Wheelchair warriors!

Foolish, foolish mortals and your obsessive need for representation, it can get so bad it hurts. Worry not dear reader, for in the world of fantasy, where at least I go to escape reality, even a wheelchair bound person can become a lean, mean, murder machine. With a couple of simple steps even you can become a bona fide killer. I have realized that people are stuck with what they are, instead of what they could be. Take Dungeon & Dragons for example, a world of imagination, adventure and debatable rules to live and die by. In most cases a cleric can heal pesky things like non functional feet and useless limbs. Miracles, gods and wishes are very much real. Unless your stuck in Dark Sun, then you're most likely dead before you begin.

First of all let's take a closer loom at a wheel chair. It is a lightweight chair, attached to two big wheels and at least two small wheels for turning. Which allow a person to use their arms to push the contraption forward. A modern one is either electric, or made a light weight as possible. However in more primitive settings, it will most likely be made of wood, especially the wheels, thus it becomes quite heavy in the long run. Though that also depends on skill of the artisan crafting the chair.. The lack of rubber and inflated wheels will also make it very uncomfortable to move around. On top of that, getting around dungeons is going to be very hard indeed. Especially when the terrain gets bad. Unless you get really creative, or embrace cyberpunk Caterpillar style threads are out of the question. Not to mention the lack of an engine to propel the contraption in any direction.

However in Dungeons & Dragons, only an uninspired pheasant think about using wheels. Even though a cart is cheap to buy and almost free if stolen. Though in 5e a donkey is act actually cheaper than a cart, which it is most likely capable of pulling. If you really want to be pedantic, modify a wheelbarrow they're most likely worth less than five gold. However let's forget reality for a while, for what is fantasy? But a way to have a merry time and escape from the rules of our reality. Granted being a bad-ass in a wheelchair does have its merits, more on that later.

The most basic thing any sensible adventurer can do is to acquire a mount. Such as the donkey I mentioned earlier. From my personal experience, a donkey is a smooth ride on a stubborn equine, that has a low ground clearance and high carry capacity. Camels on the other hand, now those are absolutely terrible and that is me speaking from personal experience. Like I said, let's forgo reality for a while. Take a giant spider as an example, now there is an interesting mount. Especially for someone that want to strike fear into men and monsters, have decent defensive capabilities and being able to traverse rough terrain. With some creative rule abusing, it can probably be equipped with a chair, or a saddle, then attach zephyr horseshoes. Suddenly you've got yourself a flying spider. Granted a good mage can learn to fly through magic. Or just get a comfy flying broom with a seat on it. After all in Dungeons & Dragons walking is the least interesting way of locomotion. Personally I would get myself a hippogriff or another terrifying beast, that can actually fly. Even if it has to be fed half a cow every day. Essentially the creature is fast and ferocious and capable of defending itself. Which technically can either attack on it's own turn, or use one of riders actions instead. It depends on the rules really.

For the more refined gentle person there exist a more classy alternative exist. The portable chair with two poles attached, which has to be carried by two fateful servants. It is a simple medieval lord favorite, extra bonus points if it comes with a human footstool and a troubadour. A chariot is also a very valid example of a true and tested transport. Unlike a wagon it is small, fast and light weight. But it does leave the beast of burden exposed to attacks. A typical horse is unfortunately very easy to kill, due to low health and few ways to attack. Since most monsters are bloodthirsty killers out for blood. A life giving fluid most horses have a lot of. Unless the clever player dives in to Mordekaines emporium and dig up some fancy figurine that turn into a mount for a time.
Particularly evil characters will use skeletons and the reanimated dead to move them around the word. There is always the mind control option, thralls and various infernal beings.

Let us look at the generic wooden wheelchair, which is lighter than steel and cheaper than fancy lightweight material like mithril or admantium. It will be fairly heavy and rather uncomfortable to actually move around, plus oak wheel have terrible shock absorption. Essentially the user would feel every bump in the road and a pillow only absorbs so much of the impact. It might be fantasy, but gravity still exist. Combine this with armor and it will get even worse to push around, because a high armor class will make up for the lack of dexterity. Because using the arms a lot makes a person strong, unlike a sissy rouge skulking around in the shadows. For extended reach a polearm is an excellent choice, especially with attack of opportunity, then very few things can get behind the wheelchair warrior. An additional design feature that comes highly recommended most would not think of is some kind of rest for the weapon, when switching between moving and fighting.

 Since this build will be heavy and unwieldy, some sort of servant is needed to push the wheelchair. A human is a cheap and unreliable choice, but at the start of an adventure that is the most likely the only option. But a human is very weak and most likely very squishy. The more advanced and stubborn wheelchair bound adventurer will invest in a golem. A simple construct that follows basic commands and is good at manual labor, it can also crush smaller creatures and defend itself. A war forged one is a couple of steps above that and most likely a player character, which would lead to some amazing synergy. Essentially the wheelchair warrior wields a sharp pointy sick and a shield, while the golem pushes the player into into battle. Yes, I am imagining wheelchair jousting hero here and you're welcome.

