#pitchposting

Our protagonist is a hack movie producer. We open on the first day of shooting, and he's a dick to everyone, which leads into a montage of flare ups on set and in the editing booth, introducing our cast of characters and the recurring problems (the co-stars end up sleeping together, which is a problem because they're married to other people, the director is an auteur on a schlock scifi project, the writer is completely lacking in original ideas and anxious about imposter syndrome, which is warranted in this case).

The movie premieres, the box office numbers aren't great, and a week later it's clear that the whole thing is a flop.

Our protagonist wakes up, and it's the first day of filming again. It's a time loop, and he's only getting out of it if he makes this movie good.

What follows is a guy grappling with trying to make a good movie in the Hollywood system, grappling with budgets and VFX crunch and competing artistic visions and different personalities. He works harder than he's ever worked before, and over several loops (note: most movies take a year from the day shooting starts to the premiere, it would be better narratively to speed this up) he develops strategies for dealing with people and avoiding some of the pitfalls that wrecked this movie the first time. He moves the shooting schedule around, he tweaks the script, he keeps the leads from blowing up their lives (and the movie) with an affair, he anticipates and solves every problem, learning and growing along the way.

And finally, he gets the Golden Loop, the one where he keeps the whole movie firing on all cylinders, where he offers exactly the right comfort and support at exactly the right moment.

The trailer is cut perfectly. In interviews, the cast say that it's one of the most fulfilling projects they have ever worked on. It gets an A+ Cinemascore and huge word-of-mouth after the premiere, straddling the line between high art and mass market appeal.

And then after a week of renown about cinema being saved and various people being heralded as "ones to watch" (though selflessly, never the producer himself), the loop resets.

Our protagonist is stunned. He did it the best he could ever do it, the best anyone could do it, he was on the ball, he gave himself fully to this film, it was Good Art, and he doesn't know how he could have done any better.

And it's then that his family stops being side characters and start to take focus, because no one actually told him that he had to make the Best Movie, this is actually an allegory about workaholics and how maybe it doesn't matter whether the movie was good or not if you had to burn yourself and your personal relationships like jet fuel.

This final act swerve would probably piss some people off, but I think that's why I would like it. The story has been leading you by the nose to think that perfection is what's going to make the loop stop, and this is the mindset of this particular guy. And yes, he grew as a character, but never stopped to consider whether this whole project he's been killing himself over was what the end goal was.

Then he learns about being a good father and reconnects with his wife, and we get more insights into the sorts of problems that he has absolutely not been working on while trying to get this movie made: the ways that making the movie was already all-consuming before the loop.

So!!! Ref for my pc!!! Here's Pitch, an Urchin known for being tall and tired-looking enough to be mistaken for an adult, getting himself into the strangest situations, and being able to blend into high society effortlessly.

He may or may not be from the surface, may or may not have won the marvellous, and may or may not have done many strange but important things the Urchins in the flit still spread rumors about to this day...

More information under the cut, if the cut actually works and doesn't hate me. There's a stats image at the bottom that seems to break everything when I move it to where it's supposed to be. Agh

six eggs/baby trans women get gender affirming makeovers. but one of the stylists is a traitor trying to sabotage their client. if the other five can guess who, they each get a lifetime supply of hrt. if they can't, the sixth contestant gets $100,000

Obviously you'd want to only weakly simulate it, distilling down the changes over the years to whether cumulative metrics are hit, or racing ahead when things are in some equilibrium. And you'd want to minimize how much stuff happens that's just totally random, so that the changes over time are, to the player, as close to perfectly legible as possible.

And what do you get out of this? How is this better than what the games already do, the puzzle approach where they just cheat everything?

A stronger sense of continuity, greater player agency, some token realism, emergent solutions to problems ...

I suppose I'm imagining that you have a village of people, right, and there's some calamity thirty years or so in their future, and you can travel into the present, which is a wasteland, to search through everything that they've left behind.

