Gee!

I invented a "portable practice booth" and tried it out today.

It is a box built of baltic birch ply and lined with acoustic material. Works like a charm. I had no qualms about practicing trumpet during the day, even without the mute.

And something has changed. Either the comfort (of being able to blow as hard as I wanted but without a practice mute to block it) or something in my posture or just that I've been posting at Quora lately and thinking a lot about embouchure and trumpet technique, but I blew a high G.

Clean, and repeatable. I can even run up and down the scale from the C above the staff to the F (first time I did it, though, after three passes I nearly passed out myself). And, yes, I did tap the A once but I'm only counting clean notes here.

* * *

On the other hand...

I had to take a big break on the novel. I had charged ahead into the next chapters but I could sense it wasn't working quite right.

The problem is that this is an origin story. Now she's "origined." So now I have to figure out what kind of character she'll be for the rest of the book (and possible series).

And there's a lot of elements of the character that are there because they needed to be for the origin to work. So Penny is energetic, confident, an auto-didact, physically fit, widely read. Basically, she had to either have the skills to carry off "Athena Fox" in the real world, or be able to learn them over the course of an adventure.

Other things I discovered while I was writing; things that made a scene or moment work and seemed consistent with the character I was building. So she is musical, an experienced actor, and speaks a little bit of a couple of languages.

So there's a lot of directions I thought I would go that in practice didn't work. Some times I got them all the way to a trial scene and they didn't work. For instance, on paper I liked the idea of her thinking of Athena Fox as an alter-ego, as someone she transformed into. So she'd lack confidence in her own skills when in mufti but put on the hat and she'd be all competent. Well, that didn't work. Having her outside the heroism meant she couldn't enjoy it or take pride in it.

Subtler than that is her thinking of Athena Fox as a character, as a fictional thing she portrays. The trap here is that it made her way too genre-savvy to live with in a semi-realistic book. The world of this novel, unlike the Diskworld, does not run on Narrativium. And it also called too much attention to the tropes I was touching on. It is better to continue how I started; that Penny is actually going around traveling to exotic lands and speaking multiple languages and solving archaeological mysteries...she just doesn't quite realize it.

The crossing point, the big moment of the previous chapter, is her realizing she can actually be Athena Fox. But here's the trick. She doesn't want to be a character. She wants to be the person. She doesn't want to have genre tropes happen, she wants to travel and explore and solve mysteries.

Of course I've got the Act III crux coming up. And that is where the "dark side" of the character shows up, and I confront head-on the idea of genre awareness.

But I still need to construct what she is like now.

* * *

Played through to the Minutemen Faction ending in Fallout 4. If you do it right, this is the one with the fewest betrayals. (If you try to complete with the Railroad Faction, you need to follow the Institute thread past the point of becoming an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. And both Institute and Brotherhood involve massacring all the other factions.)

It isn't a game without problems. I think it comes down to gamification. There are many things that have to be in there to give a long and rich playing experience, and they can clash with some of the core story.

One of the strongest for me is that most of the encounters, including the majority of all of the Faction threads, are forced to assume you are a starting player; a wanderer, a wastelander, just out of the vault. If you let the Railroad give you a default code-name it is "Wanderer." When you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel even fairly far into their thread they call you "Wastelander" and (as do all of the factions) speak of you as if you are a loner with no connections, no identity, no society you belong to.

Thing of it is, you can already be General of the Minutemen and have personal control over most of the settlements on the map. Which means the other factions should be treating with you diplomatically; as one of the most powerful political figures they've encountered. Okay, the Brotherhood gets a pass on this since they are assholes anyhow. And the Institute, too, couldn't care less for Surface titles. But the idea still stands.

(The other thing that gets me about meeting a faction late-game is the dialog simply can't take into account your history. There are some clever bits, like Preston noticing you already have power armor, but by late game you are basically a Person of Mass Destruction. Heck, they even warn you about the difficulties of the Shining Sea, when you've already explored the entire thing, been to the place they want you to find, and can shrug off a couple of rads without even bothering to wear protective gear.)

Heck, even your own settlers will sometimes wonder who you are and make snide remarks about wastelanders.

But here's a bit that I found really kind of off-putting. And that's dialog checks. Why do these work so much better in Mass Effect?

Well, it might be Mass Effect has better writing. Not the fault of the writers, but more the pacing of the game means plot points need to be bigger and move faster in Fallout 4. So Elder Maxxon can do a 180 with just one line of dialog.

I think it is largely the gamification. In Mass Effect, the special dialog options (Persuade or Intimidate) are available if you have a high enough point value. Otherwise they are grayed out (which is somewhat annoying; you are given the words you could say to resolve the situation but you are prevented from saying them). In Fallout 4, they are a die roll. The higher your skill (Charisma), the better chance of making the roll.

But because this is a roll, the game awards it with a "ding" sound. So the way it all comes together is thus; you are presented with a dialog option in color-coded letters (meaning it is going to be tough to make it work). If you made it, there's the "ta dah!" sound effect and the person you are talking to suddenly agrees with you and changes their mind. It feels...artificial.

Okay, maybe there's another reason. Mass Effect the sound design is much more satisfying even for the Interrupts, which are sort of a hyped-up, QuickTime Event version. And there's no annoying effect for regular dialog options. But also...you are playing Shepard. Shepard-Commander, who talked the Salarians into reversing the Krogan Genophage, who saved the Rachni race from extinction, who talked back to the Council, who was able to get a dozen fractious races to work together to defeat the Reapers. Shepard who brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth. Shep isn't just some random vault-dweller who is trying to be persuasive. It is who she IS.