ftl ✅ @ftl@awoo.space

And writing this was better than refreshing election results.

The fight/act choice might even be played with - maybe Kris is kind of a violent dude to start (there's certainly indications!) and the good path is actually the one where you let him learn to be a better person on his terms, rather than railroading him into being a pacifist from the start.

Anyway, full Delta Rune not out for many years if ever, but it should be fascinating.

That's going to be the dilemma presented to the player - do you force Kris to do what you want, or do you find a way to help him get un-possessed. The "best" ending will be the one where throughout the game, you play AS Kris would. The "bad" ending is going to be the one where you stomp on his personality deliberately, to the point of throwing away his stuff. And maybe the neutral play through is going to be somewhere in the middle, where you eventually free him.

But I think that's going to make sense because "YOUR CHOICES DON'T MATTER" is a message for KRIS. His choices don't matter because a Player is taking him over.

And THAT'S going to be the secret conflict of the rest of Delta Rune. As you play through, you'll find opportunities to see what Kris wants, for his personality to assert itself.

This goes well with the stated theme of Delta Rune - "your choices don't matter". That phrase gets shoved at you a few times, and it's clearly important, but it wasn't at first obvious to me how that would make for a compelling theme. What, is the game just going to be transparently railroading you like every other game? That doesn't seem very interesting, you can't make a game have a theme just by making it linear and lampshading that.

People have pointed out that most of the time in cutscenes, Kris just stands there - you're possessing him and not doing anything, so he's frozen. When Suzy grabs him and when he falls into the dark world, he's a rag doll. But sometimes... he acts. It's rare, but it does happen. And at the very end, in the last cutscene, when Kris literally rips out his soul and puts it in a cage... you can control the soul, and lose control of Kris.

One immediate thing - you CAN'T actually kill anyone. No matter what happens, you get zero EXP. The choice to kill or not is a false one. But what is there under the surface is us taking over the character. The first time you save, you overwrite a save with Kris's name with your name. Lots of NPCs in the town comment on how you're behaving quite out of character for Kris (because you're not Kris, you've just taken him over.)

So, I've got a theory about what Delta Rune is really about. (Credit to lots of people online whose stuff I've read that helped me crystallize this, and whose theory this probably originally is.) Delta Rune is about how a player possesses a character, and how that takes away their free will.

@eldang ugggh me toooooo

Sent my last texts before my shuttle gets in to work... now I can just wait. See you all after the workday when I'll check on what happened.

Better people than I have been fighting for civil rights for decades and centuries; worse people have been fighting against them for even longer. Progress is measured in generations, and the social forces involved are bigger than any one person, and even bigger than any one country.

All we can do is make our time, our place, just a little bit better with our involvement.

Tomorrow we need to take a few days off. Rest. Either mourn or celebrate. And then remember that the fight continues. If we win, we can't get cocky; it only takes one election to change course. If we lose, we can't give up; same reason.

(2/n)

Well, today's an election. Vote, if you haven't yet.

I don't know what's gonna happen today. Anyone who claims confidence is overconfident. If Democrats overperform polls by 2-3 percent, they can take house and senate; if Republicans outdo polls by 2-3 percent, they do. And a few percent is well within normal polling error. Regional differences matter too. So who knows.

But what I do know is what we need to do tomorrow. (1/n)

Played #deltarune ! (Chapter 1). It was very engaging. Reading all the commentary on it is fascinating too.

Too bad it sounds like we'll have to wait a very long time to get the rest of it.

@aldeka Please don't eat your ballot

Sure there's a lot of wealthy people running for things, but this isn't what we mean by "eat the rich"!