to come from Rend - stacking spears in a target to deal a large chunk of damage all at once, even if subsequent spears after the first deal reduced damage. But because you can stack up to 254 spears in a person for maximum damage, no amount of damage reduction is going to inhibit the raw damage output Rend will have.

So, her attacks have to be weaker, her crit damage is lower (157% instead of 175%), and her Pierce has to be piddly weak to compensate for the damage she can rack up with enough spears in a single target. Especially since, on-kill, Rend refunds mana (up to its full cost at max rank) and resets its cooldown - and this triggers on killing ANYTHING with Rend; if you have multiple spears in one Champion, and a few in a minion, then kill the minion with Rend, you get the CD reset and mana refund.

So, really, Kalista is less of a skirmisher and more of an assassin - with her burst damage tied to extended combats where she can stack a fuckload of spears into a single target. Cool. But she’s also designed for the bottom lane, and has her whole “force your Support to be the other half of your kit for you” gimmick - which is the Passive part of Sentinel and Fate’s Call.

If you and your Support both attack the same target within 4 seconds of each other, whoever got the second hit deals 14-18% of the target’s max health as bonus Magic Damage. This is kind of nice for extended fights - which are Kalista’s forte - and it also gives Kalista hybrid damage to deal with tanks who might itemize specifically against her, but there are two problems;

First; it relies on your Support to be willing to coordinate attacks for the bonus damage, which isn’t going to happen often in lower skill levels, and second; the only scaling for the magic damage is the enemy’s maximum health, which increases by ranking the “Give 10 gold to your enemy” button, meaning even in situations where you want to tank bust as Kalista, you’d be better off either buying Kraken Slayer or playing Vayne.

All of this combined makes Kalista extremely weird and constantly at odds with herself - she has kiting tools, but isn’t incentivized to kite. She wants to shred people in skirmishes, but she does no respectable damage outside her E burst. She wants to work with her support, but gets no real effective reward for doing so. She has vision tools that don’t really work. She’s an assassin who needs time in a teamfight to ramp up and get her burst.

And all of this on top of what I mentioned earlier - she has a really cool thematic with solid potential for expression in gameplay that amounts to a one-sided dependency on another person to get the full extent of your kit.

And anything Kalista can do, another Champion can do it better. Quinn and Graves are better assassins, Graves is a better rushdown Champion, Ashe is a better kiter and vision expert, Twitch has a better “execute” burst, Vayne is a better tank buster... You get the idea.

I would love to see Kalista reworked to clean up the jank in her kit, and better synchronize her gameplay to her thematic of the restless spirit who hunts those who’ve wronged her soulbound charges.

It would be awesome to see her expand her teamplay abilities beyond just her Support - do away with the Black Spear soulbind mechanic and give her more freedom to choose who she “saves” (I mean, fuck, if Supports with Zeke’s Convergence or Knight’s Vow can change their priorities mid-game, why can’t Kalista?)

It could also be cool to have her embody “vengeance” better - getting a potent offensive boost when her allies die.

And, this thought might be considered blasphemous to some, but I especially think it would be kickass if she was refactored to work as either a Midlane roamer (a la LeBlanc or other such Assassins) or a Jungle Skirmisher - give her a mechanical incentive to roam around the map, giving her the opportunity to save her allies and/or hunt down the betrayers.

That more-or-less covers the gratuitous thoughtspill that struck me. I can only wonder if anyone would agree with me, but fuck it, these posts aren’t called “ramblings” for nothing.

