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A Simple Transaction I

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Unelemental said:
The same thing that is hard to follow about us being able to win more difficult fights - which we can expect with Aggressive - and thus ending up stronger even when Tired than we started out initially. So we take a risk we couldn't have otherwise and retreat, which is the point of Aggressive exploration.
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Given that the conservative option explicity mentions it's difference being we'll take frequent breaks from the dungeon which will require staying near the doors, it seems overly optimistic to expect Aggresive to back down after one fight.

DarkSideBard said:
How the hell would other people know that we have the Tyrant's Doom? Neither of our party members would know the specific details of our curses at all if we hadn't told them! You can't honestly read our repartee with Gisena as happening because Hunger is somehow mechanically replacing being witty with being threatening when the actual dialogue is right there.
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We're not intimidating because of the Tyrant's Doom we're intimdating because of our high charisma. If you go back and read Rihaku's comments on the trade and our first interaction with Zea we got the upper hand by intimidating them with our presence.

People don't need to know about the doom to trigger it all that needs to happen is we blunder sword drawn into another party of adventurers while aggresively exploring. They'll ask us to stand down and we'll refuse because how dare they try and make us follow the rules, then they'll attack us thinking we're hostile.
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Byzantine on Jun 5, 2020 at 4:48 AM, finished with 218 posts and 46 votes.
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Byzantine said:
There is a reason Rihaku phrased it
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Entering Rage is pushing ourselves.

LordOfMurder said:
Given that the conservative option explicity mentions it's difference being we'll take frequent breaks from the dungeon which will require staying near the doors, it seems overly optimistic to expect Aggresive to back down after one fight.
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Aggressive also explicitly says that it doesn't abandon intelligent decision-making.
 
Unelemental said:
That's a pretty radical interpretation. These things are still subject to votes.
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No, it isn't. You're basically ignoring the biggest downside of Aggressive by claiming it doesn't exist, even. We aren't going to be stupid, but we are going to push ourselves. And we've made it a regular part of Hunger's character that he will push to the point of collapse for... no real reason at all. Picking Aggressive is likely to make that mindset even worse.

Unelemental said:
Entering Rage is pushing ourselves.
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Yes, it is. Unfortunately our characterization is we push until we collapse. Which one rage does not put us at. We'll try to retreat after a second and be terrifyingly vulnerable the entire time we are making our way back out.
 
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BrainInAJar said:
Luckily Panoply's the strongest of all three builds! So we have a higher chance of standing up to them. Not that I think social capability and adventuring power is in anyway correlated anyway. I mean, Letrizia's practically a kitten!
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Letrizia is socially dominated by Gisena and to an extent Hunger as well, sure. But she would trivially dominate, say, the average group of college students / soldiers even without the benefits of her rank.
 
My problem with Form of Rage strategy is that our MC is not healed mentally from everything that happened to him in the past and now we wish to add the effect of FOR to it. It can go bad if we are forced to use this ability too many times, which is possible considering we are in an place for higher level fucks than ourself.

Edit: It's an emergency power, not one that we should depend on to grind through an dungeon.
 
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The text of Aggressive explicitly says that we'll still make "tactically sound decisions". It's not like Hunger's going to throw everything away frivolously. Conservative vs. Aggressive is more about our overall mindset. In either, if it becomes hopeless, we'll withdraw. What, anybody think Hunger defeated the Tyrant without knowing the value of tactical retreat?

LordOfMurder said:
We're not intimidating because of the Tyrant's Doom we're intimdating because of our high charisma. If you go back and read Rihaku's comments on the trade and our first interaction with Zea we got the upper hand by intimidating them with our presence.

People don't need to know about the doom to trigger it all that needs to happen is we blunder sword drawn into another party of adventurers while aggresively exploring. They'll ask us to stand down and we'll refuse because how dare they try and make us follow the rules, then they'll attack us thinking we're hostile.
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Charisma is the ability to effectively utilize intimidation, among other social effect, not simply the practice of intimidation itself. And Charisma isn't simply reduced to "the ability to intimidate" by the Tyrant's Doom existing at all.
 
