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I need your help in deciding a story theme.

ok

you wake up one morning and there are spiders having spider-sex inside your mouth...there's your theme now go!

You should include that in your horror entry. @mizal

Nah, I've got a ghost town and then I guess the ghosts possess somebody, which honestly is all a bit meh as far as horror stories go. I think I must have gotten the tamest of all possible theme combinations.

hmm i dunno maybe the spiders die when you accidentally swallow them and then their ghosts possess you. if there are enough spiders having orgies inside your various orifices maybe your body can technically count as a 'town'

 

damn this story is really going places now, thanks 3J!

I'm not sure if an accidental swallowing pisses the spiders off enough to warrant them haunting the accidental swallower. I think that the spiderghost epidemic probably started when a new guy with a penchant for shoving spiders up his ass, moved to town.

it's such a harmless hobby though

 

And I mean, who hasn't shoved a spider or two up their ass at some point in their lives?

Or taking off the stingers of bees, and sucking their honeys out their wound? 

I'm... pretty sure honey doesn't come from the bee's insides Nmelssx.

No, you're right. They come from outside of the bee. 

The theme is llamas...

IN SPACE!

Warrior Cats! <---

How about this: You play as a sorcerer that tries to hide his/her ever growing power, but is ridiculed and bullied for how scrawny s/he is. The more s/he gets angry, the easier it is to lose control. S/he runs away after accidently majorly hurting his/her only friend in an argument they have because s/he is  afraid of what s/he may do. S/he has to learn to control the power, if s/he doesn't, then eventually the power will consume her and leave nothing behind but a pile of ashes.

Yes but drop all this confusing s/he nonsense and just make the character a futa

Well, I didn't want to appear sexist. It could be a he or a she in the game. It's the authors choice.

Use whichever pronoun you want, but choose 1 and stick to it. Trust me, if the author wants to write from a female perspective, your use of the male pronoun won't stop them. There is nothing more annoying than (s)he or s/he.

Here's a concept. Create a GENDER variable. Have the variable set so that a value of 1 will signify male and a value of 2 will signify female.

Then, you can just do this:

%%GENDER%=%1%he%%%%GENDER%=%2%she%%%

If you do something like that for all pronouns and such, you can give the player the option to choose the character's sex. Actually, I believe several users (Sindriv, BerkaZerka, etc.) have used this technique.

It's the worse option ever. Ever time you want to write, she did this, or he did that, instead of typing he or she you would have to paste the code. Just make it say 'you' instead. That would be much easier.  

Well, you would do that too. I mean mainly in quotes.

"Hey, you, the young %%GENDER%=%1%boy%%%%GENDER%=%1%girl%%%% in the cloak, come here," he said with a gesture.

Oh. Yes. That would work. 

I always try to write from a "you" perspective.

also holy shit can we ban Warrior Cat stories? I've been away awhile and only just now noticed what a plague they've become.

Maybe if the site enforced some kind of minimum age requirement to post a story here....

This has been discussed like in 10 different threads.

There was a great purging of them (and some other stories) and continues to be when the need arises, but for some reason warrior cat fanatics have been drawn to this site like cloppers to a pony farm.

 

Ok wow I guess I'm gonna go ahead and write my Redwall story after all then to show them what a proper bad fanfic about a poorly written children's series is supposed to look like..

I think I've deleted maybe 25 warrior cats stories. The others aren't quite bad enough to delete, IMO. Check this out.

Oh my God 3J I am so jealous right now, why can't we have something like this on IS.

Reading the other threads too now and I would kill any number of Warrior Cats-fanfic writing peeps in cold blood if it meant we could we could set up a tribunal on the forums over there and drag horrible stories forward one by one and watch them cower under our stern glare before purging them forever.

Here is our tribunal :)

Right that's one of the other threads I was looking at. Damn, why can't we be doing this at IS right now?

There were only six Warrior Cat games that got recommended for deletion though, and only five of them were.

