✍️ Writing
A community for writers, like poems, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, long books, all those sorts of things, to discuss writing approaches and what's new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing.
Rules for now:
1. Try to be constructive and nice. When discussing approaches or giving feedback to excerpts, please try to be constructive and to maintain a positive vibe. For example, don't just vaguely say something is bad but try to list and explain downsides, and if you can, also find some upsides. However, this is not to say that you need to pretend you liked something or that you need to hide or embellish what you disliked.
2. Mention own work for purpose and not mainly for promo: Feel free to post asking for feedback on excerpts or worldbuilding advice, but please don't make posts purely for self promo like a released book. If you offer professional services like editing, this is not the community to openly advertise them either. (Mentioning your occupation on the side is okay.) Don't link your excerpts via your website when asking for advice, but e.g. Google Docs or similar is okay. Don't post entire manuscripts, focus on more manageable excerpts for people to give feedback on.
3. What happens in feedback or critique requests posts stays in these posts: Basically, if you encounter someone you gave feedback to on their work in their post, try not to quote and argue against them based on their concrete writing elsewhere in other discussions unless invited. (As an example, if they discuss why they generally enjoy outlining novels, don't quote their excerpts to them to try to prove why their outlining is bad for them as a singled out person.) This is so that people aren't afraid to post things for critique.
4. All writing approaches are valid. If someone prefers outlining over pantsing for example, it's okay to discuss up- and downsides but don't tell someone that their approach is somehow objectively worse. All approaches are on some level subjective anyway.
5. Solarpunk rules still apply. The general rules of solarpunk of course still apply.
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We definitely found some situations where the first group did something very sensible that I hadn't expected and had to write content for (much of that went straight into the guide) but no major bugs yet, just skipped or missed content. And I wrote the thing with the expectation that any group of players would only see a fraction of the content.
I do feel like FA does a good job of allowing you to act "reasonably" in any situation. I've seen it said that tabletop games tend to be better at (or more fun when) simulating fiction rather than simulating real life. Fiction tropes, movie set-piece action scenes, etc all sort of work better than mechanically-codified real life. But for some reason FA kinda hits this effective middle ground where it's still a bit escapist but you can generally act how you would in a given situation IRL if you want. Somebody gets if your face, you de-escalate, etc. The big climactic situation at the end of the first campaign featured a single guy holed up with a bunch of weapons and a whole lot of regular people trying to solve what could become a lethal situation. It was quite tense (especially since I didn't know how they'd handle it). And the players found a very clever set of solutions to eventually take the guy down without hurting him so he could face justice. Their plan (which included a drone they'd stolen from the bad guy, an item they crafted way back in the third session, some smooth talking, a sudden rush, and several great rolls) surprised me in the best way. And for bonus style points, the the one who ended up tackling this aged, old-world fascist was the group's fairly meek environmental restoration specialist.
In everything up to that, they generally behaved like competent, clever, but otherwise ordinary people in a rather extraordinary situation and I really enjoyed watching them go.