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Troll Bridgington
Dec 22, 2011

Keeping up foreign relations.
I read all of them, because I hate myself or something. Seriously, I even read the entire Sword of Truth series not once, but twice. I don't remember why, because I disliked it the first time. The second time was kind of a hate-read thing. I still think we should gather all of the self-loathing fantasy fans and do a Sword of Truth reread thread, just for the comedy value.

Anyways, the last book of The Inheritance Cycle was absolutely horrible. I enjoyed the first couple of books when I read them in high school. They were entertaining cheesy stories that were indeed heavily based on Star Wars. I'll spoiler this just in case.

The conclusion was basically Eragon casting a spell that made Galbatorix (the book's main antagonist) "understand all the pain and suffering he has caused" which made him so depressed (he also lost his dragon, which added to his anguish) that he cast a spell and "unmade" himself. He basically killed himself. And that wasn't even the end of the book! He spent the next 100-something pages awkwardly tying up as many loose ends as he possibly could.

Paolini's writing actually got worse with time, and the fact he decided that the story was too complex for 3 books makes the situation even more hilarious. I have no idea what Brandon is going to work on with him, but I'm not sure if I can make myself be excited for it. Maybe Brandon will mentor him or something, and we'll get a book about dragons with a Sanderson style magic system? Who knows.

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Tunicate
May 15, 2012

thespaceinvader posted:

You'd want it to? I'm not sure I want Mistborn|Eragon.
It'd be like reading a trainwreck. Couldn't stop turning pages.

Democratic Pirate
Feb 17, 2010

They'd just alternate chapters from different characters' POV. Eragon dude thinks it'll be a great book and tries his best while Sanderson realizes it's going to be at least 50% terrible no matter what so he indulges in all of his writing vices and makes 4-5 dad jokes a chapter.

I do remember liking the part in one of the Eragon books where his brother goes crazy in a fight and it ends with him standing on a pile of 200 bodies or so. Thought it was pretty :black101: when I read it.

Hopeford
Oct 15, 2010

Eh, why not?
I think the one collaboration I'd want to read between Sanderson and a less than stellar author would be him and Goodkind where Sanderson has to pick a paragraph Goodkind wrote at random and expand into a story with no clue about the original context of that paragraph. This is because Goodkind has all those...insane setups and if there's one skill Sanderson has, it's the ability to take the most ridiculous ideas and run with them with a straight face.

I mean who here wouldn't want to see a Sanderson story where he tries to explain the origins of the line "But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest."

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Sherringford posted:


I mean who here wouldn't want to see a Sanderson story where he tries to explain the origins of the line "But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest."

I'd pay money for that.

I'd really love to see a Jim Butcher/Sanderson teamup also.

Troll Bridgington
Dec 22, 2011

Keeping up foreign relations.

ConfusedUs posted:

I'd pay money for that.

I'd really love to see a Jim Butcher/Sanderson teamup also.

That would actually be pretty cool. I never read The Dresden Files, but I really liked Codex Alera.

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd
Can someone explain Compounding to me?

I'm re-reading Alloy of Law and they just explained Miles' being a double gold or whatever.

Is it he burns gold like a normal allomancer and this allows him to recharge his metalminds which he taps to allow him to burn gold like an allomancer?

Because doesn't the metal need to be ingested for the allomantic abilities to happen?

berenzen
Jan 23, 2012

Basically, he has stored health in his gold, which, when burned, is heavily multiplied. So he heals at incredibly fast rates when burning his gold stores, and he doesn't need to spend as much downtime storing up his gold.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

omnibobb posted:

Can someone explain Compounding to me?

I'm re-reading Alloy of Law and they just explained Miles' being a double gold or whatever.

Is it he burns gold like a normal allomancer and this allows him to recharge his metalminds which he taps to allow him to burn gold like an allomancer?

Because doesn't the metal need to be ingested for the allomantic abilities to happen?

Basically, you take 10 hp of damage to create 10 black mana and put it in your goldmind.

Then, you eat your goldmind, discarding it to the graveyard. Doing that gets you ten times the mana you put in, so you now have 100 black mana. Take your 100 black mana and put it in 10 goldminds.

Tap goldmind #1 and convert 10 black mana into 10 hp. You now have 90 black mana stored. If you ever take damage again, you can turn the stored mana into hp as usual, and you can always take your stored 90 and turn it into 900 - so long as you have some goldminds to put it in.

