#fuck it i'll do a loadout for both

[spook5hadow]

Ahhh I just got her and I don't know which one I love more T-T

[yandere-plague]

[Yandere! Agent Jones - Fortnite]

(Headcannons + oneshot)

// mentions of suicide , stalking , kidnapping

I never thought I'll be writing for Fortnite. But hell yeah the lore is fucking dark as shit. I thought I knew it pretty well but obviously not when I looked at the fortnite wiki lol. Some things may be wrong / will be wrong in the future so keep that in mind.

Yandere is not a healthy thing so please back off kids.

He had a wife, kids and grandchildren.

He couldn't see them, but as long as he works for the IO they'd be safe from the dangerous planet he lived on.

Though, after IO found out that he's immortal. His plans to retire was denied, and if he quit they would stop protecting what remained of his family.

So he kept on working, slaving himself away to protect an descendant he's never met, or going, to meet.

He soon realises that he's never going to see real family again, and what point is it to work for the company that leeches from him?

He still wears his wedding ring, the least he can do is honor her memory on him.

If you are another IO employee

He looks at you, and instantly he crushes, hard.

He does everything he can to hide from you.

He doesn't want to love anymore.

I mean, whats the point if you are going to die?

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of employees, so you might not even know he exists. For better or for worse.

But obviously something happens and you are both forced to strike up conversation.

He's a nervous wreck, he wants to get away but his heart and everything else wants to stay.

He finds your schedule, looking it over and over to find any crossovers you both share.

If you don't have any, don't worry! He'll be sure to persuade some people to give you a raise to his level of work.

He's gone too far not to be attached to you. But all his thoughts are on you.

He has, no NEEDS to make you his. Even if you disagree.

When the Zero Point is exposed

Everythings going to shit, the IO is in shambles trying to stop loopers from trying to escape.

Due to your, shockingly recent promotion, its up to you and Jones to stop it.

"We should have done this from the start! We're going to the Seven!"

"hang on, what do you mean 'we?' Jones?"

If you are trapped in the loop

24 hours , 7 days a week you are forced to fight to the death.

An endless loop, if you will.

You win, you get to go home.

If not well, your memory gets wiped and you start all over again.

All methods of communication are stripped except from non verbal forms.

It doesn't matter if you are superhuman, invincible or not even human at all. You are not impervious to bullets.

He goes onto the island and watches you, seeing you fight after fight after fight, in your mind to be the last one standing.

Obviously he can't just watch you, even he gets bored of that. That's what he tells himself, in reality he just doesn't want you to leave.

He finds your records and looks at everything about you, your name, homeplanet / universe ect, and your favourite loadout by statistiction.

He starts nudging your favourite weapons to more frequently show up in the chests and loop YOU find. Not anyone else.

The slight smile, the slightest emotion that your numb body can give fuels him.

When the Zero Point is exposed

No no no no!

He can't have you leaving the loop! Not now!

This is his breaking point, he's joining the Seven.

He sees you, running and jumping for your life towards it, as if it was calling for you.

"No!"

You fingers grazed it, a huge smile appearing on your face. Freedom, at last.

Sand instantly filled your mouth.

Wait sand?

You coughed it out, suddenly realising you got shoved out of the way of it.

A Jonesy you had never seen before, wearing clothes you never saw before towered beside you.

"I can't let you leave the loop, I am so sorry (Y/n)."

(Y/n)? That sounds so familiar...

●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●

You opened a chest, grabbing the loot and searching the rest of the building. The slight mummer of creaking keeping you on edge.

You turned the corner, your gun pushed into the chest of a Jonesy wearing a suit and tie.

He held his arms up defensively, while you stared down at him and tighted your grip on your weapon.

"H-hey." He spoke.

You know the words, what it means.

A greeting.

You had forgotten how speaking felt like, sounded like. You moved your tongue behind your closed lips, wanting to sort of recreate that feeling.

His lips curled slightly at your reaction.

"You don't realise you miss the little things until they're gone."

You nodded lightly, lowering your gun a smidge, he didn't seem like a threat.

He reached behind his back, he was going to grab something.

In a blink of an eye you raised your gun back at him. A feeling of betrayal and anger clear on you.

"Easy, I'm just going to-"

You fell towards him, your head felt like it would have been split apart.

He didn't get to finish his sentence, or if he did the words wouldn't have reached you.

A stranger went inside the same building, and shotguned you in the head.

You would have collided with him if your body didn't turn into a hologram seconds after, a machine collecting you almost like data waiting for the match to be over to be wiped and reused.

You opened a chest, grabbing the loot and searching the rest of the building. The slight mummer of creaking keeping you on edge.

No wait, this has happened before.

The gun you held felt different, it didn't feel the same, as last time?

You swung around, and yet again face to face with him.

"Hello again... Okay well, not for you. Its your first time seeing me right?"

Familiar but not quite at the same time. He definitely sounds familiar though.

"...or do you recognise me? Honestly the loop is so wierd- I wasn't supposed to say that- I-."

