Grrl Power #1146 – Pressured selection

I am pretty bad about picking skills in RPGs, but I blame this on games these days as much as myself. In most games, if you want to really maximize your damage output, you have to spend a zillion levels buying up these tiny incremental skills, and then luck out with a good unique drop that complements what you were working toward.I'm not suggesting that games should let you pick a few skills in your first 5 levels and then you just breeze your way through the game, but it does feel like leveling up is this really incremental experience and you rarely feel any oomph after spending a new skillpoint.Of course, a lot depends on the back end systems. There's a huge difference between:
Str: 40 TIMES 1.45% from a series of strength enhancing skills, PLUS 32 points of additional strength from gear
and
Str: 40 PLUS 32 points of additional strength from gear, TIMES 1.45% from a series of strength enhancing skills.Most systems use the first one, because doing it the other way means that stats can get out of control really fast, and then it becomes more difficult to balance the game between the casual players and the critical skilltree path sploitzers. I get it. It's just more fun for us minmaxers the other way.I think it'd be cool to read a LitRPG where the special gift the Isekai Goddess gives the MC is the ability to rearrange the order of operations for stat and skill calculations. MFer would be OP by level 10.Anyway, Sydney doesn't have these problems because her mysterious super powers have poor documentation. Also she can't ALT+TAB over to youtube and find some channel with 30 different optimized builds for the latest patch, so she's stuck just throwing darts at the board with a blindfold.

The new vote incentive will be up with the Monday comic. I should probably admit that I don't really get a lot of work done on bonus pics during the week. But yes, it is Sydney centric. (But not airplane bathroom selfies.)

The March Vote Incentive is up! The thumbnail is weird because the picture doesn't have anyone's face in it. It's an odd incentive, admittedly. Trying something new. But hopefully you all still enjoy it.

Variant outfits and lack thereof over at Patreon, as well as the semi-usual bonus incentive related comic.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.