But what they've left behind is contingent on what happened over those thirty years, whether their village was prosperous or suffered, so you're scavenging in the present to bring things to the past, building up infrastructure and goods, helping make sure the generation of children have good educations. You want the blacksmith to be able to craft quality swords, and him and his apprentice are certainly going to be better at that in twenty years time, but only if the bellows is replaced with a better one, and that's only going to happen if there's a supply of leather, and that's only going to be there in the future if the cattle are able to survive the year 6 blight.

You help the people, they incidentally leave you more to gather from the future, you go make a trip there to scavenge and fight monsters, then you return to help them more.

This would have been back when I was in college, maybe around 2008, before I was as good about backing up even the failed projects. So far as I can tell, it's completely vanished, and I don't think there was anything worthwhile enough to go looking for. But I can remember it well enough.

The book was about an MMO. (For background, I was destructively addicted to World of Warcraft from ~2004-2006.) It was a VRMMO, though I'm not sure the term had been popularized at that point: to play this game, you had to put on a helmet to play it, and it was completely immersive, because the helmet did unspecified things to your brain.

Early on, it's revealed that the helmets are a two-way street: you are fully immersed within the game, but also, extra compute is being leeched off your brain. And in this way, the VRMMO that has a stranglehold on millions of people and has cornered the market has given rise to a superintelligence, which has stomped out all other attempts to create a superintelligence.

Something, somewhere, has started to go wonky within the superintelligence. It does not understand its own pathways of cognition, and there's no source of compute powerful enough that it can get in a more stable state. It's literally living in the minds of humans, riding a tenth of the brainpower of the online userbase, getting dumber when there are lulls in gaming.

The game itself, the quasi-medieval kingdoms and such, are in some sense a part of the superintelligence. There are correlations between this vast land and the thoughts of this entity. They're entwined together.

And somewhere in the endless bramble of the virtual world, something is happening that the entity can't view on its own.

So the story is about a small team of people who have been assembled for a quest deep into the unexplored lands, parts of the virtual fantasy world that have never been seen before. They've been recruited by this superintelligence specifically for this mission.

We have:

A woman who works for the game company, an expert in the mappings, and an avid player

One of vanishingly few people to have successfully gotten a brain implant, he used this to become a black hat hacker, I think he probably belonged in a cyberpunk novel instead

The Best Player in the World, a guy who has a position as absolute ruler of one of the kingdoms, the pinnacle of what a person can achieve in the virtual world ... and in real life, he stays catheterized and emaciated, never leaving his apartment

Most of what was written was the team getting assembled, in a way that I don't think I would endorse doing now: it's too much backstory, one after the other, and would be much better to just get into things.

Here's the other thing: I didn't have an ending in mind. I guess I thought that I would figure it out as I went along, what this thing in they needed to voyage to represented, but I also think that I'd have had more enthusiasm for doing work on this if there weren't this looming mystery I didn't have a good solution for.

Thinking about it now, I have a lot of problems with it. For one thing, I think it's your duty as a writer to decide on the resolution to a mystery before you start writing it: this is a negotiable duty, but I think a lot of bad books (or failed books that are never finished) come about because someone was pantsing on the wrong things.

The bigger issue is that I don't know what this thing was trying to say. It was definitely "about" World of Warcraft in some way, it was mining from that period of my life and the way I was trapped by the game. And if that's what it's going to be about, then I think there's a thematic through line: the unknowability of the mind. There was a time I was grinding loyalty in World of Warcraft and not having any fun with it, just going through this repetitive action because ... I don't know. A certain depression, a numbness, a way in which my brain had been captured by slowly filling this bar so I could get a rare skin for my mount of some shit.

And so this is the thing that the novel should have been grappling with, a superintelligence whose own mind is opaque to it, sending a team of dysfunctional people at the edge of various bell curves out there, hoping the interactions of their minds would knock something loose, unable to escape these horrible patterns.