Byzantine said:
I suspect high level adventurers are a fair deal more resistant than merchants. But Murder is also rather... annoyingly monofocused on Gisena, so his arguments aren't always very sensible.
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BrainInAJar said:
Luckily Panoply's the strongest of all three builds! So we have a higher chance of standing up to them. Not that I think social capability and adventuring power is in anyway correlated anyway. I mean, Letrizia's practically a kitten!
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Rihaku said:
Yeah, double +Charisma means that Letrizia was too intimidated by the hero to assert herself overmuch. She's actually got quite a fiery personality when speaking with her peers...
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Rihaku said:
[ ] The Plumed Offering - Hunger encountered a group of traders who, stunned by his force of personality and breathtaking appearance, happily traded him a magnificent regenerating creature for the King Fish's Scale and meat. The tormented beast had spent its life regularly being carved for steaks and was relieved to experience the blissful release of death.
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I was referring to these descriptions of our charisma in action. Emphasis mine.

I think there was another quote as well about how intimidating people so they don't talk back was the best strategy for avoiding triggering the curse.
 
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LordOfMurder said:
People don't need to know about the doom to trigger it all that needs to happen is we blunder sword drawn into another party of adventurers while aggresively exploring. They'll ask us to stand down and we'll refuse because how dare they try and make us follow the rules, then they'll attack us thinking we're hostile.
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Rihaku said:
You absolutely refuse to submit to, or even acknowledge the legitimacy of, any rule, custom, law or authority above your own
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People asking us to stand down is not a rule, custom, law or authority; it's just a request to deescalate. If we had to be disarmed in the camp, for example, we wouldn't follow it; but just outright request would fine. Again, we'd have negotiated with the merchants successfully.
Rihaku said:
Letrizia is socially dominated by Gisena and to an extent Hunger as well, sure. But she would trivially dominate, say, the average group of college students even without the benefits of her rank.
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Man, this makes bringing Gisena along even less necessary. We are fine without her, people. Let's actually get some real power to take this on.
LordOfMurder said:
I was referring to these descriptions of our charisma in action. Emphasis mine.
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We've already been told CHA works as normal, though. We aren't bound by this linear approach.
 
Wow, Aggressive is overwhelmingly ahead. If you think that your build would operate well under Aggressive but that the others wouldn't, and there's significant chance of the others winning, wouldn't you prefer Conservative? Voting Conservative in general is probably safer given the build vote is still in the air. You can always switch to Aggressive if your preferred build comes through.
 
BrainInAJar said:
People asking us to stand down is not a rule, custom, law or authority; it's just a request to deescalate. If we had to be disarmed in the camp, for example, we wouldn't follow it; but just outright request would fine. Again, we'd have negotiated with the merchants successfully.

Man, this makes bringing Gisena along even less necessary. We are fine without her, people. Let's actually get some real power to take this on.

We've already been told CHA works as normal, though. We aren't bound by this linear approach.
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I feel like my argument is hamstrung by us never having witnessed the Tyrant's Doom in action. Given it's one of the accursed curses I doubt it's as trivial to avoid as just having a couple of points in Cha. But if you feel like gambling on an activitation in the middle of a murder dungeon go for it I guess.
 
LordOfMurder said:
If we need to be close to the doors to leave the temple and Aggresive pushes ahead as quickly as possible in order to secure more loot and xp we won't be able to leave to rest even if it was intelligent to do so.
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We'd be stronger than at the start and have one more Rage in us. If we can't reach the Temple exit with that, we're screwed no matter what.

Byzantine said:
No, it isn't. You're basically ignoring the biggest downside of Aggressive by claiming it doesn't exist, even.
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I'm claiming we don't lose our mind after picking it, which shouldn't be something I need to state.

