wu er ling…
JUNE 2026 – It’s the Economy, Stupid
Progress Report
- Chapters 13 and 14 playtested and written
- Handful more Act 3 stuff written
- Working gradually on interlude talks – ultimately have basically caught up to the gameplay
- Lumi has sketched several unit designs
- Maxing, relaxing and regrouping
This post has been complete for several days and my dinky refurbished work laptop is really excited to try and memory leak, so I’m getting this post out of the way a little earlier just so I can close the tab.
The Meat Market
I knew last month that the economy needed a rethink. This month I started to tackle it in earnest.
I said in the opening post that boss recruitment had to be the main source both of recruits and gold. Well… the first part of that’s already fallen by the wayside a bit, just with how the first Act was structured. I wanted to establish a baseline squad of unpromoted garbage which you would then add to from Chapter 7 onwards. It turns out that if you have a baseline squad of unpromoted garbage, you can kind of ride that to the end. Part of that is the XP formula – right now it’s vanilla, as a placeholder, and it’s going to be somewhat more cruel than Homecoming’s. I want players who just use the first units to suffer. Not because those units are bad, but because they need work to reach the point where your other recruits… just sort of start from. But you’ve had Ulrike from turn 3 of Chapter 1; she’s been helping you out for all that time, and that experience had to go somewhere. Szalai, you can liquidate.
But the fact is that it’s hard to make boss recruiting truly central to the game, as opposed to kind of a garnish. Pushing the start point later was a good call, I do think, but it does mean that no individual recruit makes as much of a difference to how chapters play as, to take the least fair example, Helje in DoW. You either have a flier in Chapter 1 or you’re waiting until Saszkia – underlevelled, though with a better statspread – in Chapter 5. And Saszkia’s best support is with Helje anyway. So advantages must instead come through power spikes and, where possible, unique classes. But I want every character to remain viable to the end, so it’s looking like kind of a Do5 situation again – these units have good stats against their competition, but poor stats for their level, and will need good growths to compensate for that. We’ll see. I think growths are going to shift around a fair bit once I actually get to Chapter 31.
Anyway, right now the cast is 20 potential boss recruits and 29 from other sources; only seven (plus probably one more) join after boss recruits start rolling in. That leaves a flex slot I plan on giving to a secret character as soon as I figure out what I want, or what the cast needs, or in case I miscounted or something. But I do plan on filling it. The set of 20 is pretty neatly in stone and ends on a high note, the kind of thing you write down and then sit back and think: yeah, that’s got to be where you draw a line under it.
A Study in Teal
Sometimes you keep around certain things because of convention. Like, they’re not levers you think about. But you can actually adjust them. Completely trivially. One example is that there’s literally no reason to have an extra [A] press involved in having a full inventory and being prompted to put something in the convoy, so I’ve pruned it, and honestly, next time I patch the prior campaigns, I’m making that adjustment there, too.
So now I’m looking at the economy, and I’ve already made one change to Gems, which is… uh… you know you can just set them to instantly liquidate, right? Just use the same code as the gold drops and they’ll just immediately Become Money. Problem: if I want 5000 gold per ransom, then the numbers become very unwieldy. At first, I wound up just giving out a bunch of Ruby Gems, but I wanted bigger rewards… but they were bigger by too much. If only there was some solution to this.
Just slash the prices on Gems, idiot!
So that gives me smaller numbers and smaller increments. I already had a Loot item for 500, stuff like ‘you won’t really go out of your way for this but hey, it’s a little more incentive to hit this corner or beat this antiturtle’ (short- and long weapons, your bread and butter, cost 750 for 30 uses); Ruby being 1500, Sapphire 2750 and Diamond 4000 is just a lot more manageable, and pads out the middle of the scale from 500 (loot) to 5000 (human) in a way that itches my brain nicely. +1000, +1250, +1250, +1000!
The Iron Price
Another part of trying to focus on the economy had been a resolution to try and rein in the habit of ‘just kind of carelessly giving the player shit’. If money is to matter, then shops have to matter; in order for shops to matter, you actually need to use them. Now, part of that is going to be the upkeep of basic weapons. At its most basic, there are weapons worth 750 that are pretty good, and weapons worth 100 that are godawful. So as part of this, most rewards were monetary, particularly in Act 1. People didn’t just arbitrarily drop weapons, and there weren’t many chests or villages.
