Well, one person’s intention is to strike a conversation. The other’s is to take jabs at someone. Hating on someone because they make really long paragraphs about very specific and sometimes weird topics doesn’t sound worthwhile to me. There are so many better people to hate on.
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I’d differ - rather that that one person’s intention is to be heard - there’s a complete lack of conversation from the OP’s in any of his threads beyond two replies or so in the rare thread. Jason isn’t going for striking up conversation at all.
But you do have my intentions right.
genuinely getting mad at this thread is stupid and if you’re trying to frame this thread as a problem in a vacuum you’re being dumb
but jason has a very well-established pattern of dropping “discussion threads” where he isn’t interested in discussing at all, he just wants to rant about a thought that recently came to mind for him
that’s why the posts are always massive unedited text walls of stream of consciousness where he doesn’t respond to any of the posts that follow. Honestly the guy just needs a blog or a journal or something, or at least a single thread dedicated to his particular brand of ramblepost. Framing his posts as “jumping off points for discussion” misses the context of him having spent well over a year pointedly refusing to discuss any points he’s tried to make.
this is why people get irrationally annoyed when they see “writing thread to discuss writing!” and open it up to see it’s another jasongodwin unstructured longpost instead of a call for discussion. They know, immediately, that the thread isn’t actually for “everyone and anyone’s writing discussion” it’s just for that top post. now the thread is an orphan. his dad abandoned him. I’m sad about it. bring back jasongodwin’s orphan son.
it’s still stupid to pretend this thread is disrespectful or trying to vaguepost and call out another hack, it’s very obviously just another instance of “neurons fired and jason spammed out an essay in 20 minutes” and getting genuinely upset about this happening is so so silly. saying “I saw a thing I didn’t like in a hack that I see frequently” is not an attack on hacking, nor a veiled attack against a single hack. Jason isn’t a bogeyman he’s just a forum poster
anyway jason I am serious, just start like a thread called “jasonposting” or something and just make it your personal little devblog thread, if you just stop framing your posts as “discussion threads” or “advice” and just own that you’re just jotting down your thoughts for the world to see, people won’t get upset about the fact that you’re clearly not posting for “discussion” or “advice”
so yea stop bickering it’s dumbbb
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Sometimes when I write and get writer’s block, I like to just set it aside until I have time to shower. This is common knowledge for most, but for the few people on FEU who never shower (or shit?), the shower or the shitter is the best time to unravel your thoughts and pierce through blocks.
Just don’t bring your phone into the bathroom for this, it defeats the purpose.
EDIT: I don’t personally get the chance to do this on the shitter because I am a morning shitter and I don’t usually start on hack writing that early in the day, hence why I mentioned the shower for myself personally.
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I agree with the OP. While over the years, we had had many quality hacks, some did suffer from writing issues.
What we have to keep in mind is that many people doing hacks are quite young and inexperienced. What we should do is to advise them how to do better and impove.
A good intro would establish the basics of the plot with the entire story being slowly revealed as chapters go. There’s no point in introducing characters that won’t have any plot relevance until the second half of the game.
In fact, Fire Emblem is very guilty of unnecessary info dumps. Only while playing FE4 for the second time I noticed how many things were introduced that I forgot about because it had no plot relevance for a long time. Meanwhile - FE1 has no initial info dumps yet you never has any issue following the plot.
There’s something to say about minimalist game design. Look at one of the most critically acclaimed plots of the recent years - the 2018 God of War. What initial information we’re given? None. The game just starts. If you haven’t played the previous games, you have no context. Yet the plot is easy to follow.
But I shouldn’t ramble. Because else my point would be hard to follow as well 
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I do think there are some fair points in here. I think for instance it’s really hard to care, let alone remember, countries and leaders when all you have is said country’s name and the leader’s face before being thrown into the game. Especially since most of the time the information presented in the infodump is pretty redundant as the same information will be given later whenever it’ll be relevant (usually)
That being said, there are some faulty comparisons here too. Sure, ATLA’s infodump is cool and has visuals that stick out, but the FEGBA engine can’t really do anything like that, so I feel like it’s unfair to bring that up?
An understated aspect of a game’s introduction is TONE. More importantly than setting lore or worldbuilding, your game’s intro should set a tone for the rest of the game. Whether your game is a comedy game, a horror game or an epic fantasy, the intro is what sets expectation for it. If your intro is a very verbose exposition dump that is 100% worldbuilding and 0% character, the tone you’ll set for the player is that your rpg is generic and boring.