He sighed, putting his hand to his face.

He has a ring, he's married. But to who?

"Anyway..." he went to go grab... something in his coat.

Instinctively you held up your weapon at him.

"Okay, this is getting nowhere."

He ripped the gun out of your hands before you could react, quickly pulling out a device and putting it on you.

You fell to the floor almost instantly, uour vision became blurry, liquid running down your face.

Where you crying?

"Hey, its going to be okay."

His sudden soft demeanor was terrifying.

"Im taking you home."

"... Home?" You whispered.

With wide eyes. You grabbed the gun, ripped of the thing he out on you, turned the gun towards you.

And pulled the trigger.

●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●

So... How's this? Should i do more?

[binarystargames]

Thinking about (a very broad definition of) quarterbacking, especially as it relates to TTRPGs (part 1)

This is going to be a bit meandering and I'm not going to have answers at the end of this post because it's already too fucking long. Bear with me.

Disclaimer/preface: I'm mostly spitballing based on my own experiences as someone who has both seen and done this. I'm sure there are better terms for what I'm saying and that I'm probably reinventing the wheel. I'm fine with that. I know about the killer/explorer/socializer/roleplayer model for multiplayer games already, it's useful and there's definitely an intersection point on a venn diagram of where it interacts with this but it doesn't 100% map to where I'm going with this.

As I mentioned at the end of my post on diceless ideas for APOCALYPSE FRAME, I like the idea of resource-management-based rather than randomness-based methods for tactics games, but I am slightly worried that it would increase the prevalence of quarterbacking.

Typically the definition used for this in this context is: in a setting where everyone is on the same team, one person (the "quarterback") tells everyone else in the group what to do. I'm expanding that definition here into generalized situations where people are telling seemingly-equal peers what to do during a game or even to some degree when people feel pressured/coerced into taking certain kinds of game actions. I like to think of this on two levels:

Strategic. The kind of decision that's made at a high level, usually before anything that actually happens takes place. Quarterbacking here takes the place like someone having to pick a specific class or character or role. If you've ever picked the party cleric because nobody else wanted to be a healer, even if nobody told you to or even suggested it, that's what I mean. The more defined player roles are and the more essential they all are, the more this comes up, but it can also be reflected in things like equipment loadouts.

Tactical. The kind of decision that's made at a per-action, per-encounter, etc level. "Go over here", "do this", "cover X other player", "spend this level of resources but no more", etc. The more important a given action or resource expenditure is, the more this comes up.

Tactical is mostly what I'll get into because that gets to what made me think about this, though I'll probably get back to Strategic later a bit in part 2 because I have a few thoughts there.

Where does this show up?

As much as I'd love to say sports, in seeking a useful definition, I've actually defined it here in such a way that kind of crowds them out: in American football, for instance, it's not intended to be an equal team of people making play decisions: roles are predefined, a play is passed down from a coach to the quarterback to players, and it's up to them to stick to the spirit of the play while interpreting the best course of action along the way. In the context of non-sports, you can see it a lot in video games, board games, and RPGs.

Online games are a big one that comes to mind. There can be a lot of coordination involved and if you're in a group of randos you will inevitably run into someone who decides to tell everyone else what to do. They'll probably start being real shitheads if you ignore them too! Co-op board and card games have this too (I'll get into this more below). And of course, TTRPGs, that's what brought me to the dance after all and got my brain spilling all over the page about it.

Is this actually a problem?

Maybe! It depends! It's a really broad thing I'm outlining here so it's hard to answer.

I think it's a function of expectation going into it. For a lot of groups maybe this is how they like to do things: the strategy person gives out marching orders and everyone else goes along with it, everyone decides party composition ahead of time, etc. If one person is just not as good at using the tools at hand, they might ask for suggestions and that's good! If someone's obviously floundering, suggesting a way out of it is probably also good as long as they're cool with it.

I'm going to use the cases of TTRPGs especially for cases where I think it can be a problem because I reckon there's a few kinds of expression going on that can be at odds. I'm going to make some terms up so bear with me, I'm sure someone way smarter has come up with a better distinction but this is how I'm thinking about it:

Game state expression. This is the "trying to win/lose" or "trying to solve the puzzle" layer. This is where quarterbacking makes the most sense! If you're coordinating to win then coming up with a strategy together, maybe with someone setting it all out, can definitely make perfect sense.

Narrative expression. When you think about an action scene or a fight, usually there's one of two things happening. One, there's a major plot point that's getting resolved by it. This is where you get like "boss fights" and "setpieces". Two, and this is more common, they're pretty low-stakes but are used as a way to show off how characters prefer to do things. Does a vulnerable character keep distance or put themselves at risk? Does a bruiser character pick targets to keep friends safe, to take down easy pickings, or to go for the biggest thing they can see? Do defensive characters mostly keep themselves alive or protect others? This is where I think TTRPGs can really shine. Sub-optimal play isn't strictly necessary for this, but situationally, it can be a way to express this. Quarterbacking often steps on those impulses, but not always: maybe characters are willing to put their personal ways of doing things aside for the greater goal, and that can be narrative development too! But I suspect that's not going to be the response every time.

