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All Level, No Experience (Worm/Pathfinder Amnesia Quest)

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Wolfy said:
She didn't have bad experience because she was "forcefully recruited", she had bad experience because she was emotionally tormented and all people she liked were used as hostages against her because Coil is evil slime.

On top of that we are not even "forcibly recruiting" her, we are making her an offer she can in fact refuse.

Well then good thing she is adept at getting to know things, no?
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These things tend to be associated yeah? Being the minion of an ambitious mastermind has been a very bad experience for her.

And well, her power is deduction not omniscience. We have been talking for 20 seconds. She simply doesn't have enough data to determine what sort of boss we will be like in the long term, in part because we ourselves don't know how we plan to manage things in the long term.

She has had a lot more time to suss out information about Coil.

Ultimately more forceful tactics are unnecessary. If she thinks she is leading us into it I absolutely expect she will throw us at Coil. But if offered as part of a recruitment offer it takes a much more sinister tone. "Oh your current job? You don't need to worry about that anymore."
On the other hand staying enigmatic acts as protection for both us and her. Sure we say it is an offer she can refuse, but only up to a point. If she learns too much about us that may rapidly change.

So if a softer approach can produce same or better results, with less risks of generating resentment, why not go for it? That's not rhetorical by the way. What advantage do we get by going for the more aggressive approach?

Sckribe said:
Why not both?.jpg here. I'd imagine it was all around a deeply unpleasant time from the get go.

Also, in general, you guys can allow time to pass, y'all do know that the last Endbringer attack has happened recently enough ago that, based on their usual schedule, the next one isn't due for a little while. That and, RL it has been a bit of time since the quest started,but in terms of in In-world time, it's about noon-ish on January First, when y'all showed up at around 1 AM-ish December 31st. It has yet to be a full 48 hours/2 Days since y'all even showed up on Earth Bet, you guys are so far operating at an insane pace.
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Competence yay! Wanna bet we can take over a city before the week is over? Or at least become a billionaire?
 
Short term, it's possible that this alienates Lisa by a bit, but I think it'll work out in the long-term, given how big a carrot we have.
 
Sckribe said:
Pretty much everything else in this post is either pretty insightful or something I can't give away without it being impossible knowledge, but here's the thing, being good at deception, particularly in PF or from PF, don't by default rely on your smarts. You could be a savant, and absolutely terrible at lying. Heck, for your level, you guys are surprisingly meh at Bluff, to not even get into the unintended comedy of farce that is seeing your Spellcraft and Sense Motive side by side.
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Sckribe said:
Also, here's one last thing- smarts and knowledge, especially once you get to certain things, can be very field dependent. Now, for magic, Tech, and [Unknown]? You were able to determine the metals in the operating chips of a smartphone and could successfully recreate the hardware manually by knocking on it. Once. You know your shit in those fields. In other fields, particularly when it comes to People Smarts?

Yeah, I'll just mention that that "Rare moment of interpersonal insight"? Nat 20.

It took a Natural 20 for Iluontar to even consciously realize that Tattletale was trying to rile him up.
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I mostly meant what it looked like for Tattletale herself when her entire planned game fell apart in a matter of seconds. Perhaps Iluontar was just lucky, but as far as they both know, Iluontar completely outclassed Tattletale in the duel of wits with amazing ease, leaving her seriously scared.

Wolfy said:
Which boils down to "TT will irrationally act in ways that support my arguments because, uh, because she just will ok?". We clearly see her mo in canon, and she would absolutely jump at opportunity to get out of literal day to day mental torture. The only reason for her to not immediately try to work with us is ... well there is actually no real reason because she lucked into being able to provide info that is of extreme importance to us while we are willing to pay her for it. Hell we can ress her brother even, if she proves to be useful enough.
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I came to a conclusion by studying Tattletale's character and background, taking into account her current state of mind, and also taking into account that she does not know that much about her interlocutor and that she is not a robot who automatically makes the best decision for her in the long term based on data it may not even have. Is it that strange?

Wolfy said:
Ah yeah, Tattletale, the famous cape who hates danger and enemies and goes out of her way to stay out of the spotlight. Man remember that time when she didn't mouth off to Jack Slash? Good times, good times.
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I am completely sure that she would prefer not to do this, and if we offered it to her right now, she would absolutely refuse.

