Recent content by ButlerianHeretic

I've been playing with it some more. I'd done a 1 on 1 fight before and that worked ok. But when it gets to three participants in an action scene it breaks down. Even specifying the other two precisely, it gets confusing and requires a moment of "who is this again" when the action gets back to...

There's a couple of ways to handle it. One could go with some sentence fragments. "Sword out. Ready to fight." But, that doesn't feel as authentic to me. Especially if one is highly trained, technique feels like it is doing itself. We may set a goal to accomplish something if we have time, or we...

There's stuff is easy to shorthand in normal writing like "I draw my sword." But that comes out clunky. The result of working around it that feels most natural ends up being a bit slower paced than I'd think a fight scene should be, but it encourages sensory descriptions that one would tend to...

I can't really see doing it in past tense. It's very much a stream of experience. That's good at helping with showing too.

I kinda think of it as a mix of first and second, but really it could be third: "All of his conscious thoughts are washed away by that gaze, leaving only acceptance." It's weirdly amorphous, but reading it I feel pulled into it. Though I'm hardly objective since I wrote it.

I've been experimenting with an alternative perspective, and I feel like I can't be the first person to have thought of this. I don't think English grammar wants us to write like this, but violating grammar rules occasionally seems worth it to me. The idea started with writing more like a first...

A trick I find helpful is changing my POV between drafts. Like writing first draft in 3rd or 1st person, then the second draft in the other. When writing the first draft I'm focusing on getting the story out. If I rewrite in the same POV then it is easy to be lazy and mostly accept it as is. But...

Thinking about this more, I just need to accept that no empire is static, and they all transform into something else and usually break up or change dramatically over the course of relatively small segments of human history.

I'm sure one could do something similar with seven energies for the purpose of making a system rock-paper-scissors, but it leaves more pieces out of any given interaction. In a 5-way system, every energy has some relatively simple relationship to every other, whether as the energy that creates...

I realized this was something that I have a fair amount of practical knowledge that I should share with the group, at least within the domains in which I'm familiar with applying the concepts, so here goes. While it is common to refer to the five elements of traditional Chinese philosophy, I'm...

It isn't so much that the people in question not claim land or establish strongholds, in fact they must. And with advancing technology they or their cultural heirs are to build canals and locks. What I'm focusing on though is the difference between a settled people and a nomadic people's ability...

It is heavily inspired by the Vikings. The Vikings started as farmers and mostly ended up settling down and becoming peoples of the land though, and mostly ended up using their power to settle wherever they went and forming a local ruling class rather than staying mobile and continuing to...

I'd like feedback on why an empire like this might not work, and/or how stable such a culture would probably be. I feel like the fact that I don't know of any stable civilization that's worked the way I envision the latter stage of the civilization being organized suggests that there is a...

What would China have purchased from Britain? The wide variety of things Britain bought from China shows how utterly superior every aspect of China's crafts were, except in a very narrow realm of industrial and military hardware. And it isn't like the Brits were going to sell that stuff to any...

Touche, I was insufficiently nuanced in my comment. Cheers!