GrrlPower III: Crisis Of Infinite Filler Comics

[lord_khaine]

Thread dedicated to discus the still popular webcomic Grrl Power, where we follow/tries to tolerate the antics of the at times scatterbrained Sydney in a wide and diverse cast.

The discussion about what actually constitues filler will no doubt soon begin, but the voices of the people have spoken.

links to the past
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...on-Super-Power
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...414-Grrl-Power

[-D-]

Filler is the stuff from Twinkies, right? #NailedIt

[Celestia]

Filler is what you do after the date.

[lord_khaine]

Filler is what you do after the date.

If the date is good your to tired for much of that though

[Traab]

I actually disagree with dave here. So long as noone dies, I dont think max would be too upset with sydney. A bit disappointed maybe, but not angry. Yes she did really well in the early fights, but she is still an incredibly under trained and inexperienced person who just got caught with her pants down and had no way to protect herself. Freezing is a natural response. I just figure they might put her through some sort of training designed to help her react better. Probably give her dodge training where she isnt allowed to use her orbs and they ambush her at random times until she learns to think clearly with or without the orbs in place. Helps her get used to the shock of sudden combat and teaches her she has other options available if the orbs arent.

She really isnt supposed to be here. She is a freaking recruit and max wasnt happy about it in the first place. But so far sydney has been doing really well in combat situations and her power set DOES make her really effective against everything they have faced so far, so it was a gamble to take but one with less than terrible odds. Well, now we see why it was a risky bet. A partially trained recruit tends to not always react in the best way under stress.

New prediction. She has had trouble with the ppo before. It doesnt work right, it doesnt work through the shield, the new ability is something unfortunate. Her backup plan is to hold the shield up, and use her com orb to teleport to pixel. Basically, try to regroup with everyone under her shield and either hunker down, or make a new plan. Why teleport instead of fly? Because the robot would be able to follow her flight easier than her teleporting and since a teleport is instant, she can get into position easier.

[lord_khaine]

I honestly think both of the listed reasons are BS. Noone has any right to tell Sydney about how to spend her upgrades, because for all we know they are locked lifechoices.

And well, yeah i guess in theory you should yell at bet at someone for freezing up while a teammate is getting mauled on general principle. But as it were mentioned Sydney is a raw recruit. You can just about expect her to not shoot any teammate. Especially when you have been straight up WASTING training time on making someone who can fly run laps and play with guns.

[AvatarVecna]

I don't know if Maxima would be pissed or not, but I have to say I'm glad we didn't have another month's worth of comics of Sydney freezing up and not doing anything.

If the date is good your to tired for much of that though

*You're

*Too

[HandofShadows]

I honestly think both of the listed reasons are BS. Noone has any right to tell Sydney about how to spend her upgrades, because for all we know they are locked lifechoices.

Since she more or less is in the military, yes they can.

[Traab]

Since she more or less is in the military, yes they can.

Especially since the whole POINT is an attempt to figure out how the tree works. Right now its raw guesswork, but if they can put together a theory and test it, maybe they can figure out how it works so future upgrade choices arent so random. *EDIT* As for wasting time training, even tank operators have to be able to run a couple miles in a certain time frame. Just because your job involves driving everywhere doesnt mean you get to skip getting into a basic level of shape.

[Forum Explorer]

Especially since the whole POINT is an attempt to figure out how the tree works. Right now its raw guesswork, but if they can put together a theory and test it, maybe they can figure out how it works so future upgrade choices arent so random. *EDIT* As for wasting time training, even tank operators have to be able to run a couple miles in a certain time frame. Just because your job involves driving everywhere doesnt mean you get to skip getting into a basic level of shape.

Which is probably why they wanted her to pick what they thought were flight speed points. They already know her top speed and could find out how much it increased as a result. Instead, they'll have almost no idea what it will do, unless she gets something new with point she spent.