Wolfy said:
Hell we can ress her brother even, if she proves to be useful enough.
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Actually, whether we can do it or not is a good question. Resurrection in DnD occurs due to the calling of the soul from the place where it arrives after death, most often the domain of a certain deity, but whether there is such a dimension in Earth Bet is a good question. Souls, for example, can be reborn almost immediately, making resurrection impossible. I've seen different interpretations of how resurrection works on worlds without the overt presence of gods, and we can't know for sure until we test.

Wolfy said:
We don't even require servitude, a purely transactional relationship is perfectly fine because we have absurd amount of value and TT is easiest way to translate it into information we actually need.
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In this case, we do not need to recruit her, simply trading information would be enough. Why put pressure on Tattletale if we don't even gain anything from it? Iluontar doesn't even have a suitable base for people to live in right now.

BurnBright said:
Short term, it's possible that this alienates Lisa by a bit, but I think it'll work out in the long-term, given how big a carrot we have.
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Or we can do it gradually, without risking anything, and get the same or even more.
 
Eternal_0bserver said:
I mostly meant what it looked like for Tattletale herself when her entire planned game fell apart in a matter of seconds.
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Ahh, yeah now I see. Right, in that case, yeah you're pretty much just correct. Solid.

Also, funny enough,
Eternal_0bserver said:
Resurrection in DnD occurs due to the calling of the soul from the place where it arrives after death, most often the domain of a certain deity, but whether there is such a dimension in Earth Bet is a good question. Souls, for example, can be reborn almost immediately, making resurrection impossible. I've seen different interpretations of how resurrection works on worlds without the overt presence of gods, and we can't know for sure until we test.
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This has kind of already come up, in how in the memory of your greatest regret it only took the span of a single fight for Iluchtewhar's soul to be judged and past the point of resurrection in your past world (practically fast-tracked), and while Earth Bet/Wormverse has differing mechanics, there is a mild-moderate shot they might come up with Iluontar. The realy funny thing to me is the deal with that would have ended up being a Major, immensely important thing for the other character, like full on Major Memory 'Why are you here' level stuff.

Eternal_0bserver said:
Or we can do it gradually, without risking anything, and get the same or even more.
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Pretty much most likely, yeah. Y'all are capable of heading off a fair chunk of major threats, and the most obvious timer in the Worm setting is from Jack setting off Scion very early due to shard shenanigans, and Iluontar is already contemplating ganking the Nine for some starting cash and reputation (then again he's also contemplated straight up actively hunting the Endbringers, so take that as you will).

Patience and planning do fit a high level wizard's MO, I mean, the man not only carries around a Graviton Reactor, but even has gone so far as to proof the contents of his portable hole for being opened in any gravitational orientation. Consider the amount of resources and time that mus have gone into all of the contents of your belongings, even just amongst what you've identified. Add on being an elemental and other details? Yeah, pre-amnesia Iluontar had a downright absurdist patience.

Actually, given the time frame I've dropped y'all in on, I'm surprised nobody's particularly concerned about the actual thing you'd need to more immediately worry about, and I'm not referring to the thing with the room either.
 
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Sckribe said:
Actually, given the time frame I've dropped y'all in on, I'm surprised nobody's particularly concerned about the actual thing you'd need to more immediately worry about, and I'm not referring to the thing with the room either.
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I'm assuming you mean Taylor triggering, and for that I don't see any reason to worry about it beyond maybe trying to pick her up soon after her trigger. It's metagaming, but if we want to subvert the Shard network, having access to QA and whatever access codes she retained that allowed her to control other shards while part of Khepri would be helpful. So I suppose we might want to be there to notice her trigger? As well as noticing a trigger potentially being helpful for understanding shards in general.
 
Sckribe said:
Actually, given the time frame I've dropped y'all in on, I'm surprised nobody's particularly concerned about the actual thing you'd need to more immediately worry about, and I'm not referring to the thing with the room either.
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Its not like there is any real way we can stop that, not unless we decided to go on a rampage or something.

Also it feels a bit cheep to use meta knowledge to prevent that.
 
Sckribe said:
Why not both?.jpg here. I'd imagine it was all around a deeply unpleasant time from the get go.

Also, in general, you guys can allow time to pass, y'all do know that the last Endbringer attack has happened recently enough ago that, based on their usual schedule, the next one isn't due for a little while. That and, RL it has been a bit of time since the quest started,but in terms of in In-world time, it's about noon-ish on January First, when y'all showed up at around 1 AM-ish December 31st. It has yet to be a full 48 hours/2 Days since y'all even showed up on Earth Bet, you guys are so far operating at an insane pace.
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There's levels to this. For me the pace could be faster and our problem solving leaves a decent amount to be desired. I would aim for something like "obtain infinite Wishes within ten days" as overall goal, which is very doable given the parameters. However I am vastly more aggressive than most SV questers, so I am trying to bring my need for speed down to par.

