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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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Drop everything. All assignments. All extraneous mechanics.

It was a good run while it lasted, but pointless unless we have automation taking care of most of the fiddly bits.

I have no interest in fiddly bits anymore. I believe the majority of the thread who has an interest in mechanical discussion pretty much exclusively likes building character sheets or magic items and occasionally classes or Mythic Paths.

And that's it. No one cares about any of that other shit.

So we're going back to our roots. This is a D&D game from now on, with CK2 bolted on when we want to do something with our empire. Technically if everything turns on fire, I doubt any of us give much of a shit at this point. We're at the scale where unless they just kill Viserys and the Companions we're going to fix most things. Its a foregone conclusion at this point. We have too much control, too many resources and too much personal power for that to be in doubt.

Honestly, Azel raises a good point. It's more like this is a CK2 game, and maybe we shouldn't even bolt on D&D anymore?
 
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Azel said:
@DragonParadox, dungeon crawling will overshadow everything else yet again and we will be back to the situation where the realm means nothing since Viserys is busy gut punching gods all the time.
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Blergh... back to the old dichotomy and with no idea how to cut the knot. I'm kind of at a loss @Takesis since running any sort of adventures of Viserys and co pretty much has to mean punching gods and @Azel is right those to overshadow everything. Maybe if we spare the dungeon crawling for non-companions strictly. Would there he interest for that sort of low to mid level adventuring?
 
DragonParadox said:
Blergh... back to the old dichotomy and with no idea how to cut the knot. I'm kind of at a loss @Takesis since running any sort of adventures of Viserys and co pretty much has to mean punching gods and @Azel is right those to overshadow everything. Maybe if we spare the dungeon crawling for non-companions strictly. Would there he interest for that sort of low to mid level adventuring?
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Then there are no stakes, since they could at any point just call in the aerial artillery of a Dauntless or the magical artillery of a companion.

If you want to keep adventuring, then you can pretty much only run Viserys the Perfect Mary Sue Fixes the Universe.

And honestly, you will have to finally make a call on what this quest is supposed to be. It's been at least 3 years overdue.

Edit: A significant part of why I do not want to work further on my system overhaul is because it would firmly cement this as an empire builder quest and I'm not eager to get shat on for "pushing my agenda" again.
 
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@Goldfish, our finances are "YES".
I understand you are very close with the system, but we all gotta let go of some of those wekept up for years, if we want this quest to actually go somewhere from here.

@DragonParadox, if you really want to keep dungeon-crawling, just write up a 3-5k word-long after-action report about various PCs of ours putting out fires across the Imperium throughout the month.
With full assumptions that they get any reinforcements they need if failed, and that a Companion or two will join if situation turns really dire.

Frankly, beyond a full-on invasion by Illithids/Efreeti/Bloodstone Emps/Devils we aren't losing a character 'for good' with the sheer economy and amount of forces we have.
Ever.
So if there's no risk, why bother with adventuring beyond keeping it a footnote, something that'd tell us about the state of the world?
 
Punching Gods is fun and I like it. Making this a purely empire-building game is also not great because we've more or less won at that (apart from the wars we anticipate, and those will definitely involve God-punching). But I think that in general, CKII-style abstraction can work for most of the quest, with classic D&D mechanics returning for key social or combat encounters.

I think we need a mix of God-punching, Viserys going to highly dangerous places and talking to people (if the goal was just combat, it'd be a big deployment or an Inquisition action), institution and law stuff, and of course research actions for the big God-making project.
But we can definitely cut out most of the fetch quests, "Viserys visits a minor tribe", and "we send X baby PCs to raid a minor tomb". I mean DP can sprinkle some in as interludes if it starts fun stuff or interesting character moments or whatever, but there's no need to really plan for that or make it a big part of the quest.

EDIT: Maybe a turn or two of CKII-stuff to establish political + research groundwork, followed by a timeskip to the next war?
 
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DragonParadox said:
Blergh... back to the old dichotomy and with no idea how to cut the knot. I'm kind of at a loss @Takesis since running any sort of adventures of Viserys and co pretty much has to mean punching gods and @Azel is right those to overshadow everything. Maybe if we spare the dungeon crawling for non-companions strictly. Would there he interest for that sort of low to mid level adventuring?
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There are plenty of lower level adventure scenarios we can see every so often as a short interlude arc. We've got people at all levels of power, so it should be easy to place a group of level 5-7 folks in a suitable situation, such as an Inquisition investigation gone wrong, or some 7-9s clearing out an Undead infested barrow. Etc.
 
egoo said:
@Goldfish, our finances are "YES".
I understand you are very close with the system, but we all gotta let go of some of those wekept up for years, if we want this quest to actually go somewhere from here.
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Crafting isn't about the expense involved, and hasn't been for a long time. It's about time management for our available crafters. Expense is only relevant in that it determines how much work they can do each day.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'll finish my trimmed down sheet soon. It will be much simpler than the previous one.
 
