If you've ever seen Kitchen Nightmares, you've run into the same problem I have. The show is fine, whatever, but certain episodes would have been seriously elevated if Gordon Ramsay had been allowed to just take out some of those restaurant owners. I can't be alone in thinking that, right?

Last year we at CYS brought in the New Year with Wholesome Dog's Birthday Adventure. This year... this.

Disclaimer: This gets a little rancid.

Super Bonus Challenge: See if you can deduce which page of this storygame was written by Sent!

I discovered a thing that JJJ wrote. It told me all about this quiz-making shit. I followed the instructions, even though I disobeyed JJJ's opening lines by starting this WITHOUT a basic knowledge of any of that weird scripty shit he recommended. This was low-effort as all hell, don't ever use the classic editor for anything you care about.

AQIMFTBHOIA DLC: THE UPDATE DESCRIPTION

Since some of my questions contained outdated information and I needed to make sure everything was in working order, I unpublished this thing. Since I understand this to be something that generally fucks with ratings, I'm gonna add 5 more questions so you have more of a reason to rate it again. Also, every question now has a stupid answer. These are the ones that are so blatantly wrong/non-answers that they give you negative points... Some are better hidden than others. Aside from most of the endings being revamped, there are two new endings! One is for people who're spectacularly awful at quizzes, and the other is an ending for people who go off the beaten path... By being really  bad at quizzes.

No, I will not add a thing at the end that shows your score. If you want to know your score, you have to dick-measure in the comments yourself. Drill Sergeant Nasty has always been an accurate barometer for how well you did, in my eyes.

this is a loosely satirical and somewhat more gamey version of the game that isn't really a game. thanks to the creative juices of Bardockwest. The ORIGINAL: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/randomly-walk

In a strange world where World War I hasn't even happened yet, Law and order is the only accepted form of justice. Until NOW.

Enter Mild-Mannered Clifford T. Boot, 2nd class passenger on the world-famous vessel, the Titanic. Haunted by the shadows of his war-torn past, Clifford bought a ticket to the United States of America looking for a new life. But trouble always finds Clifford, and when an innocent widow and her child are kidnapped by a cult dedicated to resurrecting Napoleon, he has no choice but to return to his old ways and save them... Because for some motherfuckers, mass tragedy doesn't come soon enough.

Like the lights in a building clicking off one by one, the bustle of the main city thoroughfare seemed to fade to silence as  thunderous trumpet calls cut through it like a knife. Pedestrian and kiosk alike began to clear out of the way as, aside from the great brass tower, another shadow now darkened the market square.

Pulled by an enormous floating nautilus like a carriage, seemed to be an entire palace-- All columns and onion-domed rooves, festooned with vibrantly painted bas reliefs. Detailed figures, with motifs of winged serpents and elephant heads. Its gold leaf accents had begun to flake away from the wind and sand of the trip here, and the shimmering white beneath would reveal that the entire building had seemingly been carved from a single piece of nacre the size of a trireme. All this and seemingly more, hovered over the marketplace of the City of Brass on the mists of a white cloud.

The trumpets ceased to play. Jingling chains and screaming hinges now heralded the arrival of a massive unfolding staircase of marble and gold-plated steel. A parade of figures in similarly gilded armor marched down the steps in a great martial parade, cuirasses shaped like muscular torsos, and helmets with the leering, snarling faces of lions. When their feet touched the ground they threw themselves down upon it in prostration, their fanged helmets causing a cacophony against the street cobbles. Like a shimmering blue tongue tattooed with byssus thread, a silk carpet poured itself from between the columns of the palace, down the steps, and over the bowing men. A set of evidently more elite guards, with burgundy capes and slashed sleeves and pantaloons over their limb armor, marched out to carefully weigh the rug down to the shape of the steps with heavy golden poles. Only then, with long, curl-toed shoes, did someone dare to walk on it.

