Abigail Boss Fight Feedback!
6 years ago
General
Hey everyone! I'm glad to see the positive reaction to my recent FAPP story! I had a lot of fun doing the project and I've been considering what to do for my next RPG experiment.
I have some questions for everyone who checked out the log. Feel free to answer all of them or just one, any feedback is appreciated!
1. Was it too long-winded? Did the turn-based system bog it down? Would it be worth it to make a version of the story with the RPG mechanics removed and fat trimmed out, like an "abridged" version that could be read like a normal story?
2. What should I do for my next FAPP story?!? Would you like to see another boss fight like with Abigail? Or would a battle with a more ambiguous outcome and multiple possible predators (as in the original FAPP log) be more interesting?
3. Who would you want to see as a future boss fight? I have a few ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts! Feel free to recommend from among my characters, one of your own, or someone else's.
4. If I do another boss fight, I've considered making it a YCH sort of thing where people can bid to get their characters put into the adventuring party. How would everyone feel about that? Any advice on how it should be done? I've never done any writing for pay before, and the reason I'm considering it now is that this is the first time I feel reasonably confident I'll be able to deliver a product in a decent time frame, based on my experience in writing the Abigail boss fight.
I have some questions for everyone who checked out the log. Feel free to answer all of them or just one, any feedback is appreciated!
1. Was it too long-winded? Did the turn-based system bog it down? Would it be worth it to make a version of the story with the RPG mechanics removed and fat trimmed out, like an "abridged" version that could be read like a normal story?
2. What should I do for my next FAPP story?!? Would you like to see another boss fight like with Abigail? Or would a battle with a more ambiguous outcome and multiple possible predators (as in the original FAPP log) be more interesting?
3. Who would you want to see as a future boss fight? I have a few ideas of my own, but I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts! Feel free to recommend from among my characters, one of your own, or someone else's.
4. If I do another boss fight, I've considered making it a YCH sort of thing where people can bid to get their characters put into the adventuring party. How would everyone feel about that? Any advice on how it should be done? I've never done any writing for pay before, and the reason I'm considering it now is that this is the first time I feel reasonably confident I'll be able to deliver a product in a decent time frame, based on my experience in writing the Abigail boss fight.
FA+

2. Boss fights are great, though a dungeon crawl without one where it's the adventurers that get to stuff themselves on mooks could be fun also, or maybe a fight between adventurers and bandits.
3. Oh boy, there are a lot, I'm sure any of yours would be stellar choices of course. I suppose I will say if you ever need a rat [or rattata] I'd be down for offering Chance [or matti], and I always like seeing a group of characters from other folks as adventurers.
4. If you're confident you can handle it, go for it mate. Not sure if I'd be able to get in, those things tend to get snapped up fast, but if it supports you then I say it's worth trying right?
And of course I'm looking forwards to seeing more of it as it was a rather entertaining read both times, as always take care, and best of luck as things come along.
2. As mentioned above, a longer dungeon could be fun, with some traps and enemies the eat. I quite like the idea of a group of adventurers being shrunk down and having to sneak/fight their way through a castle to find the antidote. A boss fight where they're massively outmatched but the boss is trying to show off their power rather than quickly defeat the group might work.
2. I prefer the boss fight idea, mostly because I love multiprey with one pred stuff.
3. I dunno. You always seem to have good ideas, so just roll with what you want.
4. I think YCH would be pretty cool.
2. I kinda like the setup of the first one you did, the 4v4, but with the greater story context you had with Abigail. While boss fights can be interesting with the right setup, opposing groups I think help make more dynamic encounters because of the different combinations of who's embattled with who. Part of what kinda started to turn me off with part two of Abigail was that, though you had the turns and the apparent rolls, it began to feel a little scripted, which took some of the fun out of it for me. While it may have been character appropriate, Having two characters give themselves over with no/little resistance made teh "fight" feel like a forgone conclusion.
3. I'd need to go through your gallery more to get a better sense of your characters, and I reasonably can't recommend others, but I will shamelessly plug my Cynthia for some aquatic exploration with folks. She's not vorish, but I'm sure she could still do some fun things in the system (and may have to expand on her abilities some to fit in potential power wise)
4. If you're confident, it sounds like an interesting idea, for sure. While I'm not sure what to suggest as to how to handle the auction/selling of spots, I will say that if it's paid in advance, that everyone get equal screen time if the payments were equal, and if it's bid based, do not be afraid to weight the spotlight a touch towards the higher payers, though of course not to the point of outshining anybody. Also, unless character personality would really dictate against it, let the dice lie where they will and, preferably, have both sides fight to the end. Again, character personality may trump mechanical tactics, if felt like some characters just gave up a little too easily with Abigail.
As an aside, if you go a full dungeon crawl as seems to be suggested, I'd recommend having the main story broken up only by round, not turn, with a link to a turn-by-turn action/roll/damage breakdown placed in scraps. As you seemed to feel, just the one boss fight was a larger document than you thought that was broken up into two parts, so multiple fights with multiple foes per fight could get really bloated.
Cynthia is great and could easily function as a sort of support character. I'm trying to think of a good scenario for her to be involved in...
Yeah, aside from being a facilitator in either exploring or reaching something underwater, not sure what would really fit her "frontline". Now that I think about it, other than being Fabric nature, living suit and aquatic, I'm not sure what'd really fit her class wise.