Tunicate fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Oct 25, 2013

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd

berenzen posted:

Basically, he has stored health in his gold, which, when burned, is heavily multiplied. So he heals at incredibly fast rates when burning his gold stores, and he doesn't need to spend as much downtime storing up his gold.

So, he still has to store up health like normal (albeit at a faster rate for some reason) and when he uses the feruchemy to heal it's super effective because he's burning it allomantically?

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

omnibobb posted:

So, he still has to store up health like normal (albeit at a faster rate for some reason) and when he uses the feruchemy to heal it's super effective because he's burning it allomantically?

He has to store up the health to start the cycle, but once it's going he can store his bonus health from burning the metals allomantically, and never have to worry about it again.

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd

Tunicate posted:

He has to store up the health to start the cycle, but once it's going he can store his bonus health from burning the metals allomantically, and never have to worry about it again.

That's what I was looking for, burning the allomantic gold fills his metalminds.

So is he constantly ingesting gold? Or does using the metalmind also fuel his allomantic abilities? Like he does he need to fill a gold ring and then swallow that? Or does he have bracers like others? If so doesn't he need to ingest it to activate it?

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

omnibobb posted:

That's what I was looking for, burning the allomantic gold fills his metalminds.

So is he constantly ingesting gold? Or does using the metalmind also fuel his allomantic abilities? Like he does he need to fill a gold ring and then swallow that? Or does he have bracers like others? If so doesn't he need to ingest it to activate it?

Well, he doesn't really use his allomantic gold except once, since the gold power (seeing alternate selves) is pretty pointless.

Fully charged goldminds just give you the health ability, not the allomantic one - it basically 'overwrites' the normal power. They burn up really quickly, but while you're burning the charged gold you get all the health times ten out, and then can either use it, or store it in other goldminds.



Thing is, since Miles has to keep burning gold to fuel his health, and is addicted to going at 500% health, he's got a really expensive habit. I think he just has tons of gold needles embedded in his body as his gold reserve, since he can ignore any health effects from it.

Arcanen
Dec 19, 2005

Re: Steelheart and speculation.

Calamity is clearly an epic (perhaps an alien epic), and it is obviously one hell of a gifter.

It's likely that all epics can gift, most just don't before becoming evil, at which point they'd never want to gift their powers.

One cannot gift to people of the same "gift tier". I.e. Earth epics can't gift to other Earth epics, but can gift to "normal people. I suspect a gifted David could gift one of Profs powers to another human, but not to a human who is also being gifted with another of Profs powers.

The reason all of this must be true, is that Sanderson is often a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of writer. He wants to be able to establish David as a super awesome "normal" who can defeat epics without any powers. But he's also going to want a final showdown of some sort, clearly with Calamity.

So I'd bet every nickel to my name that the final showdown is Calamity vs. David who has been gifted by tons of epics. Because doing this sort of stacking on a normal human is clearly the (only possible) way to create the most powerful being i.e. someone with a chance of defeating Calamity.

Calamity either won't take back the powers it gifted to standard epics because of some story reason (e.g. wanting to test humanity etc etc) or because of some handwaved power reason (his gifting is different, can't recall gifting after a certain amount of time etc)

Mortanis
Dec 28, 2005

It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
College Slice
It's important to note that burning metals isn't what gives you the power. Sanderson isn't very clear on that in the books, but he's talked about it in interviews. The power itself exists, and burning metals is basically the key that fits in the lock that gives you access to it. It's why there's a hard limit on how much power you can get from burning a metal - it's not based on your genetics or "aptitude", it's like there's a pipe that's only so wide, and once you unlock it by burning the metal, you get access to its full potential.

When Vin ate some of Sazed's feruchemy-stored metal, she could feel the power in there. She could burn it as a normal metal, but the power within was locked away. If you burn metal you've stored energy in yourself, it tears the "lock" way wider and the "pipe" access becomes much larger - you can access a far greater amount of Allomantic power now. Your garden hose of strength becomes a fire-hose of strength. So you store some of that excess back into your metal, as you normally would, and use the rest for whatever you want - you've still got 90% of it left, and that's still a dozen times normal capacity. The metal doesn't store any more, but since you're using a firehose to fill a bucket, it fills quickly and you're still left with plenty to use for other stuff.

With gold, since there's no benefit of use, he can just put all 100% (which is dozens of times normal burning capacity and storing capacity) into goldminds. Each cycle is a net gain of a metric crapton because of this, and he doesn't have to burn any metals except to fill the goldminds, so he's not continually burning anything (and seeing self-echoes). He probably keeps himself fully topped off, though, so he's always scrambling for gold. He's paranoid of death that he'd never go without the fires roaring.

