Perfecting Your Party

[quote=”michellebasey, post:194, topic:27179”] Would you send an Anime character off to fight a war all by themself?

Would you consider that character any lesser of a being for amassing an army? [/quote]

@michellebasey insists on stealing my thunder IN MY OWN DAILIES,

but I’m not going to let her :upside_down_face:

Day 51: Perfecting Your Party

Second Post for Perfecting Your Protagonist

What is a Party?

A party is a group of adventurers [definition pending] who join together for the explicit purpose of tackling a grand quest together. Here are some examples of fabulous parties in anime:

Sword Art Online

Log Horizon

BOFURI (I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense)

Black Clover

A couple of these are more like guilds but I’ll touch on those in a future daily…

Why Parties?

Because parties are fun! :potable_water:

On a more serious note, I’ve come across some interesting videos as of late… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YarVEcwa8&list=PLMBYy3lWO3DmG-ZDP1tnDwMFecYHc8Zea&index=33

To summarize the video, Life Changing Finances is a series where Tai Zen releases videos on how to gain and maintain wealth, but interestingly enough it’s almost never about physical money. It’s about our relationship with wealth, both physical and spiritual. Success is a mentality, and one of the biggest components is the people we most frequently interact with. I actually had the opportunity to speak with Tai and it just humbled me when I asked “Why Make These Videos at All?”

I wish this was stuff someone told me when I was growing up.

This video specifically is a topic Tai addresses quite frequently: who are the people around you, and why?

You are the average of your five closest friends.

Are those “friends” continual pushing you to get to the next level, or always dragging you down to their mediocre level?

Then yesterday, I had a chance to attend one of the most powerful zoom meetings I ever had the opportunity to drop into. @RosarioCoaching led an inspirational talk about how to get to your next level, and surprise surprise, spoke about your personal network in an eerily similar fashion to Tai Zen.

Hmm, I guess all successful people think the same.

Composing Your Party

Here are some slides I hastily snagged from Rosario’s talk:

Who Should Be in Your Party?

Why Should They Be In Your Party?

If They Aren’t In Your Party, How Will You Get Them Into It?

That pie chart in the last image reminded me of something…

Boost Your Social Link

How effective your party members are is directly correlated to how strong your bond is with them (“My Friends Are My Strength!“, the ever-favorite anime trope). My biggest problem is that in our ever-expanding world, we have too many options for who can be our party members. What if there was a way you could measure how close you are with someone, and a mental note as to why they are important or non-important to your growth?

This is a neat little game mechanic from the game Persona 4 which tracks that very notion. There are moments in the game where you quite literally cannot proceed if you are not at sufficient Social Link (Bond Level) with certain characters. Heh. A bit too literal with its intended theme.

Today’s Conclusion

I threw a LOT of info in such a brief post (most of these talks and youtube videos are several hours long for a reason), but I’ll leave you all with some questions you can ponder on.

Are the people you hang out with instrumental to your growth as a creative? If so, how strong are your bonds? How can you improve them? If not, will you make the effort to reduce your time spent with them?

A great party is composed of people each specialized in different areas, but always committed to improving themselves and their fellow party members so they all overcome the grand quest together.

Who’s in your party?

@homeroom11 @dragon @wildcat @sabweld @eliturner @laurasanto @Chen @athenakatsaros @lansoffer

Side note: I would love to make a VR or AR app where I keep track of all of my friends, see who I feel are important to me, and make a mental note on the last time I touched based with them. Gee, I sure hope my app doesn’t get a data breach and expose that I REALLY hated Jared. That guy sucks, he needs to leave me alone.