The DotA is strong in this one.
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Hey! I don't join cults, I blast them! Allow me to demonstrate, FIRE THE-
Do you have an actual target for that? Or are you just firing wildly again?
I...my target was...hmphf. Spoilsport.
SpoilerHAH! You sir, underestimate the genius behind my Friendship Cannon Array! As the beams are delivered via portals, I can unleash maximum friendship energy upon a target without harming the surrounding environment! Its already done wonders for my insurance premiums!
And as for your niece, she's already made one of the classic tactical blunders: Never assume a mad scientist does not have more giant atomic monsters at his disposal.
*yet another massive portal opens infront of Nightcore*
Spoilerhttp://killallmonsters.com/wp-conten...cityattack.jpg
GROOOHAAAAAAAH!
AHAHAHA! The regenerating factor alone on this one should guarantee victory!
*Meanwhile*
...and finally I need you to flood those caverns under Manehatten with holy water. Trust me, this is an urgent matter of Equestrian national security.
Signed, Prince Regeln.
*sends letter via dragonflame*
Well, that's one down.
Haha! No, it's just his head. Body pillow would be... ugh.
I just thought it was funny.
Okay, I found my notes, two rather minor criticisms.
SpoilerThis seems to me like "presumably" would work better in context.Quote:
Twilight Sparkle had left two days earlier on a vacation of her own, supposedly on the advice of the princess because Twilight would never take a vacation if it wasn't more or less an order.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine Dash saying this. Maybe "Come on out! I'm not afraid of you!" or something.Quote:
“Come out and face me,” she cried into the dark.
Yeah, very minor points.
You... had to check? Ponythread is immortal. You should know this by now.
Picture time!
Michelle Creber is awesome.
This Day Aria, from Twilight's perspective:
Hugs!
Delicious!
I wonder if she knows what went wrong?
Remarkably awesome Discord art.
*snerk*
Cool Scoots anthro.
And lastly, let's have some WAT, provided by rule 63 Rover combat nun.
We didn't leave open a portal when we- *looks behind, sees a swarm of zombies.*
How did I not notice that yet? Oh well...
*Has absolutely nothing to do with any of these space-shenanigans; sets up a stone ring instead!* :D
You are totally a cultist, dude. Totally.
Ponythread RP - A Growth of Some SortSpoiler
Hmm. Perhaps you have some potential after all. We shall be watching how you get on.
Unicron the Unicorn. (Winged).
I can work with that.
The family thing would work, but personally I just prefer the simplicity of it being one, almost entirely honest and non-duplicitous changeling to any kind of identity sharing thing.
Also, yes. It has taken on the feeling of a fixed point in time. At least due to Sean Mirrsen's universe-external shenanigans, I have a get-out clause through which to continue the tumblr posts, should I decide to. (But only because I suspect he won't actually do anything with the character, so I don't mind borrowing it).
Not that there's been any news on the tumblr front recently.
Theory -
Spoiler
Well, the whole crop of (presumably cute) RP was exported en-mass to the IRC, as I understood it. There was none for some time, till the whole Pokonic/Alebenson thing started getting out of hand. Their enthusiastic back and forth is at least confined mostly to spoilers now, even though it has that mildly depressing lack of any progress ever thing going for it at times. Increasingly, it doesn't even result in reposted pictures of ponies, just random pictures from the internet.
I suppose we could with effort spin off a more sane and grimdark-free continuity and start with some less Xtreme rping, but that would probably require a gentleponies agreement for them not to stumble through the middle of it trying to recruit for their factions.
Sometimes it's easier just to shrug and go with the whole "If you can't beat em, join em!" thing.
Hmm, interesting distinction.
Ponythread RP - Appraising the Situation
SpoilerSo what you're saying is, you don't destroy cities anymore. And then you show us an image of one of your monsters destroying a city. Does that about cover it?
Oooh, you're asking for it now, aren't you...!
*deep metaphorical breath*
SpoilerThe ground rules we use are Manoeuvre Group, which are commercially available here, along with a good lot of fold-flat terrain (because to get the most out of MG, you need proper terrain, i.e. more than the usual wargamer's one house and two hills; foldflat cardboard gives you enough space to do that!)
They've also got army lists there as well (which are in fact real army organisation structures, with some game stats stuck in at the end.)
For the sci-fi side of the rules, you have to talk nicely to your fiendly neighnourhood Lich!
As for models, you can, of course, use anything. MG itself doesn't have a generation system as such - because it's designed to model real-world combat - so making scifi stuff is a bit of trial and error and playtesting. (And, as I alluded to earlier, understanding that despite there being 20+ classes or armour and weapons that doesn't mean there really are in practise. The stats I knocked up for the Aotrs are beign revised slowly, in between the other stuff, because I made that misunderstanding myself when I first started to play. Basically, you end up playing around roughly in MBT tank/armour class +/-3 or so). But again, talk to aforementioned Lich...!
