19 KiB
[RT][WIP][HF][MK] Threadbare (Original LitRPG)
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Author: u/immute Secretly Awesome*
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URL: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/threadbare-original-litrpg.43430
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Score: 58
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Created: 2018-01-21T00:27:19
Post:
Comments:
u/sparkc [+29] (an hour later)
For me, Threadbare was most enjoyable when it wasn't trying to be much more than a fun, unique take on the litrpg genre that didn't take itself overly seriously and focused on its protagonist.
As soon as the author started changing the tone a little, prioritising plot more and adding in side characters left right and centre, it exposed the quality of the writing a lot more. When i'm reading a story that's aim is to be fun and not take itself too seriously then i'm a lot more lax in how critical i am of character motivation, competence, realism etc. but as soon as that tone starts to shift i feel the standard i hold the story up to starts to shift with it. And Threadbare hasn't really met that standard for me.
Ceclia and Fluffbear are the only side characters i have any real attachment too, I don't particularly care about Cylvania or its citizens, i dont believe many of the characters have strong motivations or more than the smallest amount of depth and i don't find the plot particularly engrossing. None of this is overly surprising when the author is pumping out 5k words a day but if you're going to pump out 5k words a day in effort of a story with a large character list and a 'serious' plot with 'serious' consequences then, well, good luck.
u/Croktopus [+1] (2 days later)
I'm with you in terms of the writing not being jaw dropping, but...the tone change hasn't been that drastic. If anything I'd say it's keeping the same fun playful tone despite being in territory that makes it almost discordant, but in a good way. Like...
this line from the 3rd latest chapter
the whole story to me feels like taking light hearted approaches to serious situations
u/sambelulek [+2] Ulquaan Ibasa Liquor Smuggler (3 days later)
You are very kind to say the writing quality being not jaw dropping. I read this in RoyalRoadl and the transition from fun adventure in a cave into high-stake combat involving side character newly introduced is a nose dive, imo. To expand; POV keep changing, priority getting reshuffled again and again without strong cause, with just slightest clue about what's actually happening. It was confusing. After finding such confusing style persists for several chapters, I just did not have the will to go on.
Actually, that stage will become much more readable if author spare some chapters early on to show readers who the characters are, what's their motives, how they react in tense situation. What I've read, author only describe them. That only enough for relaxing type of adventure.
u/Croktopus [+1] (4 days later)
i am very kind thanks :)
<3
u/VorpalAuroch [+9] Life before Death (7 hours later)
I wouldn't call this rational, but it is definitely adorable.
u/None [+21] (32 minutes later)
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u/Flashbunny [+8] (an hour later)
The world does have consistent overarching rules. (Well, in the recent past those rules have changed, but that's a big plot point.) That the characters are unlocking new skills and abilities isn't inconsistent with the worldbuilding at all - if entirely new ways of gaining skills were suddenly introduced, that might be an issue, but that the characters don't have access to all information and powers from the start doesn't break that rule.
I also don't think the plot is pulling new skills out to "save" the characters. In the beginning this was arguably the case, because starting from nothing meant that whatever they gained in the short term (when levels are easier to gain) would be used to solve the immediate issues relating to "not dying". Later on though, the characters develop skills much more slowly - where skills are needed to overcome a specific issue, the characters clearly work towards unlocking said skills, rather than them dropping from heaven into their hands. That's just making use of the existing system that they're aware of.
I appreciate this genre (where discrete new abilities appear as characters progress) does often fail as you've described, but I don't think it's happening here.
u/None [+6] (an hour later)
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u/LordGoldenroot [+4] (3 hours later)
That one in the end would have not changed much whether it came up or not. In a worst case scenario all that would have happened would be
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
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u/LordGoldenroot [+4] (6 hours later)
u/None [+2] (16 hours later)
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u/LordGoldenroot [+3] (a day later)
As has been demonstrated by the text when they were in the beginning of the dungeon, he can threaten to do so and that will hamper the team because they don't know whether he's bluffing or not.
u/vaegrim [+1] (4 days later)
Just so you both realize, as someone who hasn't read Threadbare (and therefore didn't read your spoilers), this thread of conversation is frustratingly mysterious.
