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Age of Strife

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Powerofmind said:
@Nix so you're implying there is absolutely no upside to the diplomacy option, then? If nobody can create an argument favoring it, why was it even presented as a choice? AN isn't so arbitrary as to give us an inherently inferior choice for kicks.
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We've been given them before, when there have been drivers for the character to make bad choices that we need to save them from.

Some options are just strictly sub-optimal, or even actively harmful, as voting for Dia to extra-judicially execute captured saboteurs probably would have been.

This may be one of them, with all it doing is exposing Mirande to a substantial risk of death for no benefits.
 
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racnor said:
We just unleashed a grand and terrifying display of fate manipulation beyond the power of many human psykers a few updates ago, then read his mind and used advanced future telling while in close proximity to him. I don;t think this is an issue.
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None of that had a directly observable effect he attributed to us, though. Mind control or being so impossibly good at convincing people that it looks like mind control gives him something specific to think about.
 
Nix said:
Mirande could roll a freakishly high crit and gain a base dip point I suppose. Or we might gain intel on the biomancer and his followers (also unlikely).
AN does sometimes offer substantially inferior options with essentially no upside, yes. Think of the economic sabotage.
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The economic sabotage would've been perfectly fine if not mishandled. It WAS working up until the change in direction. Instead of redirecting the efforts of it onto the hardliners and risking a failed roll, we (well I wasn't here at the time, so not exactly we) should have just cut the red tape to opening the fallout cellar and leaked the fact that the 504 leadership was planning to move. Maybe even leveled a formal accusation on their attempt to assassinate Dia the day after making first contact with Greengraft.

Basically no check required to do any of that, it would've guaranteed a civil war, which would've been a perfect excuse to stage a military intervention.

There are always options. Sometimes one is objectively better than the other, but very rarely is an option just flat out bad. (In fact going to the above, putting red tape on the 504s opening that floor-door seemed like an objectively bad decision at the time, but if we HAD cut the red tape at the moment it would create the most conflict, it would've turned out to be beneficial).
 
racnor said:
To be fair, our diplomacy mod IS higher than Mag's initial martial mod(121-whatever the wound effect is going to be)
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He may well have an easier DC though, and the consequences if him failing are pretty minimal compared to the consequences of Mirande doing so.

It seems much easier to sneak into a settlement than for a wounded and vulnerable attractive young woman to persuade a bunch of bandits to give her charity.
 
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Nix said:
Mirande could roll a freakishly high crit and gain a base dip point I suppose. Or we might gain intel on the biomancer and his followers (also unlikely).
AN does sometimes offer substantially inferior options with essentially no upside, yes. Think of the economic sabotage.
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The Laurent said:
And it's probably a slight salve to her conscious if it succeeds.
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Powerofmind said:
@Nix so you're implying there is absolutely no upside to the diplomacy option, then? If nobody can create an argument favoring it, why was it even presented as a choice? AN isn't so arbitrary as to give us an inherently inferior choice for kicks.
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Bull. There is a bunch of possible advantages, depending on the people in the settlement.

They could have stopped raiding, and Max has bad intel.

They might be looking for a new home, and we can give them the way.

There may be a Psyker amongst them, who can/will interceded on our behalf.

That's all without really good rolls, just off the top of my head.
 
Nix said:
AN later specifically told us that there was never any chance of the economic sabotage doing what were trying to achieve.
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I don't think it would've on it's own. I'm saying that we should have used it as a foundation to launch our other actions. I just read that part of the story in an archive binge and not all the surrounding posts, but I suspect that leaking the information about the 504's plans to move and opening up access to the cellar (which they'd burned political capital with their people over) would've been enough to push them over the edge in a less regimented way than they went, giving Dia an excuse to march in and lock it all down.
 
Ekans Ekans Ekans said:
I don't think it would've on it's own. I'm saying that we should have used it as a foundation to launch our other actions. I just read that part of the story in an archive binge and not all the surrounding posts, but I suspect that leaking the information about the 504's plans to move and opening up access to the cellar (which they'd burned political capital with their people over) would've been enough to push them over the edge in a less regimented way than they went, giving Dia an excuse to march in and lock it all down.
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Even if that was the case it doesn't change that AN deliberately presented us with an option that wasn't expected to have any upside at all, just because it was a possible thing to try. Imagining possible upsides to that option if used very differently doesn't change the fact that AN is willing to give us options without expecting any possible upsides, so we can't deduce their existence from the fact that an option was offered.
 
Simonbob said:
Bull. There is a bunch of possible advantages, depending on the people in the settlement.

They could have stopped raiding, and Max has bad intel.

They might be looking for a new home, and we can give them the way.

There may be a Psyker amongst them, who can/will interceded on our behalf.

That's all without really good rolls, just off the top of my head.
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Do we have any evidence to believe any of these are the case though? We have evidence that they're false, given that Mag ran their barricade.

We can't just rely on wishful thinking to rescue us. We have to work with the information we have and not rely on deus ex machina to rescue us from dangerous situations we put ourselves in.

All the possible upsides mentioned are also still available if Mag succeeds at his plan and we come back later when we're not so vulnerable. They're not things we need to do now.
 
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Simonbob said:
Bull. There is a bunch of possible advantages, depending on the people in the settlement.

They could have stopped raiding, and Max has bad intel.

They might be looking for a new home, and we can give them the way.

There may be a Psyker amongst them, who can/will interceded on our behalf.