Designing my models. I personally use TurboCAD - mostly because I've used it for years - but of coruse that's a full CADs package and I'm not sure how much they are. (Ebay is probably worth a look - I use TCAD v16 for my 3D cadding (we have V17 but it doesn't render as well for some reason) which is about three or four version behind, so you might be able to pick it up quite cheap. My mate reckoned he saw it in town for about £8 the other week, so it's possible.) It's also worth noting I'm using the "deluxe" version, which is marketing talk for "the cheap crappy version which you can buy for £40-£80 quid new" as opposed to the Pro version or "how many thousand quid did you want to pay for the extra bells and whistles?!?"
Alternatively, you can use any CADs package, or even something like Blender (I use one of the older version, which has an add-on to import .dxf files so I can export to .stl files, which are the optimal format for Shapeways because they have a scale, but Shapeways has more acceptable formats now.) Blender is open-source, so it's free - but it's also open-source, so the UI (at least one the earlier version) is... well, crap. There are lots of tutorials on the web for it, though, but it works fundementally differently to TCAD. I can be completely exact with TurboCAD, whereas with Blender, it's a bit more about getting your eye in.
Or google sketch-up etc etc, whatever's your poison.
Whatever you use, though, be aware, that, like learning to draw, learning to make 3D models is going to be a time-sink, and 2D drawing skills are not massively translatable.
The way I make a model in TurboCAD is all about making developed shapes. Virtually everything I do is either built as an extrusion from a 2D shape or a loft between two equally noded (i.e. equal number of "corners") 2D shapes, a sweep along a line, or for thinsg like guns, a rotation. Boolean operations are the name of the name too, adding, subtracting, sometimes intersecting (things like the torsos of the Strayvian infantry were made by drawing a 2D shape, front, top and side, extruding them all together, and then using boolean intersect which means "get rid of all the bits of these two shapes that dont overlap" twice) and occasionally slicing off by workplane.
The workplane is basically the thing you do all the stuff on, your 2D paper as it were, and a lot of the work is moving the workplane around (such as, when doing, say the plating on the sides of a vehicle, I use "set work plane via three points" and then use snap-to-point to select the corners of the surface in question.)
Moving stuff about via linear copy is also a major element, as is moving stuff via the x,y,z co-ordinates (as in, move that gun back on the model (because I orientate them all the same way), some, ooh, about 0.5 on the y axix).
The final model is boolean added together (with any hollowing out - which is an unfortunate necessity at Shapeways - done as boolean subtraction). Sometimes, if you have something just at the wrong place (like a point touching a surface), I have to move things up and down by 0.01mm or something.
I then save it as a .dxf, slip over to Blender, import the .dxf and export as a .stl, then use a little program called netfabb to run a check (it often catches little problems with the mesh that you couldn't catch otherwise). Then it can be uploaded to Shapeways.
That probably doesn't all make much sense, but really, it's an art form all in itself (Thanqol probably couldn't bullet point his art process and tools used for me to understand very easily either!) and there's no subsitute for practice - and of course it entirely depends on what kind of package you're using.
Commissions are certainly possible (especially since if I'm getting paid, I can find some more time to do it) - I've done a couple of proper commissions (as opposed to a couple of modifications to some on my existing models that don't much effort); the going rate is about £40-50 for a model (maybe slightly higher) - at least that's what I've been getting, after being politely told by the nice chap I was designing for I was asking for well below what he was comfortable paying me! Scale doesn't usually make much difference in that, though obviously larger and more complex models take much more time. (As a rough guide, it usually takes me something of the order of eight-ten hours to do a model to completion if I'm having a good day - like with Applebloomtank. Shape also matters - things like the Delta ships or the Jalyrkieons are quicker to do that, say, the SSA or the Vivrathk fleets were.)
You honestly might be better starting off getting some existing models first - in any case Manoeuvre Group works at 72nd (25mm/28mm/ the size of roelplaying figures) and 144th (12mm, or half that) and the former is not practical for steriolithe models yet. You could play at 15mm, which is rather more popular for scifi (because you can have big vehicles but without breaking the bank) but then you have to make your own buildings! (Which is doable, again if you want to put the time in - you start with cerial boxes. Seriously, they already have the folds in.) Assuming you don't go to Games Workshop, there are lots of other places with far more sensible prices that do scifi - and of course WW2/modern if you choose that particular poison. A good place to start would be to go to TMP, The Miniatures Page, wherein there are forums to talk to people about.