Byzantine said:
Yes, it is. Unfortunately our characterization is we push until we collapse. Which one rage does not put us at. We'll try to retreat after a second and be terrifyingly vulnerable the entire time we are making our way back out.
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Our characterization isn't some final Geas that mind-controls us into always doing the same thing in wildly different circumstances. So he decided to completely exhaust himself on fishing when he mistakenly thought he was relatively safe or just unused to his lowered power levels. Does that mean he'll do the same in this super-dangerous Temple? Only if we vote for it.

Keep in mind that he also avoided the most dangerous route on the way to the Temple, so one scene is not going going to somehow predict his every single action.

DkArthas said:
My problem with Form of Rage strategy is that our MC is not healed mentally from everything that happened to him in the past and now we wish to add the effect of FOR to it. It can go bad if we are forced to use this ability too many times, which is possible considering we are in an place for higher level fucks than ourself.

Edit: It's an emergency power, not one that we should depend on to grind through an dungeon.
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We don't want to use it too many times. It should pay for itself during this exploration after an activation or two, after which it'll be much more difficult for our enemies to trigger it, because we would have used the gains from the fights to advance more quickly. It does however encourage taking greater risks during exploration.
 
Alright, let's do a short argument for Cut, as I lack time for anything in depth:
  • Idea behind Cuts is being as efficient as possible with our Arete, allowing us highest total output from the dungeon. We do this by realizing and making full use of fact that Quest is a series of votes rather than one singular vote at a time - what a sensational approach, I agree
  • You get Cuts if you want to win - where winning is defined as either clearing the dungeon or extracting sufficiently massive amount of value out of it. If you want to just dip the tip and go away with minimal risk, pick other options instead
  • To expand on this, compare Cuts and Murderer. Later has three additional stats and less tiring blade winds - which is alright I guess. However, it's not the kind of overwhelming advantage that would really allow you to clear. Cuts deals with it by accepting weakened state in order to gain a chance to upgrade itself into something that can do much better
  • It bears mentioning that Cuts is actually not that weak; as with above, Murderer is about the strongest build and it's advantage, while not trivial, is not major either
  • Main point of Cuts is that once we get past first encounter, it would be stronger than other builds, and by a fair margin. Injuries might be a problem, we do have a solution for that
  • Of course, real value of the Cuts is that we have a lot of our build going for it: Nightmare Praetor and Thousand Cuts allow for amazing alpha strike which would trigger second build vote we aim for and Second Form allow us a layer of safety in our somewhat weaker state and decreases chances of taking crippling injury while getting our first build vote
  • Cuts itself is a very open build, as it's pretty much stats and powerful finisher. As such, we can make it work with pretty much any option we gain inside the temple
Note that basic premise behind Cut is that dungeon is a series of (escalating?) encounters through we can level, which would have Cuts give us most optimal growth curve after initial low. If that's not the case, however, Cut becomes nearly worthless of an option.
 
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LordOfMurder said:
I was referring to these descriptions of our charisma in action. Emphasis mine.
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The Letrizia quote says "intimidated", but given that this is about charisma, that is likely to mean that she was socially overwhelmed, not physically threatened. Large difference.

The Plumed Offering quote is also...explicitly not him intimidating them? The way it's written, it sounds more like a group of people meeting a celebrity than being threatened by a man with a sword. Which is what a person would naively assume the superficial effects of a Charisma stat to be? It literally say that they were happy to trade with him right after the section you bolded.

I just don't think that assuming our CHA is useless in any socially but not immediately physically hostile environment is accurate.
 
Unelemental said:
We'd be stronger than at the start and have one more Rage in us. If we can't reach the Temple exit with that, we're screwed no matter what.
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We don't actually know how bad the tired debuff other than not being as bad as exhausted so this might not be true. For instance if we have to expend rage on an exceptional monster rather than an epic I'd expect Rage to be weaker than the other builds at that point.