[lyralit]

subtle ways to include foreshadowing

one character knowing something offhandedly that they shouldn't, isn't addressed until later

the crow rhyme

colours!! esp if like, blue is evil in your world and the mc's best friend is always noted to wear blue...betrayal?

write with the ending in mind

use patterns from tragic past events to warn of the future

keep the characters distracted! run it in the background until the grand reveal

WEATHER.

do some research into Chekhov's gun

mention something that the mc dismisses over and over

KEEP TRACK OF WHAT YOU PUT. don't leave things hanging.

unreliable characters giving information that turn out to be true

flowers and names with meanings

anything with meanings actually

metaphors. if one character describes another as "a real demon" and the other turns out to be the bad guy, you're kind of like...ohhh yeahhh

anyways add anything else in the tags

[lyralit]

(the crow rhyme)

one for sorrow,

two for mirth.

three for a wedding

four for a birth

five for silver

six for gold

seven for a secret never to be told

eight for a wish

nine for a kiss

ten a bird you should never miss

eleven for health

twelve for wealth

thirteen beware

the devil himself.

[theliteraryarchitect]

Writing Advice Posts: A Handy Reference Guide

(Updated 11/2022) Hey all, I’ve got quite a few writing advice posts & answered Asks on my blog at this point, so I’m making this reference guide to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Hope it helps!

Free Fiction Writing Toolkit

Get access to my free Fiction Writing Toolkit on my website.

Writing Advice Emails

Join my email list and get free writing advice emails sent straight to your inbox. You’ll also get early notification of any discounts or giveaways, and direct access to me to ask questions about writing. It’s totally free and you can unsubscribe anytime!

Books

The Complete Guide to Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is my comprehensive, step-by-step editing guide which you can purchase on my website :)

General

8 Ways to Improve Your Writing

10 Best Books About Writing Fiction

How to Spot Bad Writing Advice: 6 Red Flags to Look For

“Show Don’t Tell”? Not Always. Here’s When to Use Summary

How to start a story

More about starting stories

The first sentence

Weak words

Why Just About Every Published Book in the World Does 57 Things That Just About Every Book About Writing Tells You Not to Do

Creative Nonfiction Cliches to Avoid

How to Read Like a Writer

How to Write During a Pandemic

The Writing Process, Writer’s Block, & Inspiration

To all the Writers Suffering from Depression

How to Train Yourself to Write Faster

Just a friendly reminder that creativity is difficult to quantify.

Quick Writing Tip: Make a Note to Your Future Self in Your WIP

Quick Writing Tip: Take Notes!

Just a friendly reminder that writing is not always a linear process.

Quick Cure for Writer’s Block: Lower Your Expectations

Set Realistic Goals

Your Skills May Need Time to Catch Up to Your Vision

It’s Okay to Experiment and Be Weird As Fuck

Surround Yourself With Supporters

It’s okay to take a break.

Your First Draft is Raw Material

Getting into “The Zone”

Vomit Brain

Writing from Your Imagination vs. Reality

Dealing with Criticism

Getting Bored with Your Own Writing

Getting past a block

Doing research on topics you don’t have first-hand experience with

Journalling about your writing

How to Keep Yourself From Editing As You Write

Advice for Getting Over a Writing Slump

Dealing with Procrastination

How to Write Like You Used to, Before You Learned Stuff that Fucked Up Your Natural Creative Flow and Turned Your Writing into Boring, Stilted Garbage

Concept: Maybe Your First Draft DOESN’T Suck

How to Deal with Post-Writing Depression

Being Flexible With Your Writing Routine

Character Development

Creating Character Arcs with the DCAST Method

What Does Your Main Character Want?

How to Activate Your Passive Characters, One Verb at a Time

How to Use Description to Show Character Development

How to Create a Non-Cliched First-Meeting Scene

The “It Depends” Post

Shifting internal goals

When to identify your character’s goal

Writing about normal people with normal problems

If you’re worried about your character being too similar to someone else’s character 

Describing your characters without messing up your pacing

Story, Plot, & Pacing

Quick Plotting Tip: Write Your Story Backwards

Pause at the Threshold

How to Spot an “Info-dump”

