Two-Chapter Early-Access Discussion Thread

XD I Like Cube. Its obviously somewhat self aware. I'd love for it to be something that follows him from now on (its proven that he gets to "keep" any power he "saves" with, right?") Cube's the kind of Companion that he really needs.

Osamaru Ta

Wow, the Cube might be his most useful power to date. Though the delay in giving it instructions could prove debilitating in a fight. Hopefully it comes with auto-defense. Otherwise, nice to have a chapter without everything going wrong for once. Yet I still curse you for ending it right before we finally got some answers......

DiabolicalGenius

Well that was quite a twist. I never expected Untold to not only be a traitor, but to possibly also be Starsealer too? At least, that's what I'm getting reading between the lines. I hope she's lying about everyone who might help him being dead already. Or that Alana somehow managed to fool them and escape. Otherwise I'm going to have to assume you've been writing a depression-fic all along which is probably going to end with Loren breaking down, the bad guys winning and humanity being wiped out. And I'm not sure if I can take that.

DiabolicalGenius

I will never forgive you for that cliffhanger. Plus not being able to remember whose costume is blue with a white oval mask is going to drive me nuts.

DiabolicalGenius

Alicia looks like she got screwed over by the world even worse than Mara. We also got a better picture of Morgan's prior project before Epilogue. The prison is also a bit more troublesome than expected too. I was thinking it was a facility, but instead it seems like just a room left on the ocean floor. Lack of an airlock is a bit odd too. Almost as if the whole thing was originally on the surface and relocated. Which might be possible. Morgan has already shown that she has more cards to play than the known members of the group. Fortunately if he can master the use of the current power well enough, it might be able to get them out.

DiabolicalGenius

Well, this chapter revealed a fair bit. It also addressed what seemed like a big plothole until now, that being that Tiamat had no reason to let him wake up at all, let alone in one piece. There's a whole lot you can do to someone to make them useless without killing them after all. Putting him into a coma is one, but would risk someone finding and awakening him. Much easier just to lobotomise him really. Removing his limbs just to be sure. Even if you need to keep him alive, he'd be neutralised for good. Not doing that makes no sense unless there's a specific reason why. And yeah, Tiamat is seeming like the worst sociopath monster who ever lived right now, isn't she?

DiabolicalGenius

I started to write a reply but it ended up way too long, so I'm going to copy past it onto the discord to see if I can pull some more responses from everyone on it. I'll leave it here anyway, so feel free to reply either here, or over on discord. Thanks for the insightful feedback! It’s a common complaint that so many of the characters that Loren interacts with are female, it’s something that I can understand, but it’s also something that most often comes from a very strange place. I can understand if you’re pointing this out because you dislike the underrepresentation of male characters in Reroll and want more to be present so that Loren can grow more in that area. I’m going to hijack your comment to highlight a couple of strange misconceptions and point a spotlight on the less charitable side of this complaint, and the one most readers seem to be coming at this from. This isn’t really in response to your comment, as it deals with a tangential subject at best. I write a lot of women characters in Reroll—when I first started writing a year or so ago (A bit longer than that? I’m terrible with time, truly.) I was coming into this hot, eager, and with little experience in writing, but a lot of experience in reading. One of the first things I noticed was how hollow the women characters I wrote were at times(The men were as well at times). I know this comes from having a wealth of personal experience to draw from when filling out the male characters—an experience I lack when it comes to writing women. I’ve also found that I really enjoy writing woman characters, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to write more of them in an attempt to gain experience and become better at it. I absolutely believe I’ve done that, and I’m certainly better now than I was when I started. I’m not great at it by any means, but I am better, and I will continue to get better because that’s one of my goals. I understand it can come off as lopsided, but I don’t think there is anything objectively wrong with having a disparity in male to female characters. I enjoy writing men and I enjoy writing women. Here’s the more uncharitable part, and it’s not pointed at any specific reader, more to a swathe of readers on several platforms—royal road in particular, and it’s a result of the common story tropes on the website. Reroll isn’t a harem story, despite what a large portion of the readership seems to assume. Sexual interactions between Loren and the female characters have come up very, very infrequently and the plot doesn’t revolve around sex in any way. Sex is something that adults do, and flirting is something that appears in the story because it’s something that people do. Adults flirting does not a harem make—The time-loop compounds this issue, and it becomes a very unique situation in regards to relationship building. Loren hasn’t really developed a monogamous relationship with anyone, neither a polygamous one; there simply isn’t enough time for something like that to develop. The vast majority of Reroll has occurred over a two-three day period, with some outliers. The readers retain the memories of the previous loops; they pile all those interactions up into a single cohesive mess—and suddenly Loren’s a harem protagonist in a romantic relationship with 30 different characters. Characters who he’s spent a couple of days with on the high end, and more accurately 5-6 hours in most cases over the course of three days. I believe there is about three or four fade to black sentences in the 220K+ words so far that which might indicate a sexual encounter, and which have deliberately been made ambiguous. It makes me scratch my head sometimes, really.

I have to say that there needs to be at least one or more male secondary characters on Loren's side soon. Fracture was a good start, but you didn't develop Loren's interactions with him enough to relieve the slowly growing exasperation of every character that Loren spends any time positively interacting with being female. I can tell you that I was annoyed when the person that Loren saved was another girl when it was the perfect opportunity to introduce a guy that Loren could potentially interact with over several loops. This is the one main flaw that I can identify with your story, but it is gradually growing into a problem from what I have seen from reviewers on RoyalRoadl and the like. Other than that, I find this turn of events extremely interesting, especially the knowledge that Loren has to prevent himself from being mentally worn down by Eclipse and the extremely varied powers that you equip Loren with throughout his loops.

Dryxal

On Reroll, I may have read into the Tiamat interlude too much, but it seemed like their plan to contain Loren involved limiting his powertypes by what he could escape the box with, then forcing him back into the box by killing him / creating a world where he is forced to reset, until he went insane. E.G. Nuclear holocost, kill everyone important to him. I don't think it's as simple as just getting out of the box. It could, possibly, be as simple as playing catatonic for a day and being taken out on life support. But that would be hard to pull off. The one plot hole here is, they could have kept Loren on life support from day 1, and don't really seem to have a reason not to beyond the plot convenience of creating an opportunity for Loren to escape.

M

I can see it being as easy as getting a Teleport power, but the biggest benefit for the enemy is that he needs a specific type of power to escape, and if he has to be SUPER careful to not get caught again for a whole week. Essentially it's a way to make sure that all he has is a "Mover" power, and basically keeps him out of action for a full week, unless he wants to risk restarting the week or waking up next week in the box again. EDIT: Even if he wakes up next week in the box again, he would still have the power he used to escape in the first place, so it would essentially lock him into that power and make it where he can't risk dying at all.

The-Anti-Akuma

It's nice to see that escaping is actually a challenge. Though I can't see it being as easy as just getting a teleport power. They knew he had a chance of getting almost any kind of power, so it's hard to believe they didn't think of it. Seems like it might be even more complicated than it looks.

DiabolicalGenius