@Goldfish, running any sheets at all is pretty much purely for your enjoyment at this point since nobody else interacts with that to any degree except pinging you.

However, it's one of those endless pits of details that @DragonParadox can not keep straight at all. It's a detriment at this point.
 
Azel said:
Then there are no stakes, since they could at any point just call in the aerial artillery of a Dauntless or the magical artillery of a companion.

If you want to keep adventuring, then you can pretty much only run Viserys the Perfect Mary Sue Fixes the Universe.

And honestly, you will have to finally make a call on what this quest is supposed to be. It's been at least 3 years overdue.
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Yeah we are kind of falling into that pit. Anything low level enough that you would not call in a companion means it would not mean that much to the realm and thus would be disjointed from the realm building parts of the quest. Damn it I'm kind of drowning here since I do like the D&D parts and would not sacrifice them utterly if I can. :(

But I cannot see how to give any of this stakes past the politics which cannot be solved with mythic magic alone and I really should not be putting this on your guys, it is my job as the GM and my fault we got in so deep.

Part of me wonders if I should just spin off another quest for the adventurer stuff but I do not want to splinter the community, there aren't that many of us left anyway.
 
At this point I just want us to move somewhere, so I retract all my opposition to this being pure empire-building with slight fluff. I expressed such at some point years ago.
Viserys Wins.
It's a fact.

And it's a-okay to do an arc of "Godpunching" when we face off agaisnt the 15th or the Brass Ballsack, but everything beneath that is rather irrelevant by this point.

There is no relevance to any on-screen adventures of lower-level characters.
They'd always get support if they find themselves failing, and overwhelming support in face of Companion-grade assets at that.
So why bother making long-winded shows of them, if they are of no consequence, again?


Azel said:
@Goldfish, running any sheets at all is pretty much purely for your enjoyment at this point since nobody else interacts with that to any degree except pinging you.

However, it's one of those endless pits of details that @DragonParadox can not keep straight at all. It's a detriment at this point.
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Pretty much this, @Goldfish.
I mean no offence with this, but my systems (research, MAs, tracking Inquisition assets) are exactly the same shit and I'm dropping those to make the quest less cumbersome for everyone involved.
 
Goldfish said:
Crafting isn't about the expense involved, and hasn't been for a long time. It's about time management for our available crafters. Expense is only relevant in that it determines how much work they can do each day.

Like I mentioned earlier, I'll finish my trimmed down sheet soon. It will be much simpler than the previous one.
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The thing is I do not and cannot keep track of crafting, it does not feel meaningful and without the attached systems who would you even craft for? a lot of those people as individuals are about to be abstracted away.
 
Look, @DragonParadox. The core problem is that we can't keep Frankensteins Arts & Crafts Project shambling along much longer.

The quest has tremendous balance issues, is narratively completely unfocused, has no overarching story I can decipher at this point, and half the time we are just going through the motions of something.

Something has to give. Something has to go.

Edit: And we both know I've said that to you two years ago already and predicted that it would get worse, with more mechanical snarl, more balance issues and ever less stakes.
 
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God punching is exactly what we need to do on three of those dungeons I brought up, you know? And who knows what's inside Yeen?

Also, isn't this the point of assigning all those people around? So that we can do stuff that matters to the world entire?

egoo said:
So why bother making long-winded shows of them, if they are of no consequence, again?
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Because it's fun to some of us, and not all this governing and reports stuff.

It's fun when we dived into the swamps to hunt a demon, to Lys to hunt a vampire, the conquest of the Stepstones, the hunts across the planes of existence.

The godhunting and the pokemon looting. That's fun.

Making it all reports and doing away with it completely to govern turns it into work.
 
Also, why do we need opponents to be balanced against us? If we roll over them, so what? If the journey we went through to get to them is fun enough, does it matter if the outcome is inevitable?
 
Azel said:
Look, @DragonParadox. The core problem is that we can't keep Frankensteins Arts & Crafts Project shambling along much longer.

The quest has tremendous balance issues, is narratively completely unfocused, has no overarching story I can decipher at this point, and half the time we are just going through the motions of something.

Something has to give. Something has to go.
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A lot of things have to go, believe me I know that and it makes me sad, but I am determined to salvage something

Takesis said:
God punching is exactly what we need to do on three of those dungeons I brought up, you know? And who knows what's inside Yeen?

Also, isn't this the point of assigning all those people around? So that we can do stuff that matters to the world entire?



Because it's fun to some of us, and not all this governing and reports stuff.

It's fun when we dived into the swamps to hunt a demon, to Lys to hunt a vampire, the conquest of the Stepstones, the hunts across the planes of existence.