Above are examples of introductions I like, from a variety of games (in order: LISA: The Painful, Tales of Berseria, Fallout 4, Fear & Hunger Termina, Slay The Princess, Ib, Darkest Dungeon, Thank Goodness You’re Here, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Thomas Was Alone, Inscryption and Return of the Obra Dinn. Some of them pop you right into the game (Inscryption, Slay The Princess, Ib, Thomas Was Alone…) while others have quite a lengthy introduction/tutorial sequence, and both work just fine. All you need to do is to consider what the player will feel from your introduction, rather than what information they’ll sponge out from it.
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lisa mentioned
oh yeah baby the community threads been saved by kino
Thats a good idea. We should move this to the community category because, no offense, I don’t want to see this.
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Chad actually mute community tag, cause it’s cursed for real 
Honestly I think it shows more restrain and will power to not engage with people that trigger ya, like again people keep saying bro is baiting AND THEN THEY GET BAITED lol, that’s like setsuna in a hole saying “this is a trap”. just scroll pass the thread
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Setting aside the whole thing about whether the reactions to “yet another jason wallpost” are justified, I’ve moved this to community because the premise of the thread is not really what the Design category is for.
The category blurb states that Design is “A category for topics discussing different various facets of game design; level balancing, character progression, conceptual gameplay systems”, which I will interpret as needing to be at least nominally related to actual game mechanics. If you’re just talking about the story like a novel, put it somewhere else (I’m aware we don’t have a real “writing” category; I wouldn’t be opposed to making one if there is demand).
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I mean…
At least a third of any good FE game is comprised of writing-related stuff, isn’t it? Like, for as much as the mainline series has never had a truly, unabashedly excellent story, it’s got a hell of a lot of great moments writing-wise.
A ‘writing’ category would be very much warranted, I’d think.
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I see no reason to mention the specific story that inspired me to start the writing thread with that example of a writing mistake multiple stories made. It’s not something specific to one story, it’s a self-explanatory mistake many stories are worse off for having even if they are otherwise excellent.
A bad opening prolongs the time it takes the reader to get hooked by what really matters about the story, and this has to be one of the worst things to do to the opening. Even if you cut the opening crawl from the first Star Wars film, you can figure enough out from context clues to get the story. The baddies in the big ship are pursuing the little fleeing ship, the baddies and rebels are fighting, oh shit it’s darth vader, oh shit he blew up a planet, fun adorable little underestimated droids with the most important thing (Leia’s message) are underestimated by the villains, now they are going to the most important people (Obi-Wan and Luke), and Luke’s the protagonist, it’s epic.
Stories with characters have at least one protagonist or POV character even if there are no heroes.
I hope everyone irrationally angry at my presence knows I do not care about them, I do not remember their names, and I do not respect how they whine about me in my threads instead of attempting to honestly engage with the central point of the thread. So far, ignoring these people has worked out pretty well, but I want you to tell the others in the anti-Jason Godwyn discord server I do not respect them. I will not be baited into trying to convince my haters this isn’t bait. If anything, making a complaint about overly long intros and giving it an overly long intro that gets in the way of the actual point would be funny. But I didn’t do that. The point was established early enough, anyone who read the whole thing lost the right to complain about how long it was, especially if their only real complaint is “Wah, wah, Jason is talking again on my site! Mods! Mods! This maker of fire emblem hacks (who still isn’t done with his project, how dare he choose to work on something for so long) is making threads again on a discussion site dedicated to discussing fire emblem and fire emblem hacking! It irks me that sometimes his threads are overly specific and not about me and what I want to talk about instead! He should post somewhere else, anywhere else, instead of expecting me to engage honestly in intellectual discussion”.
It’s funny, I was accused of shitting on a specific hack anyway and was also called a coward for not mentioning it so it can be shat upon. (Pick one, hatedom.) Even though it’s a very common writing mistake multiple stories have made, including more than one Fire Emblem fangame. Reading comprehension is hard, I guess. If I made this thread a private message to one specific user about a game he finished long ago, that wouldn’t help any writers actively working on new stuff. Sometimes I wonder if my haters proofread.
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do you ever read aloud what you write with a straight face
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To be quite honest, your comment, Doc, pisses me right the fuck off.
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Despite me not really agreeing with Jason most the time, including now, I just don’t say anything.
Extremely unneeded on your end to be completely blunt.
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good to know, thanks
But that doesn’t make them necessarily so central as to require you to center your understanding of the plot around them.
When we talk about the total breadth of stories, I mean. Obviously.
See, it’s different for video games and children’s cartoons like ATLA, and I agree that when you intend to write a plot for one of those starting with “who’s the hero, what are they doing, and why” is a good route, because they’re fundamentally simple stories which are intended either to serve as the frame for gameplay encounters or to make it easier to sell toys. Cynical, I know, but it’s true. It’s better when you can focus all your screen time on a photogenic main character that you can later market to consumers and so you naturally build the story around their wants and goals - and for a video game, it’s great since most games have a central playable character anyway and it’s natural to also make them the centerpiece of the plot.
