#Gosh I love the corruption of the singular focus/goal that it looks like might go down with Inventor yes yes yes breadcrumb her!!!

[askatriangleandastar]

OOOOO

Oh these sounds really fun!! Just reading what you shared, some of them make me want to bounce the ideas around and find out more about the characters to put the puzzle together. What a nice motivator to get through all 35 episodes ^^)

This might just be rambling but motivated rambling all the same

Sincerely tho that is a GREAT POINT for why Lady Luck is the route Inventor has turned to for knowledge!! And what you suggested of hooking another minion :00

CO-OP DICE!! I'd be so neat if it could happen in game despite how much there'd be to juggle- and the odd functionality of this pair. That the 2 party members who go through the most changes in styles of fighting and gear with backgrounds for being vigilant, would in turn pick up on the sandpit trap of this place and the loss of veneer from their Host as they persist and seek out someone else who gets it.

The contrast between Thief and Inventor but how they might be able to work well together in part from that.... Like gears that move in different directions are what keep the clock ticking in time. They push each other forward and respect the self-oriented goals: selflessness doesn't get money nor information from where either are hidden away.

The sheer absurdity of 5ft cubes in an apartment building is making me laugh and also get excited about accommodation shenanigans. The trust building and silliness on getting around reaching the cabinetry and getting back on the ground: A Jester's Ballad XD

If Jester has feelings for Lady Luck... the want to be free in conflict with the want to see her and be by her. :0 If that came to a boiling point at the offer of freedom at the cost of others- spicy drama in the style of refusal that follows ooooo

It could even be entirely selfish in motivation- the irony of after so long being a part of the act this is the first time she's listening. You said relationship angst wouldn't mesh well with the tone of the game and it being overt during the game? For sure. That's not at all the show Lady Luck is putting on and she'd likely pull the focus away from it.

Yet the potential of the offer being made to Jester from behind the red curtains, in that nebulous part of the stage when the viewers are cut off and backstage meshes with the darkened empty front, spooky like a crossroads of velvet and still-warm-bulbs buzzing as they dim out. . . I might just need to play the game more that 7 hours, but feels like something could be there. Maybe even a layer to it of it being the rare conditions of facades failing or being made to fall while the balance of between them shifts. Even if only temporarily in this moment where the only witnesses are each other. Can you tell I love Yugioh and well-written Seto Kaiba fics ansnks

Idk social media the best but the contrast in styles of presentation and substance and attitudes sounds like a good mix! The contrast of the old ways of magic against the new ways its known up above- world building through speculation between them on the other! And the best part is the unreliability of both parties leaving pocket space for corrections and simply being wrong/lying for the flow of the conversation and knowing the other person might not have the means to challenge it. Misinformation is to social media skillset as misdirection is to a show host's- different feathers, still a bird.

I can very much relate to flavoring with parts of yourself for cooking up story ideas or fuel for the basis of a “what-if”! :D I still do it to today with writing with friends, though overall it's harder for me to write stories with the overall stressor going on irl ^^; Learning when you're putting too much of yourself in the pot and pulling back is a valuable skill, and I'm glad you're doing better! Getting wiser can be rough and tumble but progress comes over time and coping is a complicated process. Hope things keep looking up for ya! 💛🧡

Warrior seeing what's going in and it's a mix of not picking up on the clues and approaching it from the most good-faith possible has been my impression so far. So combining that with the back and forth you mentioned, the check-ins with each person having a different outlook on Warrior's progression and the point where Jester understands where Warrior is coming from being when they're able to be convinced to help. The folly of Warrior not even considering Jester could fail once they agreed to help because he's thinking nothing could stop them working together....

“Look at a situation too brightly and you'll walk right into the potholes” -sort of consequences. It was always going to take more than just their teamwork. It was always going to take more than Warrior's best efforts and spirits. What's the result of the unyielding force meeting the unmoving object and it's consequences? Probably detailed to some degree in those 35 episodes my gosh I wasn't ready but it's also really fun speculation!

The visual of the crew riding the car from the Wheel out of the Dungeon with flair and cheese my friends have relayed to me the Supernatural Impala possesses, only for the epic road trip to nosedive from mechanical failures [Lady Luck: When was it last "Serviced"?? The only service around here is all of you to me- no one was ever supposed to actually WIN THE THING, Ned! Oh but it's of no consequence- the mortal who supplied it guaranteed it was in top shape. Those fools will be back without issue.] <- was ironically scammed and the car is a lemon 🍋

XDDD the mix of reactions at realizing they're in trouble while looking at the car, and more and more unfortunate happenstance piles on along the way back. So much silliness.

⭐⭐⭐

Id love to hear your ideas if you have any you'd like to share! Either from stories you've put down or concepts you have in the spares drawer!

(⭐fanfic writers' commentary)

Hmm… spares you say..?

I wrote a lot of rough drafts for the other stories in my 'Fixing the Dice' collection (uncertain on the name still), but I didn't feel they were up to my standards so I never published them. I think I'd probably change some of their plots if/when I rewrite them, so I feel safe sharing these.

You probably won't see these exact concepts come to light though. sorry.

