No I’m not kidding.
Come at me bro
Or on me
Either or
Bright red barrel of aircraft grade fuel.
Shoot it.
Spawns a leak.
//FPS players mind’s implode//
Toss a lighted match into the growing puddle.
Match goes out.
Shoot it directly with a flamethrower.
Puddle burns slightly like a gas stove before going out again.
See also: video game AOE FX.
Big glowy green area? Could be a healing aura, could be poison. Good luck!
Nah this one is easy.
If it’s green and sparkly, it’s a good thing. If it’s green and bubbly, it’s a bad thing.
Given what Mountain Dew has done to me, that tracks.
Green w/ sparkly bubbles = Happy Drunk
Or radiation perhaps?
Or acid!
I like the fallout approach
Green glow: radiation
Brown water: radiation
Bottled Water: Good!
Not really, believe it or not, radiation. (You must be thinking of purified water)
Purple: Magic??
Green: Life/death??
Red: Life/fire??
Blue: Magic/cold??
Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.
Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.
Orange is machinery/technology
FFXIV the stack markers are close to orange… and long time ago it had Bard having a fire circle that damaged enemies but not allies, yet the tanks thought it was bad and would drag enemies out of it. Probably why they removed that one.
How about Oblivion where every potion, including drugs, are red?
FWIW, potions are drugs.
except the ones made from potatoes and cheese, those are just soup
If you don’t think soup is addicting, you haven’t had soup.
It’s a potion that cures hunger.
potions of stamina are just energy drinks
Still heals HP. Definitely a health soup.
“There are no ‘rules’ for fantasy”
Wrong. To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building” where you lay down the rules of your world. Properly done, the amount of World Building exceeds the actual works by far. It is absolutely necessary to create a core of inner logic to the story. You are not bound by the rules of our world, yes, but you are bound by the rule of consistency. If you violate those, you automatically write crap Fantasy (or SciFi).
Funny, though, that e.g. many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building.
Crap fantasy is still fantasy. Had a great time coming up with bad fantasy stories in my childhood when I knew nothing about good writing. Art is what you make it.
Life is too short to read crappy books. Like those we had to endure in school.
A clearer way to phrase it might be “there are no rules for the genre of fantasy”. An individual world needs self-contained rules, yes, but just because Tolkien’s Dwarves have beards regardless of gender doesn’t mean that your Dwarves need to be the same.
That’s hard fantasy. Soft fantasy can be good too.
Can, yes, but in my experience rarely is.
To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building”
I think this is more implying that you don’t have to work from the same framework for every fantasy world. Not everything has to be set in Arthurian Medieval Times with Crusader-Era social sensibilities. The menagerie of mythical creatures isn’t a prerequisite or delimiter (dragons / unicorns / etc are not a requirement nor are robots / cthulhoid horrors / woolly mammoths disallowed). You need internal consistency (to a degree) but you aren’t forced to adhere / omit any genre trope.
I would say, at an absolute bare minimum, you need some kind of fantastical or supernatural element to make it “Fantasy” as opposed to “Historical Fiction” or “Science Fiction” or some other category of fictional prose. Although, the genre of “Magical Realism” does make even that distinction a bit fuzzy.
many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building
You don’t necessary need to go through the whole work of World Building if you’re just banging out a short story or novella. Even serial writers don’t necessarily bother going deep on the background material until they feel the need to expand the scope of the setting. I mean, look at the Star Wars setting. George Lucas didn’t have Jabba the Hutt defined as a big slug monster until the third movie. In the original film, there was a cut scene in which Han confronts Jabba, who was just a be-feathered chubby gangster.
If you’re just spitballing or cranking out bits of fiction in brief, World Building can be superfluous. A story that takes place entirely in a single house over the course of a long weekend doesn’t need the kind of scaffolding that a Long Walk to Mordor requires.
George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building. The Star Wars universe is basically just retcons stacked onto other retcons.
And I am a firm believer that even short stories in a fantasy or SciFi setting don’t work without at least a certain amount of world building.
The number of fantasy and SciFi stories where the author thought they could get away without thinking their world through and which ended up badly is amazingly high.
George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.
If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.
All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in “Hutt Space” - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. “The Clone Wars” wasn’t just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope’s Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was “Episode IV” should say it all.
One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director’s notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.
If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.
You are well aware that those are retcon? None of this existed before “A New Hope”. Most of it was done later by specialists hired by LucasFilm.
Rules for fantasy writers.
For a post centered on reading, the actual comprehension of what is being said in this thread is poor.
I color code all my info. (…) Green means go, so I know to go ahead and shut up about it. Orange, means orange you glad you didn’t bring it up. Most colors mean don’t say it.
- Michael Scott
My health potions are red, also, pulp free is not an option. >:)
Reminds me of the blue stop signs
The old TSR/SSI game Unlimited Adventures had randomized potion colors. It’s also how I learned that khaki is not pronounced ‘kahiki’ when trying to explain what was going on to someone (I knew khakis as a type of trouser not a color).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms%3A_Unlimited_Adventures
Edit: or maybe I’m thinking of another gold-box game if that one didn’t have some random generation. Hrm.
Pixel dungeon does the same thing, you don’t know when you start a run what any color potion does. So they’re randomized.
That’s a roguelike convention. Potion colors are randomized. Runes/scrolls usually arent.
Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like “health”. Whether you die should be based on vibes.
My vibe is slightly hurt with a hint of mental damage
DM: Roll a Vibe Check
Player: I rolled Dark Green
DM: Ooohhh…
Nethack (and derivatives) is pretty much the only game I know of where the health potions may or may not be red.
And I guess Dark Souls… It’s more of an orange than a red. But maybe that’s just the color of the flask. Idk what the substance inside looks like. 🤷🏻♂️
the flask is green! i would know since i emptied it one too many times snd the texture is dark green
Then the insides have to be red for it to appear orange through green glass. The health potion is red!
Electric element. Team Yellow vs Team Blue, FIGHT!
There is (was?) an electric power provider in Germany by the name of Yellow. Their whole marketing was “electricity is yellow!”
Electricity is yellow.
Blue would be water.What game would actually use blue?
Blue-white lightning icons/symbols are quite common, I would think.
Slay the Spire comes to mind:
Then again, there are some yellow ones, too:
I used yellow for health to avoid red/green colourblind issues
I’m not sure if that’s a joke? If you have red/green colorblindness, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish yellow either. You’d just see blue and not blue.
Reminds me of that overwatch character with the yellow healing aura and the green speed aura. Just why?
In Overwatch, healing is consistently represented by the color yellow. Mercy’s beam, Ana’s darts, Moira’s piss, Soldier’s healyboo, etc. Making Lucio’s speed aura yellow and healing aura green would be visually confusing