"Hear ye, sorcerers of Keleron!" Came the booming voice of a man dressed in a truly preposterous amount of red and gold fabric. His clothes barely held the shape of a man, and swelled out from his body like the feathers of a terrified owl. His hat was a conical tower of velvet, with strings of precious stones along the slight brim to hide his face. He was accompanied down the steps by censer-swinging priests of some kind, who averted their gaze from him as he spoke, "You are about to find yourself in the presence of the most serene, the most pious, the most magnificent Emperor-- His Excellence, The Luminous One, Heir to the Sun, Liege of the Eight Winds..."

The herald's list of titles, evidently memorized by heart, lasted much longer than his trip down the stairs, over the backs of the soldiers, and finally to earth. He was still listing them off when the first pair of giants appeared.

8 muscular women-- Or so their armor would have us believe-- Each no shorter than 7 feet tall, carried a brass sphere the size of a small house on their shoulders like a palanquin. No matter how the rods tilted as they moved down the steps, the ball between them remained perfectly upright, suspended between two free-rotating rings.

The herald was still listing titles as the giants stepped to the side, off of the backs of the small guards, and set the sphere down completely. The rods tilted to steady the ball somewhat-- But what really seemed to hold the ball in place was the miserable men squirming out of the way underneath it, desperately clutching it with their bodies through the carpet like fingers from behind a mitten.

It was then that the doors on the front of the sphere opened, and revealed a human figure draped in purple cloth, on a cherrywood throne. His face was obscured by an expressionless golden mask, with many prongs in the shape of the sun's rays. And that motherfucking Herald was still going.

Perched on the lap of the festooned figure and spilling turbulently from its lap in a cascade of emerald eyes, was a peacock. It seemed... Not exactly appreciative, but not at all to mind being clutched and scratched like any housecat by the emperor's seven-fingered hands, banded by dozens of quietly clinking rings.

The herald has, by now, really worked himself up, "THE MERCIFUL, THE MAGNIFICENT, THE UNIFIER OF THUNDER VALLEY, THE DESTROYER OF THE HEPATIZON LEAGUE, THE TRUE AND RIGHTFUL EMPEROR OF LEGUMIA! LONG HAS HE REIGNED, MAY HE REIGN FOR A CENTURY MORE!"

The Herald was silenced with a single snap of the Emperor's fingers.

"Are we forgetting something, Lloyd?" The emperor's voice echoed from behind his mask, yet somehow projected out into the crowd assembled.

The herald's booming voice trembled with fear, "I... I pray not, my supreme liege."

"It seems you neglected to tell them who the True and Rightful Emperor of Legumia is!" The emperor leaned toward the herald on his chair, resting a metal cheek on an enclosed, gangly fist, "My name should be on the lips of every mortal under the firmament. This is most unprofessional!"

As if startled by the very word 'unprofessional', the Herald yelped and fell to his knees, "I BEG OF YOU A THOUSAND PARDONS, YOUR EXCELLENCY! I HAVE FAILED YOU! I AM SO USED TO HEARING YOUR NAME ECHOING THROUGH THE HALLS OF OUR HOMELAND AND CARVED INTO THE WALLS OF OUR TEMPLES, I THOUGHT THAT THESE PEOPLE HAD ALREADY KNOWN! SO SPLENDID WAS THE CITY OF BRASS THAT I HAD MOMENTARILY FORGOTTEN THAT I WAS BUT A VISITOR TO THIS MOST BACKWARDS BARBARIAN PLANET, A STAR'S GRASP AWAY FROM YOUR SERENE RULE! I HAVE FAILED YOU AS ONLY THE LOWEST COULD HAVE FAILED! I AM NOT FIT TO BE YOUR JESTER!"

Somewhere in the folds up on folds of his clothing, on one of the golden chains of his waist, the herald found a wickedly curved dagger in an ivory sheathe-- And reached up under the beads to cut his own throat, spilling blood all over his finery.

