That is more in the domain of theology and 'did not exist' could just as easily be read as 'was isolated'.
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
That is more in the domain of theology and 'did not exist' could just as easily be read as 'was isolated'.
[X] You don't really like the old guard do you
This sentence appears to have been mangled somehow.
You are equivocating two different things. Sharing your own secrets isn't the same as sharing other people's. You can screw up operations, but largely are at less risk of directly hurting yourself through the details you expose than when you're dealing with your own stuff.
Sharing that kind of intelligence should still be done with care, but it can be done more easily.
Exactly, which is why people who operate the way you propose fail and then die. When your alliances aren't permanent commitments and even the strongest still has some contention sharing information of many varieties is exposing attack surfaces and hoping they don't stab.
Because a significant portion of the thread has argued strongly against sharing at every turn and for very careful limited information release.
I'm not saying to never share; but to only do so when you know the risk profile as well as humanly possible, there is no feasible alternative that gets us what we want, and the advantage we're purchasing is worth the exchange.
If you're uncertain keep silent, because if you play this same game enough over time that will burn you personally less than the reverse even if it causes other players more pain.
You're citing our policy to date's effectiveness as a reason to change it.
You're also acting like the consequences of failure are immediate and obvious - Lash's whole thing could still end in abject failure of the worst kind to name one example. Counting that for anything is extremely premature.
The only example that you used with real relevance to this policy is Maeve's case. Which has been good so far, but that was a calculated risk which may also still have negative impacts in the future. It was probably still a good idea, but those sort of careful gambles are part of the game. They aren't evidence that you should abandon the careful part and share whatever comes to mind whenever it'd be convenient to shift the scenario directly in front of you.
We have an informational perfect attack. Knowing when, where, and how to use it is a critical part of the process.
We could still easily get punked for our hubris if we act like we're going to win by default simply because we have it.
Fixed, thanks.
Citation please. As far as I know this is wrong both historically and in-universe.
And I don't mean anecdotes! Some people who operate like this die. Some people who value secrecy also die. Statistics! Give me a breakdown of how the policy of sharing information statistically leads to death or even ruin. Or we'll just have to disagree on the basic assumptions of how the world works.
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We should just spam it.
In fact, a funny thing I have seen once about cooperation against competition was someone pointing out that there are way more people having the same dominant hand, favorizing cooperation, than there are who use the opposite one, favorizing competition.
Sure, it's not absolute proof, but the world is rife with this kind of examples, *more than the sum of its part* is practically a law of physics from the lowest level (individual quarks are not able to do thing protons and neutrons can, and those can't do things that atoms can, so on and so forth, with a biological example being the simple existence of multicellular organism and how they spread everywhere).
The technological age is also a consequence of the advantages of cooperation against competition, with a great part of it being due to people being able to communicate and innovate together. Human minds are made to share their ideas and benefit greatly from it, and isolation is death of innovation.
Most people get bitten and then learn better is the thing. An example from the Dresden Files would be that demon who got most of Harry's name just by being nice in the surface level.
Pretty much any grifter or spy is also exploiting the same principle, they get you to overshare by creating a situation where you think sharing is harmless and then exploit it.
I can't give you a statistical analysis of every spy agency to exist or something, but neither can you.
The best evidence available is that any serious organization or government in real life adopts policies directly against the ones you're proposing. Share at specific need alone, be extremely conservative about what qualifies as need, if you do not know for certain fail safe to silence. These are rules so basic everyone has used them since WW2. "Loose lips sink ships" and all that being one of the earliest big public pushes on this still in the public consciousness.
BoredMan
Maintaining the Agenda is our top priority
That last bit is premature, we don't actually know if Lash will be as such even if it would make sense in our mind. She doesn't even have a body yet that situation coud still backfire horribly down the line. Don't count your eggs before they've hatched.
To be blunt about it; this isn't an answer and doesn't matter.
We could fire the crown constantly and still lose if we don't put any thought in it, because it has limits even if it can't be blocked. We need to be asking questions about the right stuff at the right time, and the crown can't recursively select the best questions for us to ask for us.
"Once bitten, twice shy" is a maladaptive practice.
The argument we are having is costs vs benefits. My argument and basic position is that being relatively free with information (not to the point of absurdity, but to a fair extent) is a more winning strategy.
Yeah, and the countries with better adherence to secrecy, i.e. Soviet Union and allies lost.
