Remove ads

Exclusion (PMMM AU / MTG)

Reader mode
Vebyast said:
After learning more about HH it has become obvious that the best we can do is not ward their stations and jails against violence. The best we can do is take them along while we negotiate to ward other magical girls' homes so that those other magical girls can't betray us without getting everyone angry at them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Have you considered that most magical girls are unlikely to react well to this? I mean, you're suggesting we should literally lead the police to the doorsteps of magical girls we want to ally with, effectively outing them in the process. Bear in mind that the facade hasn't officially fallen yet—none of these girls would be prepared for a public reveal, and many would probably prefer to remain incognito. Instead of making friends, this seems like an excellent way to make enemies.
 
Alivaril said:
Couple hours delay on the update — I developed a painful red bump on the bottom of my tongue last night, which played merry Hell with my sleep.

EDIT: Nixeu, Convoke wouldn't be as useful in the endgame as you're making it sound - when monsters are roaming the streets, people aren't going to be too tired to run. The vote is done, so my usual policies on "Don't be that guy" for complaining about past votes remain in effect.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Point. Still not convinced most other options are much better. More to the point, I don't plan to complain, since I'm a hell of a lot more likely to be blaming myself for not being convincing enough than blaming others. I feel like I argued poorly, or at least focused on the wrong stuff.
Vebyast said:
I wouldn't be surprised if the holding cells are packed, actually, ten or fifteen people in the volume of a 2-bed apartment at any given time. Not as good as a magical girl, but not terrible either.

Another good target: hospital emergency rooms. Always packed, and they have to deal with violent patients on a regular basis. I think that that might tip me toward the hospitals.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Some of that is because, for whatever reason, coming out of certain forms of anesthesia results in you going nuts. I ripped out my IV three times, when I woke up after the only time I've gone under. Apparently. I don't recall any of it.
Vebyast said:
Goddamnit. I should have asked that earlier; that even rules out office spaces and hospitals. Pretty much only homes will make mana.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Wouldn't be so quick to rule out hospitals. Nurses pull stupidly long shifts with unfortunate regularity. Like, 12-hour shifts are far from unheard of. Citation: relatives who are or were nurses.
Alivaril said:
Actually, you think you're pretty unlikely to end up conscripted-conscripted (for more than paying protection dues), especially if you offer Hallowed Havens to mundane (rich) people. MGs will still be pricks who tax your Grief Seed hunts and you'll need to hunt to keep up your cover, but apart from that, you don't think they'll try to drag you into anything until they learn just how good your buffs are — and by the time that's clear, you'll be too strong to booli.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's good to know.
Alivaril said:
They are fabulous and don't you forget it

The three songbirds make excellent mana generators and eyes when they've been treated to Rapid Growth. The two hawks can grow to mythical sizes and are useful in combat.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So, we can drop rocs on Witches. And possibly rocks as well. Interesting that songbirds produce mana...reference to Birds of Paradise from the game?
Alivaril said:
It cost you GGGWWW to turn your two-bedroom / 1 bathroom / 1 kitchen apartment into a HH.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So, 2/3rds of our generation+Central Park's generation. Could be the worse.
Vebyast said:
I think that what we can do is offer them a foot in the door to magical girl politics, which they're absolutely going to want and need if they're going to have any hope at all of maintaining the pretense of authority. And I think that the NYPD can offer decent publicity and an excellent amount of protection; it's one thing to be implicitly operating a protection racket, it's another thing entirely to do it in front of a police observer.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm kinda unsurprised that MGs in New York are running rackets, honestly. I'm almost hoping they've formed mafia-like "families".
 
We really don't want to get ourselves into a position via negotiations with mundanes that leaves them expecting us to spend our mana regularly on things that aren't ramping. Something like the hospital say-we-heal option leaves us stuck spending mana on healing, which means less for Hallowed Havens, which means less mana to work with over time. The only services that we should be offering people are 1) things which involve warding locations people sleep, or 2) things which we can do thanks to being magical but which do not actually require magic, ex., serving as a negotiator or representative. This might seem unnecessarily greedy but we're already going to inevitably need to spend some mana on demonstrations, self-defense, and other unavoidable expenditures, and the early phases of ramping are delicate enough already without sabotaging ourselves by adding in yet more expenses that don't help us grow.