In the current version of the ROM, there’s an overcorrection. You never really get any nice toys and shops, being quite limited and quite focused on opportunities to re-acquire basic shit, mostly didn’t have very sexy items. That needs to be changed. I briefly had plans to add limited shop supply to stores, but this would require EMS, which I’m reluctant to just toss in the ROM at this point (don’t need 51+ characters, don’t want 200 supply, don’t want to lose autosaves being toggleable, don’t want to risk something exploding). So I’m just going to have to go through early shops and pepper the opportunity to buy Nice Things, because that’s felt lacking.
What’s particularly important is that OHKOs are absolutely within reach, and that some characters are very reliant on particular weapons. The myrmidon, Triss, is kind of the key example of the latter; she has my favourite combat interactions of the game, crushing anyone with light armour but bouncing off anyone larger. The Fivefinger (obligatory weak brave, sword-only) ramps up that to a still greater degree, while she obviously wants killer swords after promotion. Without either of those, she feels like a very ordinary unit. Then again – there have been plenty of opportunities to buy them, and I keep not taking them. Either way, weapons feel like they should, but the availability perhaps isn’t giving the right amount of variety.
But that’s fine. This first playthrough is largely making sure things work and the flow makes sense. The second playthrough will focus on macro and polish; things will look better, I’ll have fresh eyes for the map, and I’ll finesse my way towards the long-term approach. Third playthrough will be right before I’m ready to ship [COMPLETE], catching anything playtesters haven’t, and getting one proper experience in for myself with all assets, everything in its right place, changes I’d made off second-hand testimony, etc.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is Shaking His Head
So I am out of the country for a month and separated from my Personal Computer and, pertinently, its second screen. This is good for my personal and indeed professional development, but it’s also true that it’s affected my workflow.
So at home I have a second monitor. You probably do, too. Second screen, on the left, gets the videos. First screen, on the right, is for productivity, browsing, yapping. When I’m just futzing around with the ROM and it isn’t really fully stimulating, left screen gets a video and I can happily chat along at the same time. But Builder requires a lot of screen real estate, real estate I no longer have. Also, while I remembered to post myself the ROM – in the absolute apex of tech security, I just posted myself the let’s just agree to say patch over Discord – I forgot to bring over my save, currently parked at C14x. And deliberately didn’t bring over my controllers, so, while I wasn’t planning on testing, its’s discouraged anyway.
So now I have to pick what isn’t compromised. Well, writing has basically caught up to and in some places overtaken the gameplay… at least as far as main scenes go. But I’d been kicking a lot of base conversations with characters down the road. Battle and death quotes are quite a ways behind, too. And I can still write. I don’t watch videos while I do so, I listen to music and focus on my work. Don’t need a second monitor for that.
I also have my notebook, and that’s where all the magic happens, if by magic you mean planning. I really cannot stress enough that for probably 80+% of people the best way of scheming things is going to be on paper, and that’s an assertion backed by research; you really do remember things easier and think them through better through the friction of placing those thoughts on paper. Think about the times you were encouraged in school to write stuff down. Teachers don’t set that because it’s easy. In the age of Google Classrooms, it’s actually a massive pain in the ass by comparison. But it’s there to help you learn and, more importantly, when you don’t do it because you’re too busy losing at Clash of Clans, they give us something to tell your parents that you didn’t bother to do and offer as a cause for your failure, though often the root cause of failure is actually just that the student is a moron.
And I practice what I preach. I think I’ve mentioned before that my plotting for the game basically came together through just writing down potential plots, over and over again. Outlining the campaign, over and over. And some things stuck and some things didn’t, and then I wrote out some of one version of it, and then I killed it off but it was still an important part of the process. But that outline only gave out suggestions for certain chapter. I’m better equipped to figure out What Six Maps, Mechanically, make up a certain act now I’m at that threshold. Helpfully, it doesn’t require anything besides peace, quiet and a notebook to plot things out. I actually drafted out a chapter outline for the second half over the course of two or three sittings of ‘I show up to trivia an hour before anyone else’. One of those sessions was just written on a series of post-its I stashed in my bag. At one recent assembly, I spent the entire time looking at a clipboard, writing notes. Fortunately, because I was standing and surrounded by people who were sitting down, and were also stunted proto-beings, they couldn’t tell that I was trying to puzzle through a logical set of boss recruits and the best order for the mechanical challenges and plot beats I’d settled on.
