The Iron Rule of RPGs 1
Looking carefully through Han Se-ah's nicknames, you'll find one about some 18-star something-or-other involving companion NPCs—enough to paint her as a chronic troll. Looking back at her streams, though, she doesn't live with that energy permanently switched on. If she'd kept needling her viewers nonstop, she probably never would have grown this big in the first place.
She's still the only person in the world to pull a natural 6-star companion, and that alone put her at the top of the clear rankings—but day to day, she's basically a punching bag with satisfying hit feedback. The only time she pulls out her ultimate move, "Then pull one yourself," and starts trolling is when the chat has boiled over into complete chaos.
In short, it's a way of redirecting the firepower somewhere else to let off steam. She takes the hits with solid feedback when she should, then flips the flow with a troll counterattack the moment things get excessive.
"Whoa there—'Without Roland this girl would've been nothing but a boob streamer'—buddy, you look like you need some coolant for that brain. And without Roland, would I have been selling my boobs? I've got these, you know."
Even when she's being that annoying, the moment some guy starts going too far and kills the vibe, she ghost-reads it and vents the steam somewhere else again—her streaming instincts really are something else. After a few rounds of trolling, she spun the camera toward Grace like a psychic.
…In this case, is it just that a man's instincts are that simple?
"So we just go to the Adventurer Guild and post a quest?"
"Right. Just tell Alice that we've already worked things out with the Magic Tower."
"And the quest fee… set it at 60 gold so it comes out to exactly 100 gold per head?"
After negotiating 40 gold for storing one ogre, we left the Magic Tower and headed for the guild. Grace stretched out of habit, working the kinks from her body, and Irene stuck right to her side, asking if her shoulders hurt and kneading them with holy power.
Unfortunately, Katie—with her sleek, slender frame—could neither understand nor experience shoulder stiffness. And with Han Se-ah zooming in on it so blatantly, even the viewers who'd been seething with rage just moments ago united East and West in a chorus of hehe… ahh… wearing those vacant, drooling smiles.
No man alive hates a pretty woman with a good figure, and even fewer hate watching two pretty, well-figured women gently intertwine.
"A hundred gold coins… that's a huge sum, and yet we can just casually put it up…"
"Ten of them makes it a thousand, not a hundred. Man, when I first became an adventurer I used to fight over a few copper coins from selling herbs."
"Beginning adventurers can't help it."
"You know about that too, Irene?"
"Of course. I started the same way the first time I went into the Tower."
"Ah… right. You did go into the Tower with other adventurers before."
Stories of a fight in some temporary adventurer party before she met me, the struggles of beginner adventurers, the people who come to the temple… we were talking about all kinds of life experiences, but what the camera was showing was a pair of large, soft masses bouncing gently up and down.
Whether it was a scheme to give the viewers dementia or not, after a few minutes of blatantly close-upping just the cleavage, the chat started degrading from full sentences into single words. Watching them devolve into primates who only knew three words—holy fuck, damn boobs, ooooh—was pretty hilarious.
Still, Han Se-ah quietly swung the camera away, as if she had no intention of running a boob stream forever. The camera drone drifted naturally over my head and started framing the Adventurer Guild's door, like she was only going to show that until we arrived from the Magic Tower.
Boob stream next, first-person adventurer POV?
"Huh, what? You're already back down?"
"…Why are you down here?"
Opening the familiar wooden door revealed a spacious hall. With intermediate and advanced adventurers all funneled off to the guild branches inside the Tower, the city's guild—left with only beginners who couldn't handle anything above orcs—was utterly deserted.
And right there, occupying one of the tables in that empty guild, sprawled out and crunching on a long cookie, Alice immediately caught my eye.
So she came back down in the meantime.
"I figured you'd still be up on the top floor hunting boss monsters, but you're already down. You didn't bring me any annoying work, did you?"
"You should do some work. I thought you'd gone off toward the underground city or the Harpy Kingdom, but here you are already."
"The knight orders started moving and people from the Empire showed up, so I bolted. Getting caught once is whatever—I'm not getting caught twice."
Apparently, after the hell she'd gone through when the kingdom's knight order set up in the underground city, the news that an apprentice commander from the Empire was coming to the grasslands had her running for the hills.
Alice waved us over with a lazy flap of her hand, and our party piled around the table. The beginner adventurers who'd been debating whether to hunt goblins or gather herbs turned their sparkling eyes our way.
After all, Alice was a high-ranking official of the Adventurer Guild—the guild's mascot and face, someone a country-bumpkin adventurer fresh off the farm wouldn't dare approach. And now adventurers even prettier than Alice had come swarming in, flaunting gleaming equipment and talking about the Tower's top floors. Of course they were going to draw attention.
We set a price at the Magic Tower that ground graduate students into paste, and at the Adventurer Guild we settled on the awkward figure of 60 gold. Sixty gold per ogre sounds enormous, but factor in the hassle of capturing them alive and hauling them all the way to the Magic Tower, and it starts to feel cheap again.
But when a hero certified by the Goddess herself says she's going to do something big, is anyone going to openly complain? Anyone looking to network would gladly take the quest.
A named monster to pit against a boss in mutual destruction—alive, a Magic Tower test subject; dead, a Special Enhancement Stone—at 100 gold a head. A hundred gold sounds staggering, but once you pile on all those conditions like this, you start thinking, "Huh, is that actually cheap…?"
"You know, our adventures really are something special. The first big money we spend isn't on gear—it's on capturing ogres."
"To be precise, there's also Hanna's alchemy bombs."
And this was something an adventurer ought to do as a matter of course.
Adventurers aren't some ancient Celtic warriors painting themselves naked and proving their courage by going bare, calling gear something only cowards use. Spending money for safety and convenience is just common sense, isn't it?
When it comes to what makes RPGs fun, plenty of answers could come up.
The thrill of a massive nuke that blows through the damage meter, a super-AoE that wipes an entire map, the satisfaction of taking down a high-level powerhouse you could never face alone through precise party play.
Others dig into the well-crafted story and the foreshadowing buried in quests. Depending on the game, some have the unique taste of exploring beautiful maps, lighting up the fog of war, or grinding away at repetitive play.
But the fun of RPGs as I see it—maybe not the absolute best, but something you can never leave out—
"By the way, Roland, are you really okay with this?"
"Of course I am. The better your gear gets, the easier my life becomes."
—is pure money-flexing.
Crushing the other side one-sidedly with superior gear, better characters, heavily awakened cards, high-star high-awakening units… whatever it takes to hold a pure stats advantage.
And the easiest, fastest way to seize that "stats advantage" in an RPG is money-flexing. Whether that money is real-world cash or game currency scraped together through grinding—either way, it's about taking good gear and stomping the opposition flat.
I believe that's the essential fun of an RPG. That's why you get people who whale at launch on some mobile game, enjoy the ranker life for a brief month-long taste, then quit because they don't want to spend any more.
"Wait, but none of our party members have spent any money, have they? So aside from the gold I pulled out for making bombs, it's all still sitting there? …Why don't I know? Because I just stacked it away in a corner of the inventory, that's why. Honestly, pulling out a gold pouch and counting coins in front of you guys would feel like flexing, wouldn't it?"
So our party, having already spent a full thousand gold, resolved to spend even more.
Naturally, through the personal funds I'd been holding onto all this time.
I can't slap Special Enhancement Stones on quest-reward green trash gear, for fuck's sake.
Because I, too, had been a player who enjoyed RPGs.