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Magical Girl Home Base Quest

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Sirrocco said:
Honestly, I think our problem is that we just have Medicine Boy in his lab too much. I haven't been tracking the math side of this quest all that much, but the narrative is showing him as pouring himself into his work faster than he can recover and burning himself out. He needs to spend some time doing something other than draining ritual magic.

If we can let him spend some time doing non-ritual-magic things for a little while, then we can free up lab time for Homer. Obviously, we'll want the Magic Condenser eventually... perhaps even reasonably soon, but if we give the guy a forced vacation to recover a bit, that should let Homer grab plenty of lab time, and at that point, the Purification Chamber has a better in-the-moment payoff.
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It's been indicated that we've actually had the opposite problem overall; to much time spent working on the building and not spent in the lab making gear.

But that's not really the problem either. The real problem is that Medicine Boy has a high stress job that's only getting more stressful as more responsibilities pile up. Gotta build up the building, gotta make and sell gear, gotta try and keep the girls happy and alive, gotta improve the workshop, gotta stay on top of the Demonic Incursion, gotta burn the dead and give them last rites, always more and more and more. This isn't really a problem that can be solved at this point either. We'd need more employees to take some of the workload off.

A temporary fix would be to take some time off, relax and destress, which what's happening right now, in the form of having worked himself into illness, and look how much it sucks. We're living in hard times at a dangerous place trying to pull off something amazing and vaguely insane, all things considered. The nature of the beast is what makes this so difficult, not anything particularly wrong we're doing. There might have been better ways to do what we've wanted to have done, but those ways are in the land of might've been. We just do as we always have, use our best judgment to find what we think is the best solution and hope it works.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

I like the idea of the purifier but it sounds like it would take a very long time to build. Time is our most precious resource.


Incidentally this room is described as "expensive" and I have no idea how our finances are doing. Medicine Boy gave away his last pair of wands for free, which suggests to me that we're not doing great.

It feels like we're about to lurch from a Medicine Boy Is Sick crisis into a Homer Bankrupted The Inn crisis.

On the other hand, we just went through several turns of trying really hard to avoid a Medicine Boy Is Sick crisis and it turned out to be unavoidable.
If trying to avoid the crisis doesn't work, we should shrug and embrace it.
 
[X] Build a Room
- [X] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.

Apparently this has the most long-term benefits? More room for our girls could help with wellness.
 
7734 said:
Slugging down a thermos of cold water, you stared at your furnace intently. Chugging and burning along happily, it stared back at you, eyes wide and unblinking.

"Can you sing me a song, Papa?" it asked, a spec of blue-white fire dancing around the ports and openings in the firebox. "I've been getting so lonely in here!"
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I'm sorry, what?
7734 said:
Honestly you weren't really sure if this was heat exhaustion talking since it had been warming up again recently, exhaustion, or if you'd just finally flown around the fucking bend and gone crazy.
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Or it might be actually talking. Wouldn't put it past it.
7734 said:
"Oi!" you yelled, catching her attention as you threw her the wand. Catching it, she pulled the first inch of the blade out of it's sheath, the demonic gladius having been turned into a shashka. Blinking and pulling the whole sword free, the totemic wolf in the hilt sung in her hand.
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Now that's a cool looking wand.
7734 said:
Now your name was Homer, you were blind as a bat, and your boss was in his bed, running a 102.4 F fever,
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WHAT!? That's 49.1 in celsius. MB should be dead! Or in a ice bath in intense care unit in a hospital!
7734 said:
"So noted." The little spider said, her felt feet clicking unnaturally as she climbed the wall to dance on the ceiling above you. "People leave a boundary at places where they make a transition. The first is at the steps to their land; the second at their home, and the third at their sanctuary. Since Medicine Boy hasn't left here in… near two months I think… the first boundary is comparatively tough as hell. A magical girl without reason or permission would find it very uncomfortable to cross; and entering the building itself may actually be impossible for some of them unless they meet the conditions."
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Damn, we've created defenses without even realizing it.
7734 said:
It was a rough week. One of the girls- Ruth- died fairly early on during one of the milk run jobs, putting a pallor over everything until Thursday, and leaving you exhausted after the cremation on Wensday. Morale recovered when Thursday's raid had positive results, however, and Mission Control estimated there was one more binding token to go before it was time to hit Caim and send him back to Hell. Two weeks until the final operation.
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At least the ending of this threat is getting closer.
7734 said:
That's what the first design you came up with was to fix- an Arcane Condenser. By nullifying and controlling loose magic, you'd be able to up the flow of the area, and even set it up so you could use multiple workshops at the same time. It would be expensive as hell to build, cost you hours on hours of work, but the power increase it would lend could be unimaginable.