So that’s what I’m going to spend the next month doing. Catchup, by necessity. The gameplay is largely parked, and that’s okay. 14 chapters in seven months is well ahead of schedule, considering that the first two months were largely spent establishing the foundation.
Note to Self: Remember to Go Back and Devise Pithy Headline About Battle Quotes
What is a battle quote actually for?
It can seem obvious on the face of it. It’s for letting the player lock together logical opponents and get the feedback that, yes, the developer agreed they were logical opponents, and pog, without there generally being any mechanical advantage. It might be nice to let the myrmidon kill her old mentor, but on the map, your swordreaver fighter has a much safer kill, so you’ll be okay.
I didn’t write many of them in Drums of War. There were opportunities for some I should have taken, really, but didn’t. Vanilla doesn’t have all that many, either, most of the time (Tellius aside). Homecoming didn’t have many, either; characters were a lot closer to board pieces. Exploring the nuances of Nete’s personality wasn’t really the point. You like her because she has a broad frame and oddly high skill for her class.
Dream of Five, meanwhile, was a very interconnected setting with a lot of pre-existing dynamics, and battle quotes were a natural vector for that. You pick up Lyndra in A-route Act 2, and she’s a defector from the faction you spend most of Act 3 fighting; most Warden captains know Lyndra, and she’s close to family to some. You also pick up Conleth, also a defector from that faction… but nobody actually knows him personally, so his battle quotes are more based around, ‘hey, why are you wearing that armour?!’ and the logical explanation. Hey. It’s nice armour.
Do5, bluntly, has a shitload, to the point where some legend made a compilation of every Do5 battle quote (just ‘specific guy vs. specific guy’, not even the generic ones) and it lasts like two hours. DoR is more on the Do5 side of the occasion, but there was some bloat there. Actually, much of it had to do with the lord. Rena’s battle quotes often wound up some form of ‘die, pretender! you’ll never win!’ ‘yes i shall!’, to the point where later ones lampshaded it to some extent (“I’ve heard that defiance from so many others before you…”) in a way that was hopefully cute.
But for DoR, it’s going to be even more important, in part because of the lack of vanilla GBAFE supports. The base conversations that replaced them are built into the setting and progression, and that’s a major advantage of them. Berisha isn’t just expositing about her history and by extension the role of lesser Exile knights in society, or talking about her character flaws in such a way that will be as questionably relevant in Chapter 25 as it was in Chapter 11; she’s telling you what she thinks about the current situation. When you work with the Exiles, Jadzia tells you about her mixed feelings about coming home, Asger talks about how he’s finding it difficult to hide his contempt, Szalai’s warmly anticipating the day you turn on each other.
And so the role of battle quotes, really, is to double down on that. While there are far fewer personal connections than in Dream of Five, fewer people who are related to others in some way – in large part because most of your midgame units are potentially executable, they can’t matter too much and generally won’t have existing playables begging for them to stick around – each character even more than that stands in for a societal group and/or cultural attitude. Szalai doesn’t know Rijescan loyalist leaders, and they don’t know him, but he has thoughts about them. He doesn’t want to fight them. And their continuing resistance is a threat to his own decision to surrender to something he thought was inevitable. He’s got to push back.
You’re about to fight someone specific, they’re about to fight you. In the rush of the moment, what thoughts does that give you? That’s what battle quotes are. And seeing the characters react to the events of the gameplay helps knit them into the setting. Helps reassure the player that the developer (hi) hasn’t forgotten they exist. Acknowledges and respects their continued presence.