I expect Maxima to be upset about the panicking, but in a reasonable way. Like a sort of 'I was hoping this wouldn't happen, but now that it has I have to empthasize exactly what you should do in a fight so it doesn't happen again.'

[Traab]

Which is probably why they wanted her to pick what they thought were flight speed points. They already know her top speed and could find out how much it increased as a result. Instead, they'll have almost no idea what it will do, unless she gets something new with point she spent.


I expect Maxima to be upset about the panicking, but in a reasonable way. Like a sort of 'I was hoping this wouldn't happen, but now that it has I have to empthasize exactly what you should do in a fight so it doesn't happen again.'

Agreed, maybe even blaming herself a bit. "I may have pushed you too far too fast with all this active duty stuff. From now on anything short of an all hands situation, you are remaining with the other recruits until you finish training." Its understandable really, none of this has been intentional on max's side. Sydney goes to the post press release dinner, they get attacked by almost three dozen enemies. She decides to show sydney a relatively boring meeting with the supernatural? They come under attack by an old enemy. Normally she wouldnt get called in to help, but since she is already there and has shown she can contribute in a big way, max gets pressured into letting her help. So they gave her a low priority location to investigate so they could focus on the more likely ones. Of course thats where the big bad is/was.

[Leewei]

Nice to see Sydney finally stop derping (for now, anyway).

I'm thinking the PPO upgrade will allow it to bypass her shield, which she'll forget to drop.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Nice to see Sydney finally stop derping (for now, anyway).

I'm thinking the PPO upgrade will allow it to bypass her shield, which she'll forget to drop.

So far, things generally needed an upgrade to work inside her shield. Like when she had to improvise a jump-rope for Dabbler because the lighthook only manifests outside the shield.

What I think might happen, is that the PPO will fire in the direction she's aiming, but from some offset point on the shield, causing her to miss the target and hit something else, or just fail to destroy the target with this shot.

[lord_khaine]

I on the other hand fear that Sydney's now even more special ball will turn the murder puppet to ash

[Traab]

I on the other hand fear that Sydney's now even more special ball will turn the murder puppet to ash

Im thinking the two options are, misfire where it doesnt work for some reason, (remember, she has had problems using it in the past) or option two, its monstrous overkill and does huge damage to whatever is behind the robot. Causing some sort of incident. PR is a big part of this whole thing, and sydney obliterating a block of warehouses in an incident they cant talk about wont look good for multiple reasons. "Hey, arent you the girl who just joined like, a week ago? What were you doing out here on assignment?"

Or she destroys the factory, thus losing all the evidence they needed to figure out scionas plan. "Great job syd. We have no robot to examine, her entire headquarters was demolished leaving us nothing to search for clues, and we have no idea where she went because all traces have been obliterated. You're on kp duty."

[DataNinja]

Instead, they'll have almost no idea what it will do, unless she gets something new with point she spent.

Hopefully, at least, Krona can figure out something. Maybe.

[Qwertystop]

For all we know, it was a nonlethal option. She had noted the problem where it didn't have a lower setting.

[Doorhandle]

I on the other hand fear that Sydney's now even more special ball will turn the murder puppet to ash

I'm going to hedge my bets on the Anime cliche where is IS a super-powerful blast...and the doll walks through it like it was nothing.

[HandofShadows]

Spoiler

Show

Hey that was actually very useful. Now she doesn't have to totally drop her Shield to use the PPO. Unfortunately the murderbot has it's own shield.

[lord_khaine]

She already could use the energy beam from inside of her shield, we have seen her do so once before.

[Celestia]

When Sydney says that Sydney needs more training, you know things are bad.

[Traab]

I guess none of us were right. While my theory of her destroying the surrounding area is at least close, it wasnt through some sort of super overkill upgrade, just from her inability to aim 600 rounds per minute and some scatter hit the surroundings. Cool upgrade though. Maybe want to switch back to beam as it looks like the beam is stronger. Those shots deflected into the roof arent slicing through them like butta after all. And a beam might work better on a shield than a few dozen random impacts on random locations.