That's all without really good rolls, just off the top of my head.
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Maybe Mag stumbles across an intact data crystal with a complete pre-fall database while going through their stuff.

Maybe the biomancer has already secretly taken over this settlement and we end up dealing him a serious blow somehow.

Maybe Mag conveniently ends up just injured enough to die shortly after he gets back to the car and we need not worry about him anymore.

Maybe Mag rescues a young psyker from slavery and we can convince him to let us take care of him when we part.

It's always possible to imagine random near unrelated good things to happen from a particular option if you really try. That doesn't mean imagining such consequences is a worthwhile thing to do or a valid argument for picking that option.
 
absolutely no upside to the diplomacy option, then?

There are possible upsides. That's a fact. We don't know what they are, but they exist.

I voted the way I did, because of a number of reasons, one of them is those possibilitys.
 
No known or reasonably predictable upside. We can always be randomly given mana from heaven whatever we do, it doesn't provide a useful discriminating factor between options.

Except that we have to be able to use said mana from heaven, so that actually makes the options that maximise the chances of keeping Mirande alive more valuable.
 
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Nix said:
None anywhere near worth the considerable risk we'd take on, as far as I can see.

We specifically don't know that. Options without possible upsides (that the QM is aware of) are a thing in this quest.
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Ok, we're dissagreeing on the level of risk, that's fine.

As for possible upsides? AN is aware of the general up/downsides, but that's no argument for us. We decide off what we know.

If there are no possible upsides, that's not something we know.

I'm working off the assumption that there are, of a whole lot that have popped into my head. So, with morals in the background, I'm voting to take the risk.

Do you have anything different to say? Anything new? If not, I'm really only saying the same stuff that has been said before. So, we can continue, but, is there a point to further debate?

Why don't we wait to see what's what, and who's right?
 
Simonbob said:
There are possible upsides. That's a fact. We don't know what they are, but they exist.
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The GM has never shied away from giving us options with NO possible upsides.

Simonbob said:
I'm working off the assumption that there are, of a whole lot that have popped into my head. So, with morals in the background, I'm voting to take the risk.
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They amount to very convenient flights of fancy though. You're not working within a frame work of what information we already have. You're basically going it would be wonderful if XYZ were to happen and therefore this is a possibility.
 
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Given the critical importance of keeping Mirande alive, as succeeding at the quest will make the Dark Eldar leave for a thousand years, saving countless lives, an argument that taking a substantial risk with her life like this is moral is rather odd. I'd actually say it's immoral. If you add that she's pretty much our hope for a stable psyker tradition and for ever having a hope of dealing with the mutant problem, then it just becomes much more clear how wrong it is to casually do this. There's probably never been a person in all of human history that's been as important to Earth's population as Mirande is to Dandriss.

This is compounded by the fact that these are bandits and we've no reason to believe that us negotiating makes it less likely that Mag will massacre them, so it may well not even have any effect on the range of outcomes for this settlement.
 
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Alert: Alert
  • Staff Post
    • alert Guys, this argument has been going on for 10+ pages and the better part of a week, and as far as I can tell it seems to be going in circles. If you've already said your piece - especially if you've already said it multiple times - stop saying it and let the matter stand.
     
  • Staff Post
    • So, just sit down and let the vote run it's course then? It still looks like this could go in either direction at the drop of a hat, and SSS, Nix, and Alatran have all made good points. With current information, most of the diplomatic choices look like a gut reaction or an attempt to avoid a moral event horizon, the pragmatic upper hand going to letting Mag sneak in.

    I suppose I didn't particularly have my heart in a lot of my recent arguments, and even my final refutation I was working on doesn't really have the kind of punch necessary to really sway any opinions. It does logically appear to be the safer choice, and though I still doubt AN would deliberately give us dud votes, it will not be impossible to kill Mag later if we let him get a new meat-shield.

    [X] Let him do things his way (0.9x)
     
    current winner is it's a tie!!!

    let mags handle it is at: 36 after vote weighing

    try to barter with the raider is at: 36 after vote weighing

    Vote tally:
    ##### 3.21
    [X] Convince him to let you try to handle this nonviolently (1.2x)
    No. of votes: 30
    Strypgia, oilworker, Slamu, Simonbob, Thrice-Blessed22, veekie, Delcer, Akritedes, Ridiculously Average Guy, Apalos, markksim, sesbio, wingstrike96, Arkhan, SometimesMaybe, Bozwevial, banelord, remulian, butchock, skaro, Chronic, NegativeHorizon, Gore17, redzonejoe, Antumbra, mc2rpg, piebox, lordchaos99, Eri, tinkerbell

    [X] Let him do things his way (0.9x)
    No. of votes: 40
    Hangwind, tenchifew, dragon, Wirdo, RulerOfNothing, The Laurent, SuperSonicSound, drake_azathoth, buytbuyt, Da Boyz, trewsad55, racnor, Nix, Forgothrax, Ekans Ekans Ekans, Alanek, kitsune9, Khaos, Raron, AZATHOTHoth, Faintrosity, George, Decim, GamingGeek, Seventeen, Garlak, Holocene, Fumbles, KlavoHunter, Sarpedon, Odysseus2099, Alratan, vel10, PrimalShadow, Arbit, Algalon, Qazplm, Nianque, 1234q1234q, Powerofmind
     
    [shonen protagonist]T-t-t-t-tie Breaker![/shonen protagonist]

    [X] Convince him to let you try to handle this nonviolently (1.2x)
     
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