… But at the same time, it really does have to be a little more than just ‘grr you will never stop me’ ‘yes i shall’. The more memorable ones are always building off something better. Someone trying to talk someone else down, someone saying that they aren’t just doing their duty but that they’re gonna enjoy this, someone expressing regrets or doubts. And also, it has to reflect the actual situation, which I think is a particular weakness of vanilla. Captain Dreadnought sitting on the throne, if he’s having a battle quote, is in a situation where you’ve just killed all his men. He’s probably not under any illusions he’s walking out of this alive. But he can drag one or two of you down to hell with him. It’s an opportunity to mark a contrast from the start of the map, where he had a plan and was pretty sure he was going to be the one to squash your resistance. And when most of those quotes reflect that reality, the ones that don’t become more noteworthy. When someone actually does think they’re going to carve through your ranks, either that says they’re delusional (or at least arrogant) or, with a particular self-assured confidence and the mechanical heft to back it up, that stands out.
What’s Next
Well, it’s going to take until the 10th of July for me to be back in my home space, and realistically tack on another couple of days for me to actually get re-oriented. Thankfully, I don’t really get jetlagged (edit with benefit of hindsight: lol. lmao. i fucking absolutely do get jetlagged it turns out). In theory, I’m going to be very refreshed and ready to hammer out Chapter 15 with some of the world backfilled by then. That’s base conversations and death quotes, as mentioned, but it’s also elements of visual design. I also have other writing commitments to catch up on, and I will have the time. In theory.
11 Likes
Can’t they just… join overleveled, but with normal stats/growths for their level? You said EXP gain was going to be glacial, right? So wouldn’t it take a while for your current squad members to catch up to them?
:walter:
Can’t they just… join overleveled, but with normal stats/growths for their level?
I mean, if you have a guy rock up at Level 8 Champion with Level 20/8 Champion Stats and competitive growths, when everyone else is like, only just promoting, you have someone who is effortlessly flattening the entire competition, and the rest of the cast can only ever hope to catch up. I want them to be a legitimate power-spike (I mean, you’re passing up on 4000 gold) that’s sustainable in the long term, without just being unambiguously superior forever, and I know how to get that curve with this experience formula. This is how.
If you have more than 100 items in your supply at any one time, it’s time to liquidate. There is no actual reason to need more than that, or at least, not in an environment without a lot of gimmicky items that aren’t in regular use. It’s just encouraging hoarding.
3 Likes
Well, yeah, but you don’t have to make that character a 20/8 champion, no? They could be, like, 20/3 or 15/3.
I’ll trust your judgement on this, though.
Isn’t DoR’s economy system meant to encourage hoarding and minimizing costs?
In the context of a prepromote, a 15/3 champion is literally just another way of saying ‘a level 3 unit with poor base stats for their level’. And if, then, you have level 20s who are just about to promote (and this is shaping up to be a ‘promote at 18-20’ kind of game)… then the new guy is not actually going to get minutes, because his stats are going to be worse.
Lyndra probably works the best of any Do5 prepromote to illustrate how this works in the midgame. She rolls up as easily the best unit in your squad in A route, but when your growth units start to promote 3-5 chapters down the line, they quickly catch up to her, and due to the XP formula, she basically hasn’t been getting XP that whole time (though DoR’s will be a little less oppressive on that front, as HC’s was). If you don’t particularly like Lyndra, it’s very easy to drop her in the deployment crunch of Act 3 – here, replace that with ‘in the new wave of boss recruits’. But if you keep using her, she will take off when she starts to get levels again, though low Strength remains her weakness – and her high Speed and Defence keep her relevant, if not optimal, even through her pain point (very important given C18 heavily encourages her deployment). So she’s at her strongest at join, at her weakest when the growth units catch up to her in level, and ultimately recovers to become a mediocre but viable endgame unit.
More exaggerated version of the same thing, of course, is Garath. Garath’s bases are basically close enough to 10/1 Driscoll. But 10/1 Driscoll is not a unit that will ever actually exist; it cripples his long-term because of the XP formula, master seals are valuable, Act 2 really isn’t that hard, and you get powerspike units from fresh prepromotes (like Lyndra!) anyway. Driscoll’s actually catching up to Garath in stats by like level 14 and like chapter 11. Garath’s bases can’t get better; he’s the Jagen, he would simply snap the earlygame over his knee. Garath’s level can’t get lower; he is Level 1 and needs to be promoted. So he needs his growths pumped up, for anyone determined to keep using him. When Driscoll (or whoever) catches up to Garath’s level (or, realistically, is like 1-2 behind), he’s at his peak advantage, and then Garath gradually eats into that lead to become a pretty bad but still viable endgame unit.
