Trial of the Hydra

On the topic of Magic the Gathering again, I got the Hydra challenge deck recently, and after playing with it for a bit I've come to some flavor decisions in regards to it and an additional rule that I'm going to implement while playing.

The Hydra challenge deck has one or many players fighting cooperatively against a deck that does constant damage to all players, while simutaniously healing them should they fell any of it's heads. This eternal shift of lifeforce back and forth is very unlike any instance of damage normally used in the game's normal use (there are some instances of it, but a player is causing it to happen to themselves rather than it happening upon killing a foe), this makes me think it's not life but moral that the Hydra does damage to. As each new head grows or as each attack it deals, things become more hopeless for the players, whenever they strike down a head they would feel renewed in their actions. Thus explaining the flow of "life" and it's strange back and forth flow.

The extra rule I'm proposing is due to an instance where a player managed to consistently kill the heads of the Hydra but due to a strong start on the Hydra's behalf, couldn't finish the fight. What they could do was gain life. And by the time we decided it would not be worth continuing, they were gaining 17 life a turn and killing a single hydra head, they had 104 life when we stopped, and as such I propose an additional victory condition:
The Shonen Rule - If a player has more than 100 life at the end of the Hydra's turn they win the game
This is because I see the Hydra fight as less against the Hydra, and more a battle of the players overcoming their own weaknesses, so if they reach 100 life, they have reached a point where they can believe in themselves such that they can accomplish anything as a plainswalker and as a hero (there's a large amount of  hero messages in the set the Hydra challenge deck is set in, the reason to be a hero and the journey of one from person with strength to a warrior worthy of their legend) 

P.S. it's called shonen rule cause of the prevelance of such a trope in shonen manga like Naruto and Bleach where if the protagonist believes in the,selves enough they are unbeatable

Dude can't be a lady...cause it would emasculate the audiance

Why can't Link be a girl? There's so many generations of heroes across so many mellenia (in game anyway, out of game it's been like 26 years) and a dozen or so tales. But so far every hero of time/courage/the wind(?) Has been a dude.

Probably cause the Zelda series has a bad habit of following it's past games as a guideline, so if the last game had a male hero the next one is likely to have a male hero also. Further, while Link might be a name with no assigned gender, Zelda is deffianatly a woman's name, so both Link and Zelda would be women, fighting Gannondorf (probably) who would also be stuck in his normal gender, which would have some...issues with gender roles. Not saying Nintendo can't do good representations of women (they don't really go out of their way to try though) but in this series it probably won't work without it's own whole new villain, but with how the timeline is going in the adult Link timeline (which after spirit tracks has Link and Zelda settled in a new land they named (New) Hyrule) there's a chance a non-Ganondorf villain who'll allow such diversity of gender roles.

Though it could be from a history of reading adventure books for young girls when I was growing up (I read though all my own fantasy adventure books too quickly so I read my sister's books until I got more of my own, so I read lots of Tamora Peirce books, all of which star a girl/woman, make for new kinds of character development...like sex @_@ which child-me was not super ready for...getting back on track) but a female lead normally ends up with far more character development. Admit it you can't think of any male characters who'd contradict this claim, especially any that started their life in the NES era. So yeah, I'm all for character development (The main reason I play RPGs) and any chance to have that in more games I'll jump on, which is why I'll put Revettear: An Item Shop Tale above any other similar dungeon crawlers due to the characters and how they interact and develop throughout the game. (...also I just realized how long that last sentence is and apologize profusely...all the brackets made it hard to keep track)

So yeah...that's a thing...forgot where I was going...make up your own ending...cause interactive elements are cool.

Meeting the fans

I was recently wondering how some fantasy characters would react to their own fans, and often it would be with confusion. A strange instance would be with the Plainswalkers of Magic the Gathering. Plainswalkers are people born with a Plainswalker spark, this spark would ignite under intense threat to the owner or cataclysmic emotional turmoil, upon igniting it would grant the owner near limitless magical power and an almost immortal life as well as the ability to plainswalk across dimensions, to travel, at will, between parallel worlds.

As part of Magic the Gathering the player is also a Plainswalker, calling upon their memories of past experiences and turning them into spells to compete with other players in a battle of supremicy. Which is all fine and good. There is an ongoing story with the game, as five core Plainswalkers have many misadventures and the players continue their eternal battles where ever these core Plainswalkers happen to be, the current story is set in an ancient Greek themed plain, the previous story was set in a constantly feuding city world. Both of these stories have companion book series expositing in more detail the story. But there's no mention of the insanely compeditive plainswalkers we players represent, cause from what some of the spells are called it would be hard to miss us in many instances.

