Deedeequest or The Wonders of Mundus: Be Careful Who You Pretend To Be - A Genderous Isekai Quest

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How Dice Rolls Work
  • Informational
    • Character sheet is here.

    Dice rolls are 1d10 + Stat + Proficiency + any applicable bonuses, such as Boons.

    You may spend 3 Tension to Overdrive for a retroactive +5 to your roll (a Determination Overdrive), or +3 to an ally's roll (a Teamwork Overdrive). I will also automatically overdrive to avoid exhaustion or unconsciousness.

    It is possible to critically succeed (on +5 on skill checks and +10 on combat rolls) or critically fail (by the same margins), but rolling a 1 or a 10 does not automatically crit in either case. It is possible to crit retroactively by Overdriving.

    Your stat bonuses have names:
    • Vigor grants a Strength bonus.
    • Agility grants a Dexterity bonus.
    • Spirit grants an Aura bonus.
    • Mind grants an Intuition bonus.
    • Resolve grants a Guts bonus.
    Dice are rolled on a first come, first serve bonus. You only roll for Deedee.
     
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  • Informational
    • What do you dream of?
    [X] Love.
    [X] Religion.
    [X] This world.

    I'm always up for gods and Mundus, plus we dreamed about home and family last time. And love is also cool.

    Who should you apologize to first?
    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    [X] Shadi.

    I mean... (gestures at signature) ... plus we accidentally gave Sekh's position away with our ears and Shadi probably could use some interaction with nice adventurers to wash the taste of griefer out of her mouth.

    Are you alright?
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    It's how I'd vote even if I didn't know what's coming up for the party.
     
    I feel like pointing out we will gain Resolve, but we will also gain new and exciting neuroses.
     
    Haruhi is Waifu said:
    [X] Home.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    Can it really get more anime than found family and the power of friendship? Quite possibly not.
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    Only with the addition of Incredible Violence, which luckily the update had.

    [X] Home.
    [X] Family.
    [X] This world.

    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    [X] Shadi.

    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.
     
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    [X] Love
    [X] This World

    [X] Sekhmet
    [X] Hikaru

    [X] I'm fine. I'll just train more, get stronger.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.
     
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.
    Some form of unhealthy dependence, I suppose? It'd fit with how I like to justify sticking to the party when I play D&D, anyway.

    [X] Love.
    [X] Religion.
    [X] This world.

    I've always hated isekeis that treat the escapism as a bad thing.

    [X] Alesha.
    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.

    Just favoring the original party.
     
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    [X] Love.
    [X] Religion.
    [X] This world.

    [X] Alesha.
    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    Winged One said:
    I've always hated isekeis that treat the escapism as a bad thing.
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    Mmm, depends, if they want to go back because of people and stuff they got back home, thats fine.

    If they want to go back because their isekai experience is horrible when what you enjoy playing is not what you enjoy living, thats fine too.

    In most cases what they really want is the ability to phone home, not go home though.
     
    Winged One said:
    I've always hated isekeis that treat the escapism as a bad thing.
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    veekie said:
    Mmm, depends, if they want to go back because of people and stuff they got back home, thats fine.

    If they want to go back because their isekai experience is horrible when what you enjoy playing is not what you enjoy living, thats fine too.

    In most cases what they really want is the ability to phone home, not go home though.
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    I am very excited these kinds of discussions are going on in this thread just as Chapter 1 winds down and Chapter 2 starts spinning up.

    eta: also, imagine me gesticulating wildly towards my sig
     
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    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    [X] Love.
    [X] Religion.
    [X] This world.

    [X] Alesha.
    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.
     
    [X] Home
    [X] Family

    I think, narratively speaking, it's about time for this. We can choose to reject those thoughts or cope with them or whatever, but I think it's about time for us to think about what we've left behind. Especially seeing as we just fought another bunch of adventurers.

    [X] Hikaru
    [X] Alesha
    [X] Sekhmet

    Last in, first out; those are the last two we saw in the melee, so I think it's fair for them to be the first we apologize to. And Sekhmet is Sekhmet.

    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    The other shoe is gonna drop here eventually, but leaning on others (learning to lean on others, actually genuinely) is important. And it'll make when we are separated from them more impactful and more of an opportunity for growth.
     
    [X] Home.
    [X] Family.
    [X] This world.

    [X] Hikaru.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    [X] Shadi.

    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.
     
    Updating my vote.

    [X] Home.
    [X] Love.
    [X] This world.
    Same as before for this section. I've not included "family" mainly because... well, we already spent our last dream remembering the face of Deedee's father and I sort of flinch from doing two family dreams in a row. As for religion... there's no conscious reason, but my intuition wants to wait until later for it for reasons of its own.

    [X] Sekhmet
    [X] Shadi
    [X] Ace
    Had misread what happened with Sekhmet's position getting blown. Given how that moment actually went down, including them makes sense.

    ...and with a clearer picture of the mechanical implications of our upcoming maladaptive thumbs-up, I think I am going to buck the trend on the third vote category.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll just train more, get stronger.
    I don't like this, for reasons previously stated. But I have less fears about it interfering with either our Resolve problems or our group dynamics than the current most popular option. If we're going to be borrowing trouble, I'd prefer to borrow it someplace that hasn't mattered as much yet.
     