Slowing Down the Pace of Your Story Without Boring Your Reader

Time Transitions

How to Create a Non-Cliched First-Meeting Scene

Creating Conflict

When & how to cut a scene

If you’re good at creating characters but awful at creating plot

When you’ve plotted your story but can’t get started

En Media Res

Writing to Your Ideal Reader

Deus Ex Machina

Foreshadowing

Finding an Ending

What to write between moments of conflict

Starting a story with waking-up scene

How to Know When You’re Done Outlining

Doing a Structural Overhaul on Your Story

How to Find an Ending from a Beginning

Editing Tip: How to Speed Up or Slow Down Your Pacing

Adding Stakes to Your Story

Description, Setting, & Worldbuilding

How to Make Your Descriptions Less Boring

How to Spot an “Info-dump”

Adding Descriptions to Intense Scenes Without Messing Up Your Story’s Flow

How to Use Description to Show Character Development

Worldbuilding: How much is too much?

Modeling your fantasy world from stuff in the real world

Internal Consistency

Utilizing Sound

How to Do World-Building Research

5 Tips for Writing Great Descriptions

Point of View

How to Choose the Right Point of View for Your Story

A Beginner’s Guide to Multiple Point of View

6 Questions to Ask About Your Point of View

How to decide if you should use first person or third person

More point of view basics

Head hopping

How to Head Hop without Head Hopping

What to Do When You’re Halfway Through Your Story and Realize Your POV Isn’t Working

3 Tips to Avoid Overusing “I” in a First Person Story

Dialogue

How to Improve Your Dialogue

3 Ways to Make Your Dialogue More Interesting

Starting a story with dialogue

Are You Using Too Much Stage Direction?

Which is Better: Exposition or Expository Dialogue?

Publishing & Sharing Your Work

7 Tips to Build an Audience for Your Writing

Pros and Cons of Self Publishing

Quick Publishing Tip: Don’t Bury Your Gold

How to Properly Format Your Manuscript for Publication

A warning about posting writing online that you intend to publish later

Advice for writers who are worried about people stealing their work or ideas

Getting feedback on your writing

How to Create a Cover Letter for a Literary Magazine or Journal

How to Make a 3D Mockup of Your Book for Free

Editing

10 Questions to Ask an Editor Before Hiring Them

Quick Revision Tip: Read Your Writing Out Loud

How to Keep Yourself From Editing As You Write

Cut the fidgeting

Are you suffering from -ing disease?

Are you Using Too Much Stage Direction?

What “Editing” Really Means

Quick Editing Tip: “That”

Quick Revision Tip: Read Faster

Editing Tip: Dialogue

Tips for Editing a Story

Should You Use a Contract When Hiring an Editor?

Quick Tip: Up & Down

Pre-Editing Checklist

Miscellaneous

The Difference Between a Semi-Colon and an Em-Dash

…if you find any broken links please let me know and I will fix them!

[wreckedregent7]

Regent’s Ramblings - Zeri Was Poorly Designed

Hot take - Riot made a mistake trying to design a Champion inspired by FPS games. Sure, FPS games are popular, and they needed something to generate some extra hype for their tactical Hero Shooter Valorant, but boy howdy did they screw it up.

Bear in mind, I’m thankful that they tried, making a Marksman unique is really goddamned difficult with the established mechanics of League, but creating a character to try and imitate the FPS Genre in League was a bad idea.

“Why, though?” Is probably the first and foremost question on anybody’s mind reading this. To which the answer is; FPS games and MOBAs are too far apart to be able to translate mechanics in any meaningful way from the former into the latter.

I don’t often dip into competitive PVP in shooter games, though I do dabble a bit in Destiny 2 from time to time. There are spaces of overlap here - minimap/RADAR for enemy awareness, some projectiles can be avoided with positional awareness/obstructions, you’re rewarded for aiming your own shots and tracking targets, but the smaller, more meaningful mechanics don’t come into play.

Elevation, crouching, restricting vision with cover, flinch, etc., none of those come into play in League. You can surprise an enemy by coming out of brush, but that doesn’t confer a consistent advantage - the enemy can enter the brush and deny you concealment, whereas having high-ground in a shooter can give you cover against counterfire.