So my question again is: How would the core five plainswalkers react to any of the plainswalkers of the player base. Cause despite their near limitless power and immortality they are still human, and often have serious mental or emotional scarring from the events that triggered their spark to ignite and the trials they've suffered since. And the sometimes near suicidal combat actions of the players would probably be very upsetting.

Further examples of my being more than an IT Boy

This time again through poetry.
(I don't know poetry just seems like a nice way of self expression and I'm such a hit and miss artist, see attached mermaid suit Link from Oracle of Ages, but poetic ideas are much more consistently conveyed)

This one I got inspired by an episode of VSauce on the world's shortest poems and how making it competitive seemed to take away from the artistic merit of the creation of such prices so the Guinnis Book of World Records stopped accepting attempts on shortest artistic actions thanks to The White Stripes doing a single note concert (ignoring the fact that a hundred or so people turned up specifically for that single note and enjoyed it and the artists who were performing and the volumes that speaks on artist appreciation in our current era).

So enough expositionary banter, to the poem:

It's titled a stupidly over artisticly "Death of an Idea" and goes as such:

.

Yup that dot up there is the poem. Cause a poem is using language and it's rhythem and/or meaning to say more than is written, and here we're using the grammatical and syntactic meaning of the period to show the end or death of an idea. Cause one uses a period/full stop when we finish one idea/sentence amex start a new one. This symbolism is evident in many other works or art, a common one almost everyone I know which has a similar meaning is The Lion King. The Lion King has a similar message of death and rebirth and how when one thing ends our world will not just sit idle, there will always be another idea that follows in it's footsteps. This new idea may not come in the current paragraph, as this paragraph might be also over, but there will be other paragraphs, other chapters, other tomes, other stories told and in the future.

So yeah, deep thinking...that's a thing...

See?!

See what I mean? It's just taunting me!

No. Are you really sure?

Blogger is a crule mistress, she often taunts me with my low page views and poor spelling (though that's probably more a Firefox thing). But her most evil act (if we personify Blogger as a weird cross between an Accountant and a Herald) is her habbit of asking: "Do you really want to post that?".

"No Blogger, I just spent 2 hours writing a thesis on the canonical connections between Pac-Man and Dig-Dug, and I want to keep it to myself."

The above is entirely true and a perfect representation of how the exchange goes, I have written long posts only for a safty mesure to question me and my self doubt to add another post to my ever growing list of drafts. Or even worse, the entier post is deleated save for the title when I go to save it as a draft.

Also as an additional note, the checks to make sure you made the right decision pnly ever occur in computer based activities: ebay, changing the setings on my PC and video game shop NPCs just to name a few. But in any other circomatance such a check would never happen, it'd feel so awkward and out of place. Just imagine you go into a shop to buy a pair of pants, if when you went up to the register and handed over your money the person behimd the register asked of you were really sure, if you were absoloutly aure you wanted this item...you'd think it was shoddy or that something was wrong with it. So why are fine with this check in electronic interactions? Just something to think about... Cause i've got no answer.

Heart of the Cards

About a year ago (as I tend to do every few years), I got interested in the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Since the late 90's when it first was a thing and I purely collected them cause it was as close to actually completing a Pokedex in real life. Then after a stint of Yu-Gi-Oh in high school I became interested in how the game actually played and started making decks from my mammoth collection. But the phaze had passed for most people so I had no one but myself to play against, so games became mainly theoretical.

So a year ago, I get interested in the TCGs again but the frustrations of regular gameplay are just too much, the resource gathering and luck of prize cards are just no fun, so I start to think how one could make a good card game without them, have it be fast and fun. Within a few hours I had the basic rules and about two dozen cards for what ended up being called: Meme King Gold.

The cards were based on internet memes and pop culture referances and the rules were based on a stylized internet argument. After brain storming with a fellow uni student and doing some play testing we ended up with about 120 cards, a full set of rules, 5 structured decks and no play testers. Lots of people liked the idea but didn't have the time. It was a great idea we just had no way to properly work it or get it out to a larger audiance or any audiance.

To date my card game love has since shifted to Magic the Gathering and Meme King Gold has been shelved indeffinatly (I'd feel bad not having the other guy who helpped involved, we sort of drifted apart at the end of semester).