There are multiple ways to skin this particular cat, but this way works for this system and for my intent.
Hoarding isn’t minimising costs. It’s effectively setting money on fire through not using resources. The 3000 gold that went to buying a silver sword that never saw use may as well not have been spent, which means it may as well never have been earned, which means it may as well not exist. If there was only one silver shop in the game and it’s in Chapter 4, sure, you’d be incentivised to buy a batch and sit on them for awhile, but that isn’t this environment. Use the items you have, buy enough to keep your forces equipped with a range of good and cheap weaponry, keep a rainy day fund in reserve. Besides, not once have I seen (or had!) a 200-supply convoy that isn’t just a shitload of 8-use steels that are never gonna get used up. That isn’t efficient. Put them on units as sidearms or sell them.
4 Likes
Very notably the entirety of do5’s exp formula is designed around 1984-ing Garath’s exp gains until about c11-12 or so (earlier if you are willing to feed bosses to him, which is a pretty major cost), since in the fe7 version with the vanilla formula he’s just dominant forever on much lower growths but having access to early exp. We originally used the Fates Luna EXP patch directly in Builder but wanted boss exp added in so I ported the formula to C code and now I can just make easy variations on it if we want tighter or looser scaling whenever. HC uses a version where I loosened up the dropoff speed. DoR is looking at similar pace of scaling but i just cut base + kill bonus by like 20% or something
3 Likes
What are your thoughts on hybrid str/mag classes? I noticed in this post there were none listed and that magic swords used resistance. Is there a reason you’ve maintained keeping strength and magic offensive classes separate?
I don’t have a compelling reason to split them. Without that, a Str/Magic split would only clutter the statscreen.
5 Likes
JULY 2026 – Even Water Sleeps but the Hack Never Rests
Progress Report
- Got C15 ready to playtest (it will probably bite my head off as it stands)
- Saw Senegal 5-0 Iraq
- Went from being extremely far behind on battle quotes and camp dialogue to being extremely far ahead on these things
- Solidified the five endings
- That’s about it lol
Holidays are over and it’s back to the grind. Due to the nature of the time I had – that being separated from all of my stuff (and my save file!) and on a shitty backup laptop – it made the most sense to just keep on with conversations. So that’s what I did. While I haven’t made progress in terms of Complete Chapters, I was able to pour like 60+ man hours into the hack one way or another. It’s all about consistency.
Credit to Lumi as well, who used some of her own holiday time illustrating concepts for much of the cast.
Posting today because my holidays, well, end tomorrow. Back to the other grind. The one that keeps me in iced coffee and plastic crack…
You Should See the Other Guy
I’m pulling double duty in describing our foil, because I’m actually writing this first in order to create a design reference for him.
Something that I’ve always held is a very useful thing to think about is: what is the worst thing your protagonist has ever done? Well, one of the events that kick-starts the game is simple. Lindauer – currently being groomed by the Magistrate as a potential candidate for training as a dignitary – has noticed that her brother is reading illicit material and falling in line with rebel thoughts. Afraid of the consequences that are sure to follow if he is only caught after something terrible happens, Lindauer turns him over to the Guard. He avoids the noose, but he is branded as a traitor and press-ganged into a penal legion. At the beginning of the game, the sister is preparing to leave for Covenant in the Magistrate’s tow, while the brother is set to march south to the interminable quagmire war in Rijesca.
It is not a spoiler to confirm that that is not the last you will see of your brother.
The six years between the prologue and chapter 1 shape the siblings in very different ways. While Lindauer is a smooth, polished operative of the Confederation, Radek is a hardened warrior who has been doing the hard yards in the least glamorous corners of the Guard, proving his ability and, reluctantly, leadership, and working his way up the ranks. Both have found redemption in the eyes of the Confederation, through very different ways. And it has left scars on them both, too.
