El Goonish Shive - EGS:NP

Commentary

Posted November 10, 2017 at 7:30 pm

All three of Hanma’s examples are things I’ve seen in various things, though an example of weapons eludes me as I write this. The talking cats one is from an anime called Fairy Tail, however, and these weren’t even regularly sized cats (and technically not cats, but let’s not split hairs).

They see me re-rollin'...

The turn after Catalina’s is when I first abused my right to re-roll to make for a better story. Seven is one of the more likely outcomes of rolling two six-sided dice, so twice in a row wasn’t that unusual.

I, however, got seven for both Rhoda, Catalina, and Susan’s first turns. With Catalina, I figured it was fine. There are mechanics for landing on an owned space, and showing them on the second turn was more lucky than anything else.

Another seven, however, wouldn’t introduce any new mechanics, and I felt it would go from being fortuitous to horribly boring. So I re-rolled Susan’s first roll, and now everyone knows. Well, everyone who reads the commentary, anyway.

But we’re not even on Susan’s turn yet, so let’s see what happens with Catalina landing on Rhoda’s space, shall we?

The original script

I originally wrote a different script for this comic, and I wound up really, really disliking it to the point where I rewrote the whole thing. None of the rewriting affects the game outcome (though we do get to Catalina rolling a seven in this comic instead of the next one), but it did affect their reactions to Rhoda's card.

Firstly, Rhoda was a bit smug, claiming "she'd been bigger". Even with boosted confidence from powerful magic and this being non-canon, that doesn't fit at all with her playing this game with two people she doesn't know very well.

Worse still was that I had Susan ask about whether the Busty card's effect was attraction, and her being embarrassed when it was revealed to not be, the implication easily being that she found the effect attractive. That really doesn't work for Susan. Susan can find women attractive, but that's not the sort of thing that gets her attention in that way.

Granted, another way of interpreting that would be that she assumed that's what it would do and she was simply embarrassed about being wrong and how her asking could be interpreted, but I like this version a LOT better.