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

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Deliste said:
I'm not against the deal entirely, I just want it made very clear that MAD is not enough and nor is an extra Dragon Egg or two.

As long as people are considering of the fact that the Iron Bank as an institution will progress in tandem with the power and scope of the entire Empire, keeping in mid that plans to keep territories of manageable size will ensure that the Iron Bank eclipses every one of them in time, then I am as happy as I can be.
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I think something needs to be clarified here, that I probably should have done last night. It would not be true MAD. The Central Bank could not realistically just up and decide to destroy you. It would require too many people to become abruptly suicidal. What it would do is guarantee that you could not drive the Keyholders and thus the Braavosi upper class into insignificance, the leverage the Sealord is proposing is much better at maintaining the status quo then actually forcing change, because if some faction of Keyholders looked insane enough to try and force you into torching everything, their fellows would depose them.
 
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You'd think we'd start to reclassify that thing as a whole cave system by this point.
 
@Duesal, I'll wait for her class's details, but in the end, if all it requires is putting some (alright, a lot) strain on the mind of the person we are trying to awaken...

Well, a single Research action by Naria with her crazy bonuses should do the thing and refine the process as much as possible.

And after that...
Well, we have memory loss, we have Heart Ease.
We can take this ritualistic way of awakening mages as yet another way to push those who didn't level on their own in Scholarum.

Again, please understand:
I'm not trying to say this class is in any way better than other mages.
Nor am I trying to push for it being used as a main way of awakening in Scholarum.

But at the end of the day, some mages of even a subpar class, are still fuckmothering mages.
You can never have too many of mages.

If introduced and refined, this process will net us a steady gain of mages without us losing any initiates from other classes.
As they'll be studying, awakening and leveling on their own.

This thing...
It's just fascinating.

If my thoughts are correct and this is WIS-based prepared caster class...
Then it will be pretty great an addition - not all the students with high WIS can/will turn out to be druids (whom we will be training in Scholarum soon as well, mind you).

And if it isn't wis-based...
Eh.
We can just introduce it as a "last resort" kind of thing, for awakening people studying at Scholarum without awakening for 9+ months.

Again, we can refine the process and deal with any aftereffects easy as pie.
 
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Also if you think about it real hard, there is no one else but the Braavosi upper-class who are more well aware of the fact that Viserys "started" with everything, lost everything, and "began" with nothing, and now is well on his way to having everything.

There is probably no one else on the entire Plane more capable of going back to square one and having nothing again, but this time with the magical powers of being a motherfucking dragon.

Let me clarify that a bit.

If Braavos' keyholders tanked the economy across the entire empire, they will be just as poor as the poorest people were before they did that, with the added addition that they now have to live in the cesspit of chaos they just unleashed on the world. Viserys would remain as much of a dragon as he was when he had a functioning economy. And for the well initiated, dragons are good at becoming wealthy. Qualitative advantages and all that. :V

That about right, @DragonParadox?
 
Crake said:
If Braavos' keyholders tanked the economy across the entire empire, they will be just as poor as the poorest people were before they did that, with the added addition that they now have to live in the cesspit of chaos they just unleashed on the world. Viserys would remain as much of a dragon as he was when he had a functioning economy. And for the well initiated, dragons are good at becoming wealthy. Qualitative advantages and all that.
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That 'live' part would be rather short. Yss needs fodder, after all. And ruining the whole economy ...
 
DragonParadox said:
I think something needs to be clarified here, that I probably should have done last night. It would not be true MAD. The Central Bank could not realistically just up and decide to destroy you. It would require too many people to become abruptly suicidal. What it would do is guarantee that you could not drive the Keyholders and thus the Braavosi upper class into insignificance, the leverage the Sealord is proposing is much better at maintaining the status quo then actually forcing change, because if some faction of Keyholders looked insane enough to try and force you into torching everything, their fellows would depose them.
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Worst case scenarios happen.

I don't care that they would all have to become suicidal, it's a non-zero chance of that group deciding the fates of untold Billions.

Anyway the full scope of my argument is across several posts but I will note that Braavosi upper class will become obsolete and it will take no deliberate action on our part.

Is that a scenario in which they would hold us hostage, when poor adaptation puts them in a less than stellar position?

What happens when the number of Keyholders who have nothing to lose outnumber the prosperous?
 
Deliste said:
Worst case scenarios happen.