North Korea is one of the most secrecy-driven country in the world now. Is it more prosperous or secure than South Korea? The more secrecy there is, the more cost there is to share information, the harder it is to advance. And small bad guy societies pay less toll on such information exchange than large ones.
Sure it can.
Grab a globe and ask for a list of threats to the world. Grab something we own and ask the same question about us. Do it for similar broad scale knowldge and it should be trivial to find out what questions to ask.
Where did it get established they couldn't be killed, or that Archangels tried to?
So how many times would you touch an open flame before you'd say you've got a statically relevant dataset proving it's a bad idea?
Based on what? This is the first time one of the bits of information you've seemed to want to share since the moment we learned it actually made it through a vote and it didn't change anything because our target didn't believe us.
You can't hide secrets after you share them, and the crown demonstrates how useful knowing the details of what other people are like or are doing can be. Self reporting is something to be done with extreme care.
North Korea is losing the nation state game for a lot of reasons, I wouldn't rank it's secretiveness as particularly high in comparison to stuff like the entire operation of its government.
Or perhaps it'd be better to say that the secretiveness of the country is in service to maintaining a government which is driving it into the ground. NK would be better off without it because real information would hasten the decline of their military dictatorship, but that's not the same as secrecy itself not being a useful tool.
It's a tool and an aid to security. Secrecy alone cannot win anything anymore than body armor can win fights. It stops you from losing so you can stay in the game long enough to win by other means.
Can't ask questions about ourselves and we can't see the future. We also would
Struggle with data set size to a certain extent.
So you need foci to ask those questions on a tight interval, then to sort the data and
Make judgment calls on the marginal cases, and in the end still be missing things because someone somewhere hadn't made a relevant choice yet.
You'll need a couple hard drives filled only with names, without any additional information, to write that answer down.
And that would be even longer as that will include all the previous names, which would include such people as HE WHO WALKS BEHIND, plus all those who don't want to break the world but would like to see Molly taken down.
I would not stop touching the stove when it's not hot, and would not stop touching all the stoves if I was burned once or twice by one.
You are ignoring costs, both material, and cultural.
This is veering off topic. Suffice to say that everything I know about history is telling me that "more secrecy = worse long term results".
We ask about things that would impact us all the time. If not us we can ask about our famlies happiness or some other oblique thing. Or have a designated computer linked to us and ask questions about that.
And we can ask about beings that are threats, its not like world ending beings can spawn randomly.
only being nigh omnicent instead of fully omnicient is fairly overpowered. We can always identify preprations so its not like those guys can insta make plans.
My point is not that the crown is useless, it's that it can't do the thinking for us and requires a few different things to be fully exploited. It also doesn't defend us from people trying to learn and exploit our weaknesses or our generally do things out in the world.
Spamming the crown doesn't ensure we'll win anything.
Narrative consequences matter as well.
The entire modern history of the Black Court of vampires is a cautionary tale about the importance of information security.
But fair enough.
I just dont think the setting we're in supports your idea of what you say you want to play.
At least not while our PC is Molly Carpenter.
Yes it would.
There's a difference between Michael Carpenter, parent and citizen, and Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Cross, as a character reference to supernatural nationstates.
Michael's credibility in the supernatural as an arbiter, and his ability to vouch for people, is based on the Sword he carries and the guarantees that it presents, not in his personal person as a Good Man.
If he wasnt a Knight anymore, if the Sword had moved on, he stops being that to other supernatural people.
Especially when the person he's vouching for is his daughter.
Thats not true. Just....not true.
Like I pointed out, we've been to the Greek Underworld in the Dresdenverse, and we've seen inhabitants of Lucifer's Hell.
Both are/have Hells, places of imprisonment and punishment for the evil/unworthy.
And yet they are quite different from each other, based on who's running it.
And thats just the Dresden Files side of this crossover.
World of Darkness has a shitload of Hells and Hell-like places other than Yomi Wan, and I dont know how many of them the QM is incorporating here.
This is not true.
Not every wizard knows, but the White Council EXPLICITLY knows about Demonreach.
It was created by the first Merlin, and the Warden of Demonreach has been consistently drawn from the White Council's ranks, often but apparently not always from the Senior Council. Dresden bonded to Demonreach at a time when the Senior Council were still debating a replacement for the previous Warden, who is unnamed. Thats explicit Word of Butcher.
Furthermore, the second to last Warden of Demonreach before Harry in canon was Kemmler the necromancer, and it was a major undertaking of the White Council to keep them separated before they managed to kill Kemmler the first time.
So every senior wizard can be expected to know of it, if not all the details.
