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A Simple Transaction I

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Shard said:
No need to paint the option you dislike in the worst possible light. What if it wins? Won't that affect your enjoyment massively?

Plus, that framing isn't great for convincing people to actually swap votes.
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It's only the worst possible light if one doesn't accept that it is the objective truth of the matter. And if it wins, then it significantly affects the enjoyment of anyone opposed to that option anyway, so that doesn't really serve as an argument of dissuasion.
 
Dark Abstraction said:
It's only the worst possible light if one doesn't accept that it is the objective truth of the matter. And if it wins, then it significantly affects the enjoyment of anyone opposed to that option anyway, so that doesn't really serve as an argument of dissuasion.
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Nobody accepts the objective truth of reality, and the statement ignores stuff like:

"The society I'm ruining is one your father utterly hated anyway and would probable have eaten you alive."
"You can do direct soul-to-soul communication with your brother, which is basically the same as as him being alive. Additionally, he was going to die quite soon, so you're actually getting more effective years of communication with him due to my intervention."
etc
 
Shard said:
which does not involve eliminating our ability to mitigate our Tyrant's Doom.
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Sickul said:
No mitigating Tyrant?
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Concern about mitigation opportunities seems to be a major objection to taking Uttermost. I'd like to propose that overwhelming physical power could be considered a form of mitigation. It sounds like a meme but hear me out:

If we are intimidating enough as a combatant then strangers are (1) less likely to try to give us orders, (2) better able to bluff and intimidate in the event of a bad Doom roll, and (3) more likely to believe Gisena when she threatens warns everybody about us throwing a tantrum.

Evidence:
  • The Tyrant's Doom only insists that we remain in the dominant social position: it doesn't insist that we take any positive action
  • So far, we have scrupulously avoided social settings like the Camp that might proc a Doom. One of the reasons for this was the idea that we couldn't "back-up" the doom; we didn't want to write a check that our sword arm couldn't cash
  • When we did vote for a diplomatic encounter with the other R1, many of the tactics indicated that we could threaten them to ensure cooperation. Those would rely on our displeasure being worth avoiding.
 
LordOfMurder said:
Manipulation is so rare it's only been offered in all stats bundles or with the Mondo bait not to mention the extra Int.
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Is Manipulation even a stat? I assumed it was a substat or something. Seems a little too narrow to be on the same level as Charisma.

Inheritor: Librarian gives 1/2 of the Librarian's Int as well as whatever his other top 2 stat is. My guess would be another mental stat. Combine with Soul Evocation usually allow training in stats and it represents a way to gain considerable intelligence.

The reasoning behind taking the 2 int choice early on is that an intelligent character is able to progress better by leveraging their intelligence. This would probably at least double our Int. Furthermore the Librarian's knowledge and skill could lead towards us unlocking our own Soul Evocation.

I'm worried that we're too one dimensional. Librarian adds a lot of different tricks we can use to switch things up.
 
Hmm. I am coming around to librarian myself, Hunger himself is worried that his power is too linear and physical focused to overcome the inner Temple..
 
Shard said:
No need to paint the option you dislike in the worst possible light. What if it wins? Won't that affect your enjoyment massively?

Plus, that framing isn't great for convincing people to actually swap votes.
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I am genuinely curious about which way you think I unfairly presented the social elements at play here? Do you think it would be less extremely strange because Vanreir would be begging us to do something from inside his prison the whole time? Do you believe that this small child will simply...respond in a perfectly rational, optimal way to encountering us, in this situation?

It's totally possible that most people voting for Inheritor: Unerring are doing so because it's powerful and they don't mind the downsides. That's an entirely separate concern from the, frankly, extreme aesthetic and interpersonal weirdness of people salivating over the idea of Hunger comforting a child that he just orphaned.

Firstly, it's a big change for Hunger. Killing people always leaves the bereaved in its wake, but suddenly when a character gets some interlude screentime, people want to radically change Hunger so that he differently conceptualizes what he owes to opponents he kills? We didn't do that for the loved ones of those initial outriders we killed. Or the Magus. We slaughtered them like XP bags and moved on, so clearly it is a radical change. Picking up mental pollution specifically so you can comfort a woobie, in defiance of Hunger's past characterization, is uncomfortable to me.