Since we know that Hallowed Havens will eventually level to the point that it can gain mana from groups of people which aren't spending all their time there, power leveling it to that point is particularly important- though I'm not sure if we're on a "cast it a lot and it levels more" system or a "study and analyze it to figure out improvements" system here. Once we have that, though, we can move toward warding much more practical places than sleeping locations; subway cars, restaurants, classrooms, anywhere in a crowded city that isn't individually that large but has a high number of average people present. It'll be easier to negotiate to mutual benefit with mundane groups once we've reached a position where warding a greater breadth of locations produces returns.
 
Sapient_Ham said:
Have you considered that most magical girls are unlikely to react well to this? I mean, you're suggesting we should literally lead the police to the doorsteps of magical girls we want to ally with, effectively outing them in the process. Bear in mind that the facade hasn't officially fallen yet—none of these girls would be prepared for a public reveal, and many would probably prefer to remain incognito. Instead of making friends, this seems like an excellent way to make enemies.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Right now we are not in a position to "ally" with anyone. Right now our goal is to end up paying protection money instead of being conscripted and forced to ward all their shit for free at swordpoint. The magical girls we're dealing with are already enemies of the police. They also know as well as we do that Walpurgisnacht means their cover is blown and that their faces are going to start showing up on traffic cameras, peoples' cell phone videos, and the daily news. Showing up with an officer in the open gives them a chance to course-correct immediately instead of being revealed in three days to be a bunch of murderous gangs.

On top of that - look at our options for getting a meeting. There's no "walk into the meeting place to meet them". It's all "make a scene and wait for them to show up". If walking around with a police officer means they refuse to show their faces, then we didn't want to meet with them anyway.

On "let's get some protective publicity": Publicity is only a defense if the public can point fingers at bad actors. It doesn't stop anyone from disappearing us or threatening us to buy silence, especially if the offenders are still faceless, nameless villains. So the "get on the news" plan only works if we unmask them anyway.
 
Last edited:
Shard said:
If we ward all the MG's stuff for free at swordpoint, wouldn't we get mana out of the equation?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The problem is that we'd end up warding one gang's stuff. Then, instead of moving on to other gangs' stuff, we'd be forced to ward the first gang's uninhabited safehouses instead of anything that'd make us mana. We'd also be an active target for the other gangs, and the more desperate of them wouldn't worry about taking us alive and would just be trying to deny us to the others.

So, no, that's not really an acceptable outcome.
 
[1] Eyebrows
[2] Backrest
[5] Sakura
[3] Earring
[6] Sunset
[8] Galaxy
[7] Sky
[4] Barrier
 
I don't like the idea of dragging police with us to a possible MG confrontation. One, what do the police get out of it? Two, dragging police to MG private homes is likely to provoke MG, who are often paranoid basket cases anyway. Three, what if the MG assumes the Masquerade is still in effect and figures killing police will just have Kyubey cover it up?

I just feel like there are too many ways for things to go wrong, and the poor police, who are just trying to protect an innocent girl, as is their job, will end up collateral damage with just massive repercussions all around.

Maybe we can offer to HH hospitals instead? They have long term care wings there, don't they? And nurses do spend long shifts there. It's a good way of demonstrating our abilities to get MG attention while being totally non threatening. Also, everyone should be able to agree that preventing violence in hospitals is unambiguously a good thing.
 
[X] Head over to a local hospital and find out what you'd need to do to register as a healer. You expect (and look forward to) the media circus that will ensue when they realize you aren't joking and are perfectly willing to cut yourself to demonstrate.
 