Beggars belief that you think the White Council lost track of a facility full of the equivalent of occult superweapons and the continent-destroying failsafe under it.
Right next to a major metropolis at that.
That the Merlin who built this place wouldnt literally write down instructions for its use and to keep an eye on it.
That other wizards who were around when it was built wouldnt write their own notes about Occult Supermax to pass down to their apprentices.
It literally was Rashid the Gatekeeper who gave Dresden advice on its magical topography when he first bonded the place in Turn Coat.
1) One: The bad guys arent winning.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Black Court was a major supernatural superpower, Kemmler's alliances were in ascendance, WW1 and its occult counterpart were on the horizon.
At the moment, the Black Court has been all but wiped out and its survivors in hiding, Kemmler is dead as is most of his disciples, multiple Darkhallow attempts have been repeatedly defeated, and a bunch of elder Denarians are dead.
Things are certainly in turmoil right now, as a culmination of decades if not centuries of hostile plotting come to fruition just as the Stars Are Coming Into Conjunction.
But the idea that the bad guys are winning doesnt really fit the bigger picture.
2) The Dresden Files setting watched the Black Court of vampires go from a top tier supernatural superpower to essentially annihilated over the first half of the 20th century because the White Court, its "ally", spent centuries building a dossier from multiple sources on their operating practices, strengths and weaknesses, then had it published as the fictional novel of Dracula in 1897.
This sort of thing has been the downfall of superpowers before. And we're not a superpower yet.
3)Our opposition only have parts of the picture.
The Outsiders recognize what we were.
They dont know what Molly can do, or the rules she currently operates under, or how her charms have changed; Solars had no Hells in the Age of Glory, and neither did Creation-era Infernals.
The Neverborn may or may not be conscious, only dealt with Solars and Abyssals in back in Creation That Was, and we dont know how much of them survived the Ages and in what condition. The Fallen are Limited by the White God in how they can act.
The Yama Kings know fuckall about what an Exaltation is besides a very puissant chunk of occult power.
And NONE of these people, or the factions they belong to are known for their willingness to tell their minions pawns and allies anything besides the bare minimum.
Furthermore, the opposition is divided, which means they do not pool information.
What the Outsiders know is not automatically known to the Denarians, for example. It is not in our interests to provide them with the puzzle pieces they are missing.
4)More broadly?
All this betrays a fundamental misapprehension of the principles of the series, and it seems pretty obvious that you havent been keeping up with some of the recent books.
Literally, the existence of the Archive and the Oblivion War is all about limiting the spread of some kinds of information; Lovecraft in this setting was a Venator who empowered the Old Ones by writing about them and publishing it.
Personally? I have always had a dislike for the idea that everyone else is Doing It Wrong.
Maybe, just maybe, the people who have survived and stayed alive in these settings for several thousand years actually have good reasons for what they do, lessons reinforced by survival.
1)Because we have had information superiority. Most of them know fuckall about us, while we knew a lot more about them.
2)We dont actually know that. And its not like they need that to kill Molly; we're an Infernal Exalt, not a spirit.
3)That only matters when they are short on resources and alternative plans
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VOTE
[X] How do did you learn your phenomenal cosmic powers?
RATIONALE
Molly is 18; Carlos is 21. They're both young enough to have a commonality of experience
The QM has previously asked us about whether we want to make friends/allies among the younger wizards.
And if we want to get a personal connection among the younger wizards who arent Dresden, this is probably where we should start.
Also, Molly Awakened her wizard magic originally by hiding from her mother when she had just sneaked back into the house wearing clothes she didnt want her mother to see.
Which should make for an amusing story, if nothing else
VOTE
[X] How do did you learn your phenomenal cosmic powers?
RATIONALE
Molly is 18; Carlos is 21. They're both young enough to have a commonality of experience
The QM has previously asked us about whether we want to make friends/allies among the younger wizards.
And if we want to get a personal connection among the younger wizards who arent Dresden, this is probably where we should start.
Also, Molly Awakened her wizard magic originally by hiding from her mother when she had just sneaked back into the house wearing clothes she didnt want her mother to see.
Which should make for an amusing story, if nothing else
Carlos is technically 20, his birthday is in two weeks.
[X] How do did you learn your phenomenal cosmic powers?
It's a jotun body with a hell mythos.
There's also the matter that we are actually running a hell. It's also something else, but the charm is literally called the thousand and first hell and themes itself after the others.
It's a jotun body with a hell mythos.