S Rank Slayer

Start of Play Tips
You start out with 6 instant attacks. This means you can click on that youngling S rank and instantly slay it, giving it no chance to attack you.

If you do it quickly you will get to 6 strength while the S rank is only at 4 or 5 strength. This will give you a small lead, so you can let the game idle for awhile - the repeated slayings will give more strength charge or instant attack charges. Let it idle for a minute or so, then come back to use instant attacks and hit the strength button.


How Strength Works


If the S rank has between equal to your strength or is only five or less higher than your strength, it makes an inaccurate attack upon you (you might say it's at a disadvantage). Once it's more than five higher than your strength, it makes accurate attacks - so you'll be hit a lot of the time. This will probably be the way your character dies, in other words.

If the S-rank's strength is 50 or less below yours they make inaccurate, weak attacks. Generally bandages will make these attacks meaningless - unless your run out of bandages.

S rank gain 1 strength every time you gain 1 strength from defeating one, but occasionally gain 2 - this is how they catch up and get past your strength.

They don't gain strength when you do instant attacks or use the strength gain button (or when you click on bonus swords). So these are the ways you can catch up to S rank that are stronger than you.

The 'STR: 7/16' is a bit of a tip of the hat to D&D - it represents starting out with a 7 strength in D&D and getting all the way to 16 strength. I like to think of it as what a character went through before even getting starting stats (as char gen stat distribution let you assign a 16 to strength straight away)

And something completely different
Also I'd like to promote a game by another author which should have gotten far more plays than it did - it's a platformer fire rescue game with a lot of nifty features : http://www.kongregate.com/games/VinceBetteridge/firefighter

Roleplay games, goal based sessions and working structure

Okay, you have to go get the Mc Guffin!!! It's done alot in RPG games, so let's look at it. Also, there's a short version down the bottom of this post!

The thing is, as a player you have absolutely no idea how to. You're trying stuff, but it seems to arrive at dead ends. Or maybe what you're trying to do takes a really long time to do in RL playing time - kind of a dead end by the slowing down of how long the act takes to execute in the fiction in RL time.

This is an issue with most traditional RPG's - there is no fail condition. No explicit point jumps out and says 'well, you can't try anymore, it's too late, you've lost'. So you keep trying this or that and they don't work, but neither does the game. Thou art in limbo!

A primary issue is that yeah, the fiction tends to give no fail condition. If you're standing in front of some puzzle door, unless the ceiling was coming down slowly, there's nothing that says that once you've tried something and it didn't work, you are that much closer to failing or have failed.

Which results in a sort of RPG blue screen. A limbo.

Some traditional RPG advice is to have the players be able to move onto something else. Indeed in classic AD&D, if you can't find the hidden treasure in dungeon room...well, the players can just shrug and say they go to the next room. Which works out great.

But you/the players have to go get the Mc Guffin!

About the only solution is to explicitly make clear that it is valid for the players to just give up.

Let's not treat "Well, we've gotten to near the end of the night soooooo....we'll just have what the players just did in the last thirty minutes solve the issue, even though if they had done that at the start of the session it wouldn't have worked!" as if it's a perfect solution. If the play session is four hours, that means pretty much any solution works, as long as you sit out the four hours and just suggest anything in the last thirty minutes. Well, I guess I can only argue from my own preferences, but as much, that's not something I desire anyway.

Of course the problem with players giving up is what if some do just want to admit defeat, but others just gotta try more things, and more things, and more!

I really am not sure. Perhaps players who have given up can head out early, or they can sit in at the game table but they don't have to try and wrack their brains anymore, they can just watch the other players. Basically you don't want someone to feel they are stuck unable to know what to do next, but also unable to simply give up and move on.

The other problem is, potentially, session time. You might have four hours to play, yet what if the players give up two hours in?

At that point the whole 'well, their actions can't make them fail' probably starts to look attractive, as if the RPG blue screen actually is how you play, since it will indeed fill in the time. It's just a question of what it fills it in with.

I would suggest a secondary optional goal, that you don't introduce at the start of play but merely hint at the possibility of ("There may be an extra mission to perform latter on - they'll send a message if there is"). If the primary goal has been completed, failed, or the players have given in and admitted defeat on it, then you can bring in the secondary optional goal to pad out the session time.