Overall I am pretty happy with how the things are and especially with my performance thus far, though. We have learned our spells, opened our spellbook and met TT in good context in just two days, which are all the things I desired and tried to facilitate. The only thing missing from what I would consider a great start for my standards is getting Wish online. Given that I would use it to awaken the robot anyway, that is also somewhat fulfilled since we have way to do that now.
Eternal_0bserver said:
Actually, whether we can do it or not is a good question. Resurrection in DnD occurs due to the calling of the soul from the place where it arrives after death, most often the domain of a certain deity, but whether there is such a dimension in Earth Bet is a good question. Souls, for example, can be reborn almost immediately, making resurrection impossible. I've seen different interpretations of how resurrection works on worlds without the overt presence of gods, and we can't know for sure until we test.
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Lack of soul would make resurrection even easier, as just repairing the body perfectly would resurrect a person. Wish explicitly can do this by the way. Now, lack of soul is something I already contemplated for number of reasons, most notable being that our lack of memory might be due to our soul struggling in hostile metaphysics. However that is not terribly important overall - there are some interesting interactions that check for souls, but that's for later. If we really wanted to check we can just use one of our spells that specifically interact with souls.
Sckribe said:
Actually, given the time frame I've dropped y'all in on, I'm surprised nobody's particularly concerned about the actual thing you'd need to more immediately worry about, and I'm not referring to the thing with the room either.
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I am in fact worried that we might count as a bug for Taylor's power, or that she could trigger in otherwise unpleasant way. But we will cross that bridge once we get there. If I had it my way we would be out of BB getting diamonds and palaces in next two days, but I suspect we will have to remain here a touch longer.
 
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Our sense motive is kind of comically low. We should work on that if we can. If we want to rule the world we will have to be able to manage people.


I wonder, do we have the full +5 to every stat from Wish? At 2.5 mill per wish, that would be 12.5 million. Which is an impossible expense for a normal person, is almost trivial for a really rich person or corporation.
Considering we didn't have any diamonds on us when we arrived (But then why did we have wish prepared?) we can estimate we probably weren't rolling in diamonds before we got here.

...Hmm, what if we did have diamonds on us when we arrived, but they are in some sort of hidden compartment or something? It would make more sense then having wish prepared without diamonds. We should look back through our stuff and figure out where we would put hidden compartments. Maybe our Haversack has extra spaces that don't show up unless you know the trick?

In fact is seems odd to me that we would have troubles with storage space too. Having storage we don't know how to access would explain that.
 
Sckribe said:
Huh. I wouldn't have guessed this general response. Honestly, a bit of egg/shame on me for that. Alright, yeah, solid on y'all.
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I mean being prepared for and expecting blatant meta gaming. Especially when playing with a bunch of randoms. Strikes me as wise.

If you would like us to do something to help Taylor out let us know though.

It is a cooperative game. Between gm and player. And I for one would be glad to do so.

JayTar said:
Our sense motive is kind of comically low. We should work on that if we can. If we want to rule the world we will have to be able to manage people.
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You mean permanent detect thoughts?
 
Wolfy said:
as just repairing the body perfectly would resurrect a person
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Uh, nope? I mean, that's just flatly incorrect. Repairing a body does not resurrect a person, like at all. I even went and checked, and there's like, explicitly called out in the text for the Rebirthing Chamber Technological Artifact "Attempts to rebirth a creature without a soul invariably fail, as do attempts to rebirth a creature from partial remains while the creature is still alive. A body is created and draws breath, but lacks any intellect and dies 2d6 hours after the process completed."

So like, nope. Once again, I appreciate and love the enthusiasm, just, again, careful about the assumptions you're making, because any actions operating under what turns out to have been a false assumption? Those risk consequences.

As for the rest, fair enough on the aggression, everyone has a different playstyle.

zxzx24 said:
If you would like us to do something to help Taylor out let us know though.

It is a cooperative game. Between gm and player. And I for one would be glad to do so.
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Oh no, I'm not trying to push y'all to a specific direction or want y'all to do it specifically, it was just, well,
zxzx24 said:
I mean being prepared for and expecting blatant meta gaming. Especially when playing with a bunch of randoms. Strikes me as wise.
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Yeah, that. I've had the line "... by some strange and odd intuition, perhaps an extra sense turned towards an unknown fate, etc..." in my back pocket for a little while.
 
