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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 1522011" data-attributes="member: 13098">Sialia,Thank you for sharing that.  Though, it was not a conscious effort to tap into your delicious stories.  Macbeth,Don't worry about sounding too negative.  I know you, I have met you and we game together.  I have a context to place body language in with what your words are saying.  Besides, I happen to agree with some of your assessments.  Mechanically, this story could be much, much stronger.  And I fully expect the judges to note the mechanical weaknesses.  They have to.  As Sialia rightfully points out, you and I both have spelling errors.  I have editing errors that are almost inexcusable.  Sadly, some of them were not errors that I noted until several readings into the story.  Too close to the story to see them really.  And that is part of the strength and part of the weakness of this story.  It is close to me.  I hope I have written a story that is fun to read.  It is a niche piece.  For now, it needs to stay there.  I need to figure out how to rewrite it to pull it out of that niche.  If I do that, I am not sure I want it to remain a short story.  Perhaps a novella, or even a novel would work better?  I'm just not sure. But, I digress.I chose to stat out the characters in my mind so I would understand the parameters of the world I was creating.  I agree that doing so can create a rigid boundary that might confine the story.  Nevertheless, it was something I wanted to do.  - Heck, first of all, I am a DM.  Going through that little mental excercise creates NPC material for me.  I can present two possible builds for Jake, depending on how scary I want him to be.  But, that is a minor consideration.  - Secondly, this is Ceramic DM.  The roots of alsih2o's little contest are in adventure story writing around the D20 system.  I wanted to pay homage to the roots.  (I always enjoyed Gary Gygax's Gord the Rogue books and those are very D&D-centric.)  - Thirdly, I wanted a rigid parameter around these characters.  They do have limitations, very codified limitations. Something like Rainmaker Inc has found a way to break those limitations.  They exert their weather control over most of the United States.  By borrowing the limitations, I take a shortcut to developing the history.  I can easily envision how Rainmaker grew and what it's influence is across the nation, and indeed the world.  I know this because I borrowed the 2 mile radius limitation of Control Weather (when a wizard or sorceror casts it) and reversed it.  I took those rules, warped them and then used that as an overlay for what the antagonist of the story would do.  (Indeed, what almost any corporation would do if they had the chance to corner the market.)  But really, this all builds up to one of the biggest reasons.- Fourthly, borrowing the game mechanics that most of the readers are going to be passingly familiar with allows me to take certain ... shortcuts.  I can refer to something in a game-centric parlance that allows me to save time and words.  While I have never come close to running against the word limit, it does take time to type it all out.  (Such as the time I am not working while writing this.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)  72 hours is awfully short if you work and sleep during that time.  I also had gaming.  I was desperately running out of time and I hadn't figured out the perspective of how I was going to tell the story.  Without some of those shortcuts, I would have needed a couple more hours of writing time.  I know what the intended audience for this story is, so I chose to embrace the limitations of game mechanics for the benefits it would bring me, and because on some level it will appeal to the audience.  I would be delighted to hear that somebody wanted to make a PC like Dancing Bull, or Little Bird.  I would grin if somebody asked me for more history about Rainmaker.  You get these things out of writing around the game mechanics.  But really, these were very minor considerations for the story.  Characterization was fun.  Sialia, I am so very, very pleased that you enjoyed that.  It was a very conscious decision to tap into a few regional things.  An anglo looking guy who is named Julio, but goes by Jake and speaks with a mixture of English and Spanish.  A Native American Hispanic that speaks english.  These are people I could meet anywhere along the Rio Grande, from Taos, down to El Paso.  I could meet them in places along the Gulf of Mexico.  I wanted them to feel authentic.  OK, I have never met a talking buffalo, but this is a world of magic, and spirits and it really isn't that hard for me to imagine meeting a talking buffalo.  I hope the characterization is where you get glimpses of what is going on beneath the obvious story.  Because, really, Jake and Cheryl are just window dressing for what the story was really about.  But, maybe that is best left for another post?</blockquote>

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