Hmm, I'm wondering if we should set up some sort of rules or guidelines for what are acceptable OOC Questions to ask as omake rewards. Some thoughts on it:
-One of the main uses of OOC Questions so far has been determining the risks of certain actions. This I think is fine. SV tends towards being risk averse and dislikes losing resources, and especially dislikes endangering them to unknown factors. These sorts of questions are good for helping the players judge risk and so encourage them to do risky actions because they can calculate the odds. I'd have probably found it a good deal harder to convince people to go for things like Vermin-killing or Lord Hunting if I wasn't able to spend Omake Rewards and so get a general idea of what the dangers would be and the amount of force (and kind of forces) to fight them. And even with that, OldShadow has shown that enough details can be concealed to take us by surprise, like with the Many-Limbed Devourers strength level being higher than expected.
-Another potential use for OOC Questions is things like Lore. For example, one thing that I've been wondering is if
Cahokia is still around. From information on Wikipedia, it declined in 1400, but hit a rebound and reached a new height in 1650, so it should still be around as a fairly significant power, especially with the presence of magic giving Native Americans a much better fighting chance against both weird monsters and European disease/invasion. This would not affect our current status in any way, but it would broaden our understanding of the larger world, and would maybe even give us an idea on things like "how far west does Winter's influence extend?" Or maybe give us an idea if there's the potential to send a trade or diplomatic mission west (
waaaay further in the future.)
-On the note of lore, there are subjects that I think should just be outright
invalid for asking questions. That is, questions that we can answer by doing actions for, or are highly likely to be able to do actions for in the future. For example, we shouldn't be able to ask OOC "What's up with Sara and the Mourners and what makes someone a Mourner?" Because we already have a way to do that in our action list with "The Nature of Mourning." Things like "more details on what Hunger and Cold are" I think are also things that shouldn't be valid Questions. Stuff like that detracts from one of the mental environment of this Quest of playing as an isolated settlement whose knowledge of their immediate threats is minimal and must be purchased with blood and hardship. If we want to peel back the mysteries of the occult that we interact with ourselves, we should need to do it the hard way.
-Most related to the current Question are things like figuring out the consequences of actions, particularly in these in-between turn decisions. Back on Turn 9 it was made to discover if we could force the merchant to lower his prices, and I just made another about the Funerary Practices Policymaking. This I feel is an awkward grey area that leans dangerously close to "Asking the QM to tell us the best options." If it is allowed, I feel like it ought to only be allowed if we have already made a significant good-faith effort into sorting out our own plans and
then asking for feedback on them. It's messy for me because actually trying to sort through and figure out what the policy should be is the part of this Quest I find less entertaining, because there's so much nuance that makes it hard to figure out. In one sense, that's fairly accurate to how it would actually be with Union making all this up as it goes along, but it's also quite mentally exhausting (at least for me) because I get stressed at the idea of going through things and messing something up, since I'm not sure on what our capability for reforms are.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on the above?