Outside of Dungeons & Dragons, there is settings such as Mage the awakening. Where a friend of mine made a version of Xavier. A bald mage incapable of walking. In combat he floated around several swords and a shield for protection. But this fellow I a clever little munchkin and made the wheelchair capable of transforming into an exoskeleton. Suddenly the man could miraculously walk into battle, despite having no movement stat.

That is all I have for now, Zaceron signing out

Game ballance, what is that?

Game development

Hello I'm your host zaceron and today I will look at

The strategy game conundrum, a convenient alliteration, which encapsulate this complaint. I both love and loathe strategy games. Be it turn bases or real time. Yes I am a bit rubbish at them, more like mediocre really. However this does not stop me from playing the hell out of them. Especially command and conquer is a favourite series of mine. Regardless I will not deal with multilayer here though. This is purely from a gameplay perspective, mainly campaign modes and pre made scenarios. Such Fan made missions or from the side of the developers.

I really, really enjoy the general challenge in zero hour, but the base game is fairly easy and a lot of interesting content was cut. The mod shock wave restored most of it and then some blowing new life into the game. A couple of triggers did break though making some maps a tad too easy.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is contra 009, which overhaul the entire thing and makes it hard, no not hard, a slog, you know like waddling through a Marsh wearing soggy sneakers caked in mud, during a torrent of rain. A sodding hailstorm of endless waves of units, super weapons and artillery, the kind units are incapable of returning fire, unless baby sitting takes place. But the moment I dare to split push, or put my attention elsewhere for a split second, everything goes belly up, like a dead fish in water after tossing dynamite into the water.

A typical scenario goes like this.

I pick a general to play and plump down a base as quickly as humanly possible. While also get a good economy going and a defensive wall.

Then I hunker down for at least twenty to fourtyfive minutes, getting my special powers online and unlocking super weapons, before I'm bombed back to the Stone age by the enemy super weapons.

Which leaves very few legit and efficient strategies for taking out the enemy without being overwhelmed, like a roach on an anthill. The normal maps offers a fair enough challenge I suppose, once I find the best strategy. However there are three bosses, which I scale from doable, just a bellend and oh god why? What where you thinking? Needless to say, the USA boss is a straight forward affair. GLA boils down to cleaning a toilet with a cotton swab, while being swarmed by gnats the size of tanks. However China is an entirely different beast. Because she comes with more artillery, more units and there is no convenient choke point on the map to make up for the insane income infrastructure needed to survive long enough to exterminate Liang. To top it all off, there are at least three scripted reinforcement events and her artillery barrage general power.

About the only way to have a decent chance is to trash each command center and the dozers, within the three different bases. A course of action that is either ridiculously easy, or insanely hard. It depends entirely on the general. Instead of a fairly fair, fun and challenging map. It becomes becomes a quagmire, where nothing is fun and everything is just tedious to the max. Easy mode is terrible enough, but there are two more difficulties. Ironically enough the normal generals becomes a joke in comparison.

I do not know how to balance this kind of skewed difficulty though, but it happens with an irritating frequency. I do believe it often has to do with fans whom play the game to death, setting the challenge rating based on their skill, instead of the general skill level of people not that heavily invested in the game.

Zaceron signing out

A bit about manga, phillestines and art

Those who claim that the Japanese manga art direction is not real art, lazy and what not are filthy pillestines. Anyone that has ever dabbled in comics and have had proper art education, knows how much effort it takes. In order to draw a comic several things is needed.
Such as a story, or some sort of joke. These are not very easy and only a few people can keep it up.

The next step is interesting characters, whom can play of each other. Or just borrow the generic japanese stereotypes. You know red hair for temper, while blue hair is cold, emotionless and chill.

Then the character needs an unique look, everything from eyes, to hair, color, clothes and accessories is important. Hell eve  school uniforms are somewhat customized in manga and anime. But school related everything, or sport sure is a time saver. Besides they say write what you know. Probably why almost all anime schools look practically identical.

Have you gotten past the previous steps? Excellent.

First the story board has to be sketched out, unless it's two people just standing still and pretty much everything is just clever, or not so clever dialogue. The newspaper approach is prettymuch just copy paste and requires carry little actuall effort to do. Yes a story needs to flow, and once the story board has been jotted down, the next step starts.

Planning the panel layout and sketching all the detail into the panels, while also keeping dialogue in mind.

Then comes inking, be it digital or traditional. An arcane skill that takes decades to master and a steady hand to apply.

By now I forgot to actually make sure the characters look consistent and anatomically correct in every single frame.

Did I mention coloring, that is fairly optional. Most japanese artist use tones most cases, instead of crosshatching, or a mix of both. Yet another skill to take into consideration.

Yes, making any kind of comic, regardless of style and country is a time consuming process. Anyhow, back to my main point of this random ramblig rant.  There exist an artistic elite out there, one which loathe the Japanese art style most of us prefer to as anime, or manga. Words which means cartoons and comic in Japanese. Everything can and will be labeled, then put in nice boxes after all.