Where did you and u/appropriate-username finally land on [rt] validity?
u/Kuiper [+4] (2 hours later)
The fictional world's rules keep getting adjusted because of all the new skills.
I haven't read all of Threadbare, but this does not strike me as inherently irrational -- changing rules and paradigms are a natural part of how the real world operates.
For example, in the early part of the middle ages, one of the "rules" of conventional warfare was that stone castle walls were an impregnable barrier, and most methods of assaulting a castle consisted of trying to surround it and cut it off from outside resources and trying to indirectly attack the castle's occupants with hunger, disease, and thirst rather than trying to actually penetrate the stone walls.
Then humanity unlocked the "cannon" skill and the rules changed.
Whether rule changes "makes sense" is mostly related to how closely these rules can be tied back to first principles. For example, we can treat "gravity" is a first principle (or about as close as you can get to it), while "it's impossible for a human to vertically jump 3 meters" is not. If tomorrow we discovered a human who had a vertical jump of 3 meters, it would defy a lot of assumptions, and break a lot of ideas that athletic coaches have probably been enshrined as "rules" about what the human body is capable of, but it wouldn't fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe.
u/None [+0] (4 hours later)
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u/BoilingLeadBath [+2] (15 hours later)
u/None [+1] (15 hours later)
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u/BoilingLeadBath [+1] (16 hours later)
Well, I dunno if magic eliminates a tendency (or reasonable expectation on the part of the audience) for consistency of physics.
Magic in threadbare seems to "just do what it's supposed to": healing increases health... Why do you ask? What's that have do do with the giblets? I would be surprised if something had mechanistic consequences. (but not that surprised - as someone noted, the author is going fast and is quite eager to introduce new details... (Nevermind that characters have pretty solid plot armor.))
u/None [+1] (17 hours later)
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u/BoilingLeadBath [+2] (21 hours later)
Really, "rapid healing by accelerated cell division" runs aground on the shores of modern physics just as hard as teleportation, it just bothers your intuitions less.
(For what it's worth, the "healing" thing bothers my intuitions less too. My sense is that "(living) objects change over time" is fairly natural, while things having to move through space at a finite speed is an object permanence thing, or something innate in the way I run my visio-spatial sketchpad.)
That said, we've been pretty sure that the world of Threadbare doesn't run on physics for a long time. spoilers
u/None [+2] (a day later)
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u/BoilingLeadBath [+1] (2 days later)
It's possible that we have different definitions of "fast" here. I'm expecting "heal" to cure a stab wound in less than 6 seconds. (1D6/round or so, right?)
Normal healing is a metabolically expensive process. It takes a lot of calories to do, and generates a lot of waste heat. Where's the heat go? (First law of thermodynamics)
There was loss of blood and perhaps other tissues. These need to be replaced. Where's the mass come from? (Conservation of mass)
Cells depend on enzymically catalyzed chemical reactions to do things like heal - reactions which often only don't go faster because the enzymes are working full time - "rate limited by availability of enzymes". Healing magic would either have to provide this cellular machinery (not enough room to put it), change the laws of chemistry (requires changes to how quantum mechanics works), or change how fast time goes (yikes).
u/None [+1] (3 days later)
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u/BoilingLeadBath [+3] (4 days later)
Eh, Ok, actually doing the calculations for relatively minor healing (the 10g of muscle required to close the stab wound - that number pulled from thin air) shows that it only requires about 9000J of energy to be dissipated. While this would boil the effected tissue twice over if done instantly, it could probably wouldn't cook anything if it happened over a couple minutes.
Over a couple minute time frame, you can probably scavenge the required protein from the blood, though you'll be essentially loosing a small quantity (~1/3 pint) and replacing it with saline. You almost certainly need new blood vessels to form to feed the rapidly growing tissue, but that's no big deal, I suppose.
I'm pretty sure you still need the literal "exotic magical nanoassembly" function of the exogenous enzymes, but you might still be in the same genre.
u/Seiglerfone [+1] (7 days later)
I'm not sure where you're getting the "boiling twice over" part.
9 kJ is 2151 calories, which is enough to raise body-temperature water (probably not too far off) to boiling point, and then convert it into steam approximately 0.4 times. You'd suffer severe local burns, but it wouldn't be boiling the tissue.
