[Episode] Perhaps sometimes piracy is a right thing?

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Karl Friedrich
+ In your first post, you establish Karl as your point-of-view. In such a case, it is important to narrate from your character's perspective.

Omniscient exposition is something we all fall victim to as writers. While it can be useful at times, you should consider whether it is necessary, or if you can't reveal these details from your character's viewpoint.

As an example for this particular scenario, you could have described the village in dialogue. Maybe the person who ferried Karl was from this village, and very talkative at that. You could've used them as a tool to provide meta-information about the village. At the same time, this would allow you to show a glimpse of Karl's personality by describing his reactions to this chatterbox. I did note Karl's "He wasn't lying, it really is small" comment. This was good because it indicated that the previous information you exposed about the village was all something Karl most likely heard from the sailor.

This same idea of using Karl as your anchor to describe things can apply to all of your writing. Binding your exposition to your character's perspective is an important tool in highlighting the fact that this is, in fact, Karl's story.

+ I assume you mean "birch" when you say "borch" - as in the tree.

+ The introduction of Karl's first conflict felt a bit too flat and generic. The typical thugs you used for marines felt like brutes you'd find in a children's story.

While I respect you going for more humble origins, I do think you could have added a bit more personality to the two marines to make the encounter more unique. I have faith you can do better than "You heard me. Which Marine school did you graduate? Bandit version of it?", even if you were intentionally going for a cheesy line.

Also, when you write "Clearly those simple words hit somewhat deep", you have already shown what effects Karl's words had by describing their reaction. You should not simply state that the words made a deep impact. It is redundant.

+  The introduction of the main baddie and what led up to that fight was, again, respectably humble, but far too generic and flat.

+ Mechanically speaking, you did exceptionally well with your first use of the combat system. No errors stood out besides the ones we'd already talked about (which I appreciated you fixing). Kudos!

+ It's pant/panted, not panth/panthed. Also, it's assault/assaulted, not assult/assulted. XD I highly recommend using something like Grammarly to type out your posts. It would help with some basic grammatical errors and typos like these!

+ I appreciated Karl's realisation of how far he went in this fight and the regret over it. It was a good character development moment.

+ I look forward to seeing why Karl seems interested in the Moosebella crime family!


Overall, I feel like this thread fell rather flat. As mentioned before, I can see that you might have been trying to go for a bit more of a humble beginning for Karl, but even so, the story barely had any plot, and I did not find any of the characters particularly interesting. The fight was especially tedious. While I realise that the combat system determines how long a fight drags out, you can still do plenty of character development and fun stuff within the fight itself, as demonstrated in the example quest I have linked before. Regardless, keep up the effort and strive for improvement in your writing, and I'm sure Karl's tale will transform for the better!

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Karl Friedrich
Difficulty Bonus: +25% (+1)
Quality Bonus: +50% (C)
NOTE: Since I had raised the rewards of the "grading pending" after first giving out your rewards, I have bumped up your quality bonus from +25% to +50% despite giving a C.

EXP: 123 1.4*[50 + (50%*50) + (25%*50)]
Berries: 6,737,500 1.4*[250k*11 + 50%(250k*11) + 25%(250k*11)]
Bounty: 8,000,000 | {For the attempted (or actual) murder of a Marine lieutenant, even if he was later found guilty for corruption.}

Old balance: 0
Updated balance: 6,737,500

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