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A Simple Transaction

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Wolfy said:
We'd get presumably powerful artifact right of the gate without having to mutilate our soul. Or at least part of our soul that we care about.

Sounds pretty cool to me. We may even try and use it to browbeat reincarnatee into behaving, provided he or she is sapient. It's curious synergy for sure.
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Having the capacity to make artifacts has no implication of starting off with one, and soul mutilation is a fundamental facet of the powerset. I tremendously doubt having one to start out with, if we even do, will be free of its price.

And I see absolutely no synergy to having a hatred-filled reincarnation spirit and being able to mutilate our soul into artifacts. Besides the parallel of soul mutilation, there's no particular interaction - We'd already start out capable of masterwork if we picked Binary Magic in the first place.
 
Thrice Great. Forget Binary Magic. Anybody interested in 2/3 builds?

Cultivation/Diagram?
Diagram/Naturalism?
 
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I can't help but get the impression chargen is doing the Isekai thing, where we sit around with a god discussing which boons we choose for our mission to go kill the demon lord xianxia protagonist.
Depending on the specific setup, that does kinda influence how much value we should really apply to long-term sustainability of a build or what position we end up in afterwards.

If the whole deal is we go whack the target and get out for a sweet afterlife, that does kinda curtail too long term considerations cause we probably shouldn't give them that much time anyways.
If we are assured that completing our mission even realigns fate to its proper course or whatever reason we have for being sent there in the first place, minmaxing towards earning our paycheck might even be morally justifiable.
Course, similarly if the deal is we do our part and as a reward we get to live out our life there, those considerations don't really apply.
 
Unelemental said:
And the possibly sentient sword that we've sacrificed the part of our soul that hated us for will naturally not betray us to the protag at the first opportunity.
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Now that's making two different assumptions - which doesn't matter because boy does that sounds cool.
Dark Abstraction said:
Having the capacity to make artifacts has no implication of starting off with one, and soul mutilation is a fundamental facet of the powerset. I tremendously doubt having one to start out with, if we even do, will be free of its price.
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Huh? Point is that you start with part of soul that you don't like but that's also full of potential, so you don't mind Artifacting it.

I mean, it could be that we don't posses ability to specify that particular part of soul, one way or another, but that just seems like a neat combo to have. Plus it's hilarious

>be sent back in time on a grand quest
>guy you reincarnated into just turns you into a fucking wand
 
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If the game guarantees that we lose by taking thrice-great, then why is it an option.

And it does have some pretty significant early game power in the artifact creation.
 
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There's no guarantees here, but remember how thinking too much about long-term potential and too little about current capabilities (Geas + Praxis) would have shot us in the foot at the start of Simple Transaction. Thrice-Great gives us great talent in all three branches, but we lose out on resources/background/initial power/other opportunities.
 
Shard said:
We should have waifu'd the Strategist. Why didn't we? :/
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Truly patrician taste, friend. As for why not... well, the Strategist didn't have feet.
Alectai said:
Again, I'd point out that Cultivators are already on the bust cycle as of now, where they've tapped all the easily accessible veins of power and have descended to stabbing each other in the face to steal their stuff.

As hyped as it is, it's on the decline, and it's a philosophy that inherently rejects the idea of becoming sustainable--it's by its nature an art where one consumes resources in a bid for divinity.
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All we know is that "competition for Cultivation resources is unremitting." Unremitting implies this is constant; no mention is made of a steady decline or natural resources being depleted. It's premature to prophesy the doom of Cultivator civilization on the basis of a single line.
Wolfy said:
We'd get presumably powerful artifact right of the gate without having to mutilate our soul. Or at least part of our soul that we care about.

Sounds pretty cool to me. We may even try and use it to browbeat reincarnatee into behaving, provided he or she is sapient. It's curious synergy for sure.
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Access to Binary Magic is valued at one orb; creating Artifacts is a subset of this. Reincarnation gives us an eventual payday valued at roughly three orbs, at the price of waiting and a potentially troubled relationship with a piece of our soul. It seems unlikely to me that any Artifact, no matter how exceptional, is more valuable than the aggregate potential of our past life, even if we could control what portion of ourselves is sacrificed reliably enough to make good on the threat. That's a long shot in itself; we were warned not to expect "consistent or replicable results." Beyond that, if you need a cautionary tale about an adversarial relationship with a voice our head, look no further than the Terrascape...
 
Nonsense. Having powerful Artifact now means tons of immediate power. Playing Rihaku quests should have shown how such could be leveraged in long term gain.

Indeed, I'd be completely unsurprised if some sort of relic turns out to be one of choices.
 
Wolfy said:
Nonsense. Having powerful Artifact now means tons of immediate power. Playing Rihaku quests should have shown how such could be leveraged in long term gain.

Indeed, I'd be completely unsurprised if some sort of relic turns out to be one of choices.
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I'm fine with giving picking a relic a fair shake, if one is offered, but self-mutilation to create an Artifact that's strictly inferior to the benefits of letting Reincarnation play out is pointless. We'll have enough enemies without making one out of our (debatably) better half.
 
The consequences of Artifice aren't that bad until the Artifact is separated from its maker. If you keep all your Artifacts for personal use it's a rapid path to power.
 
Orm Embar said:
I'm fine with giving picking a relic a fair shake, if one is offered, but self-mutilation to create an Artifact that's strictly inferior to the benefits of letting Reincarnation play out is pointless. We'll have enough enemies without making one out of our (debatably) better half.
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Again, being stronger in longer term means nothing when you can actually invest short power, especially when we start changing powersets every three updates.

Synergy between ability that uses your soul as a fuel and one that bolsters your soul should be obvious. They are even complementary, one giving short term power while other naturally scales.
 
Rihaku said:
The consequences of Artifice aren't that bad until the Artifact is separated from its maker. If you keep all your Artifacts for personal use it's a rapid path to power.
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Looks like this maps pretty closely to what we see from the likes of Sauron and Fëanor. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye a ring. That does make Thrice-Great more appealing, though, if we can offset our initial weakness by crafting an Artifact and then recouping our losses with Cultivation down the road.
 
So, @Rihaku, if this Quest is cancelled, could you provide us a list of every curse you came up with for this Quest, please? Or, if such is already up, could you please direct me towards it?
 
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