Sckribe said:
Uh, nope? I mean, that's just flatly incorrect. Repairing a body does not resurrect a person, like at all. I even went and checked, and there's like, explicitly called out in the text for the Rebirthing Chamber Technological Artifact "Attempts to rebirth a creature without a soul invariably fail, as do attempts to rebirth a creature from partial remains while the creature is still alive. A body is created and draws breath, but lacks any intellect and dies 2d6 hours after the process completed."

So like, nope. Once again, I appreciate and love the enthusiasm, just, again, careful about the assumptions you're making, because any actions operating under what turns out to have been a false assumption? Those risk consequences.

As for the rest, fair enough on the aggression, everyone has a different playstyle.
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I think the idea is that if souls flat out don't exist in Worm, then it'd be enough.

Sckribe said:
Yeah, that. I've had the line "... by some strange and odd intuition, perhaps an extra sense turned towards an unknown fate, etc..." in my back pocket for a little while.
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I mean, honestly, I do want to metagame in the sense that I'd care more about recruiting Taylor as a minion than a lot of other canon characters, even if her power is useful but not god-tier or anything. But I'd rather make the story as believable as possible, first and foremost.

Anyways, heading to save her or whatever strikes me as likely to avert her trigger.
 
Wolfy said:
Lack of soul would make resurrection even easier, as just repairing the body perfectly would resurrect a person. Wish explicitly can do this by the way. Now, lack of soul is something I already contemplated for number of reasons, most notable being that our lack of memory might be due to our soul struggling in hostile metaphysics. However that is not terribly important overall - there are some interesting interactions that check for souls, but that's for later. If we really wanted to check we can just use one of our spells that specifically interact with souls.
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I question the complete lack of souls, as that would really make all interactions with souls unavailable, and that's no fun. But for example, I saw how one QM ruled that souls remain in the world for half an hour after the death of the body, after which they go for rebirth. Of course, the main reason was to make death a meaningful event, and not trivialize it with the ability to undo it at any time. Well, and also prevents the resurrection of a huge number of characters like the Hero. A game with unlimited resurrection tends to get out of control quickly, but on the other hand, QM might be ok with that.
 
Sckribe said:
Uh, nope? I mean, that's just flatly incorrect. Repairing a body does not resurrect a person, like at all. I even went and checked, and there's like, explicitly called out in the text for the Rebirthing Chamber Technological Artifact "Attempts to rebirth a creature without a soul invariably fail, as do attempts to rebirth a creature from partial remains while the creature is still alive. A body is created and draws breath, but lacks any intellect and dies 2d6 hours after the process completed."

So like, nope. Once again, I appreciate and love the enthusiasm, just, again, careful about the assumptions you're making, because any actions operating under what turns out to have been a false assumption? Those risk consequences.
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Repairing a body does resurrect a person. In Worm. In most settings, including PF, a soul is vital for making your flesh actually living and not a empty doll, but worm works on principle that body is all you need. There was an entire arc about clones in fact. You can fiat it that for some reason it works differently for our magic specifically and that we can't replicate what Bonesaw did via Wish, but that's another thing.

If it wasn't obvious, I am never afraid of consequences. You just deal with those.
Eternal_0bserver said:
I question the complete lack of souls, as that would really make all interactions with souls unavailable, and that's no fun. But for example, I saw how one QM ruled that souls remain in the world for half an hour after the death of the body, after which they go for rebirth. Of course, the main reason was to make death a meaningful event, and not trivialize it with the ability to undo it at any time. Well, and also prevents the resurrection of a huge number of characters like the Hero. A game with unlimited resurrection tends to get out of control quickly, but on the other hand, QM might be ok with that.
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Sure, I have no issues with ress being forbidden. I strive for ultimate power enough that I am already sick of whole "and then everyone was resurrected happily ever after" endings.
 
Basically, there is no guarantee that the clone was the same person with the same soul as the original. They may start at the same point because of memories but then drift apart. But yes, this is an eternal stumbling point when combining worlds where souls definitely exist and those where they most likely do not. I'm curious what explanation the author will choose.
 
Eternal_0bserver said:
A game with unlimited resurrection tends to get out of control quickly, but on the other hand, QM might be ok with that.
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I most assuredly am. Especially since that opens up it's own interesting can of worms as such (pun unintended). That and, I pretty much always end up running my actual D&D games as "Right, here's your characters, here's a brief intro quest to get the party together, and with that done, welcome to the entirety of the world. Let's see what you do with it."