I don't care that they would all have to become suicidal, it's a non-zero chance of that group deciding the fates of untold Billions.

Anyway the full scope of my argument is across several posts but I will note that Braavosi upper class will become obsolete and it will take no deliberate action on our part.

Is that a scenario in which they would hold us hostage, when poor adaptation puts them in a less than stellar position?

What happens when the number of Keyholders who have nothing to lose outnumber the prosperous?
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A Inquisition raid aimed at eradicating a dangerous group of dissidents that attempted to undermine the Empire and plunge it's citizens into poverty and chaos.

By the time the Keyholders have lost so much influence and power that they might think it a good move to slit their own throats to drown us in their blood, they are no longer too dangerous to remove.
 
Deliste said:
Worst case scenarios happen.

I don't care that they would all have to become suicidal, it's a non-zero chance of that group deciding the fates of untold Billions.

Anyway the full scope of my argument is across several posts but I will note that Braavosi upper class will become obsolete and it will take no deliberate action on our part.

Is that a scenario in which they would hold us hostage, when poor adaptation puts them in a less than stellar position?

What happens when the number of Keyholders who have nothing to lose outnumber the prosperous?
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And yet Viserys deciding the fates of untold billions is fine... What you seem to be arguing is that any check on Viserys' power is ultimately unacceptable because all other people can fall to Stupid Evil. Also I question the notion that 'nothing left to loose' will ever exist considering just how much Viserys can make people loose if he puts his mind to it.
 
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DP is saying that Viserys could basically order his engineers mages to invent something new for people to lose, just to take it away from them.
 
Azel said:
A Inquisition raid aimed at eradicating a dangerous group of dissidents that attempted to undermine the Empire and plunge it's citizens into poverty and chaos.

By the time the Keyholders have lost so much influence and power that they might think it a good move to slit their own throats to drown us in their blood, they are no longer too dangerous to remove.
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Oh, money can buy a lot of power...
Still, it can't make you resist DIPLOMANCY. Anyone stupid enough to fall to stupid evil will quickly fall to us instead.
This just means adding another few people to keep loyal and indoctrinated, forever. Ugh.

Crake said:
DP is saying that Viserys could basically order his engineers mages to invent something new for people to lose, just to take it away from them.
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We could also, you know, take their souls and torture them for all eternity. Things like that.
 
We outsource such menial work when it is required.

It is more productive to turn it into a battery or fertilizer.
 
DragonParadox said:
And yet Viserys deciding the fates of untold billions is fine... What you seem to be arguing is that any check on Viserys' power is ultimately unacceptable because all other people can fall to Stupid Evil.
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1. Yes, obviously. Of course I trust us more than others, if I didn't then I wouldn't take or vote for those actions.
Even when you trust someone else you first have to trust your own judgement in trusting them.
2. Not necessarily stupid evil, this is what I meant by your quote of me not covering everything.
As I said before there are things a level 6 Banker cannot think about, as in totally incapable on a Nat 20, let alone grasp the concept enough to make intelligent decisions.
Best case scenario it's a group of mundanes with ever increasing importance to the stability of the realm that require us to protect them to the extent a PC would be protected at a minimum when they have no PC capability to protect themselves.

This is a problem people had with Rhaella you will recall so it's not a new concept, but it is new that it's people we don't personally care about in the slightest, their only importance to us is the threat they pose by existing and potentially failing through their own fault or not.
 
The key there, where subversion or corruption are possibilities (memetic or otherwise) that you have to keep abreast of, is to create security measures and laws that structure things in such a way that a cult or terrorist organization somehow taking control of a key institution just shouldn't be possible (without getting caught before they can do serious harm).

And yes, in this case, it would be trivial to classify "deliberately attempting to crash the economy across two continents" as an act of terror.
 
@Deliste, the same holds true for any other subordinate of ours.

Giving Gerold command of our so far only Legion has given him quite tremendous leverage to screw us over.

Which is why I want some leverage in turn to steer the Iron Bank. This deal can work fine on mutual dependency, but it goes down in flames if our only recourse to settle disputes is the threat of force. You can destroy economies with armies, but not steer them.
 
If arresting them all would be possible without crashing the Empire then this is a very shitty control from their perspective, I very much doubt that what they have in mind doesn't involve intertwining themselves to prevent exactly that for the fear we would engineer a reason.
 
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