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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   28437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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For some examples of degrees of System Stuff:

  • Forge of Destiny is low-System, to the point where most people who don't like system stuff will tolerate it. Magic in this world has some level of predictable rules and understandable paths or levels of progression, but these exist only in the sense that we have concepts like evaporation or atoms. At their most game-like, you'll find this level of writing has 'ranks', where a higher-rank character will rarely lose to one of a lower rank, and almost never to one several ranks below, but they're still closer things like martial arts black belts.
  • The Broken Knife is more moderate. Rules in-setting are not merely physics, but reflect and revolve around extremely well-defined roads of progression, though they're still not too overtly game-like. There are few or no explicit stats, but characters spend no small amount of time considering conceptual visualizations of various attributes.
  • Ar'Kendrithyst is a more central example, where there are explicit stats and Blue Boxes, but they aren't the only way to interact with the universe. Ar'Kendrithyst has a Watsonian explanation as a tool where the System was created to simplify access to more 'wild' magic, but sometimes these are just the fundamental laws of physics (such as in Edge Cases cw: stubbed), or they're available to 'only' the viewpoint character because of how they interact with magic (eg The Heart Grows).
  • Delve (cw: low update rate) is at the higher end, where not only is there group of in-universe designed processes giving various game-like user interfaces to people, and actual chapters focus heavily on optimizing for specific stat numbers, but the overarching plot is about understanding and fixing the system and its hidden knowledge. Intelligent Design is another extremely-high System work: while it's better than most.

Even good high-systems works tend to end up with pages or even chapters full of random blue boxes that will get your eyes to gloss over; bad System-focused works tend to end up feeling like watching someone grind an MMO, often in full murderhobo mode.

Ar'Kendrithyst is a more central example

Great rec for our specific community (assuming the reader is someone who can get past a slow start).

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