Secondly, it strikes me as creepy. Rihaku can dictate canon facts all he wants and always be correct, but he can't dictate what's creepy or not: that's absurd. He can control how tasteful the in-universe events are, but that won't erase the creepiness behind the emotional aesthetics of the people who seek it out. Even if we consider the optimal situation of mental contamination and communication with Vanreir, people would be purposefully, substantially pivoting Hunger's character in order to specifically get scenes of him getting into in an emotionally intense confrontation with a small child, in which he would insinuate himself socially to them by baiting them with being able to talk to their dead relative, something which they have no way to verify. Maybe we killed him and absorbed his knowledge! That is an indistinguishable scenario from holding his actual soul captive and them being able to communicate with him through us. Deliberately seeking that sort of emotionally intimate encounter with a child we have done a significant (but not immoral) wrong to, just in order to get the personal satisfaction of comforting them, is fucking...ugghhhhhh. It's bad.

Please get your satisfaction from character interaction within the relatively tight and innocuous relationships we have already. You do not have to clamp onto a character just because they are named and had screentime. You do not have to seek emotional satisfaction by purposefully subjecting a fictional child to an interaction like what is being proposed. Please do not.

I highly doubt that this will convince anyone, but that's mostly because the people who genuinely want such a thing must have pretty divergent aesthetics from me. Can't convince someone out of a genuine values conflict. You can only make the conflict and the reasons for it explicit.

If the option wins then I'll deal, just like every other time a vote doesn't go my way, because Rihaku is a good writer.
 
My impression and understanding of the Inheritor option and Rihaku's clarification of it is pretty different from the one you postulated, which is frankly extremely disturbing (and which I think is a gross misunderstanding of the option).

e: I'm personally going to wait for Rihaku to weigh in on the matter.
 
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DkArthas said:
Hmm. I am coming around to librarian myself, Hunger himself is worried that his power is too linear and physical focused to overcome the inner Temple..
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Bah, that is only because he is still unable to just cut through the potential exotic and magical effects. If he learns Heavy Counter To Cut Through and picks up Magic-Defeating stance, his concerns are going to quickly become mostly irrelevant.

No need for verisimilitude of mediocre effects when we can acquire just one godlike effect and tie its effectiveness to the single important godstat.
 
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Shard said:
My impression and understanding of the Inheritor option and Rihaku's clarification of it is pretty different from the one you postulated, which is frankly extremely disturbing (and which I think is a gross misunderstanding of the option).
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By-the-by, I do not believe interacting with Erii is necessarily implied by taking Inheritor: Unerring. It's something that we would have to additionally do, and it's additionally doing it that I find objectionable.

But okay. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding what people mean when they propose interacting with her, and that it's not necessarily weird whatsoever. How do you envision such a thing happening in-universe?
 
DarkSideBard said:
By-the-by, I do not believe interacting with Erii is necessarily implied by taking Inheritor: Unerring. It's something that we would have to additionally do, and it's additionally doing it that I find objectionable.

But okay. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding what people mean when they propose interacting with her, and that it's not necessarily weird whatsoever. How do you envision such a thing happening in-universe?
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Soul telepathy.

Basically, like visiting a relative who happens to be in prison and behind bars.
 
Avoid the moral quandaries of Inheritor, and pick Stranglethorn! We gave up the ability to steal shit from our fallen foes when we dropped King of Thieves! Just become a tree, and fuck shit up!
 
Shard said:
Soul telepathy.

Basically, like visiting a relative who happens to be in prison and behind bars.
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Okay, I've just gone through all of Rihaku's posts since the update, and nowhere does he say that this is the case. I understand how you could think that "directly convey his thoughts" would mean soul telepathy, but upon closer reading this seems to mean that we would be acting as a "go-between" by taking his thoughts and voicing them to her. This makes sense, as it is compatible with what the ability is supposed to be able to do (imprison his soul to use its soul evocation, and communicate with and be mentally polluted by it), and doesn't introduce a new element out of nowhere (soul-to-soul telepathy). He mostly said that we shouldn't dictate how the bereaved feel, and that how Erii feels about us determines on how we would present the situation.

So. No, actually, it seems like we would in fact be deliberately insinuating ourselves with the child of someone who we killed and then imprisoned the soul of, by manipulating aforementioned child to prevent them from being too upset, which OOC would be for the purposes of our own aesthetic and emotional enjoyment of being able to perceive and then resolve the child's distress. I'm not seeing how this is different.
 