All of that model/rule talk is for the ground combat side, of course. For starships, you have to grovel real nice to magical space-liches, and if you're very good, they can send you their as-yet-unreleased-but-like 99.999% complete starship rules. There is even a "starter set" which is a (slightly!) cut-down version of the main rules with just the rules for the bits the Stone Portals and Vivrathk fleets use, with a set of markers for starships so you can almost sorta play out of the "box."
Starship model wise, you're really spoilt for choice. Aside from the Shipyards, there's crap-loads of places on Shapeways, and of course, even more regular castings. Two companies of particualr note are Ground Zero Games (which is arguably the biggest starship guys, though they do loads of other stuff like 25 and 15mm stuff too) and Irregular Miniatures, which do pretty fracking everything of variable quality, but at very cheap prices.
Does that begin to answer your questions...?
Also, to keep this tangentially pony-related, and even sort of relevant to what I'm blathering about, here is Applejack wearing an Irregular Miniatures Human Destroyer (or as we would say, a ubiquitous Delta Heavy Cruiser, this particular one in the livalry of the former paramiliary self-styled Imperator Caesar) as a hat.
(Yes, some of you may have seen it before, so sue me, it's too dark to take a new picture!)
Bread upon meeting? Great. Starry, we are bound by hospitality now.
And the stones are an old superstition is all. Helpful in these evil times. Actually...
Starry, I'm activating you to see this to fruition. Fresh is now an investment. Keep him safe.
What? This sucks I just got off the Bleak despair!
Your cover identity would be sufficient to prevent your arrest for War Crines, and his wards would keep you safe from Celestia's hounds. Do it.
You didn't shoot. I am... Surprised. Perhaps there is yet hope.
Just in case however, Starry, you'll need to set up a forbiddance around Ponyville proper. I'll handle the rest when you're done.
How am I going to get the power for that?! Ugh. Fine.
Belle and the BreadmakerSpoiler
Ugh I'm surprised nothing nearby is on fire I hate this shadow.
Hi Fresh! My name is, uh, let's see. Call me Constance! And I am a, I dunno, traveling charlatan or something. Astrologer? Yes! I'm an astrologer!
We should be friends! Soon I'd possible, I'm kinda hungry...
"Constance" smiles broadly at the wheat farmer
A Breadmaker and a Belle!
Spoiler"Ah, well, I just moved into this little town... I heard it had a good market for fresh made, delicious bread. I brought a few dozen loafs, to use as, you know, ice breakers!"
The tan-colored earth pony hands Constance the astrologer a loaf of semi-fresh bread.
So, has RP and weapon discussion been mostly what's been happening here?
I resent that. I'm not a cultist--I just supply them with weapons every now and again.
The Bombmaker and the Breadmaker
SpoilerWelcome to the neighborhood. Allow me to introduce myself! I am known as Dive Bomb, the Explosion Lord, or occasionally as "Hay You" by pursuing guards. This is my butler-***-bodyguard Blunt Trauma and my daughter Athena.
A pleasure.
'Sup?
And, seeing as you are new and we're certain to be great friends, let me give you some things to help you set up. First, we have this lovely certificate, good for a... large sum of bits at the First Bank of Canterlot. It should help you get set up, should you need it. The second item, or more correctly, items, is this sack of mini-grenukes. One, properly placed, could somewhat messily till a field, remove any troublesome rocks or trees, and they're certain to get rid of any angry timber wolves. Just be careful--they explode on impact, so don't drop them.
The Ichor of The Meddler
SpoilerHuh, thats the last of the fire elementals.....wait, whats.....ah, another doombeast. Wait a moment, what is that little filly-DONT YOU TOUCH HER!
Hey, mista thingy, could you leave now?
SCRREEEEEEEE-SWU?
Pweese?
SCWU.......
"walks off"
Yay, I did it!
But...how. Your small and more importently, edible.
Miss Glory taught me how to a lonnnnngggg time ago. I just think realy hard about what makes something move, and when I want them to go away they do!
Wait, soul magic? Who in the name of the Nightmare would teach you th-
"portal"
-socoldsocoldscoldsocold.....
She did!
........Ah. I wonder what Silent must think about his little crazy filly learning to be crazier than he is.
"meanwhile"
Eh, she's a grown mare, she can take care of herself.
SpoilerHopefuly, we can keep in touch.
ALL THE GROVELLING.
*nom nom nom*
...
They...
They are made with love ;~;
*Hugs Fresh Loaf*
We are going to be good friends~!
pssst! I'd be careful with that stuff if I were you. Anything overtly magical or technological on the weapons end of the spectrum around here is liable to go poorly. I don't know what he did, but it's best not to find out...
wait a minute, we have a zombie invasion? when did this happen?
Spoiler
*steps out of very large portal*
*cackles maniacally*
i really shouldn't
*twitches*
i mean, it's not like they're really ponies.