I have virtually zero ambition to ever try writing this again, especially because so much of it seems so half-baked now, and partly because VRMMO is a whole genre now and it would be seen in the context of that genre, which it is not a response to or in conversation with. But I do think about this story from time to time, and wonder where I'd have ended up going with it, if I had stuck with it. Maybe it would have found something to say.

Pitchposting is when you put up a partially fleshed out idea, free to a good home. I can't guarantee that I won't ever want to write this one, but you can't copyright an idea, so I think we're good, and if you wrote it, you'd do different things than I would do.

There was a web serial called Reroll that I never read, whose premise was that it was a time loop with superheroes where the protagonist got a different power each time they looped. This is a great idea, though I think I heard that there were some issues with the execution (and cannot speak to that).

The main thing that this gets you, the broad concept of "time loop with variation" is that there's always some opportunity for variation, which keeps the loops from getting too stale. At the same time, it opens up temporary paths that then close when the loop ends, raising the stakes for any given loop, which helps shore up the tension problem that time loops have. And because the powers will be different every loop, there's a real option for having "reveals" that are much more natural.

So the idea here is to take it and tweak it. Rather than superpowers, which I'm never a huge fan of, we do some kind of fantasy thing, and we do some kind of litrpg system with the main thing that's changing every time the protagonist's class.

You know that thing in Skyrim where you do a playthrough as a stealth archer, then another playthrough as an archwizard, then another playthrough as a warrior? This is something that I have never seen nor heard about in the litrpg space, and it seems ripe for someone to do it.

Our protagonist starts every loop by making a choice: what class are they going to take? And though the people and scenarios in each loop are always the same, this fundamental choice alters everything.

So you start with the protagonist in some kind of contained environment, since I'm strongly of the belief that a time loop story is better if it has some kind of cause to unfold slowly. Maybe it's a castle under siege, maybe it's a prison, maybe it's a ship about to make landfall, whatever. They're in dire straits and need to get out, and that first "discovery" loop happens either without any kind of power, or with a generic fighter class. They learn about getting experience points and levels and improving in skills.

And when they inevitably die, they get a choice of another class, or their class is randomized, or there's some kind of incentive to try something different, and they wake up in the same place they were, having forgotten all their old skills but keeping their memories, and importantly, with new skills.

The first time they get out of their contained environment, they fight their way out, but there are other ways: slipping past the guards using stealth, scaling the walls, or smooth-talking the guy at the gatehouse. There are maybe three different magic systems, and only one of them is usable in a single run, each locked to a specific class, each with their own peculiarities.

So in a given "run" we're getting:

More information on what a specific class does

More information on the world as seen through the lens of that class

More "progression" information that leads us toward completing goals and "permanent" widening of the world

Our protagonist slips into the warden's office as a thief and read the documents that implicate him in a scheme against the queen. He talks to the warden as a silver-tongued bard and get him to admit to an affair he's having with the prince consort. And after that, though the silver tongue is gone, the information remains, and getting out of prison is a matter of just saying the right words in a clumsy way to the right people, which works no matter which class the main character is wearing.

I think for me, a nascent novel exists as a constellation of scenes, the things that stand out to me as something cool and worth doing. Here, it's the context switching, meeting the same characters under different circumstances. The sly street rat is mistrustful of a mage, since there's an enormous class difference, but if you meet them on their terms they're warm and kind. The princess is actually kind of a terrible person, if you're not presenting as an aristocrat. You get a chance to look into the mind of the vizier and recoil in horror at what you find there.

I think it's important for the concept that the protagonist keeps rotating through the classes. If they lock in as "thief best class" then you're not leveraging the possibilities of the idea. And for this, you either need mechanical limitations (inability to select the same class twice, vital xp bonuses for switching it up), or you need carefully arranged possibility spaces that routinely encourage variation simply because that's how goals are accomplished.