"Jesus Space-Christ," The Emperor huffed at this display, and with a dismissive wave of his hand, (and a stifled, half-second scream of agony from the dying man) Lloyd was engulfed in hissing blue flame until naught remained of his entire person but a smear of ash, "Have that man's family notified of their status as nobility in my court, because Lloyd's such a fucking Drama Queen."

The Emperor turned back to the crowd assembled, "Sorry about that, everyone. Where were we? Ah, right. My name, as you may or may not have heard, is Saratoga Spleench IV. My dynasty has reigned over Arda for seven generations! Twelve, if you count the non-consecutive emperors, but I didn't come here to brag. I need help, and the one who helps me shall be rewarded handsomely!"

"There is a magisterial house in my court I have come to despise. The Lord Governor of Pukklwyd and his sons are backstabbing social climbers to a man. I know, most courtiers are, but there's no lengths they will not sink to in their harebrained grasps for any amount of power among their peers. They compromise the peace between my most powerful vassals and their delegates, and frivolously spend the resources of their own entrusted provinces on campaigns of flattery and corruption. I know not what will satisfy them, save for my own throne... But if that's the case, they have no idea what they're after. Also, they're quite ugly, and I wish them gone as a matter of principle.

Technically, it's within my right to revoke their titles right out, but because they were elected by a council of their subordinates, I fear it might lead to furor in the realm. My plans for this world are many-faceted, and to spend any time crushing rebellion in my own states would set back my intricate statecraft by fifty years! It's a real pain in my ass!

Aggressive action is right out-- What I need is a gift, to reward House Pukklwyd for their dutiful service. A spiritually sacred creature befitting of my station-- But so expensive to take care of that they cannot accept it, for if they do, it will financially ruin them and make their family unfit for peerage. Something so precious, that if it died in their care, it would be legally and morally permissible for any of their numerous rivals to kill the Lord Governor for the offense. And if they should refuse their emperor's gift..."

The emperor shrugged, and made a coy, inarticulate grunt to the tune of "I-dunno!" as the priests below started setting up a small funerary incense in the center of Lloyd's bone-shadows.

The bird fellow eyed his slobbering steed with some concern. He couldn't just try to pawn off a vilewolf twice in a day, eventually it was going to figure out he was trying to get rid of it and become quite upset with him. But surely there was a creature he could pawn off to this guy in a hurry. He might not know magic, but he did know the adventuring market-- And the hunting market. It was what got him into this mess in the first place. He hurried off again, and eventually came back dragging a large cage on wheels, covered by a tarp.

"Boy, I can tell you're new to the Dark Lording business, and let me tell you-- What you're probably thinking of, something like a 'final boss', big setpiece creature that can withstand an entire six-man party of experienced warriors and wizards wailing on it for 6-7 sets of roughly six-second intervals... Out of your price range. And I mean that with absolutely no offense to you! But let's say, best case scenario, you can afford any asking price, and you take a dragon home today. A brand new one, no old scars or secret weaknesses, no familial curses, no prophecies about how a little boy from a village it burned down was destined to shoot it out of the sky. Just a normal dragon, hatched by a little old druid who only used it to torch the neighboring wheatfields on Sundas. First of all, you're gonna need to make sure you have the SPACE for a monster like that. So I hope there aren't any big halls you were hoping to rennovate for a minions barracks or a grand throne room or a library of evil tomes or something like that. THEN you're most likely going to have to buy enough treasure for that thing to guard and/or sleep on. Normally when you already have a monster like that, that sort of thing just accumulates naturally as a ton of adventurers die in your dungeon. But it's clear that you don't, so you're going to have to pay for it out of pocket or the thing is probably just going to try and migrate to a richer dungeon! Now let's say you have all that handled-- You must make sure it's either not too smart, or you have some kind of magic object that controls the beast, because otherwise it's going to decide eventually that it's not really your dungeon anymore, isn't it? The dragons that can talk are the worst ones for that kinda shit. I've seen it befall many a young ner-- Necromancer like yourself! And then, after all that, you have to factor in the monthly cost of feeding something that big! And let me tell you, I've wandered to the end of enough wretchedly bare tombs, utterly DEVOID of ancient riches, to know that a cow, maybe two or three goats if you're lucky enough to get a mid-size dragon-- Is a terrible monthly cost to reckon with when you're already struggling to pay off Wizard School loans."