The godhunting and the pokemon looting. That's fun.

Making it all reports and doing away with it completely to govern turns it into work.
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The trouble with this is Ok, let me put this in comparison. Do you know how long it took me to design the first encounter for this quest? The first proper one, the fire elemental whose name I cannot quite recall? That was a few minutes of looking up a source book, now to make a Companion grade encounter takes me months or even days, it takes @Artemis1992 less thank heavens or we would not get any at all, but still that is a lot of work that can all go to dust in one roll of a 1d20 turning it into a turtle or a bottle.
 
Takesis said:
God punching is exactly what we need to do on three of those dungeons I brought up, you know? And who knows what's inside Yeen?

Also, isn't this the point of assigning all those people around? So that we can do stuff that matters to the world entire?



Because it's fun to some of us, and not all this governing and reports stuff.

It's fun when we dived into the swamps to hunt a demon, to Lys to hunt a vampire, the conquest of the Stepstones, the hunts across the planes of existence.

The godhunting and the pokemon looting. That's fun.

Making it all reports and doing away with it completely to govern turns it into work.
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That's the entire problem. The quest was never allowed to grow from that. Instead it just added power level upon power level and the whole internal logic of the world got stretched to the breaking as the Holy Adventuring needed to be the focus and everything else had to awkwardly shuffle around that and the ever bigger numbers demanded by some.
Takesis said:
Also, why do we need opponents to be balanced against us? If we roll over them, so what? If the journey we went through to get to them is fun enough, does it matter if the outcome is inevitable?
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Because I for one take zero enjoyment from seeing Viserys effortlessly roflstomping everything around him.
 
@Takesis, I can sympathize with not giving a damn about governing issues.
I've not read a single chapter since the Yin delegation departing, just cannot force myself to care enough.

But the fact is, doing dungeoneering on-screen would bog us down again.

Azel is quite on-point with us having no direction.

The only "godpunching" that has any semblance of narrative importance are Efreeti (much later), Valyria (relatively soon), Illithids (???), and the Long Night.

Everything else...
Pretty much irrelevant narratively?
Sure, I'd like to delve in jungles of Sothoryos again.
And loot the Forge of unnamed God in seas of PoF.
And many other things. Llolth, Sseth, Hex-dragons, Coatls, you name it.

But they are beneath us in the narrative, like, objectively so, we can't do them without it coming out of nowhere and being a mindless roflstomp.
 
Takesis said:
Also, why do we need opponents to be balanced against us? If we roll over them, so what? If the journey we went through to get to them is fun enough, does it matter if the outcome is inevitable?
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Because I like to think this is a game and the point of a game is that you can lose, or at least could face setbacks. I have to keep some sense of narrative tension to all this. I had and still have such plans and yes some of them are god punching, but we need to get though the years from now to winter somehow.
 
Azel said:
@Goldfish, running any sheets at all is pretty much purely for your enjoyment at this point since nobody else interacts with that to any degree except pinging you.
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egoo said:
retty much this, @Goldfish.
I mean no offence with this, but my systems (research, MAs, tracking Inquisition assets) are exactly the same shit and I'm dropping those to make the quest less cumbersome for everyone involved.
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DragonParadox said:
The thing is I do not and cannot keep track of crafting, it does not feel meaningful and without the attached systems who would you even craft for? a lot of those people as individuals are about to be abstracted away.
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Okay, I'll miss that aspect of the quest, but I can deal.
 
I mean, one of the biggest issues I have is how we blazed through so much research and military R&D in a few months of actual time. That's pretty much the result of needing these things for there to be any semblance of relevance to the Legion and the realm at large. And doing these things in a realistic timeframe of actual years was entirely infeasible with the speed of the quest slowing to a complete halt due to thread ADHD and nanomagement of everything.

It's been less than an IC year since the first Wyvern flew. Which took 3 months or so of R&D.
 
Takesis said:
Because it's fun to some of us, and not all this governing and reports stuff.

It's fun when we dived into the swamps to hunt a demon, to Lys to hunt a vampire, the conquest of the Stepstones, the hunts across the planes of existence.

The godhunting and the pokemon looting. That's fun.
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It was fun, but now it's all been there done that.

@DragonParadox
I agree that it is propably time to let the D&D part die. It was fun making charsheets and for my own enjoyment at least I hope a few of them might be useful in defining the narrative characters they would become (though most will certainly fall below abstraction).

But despite that, I don't think we should bother with them anymore. Fights below Viserys size are not relevant and fights at Viserys size turn into a game that Goldfish has won each of the many dozen times he played it, with no reasonable chance of that changing.
 
I think the ruling for CK2 type games on this site is that there is only ever as much numbercrunch and biggatons as the DM can personally manage.

If DP's quotient for that is pretty small, the quest's carryon bag for all its baggage should be very small too.
 
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