Kill the Golden Man and Tyrant of the Bay both updated recently after being thought abandoned.

I highly recommend both. They are based on the worm CYOA and are good examples of doing it right. The writing in both is above average in my opinion.

 

Can't say I'm a huge fan of those CYOAs (CYOAs in general). The powersets are so broken that I don't know if there will be any meaningful conflicts in those stories.

e.g. in Kill the Golden Man, the SI protag basically solos Leviathan, with some help from Flechette and her multidimensional arrows.
I mean, wat?!

 

By "doing it right" you mean "ignores CYOA because it's stupid as fuck" right? Since I'm not clicking them otherwise.

 

Recoil would be much better without Andrea, those fucking dreams, most of the dialogue between Kinsey/Taylor/Andrea, and a little less Gladys.

On the CYOA note, being ultra powerful is a prerequisite. And those links go to the same story.

 

It's funny because there's now a catch-22. The original CYOA powers -especially Kaleidoscope- were so ridiculously broken as to be worthless. So it was revised two or three times to be more "balanced". But those new revisions -while having weaker original powers- basically allow you to do stuff like pick magic out of tabletop systems or roll for a random power so you end up with stuff that's possibly broken and definitely alien (to me).


But you can do worse than Tyrant of Brockton Bay tho. I don't recall anything about the other one.

 

Why there is no Worm section in library https://forums.darklordpotter.net/forumdisplay.php?f=104 ?

Is it due to lack of really good Worm fanfiction? I am currently looking for one and I am not happy about looking through 20+ pages of thread to find 5 best stories.

 

Links fixed.

It's true that the powers are broken but as with anything else how good the story is depends on the writing. To each their own though, I enjoy seeing new powerful characters in the worm setting and how they would affect the plot.

The MC in Kill the Golden Man was nerfed in the beginning and has no knowledge of the plot which helps stop it from being a fix it fic. He's pretty overpowered now but the writer is handling it pretty well by focusing on his trying to be part of the system and protect others.

Tyrant of the Bay is the Alexandria package so while powerful he can't do anything completely ridiculous.

 

I don't mind community involvement in stories, but writing a story like it's a game results in a shitty story (or, this is what I've observed so far). It might make for a fun game, but for a passive observer it just stinks to read. It really doesn't help that the Worm-specific CYOA rules are fucking dumb:

Self-Insert - You are you, except you are perfect now.
Reincarnation - You are you, except you have two competing histories. Oh, and you're perfect now.
Endbringer - You are you, except you are perfect now. And a monster. /crawlinginmyskin

Three competing flavors of shitwank writing. It doesn't help the rules encourage picking one or more ridiculous broken powers. Having foreknowledge of coming events in your life just isn't enough to have agency in the story, you also need to have powers which outstrip most people around you.

I get pepole want fulfillment. I also get that people want to be entertained by action and skip the early build up a story (by introducing things readers may already have pieced together to the characters involved). I don't think this design lends itself to either. By having broken powers and foreknowledge, you need to introduce Namekian conflicts to Worm. This just overcomplicated the human element of Worm that is enjoyable. By escalating the action early on, you often make it incomprehensible or stupid.

I'd read CYOA stories if the characters were at least relatable and had powers that were more-down-to-earth, but it's hard to take any of them seriously. Worst of all, they're self-insert heavy. Self-inserts are just one step short of My Immortal or Soul Bonds in terms of quality.

 

If there were certain perks removed like Invictus/Blank/Shattered Limits the whole thing would be improved. Invictus basically lets the author have his nerdy SI act like a war veteran able to rationalise killing people etc. Blank and Shattered Limits are just ridiculous.

 

There's another version if I remember correctly

 

This wouldn't be such a bad thing if the character actually was that callous and/or sociopathic in general. The characterisation would be coherent, at least.

The problem comes from reading the portrayal of the average SI -who often has high moral standards-, and then seeing him/her make a 180 and rampage through the antagonists without a fucking care.

If you're referring to the CYOA v2 or v3, it's still hilariously broken.

 

Found it http://m.imgur.com/a/oEETP

Edit

I like how the hardest mode is named Kid Win mode instead of Skitter, because in all honesty Taylor's bug power is pretty dangerous also in the CYOA above some of the lesser powers are better than the greater ones

 

I wrote a CYOA once. Primarily it was just to get the idea out of my head, but I was leading up to exploring what sort of terrors my subconscious mind could unleash on the world.

