Grrl Power #917 - Tata karate (Patreon)

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To be honest, I'm not sure how that rebar got through Henchwench's leg, if Brüt's knee could take Maxima's .557 round. I will say though, Max wasn't using an armor piercing Tyrannosaur round. She knows she's not Archon's best shot, and she was aiming at the guy's knee, not his billboard of a chest. She didn't want to put a hole through everything between Times Square and the Statue of Liberty if she missed.

Yeah, so Henchwench can definitely use powers better than the original super sometimes. This mostly happens when she has access to multiple suites of powers, like Brüt has some pain resistance, which is why GhostWench doesn't seem bothered by MeatWench's shin-ka-bob, whereas Concretia could definitely feel people zapping her meat.

Although GhostWench doesn't have pain resistance... well, she has pain resistance to meat pain, but not ghost pain. Look, super powers are complicated.

I read a book I liked! True Hero (Champion is Playing Book #1) I'm going to break my own rule, and recommend a book that takes place largely in a video game. It bypasses my cynical resilience to the... uh, it's not a genre, really. The framing device. It's a book about people playing a game as a competition, not a book about people for whom the game is reality because the author was too lazy to come up with a better system for the characters to have magic abilities and stat screens.

The premise is a guy gets Isekaied into the relatively near future (this point seems largely irrelevant to the book other than putting the MC in a position where he's ignorant of just about everything) where all aptitude for employment is determined by everyone playing a multiplayer DOTA/AoE type game. (Age of Empires, not Area of Effect, you yoots.) The upper class of people literally go to school to learn the best strategies, and the main character, knowing almost nothing about how to play of course proceeds to kick everyone's ass up left and sideways, almost entirely by accident.

That by itself isn't such a unique idea, but the reason I decided to check the book out is that it switches POVs to his opponents after most major skirmishes, and they're all going out of their minds trying to figure him out and predict his next move, assuming he's some super-genius savant, and not a lucky idiot. And that is pretty funny to me. I've only read the first book, and I don't know if that would be sustainable through the next two books, but maybe books 2 and 3 do something new with the idea.

I'll also say that the people in the book who make the game must be super frustrated that no one before this guy figured out the millions of hidden systems in the game, like... this doesn't happen in the book, but for example, if you chop down a thousand trees (and why would the player when he can assign peasants to do it) then he gets the ability to move through forested areas without incurring any movement penalties or something like that. Everyone else just plays their version of critical path, and this guy does a bunch of crazy stuff and it all pays off in spades.