Personal expression. Sometimes people don't like to do a certain kind of thing, you know? Maybe someone doesn't like their characters having less than half health even if it's like, fine. Maybe someone never wants to spend more than half of their resources "just in case" even when that makes no sense. Maybe someone always goes full auto instead of using bursts because it feels better. Maybe someone only prepares AOE attacks instead of individual-target ones. But it sure would be better for everyone else if they did things that made more sense! This is the one that quarterbacking can really clash with because it's often strictly suboptimal behavior.

I suspect you're going to see quarterbacking be more accepted and less of a problem in video/board/card game scenarios because Win The Game is a lot more emphasized in those, so there's more acceptance of taking some direction from others in order to succeed because that's why we're here. Personal expression still crops up for sure, but aside from like roleplay servers or the more nebulous early phases of an MMO - Dan Olson's example of a WoW player who always stays shoeless and always walks outside of combat and eventually draws the ire of their guild is a great example of that transition, for example - I don't think there's honestly too-too much in the way of narrative expression for multiplayer video games. Your "verbs" and goals are necessarily much more actively restricted too, which furthers this - no matter how you feel about your character or whatever, at the end of the day, W or L is in many cases the thing the game expresses, so that's what folks will aim for. (Some games are, of course, better at this than others.)

Now, this is not to say that I'm drawing a "rollplay vs roleplay" distinction. I would really hope we're several decades beyond that. (I know we're not actually but I like to be optimistic.) What I'm saying is that in a given situation, someone playing the game is going to have several motivations pulling them in different directions, and in a lot of cases any of these can lead to folks telling other people what to do or feeling like they have to do something they don't want to. I mostly think this is a game state vs. other motivations thing but it can definitely happen from narrative or personal angles too: if someone has ever told you that your character probably wouldn't do something, for example, there it is!

Why does turn-based make this more of a thing?

There will almost certainly end up being "correct" decisions, and when there are "correct" decisions, there will always be a frustration in some players when others aren't making them. You can correlate this extremely strongly with the margin for error for victory/etc narrowing: as soon as there's a perception that a binary win/loss is at stake, people will start to do this more. And the longer a game lasts, the more likely this is. The idea of playing a co-op game for 4 hours and losing kind of sucks - much less a campaign that lasts a year and is on the brink of ending in a TPK or whatever!

For turn-based games, you have much more of an opportunity to draw out a turn and figure out the exact optimal thing, and do an "are you sure" or "please do this instead" when someone says the "wrong" thing. In contrast, for a video game that's real-time (and especially one that's remote!) you don't really have a chance to second-guess anyone's course of action, they're just going to do what they're going to do and you can either scream obscenities at them for it or not. Depending on the game, they may not even be able to hear it!

Why does removing randomness also make this more of a thing?

Let's imagine a three-person combo: Person A sets something up with one ability, Person B primes it in some key way with another, Person C finishes it off with a third that ends up as something far greater than the original. Great! This is what co-op tactics games are made of! It's cool when people contribute. We love to see it.

If this works every time, if all of them can be guaranteed to be able to happen, then setting things like this up is the play, no question. If you're Person B, you're guaranteed to be decreasing the value of your actions by doing something that isn't bridging that gap between A and C unless there's a situational reason not to do that. If you can't guarantee any part of that combo happens/will work, though, the value of being able to set those combos up decreases or they'll be much shorter/more conditional to account for it.

This isn't to say it's useless when there's more uncertainty, but there's way more latitude for not sticking to the plan when things have an increasing number of ways they can go off track.

Can't we just solve this by talking it out.

Yes. I feel the need to emphasize this, yes. I've done it in the past. You can always talk to a group of friendly folks to fix almost anything. It's always correct and valid to just talk to people if there's an issue if that's an option. Talk to your friends.

Now that that's out of the way, I think it's a bit of a thought-terminating cliche. Of course you can just ask your friends to knock it off...but that assumes you're playing with friends, and often if you're playing with someone you aren't that comfortable with it's way harder to do - doubly so if that's how they've always played and they're not sure what they're doing wrong. And especially if you're time-limited, like at a con game! "Suddenly become an extrovert" and/or "figure out how to confront people you don't know" is a little beyond the scope of this topic, and if you can teach people how to do that, write a book about it or something.

Ideally I'd like to design and run games so it doesn't feel like it needs to get to that point as often or as quickly. For instance, a game that's wildly poorly designed and unbalanced requires a lot more pulling punches and intentional spotlighting to keep things even-keeled than one that isn't, you know? For traditional GM-centric games it puts a lot of work on them, and even for more distributed-role games it adds a ton of work that doesn't have to be there and expends a lot of energy that could go elsewhere. As such I think there's value in figuring out design and play tools to help myself and others with this (and luckily, there are neat examples to pull from).

Next time.