‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 417

Colors by Jemma. Everything else by me

Erbana is a lot easier to do when you can find the good stuff relatively quickly.

29 Comments

Yeah, Kat’s gotta pick up those acting skills real quick to pretend to just be lucky.

Also, for some reason I thought there would be real pain… I guess it makes more sense this way – this was supposed to be a Fun Game, not a violent and brutal competitive sport.

That is a big problem in most roleplay situations. You have to keep in mind what you know vs what your character would know.

I once played with a guy whose low intelligence barbarian, that grew up in a forest by himself and could barely even speak, somehow knew the exact stats, skills and weaknesses of even the most rare and obscure of creatures we encountered.

Just cos you can look it up in a monster manual doesn’t mean your character should know what you found. 😛

I used to penalize that kind of metagaming by doing things like docking xp or withholding quest rewards. I ran my games with a heavy focus on role playing, and I was very permissive when it came to alignment and character knowledge, so long as the character could justify knowing that. But if the first answer to “How does your character know that?” was “Well, it’s on page xx of this book”, I informed them of my metagaming penalties. Second time, I started docking experience points, levels, quest rewards…until eventually, the person got the hint and stopped metagaming or left the group entirely.

he couldn’t justify it with some sort of wilderness knowledge thing from being in the forest his whole life?

Players are going to metagame. The good ones can do it without being obvious.

And for the most part, I allow it, so long as they can justify it in character. If they can’t, I penalize.

I ran my games where the focus was on fun. I fudged dice rolls to be in the favor of the party if it made things more dramatic. I let them go off the beaten path if it made a better story. But when it came down to it, my group knew that anything that happened had to be done in character if I was going to let them do what they wanted.

Which brings us back around to Kat. She knows that there’s only so much metagaming she can get away with in character if she’s not going to be accused of being a hacker.

Hahaha, Kleya, you’re so clever. “Oh, I need to gather plants or something in order to heal my friend who’s hurt, I guess. Wow, look, a rare and powerful thing nearby that I happened to stumble across. How lucky of me. I definitely didn’t hack the game in order to miraculously know I should search here. That would be ridiculous. Nope, just crazy good luck.”

“Oh no! I tripped and fell into this tree and found this rare Erbana item. Talk about luck!”

Dude! As a Cardista, luck is supposed to be MY thing!

And I guess the old “Oh look what I just HAPPENED to stumble across…” wouldn’t work too well at first…>.>!

Nah, it works the first time. It’s the 7th time that it happens that people start to get suspicious 😛

It’s like wall hacks, except she can use it for other purposes.

Having Danni there for Kat to talk to and explain things to is great – it makes them /both/ more relatable.

Kat needs a “special” that appears to direct her to whatever rare plant she’s seeking. It would be perfectly in character for a hacker Erbana. She just needs to make it plausible enough to fool TENKa….

“Erbana is a lot easier to do when you can find the good stuff relatively quickly.”
Ah, so THAT’s what you meant when you had the Bandit say that the good stuff takes forever to get. I thought it had something to do with having to reach a high level to gain some epic abilities, but I am believing more and more that there aren’t any levels here.

Or rather that the high level items and equipment aren’t level-gated, so a level 1 person can totally use that Ultimate Staff of Doom if they can find it.

Okay, this one actually bugs me.

It’s been established that the Game was popular before the Ending. If so, it’s entirely believable that Kat may have retained knowledge of rare plant spawn points, or just what the high-end plants look like if spawns are procedurally generated, from a GameWiki before the Ending.

She picked it up through her hacker-vision, not remembering the location.

I think those plants spawn at random. Probably all spawn places are high in the treetops or in similarly difficult to find places, but there are probably thousands of places any one item can be, so checking each of them would be quite tedious.

Just try digging for diamonds in Minecraft.

Kleya’s mum was a keen Erbana player, Kleya herself preferred more exciting routes. Although she can “see” where rare items are through perusing the code, she can’t make it obvious – she’s playing a completely different character to before The Ending, both to be seen as “nice” and to minimise any connections with her previous character (and from there to her real self – don’t forget that the media have portrayed her as Public Enemy Number One for the past couple of years).

Furthermore, Erbana’s seen as the “boring” route – probably because people *don’t* have a record of all the cool stuff that can be done with it.

So how does the whole pain thing work exactly? Is it like the Matrix were if your character gets hurt you get hurt? Or is it a simulation, only an illusion?

Yeah, don’t ignore the red light and do anything exciting Danni . . . that would be bad . . .

LOL – You picked a very good colorist!

Haha! I thought panel 1 was an angry catfish at first.

That panel 3 face…

Too bad Kat’s so dead-set against being a villain.

herbana’s path seems like it pretty heavily relies on metagaming anyway, you’d have to have had the wiki open in another tab to know you could tame a fendi with malreve and that flower right? or did she skip some dialogue that hinted at it when they jumped the first half of the tutorial?(actually most classes seem like 2nd playthrough things)

I believe it was stated that Kleya knows the tutorial parts, and it was also stated that they were skipping the initial tutorial bits on how to move, etc, in favor of jumping straight to “obtaining your first esone” which the tutorial no doubt would have covered for the Erbaha route. They’d probably have some sort of step by step intro of the six different paths so that players could figure out which kind they might want to aim for, and samples of how to go about doing things questi, erbana, demoli, etc, style.

Oh for a loot-a-rang right about now.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 417