The second option was less ambitious, but still an increase in power for the hostel: an Area of Purification. Health and wellness was hard to keep up in the still-blighted squalor of the hotel, and the complaints about how you were collectively handling sewage had been legendary when Calypso lost her temper in the mess hall one day. Equally importantly, this would work for spiritual purification as well, meaning that some of the more deliberating wounds that the girls had suffered and scarred over could possibly worked on- including, a part of your mind insisted, Jocelyne's.

Finally, there was the most boring, and also practical of your designs; a magical paternoster. Your original plan to build an elevator didn't have enough moving parts- and it hurt your soul to say that- so the paternoster was a compromise to keep magical flow constrained and moving. Still ludicrously expensive and liable to take forever to do, mind, but an option.
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That's very good work, Homer.

[X] Build a Room
-[X] Area of Purification: Increase item yields, grants health benefits.

Increased item yields is nice, but health benefits are where it's at.
 
Wirikidor said:
Incidentally this room is described as "expensive" and I have no idea how our finances are doing. Medicine Boy gave away his last pair of wands for free, which suggests to me that we're not doing great.
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You can see our resources in the workshop tab of the spreadsheet. Currently we have:
25 Mundane Goods
0 Gubbins
10 Spooky Stuff
24 Witchy Stuff
20 Demon Stuff
0 Holy Stuff
11 Misc

(We also have an income of 1 Spooky, 3 Witchy, and 3 Demon Stuff per turn. And an expense of 2 Mundane each turn.)

For reference, each Mundane Goods is roughly equal to $500, and our magic items only cost the same amount of resources as their Tier. (A Tier 3 Trinket costs 3 resources, though it has to be three different resources.) So we probably have more than enough resources to spend on any one of the big expensive projects this turn.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

More crafters means more items. More crafters means Medicine Boy can pursue other projects and the girls will still get gear. More crafters means projects can potentially get done faster, as there will be more hands working on them.

Also:
7734 said:
They're all multi-stage projects, and they're all about equal in combined time and cost- some are fast and expensive, some are long and cheap. Note the listed benefits are the end state bonuses though.

Somebody didn't read the commissions very thoroughly I see. What's going to make a Artifactrix or Artifacer pick up sticks and go someplace they can't work?

It depends on what you decide to do with him. Some stuff compounds a lot harder than others, in order from most the least being the Paternoster, the Condenser, the finished Purity Chamber, followed by a pair of cardboard boxes full of scrap iron, and then literally any step of the unfinished Purity Chamber.
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7734 said:
It takes a few more weeks than the rest of the projects, which each take a couple of weeks. Most of the construction is a background thing, not an action eater until you get to the capstone or roll poorly.
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If you're voting for Purification for the short-term benefits, don't. It takes the longest, and pays the least dividends until it's actually finished. Meanwhile, there's another crafter that does Uniforms that we can probably pick up once the Condenser is far enough along to permit an additional workshop, which will also contribute to survival rates.

As for the Paternoster, we haven't even finished cleaning out the second floor yet. As useful as it will be in the long run, it can wait a bit.
 