Scion-Shmion. I was gonna be the endgame boss. That's the only way something like that could work, I feel. Slightly cracky, but not too much, slightly serious, but not too much, with a hint of train wreck/crashing plane, ya' know?

 

That alternative CYOA is pretty interesting. I love that it doesn't have the obnoxious "Man of Mystery" perk, only a weaker version of it. Spacebattles writers hate Contessa and the Simurgh, so they insist on making every single one of their SI's have that perk. It's so stupid.

 

Flipping self-inserts around could potentially be interesting. I guess you'd call them, what, self-extractions? Character-extractions?

Take a Worm character and dump them in the real world circa 2011~2013. Everything and everyone they once knew exists in an obscure web serial, (or we go for the real world minus "Worm"). They'd be the one and only parahuman on Earth unless they budded. You could watch the political and pop cultural ripples spread out from the present day, which would be different depending on how things unrolled. It'd really depend on the person who gets extracted.

Taylor might be unworkable unless a villain comes along with her. She needs a strong challenge to butt her head against, and our world wouldn't have those. We're way too peaceful compared to Earth Bet. Although it could be interesting to pull a Copacetic (at least what it started out as) with Taylor retired in a world without capes, I don't think she works well with the self-extraction concept.

Colin & Dragon... they'd probably establish themselves as non-capes, or stick to working behind the scenes: corporate intrigue, making cash, running charities, building up their infrastructure. I could imagine Colin donning a "Batman" or "Iron Man" costume just to create plausible deniability. The allure of being THE superhero would be really tempting to Colin. If D&D ever event public, you could milk a lot out of them dealing with that.

Guts & Glory... it'd basically be taking their normal lives on turbo with the break lines cut. Victoria would be THE superheroine, and fit the image to a T. Amy would be a messiah-figure that everyone in the world would want to be touched by. If they somehow manage to keep secret identities, then Amy has the temptation of no one knowing they're sisters. Which could go badly. OTOH, tossing Gallant into the mix could be fun, especially with how his power would widely be seen as useless compared to theirs. You could also get some mileage out of Amy's complexes pushing her to out herself as a new Legend, because circa 2011 gay rights would be a lot more controversial and undeveloped compared to Earth Bet.

As far as villains go... Accord could make for an amusing one-shot. It'd be a lot easier to bring about utopia when all the pieces on the game board as muggles, plus there's no Endbringer randomly wrecking shit. A Lung-centric story would have to be about him being his own worst enemy, because he was nigh-unstoppable on Earth Bet. Theo and the Pure has potential.

Hmm. Looking at this write-up, the extraction scenario seems to be geared toward internal struggle. Which makes sense given the whole point is to dump them into a (comparatively) peaceful world that has no other capes.

 

I made my own CYOA rules, just because I could.

http://pastebin.com/fC9MagrE

They may or may not suck, but I know they're better than the shit I've seen on spacebattles.

 

I feel like that's actually like an SI hard mode. At least they have the basic character and world structure.

Or, better to say, once the parahuman drops into the public eye it becomes hard mode. Clearly a one-shot with Thinkers wouldn't have those problems.

EDIT: So...Defiant and Dragon for first choice tbh.
Also:

I'm not certain. Amy is attracted to Victoria, which is, iirc, where her "gayness" (problematic on its own perhaps, the idea that she is... culturally (?) gay) comes from. She might not want that out there.

In fact, one could argue that her complexes have pushed her in the opposite direction. Maybe she'd just be Lady Gaga, not Elton John.

 

I can't figure out how to give a thumbs-up (maybe a problem with my browser, Chrome on android mobile), so just posting here to say that's an awesome idea and I can't believe it hasn't been done before. Accord would be interesting.

Other cool candidates would be Purity+Aster (she can try to be a hero with a clean slate), Assault+Battery (public superhero duo, and imagine yanking them from Arc 12 and then them reading the S9 arc of Worm), and Imp (hahahahahaha).

And, of course, for shaking things up...Bakuda! If you thought she was crazy in my Timelooping Tinker, imagine the shenanegans she'd get up to in our world as the only supergenius/cape. She might not even become a villain, if academia or the military make her a good enough offer that gives her fame and freedom...

 

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