The biggest gripe these art critics have from the general look of things is the unrealistic faces. Yes most manga faces is a highly stylized take on a human boxing. Let's face it, many popular characters from the east are  drawn with concave eyes. Lenses that somehow bends inwards. Which opens up another can of worms. Since I have no idea how these creatures sees the world. If they can se anything at all that is. The hair is also a dead ringer and breaks the rules of reality, due to the practicality of keeping it consistent and stylish.

Once a person gets past the face, they will hopefully notice that practically every professional artist drawing manage and animating anime, has studied human anatomy and mostly follows the traditional rules. Yes, practically every anime human is anatomically correct and is mostly kept consistent throughout the story. Boobs is the exception to the rules though, but even those can be sensible at times. It's quite impressive that most artist does this every day and somehow makes around thirteen pages every week. I'm proud if I can do one each week, and even then I want to burn the paper. So as far as Asian artist go, they are exceptionally skilled at what they do, more than most art teachers and critics are.

Now, if the idea is to draw still art and a kid is preoccupy drawing badly made Yaoi ar the back of the classroom. Getting g angry and demeaning is not the way to go. Encouragement works better, along with positive criticism. Put it this way,a skilled japanese artist will find the best reference pictures possible of whatever that has to be drawn, then replicate it to the best of the artist ability. The trick is to the get the anime obsessed child in the class to be that dedicated at conveying what the person sees, instead of using the unreliable human memory.

http://shardworld.home.blog

Zaceron signing out

Delete Master Yi

Some hate Teemo, some hate Katarina, I seldom hate, but I'll make an exception for master Yi in League of Legends. A game I have played for a long time and will not likely be stopping anytime soon. Within the game roster there are several hundred to pick from and they come in many shapes and sizes. Some have a high skill dealing, others have none. Like the yellow multi lense helmet wearing sword boy known as Yi. His main skill is to cut things with a sword many times, followed by becoming untargetable, while zipping between 5 enemies. The unremarkable meditation that increases his armor, turns him immobile and returns some health, which often saves him from a certain death. Lastly there is highlander, which makes him run really, really fast, while being immune to slow. 

The problem with this skillset is that it is very boring and requires very little skill to use. Which means that a bad Yi, the most common kind runs into the enemy, spam keys then die. Tower dive at level one, then expire. Run into a team of five, then croak, or a decent one, the type to pentakill my whole team. Yes, Yi will either feast or famine. The really big challenge with this character is that the simple kit makes the player feel empowered, brave and full of suicidal overconfidence. A slow and insidious killer, which only works because no one brought any kind of stun, snare, taunt, or any other ability that actually stops him dead in his tracks. Yes I dare say that from iron to gold, people are too incompetent to actually stop a fast running man from gutting them alive. Especially in a team fight where he can clean everyone's clock by spamming q, until he can use e again, becoming untargetable. Mind you he can still die from indirect damage and damage over time, but this is so rare that it is a moot point. At this point when I play ranked badly, I have to ban either Yi or Yasuo to have a decent chance at victory, due to everyone being to dumb to live. So, yes I hate Yi, and now you know why and because I'm online I have a perfect place to vent, while practicing my writing skills. Feel free to check out my fantasy s story that I update monthly as well. I try my best to edit it, but I still mess up the grammar here and there

Have a good day.

shardworld.home.blog

Zaceron signing out

The latest lie from US

I can only think one thing when I see the reviews of The Last Of Us 2 and that is, every one is lying. All the toxic  media outlets are busy kissing the buttocks of a three eyed donkey on drugs. In my personal opinion a perfect game does not exist and will likely never do. As an example I really love the  Command and Conquer series too death and have all the games, aside from the crummy mobile one. These games are fun and has a lot of good stuff, but the pathfiding is atrocious. Originally all units would literally hug hills until they got to the location. Combine this with units having various speed and size, suddenly I'm stuck in a traffic jam. Back to my opinionated oppinions about the various journalists who has played The Las Of Us 2 before it came out. They might love the game, but is it perfect? Not likely, but that does not matter to these fools, because they have no integrity and are dishonest. I can only assume it has to do with a game actually introducing a transgender character in a prominent role, and that the player plays as girl out for revenge I presume. Now that is fair enough, I do not care about that one bit. However my beed is with how much he trusted media outlets are lying to my face, be it digital, or traditional new outlets. Unfortunately this is nothig new, such outlets lives on outrage and judging by my visceral response to the fake facade they have erected around themselves, the business model is succeeding.

Anyone that has actually followed the leak debacle online and the silly number of DMCA takedowns issued by Sony and Naughty Dogs should realize that there is very little honesty involved in the release of this game. Due to the console exclusive nature of the game I can't really tell if the game itself is worth the praise. So this is just my opinion on how perfect this game could be, is unfortunately flawed. But unlike the rest of the activist on the web, I am at least honest about it and that is much more important than getting a doggie bag with treats from a corporation. 

On a side not, I really need to get my stuff properly edited at some point.

Zaceron signing out