Keeping in mind a couple of factors:
-The Magical Girls are unlikely to trust that our magic does what we say it does. They're competitors with each other, and they have no way to verify that it is benign beyond the superficials. It just sounds too good to be true

-The Police do not offer direct mana ramp up, however they allow us to bypass part of the rampup difficulties:
--In that police stations and jails are Significant Locations to many people and thus mana producing lands. That police, as combat capable, White aligned individuals, are likely to be more significant in mana production than the equivalent land area of a garden or park.
--In that the police bypass the difficulty of generating combatants with limited mana reserves. A modern police squad with guns should be at least 2/1 First Strike in MtG terms(3/2 and doublestrike if accounting for a SWAT team or the like) before any buffs. This gives us a more stable platform for negotiation, most people, MG or not, would hesitate before overthrowing the government authority, even if they consider themselves beyond the law.
--Government contacts also allows for identifying magical individuals, if they know what to look for. Not a bad way to put out feelers.

Keeping in mind we're not in some kind of zero sum power-at-all-costs scenario. Green-White works best with organizations and starting a new one is much much harder on our budget than just being adopted into an extant organization. Theres no actual need to be in charge save for player inclinations.
 
Kai Merah said:
One, what do the police get out of it?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Okay. You are the police. You have just learned that there is a masquerade and that you have a bunch of violent gangs in your city running protection rackets. What do you do? You start building the capability to do something about them, and in the meantime, you gather information.

We offer information and a foot in the door.
Kai Merah said:
I just feel like there are too many ways for things to go wrong, and the poor police, who are just trying to protect an innocent girl, as is their job, will end up collateral damage with just massive repercussions all around.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So your alternate proposal is to... try to negotiate with someone that you believe is sufficiently violent, unstable, and short-sighted that they're willing to off a police officer who showed up to act as a neutral observer at a peaceful negotiation?
 
Prisons have a lot of people and are probably the next-best alternative to MGs in terms of mana ramp.
 
DarkLight140 said:
We really don't want to get ourselves into a position via negotiations with mundanes that leaves them expecting us to spend our mana regularly on things that aren't ramping. Something like the hospital say-we-heal option leaves us stuck spending mana on healing, which means less for Hallowed Havens, which means less mana to work with over time. The only services that we should be offering people are 1) things which involve warding locations people sleep, or 2) things which we can do thanks to being magical but which do not actually require magic, ex., serving as a negotiator or representative. This might seem unnecessarily greedy but we're already going to inevitably need to spend some mana on demonstrations, self-defense, and other unavoidable expenditures, and the early phases of ramping are delicate enough already without sabotaging ourselves by adding in yet more expenses that don't help us grow.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I agree with the general gist of what you're saying, but the idea behind registering as healer isn't to run a charity. People with incurable chronic diseases will pay a fortune to have us cure them. Personally, I think spending a bit of mana—even daily, though that's by no means necessary—is worth it if it means never having to worry about money again. It should also generate a bunch of positive publicity, which might offer some protection against extortion, and encourage the braver MGs to seek us out.

Vebyast said:
Right now we are not in a position to "ally" with anyone. Right now our goal is to end up paying protection money instead of being conscripted and forced to ward all their shit for free at swordpoint. The magical girls we're dealing with are already enemies of the police. They also know as well as we do that Walpurgisnacht means their cover is blown and that their faces are going to start showing up on traffic cameras, peoples' cell phone videos, and the daily news. Showing up with an officer in the open gives them a chance to course-correct immediately instead of being revealed in three days to be a bunch of murderous gangs.

On top of that - look at our options for getting a meeting. There's no "walk into the meeting place to meet them". It's all "make a scene and wait for them to show up". If walking around with a police officer means they refuse to show their faces, then we didn't want to meet with them anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Murderous gangs? That's a remarkably negative opinion of the local magical girls, when we know essentially nothing about them. I think you should refrain from making such sweeping generalizations when we haven't met one magical girl yet. You're assuming hostilities are inevitable, and therefore guaranteeing it.