Radek has found some appreciation for the Confederation, sure, and his rebel tendencies have faded. But he still resents what the place has done to him, and what he’s been through, and… he has not forgotten who put him there, either, nor forgiven. Bouncing from battalion to battalion and battlefield to battlefield has given him a rather ramshackle assortment of heavy armour, and his natural build (visible in Prologue, that being: Lunk) has sharpened into a hulking, tigerish killing machine, a full-on linebacker. Beyond that, well, you’ll have to wait on what Lumi produces…
But as a person, Radek is someone who has risen to the moment… sort of. He found a way to work within the system, at the second time of asking. He did not throw away what he thought of as his second chance. But he did throw away his dreams of a better way of life, and is resigned to leaving all that to those above his head. He’ll lead, with some reluctance, by example, but his eyes are fixed at the ground and he’s just providing his men someone and something to rally around. He’s still alive, but he’s been ground down, and needs to remember he’s allowed to look up and notice the stars again. Trouble is, when he does have the chance to look up, he’ll instead find the entire reason he’s stuck in this hellhole to begin with.
What a great find for the Damned Cohort he shall make.
Finally, The Straight White Male Patiently Explains Gender Politics To You
And he’s gay. Radek, I mean. Not the straight white male. That’s me. This is probably not a surprise.
It’s overdue that there’s a significant Man With A Solely Male, Requited, Fulfilled Love Interest in an NQR campaign, something I have (please do trust me on this adjective) inadvertently swerved to date. Technically in The Documents Kalevi is bisexual, but there is no evidence for this in DoW itself; Jolyon is explicitly bisexual but his only requited love interest is a woman, while Arcus shoots him down; and while Hereward is gay and can have an MLM relationship, his only potential partner is a low-tier B-route prepromote whose movement doesn’t match and whose weapon types and statspread are redundant, so it’s unfortunately very rare to actually see in the wild. There’s a couple of ships between minor characters (Sander/Kestut, Conleth/Chester, Alexis/Stolypin), but that’s about it. Eyebrows have been raised, and accusations of a disparity are, honestly, completely fair.
I am probably the wrong person to speak at much length about this. But I am far from the first person to note that this disparity goes well beyond NQR and into the custom campaign scene as a whole. A large part of this stems from the environment we’re working in. We’re dealing with a strategy game from a more heteronormative and chauvinistic time, so of course we perceive a lack of significant women and a lack of gay people and work to consciously address it, and wind up drowning in lesbians. Even today, going into media as a whole and saying ‘there should be fewer lesbian relationships, actually’ would be psychotic. And, honestly, I can only think of a couple of campaigns which in isolation strike me as questionable in that regard. If you are reading this and are about to write a WLW protagonist, well, you certainly shouldn’t stop on my account. (Even if I somehow thought that, that is for several obvious reasons Not My Call. I’m presumptuous, but not that presumptuous.)
But it’s about patterns. At some point we have to become conscious of the environment we’ve collectively built, and the community we’ve fostered. In that community there are a lot of WLW that are pleased to find WLW representation in custom campaigns, and that’s truly wonderful. I do not at all mean to downplay the significance of that. But… you’ve seen the same comments I have. People drooling over The Yuri, not even really for its own merits but simply just because it’s The Yuri. And, yes, some of the portrayals of women in custom campaigns (my own included! Unfortunately!) have the male gaze, if not necessarily front and centre, at least looming in the background. I’m obviously not saying people can’t or shouldn’t find characters attractive and relationships appealing. But at the very least, we should remain conscious of how all this looks on aggregate, and do our best to ensure that nobody experiencing our works feels like they’re an afterthought, or that their orientation wasn’t titillating to the author and so for that reason was sidelined or forgotten, or that their orientation was titillating and so for that reason was made prominent for the author’s benefit.
Anyway, Radek’s gay, there is a romance option lined up for him. Lindauer’s bi, there are male and female romance options open for her. There’s little romance between other squad members, in part because of base dialogue taking over from supports. I do not think I have been guilty of particular excess, but I have undeniably fed into a greater pattern. I am trying to remain conscious of my biases and those of the community on aggregate. This isn’t worthy of praise, it’s just what I should have done from the start. Better late than never, I guess.