Well thankfully we seem to have avoided the Warrior Cats plague over there (Er..I think. I don't really check the main page much anymore...) but there's still plenty of horrible low effort garbage around. And that's even just counting those that make the 20 page minimum to show up in the first place.

Really though it's an entirely different situation at IS, you see there's only a tiny handful of users who are actually real people and the rest really just needed to be rounded up into camps somewhere and mercilessly crushed under our steely boots, and a system like this would give us as good an excuse as any. :)

Umm...since when do we have a 20 page minimum? I don't recall that.

There isn't here, but over at Infinite Story, you need to at least write 20 pages before it shows up on the main writing site, otherwise it stays "hidden." (You can still access it through the author's profile)

It actually would be sort of cool to have that here though.

So, I've been meaning to ask...how does IS work? Do you have to leave the stories open ended.

No we're all just really lazy.

I mean my first experience with CYOAs on the Internet were the sort that were supposed to be these huge collaborative messes that anyone could jump in anywhere and add on to, and I think IS used to be a lot more open to that style of writing (with apoth's Hall of Infinite Doors being a notable example..), but today I think it's mostly just laziness and procrastination, there's no real community except for the aforementioned tiny handful on the forums so no real pressure to finish what you

meh *clicks post button*

Hahahahaha! Yeah, but I don't know if cleaning up IS is really worth it. You guys have this loveable thrown-together hanging-on-by-a-thread firefly style image going on right now.

First order of business would be to get rid of all the pokemon and anime dating related fanfic over there.

Any stories about dating actual Pokemon can stay though.

I deleted a whole whack tonne of stories the moment site standards were put in place. Including at least 20 warrior cats stories.

Oh. I don't know when that was, I guess I missed it. Sorry for trying to correct you.

It seems like failed attempts to correct me are fashionable right now.

@coins @TacocaT @jamescoker1226

Well, I believe that I might be the first to actually back down immediately and just apologize rather then trying to argue with you. I only say that because I can't really see coins apologizing and I saw james argue with you.

Works for me! I wish @Killa_Robot felt that way about the lengths of storygames ;)

Weird, it didn't actually tag me here.

@killa_robot

^That one worked though.

Tags cannot have spaces after them, or the tags won't work :s that's why tags are best used at the end of posts or without spaces after them. A weird quirk, don't know if it was meant to be like that or not.

Just how...many experiments did you do with tags...?

james simply misunderstands the tone of a conversation a lot of the time, so it's excusable once he gets a grasp of "Oh wait, I was wrong and this isn't supposed to be an argument..."

Coins is one month of being meh and one month of being an shit talking asshole insulting everything he can read xD it seems to alternate

What would that make me? ;?;

rare and indifferent to any topic that you didn't create a thread for xD

Thanks. I'll try not to be offended by that statement.

Which one?

The one JJJ made and tagged him in.

He forgot to tag me. 

I think he has a rule of only picking on three people at a time...and one of them, by default, has to be me. Apparently, everyone I went to middle and high school with had to follow this rule too. Must be some sort of weird, new religion. XD

You're an orphan that grew up in a city inside of a sea monster's belly. You and many others are awaiting the time when your lives will end, when something happens. Suddenly there is salt water rushing in and blood everywhere. You struggle through the water and mange to surface. You are then pulled aboard a ship and taken in by the sea monster hunter that inhabit it.

A man going through his life with bad things happening to him, nothing fantasy nothing super-natural, just bad luck coincidences that aren't completely out of proportion - then end it on a happy note, or have it get better towards the end; then drop the bomb and zark happy endings. That's a good story. One that captures the reader's feelings - allow them to connect with the character, have the reader feel as though they know the main character like a life-long friend. Then shove the story up their butt and reveal the horrible truth behind life - inspiring others to go on where the main character has failed.

I'd like to take back any negative things I might have said about the Warrior Cats fandom in this thread. On the contrary, my belief now is that they're an asset to the site and they have a lot of entertainment value to offer.

I want them to stay forever and never change.