Also, the PC believes it's unlikely any of the local magical girls will conscript her, especially if she goes out of her way to make friends with powerful people:

Alivaril said:
Actually, you think you're pretty unlikely to end up conscripted-conscripted (for more than paying protection dues), especially if you offer Hallowed Havens to mundane (rich) people. MGs will still be pricks who tax your Grief Seed hunts and you'll need to hunt to keep up your cover, but apart from that, you don't think they'll try to drag you into anything until they learn just how good your buffs are — and by the time that's clear, you'll be too strong to booli.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
Last edited:
Vebyast said:
Okay. You are the police. You have just learned that there is a masquerade and that you have a bunch of violent gangs in your city running protection rackets. What do you do? You start building the capability to do something about them, and in the meantime, you gather information.

We offer information and a foot in the door.
So your alternate proposal is to... try to negotiate with someone that you believe is sufficiently violent, unstable, and short-sighted that they're willing to off a police officer who showed up to act as a neutral observer at a peaceful negotiation?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The difference is between approaching paranoid, possibly emotionally unstable magical girls with the implicit threat of police officially knowing their homes and identities, and letting them approach us in a nice, public, civilian setting. I don't necessarily think that MGs will jump straight to attacking the police if we show up with an officer or two, but if they haven't gotten the memo about the Masquerade going down, they could decide to 'teach an uppity newb her place', and then accidentally smush the police mundanes in the subsequent fight, because they assume even if they're careless, Kyubey will hush it up.

The more I think of it, the more I think HHing hospitals is a good idea. It gives us good publicity, it means lots of media attention on us so that if any hostile magical girls try to grab us, that will be noticed, and it provides good advertisement of our abilities. If we make a big splash at the hospitals, MGs will likely notice, they can discreetly test out the no-violence rule in the hospital so they know we're the real deal when it comes to home protection, and if we do multiple hospitals, lots of MG should find out at once, so one group can't co-opt us without the others being aware of it.

[X] Head over to a local hospital and find out what you'd need to do to register as a healer. You expect (and look forward to) the media circus that will ensue when they realize you aren't joking and are perfectly willing to cut yourself to demonstrate.
-[x] Also offer to ward the hospitals against violence because that is generally a good thing to do, but also as discreet advertisement for Magical Girl home safety.
 
Vebyast said:
Okay. You are the police. You have just learned that there is a masquerade and that you have a bunch of violent gangs in your city running protection rackets. What do you do? You start building the capability to do something about them, and in the meantime, you gather information.

We offer information and a foot in the door.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Violent gangs with magic, with that last bit being key. They deal with the regular kind of gang running protection rackets all the time. It's New York City. Cosa Nostra, aka the Mafia, is alive and well in NYC to this day.

Actually...I wouldn't be shocked if there's at least one MG faction with Mob connections.
Sapient_Ham said:
Murderous gangs? That's a remarkably negative opinion of the local magical girls, when we know essentially nothing about them. I think you should refrain from making such sweeping generalizations when we haven't met one magical girl yet. You're assuming hostilities are inevitable, and therefore guaranteeing it.