Lets be explicit though - this is an optional goal. If the players don't want to take it up, then they don't. If they have to play it, it doesn't escape the RPG blue screen problem really, as the players are now stuck with another problem because they couldn't solve the prior one.


Short version
1. Tell players they can simply admit defeat on their pursuit of the Mc Guffin. Those who do can retire from the table or sit and watch the others, but they no longer have to run their PCs (whether they can offer suggestions to any players who continue is up to you - I think there's benefit in that. On the other hand, they did give up already and that aught to be acknowledged)

2. Have a secondary optional goal they can move onto. They don't have to take it up, but it benefits them somehow (even if just in a sense of increased PC prestige!). This goes by rule #1 as well, as they can just let it go. If really concerned you could make a third optional goal, probably the second is enough to fill out the extra session time (if filling out that time is a concern).

Dark Souls : Capra Demon - not that big a deal?

Heard this guy was ultra tough? Did die to him three times, but on the fourth, after working up to just throw a firebomb as soon as I pass through the portal (just bash the button, you don't need to aim/lock on to anything), that kills one dog automatically. Then I do a bit of fencing with him, a few slashes and once I'm hurt, I ran up the stairs and across the arch of a door. A dog followed me but he stayed below. Managed to kill off the dog and switch to my estus flask and drink, then dived off and...missed him! Then ran up the stairs, dived off again with a downward stab attack and...he died to the first one? Heck, I had to down stab the Taurus demon more times than that?

Capra demon - unless I've hit him way latter than I should have - not a biggie.

Dark Souls - Moonlight Butterfly

Not even sure why I took this on - I guess you peek through the grey mist for curiosity. Then for revenge, after being killed!

Ended up upgrading my crossbow to max, buying 100 heavy crossbow bolts and kindling the nearest bonfire so as to have ten flasks (I had some miracle healing, but it's kind of slow, the flasks are the fastest). If you have a couple of points of humanity, probably better to spend two of them to kindle the bonfire above the blacksmith (the one who just keeps hammering - shuddup!) rather than die to the butterfly, then possibly lose them to a slip up trying to get back to it.

Also I upgraded my shield a bit as well. Though the butterfly will tempt you to fire one to many times (probably because it wobbles up a little bit and your shot sails past it) and your guy seems to think he's in a happier, huggier game and when you hold down the shield button, he should just keep reloading his crossbow and thus take various spike blasts the butterfly pumps out on a regular basis.

Regardless in the end I recommend just shooting early and shooting often (from the far end of the walk way though, to let the spikes dissipate a bit). Some of that insects attacks just seem unavoidable - when I did kill it, it was from shooting it. Shooting it lots and lots. Till it died. Didn't let it get to that stage. Still, seems a chancy way to kill it - there's probably a more elegant method. On the other hand it worked!

Not sure if the thing at the top of the castle further on is always dead, or dead cause I let some guy out of a cage awhile ago. Curious.

* Good luck * * Praise the sun! * * Try rolling! *

Unity: Counting substrings inside a string

Tying into the previous post, it seems unity has no actual command for counting the number of instances of a substring in a larger string. I've been hunting around for ages and having found no actual command, I've decided to show some code that does it. The code is about as tight as you can get it without it actually being a command!

As with the last post, I'm using /n instead of \n. This is because when the interpretor looks at \n it decides to ignore the n part, making the search only one character in length. The previous post lists the way you can easily convert /n to \n. I know, it sounds annoying - if I were reading this, I'd think it was annoying. But given that unity gets uppity if you try to enter strings into the inspector (ie, it just wont do line breaks if you do so), you're probably gunna have to end up switching /n to \n anyway. It's just a simple replace command anyway (okay, fine - if you don't want to look at the other post replace is as simple as: guimessage = guimessage.Replace("/n", "\n"); )

But I make excuses like a man! Now, onto the search code!

    var stringtosearch = "this is the test string /n with several /n line breaks in it";
    var searchingfor = "/n";
    var substringspresent=0;
   
    var searchextent=stringtosearch.Length-searchingfor.Length; // makes sure we don't search past the end of the string!
    for (i=0;i<=searchextent;i++)
    {
    var sectionscanned=stringtosearch.Substring(i,searchingfor.Length);
    if (sectionscanned==searchingfor) substringspresent++;
    }
   
    print (substringspresent);