Anyway. Enough about me. Let’s talk about You.
You
Here’s the question. In the eyes of the campaign, who is actually calling the shots here? Who does the player represent?
I often like to hearken back to old strategy games and, hey, I’m going to do that here. In those, the player was generally some nameless strategist figure. You always got a you. There was a sense of role-playing. What does that look like? Lead us away, Warcraft 1:
Blackhand has assigned you to an outpost in the Swamps of Sorrow. Your task is simple enough that even the War Chief feels that you are capable of it. Construct at least six farms, so that we may keep our troops well fed and ready to do battle. Only a fool would leave his treasures unguarded, so you must also build a barracks for the defense of these farms.
Sometimes this would later become a character. IIRC the You of C&C:RA1 is implied to be your commander in C&C:RA2. In Starcraft 1, ‘the Magistrate’ would become Matt Horner*, ‘the Executor’ (Tassadar has failed us; you must not…) would turn out to be Artanis, replaced by a new ‘the Executor’ in the next campaign, who would in turn become Selendis. Hilariously, in Campaign 2, You are a nameless overmind… which gets ganked like three maps into the next campaign. But ultimately you don’t really become a character who inhabits the world, and only by departing your control can a character be attributed Your past successes.
I know I just said it was an old-school thing but the sheer bluntness of ‘You are [Name Entry],’ is timeless, OK
So how does this apply to FE? Well, sometimes there’s a tactician, most obviously Mark, being the character You are inhabiting. In Mark’s case, they’re obviously denied any real characterisation of their own. Because… it’s You. And, hell, for 13-year old Daisuke handed his GameBoy Advance™, he probably just input his own name and gets to be the guy Lyn is expressing interest in and his decision to throw Bartre into a killing edge myrm because he might just hit this 27% (which absolutely has a 27% chance of happening, right?) is honoured by the game. Daisuke The Kid wills it, Daisuke The Character orders it, Bartre eats shit and Fir is evaporated from canon.
But I think most people will agree Mark in execution is kind of dumb. Not to say tactician characters can’t work. FE3, everyone’s favourite game to pretend to have played, has Malledus. But most FEs never attribute The Orders and The Management to any one guy and I don’t think they suffer for it. In part this is because of the scale and the fantasy being sold. Guy doesn’t need to be told to run at that bandit and run him through. Guy does it on his own. If anything, attributing these actions directly to a character strains disbelief. You are the vague spirit pushing the army forward. So one thinks yet again back to Blizzard RTSes, back to Warcraft 3, which never has any explicit character behind the cursor, and to the Priest’s declaration: I have been chosen by the big metal hand in the sky!
Not her, either, unless You is also You.
So ‘who are you’ is not really a question that matters or needs an answer in this genre… except that You, Behind The Camera, are asked for input a number of times in Day of Reckoning. Indeed, you are in Drums of War, too. Roxelana isn’t telling Andrea to advance three tiles and then use Courtain to vapourise some cunt from 2-range, but she’s probably deploying Andrea in her abstract elite guard (well, mine isn’t, but maybe yours does). Who is the one deciding to recruit or ditch people? Well, it’s Roxelana, but why is it different between playthroughs? Does any of this even fucking matter? What the fuck are we doing here?!
And, no, it doesn’t, really. But the sense of playing a role never really fits into DoW. These are the only choices Roxelana might make differently. Rena and Bronwyn don’t even get that. Lindauer, though? You’re routinely making calls for her that are 50:50. It’s not that she’s a blank slate; indeed, if you’re hoping to use her as a self-insert, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The picture is not altogether flattering. She’s ambitious to a fault, loyal to causes that don’t deserve it, situationally ruthless, and she routinely lies through her teeth. There are many secrets she keeps that the player is not privy to. You don’t get to choose who Lindauer, at her core, is… but you can pick pivot points at times where some quantum version of Lindauer might go either way.
But I’ve already gone over her as my form of a slightly more RPGish Avatar. What’s new to this post and the point I’m getting around to is this:
Can I get away with saying ‘you’ here?