Tapping is fast effect (:smuggo:) so he can pretty much be guaranteed to stoke the process up to full even if he's shot in the brain.

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd
Ok, so you've got to kill him before he can heal. This may be to gory for Sanderson, but wouldn't the easy way to have someone grabbing a guys head from behind and pulling up on the chin while you decapitate him from the front?

The back guy is keeping the two parts (head and neck) apart so they can't stitch back together?

Sorry for all the questions, I have a job with a lot of downtime and am rereading a bunch of stuff.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice

omnibobb posted:

Ok, so you've got to kill him before he can heal. This may be to gory for Sanderson, but wouldn't the easy way to have someone grabbing a guys head from behind and pulling up on the chin while you decapitate him from the front?

The back guy is keeping the two parts (head and neck) apart so they can't stitch back together?

Sorry for all the questions, I have a job with a lot of downtime and am rereading a bunch of stuff.

He pretty much heals like at least a T-X. You might be able to draw and quarter him. Then burn him.

This wouldn't work with someone like Lord Ruler though.

syphon
Jan 1, 2001

Shakugan posted:

Calamity either won't take back the powers it gifted to standard epics because of some story reason (e.g. wanting to test humanity etc etc) or because of some handwaved power reason (his gifting is different, can't recall gifting after a certain amount of time etc)
Can an epic even "take back" a gifted power? They didn't discuss gifting in very much depth, but I don't recall them mentioning if this is even possible or not. It could just be a "one way valve" so to speak.

The closest I remember to this happening is when the battery epic shut down the power to Newcago. It wasn't very clear how he was doing that... did he 'drain' the batteries he had previously 'filled', or was he somehow constantly powering them and just shut off that flow?

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice

syphon posted:

Can an epic even "take back" a gifted power? They didn't discuss gifting in very much depth, but I don't recall them mentioning if this is even possible or not. It could just be a "one way valve" so to speak.

The closest I remember to this happening is when the battery epic shut down the power to Newcago. It wasn't very clear how he was doing that... did he 'drain' the batteries he had previously 'filled', or was he somehow constantly powering them and just shut off that flow?

He could decide to "ungift" his powers. He took his power back from his giftees so they couldn't fill the batteries in his place.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

omnibobb posted:

Ok, so you've got to kill him before he can heal. This may be to gory for Sanderson, but wouldn't the easy way to have someone grabbing a guys head from behind and pulling up on the chin while you decapitate him from the front?

The back guy is keeping the two parts (head and neck) apart so they can't stitch back together?

Sorry for all the questions, I have a job with a lot of downtime and am rereading a bunch of stuff.

POssible but difficult. Apparently the lord ruler would have actually been killed if thy could seperate his head from his goldminds. When he was apparently decapitated, the other end of his neck actually healed up before the blade was all the way through.

egg tats
Apr 3, 2010

api call girl posted:

He could decide to "ungift" his powers. He took his power back from his giftees so they couldn't fill the batteries in his place.

On top of that, no one would ever let him use his powers himself, which was why he was just a normal dude

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd

Tunicate posted:

POssible but difficult. Apparently the lord ruler would have actually been killed if thy could seperate his head from his goldminds. When he was apparently decapitated, the other end of his neck actually healed up before the blade was all the way through.

Yeah, that's why you have guy two in the back pulling up on the chin to stop the side of the neck from healing back together.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice

omnibobb posted:

Yeah, that's why you have guy two in the back pulling up on the chin to stop the side of the neck from healing back together.

Again, good luck with doing that to the Lord Ruler. And I wasn't really making the T-X comparison in jest, because with the forces needed to separate your head from your neck via guillotine/axe ... apparently you need to be able to pull the body parts strongly and quickly enough apart.

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!

omnibobb posted:

Can someone explain Compounding to me?

I'm re-reading Alloy of Law and they just explained Miles' being a double gold or whatever.

Is it he burns gold like a normal allomancer and this allows him to recharge his metalminds which he taps to allow him to burn gold like an allomancer?

Because doesn't the metal need to be ingested for the allomantic abilities to happen?