[X] The Ring of Power - Inheritor (3 picks, 2 Arete)
-[X] The Librarian
[X] Fierce Quickening
[X] True Maiming

Magelord go! Come on guys think of those hilarious Librarian gags. Yes I am standing behind you.

Also we really need to leverage our intelligence after getting ourselves into this mess. Gisena is basically INTing her way into boosting herself and we can probably figure something out too! Or at least how to not make the situation worse.

Makes you wish we had the Rune King's wisdom.
 
DarkSideBard said:
Okay, I've just gone through all of Rihaku's posts since the update, and nowhere does he say that this is the case. I understand how you could think that "directly convey his thoughts" would mean soul telepathy, but upon closer reading this seems to mean that we would be acting as a "go-between" by taking his thoughts and voicing them to her. This makes sense, as it is compatible with what the ability is supposed to be able to do (imprison his soul to use its soul evocation, and communicate with and be mentally polluted by it), and doesn't introduce a new element out of nowhere (soul-to-soul telepathy). He mostly said that we shouldn't dictate how the bereaved feel, and that how Erii feels about us determines on how we would present the situation.

So. No, actually, it seems like we would in fact be deliberately insinuating ourselves with the child of someone who we killed and then imprisoned the soul of, by manipulating aforementioned child to prevent them from being too upset, which OOC would be for the purposes of our own aesthetic and emotional enjoyment of being able to perceive and then resolve the child's distress. I'm not seeing how this is different.
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Rihaku said these statements:
Rihaku said:
There's no surrogate relationship, Vanreir is still there...

The alternative is that he dies and simply never comes home that day!
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Rihaku said:
You fundamentally misapprehend the nature of the option. You can directly convey the thoughts of the real him, who is still around, to his sister by acting as a go-between. Again, Vanreir is still there. His soul is still present, though as Hunger's prisoner. Certainly it is preferable to being dead.

But even if the option were as you understood it, I think one should deeply consider the perspective of the bereaved and deceased before labeling something "creepy" and insisting that they instead accept the loss on the basis of your judgement thereof. To be frank, IRL even if that something is "creepy" it would be an extremely small price to pay for even a fraction of what was offered here.
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Shard said:
How in the world would she be less sad on encountering someone who has basically locked away her brother's soul. Horrified and angry, more like..
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Rihaku said:
It all depends on your presentation! And it's certainly better than Vanreir simply being destroyed...
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Which to me directly contradicts the implication of how it would resolve. I mean, how does 'directly convey thoughts of the real him' become 'voice out the words of the real him'? That doesn't really make sense. And, again, is a very disturbing way of interpreting the option.

Personally I'm waiting for Rihaku to come in and speak his opinion.
 
LordOfMurder said:
The real downsides are losing Rage and the possibility of tyrant mitigation. Rage is basically dead in the water anyway after Quickening won and basically made it superflous and when we were offered Tyrant mitigation it was so underwhelming people didn't want it. We can probably just use manipulation to trick people into not triggering it accidentally anyway.
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FoR isn't useless just because Quickening makes it less optimal. It still gives us a buttload of stats and increases our effective HP by a lot. Moreover, taking other options that increase our stats and rank (such as Stranglethorn) also multiply our gains in Rage. Thus, I reject the assertion that it is superfluous. It isn't now, and it doesn't have to be. Here's some WoR that proves FoR is useful:

Rihaku said:
Form of Rage has been pretty good so far. You may not have actually used it, but it's reduced your chances of actual death against a number of foes by almost an order of magnitude each time.
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The Tyrant mitigation point similarly is bunk, because an instance of denying Tyrant mitigation before does not mean we will never take it ever. Perhaps you could be making the claim that Tyrant mitigation in general is rather weak-- to which I would respond with the fact that that is not necessarily the case, since there are other potential forms of mitigation we might not have seen. The manipulation point is a bit more generous, I'll give you that, but this means nothing in the face of enemies we cannot manipulate, or enemies stronger than us. Moreover, we might face people unwilling to cooperate for game theory reasons or because they want to exploit us, at which point we have no rejoinder.

I agree the Uttermost is a terrifically powerful option, but I don't think downplaying its costs will get you very far.
 