I tried to avoid it early on in the campaign, but there are just moments where it flows a lot better. And avoiding ‘you’ in these can come across like avoiding ‘I’ in an essay; like inefficient obfuscation that still leaves it pretty plain what’s been unspoken. At the same time… no, Lindauer isn’t your self-insert. That’s why she’s so set in stone in significant facets of her character. Why her backstory and personality are 90% the same no matter what. Why you choose between twelve names instead of just choosing your own. Does it go against that to ask what you would do in her shoes, and then have her do that?
And the answer, I think, is, uh, ‘no, but not fatally’.
Because you can still play a role with it being set in stone. After all, there’s always things set in stone in any roleplaying game. Daisuke The Tactician is still some dipshit in Lorca lands while Daisuke The Kid is still some dipshit who needs to improve his Maths grades. Ultima’s Avatar is you; you are not the Avatar. So asking the player to just commit that little bit more to being this cold-blooded Tudor lawyer type does not seem as though it fatally undermines the vision.
Is ‘fuck it, it doesn’t matter so I’ll go with the one that lets me write tighter sentences’ a very satisfying answer? No. Is it the one you’re getting? Yes.
On Endings
So what kind of choices do you get? Approaches in dialogue, some that matter, others that don’t. Romance options. Oh, yeah, and five endings.
Not five true endings. Not five equally happy endings. Nor is the true ending hidden, or hard to achieve. You don’t gotta collect the starsign stones. You don’t gotta not use the legendary weapons. 80-90% of players will get the best of the five endings. But you still need to choose them. And what’s the point in a choice when there isn’t an alternative? Why offer you choices only for inconsequential things, so long as Lindauer might plausibly follow along?
(You can see why thinking too much about What Lindauer Should Do leads to headaches.)
I hope you like when I bring up unrelated games. Suikoden 5! Like most people, I’ve only experienced it through the SomethingAwful LP, so here goes. There comes a point at which you’re beset by an enemy army. You are heavily encouraged by your insufferable Zhuge Liang expy advisor to ditch the stronghold and abandon it to the enemy, to do Schemes somewhere else. The game makes it really fucking obvious: She Is Right. But you can tell her to go fuck herself and hold your ground. It’s not a game over! It’s not even a bad ending! But in the attempt to hold your ground, you will lose a character (and, I think, get bailed out by Temu Zhuge’s backup plan anyway).
And of course Yggdra Union, which people (fairly) assume I like, but I don’t have particular thoughts about it beyond that I don’t love the aesthetic and that it beat the shit out of me when I was a kid, or at least the GBA version with its attrition mechanic did. My memory of the specifics is… vague… but there’s definitely something where you win the war, secure all your objectives, but you can keep fighting. There’s no story point to keeping on fighting and you get a worse ending; if you let momentum carry you on without purpose, you’ll pay for it. Rondo of Swords has something similar, too. Not the first time I’ve taken inspiration from something ending-related from that…
Unlike Wizardry IV, the true ending will not require a basic understanding of pop-culture Kabbalistic ritual.
So, endings. A through E; one Good, one Neutral (leaning positive), one Neutral (leaning negative), two pretty unambiguously Bad. A and B get you ending slides. C-E do not. There’s options if you want them. And it provides an opportunity to see the world from other perspectives. Is this an efficient use of time? No. But you should always colour one layer beneath the surface. And it’ll be fun.
What’s Next
Back to the grind. I need to get working on Chapters again, getting back up to speed at two or three a month. I’m ahead of writing, which means I can work on some of my other commitments with that time. What’s also very important is getting my schedule back in whack. I’m finding myself sleeping at 5 and waking up at 1. This will not do. 6-8 is when my writing time is, but even if I could push through, I’d be too tired to do anything then.
*This is explicitly not the case, but is such an insanely obvious missed opportunity that I refuse to accept the canon here.
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I always look forward to these updates and this one in particular means a lot to me. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and point some of the issues regarding representation in the community.
I’m really excited to have an unambiguously gay male protagonist/deuteragonist in a hack.
I’ve finished DoF have just started DoW and can see the love and passion you have for your work and this series. We all know you’re going to knock this game out the park.
Can’t wait to see the next dev diary, keep them coming! 
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