Anyway, about the big issue in your post, namely too long infodumps at the start of romhacks. Can’t say I am some kind of librarian in romhack stories, but I am a fanfiction consumer and the principle is very similar (romhacks are, in a sense, either fanfiction or short homage stories, just in video game format. I stand by this claim), and yeah it’s an issue with stories by less experienced writers. The issue I feel is uh, how do I describe it… “fan wiki ambition”. Lots of people who end up writing fanfiction/homages interact with their media of choice through fan wikis and have an encyclopedic understanding of their show’s lore, and fan communities generally encourage this through constant debates about minor and fairly irrrelevant pieces of media lore. When said person decides to write their own take at said story, they approach it with this in their mind and believe that they must develop as many details as they can for their story world to make it “good”. Or, if they want to “fix” their media of choice, they might believe that said media was not detailed enough (something something “what’s Aragorn’s tax policy?”). i.e. they want their story to have a fan wiki. That’s the “fan wiki ambition”.
But being amateur, less experienced writers, they do so without really understanding how said detailed worlds described in fan wikis are formed. Generally it’s in a far less sexy way than they imagine. Like half of Dragon Ball deep lore is either random interview statements by Toriyama or straight up fan lore. No, they try to cram it into their story, and it’s difficult enough for an experienced writer to do, so a less experienced writer thus ends up with long blocks of exposition because they simply need their future fan wiki content to be displayed somewhere.
But that’s not really a problem that needs to be confronted or fought. Nobody starts with years of writing experience, nobody’s first story, or more accurately first fifty stories, are particularly deep or well thought-out. It happens. People read more media and learn what works and what they should do.
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people would be less likely to think you’re baiting all the time if you didn’t solely engage with the worst faith stuff in most every reply.
i can count the amount of times you’ve tried to engage with anyone being sincere with the topic you’ve made on one hand. and most of those are glasses thread and this post here. otherwise you’d pick the most flippant replies and only engage with them.
again, i think the shit here was a lame as fuck reason for people to blow up (seriously guys, for NOT making a thread calling out a hack?) and people are too quick to gun for the drama button when the main thesis of this thread is fundamentally fine (if too long for the point). but you’ve 100% done alot to wear down goodwill on intent when it comes to your actions vs your words
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: ‘after this, therefore because of this’) is an informal fallacy which one commits when one reasons, “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.” It is a fallacy in which an event is presumed to have been caused by a closely preceding event merely on the grounds of temporal succession. This type of reasoning is fallacious because mere temporal succession does not establish a causal connection. It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy. A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical fallacy in which one event seems to be the cause of a later event because it occurred earlier.
Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because correlation sometimes appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.
I’ve been accused of acting in bad faith here for “shitting on” a game I refused to name, even though I refused to name it because I knew I’d be accused of “shitting on” that game if I did name it. Bad faith is just another buzzword for my harassers to use against me like “troll” and “baiter”.
The people here in bad faith posted what they posted BEFORE I responded to them, and they continue behaving the same way whether I reply to them or not, so are you really going to blame me as a person for how these grown adults choose to behave no matter what I do?
I’m not harming anyone or wronging anyone by choosing to occasionally make threads and posts on a public Fire Emblem discussion board they don’t personally find interesting, but instead of ignoring threads they don’t like, they harass me whether I respond or not. It doesn’t matter what I post, it doesn’t matter how often I post, they choose to harass me, and any excuse they concoct to justify their behaviour is post-hoc.
You can’t appease them and play both sides by telling them they’re being ridiculous AND pretend they have a point here, when pretending they have any kind of point requires blaming me for how grown adults have chosen to harass and abuse me on a Fire Emblem discussion forum for literal years. Don’t victim-blame.
They are, solely and entirely, ridiculous people behaving unreasonably, and that is not my fault, and that should not be my problem. If you can’t see that, if you do but you don’t have the spine to call that out without trying to cover your ass because you’re scared shitless of how they might treat you if you came out in support of me, that’s on you.
Sometimes moderators post something along the lines of “This thread is allowed to exist” in my threads. It makes you wonder, how often are my threads and posts reported by these “people”? When will they tell my abusers to knock it off, or enforce site rules against them over this sad pathetic harassment campaign that’s continued against me for multiple literal years? Would staff ever do that, or would they decide permabanning me to appease the mob would cost the site fewer users? Maybe if more people stood up to the abusers and called them out when they are being absurd and unreasonable, and violating site rules openly, they wouldn’t feel so invincible.
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