DarkSideBard said:
The Letrizia quote says "intimidated", but given that this is about charisma, that is likely to mean that she was socially overwhelmed, not physically threatened. Large difference.

The Plumed Offering quote is also...explicitly not him intimidating them? The way it's written, it sounds more like a group of people meeting a celebrity than being threatened by a man with a sword. Which is what a person would naively assume the superficial effects of a Charisma stat to be? It literally say that they were happy to trade with him right after the section you bolded.

I just don't think that assuming our CHA is useless in any socially but not immediately physically hostile environment is accurate.
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When did I say we were physically threatening them? More seasoned adventures are less likely to be wowed by our social presence than Zea or the traders were. My argument isn't that CHA doesn't work on people because of the curse but the best way to mitigate the curse is to so thoroughly wow people that they go along with whatever we say. Become the boss of the conversation basically. Anytime that doesn't happen is a time we're likely to activate the curse.

So far all our social interactions have been with people who either were too socially intimidated by us to gainsay us (Zea and the Traders) or could somehow sense the limits of the curse and work around it (Gisena). I doubt either of these will be the case for whoever we run into in here.
 
LordOfMurder said:
I feel like my argument is hamstrung by us never having witnessed the Tyrant's Doom in action. Given it's one of the accursed curses I doubt it's as trivial to avoid as just having a couple of points in Cha. But if you feel like gambling on an activitation in the middle of a murder dungeon go for it I guess.
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LordOfMurder said:
When did I say we were physically threatening them? More seasoned adventures are less likely to be wowed by our social presence than Zea or the traders were. My argument isn't that CHA doesn't work on people because of the curse but the best way to mitigate the curse is to so thoroughly wow people that they go along with whatever we say. Become the boss of the conversation basically. Anytime that doesn't happen is a time we're likely to activate the curse.
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But the Curse isn't that we can't talk to people dude, is that we have difficulty integrating into society. Just meeting people randomly gives very little risk. It's when we are forced to interact with institutions that we're fucked. If went into a murderous rage every time we're socially outwitted, we'd have attacked Gisena already.
Wolfy said:
Alright, let's do a short argument for Cut, as I lack time for anything in depth:
  • Idea behind Cuts is being as efficient as possible with our Arete, allowing us highest total output from the dungeon. We do this by realizing and making full use of fact that Quest is a series of votes rather than one singular vote at a time - what a sensational approach, I agree
  • You get Cuts if you want to win - where winning is defined as either clearing the dungeon or extracting sufficiently massive amount of value out of it. If you want to just dip the tip and go away with minimal risk, pick other options instead
  • To expand on this, compare Cuts and Murderer. Later has three additional stats and less tiring blade winds - which is alright I guess. However, it's not the kind of overwhelming advantage that would really allow you to clear. Cuts deals with it by accepting weakened state in order to gain a chance to upgrade itself into something that can do much better
  • It bears mentioning that Cuts is actually not that weak; as with above, Murderer is about the strongest build and it's advantage, while not trivial, is not major either
  • Main point of Cuts is that once we get past first encounter, it would be stronger than other builds, and by a fair margin. Injuries might be a problem, we do have a solution for that
  • Of course, real value of the Cuts is that we have a lot of our build going for it: Nightmare Praetor and Thousand Cuts allow for amazing alpha strike which would trigger second build vote we aim for and Second Form allow us a layer of safety in our somewhat weaker state and decreases chances of taking crippling injury while getting our first build vote
  • Cuts itself is a very open build, as it's pretty much stats and powerful finisher. As such, we can make it work with pretty much any option we gain inside the temple
Note that basic premise behind Cut is that dungeon is a series of (escalating?) encounters through we can level, which would have Cuts give us most optimal growth curve after initial low. If that's not the case, however, Cut becomes nearly worthless of an option.
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We have been warned that to survive outright it's best to pick a 7+2 option, or even a seven and multiple twos. Barest Cut is essentially gambling we'll do well enough in our first encounter to grab another synergistic seven option; which puts immense pressure on the voterbase and the conservative options that would mitigate its risk also offer less rewards, going against the point of the build in escalating in power. It's basically a huge gamble.
 