As for the general argument, I'm not convinced you couldn't get around that. For example, by storing reservoirs of these building blocks/enzymes/more efficient enzymes throughout the body, paired with more nutrient flow in the blood than typical, with damage triggering a local release. This would especially be the case if the healing process was prioritized. For example, stop bleeding fast, rebuild a basic "scaffold" within a seconds/a minute, and then fully regenerate the tissue and restore functionality between minutes to maybe an hour.
I mean, we're talking about non-real world fiction, so there's already a certain level of suspension of disbelief involved.
u/BoilingLeadBath [+1] (7 days later)
Earlier, and below, I am assuming the energy consumption during healing occurs only in the tissues being healed:
2000calories / 10 grams = 200 c/g = Δ200°C
200°C is twice the boiling point of water, so "boil it twice over". If we wish to be pedantic, we may note that, of course, the liquid can't reach 200°C - it boils first, so instead:
10g water @ 40°C + 200c/g → 7.5g water @ 100°C + 2.5g steam @ 100°C
Depending on the speed of the healing, this steam either: Doesn't exist, because the healing is slow enough that conduction ensures that the tissues never get that hot; escapes slowly, cooking the adjacent tissues in the wound; violently blows the healed tissue apart, as 1 cm³ rapidly tries to occupy 2000 cm³.
The above of course entails making a silly assumption that these enzymatic processes continue, regardless of the temperature of the place that they are occurring - but that's half the point. Steam is hot; if the tissue gets hot enough to boil, things like "replace the damaged proteins with intact ones" become impossible, as the new ones are immediately denatured (cooked; destroyed) by the heat. (And it should be noted that conventional enzymes are proteins, BTW.)
(BTW, I like how you kept three/four digits on my calculations. Let's just say that my sources were of the ±10% nature, and that only got worse during the three steps of mental math involved...)
Anyways, yes, if you wish to modify the body in advance if the insult, more options open up. My own opinion is that, at that point, you might as well just replace the flesh with magical steel, but to each his own...
u/Seiglerfone [+1] (8 days later)
I'm aware.
I kept the same number of digits for the purpose of valid comparison back to your figures, not because I was implying anything about the precision of those values.
I disagree. Replacing the flesh with magical steel is entirely less believable than having an organic system that is designed/has developed to facilitate rapid regeneration.
u/Exadra [+1] (9 days later)
Does no one remember teleportation being used by Melos's gang when they first go for the house?
u/immute [+4] Secretly Awesome (an hour later)
Hm. I get what you're saying here, though in these respects, I'm not sure how the story differs from Worth the Candle, except that the latter has the protagonist questioning the nature of the text.
u/serge_cell [+3] (7 hours later)
Character development in Worth the Candle is much deeper. The problem of Threadbare is it's difficult to add much character depth to toy bear. He/It don't have history or memories. It's quite like to write about non-humanoid alien. It's either too human or too alien to care. The protagonist character is threadbare by necessity.
u/None [+2] (an hour later)
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u/sparkc [+6] (an hour later)
The story is divided into 'books' and there are three 'books' completed i believe. It's the most popular fiction posted to this subreddit at the moment, based on upvotes. Personally it's by far my favourite ongoing serial.
EDIT: Second most popular behind MOL
u/None [+7] (an hour later)
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u/sparkc [+2] (2 hours later)
"At the moment" is kinda vague but by upvotes and discussion this subreddit is a "mother of learning" discussion and fan forum that sometimes talks about rationality and other stories.
I feel like upvotes within this sub is a reasonable metric of popularity and that popularity among r/rational subscribers is useful evidence to give to someone posting to this sub if they're trying to determine whether to start a fiction.
If i completely misunderstood you and you're comment was aimed at my misstatement that WTC was the most popular fic on this sub then yes, MOL is more popular though i did edit my comment to this effect immediately after posting and realising.
u/RynnisOne [+1] (a day later)
Hmmm, this looks new to me.
Not very rational, but a ton of fun so far...
Reads until Golemist + Ruler...
Blinks
Oh good, self-replicating machines can't possibly go wrong...