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    [X] Love.
    [X] Religion.
    [X] This world.

    The last two because they seem like they could have useful info. The first one because it seems like our MC could use a hand :)

    [X] I'm fine. I'll be more careful in the future.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.

    Definitely not voting for the game one because that seems like a good way to go completely amoral. (And I hated what I've read of the Thomas Covenant books.) And the power-up one just reminds me of shounen plotlines, which I've seen a thousand times before. These two are the more interesting ones to me.

    [X] Ace.

    So was all the tiredness us running out of stamina? Did this battle take significantly more than the last, since I thought we had something like 60% left after that?
     
    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Definitely not voting for the game one because that seems like a good way to go completely amoral.
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    Good call.

    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Did this battle take significantly more than the last, since I thought we had something like 60% left after that?
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    There's an answer to this! One I've known for a couple days now, because Talia told me.

    So here's the thing. Every other fight we've had was with normal level mobs/mooks. These fuckers were Elites.

    Basically we went mano-a-mano against another set of adventurers and those fights of a necessity last longer/require more techs/use up more stamina. And we skipped stam regen so that Ace could realize we were egg.
     
    BagFullOfLizards said:
    Definitely not voting for the game one because that seems like a good way to go completely amoral.
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    I dunno. Everything we've done these last few updates has been on the assumption that the people we've been meeting are people - I doubt this vote could wipe all that out. I'd personally be more worried about this kind of thinking leading to, like, ignoring pain/fatigue/self-care because it's not like any of the damage is affecting your real body, right? Self-destructive stuff, which would have a... bad compatibility with Deedee's existing flavor of troubles.

    bii said:
    So here's the thing. Every other fight we've had was with normal level mobs/mooks. These fuckers were Elites.

    Basically we went mano-a-mano against another set of adventurers and those fights of a necessity last longer/require more techs/use up more stamina. And we skipped stam regen so that Ace could realize we were egg.
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    So is "Elite" a purely Doylist/game-mechanical concept, or does it have a Watsonian/in-universe shadow? Hikaru was saying something about people getting power "invested" into them as though we should all already know what that means, but it's also possible this is one of those things that a lore junkie forgets the rest of his party didn't pay attention to during the tutorial quests.
     
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    Bii explains the significance of Adventurers with a capital A
  • Informational
    • Qoheleth said:
    I dunno. Everything we've done these last few updates has been on the assumption that the people we've been meeting are people - I doubt this vote could wipe all that out. I'd personally be more worried about this kind of thinking leading to, like, ignoring pain/fatigue/self-care because it's not like any of the damage is affecting your real body, right? Self-destructive stuff, which would have a... bad compatibility with Deedee's existing flavor of troubles.
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    This is also a good point. A very good point.

    Qoheleth said:
    So is "Elite" a purely Doylist/game-mechanical concept, or does it have a Watsonian/in-universe shadow? Hikaru was saying something about people getting power "invested" into them as though we should all already know what that means, but it's also possible this is one of those things that a lore junkie forgets the rest of his party didn't pay attention to during the tutorial quests.
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    Right! So here's the thing. Like Hikaru was saying, you don't need to be a player to be an adventurer. Some of the people of Mundus have adventurer status. Right now (as of few days into this mess) the highest level local adventurers actually outclass the players by quite a bit, actually, because they didn't get isekai'd and nerfed. The two strongest adventurers in the world at the moment are a lovely gay couple who've been at this since the game was in beta, actually. You'll meet them later. But being an adventurer means... well, a lot of things, including leveling up at very fast rates and more health and getting your soul/mind/what-have-you connected up with the local temples so that you dying means respawning, not game over. Which means the would-be normal person has to get a lot of magic and power invested into them, to transform them from your normal, everyday Jose Mundane into a bright and shiny Adventurer, with all the perks that goes with it. Which means paying the people to do it. Which, uh, is why most local adventurers are higher ranking or come from a wealthy background and why not everyone on Mundus has become one if it's not limited to the players.

    So in a garrison like this, you have normal people who're the normal fighters. And you've got their leader, Miles, who paid up (or was paid for) and got invested with the good, good adventurer juice and has a class like Alesha's. But he's probably one of the only people at the fort who does. Which would be fine in normal circumstances, because the local pirates would normally be a bunch of mooks on level with his fighters, plus one or two boss pirates with adventurer status like him.

    The thing about players is, they come in from outside. So they get created in the system with the adventurer template. There's no jump from normal person to shiny Adventurer that requires a downpayment, because they didn't need it. So with these dang griefers working with the pirates, team baddie went from being roughly an equivalent strength with team fort to outclassing 'em.

    Which I guess is a very long-winded way to say that nope, there's a Watsonian explanation... sort of.
     