Basically, you can allomantically burn feruchemical reserves (if you have the abilities corresponding to the same metal), and their power is significantly increased by doing so. People with compounding abilities presumably still need to spend some time charging up their abilities (c.f. the Lord Ruler needing to spend some time as an old man to store up youth in his atiumminds), but they can charge a relatively small amount of *thing* for a massive return. Presumably you could run Miles out of power, but it would take a long-rear end time, and I'd've assumed ([spoiler]though presumably not since the execution was apparently successful) that he would have embedded some in his body in order to be able to refill and burn them without needing to chug them. Vin was able to sense the reserve of power from Sazed's metalminds, but not to activate it - the power can only be accessed by the person who stores it, as it stands.

I'm not absolutely sure Allomancers actually need to have the metals in their stomachs to burn them anyway, I have a feeling in the bloodstream is enough for those that are biocompatible.

I love the magic systems in Scadrial. They're definitely Sanderson's best for my money. It's so flexible, and there's just so much more left to explore with it. And it's so clever, so rarely is there any time where you say 'well, why not do x with magic'? And when you do, it's usually just because someone hasn't thought of it yet, and then proceeds to do so (c.f. Vin with the horseshoes).

And yeah, theorising about killing gold compounders is all very well (decapitate them with something wide enough that their head is completely separated from their neck by the blade - Kell did it to one of the inquisitors, who have gold compounding powers), but getting into position is a bitch.

drat I love these books.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

thespaceinvader posted:

Basically, you can allomantically burn feruchemical reserves (if you have the abilities corresponding to the same metal), and their power is significantly increased by doing so. People with compounding abilities presumably still need to spend some time charging up their abilities (c.f. the Lord Ruler needing to spend some time as an old man to store up youth in his atiumminds), but they can charge a relatively small amount of *thing* for a massive return. Presumably you could run Miles out of power, but it would take a long-rear end time, and I'd've assumed ([spoiler]though presumably not since the execution was apparently successful) that he would have embedded some in his body in order to be able to refill and burn them without needing to chug them. Vin was able to sense the reserve of power from Sazed's metalminds, but not to activate it - the power can only be accessed by the person who stores it, as it stands.

I'm not absolutely sure Allomancers actually need to have the metals in their stomachs to burn them anyway, I have a feeling in the bloodstream is enough for those that are biocompatible.

I love the magic systems in Scadrial. They're definitely Sanderson's best for my money. It's so flexible, and there's just so much more left to explore with it. And it's so clever, so rarely is there any time where you say 'well, why not do x with magic'? And when you do, it's usually just because someone hasn't thought of it yet, and then proceeds to do so (c.f. Vin with the horseshoes).

And yeah, theorising about killing gold compounders is all very well (decapitate them with something wide enough that their head is completely separated from their neck by the blade - Kell did it to one of the inquisitors, who have gold compounding powers), but getting into position is a bitch.

drat I love these books.
Couple points: Apparently you don't need to spend time charging up your abilities; the Lord Ruler spent time as an old man just because he was tired as hell of ruling the empire.

Inquisitors actually weren't compounders, they were just normal gold feruchemists. Well, a bit sub-normal, hemalurgic decay and all that. That's apparently why they spend so much time resting. Apparently some of them might have figured it out, but there's some unspecified details that make it more difficult than just 'eat this'.

Tunicate fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Oct 26, 2013

omnibobb
Dec 3, 2005
Title text'd
This is why I love Sanderson. We can sit here and have real defined discussions about these things.

Other things are like "No. Windu clearly has more midichlorians than Jacen." And I'm all like "gently caress you nerds"

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!

Tunicate posted:

Couple points: Apparently you don't need to spend time charging up your abilities; the Lord Ruler spent time as an old man just because he was tired as hell of ruling the empire.

Inquisitors actually weren't compounders, they were just normal gold feruchemists. Well, a bit sub-normal, hemalurgic decay and all that. That's apparently why they spend so much time resting. Apparently some of them might have figured it out, but there's some unspecified details that make it more difficult than just 'eat this'.

I'm fairly sure they were (or could have been) compunders - they had the ability both to feruchemise and to burn gold - or could have if they were given the latter ability. Maybe they weren't, I'm not sure it's easy to tell the difference between feruchemical gold healing and compound gold healing until one runs out and the other doesn't.

I presume you need to charge at least once though - but once you had, you could presumably fill one metalmind whilst burning another, for ever-increasing returns. Normal feruchemists and only go in one direction at a time, but I think compounders work differently.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice
They had to be given powers by taking them from feruchemists, so I think it's reasonable the Lord Ruler didn't allow full compounders to be created amongst the Inquisitors.

veekie
Dec 25, 2007

Dice of Chaos

api call girl posted:

Again, good luck with doing that to the Lord Ruler. And I wasn't really making the T-X comparison in jest, because with the forces needed to separate your head from your neck via guillotine/axe ... apparently you need to be able to pull the body parts strongly and quickly enough apart.

