The Other End of the Quill Commentary

[Merchant of Venice]

All I need is probably to start learning some of the more advanced stuff as with many of my photos I wonder what I can do to improve it past various simple edits.

I think if you role-play your character it can get a lot more interesting, however it can also get boring quite quickly. If you get an ordinary character and you role play it might be a bit odd that he's already conquered all of the Italian Peninsular and so you are kind of limited in what you can do. Also, I think it holds a lot of appeal as a story writing game simply because it hands you deep characters which you don't really need to imagine backstories and stuff for whereas we AAR writers are used to creating deeper characters then ones CA gives us in Shogun 2, Rome etc.

[Hitai de Bodemloze]

I know there you to be a few GIMP courses here in the TWC university. If nothing else you could probably have a look through their old lessons and stuff.

Yeah there's definitely huge scope for it; I just found the actual gameplay got stale. With a game with such a large RPG element, I found myself more dictated by it - thus when the same stuff just kept happening over and over, it didn't feel right. Although Total War games give you a lot less to work with, you also have a lot more scope to do what you want. There are pros and cons on both sides I feel. All comes down to which game you enjoy more, since that will ultimately help determine the longevity of your AAR.

[Merchant of Venice]

The huge scale is one of the problems. There is also a believability problem. For instance, Shogun 2 revolves only around Japan and conquering it with any of the clans is historically (well most historically) plausible task as Japan was in a state of civil war at the time. On the other hand, in CK 2 or even like Medieval 2 and Empire and such, its kinda unbelievable for a small duke to take over the known world.

My advice for games like CK2 and EU4 is because of their massive scope, focus on a small part of the game, for instance, a civil war or a long, never ending war. This way, you can keep the storyline believable and if you're aiming for a narrative driven AAR it doesn't turn into "On this date, we pressed our de jure claim and on this date we assassinated this person."

[Hitai de Bodemloze]

Very true. At the very least I got the impression that Paradox games are paced a bit better; so even if you do conquer everything it won't be managed in a couple of generations.

True, true. CK2 does it better. EUIV you have a lot less to work with - in terms of characters and events. Yet I prefer EUIV far more than CK2. Spring Morning was actually originally intended to be an EUIV AAR, but it just seemed kind of pointless in the end - since the story I wanted to write was so completely separate from the game. I think that's an issue when you try to focus on a little window of a very broad game like that - at what point do you draw the line and just say that what you're writing has no relationship with the game? Games like EU move so fast that you're left filling in a lot of the gaps yourself, with characters you've either had to invent or draw from history, since the game doesn't provide many. It's a problem we've all encountered in our attempts to define what AARs mean to us. I'm not sure it stops the story being an AAR, but it's an interesting thing to think about.

[Tigellinus]

Hey, Hitai.

What was this Wushu Drama you spoke of in your last update?

Been having a Chinese History frenzy lately. Gobbled up history on the Three Kingdoms period.

Thanks

Tigellinus

[Hitai de Bodemloze]

It's called Painted Skin 《画皮》 It's really awesome! I'm struggling to not steal everything from it for Yokai, since it's so inspirational. Nothing super original, but just really similar to what I'm doing at the moment. All based on old Chinese ghost stories. There's a film version as well actually, just noticed.

I love Three Kingdoms stuff, feel free to give me a shout if you want to talk about it. You should check out the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games - kind of like the Chinese version of Total War.