ISentinelPenguinI, The Grandmaster Goblinologist
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Credit to Suranna for her lovely art, and Avery Moore for her fabulous animation!
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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Since some of my questions contained outdated information and I needed to make sure everything was in working order, I unpublished this thing.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.
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A Tutorial for TeachersRecent Posts
BEASTMANCER: Game 1 on 2/12/2025 9:52:15 PMCatching 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
BEASTMANCER: Game 1 on 2/4/2025 3:05:38 PM
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|
What Games are YOU Playing in 2025? on 2/2/2025 8:41:12 PM
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.
What Games are YOU Playing in 2025? on 2/2/2025 7:45:20 PM
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.
THUNDERDOME on 1/31/2025 10:46:52 PM
Oh my God.
THUNDERDOME on 1/31/2025 10:45:26 PM
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
THUNDERDOME on 1/31/2025 10:05:48 PM
Alright, well keep it that way. I've got my eye on you.
THUNDERDOME on 1/31/2025 9:52:12 PM
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.
THUNDERDOME on 1/31/2025 8:52:36 PM
Let it never be said that there's something Ben won't double down on to shelter his own mind from an L, even if he's gotta defend his public cumsucking fanfic like the Maginot line!... Or, I think the blowjob story is what's being referenced here, I didn't read all the way through that. If there's another I wouldn't deprive you of the title. As long as we're bringing up shit from months ago I just think it's funny that the only other time I've ever noticed your presence here before it was because your only reference for the term "Content Creator" was onlyfans. Wait, shit, guys, is this a pattern? Is that just Ben's thing?
FRANCE TRIP THREAD on 1/31/2025 6:26:25 PM
The pit surrounded by medieval buildings is La Fosse Dionne, and it genuinely looks like a portal to Oolacile.
The devil bridge I found through pure brute force was Pont Valentre, and apparently the devil was scammed this time because the architect promised the devil his own soul if he helped build the bridge all the way to the end, but then on the very last day of construction he was like, "Your last task is to fetch me all the water we need to mix the grout with THIS COLANDER!" and it seems the devil gave the fuck up right there.