Gonna state what seems to be the uses of the various projects

7734 said:
-[] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.
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Allows more crafting at once, and encourages other crafters to come here since they would be able to craft here. More people more stuff that can be done.
7734 said:
-[] Area of Purification: Increase item yields, grants health benefits.
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This seems to improve quality and allows everyone to work at their best, I think? Seems like this one is the least obvious of the three.
7734 said:
-[] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.
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This allows us to use the upper floors to it's fullest, giving us more rooms to work with.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

Yeah, while the purification room is tempting for helping girls get off the ground faster, I'd rather have something that increases our productivity with regards to making sure they don't get injured in the first place, and that means equipment. Plus, I bet Medicine Boy is going to be mostly healed from whatever he's caught by the time the purification room is finished, so it'd be a moot point in that regard.

Basically, I think this addresses the root of the problem, while the purification room is a bandaid - an effective one, to be sure, but still a bandaid.
 
Icipall said:
WHAT!? That's 49.1 in celsius. MB should be dead! Or in a ice bath in intense care unit in a hospital!
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Technically you bust out the ice baths at 103 F, but yeah he's doing Not Good. Considering clinical brain death is expected after a few hours of 105+, though, there's still some margin.
 
[X] Build a Room
- [X] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.

Cool, more items; That's always helpful.
Health benefits though? That sounds like a quality of life improvements overall, in addition to whatever other health benefits it provides. And, if for some reason Medicine Boy isn't awake by the time it's finished, a completely AoP might just help him recover from whatever form of burnout he's suffering. So yeah, I'm in favor of starting it.
 
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7734 said:
Technically you bust out the ice baths at 103 F, but yeah he's doing Not Good. Considering clinical brain death is expected after a few hours of 105+, though, there's still some margin.
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I'm not a medical expert, but somehow I don't think being 0.6 degrees off or 2 degrees off would save Medicine Boy from being dead by the end of the day. It might be best if the fever were slightly less hot.
 
Derpmind said:
I'm not a medical expert, but somehow I don't think being 0.6 degrees off or 2 degrees off would save Medicine Boy from being dead by the end of the day. It might be best if the fever were slightly less hot.
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It's a very good thing you don't have to be, since in terms of body homogeneity that's a massive difference. What causes the clinical death is heat unwinding protein channels for neurological activity, which doesn't happen until 103.4 or so. This is a high, dangerous fever, not a fatal one.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

The other options would be nice to have, but this is basically the holy grail. More production means stronger girls, less fatalities and more resources.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Area of Purification: Increase item yields, grants health benefits.

More items means we don't have to worry as much about running out of mundanes or something. Increased quality of life from health benefits is also pretty nice.

Edit:
How about if the next time we seem to be working ourselves to death we try out the kolobok? That way the worst case scenario is that we get messed up and have to spend a few weeks resting. It's a win-win. :p
 
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[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

We kind of need to be getting more crafters in here. More crafters means more equipment. More equipment means more slack. In which we can build the Area of Purification.
 
[X] Build a Room
-[X] Magical Condenser: Allows multiple workshops to run in parallel.

Honestly, I personally favour the area of purification, and if we were voting as Medicine Boy I'd take it in a heartbeat. But we're playing as Homer this turn, and Homer's consistent complaint has been the workshop hours conflict between him and MB. And I think it is more consistent with Homer's character to go with the condenser.

Also, any ideas on what we could have done - in retrospect - to avoid overworking ourselves? Because nothing on the work list last turn seems like it would be particularly relaxing, or de-stressing. It might be that this was unavoidable due to the prolonged crisis and deaths, but it feels like we could have done something, and just missed the signs.
 
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7734 said:
That would be spoilers, since things aren't over yet.
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I would like to ask a similar but distinct question, then. Based on the information you feel like you have given, should we (the player base) feel dumb that we decided to go with gear-crafting rather than Kolobok research? We have at least one person going all salty on asserting that they were right all along and Kolobok was obviously the correct answer and the rest of us should feel bad for not having recognized and bowed to their genius on the matter previously. (For the record, yes, that was hyperbolic overstatement on my part. I cant' hit "precise" so I tried to go for "comedic".)

Regardless, is that sentiment an accurate one, from your perspective as a QM? Was Kolobok the clearly superior choice, had we had but eyes to see?
 
The only thing I can think of is that we could have made weaker items instead of always going for the strongest level. But the QM said this was Plot and not our fault, so...
 
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