Also, the PC believes it's unlikely any of the local magical girls will conscript her, especially if she goes out of her way to make friends with powerful people:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
V derived it from our character's view of things. Mostly this paragraph:
Alivaril said:
You basically need to conquer the city. Oh, your family called it "allying as many Magical Girls as possible," but you've heard too many stories of MGs to actually buy that. You're sure some of them are fine and everything, but the others might as well be mafia members. Grief Seed tithes for living in their territory, "protection money" if they know you're rich enough, torturing or running off girls who don't comply, crushing any fermenting rebellions as ruthlessly as possible... really, it seems as though being a powerful MG and being a good person are mutually exclusive. You've resigned yourself to the fact that you'll probably need to align yourself with a local faction and pay their fees until you're stronger, more skilled, and have some friends willing to help you make your own faction. And there's another problem: Your future friends. Or, more specifically, how you'll need to hide the nature of your magic from them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Admittedly, "murderous" might be the wrong word. It implies a love of violence for violence's sake, and any cohesive MG faction is unlikely to be that openly psychotic. "Ruthless" is perhaps more accurate.
Kai Merah said:
The more I think of it, the more I think HHing hospitals is a good idea. It gives us good publicity, it means lots of media attention on us so that if any hostile magical girls try to grab us, that will be noticed, and it provides good advertisement of our abilities. If we make a big splash at the hospitals, MGs will likely notice, they can discreetly test out the no-violence rule in the hospital so they know we're the real deal when it comes to home protection, and if we do multiple hospitals, lots of MG should find out at once, so one group can't co-opt us without the others being aware of it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's not a terrible idea. There are definitely going to be people around for more than 12 hours in at least some sections of the hospital. Overnight stays happen with decent regularity. People staying for a week or more isn't that uncommon, either.
 
[1] Earring
[2] Eyebrows
[3] Barrier

Really big point I haven't seen made:

We can only go public once.

(So we should probably save it until we have a bit of stability in the secret world. Also, like, friends and named characters other than ourselves. The lay of the land, if nothing else. Deal with the magical girls, then the mundanes. Our powerset supports this too. )
 
If we need a location that would benefit from a non-violence aura and would have a large number of people in at all time, how about youth hostels or homeless shelters? This is New York after all, the city must be boiling over with places like that, albeit not many close to central park.

Which reminds me, if money is a concern, how the hell is MC-chan living near Central Park? I could build a house with the money she'd be spending on rent.
 
[X] Head over to a local hospital and find out what you'd need to do to register as a healer. You expect (and look forward to) the media circus that will ensue when they realize you aren't joking and are perfectly willing to cut yourself to demonstrate.
-[X] Also offer to ward the hospitals against violence because that is generally a good thing to do, but also as discreet advertisement for Magical Girl home safety.

Haven't seen anything better yet. Still open to different options, but going to the police seems like something to do when we actually have a way to make them relevant.
 
Alivaril said:
You haven't precisely tested, but think it's somewhere around 12 or more hours out of a day.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Does it have to be the same person who spends their time there, or just that someone was there. IE Would putting it in a police station where there is always someone on duty 24/7 still generate mana even if the same person didn't spend 12+ hours there?

Also, we don't have to only out them where we get more Mana out of them, we can just sell the "No Violence" part for things we need, like Money or a safehouse.
 
Last edited:
Odysseus2099 said:
You expect (and look forward to) the media circus that will ensue when they realize you aren't joking and are perfectly willing to cut yourself to demonstrate.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
...Should we bring a cat so we can demonstrate with giant growth, or do you think they'll demand to see actual healing? This particular demonstration might be a little bit too much morbid, especially if we're attempting to become a public figure so that we can't be disapppeared without incident.
 
Vebyast said:
...Should we bring a cat so we can demonstrate with giant growth, or do you think they'll demand to see actual healing? This particular demonstration might be a little bit too much morbid, especially if we're attempting to become a public figure so that we can't be disapppeared without incident.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean, even demonstrating giant growth doesn't necessarily mean we have magic healing. I think making a light cut on our arm should be fine. Between minor self-harm and animal cruelty (if we wanted to demonstrate healing on our cat) I think self-harm is probably better, especially if it's a shallow cut and we prove we can heal it up super fast.
 
Nottheunmaker said:
Which reminds me, if money is a concern, how the hell is MC-chan living near Central Park? I could build a house with the money she'd be spending on rent.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Her family are paying rent but not expenses.

Vebyast said:
I'm not sure I see the reasoning here - the current plan is to go public to gain stability.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It is my general opinion that radically changing the local understanding of physics, upending the lives of a bunch of people used to operating outside the law, and generally kicking off a revolution, is the oposite of stability. Do you want the first thing anyone thinks when they hear of you to be "The girl who went public"? Because it will be, forever.
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top