[Leewei]

I just don't see the benefit of the rapid fire mod. Sydney's original beam was powerful and precise. Now, she can fill a room with blasts with far less precision. Maybe if it's smokey or the enemy is invisible?

Oh, and her opponent now magically (appropriately enough) has a force field and can deflect her attacks, and so can continue to fight.

Props to Sean Mirrsen, who was right about it already operating through her shield. (I wonder if that's what the filled pip between the Shield orb and PPO does.)

Same issues as always with the comic. Great art and concepts, decent dialog, plot advances like molasses flowing in January.

[Traab]

You dont always want to use tank obliterating levels of power, and there may come a time when she is fighting off a large force. But in general, yeah, this looks neat, but is kinda less than optimal. As for the shield out of nowhere, I give it a pass. This robot is being built by someone who is quite clearly going the borg route. Highly adaptable, assimilating every strength other races have into her own, etc etc etc. So of course her robot would have magical shielding of some sort.

[halfeye]

I just don't see the benefit of the rapid fire mod. Sydney's original beam was powerful and precise. Now, she can fill a room with blasts with far less precision. Maybe if it's smokey or the enemy is invisible?

Or mooks. It's why tanks still have machine guns.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The low-power rapid-fire mode is for when you have to worry about overpenetration more than missed shots. Like, say, fighting inside a building or any kind of populated area. Putting out a few dozen small fires and repairing a whole lot of blasted masonry is a lot of work, sure, but it doesn't really compare to having to rebuild a strip of city just because the only way to save the day was a star-powered killbeam.

[Kantaki]

So the new upgrade is a energy shot gun? Nice.

And even if it wasn't useful right now having more options than the tankslicer can't hurt.
Might even tell them something about the skill tree assuming Sydney can roughly remember where she put the skill point.

[tyckspoon]

So the new upgrade is a energy shot gun? Nice.

And even if it wasn't useful right now having more options than the tankslicer can't hurt.
Might even tell them something about the skill tree assuming Sydney can roughly remember where she put the skill point.

PPO has a relatively simple upgrade grid; one loop of dots, each with an attached dot of its own, one line of 5 connected dots, and a single orphan (plus the interconnects to other orbs that they all have.) The line is presumably its power rating; it's at 3, which matches with Sydney's dossier 'blast' rating of 3. The orphan would cause the PPO to do something completely new but kind of related, going off what it did for the telepresence orb; it could be what she put that point in, but given the author comment on this latest comic it's unlikely. "When Sydney gets that branch completely filled out.." so she almost certainly put it in that ring of spaces, the one that already has its entry point and the attached inner space filled. So.. yes, I guess it tells them something - that ring is mode of fire options. No idea what the inner points represent. They could be something different for every alt-fire the PPO has.

Unrelated at the moment: The Lighthook orb has no fewer than 4 of those 'level of effect' lines. They're all at 1, bar the single that is at 3. Weight limit/strength of the hook is a safe guess for one of them.. any ideas on what the other ones represent? Maximum length of tentacle? Number of simultaneous tentacles allowed (Sydney already likes the lighthook, imagine how much fun she'll have if she can go all Doc Ock with them!)

[Traab]

For the ppo options, im thinking full contra. Spread attack, homing, ray, machine gun, flamethrower, crusher missiles, (Short range exploders) that sort of thing. We now have ray and machine gun, im hoping she unlocks homing soon as aim is going to be an issue.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The PPO is star-powered, apparently. So it'd make sense for all of its "fire modes" to literally involve fire, or plasma and heat, in some way.

We know there's a "tank confetti maker" exploding laser setting. There are now rapid-fireballs. I think other modes will include a "firebomb launcher", a "plasma sword", perhaps an actual flamethrower, and maybe a guided plasmaball thing.