The bird man reached for a corner of the tarp, and yanked it down, revealing a shimmering shadowy shape with a pair of baleful golden eyes.

"You don't want a big setpiece monster that comes with all the fuss-- Most likely, you also don't wanna have to clean up after a climactic final battle with high-level adventurers every week. What you need is something simple, cheap, independent, that can take care of itself, and furthermore, something effective. You're not gonna be receiving shitty reviews from adventurers anymore, because THEY'LL ALL BE DEAD!"

The enormous cat-- Because that's certainly what it was, seemed to take issue with the sudden loud noises and gesticulation from the birdman, but rather than lash out like a normal leopard or something of the like, it calmly stood up-- And a fucking SWORD flew straight at the barbarian's penguinous head with the speed and certainty of an arrow. Only because the barbarian seemed to be expecting an attack like this did it miss, and embed itself loudly in the cobbles next to him. A circle of blades hovered around the beast like a slowly rotating halo.

"What you see here is an apex predator of the mysterious occident-- Much like a tiger, it lives in the trees, walks silently without tracks, and eats whatever it pleases. But it's more terrifying than even a tiger! The favorite meal of this creature is a kind of small water-dragon, which is armored all over its body. But it is least armored in the back of its neck, which has to move for it to be able to open its mouth. This beast hunts with such horrifying precision that it can see this beast even as it camouflages itself in the water, and drop down from the branches above to crunch its spine in its jaws! This one in particular was born with completely black fur, so that it blends in with the shadows. It was also enchanted by a foolish wizard, who saw fit to give the animal the ability to conjure and hurl swords with its mind. So you know it's had a lot of experience fending for itself in a dungeon without needing much maintenance." The barbarian was grinning like an insane person by this point, "This is how you get a dungeon with reputation! The reviews might drive people off at first, but now that people think the place is easy pickings, you're going to have hundreds of newbies disappearing in droves! If there are any survivors, they'll be telling a different story! All adventurers will live in fear of the |Panther| |Of Swords|!"

*Creature, Suffix, and another suffix please because it seems I keep getting Anthraxus's cards

Catching the sound of a little brass bell hanging from his belt, the birdman quickly left the marketplace, before arriving sometime later with a tremendous, lumbering thing snuffling and snorting as it attempted to get out from inside the net he was dragging it around in. Eventually, Sent procured his dagger and cut the beast free, releasing... A confused, but docile animal. It appeared, at first, to be some kind of enormous monkey with three legs-- Two armlike ones, and a single leg behind, all ending in clawed feet. It had shaggy fur that sparkled with droplets of water, repelled from its surface, with wide eyes, a kind of silly, gormless smile, and a bulbous nose.

"Lo and behold, the Amabiko Of the Rivers!" The barbarian said, "I caught him in my net just hours ago. Legend has it that these things come out of the water to deliver prophecies of good fortune followed by horrible curses-- But you can protect the area from the horrible curses merely by copying down what they look like and distributing the pictures everywhere. Surely you've all seen a drawing of one at some point! At any rate, he seems like a nice enough... Thing. A little smelly, I suppose. But it might help dispel your daughter's curse if you had your court artist draw a picture of this thing and mail it to everyone you know. It couldn't hurt!"

"I'll even do one for you, free of charge!" The barbarian quickly began thumbing through the belongings of the still-face-down wizard he'd hit earlier, hastily scrawling a picture of the creature onto a blank scroll, "Doesn't it make you feel better already? I think the more giant three-limbed primates people draw and distribute, in general, the better the vibes will be."