Thief is planning an escape route with Inventor. The story focuses on showcasing the tensions he has in the main campaign with the other contestants; I picked Inventor as the character for him to bounce off of because she's crafty in a different way, and picks up on the dungeons being rigged the fastest along with him.

I don't think I ever figured out whether Lady Luck was gonna come into it for the main story, but she does show up at the end and point a finger at Inventor to be like 'that's the guy you're trusting. lmao'

From what I remember this was the draft I liked the most. It was pretty tonally solid. I think I ran out of stamina when it came to writing because I was under so much stress at the time. Also I struggled a bit with characterisation between the two, since the dice tend to be a lot shorter on dialogue than Lady Luck and Jester.

I think Witch was supposed to have a live interview with Lady Luck on her own request, which, as you can predict, doesn't go very well against someone much more experienced in entertainment and rooting for your downfall. I think I might've also had another way earlier version of her doing some fighting and magic, but I never wrote that down

I quit that one because I didn't have much to really say in it. Maybe a theme of influencer culture versus the entertainment industry? I suppose, but I don't care about either of those. I had a couple of ideas about a discussion about peoples' beliefs in magic and luck and whatever, but that felt a bit out of hand for a study on Witch's personality, who's like. A instagram user

…maybe I could make that contrast of attitudes work, actually. Try and reproduce the vibe of Eric Andre's 'did Margaret Thatcher effectively use girl power'. It'd probably still be a bastard to work with, tone-wise, but who knows?

I like to write these stories with a pinch of my own insecurities as the driving force, and I didn't really have any regarding fame at that point, so Witch was really hard to brainstorm for.

Warrior… I wanted to have him play off Jester and Lady Luck at the same time. He was kind of hard to think of a 'deal' for since he's the simplest of the four contestants in terms of character, and doesn't really pick up on Lady Luck's subtle-not-subtle evilness. The idea was instead to make this was a hope spot in the series between him and Jester, and have him trust Jester to help them find a way out, which ultimately fails.

I really struggled to find a setting for this. In the draft I wrote, I settled on a game-show-mandated road trip (they get to touch grass for one hour) out of the dungeons in that fancy car on the wheel. But it just didn't really work well tonally at all, and I personally have no experience on awkward car journeying at all, so.

Inventor I'm actually rewriting now. I've been posting snippets of it on my blog, even, since I'm no longer in contact with some of the friends who used to be my beta readers.

I don't want to spoil its new premise, but I will say the tone has changed massively from 'let's watch this nerd run around in a saw trap and solve maths puzzles that imply that the universe and all knowledge in it is fundamentally doomed' to 'Inventor's urge to know about everything in the dungeons and the world' versus 'WHY ARE YOU ASKING HER ABOUT IT'. It's a slight change, but I think it works way better with the ending I'm planning to use.

It's got a bit of commentary about how the general public reacts badly to maths and you only find respite from that with people who have learnt it sorta deal. I think Lady Luck would be the kind of deity who definitely knows the rules of her domain, given she's the one who designs the puzzles in-universe and is otherwise quite crafty, but obviously doesn't want to tell anyone any of that.

Unless. Well, unless she can get a new minion out of it.

…It's a fun time. I promise c: Now I just need to do research to make sure everything STEM-related I put in there is correct…

Jester was going to fail backstage. A fun reminder of how I was one of the few people who failed that level first try because I didn't realise it was a gimmick fight until half-way through >.>

I struggled with writing the action in this, since that's not usually a focal point of my writing. I felt that it would be useful for building up tension to an anti-climax, and we could have he rest of the story be a sense of failure and being stuck in life, but what actually ended up being written down just felt like a really stilted tonal shift from one bit I felt was obligatory to another I actually felt like doing.

also it played a little to one of my personal headcanons of Jester having a one-sided crush on their boss, with the scraps of recognition they have keeping them going despite the fact they can't leave the dungeons. This was definitely the least canon-compliant thing I put in the series, but I think it's still an interesting concept.

I will be honest. I don't think I would've handled it well. relationship angst doesn't work well with Dicey's mostly lighthearted tone I think. Nowadays I'd rather explore it with the jokey Pride Month DLC my brain cooked up because 'toxic yuri' and 'turbo divorce' are among my favourite words in the English langauge.

…not to get too personal but I think I was kind of putting way too many of my fears into that first draft and using writing it as an unhealthy coping mechanism. so. uhh. yeah after I got called out on that I was a bit embarassed and stopped. I think I'm in a better position nowadays, but as a result of that I don't really have a solid idea of where the tone would go on that story if I wrote it now.

I never really figured out what I wanted to happen to Jester in that fic. One potential ending had them being forced to cohost, like they'd always wanted. Another has the confrontation with their boss just kind of end on an impasse as they refuse to break. I think there was a bit where Lady Luck offers them their own escape at the cost of everyone else, which they did definitely refuse.

A bonus: I think I wrote one story about Warrior helping Jester move into an apartment or something after they got released. It was supposed to be a thing about finally getting to live your life the way you wanted and whatnot. I stopped writing that because I couldn't fucking fit the tone with the fact they were 5 foot tall cubes in my head