Much, much harder with a full Feruchemist-Mistborn I'd say. You have regular allomantic Pewter and Iron too, and both are at incredible strengths.

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!
Not to mention feruchemical pewter.

From the Alloy of Law appendix, probably the answer is aluminium weaponry.

veekie
Dec 25, 2007

Dice of Chaos
Aluminium weapons are going to have some trouble penetrating Pewter flared skin.

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!
Possibly - I'm not sure though. The way it's written, it does seem like aluminium just nulls magic, so it would probably cut normally.

Of course, the way to do it properly would be to use the pair of metals that does externally what aluminium does internally...

platero
Sep 11, 2001

spooky, but polite, a-hole

Pillbug

Thalamas posted:

I thought Steelheart's weakness was that the weapon needed to be passed through the body of another Epic. Dad shoots Deathpoint and it passes through and scratches Steelheart. Thought in the final fight someone would put a bullet/Prof would put a sword in Nightwielder and it would pass through and kill Steelheart or something. Boy, was I wrong.

Also, I enjoy Sanderson's sense of humor - even Shallan. Then again, I have a terrible sense of humor.

jneer posted:

I thought Shallan was obnoxious and unfunny in the worst way in the beginning, but then, I think that was the point. As the book progressed you can notice that she holds her tongue more and more in social situations and grows up in general.

It's not like Sanderson is incapable of writing genuinely witty dialogue - the Lightsong character in Warbreaker had some great one-liners.

Dad jokes best jokes.

The Puppy Bowl
Jan 31, 2013

A dog, in the house.

*woof*
I love dad jokes and bad puns but Sanderson's humor is easily the worst part of his writing. I think it has to do with the nature of a bad joke. A certain internal back and forth is required to fully expose the inadequacy of obviously bad humor and it is in the failure of a joke that the actual humor lies. When that interaction occurs on the page, worst when it is the mind of a single character, the subtle layer of acknowledgment of poor quality is stripped away. Almost like his characters genuinely believe the humor to be witty which just makes them insufferable.

Maybe Sanderson is just bad at bad jokes.

wallaka
Jun 8, 2010

Least it wasn't a fucking red shell

No, he's GOOD at bad jokes.

Luminaflare
Sep 23, 2010

No one man
should have all that
POWER BEYOND MEASURE


Superstring posted:

Aren't Eragon and it's sequels supposed to be kinda bad?

The first three are kind of okay but the last one is loving awful.

edit: And I missed an entire page of posts, go me.

Troll Bridgington
Dec 22, 2011

Keeping up foreign relations.
Looks like we're getting 2 more Wax and Wayne books. :woop:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/10/tor-acquires-two-more-mistborn-novels-from-brandon-sanderson

quote:

I expect the Stormlight Archive books to arrive far more regularly now that the Wheel of Time is done. However, one thing I’ve wanted from the beginning of the Mistborn series was to show the interactions of magic with technology and society through different eras of that world’s development. There is much more to explore with Waxillium Ladrian, his comrade Wayne, and their time period, so we’re going to stay with them for a couple more books. I think you’re going to like what’s coming.

Drunk Tomato
Apr 23, 2010

If God wanted us sober,
He'd knock the glass over.
i wonder if we are actually going to get two more mistborn trilogies, or if bransan will get tired of the universe by then

Xachariah
Jul 26, 2004

Drunk Tomato posted:

i wonder if we are actually going to get two more mistborn trilogies, or if bransan will get tired of the universe by then

He writes so many different series at once to prevent that. His idea of taking a break is to write a different book.

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Mortanis
Dec 28, 2005

It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight.
College Slice
I really enjoyed Alloy of Law. I really love Well of Ascension and Hero of Ages - have signed copies on my shelf even. However, they certainly suffer compared to Final Empire, and I hope the next two Wax and Wayne books don't have a similar drop off. Sanderson's really honed his art quite a bit since then, but I'm wondering what he'll bring to the table on the books. Mistborn was a bit of a natural progression, introducing a rigid magic system and exploring the depths of it and everything with Preservation and Ruin. Alloy of Law delves a lot more into the mechanics of other metals and compounding. I'm wondering what else there is to explore beyond "more story". Which, don't get me wrong, will be great. He just usually explores mechanics as well as story.

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