Sickul said:
Is Manipulation even a stat? I assumed it was a substat or something. Seems a little too narrow to be on the same level as Charisma.
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Rihaku said:
+All Stats covers at least this much:

+Strength, +Con, +Agi
+Int, +Wits, +Wis
+Cha (+App), +Man
+Protection, +Luck, +Willpower

It does not cover:
Stats you lack
Aspects of your character that aren't Stats (Rank, Progression etc)
Aspects that're arguably stats, but with significant downside (Heartlessness)
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From the Ruling Ring reveal. Seems to only be 2 social stats cha and man, not clear whether the malus also applies to App though or if there are more social stats that we just don't have.
 
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Talace said:
FoR isn't useless just because Quickening makes it less optimal. It still gives us a buttload of stats and increases our effective HP by a lot. Moreover, taking other options that increase our stats and rank (such as Stranglethorn) also multiply our gains in Rage. Thus, I reject the assertion that it is superfluous. It isn't now, and it doesn't have to be. Here's some WoR that proves FoR is useful:



The Tyrant mitigation point similarly is bunk, because an instance of denying Tyrant mitigation before does not mean we will never take it ever. Perhaps you could be making the claim that Tyrant mitigation in general is rather weak-- to which I would respond with the fact that that is not necessarily the case, since there are other potential forms of mitigation we might not have seen. The manipulation point is a bit more generous, I'll give you that, but this means nothing in the face of enemies we cannot manipulate, or enemies stronger than us. Moreover, we might face people unwilling to cooperate for game theory reasons or because they want to exploit us, at which point we have no rejoinder.

I agree the Uttermost is a terrifically powerful option, but I don't think downplaying its costs will get you very far.
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Rage has primarily been useful for lowering our risk of dying as a fall back option. However if we make our primary form even stronger than form of rage our chances improve the same or more and we don't have to die or pay arete and exhaustion to do it. A bunch of stranglethorns extra stats also won't apply to form of rage since a considerable portion is derived from Quickening's buffs which only apply in our first form.

Tyrant mitigation won't help us against stronger enemies or those unable to be manipulated. It only helps us in social situations where someone else wants us to do something because they say so. We're almost certainly going to have to retreat or fight in such a situation anyway so we might as well take the build that's suited to that.

Tyrant is a very specific curse which we could basically avoid ever triggering if we tried hard enough, if it was something like the geas of indenture or the apocryphal curse it would be to strong of a penalty to take but Tyrant is something we can live with.
 
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LordOfMurder said:
Rage has primarily been useful for lowering our risk of dying as a fall back option. However if we make our primary form even stronger than form of rage our chances improve the same or more and we don't have to die or pay arete and exhaustion to do it. A bunch of stranglethorns extra stats also won't apply to form of rage since a considerable portion is derived from Quickening's buffs which only apply in our first form.
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Making our primary form very strong is good, and reduces risk, and I agree with that. The difference is that there are plenty of ways to make our primary form stronger without sacrificing our third form to the wind. They increase our chances of survival in qualitatively different ways (we end up getting stronger the longer a battle goes, instead of weaker, we can resist singularly powerful blows with overflow damage, we have supreme Rank gains and triple our battle attributes), and even if some stats aren't applied, that doesn't mean no stats are applied. Form of Rage is a way of multiplying battle stat gains by three, letting us benefit from stat gains in our base form and tripling those stats in FoR. We genuinely haven't had an option as efficient in creating stat gain as this.

LordOfMurder said:
Tyrant mitigation won't help us against stronger enemies or those unable to be manipulated. It only helps us in social situations where someone else wants us to do something because they say so. We're almost certainly going to have to retreat or fight in such a situation anyway so we might as well take the build that's suited to that.

Tyrant is a very specific curse which we could basically avoid ever triggering if we tried hard enough, if it was something like the geas of indenture or the apocryphal curse it would be to strong of a penalty to take but Tyrant is something we can live with.
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This is a false dichotomy. We don't have to fight against every enemy-- Tyrant often makes diplomacy harder in that you can't ever acknowledge the authority or legitimacy of rule of others. When someone wants us to do something, it is untrue that we will certainly have to retreat or fight anyway. For example, if someone wants us to stop jaywalking, we can't just stop jaywalking because that would legitimize the rule of someone else's laws over us. Broadly speaking, these situations won't be as uncommon as you think, and stacking Charisma/Appearance/Manipulation is one way of avoiding it, except this advancement also reduces Charisma gain.