*Creature, Suffix, and I didn't use a second suffix, but from what somebody else played it seems we have a duplicate so I'd like another to replace it

The cloaked figure nodded ominously at the request, and its outstretched hands began to glow as it conjured--

A wooden THUNK noise, and a familiar voice saying, "HAH! Gotcha bitch!"

The light went out of his hands, and the wizard collapsed face-first onto the ground as he had been struck in the back of the head by a |Pinewood| |2x4| |of Mage-Slaying|! The muscular figure standing over him was clearly no sorceror, but a superstitious penguinite barbarian who had evidently tracked him here. His eyes widened, however, at the realization that he had tracked this wizard into the proverbial belly of the beast. Or in this case, the back of one. Here he was, hunting a wizard, all the way to the unholy center of FORBIDDEN, WITCHCRAFT COMMERCE! And he'd just clubbed a sorceror in the middle of a public square like some kind of troglodyte. This was fucked up. How was he meant to get out of this one!? There was only one way out. He'd have to pretend to be one of these beast-conjurers to throw off suspicion. But how would he come up with an animal for this?

Quickly, the bird-man pulled his hood over his head and waved his fingers around mysteriously, pulling on what seemed like the chain for a hound until a massive unseen shape began parting the crowd he had just appeared from like a wagon rolling through a cornfield.

"Men of the caravan! I presume you are all worldly folk who have heard tales of the direwolf. A far northernly beast, twice the size of a normal wolf, what devours men. May I present to you, a beast even MORE far northernly, that's even bigger, and eats bears! I was able to ride him all the way to this town, and followed his nose to track down this... Illusive witch-projection of myself, that I knocked out here."

What revealed itself was a mountainous, nasty creature that looked for all the world like a gray wolf stretched, squashed, and otherwise contorted with massive sinews and superfluous skin, into a great slimy-faced bulldog the size of a pony. The birdman barbarian tentatively reached through the almost visible cloud of dog breath to gently pat the creature's head, "Gents, I present to you, the VILEWOLF! Please take it with you."

|Descriptor| |Creature|

That's pretty funny that you've allowed a score number that I guarantee most players don't even see, or look at if they do get to that point, dictate your idea of how the game is objectively supposed to be played. If Skyrim had a Pacman points counter in the corner that went up whenever you killed something would that suddenly change how you interacted with it? Would the point of the game to you then be fighting everything you come across rather than messing around with the open canvas and experiencing all the different written content and choices?... I mean, they do have that, technically. It's called gold. But I think we both know having like a billion gold or whatever doesn't really communicate anything about the fullness of how you interacted with the game, not more than actual milestones like quest completion or completely organic things you managed to do. And before you go and say that's not comparable because gold is a resource and not really points-- So is your final score in Crusader Kings? Iirc it's just your prestige score maybe added to something else, and prestige in Crusader Kings is just as much of an arbitrary numerical resource as gold is. If that was the point of the game, literally why would you ever spend prestige on anything that wasn't directly invested in getting more prestige? That's an absurd limitation on what Crusader Kings can be!

Crusader Kings is structured the same way and yet you define the success of your playtime by some arbitrary counter that is merely a broad attempt by the devs to create a loose kind of incentive structure for when the simulation they made ends? The real incentive is the game itself, it's a pure sandbox, that's the point. It doesn't have a campaign or story missions, it's a system that generates stories by the nature of what it is. Nobody telling stories of a game they played is going to be waxing on about what a glorious and long-lasting fake lineage they built up-- If they do that at all it usually has to do with something absurd they managed to do as a result of that power. The most successful stories tend to be like "Lol, look how inbred and fucked up my family is" or "Look at the absurd lengths I had to go to to establish [obscure kingdom]" or "This is my collection of relics from conflicting religions" or "Congrats to Philip Ulangaator VIII of Hungary for systematically destroying Serbia, if only he did that in our timeline" or "Lmfao AI turned Tibet Catholic when I wasn't looking" or suchlike, it has very little to do with abstract numerical incentives because that's not where the magic is. And the people who made the game know it!

