The Gaming Den

Judging__Eagle wrote:Still, the science is wrong. You can't have a visible elemental made out of stuff that isn't visible, and you can't make it "dark".

Well, you can, but you can't see it.

The ironic part is, given that there's magic and elementals and mime walls, he could have just called them "darkwalkers," or "shadow elementals," or some crap like that. Much less confusing and it achieves what he was going for.

Edit: I'm tempted to rewrite that sample text into something coherent, just to prove that I can.

I think this kid has a bad case of imagining scenes he thinks would be cool in a movie, then writing them down. That's my immediate reaction to crap like they were in the dark, and then using hand signals--in a movie scene in the dark, you can of course still see everything relevant. Also, his assumption that the actions he describes build tension or keep the reader interested (the expert infiltrators reporting that they cannot count on their luck to hold out). In text, there are no dramatic John Williams musical cues eliciting pavlovian responses. Furthermore, lots of badass energy fighting which would look really cool as CG effects, but don't look so cool as lines of words on a page.

The card playing scene seems to me like maybe in a first draft he had a M:tG tournament report, then he showed it to someone who is not into M:tG tournament reports and they said it was boring and long, so he just summarized it, really poorly.