Tyrant is a very specific curse, until you realize we haven't actually walked into a place with laws, rule, or order, but instead have mostly stayed in the wilderness and kept to personal interactions. I for one, would eventually like to see the cities of Rihaku's devising.
 
Talace said:
Making our primary form very strong is good, and reduces risk, and I agree with that. The difference is that there are plenty of ways to make our primary form stronger without sacrificing our third form to the wind. They increase our chances of survival in qualitatively different ways (we end up getting stronger the longer a battle goes, instead of weaker, we can resist singularly powerful blows with overflow damage, we have supreme Rank gains and triple our battle attributes), and even if some stats aren't applied, that doesn't mean no stats are applied. Form of Rage is a way of multiplying battle stat gains by three, letting us benefit from stat gains in our base form and tripling those stats in FoR. We genuinely haven't had an option as efficient in creating stat gain as this.



This is a false dichotomy. We don't have to fight against every enemy-- Tyrant often makes diplomacy harder in that you can't ever acknowledge the authority or legitimacy of rule of others. When someone wants us to do something, it is untrue that we will certainly have to retreat or fight anyway. For example, if someone wants us to stop jaywalking, we can't just stop jaywalking because that would legitimize the rule of someone else's laws over us. Broadly speaking, these situations won't be as uncommon as you think, and stacking Charisma/Appearance/Manipulation is one way of avoiding it, except this advancement also reduces Charisma gain.

Tyrant is a very specific curse, until you realize we haven't actually walked into a place with laws, rule, or order, but instead have mostly stayed in the wilderness and kept to personal interactions. I for one, would eventually like to see the cities of Rihaku's devising.
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Is was against getting form of Rage in the first place because it's best if you never use it at all. It's also not even really as much of a powerup anymore after getting Quickening. Because of the lost stats it's probably only twice as powerful as base stranglethorn instead of three times. Plus it doesn't even always activate adding yet another element of risk and when it does it costs us either an arete or an advancement plus making us tired on top of whatever debuffs we pick up from being killed twice during a fight.

With Uttermost we're constantly 5 times as strong as we were in this fight and if we need more combat sustainability we can take what rains may fall which reverses wound penalties.

To avoid Tyrant just have Gisena mediate for us or never go to areas where people are likely to take offense. It's what we're going to have to do anyway since during the scope of this quest we're unlikely to get more than one or two mitigations for Tyrant anyway. That might be enough to let us obey maybe two or three rules if Gisena explained them to us or something.

Either Tyrant is easy to get around in which case there's no problem with not mitigating it or it's difficult to work with in which case the mitigations we've seen aren't powerful enough to let us act in society anyway so we'll have the problem whether with take Uttermost or not. Mitigation is almost certain to be limited like it has been before and our priority is always going to be the Apocryphal. If all we're sacrificing is the illusion of choice it's hardly a sacrifice at all!
 
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Dark Lord Bob said:
I'm still kind of sad The Chains was such an unpopular vote in Terrascape.
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The illusion of choice is really important to human functioning.. That being said, I'm fairly sure Chains would have maintained that illusion. Not for Arthur, though. Knowing everyone you meet was being subtly manipulated by you for your best interests would have been pretty unpleasant for him, I imagine.
 
[X] True Maiming
[X] Forebear's Blade - Uttermost

Don't mind me, I'm just imagining a build (in the near future) with both Uttermost and Stranglethorn as Defining Advancements and salivating. :tongue:
 
LordOfMurder said:
We've never once actually used form of rage.
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Insurance doesn't have to be invoked, and indeed shouldn't, in order to do it's job. You don't crash your car to get your money's worth before the end of a fiscal year.
Sickul said:
I don't know why you guys are so afraid of Middle Temple right now. Rihaku said there are two Outriders left who would have been a worse matchup for us than Van. Having gotten more power from killing Van and with the aid of LimeGisena, I'm guessing the matchup tilts back heavily in our favor.
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The very fact that we don't have to worry about the Middle Temple as much means we can no longer farm it well, while going to the Inner represents yet another vast jump in power and ability.
 
[X] Lingering Exhaustion
[X] Hunger - Stranglethorn

Stranglethorn gives benefits when we're fully committed to completing a goal, and our desire to take down the temple definitely qualifies. It's also just an obscene amount of stats. Like, wow.
 
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