The score is by no means the objective metric even most player communities use to try and measure the success or the "point" of the game. There was actually an esports company that ran in partnership with Paradox themselves to host contests, and that's what one would imagine to be as close as possible to trying to objectively measure the skill and "point" of what the game is, right? I'm pretty sure none of them even considered that score. Like, for most of the smaller contests, they had everyone feuding over the right to form/usurp very specific titles or achieve specific goals. For the really big long game, they actually had a kind of scavenger hunt thing where you had goals depending on the lifestyle you picked. Nothing at all about winding up pointsmaxxed at the dawn of the early modern period.

Holy shit it's bizarre how much somebody who's played both games can have come to the complete opposite conclusions on every individual point lmao. You can make hilariously unlikely alliances in CKIII too, the AI works the same way, there's just extra steps. It's the same with intrigue and the inheritance system. Like, you have to play different parts of the game to unlock the ability to do that sometimes, but these things aren't really different between games, at least not in a way that makes it more realistic, at any rate. The path of least resistance is slightly more historical, but slightly is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. And I know this not because I'm even that familiar with CKII, but because I'm familiar with CKIII since I find it way easier and have no idea what you're talking about in that regard.

And while CKII errs more on the side of fantasy at some points, I find the blatantly wacky shit to be entertaining. I genuinely don't see that much of a point for realism in the game anyway so maybe I'm the wrong person to talk about it, but unless you have every DLC on at once most of the fantasy things are pretty rare anyway. CKIII still has absurd fantasy situations that it includes in the game through mechanical ommission and the occasional condescending "Maybe that was just what my character thinks happened and I didn't actually fight a giant squid or meet Odin" chicanery which I honestly find to be more lame and stupid than actually just having fantasy events. You can't even turn that shit off in CKIII like you can in CKII, it's just in there.

And a lot of this is probably up to the fact that CKIII is a much younger game, but CKII has way more things to do, more goals to have. It is a more feature-complete game with more interacting systems. I don't find it as rewarding because the interface is less legible to my brain, I'm not organized like that for whatever reason. But the fact that sometimes you can just survive rabies using witchcraft (very historically generalized/in some cases outright innaccurate depictions of the occult, religion, and politics in general btw, which is kind of why I view realism as a low priority in this kind of game since much has been shaved down to make it comprehensible as a game system. Which is fine, the priority isn't education, it's a goofy incest paperwork boardgame.) or become immortal, or encounter a Horse Pope, honestly make the game more fascinating for me, not less. That's something I actually miss in CKIII even though it's the only one I play with regularity. For actual babies who need something to fit their preconcieved notions of reality in order to be satisfied by their pretend empire, maybe they can still turn most of that off. I would prefer to be able to turn off the obnoxious mealy-mouthed events in CKIII that try to have their cake and eat it too. The ambiguity is not satisfying, they just write this shit as if it's real and then say like "But it could all be in your head" afterward, which simultaneously puts an annoying limit on everything the weird things of the CK world are capable of being allowed to do, and probably doesn't please the "No fantasy in my game" camp either. CK3 has its predecessors beat in terms of feedback and legibility, but in terms of sheer in-game possibilities it is weak and hasn't caught up even though they've been saying for years it would.

Oh my God.

Right right, I forget that you're a zoomer I can't just reference nerd things without providing educational links. 15 YEARS IN THE ACADEMY OF LAW FOR YOU, KID.

https://archive.org/details/judge-dredd-necropolis/mode/2up

Alright, well keep it that way. I've got my eye on you.

 

I came back to this thread to KILL you, because the previous post you made, made it seem like you weren't using threaded view. I made a solemn vow many years ago to kill anyone who did that. But after this post I'm not even sure anymore, it seems like maybe you're just like that and I would've been in the wrong. Your BRAIN is unthreaded.