And trade priority seldom comes into effect either, or rather the priority in League is more flexible than a shooter. With similar rates of fire, whoever gets the first shot in a shooter is liable to win the trade if their aim is consistent; failing that, numbers advantage trumps the first shot. In League, the playing field is completely different; trades are measured on a Champion-by-Champion basis with no real consistency.

Crowd Control can somewhat emulate flinch, in that it disrupts your opponents actions, but once again, we’re dealing with incomparable mechanics. Flinch throws off your foe’s accuracy, making them liable to miss, whereas crowd control stops or delays an enemy from attacking or approaching.

And these are all just the broad strokes, but this has little to do directly with Zeri. So what makes Zeri’s design bad - it can’t all just be based on mechanical incompatibility between genres, right?

Well, let’s start off by setting down one certain thing to understand why Zeri’s design failed; in order to emulate FPS gameplay, Zeri’s primary source of damage output cannot be her auto attacks.

This is an important rule for the design; because in League, auto-attacks (while they can be fired from a gun) are extremely hands-off, and with the right items, you could theoretically right-click an enemy Champion and take your hands off the keyboard and let the fight play out.

Obviously, the reality is that you need to adjust your positioning, use abilities to keep distance or disable your target or supplement your damage, but FPS games require you to aim at your target, and unless they’re running in a straight line, you can’t get away with holding down the trigger to kill them.

So, what to do about this? How do you emulate FPS gameplay if you can’t autoattack? Well, the answer is to take a recognizable mode of fire and layer that into an ability to serve as your primary damage source. And while there’s a lot more nuance to shooters, I’m going to distill things into three general archetypes;

CQB focuses on closing the distance with your foe and blasting them with a shotgun or SMG with low range; the Time-to-Kill (TTK) is usually very low for the risk of getting up close and personal. Riot already has Graves, though, so that’s a no go.

Assault is built around mid-range damage with burst-fire or automatic weapons, all typically rifles, though some machine guns work in the mix as well. TTK is usually moderate with good opportunities to find cover. Sustained fire would be hard to work with, which is probably why Riot went with the 7-round burst.

And lastly, Marksman traditionally uses semi-automatic weaponry, such as semi-auto rifles, snipers, or high-range revolvers to make accurate, high-damage shots from long distance. TTK is often low, though non-sniper weapons give the enemy more time to react.

Some games allow you to mix and match equipment to flex into other roles, and that seems to be the case with Zeri since her kit feels like it wants to blend all three archetypes together. She has decent mobility to get into close quarters, prefers medium range for her standard fire, but has a long range option.

And that’s...Entirely the problem. Her kit feels like it should be doing too many things at once - getting in close, hosing down enemies with a shower of bullets, backing off and picking a foe off with a well-aimed snipe...Except, again, FPS mechanics clash with League of Legends.

She’s not a CQB specialist, because she lacks durability in close-quarters engagements. Her assault capabilities feel pitiful at best, and she can’t stay light on her feet without a commitment to crit or using her Charged Auto Attacks. And she can’t snipe effectively because it relies on 1. being able to hit terrain, 2. an enemy being behind the terrain, and 3. the enemy not dodging the highly telegraphed attack.

The only thing she really emulates is the frantic scramble of being out of position in the middle of a gunfight - and that’s only because actually using her Burst Fire is taxing enough to make just laning - not even trading, but farming minions - feel more frantic and annoying than it ever should be.

At the end of the day, I think Riot should’ve focused on building Zeri’s kit more cohesively around one playstyle - her heavy focus on movement could lend itself to CQB, but then they’d have to kit her out as an assassin. She can keep some of her movement as an assault-oriented attacker, but her ult and W would have to be changed. Or they could focus more heavily on a highly accurate, aim-rewarding Marksman playstyle, lowering her mobility in favor of higher burst damage.

Either which way, the “inspired by FPS games” design was pretty heavily flawed from the beginning, and giving her a wallbang does not a good “FPS inspired” design make.