Because I find it incredibly interesting how you can start with the same core, overall ideas, and with small changes end up with wildly differing outcomes. Why is Jeff Goldblum in my house all of a sudden?

Like, you have the somewhat obvious ridiculousness of this character in being a stupid high-level wizard who packed for the long haul and is overall geared to the teeth. The other guy on the other hand? Also his own brand of absolute nonsense, as in, while Iluontar is, to you're knowledge basically flying solo but individually still very much powerful, with the capability of going to ground (pun half-intended) at a dime.

The other guy? He had some serious backing. I can feel pretty safe in saying that, since even if I do end up running said pseudo-sequel to this quest down the line, it would have been immediately revealed the second y'all checked his belongings and checked what stuff he did have on him. But like, he has 'I had to break out the mass combat statistics' kind of backing.
 
[X] Plan: Proposal for cooperation.
-[X] She probably had something she wanted to say earlier, didn't she? Was it her initiative for the meeting?
-[X] Don't push too hard - you don't want her to panic and do something stupid.
-[X] Compliment her powers of observation and encourage her to provide you with information in exchange for money, or perhaps a favour, as long as there is nothing illegal about it.
-[X] If in the process you realize that her current employer is holding her back with death threats... Well, that's a problem you're willing to help with.
-[X] You're open to the idea of hiring her on a more permanent basis, although to do that you'll probably have to trust each other more.
-[X] Try to be mysterious without confirming or denying her conclusions.
 
So this is the current list of tasks we can do to figure out stuff about ourselves:
  • Use a mirror: Given that we have Needles of Flashgraving related task, it would be great if we actually knew what the tattoo looks like, plus we can see our body in detail. This shouldn't be hard to do; we could sneak into a mall during the night, or just use Prestigidation to generate ourselves a small reflective surface. Very low investment for some very important data.
  • Tally our reagents: We have a number of spells that require specific things to be useful. It would be great if we IC went through our inventory, hidden compartments and the like, and made a list of things we need to obtain. Think of it as getting bunch of collectable side quests. We can even give them to our future minions! Easy to do IC and it lets us know how many spells we can actually use
  • Robot: We have the body, and we have the spell. Now we just need powdered starmetal, which might be impossible unless we cannibalize some other equipment. Try to see if we have reagents, if we have stuff we can scrap(it would be very funny if robot had adamantium armor that could be scrapped to recover both used adamantium and its personality, although this is likely a no go e: spell explicitly states that missing pieces remain missing so nope) or we will have to find a way to program it the old fashioned way
  • Scrolls: Out of our fifty scroll, ten have no text on them. This implies that other forty do in fact have something written there. Spells, prehaps? It would be great if we could check this potential resource
  • Limited Wish: Being around twenty times cheaper than Wish, getting diamond for this one might be actually doable in the BB, and even Lesser Wish offers us access to certain effects we currently don't have(i.e. Legend Lore). Not terribly important but certainly something to consider
Besides these more actionable points, our Crafting remains a big mystery box. Quite important one since we re putting it over our spellcasting as our greatest strength. However since we have stuff to do, I am ready to just sleep on this for now until we have Memory Action to use, and then use it to recall our Craft. Do other stuff in the meanwhile.

Anything I've missed? Also it would be great if you guys had some ideas on how to determine our alignment, stats and feats we are probable to have, since I'm currently drawing a blank. Every little bit counts.
 
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Regarding our wizard stuff, my current theory is that we are Universalist - Arcane Crafter and that our dagger is our bound item. Arcane Crafter is just the most obvious school for Iluontar, of course, however it becomes a bit more interesting once you get into it.

Universalist gives us Hand of Apprentice, which functionally allows us to hit opponents at range with out melee some amount of time per day, and Metamagic Mastery, which allows us to use metamagic feats some amount of time per day. Arcane Crafter swaps Hand of Apprentice for Metacharge which gives us additional feat as well as crafting bonus.

With that in mind I would theorize we started as universalist with dagger as bound item for Hand of Apprentice, then we moved to Arcane Crafter and swapped out Hand, so we improved our bound dagger to retain functionality it had in past.

How to test this? I imagine the easiest way would be to do some very specific metamagic spell alternation we are unlikely to otherwise have(i.e. benthic spell) to test if we have Metamagic Mastery, at which point Arcane Crafter is a given. I don't know if Iluontar would know to try this IC however.
 
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