  • Informational
    • Which also neatly explains why Miles, rather than being confused by our "idiot newcomer" behavior, instead clocked us as noble dilettantes getting our first post-juice taste of what real combat is like. Okay, yeah, this makes a lot of sense and is good ammunition going forward for handwaving our outside-context weirdness to the locals in terms of something that's at least inside-context weirdness.
     
    bii said:
    The thing about players is, they come in from outside. So they get created in the system with the adventurer template. There's no jump from normal person to shiny Adventurer that requires a downpayment, because they didn't need it. So with these dang griefers working with the pirates, team baddie went from being roughly an equivalent strength with team fort to outclassing 'em.
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    Ah, so that's why they first figured the level 1s were spoiled rich children facing their first hardship and the level 2s were naive rich folks who only recently discovered hardship. And here I thought that was just how the isekei folks had been acting. And then were very happy to have us anyway, once the fire nation pirates attacked.
     
    [X] Family.
    [X] Love.
    [X] Sekhmet.
    [X] Ace.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll be fine as long as you're all here with me.
    [X] I'm fine. I'll just train more, get stronger.
     
    Winged One said:
    And here I thought that was just how the isekei folks had been acting. And then were very happy to have us anyway, once the fire nation pirates attacked.
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    Well, that too. But the younger a newbie adventurer is—and remember, the players get nice shiny twenty-year-old-ish bodies through chargen—the more likely it is that they achieved their adventurer status through Having Lots of Money rather than the Hard Work it takes to save up on your own or impress that wealthy Patron, at least among the locals. (Miles isn't much higher than us in level but he's probably in his thirties if not older.) So even if the players hadn't been dumbasses, he'd have been side-eying them skeptically a little.

    But yeah, we handled the fort fight pretty easily even with the griefers among the pirates because there were a lot of adventurers at the fort, more than with the pirates. But when it was just our party against another party of roughly our level, the whole thing ended up so much more drawn out. (Which is how we ran out of stamina.)
     
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    Qoheleth said:
    So is "Elite" a purely Doylist/game-mechanical concept, or does it have a Watsonian/in-universe shadow? Hikaru was saying something about people getting power "invested" into them as though we should all already know what that means, but it's also possible this is one of those things that a lore junkie forgets the rest of his party didn't pay attention to during the tutorial quests.
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    This is a frequent problem that the maxed-Mind and Wikiwalk personage of Hikaru has; he forgets that the other people didn't write most of the wiki.

    bii with some cuts for brevity said:
    Right! So here's the thing. Like Hikaru was saying, you don't need to be a player to be an adventurer. Some of the people of Mundus have adventurer status...

    ...being an adventurer means... well, a lot of things, including leveling up at very fast rates and more health and getting your soul/mind/what-have-you connected up with the local temples so that you dying means respawning, not game over...

    ...So in a garrison like this, you have normal people who're the normal fighters. And you've got their leader, Miles, who paid up (or was paid for) and got invested with the good, good adventurer juice and has a class like Alesha's. But he's probably one of the only people at the fort who does. Which would be fine in normal circumstances, because the local pirates would normally be a bunch of mooks on level with his fighters, plus one or two boss pirates with adventurer status like him.

    The thing about players is, they come in from outside. So they get created in the system with the adventurer template. There's no jump from normal person to shiny Adventurer that requires a downpayment, because they didn't need it. So with these dang griefers working with the pirates, team baddie went from being roughly an equivalent strength with team fort to outclassing 'em.

    Which I guess is a very long-winded way to say that nope, there's a Watsonian explanation... sort of.
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    I will note that the term "Elite" for this came from datamining, and is not the term in the highest Mundane (that is, Watsonian) circulation. Normal people and most monsters are referred to as "Soldiers."

    Bosses are "Masters."

    (According to Doyle, these are mechanical distinctions in Valor, which I feel like reminding people is a real tabletop game that I didn't make up.)


    ...As an aside, I need to talk about meta layers for this, because there's Mundus (the world of the game), the Virtual 40's (the world where its a game), and our world (where both are components of this Quest.)

    Call Deedee's world "meta level" and ours "pata level" mostly because I love what the SCP foundation has done with 'Pataphysics.

    Qoheleth said:
    Which also neatly explains why Miles, rather than being confused by our "idiot newcomer" behavior, instead clocked us as noble dilettantes getting our first post-juice taste of what real combat is like. Okay, yeah, this makes a lot of sense and is good ammunition going forward for handwaving our outside-context weirdness to the locals in terms of something that's at least inside-context weirdness.
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    bii said:
    Well, that too. But the younger a newbie adventurer is—and remember, the players get nice shiny twenty-year-old-ish bodies through chargen—the more likely it is that they achieved their adventurer status through Having Lots of Money rather than the Hard Work it takes to save up on your own or impress that wealthy Patron, at least among the locals. (Miles isn't much higher than us in level but he's probably in his thirties if not older.) So even if the players hadn't been dumbasses, he'd have been side-eying them skeptically a little.
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    Also, keep in mind that the people playing Another World Online are ones with access to decent gaming rigs and expensive VR equipment, and SAO cyberpunk bullshit VR equipment at that. How different is that from achieving adventurer status through having Loadsamoney?

    Yet it's plausible for such people to be poor by Virtual 40's standards. For example, Deedee. And Sekhmet.
     
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