We literally have four ap we can spend a turn. Two of those are always ear marked towards the Task Belegar sets us as a minimum whilst we have Qrech in the prison and we need to keep him occupied for him to be valuable we have to dedicate another 2 ap. One on him directly another on acquiring materials. That leaves us 0 AP for other tasks unless Queekish is the task.
Fair enough, although I could also point out that Qrech is basically in the same situation as the AV, in that if we want them to be useful we have to spend AP on them. The only difference is that we've had AV burning a hole in our pocket for almost a decade now, while Qrech is a--if only barely--flight risk. Personally it's my opinion that we've used up most of his immediately actionable intelligence, and we've taken about as many precautions as wizardly possible to keep him from disappearing or going insane from boredom. Letting him abide a turn or two wouldn't be any more dangerous than risking a Dragon rampage without easy access to Ancestor Runes for a turn or two, or any of the other possible messes that could jump on us which the AV might help with. I also doubt BoneyM would penalize us for not actively using him, at least not without at least one turn's worth of warning. We aren't
required to do anything with him, just like we're not
required to study AV. It's a choice of what people want, plain and simple.
Spending favour to get others to contribute means they're not expecting or getting any of the credit for doing so, which is why you have to spend favour in the first place. If it's your official task instead, then any costs in money, supplies or favours are covered by your employer, and you're being paid for your time as well. 'Magister Weber discovered X' versus 'in a project lead by Court Wizard Weber, K8P has discovered X'.
Fair enough. That's where my mental dissonance was, I think, namely being reasonable in looking at a situation and considering what was actually done, not why and how. In a modern world most people would probably look at either situation and just conclude that Mathilde is a genius either way, and Kragg is a genius either way, and them working together is beautifully effective regardless of the circumstances so they should be thankful it happened, but this ain't a modern world. More's the shame, really.
It's not about Belegar guilt tripping us, so much as it's about doing our job; the thread is obsessed with doing our duty (in a good way), and it'll always come before personal goals, and then we have to stick one or two of our hundred our nice-to-haves into the cracks if we want to fit them in.
I was mostly being facetious about the guilt-trip line, although it should be considered that this is basically the same thing. We want to please Belegar so we put in--as noted by others--an excessive amount of effort into our official projects, instead keeping some of those AP to diversify our personal efforts. On the other hand, the point still stands that if people
really wanted it to get done, it would get done, even if they had to shove all their personal AP at it. It shouldn't matter whether it's official or not, it would still happen, so basing arguments on it being official 'shaking loose AP' is ridiculous. Either it gets done or it doesn't, and everybody seems to want it to get done. If people wanted to argue about the worth of oversight versus resources, or even the credit due for pulling this off on our own initiative--which I will fully admit I was wrong about and retract the relevant statements in the original post--then I wouldn't mind. But at the time I commented people were going round and round about whether getting the job would affect people's willingness to spend AP on something. That's a conversation that should be kept for when people are, you know, actually
spending the AP, and not based on theoreticals of how one voter thinks another voter will react to a certain set of circumstances. It was a very weird version of putting words into people's mouths that just came off as stupid and pointless.
Tl,DR: Relevant arguments should be held for relevant votes, and people shouldn't try to tell others what they will do if a certain thing happens. It's just comes off as condescending and rude, and I for one don't want to read a dozen pages of it while trying to follow the main topics of conversation.
*looks at Liber Mortis* But surely not us!
Hey, we
did take enough precautions, or Mathilde would be conquering Eight Peaks with her own undead army right now.