Aggressive is almost perfectly suited to Murderer's Panoply. We Rank faster, which is further compounded by the strength gained from MP which allows us to challenge far stronger foes and triumph, defeating mightier foes is one of the ways to Rank up fast. We can use the picked gained here to further elevate our various stats even if we don't have Arete. And so on and on.

Form of Rage is good for a few fights but don't we want to fully exploit this place?
That's what MP gives us the potential to do. Power enough to not only survive but to succeed, at probably no cost to our mental well being.
 
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LordOfMurder said:
We don't actually know how bad the tired debuff other than not being as bad as exhausted so this might not be true. For instance if we have to expend rage on an exceptional monster rather than an epic I'd expect Rage to be weaker than the other builds at that point.
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That is true, which why we'll want to zero in on the most dangerous opponents. If Conservative can maneuver to avoid the dangerous monsters, then surely Aggressive is capable of picking the most difficult fights. Thus instead of slowly working our way up the level ladder, which could be dangerous in its own right if we misidentify their level, we make a few jumps by provoking level-inappropriate opponents.
 
Unelemental said:
That is true, which why we'll want to zero in on the most dangerous opponents. If Conservative can maneuver to avoid the dangerous monsters, then surely Aggressive is capable of picking the most difficult fights. Thus instead of slowly working our way up the level ladder, which could be dangerous in its own right if we misidentify their level, we make a few jumps by provoking level-inappropriate opponents.
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Bright Vanquisher has another problem in that the toughest monsters are the ones that seem to be able to apply unhealable debuffs. Since in order to activate Rage we have to die twice first doesn't that make this build incredibly susceptible to them?

BrainInAJar said:
But the Curse isn't that we can't talk to people dude, is that we have difficulty integrating into society. Just meeting people randomly gives very little risk. It's when we are forced to interact with institutions that we're fucked. If went into a murderous rage every time we're socially outwitted, we'd have attacked Gisena already.
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Aggressive explicitly lists a chance of triggering Tyrant's Doom as a downside so I think a broader range of things count as customs than you're thinking.
 
Wolfy said:
To expand on this, compare Cuts and Murderer. Later has three additional stats and less tiring blade winds - which is alright I guess. However, it's not the kind of overwhelming advantage that would really allow you to clear. Cuts deals with it by accepting weakened state in order to gain a chance to upgrade itself into something that can do much better
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Murderer's has +STR, ++Con on Cuts, so its survivability (and offense when using Fell-Handed Stroke) are notably superior, plus can spam blade wind more easily and has the chance to crit on blade winds, plus leverage / utility advantage from any attack in which a fall can be utilized. There are a lot of incremental advantages that compound into a much greater offensive package overall. Whether or not it would be classified as "major" is situational, but such situations exist (lucky crit, Fell-Handed Stroke falling attack, etc).

I do agree it's an efficient use of your Arete, though it would be much safer with a Conservative strategy and +Rank.

In summary, vote Conservative! It's far, far less suicidal!
 
LordOfMurder said:
Bright Vanquisher has another problem in that the toughest monsters are the ones that seem to be able to apply unhealable debuffs. Since in order to activate Rage we have to die twice first doesn't that make this build incredibly susceptible to them?
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They apply unhealable debuffs because our Rank is too low and we're too weak, which Rage helps with. Rage also doesn't have a body or spirit to injure, so it would be more difficult to inflict permanent damage.
 
[X] Conservative
[X] +.1 Rank - The will to go on
[X] Murderer's Panoply

Yeah, best to vote for conservative just in case. The only builds I consider viable with Aggressive are MP, Forbidden and BV.
 
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