u/SkyGlittering2579

I've been thinking about a game setup where the main story beats are locked in ahead of time, but players still get to nudge certain things along the way.

Things like

• who ends up allying with whom
• what resources the group has on hand
• whether some private conversations even happen
• how ready a character is for the next big event
• which short-term plan gets picked

But the overall narrative arc stays authored.

The design question that keeps bugging me is if the ending is set in stone, doesn't player agency eventually start to feel like an illusion?

But if you let players change the ending completely, then pacing, character arcs, and story coherence get a lot harder to keep together.

So where would you draw that line?

Would you rather let players alter the actual ending, or let them shape the journey, relationships, resources, and fallout in meaningful ways while keeping the big picture intact?

I'm especially curious how people here draw the line between meaningful agency and just throwing in more dialogue branches for the sake of choice.

尤其在Reddit上，这个感觉最强烈，好像只要沾上AI，不管内容是什么，评论区必然会看到有人说AI slop，就感觉已经成政治正确了。

起因是我在一个子社区分享了我做的上海作家生活地图，就是把作家们曾居住和活动过的地点做成一张地图。创意，结构设计都是我驱动AI来做的，当然帖子收获了蛮多的upvote，但也有人直接丢下一句AI slop。

说不在意肯定是假的，我就奇怪了，这是把AI使用本身变成原罪了吗，究竟是在反对什么？比如AI让本来不会画画，但是有很多想法创意的人，能做出一张属于自己印记的地图，为什么这就不是一种创作方式了呢？

当然AI也会生产批量的低质内容。但slop这个词是不是被滥用得有点过头了？

I’ve been making a dreamcore+ surreal horror story series about an Eighth Day that exists every week.

I posted abt the setting here before and some of the discussion gave me ideas for how society might actually deal with something this strange.

So I added a new piece to the world: SDS — Surrealism Dream Solve.

In this version, people are already used to the Eighth Day. It’s the one guaranteed day off every week, because small disasters always happen on that day , flash floods, moderate earthquakes, sudden fires, freak storms, things that disrupt a city but usually stop before becoming full-scale catastrophes.

There’s a popular urban legend explaining why they stop.

SDS members supposedly enter dreams, use the dream to reach the disaster, find the giant anomalous creature behind it, and contain it.

But I’m trying to figure out one of the rules for SDS members:

1. Only people with extremely strong imaginations can become members.
2. After successfully containing a creature, they enter a peaceful, beautiful dream almost like an ending screen.
3. When they wake up, they forget the actual mission: the creature, the danger and what happened during the containment.
4. They still remember that they are an SDS member, and vaguely remember being busy in their dreams.
5. They know they must never reveal their SDS identity in real life. If they deliberately do, they die immediately.

So they know they belong to SDS but they can’t fully remember what SDS actually makes them do.

That’s the rule I’m still unsure about.

Does that create a good kind of mystery, or does it make the organization too hard to believe?

I recently came across this Chaoshan language film about letters sent between Southeast Asia and southern China.

What interested me was how much of the story seems rooted in regional culture, the Teochew language, family ties, migration, and the tradition of sending letters and money back home.

I also noticed a brief appearance of Yingge Dance, a traditional performance from the Chaoshan region. The painted faces, wooden sticks, drums, and almost martial-arts-like movements really stood out to me.

For anyone who has seen the film, did the cultural background make the story more moving or did it make parts of it harder to understand?

And for people familiar with Chaoshan culture, did the film feel authentic to you? I’m especially curious abt the use of Teochew and the way traditions like Yingge were shown.

I've been wondering what people outside China actually picture when they hear Chinese horror.
Do most people go straight to jiangshi, Taoist rituals, ghosts, folklore or something completely different?

For me, the first thing that pops into my head is still the Lam Ching ying jiangshi movies. I grew up watching those yellow talismans, wooden swords, all those ritual rules, hopping corpses and that weird mix of scary, funny and oddly heartwarming. They pretty much defined my early idea of Chinese horror.

But I'm curious how do those films come across to people who aren't from the Chinese speaking world?
Is there another Chinese language horror movie that really stuck with you? What makes a horror story feel specifically Chinese to you?

I’m thinking about a world where there is an extra day between Sunday and Monday. All clocks, phones and servers call it the Eighth Day.

It happens at the same time everywhere, everyone can make wishes that change reality with four rules:

1. You can wish for almost anything but it usually only lasts for that one day.

2. You can bring dead people back but they might be dangerous and they might not disappear after the day ends.

3. Every wish has a permanent cost that you don’t know about at first. It stays with you forever.

4. If you don’t make any wish, you are promised a “true reward.” But nobody knows what that reward actually is.

At first, I think people would see the Eighth Day as a miracle. They wish for money, houses, superpowers, cures, dead relatives etc. But when it happens every week, society would have to change.

I can imagine new things appearing because of this:

1. insurance for wish risks

2. government offices to register wishes

3. black markets for testing hidden costs or moving them to someone else

4. religions that say you should never wish

5. shelters for people who were brought back and don't disappear after the day

The whole communities that treat the other seven days as just waiting time. The hard part for me is how fast would normal society get used to this instead of just falling apart?

Would people start making strict rules about wishing, like we have for medicine, guns and money? What new businesses, rules, religions or habits do you think would show up first?

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Huangshan (The Yellow Mountain) is easily one of the most stunning places in China, but navigating it as an international traveler can be confusing due to the recent digital-only ticketing systems and sheer physical intensity of the mountain.

I wanted to map out Huangshan in a gamified, easy-to-digest way to help anyone planning a trip to China.