2. Oh heck, I dunno. :B Multiple predators could be fun! But it was also fun watching one boss take down multiple people. x3 I almost wonder if you could do something like, an adventuring party is in a town, and they have to figure out why disappearances are happening, before they start disappearing too. x3 But I don't know if that'd even fall in line with the mechanics, so that might just be a whole bunch of story before actually getting to mechanics, haha. x3
3. I can and will totally say, I would love to stick my squirrels into this sort of thing. x3
4. Part of the problem with this would be balancing out everybody's kink preferences and all. Might have to like, say what sort of themes you'd want to go for, or maybe have a general idea of what kink categories to go into? That'd probably help people get into the idea. x3 Plus, might also wanna mention that they might get taken out early too, just given how the fight works and all. Otherwise they might not be happy being the first person out. x3 But heck, I'd be down for that sort of stuff. x3
2) I'd only recommend keeping the structure straightforward. The first FAPP story was clunky and hard to follow. Abigail was far more cohesive, but had the same problem of being written like the reader was familiar with them all, except the cast comprised a bunch of strangers.
4) If you want to do a YCH, then you explicitly need to state the following, up front: who the boss is, what they're capable of, what the party members can potentially go through, and that any bidder must be comfortable going through all of those things. Being flexible in your creativity to satisfy a paying customer is fine, but you are at your best when you get to mix whatever decidedly messed up ideas you have and subject victims to said ideas in creative ways. Let people pay to enter your circle of kinky shenanigans, not try to find a spot in the disfigured, overlapping shapes where everything happens to overlap.
That said, I personally don't think having to split attention according to money paid is a good idea whatsoever. As an example, just pulling numbers out of my ass here, say you get someone who gets in at $5 and another at $80. I, at least, would rather not want to read a tale where I'm seeing the events unfold while constantly thinking about how much the characters' owners paid. Maybe you're skilled enough to somehow hide that, but I'd wager the issue is entirely unavoidable. The Abigail thing works so well partially because there's equal attention paid to all the characters. With a YCH, someone has to be ride the caboose, and depending on how much gets paid, could easily wind up an afterthought since you have to make sure the higher bidders feel like they got what they paid for. The larger the discrepancy, the more blatant the feeling will be.
Oh, and I guess I'd be exceedingly wary of using other people's characters as bosses. Much as I'd leap at the chance to volunteer someone of mine, you have plenty of fun and quirky characters of your own.
A couple things.
- It was a bit unfair from a gameplay perspective that basically two people from a five person party betrayed them. This sort of made it "three on three" but this was supposed to be a boss fight. They really had no chance. Of course from the story perspective I can say this did not effect the appeal at all.
- You should put the mechanics blurbs (the bold stuff) after the text sections that describe them - they're like mini spoilers for what you're about to read. If they go at the end they provide a summary of the action you just read rather than a spoiler.
- For future ideas, how about a chain of encounters with (sexy) debuffs that carry over and wear down their performance (of course, leading to an eventual wipe).
1. I didn't think it was too long winded, but I was really unclear why Grey immediately suicided into the boss's ass. It seems like everything he did was either useless or counterproductive towards beating her, was that a plot backstory beat that wasn't included as part of the download? Would have been good to maybe establish that he's gonna do that ahead of time, or give him one round of in-ass-shenannigans to establish what the point of it all was. Maybe a bit of inner monologue to establish what he's planning on doing, then Abigail wrecks his plans immediately afterwards?
Was this all based on an actual RPG session that went like that, action and rolls-wise, but you wrote the story to flesh out the details of that chain of events?
For what it's worth, this made me interested enough in the whole RPG system that I went and downloaded the rulebooks to learn more about it. Not my cup of tea, but I appreciate the work they put into it.
2. I think it might be interesting to see more of a PvE content, sorta like Roaming_Shadow's story down below. Multiple PCs, with different abilities (but everyone's got vore abilities of one stripe or another, naturally), and maybe some sort of overarching objective like a rescue mission or wiping out an enemy stronghold. NPCs are multiples of the same baddie type, or maybe variations on a theme based on each room?
For example: On the surface, a goblin cave with small, weaker enemies, but they have overwhelming numerical superiority. After that, a deeper chasm with a tentacle beast, maybe sort of a miniboss with weaker "adds" that are mind-wiped former adventurers. Past the beast's lair, a deep branch of a Mithril mine, a small number of pretty tough dragonspawn overseers and neutral NPC slaves that can be "encouraged" to rise up and help the adventurers. Finally, the big boss, it's a demon who's trying to force his way thru into this world, give it Fiend powers and maybe a splash of Fleshcrafting for some extra body horror sizzle.
3. Couldn't offer any suggestions, sorry
4. Can't offer any suggestions for YCH writing, but I wish you the best of luck making it happen! Maybe partner with ASaneMan, split the proceeds and they get an Art to go along with it?
The story is made from an actual session as I play it out. However, its sole purpose is to create a story from the beginning. The owners of the characters aren't actually involved, I just ask them for input sometimes on what their character would do. It's just me doing the rolls and all, but the RNG that appears in the story is real.
I'll have to consider what sort of things I could do with a PvE adventure. Your input is very much appreciated!
2) I'd love to see another boss fight story from you especially if it had CV or AV as the main type of vore as the focus.
3)I'd really love it if you made Bruna or Eko the boss if you went that route.
4)I don't really mind YCHs but I'd prefer if you used your characters personally because I really enjoy the banter between them and seeing them interact I just wouldn't have that kind of vested interest in random OCs than with your pre-established characters as for how to go about it I guess bidding makes the most sense if you did a YCH