*wriggles*
there's no substitute for real ponies.
but i want to so badly.
*opens giany gummy portal
time to play
Spoiler
*begins rampaging through the undead masses*
Arguing over murder rights....
This shadow may be too far gone, Starry. I wish you the best.
In a more topical twist, we are thinking of making My little pony: the thread: the Game: the RPG. That is, grabbing a system, figuring out something vaguely akin to a story, and playing out the thread the game the show as a PbP. Thoughts?
The Belle and the Breadmaker [FFRP] [Slice of Life]
SpoilerWheat looks at the pony who... just tried to sell him explosives. "I'd rather not blow the soil out of my fields, thank you very much. And thanks, but the Loaf's don't accept handou--ack!" The pony is suddenly cut off by a surprise hug from the nice mare he has just met!
"Oh, well, thanks, Miss Constance. It's an old family recipe, hoofed down in the Loaf family for generations. And I'll make sure to stay away from magical devices." He smiles! This town seems a bit eccentric... but also, pretty interesting!
Yay!
PonyRP: The Yeast of Friendship rises.
Spoiler"Bread, sweet!" *noms*
"Why thank you, I don't presume to have much knowldge of petriculture but I'd be happy to help for a bit in moving those rocks"
"Actually, those are a variation of basalt called Dolerite or Diabase. Generally subvolcanic, quite solid and very good at absorbing magical energy and spells ... also has a good chance of containing trace glass crystals, so they're quite sparkly in the right conditions."
*Stares at the guardpony*
"What?"
The bReadP continues:
Spoiler"Yeah, you guys go ahead and do that. I don't do any friendly huggy stuff like this unless there's something in it for me."
"You mean besides the free bread?"
"Well, yeah."
Did I mention that the guardpony is there?
*Igneous Staaaaarrreeeeeessss at the newcomer.*
Well, that and me trying to recruit/solicit ideas for a pony PbP RPG. :smalltongue:
Speaking of which, Thanq, DD, any chance I can catch you guys for ideas sometime? I need some help with a plot thing.
RP Fresh from the baker's oven:
Spoiler*Igneous waves to the other newcomers*
"Hay you!"
SpoilerI'll start by saying that I'm not a fan of human-in-Equestria stories, and I find first person perspective a little tricky or even jarring at times. I didn't have any major problems with the story aside from that, it was well written and interesting, so I reckon most of my issues were just a matter of taste.
Interesting bit about pegasi and fog. I was rather curious about why Fluttershy was moving like she did, and definitely surprised by the answer.
A few mistakes I caught:
Quote:
I turned and reached towardto[the] glove box
"Completely" seems a little redundant in front of "totaled", perhaps.Quote:
was completely totaled
This sentence seemed a little clumsy, the "I was sure I had" kinda threw me off, maybe add a "which" in front or a comma after "had", or both.Quote:
but between my tear-stained cheeks and the nosebleed I was sure I had it probably didn’t look very good
I find it a little hard to imagine Pinkie casually breaking a promise.Quote:
Suddenly her eyes widened and she shoved her entire hoof in her mouth.
Quote:
inthefavor of the only pony who [had] actually been helpful so far.
Quote:
No, they’ll think we’ve run into [a] monster
Went from past to present tense there. Or perhaps change the sentence a bit, maybe "Pinkie licked her lips, no doubt imagining enough molasses to swim in."Quote:
Pinkie licked her lips, Ican[could] only assume imagining enough molasses to swim in.
Quote:
I[t] had been a long day already, and I was dead tired.
I do rarely.
Is it really surprising that the Element of Loyalty took the most loyal pet?:smallwink:
I'm getting to it
Not a cultist though I rarely RP
I'm interested but what powerlevel would it be at?
i kinda like the random silly non-rule-ness of what we have. besides, i dont thnk splitting the thread would be for the best. most of the RP comes from actual mlp discussion. and vice-versa
Alright let's see what we've got here
Spoiler
Overall: It's okay. Not great, not bad, just okay.
No gigantic spelling or grammar errors jumped out at me, always a good sign.
The first thing I notice is that three chapters into the story I have no idea what kind of a person your human protagonist is. Obviously the Mane 6 have predefined personalities if you're definitely going to use them, but you have to give us more to go on with Regis. Take for example that the emergency kit was something his mother insisted he carry. Is he young enough that his Mom can force him to do something like that, or is he an independent adult and she just nagged him about it until he bought one to shut her up?
I think you're doing a pretty good job with the "alien world" thing although I do hope you'll expand it into a wider variety of settings unless your thesaurus has a whole lot of synonyms for "grey" and "rock."
I would also suggest you figure out what you want these guys to actually be doing and get to that as quickly as possible. You can keep developing the characters and relationships while other things are going on, no need to spend too long establishing everything before the plot gets moving