Legitimate question: have I done that enough to earn that reputation now? If not, just keep in mind that when fecal matter hits oscillation devices it's not entirely unreasonable. If so... well, shit.
Kinda sorta. It's a love-hate relationship, because while there's stuff that you just absolutely, perfectly nail (like EOA's
meditation on Clarity, which I still contend is the most awesome thing you've written this whole quest (and you're written plenty of awesome things, BTW)), there's other stuff that from my perspective as a player just feels like dick moves.
Things like Clarity during the Behemoth fight, which was widely detested for its execution. [edited for less exaggerated rhetoric]
Or here, where, given the choice between two valid information sources, you choose to go not for the easily-tortured squishy mortal with access to a whole bunch of classified documents, no, you choose to have our Familiar stab us in the back.
Or things like, despite how you might justify it within the narrative itself, FPoP conveniently ends the update mote-tapped and below 50% WP thus effectively killing in the cradle any attempts by the player to immediately turn around and go after the Nine.
I know it seems like most of what I do is complaining, but it's a labor of love. I bitch because I care. I wouldn't be here unless you were doing things (mostly) right, if this wasn't an awesome story about bullshit magical-girl commie robots with one member of the (recently revealed, and good job at laying the groundwork BTW, it was almost subliminal because while I didn't notice it coming up it made perfect sense in retrospect) OTP battle couple rocket surfing the other through the eye of a metal tornado.
Fair enough, since PTA does not explicitly declare that you must move at full speed all the time. I'll just take the 'you auto-take Terminal Velocity damage' part of the sub-mod as saying that the charm flips out when you hit an errant object and grinds you into it before cutting out. (Which calls to mind Sinestro during the end fights of The Incredibles.)
I do believe that we are talking past each other. I am not saying that Marrow has absolute, perfect control over her momentum at all times. Going full bore in combat or in flight mode does not mean that she can easily stop on a dime (assuming we're talking about the combat burst, she's a six hundred pound object going at a little more than
100mph), she gets those fun Dex + Athletics rolls if she wants to actually do fine maneuvering. But she can also use her thrusters to emergency brake (which is a Dex + Athletics check (although not a hard one since it's just applying thrust in the opposite direction instead of trying to avoid objects while going at breakneck speeds)), do insane 90 and 180 degree turns (also Dex + Athletics checks) and she can choose not to as fast as full-out.
Of course this bring up the question of why you'd choose not to go as fast as possible in combat, but the point here is that the charm user is
in control. So mostly my rejection is focused on flight mode because, seriously, how lame is it if she can't use it to do basic things like hover in the air (just enough thrust to stay in position) or match speeds with her friends?
Mass-Penetrating Scan costs 1 mote of essence, is for only ~5 seconds, and is limited to 9 total feet of matter you can penetrate. It's really good for when you've got something narrowed down, but simply spamming will not find you everything in a range as large as Philadelphia+Camden+outlying areas.
3 yards of total obstruction is a lot, particularly when combined with Ultraperipheral Awareness, Telescopic Lens, Microscopic Lens, and IEU. The amount of sensory data that she can process is really quite astounding. Take at the bare minimum, these charms/submodules combined allow her to focus on six separate targets at once in a 360 circle around her which can be a mile away from her even if they're obscured by 9 feet of solid matter all while still getting 2 autosux to pick out details from those targets.
It won't let us scan downtown Philly in one go, no, but it's really quite good at narrowing things down when we've already got a lead on their location and are actively tracking the Nine.
Also worth noting is that Iris is not 'leaking' Essence (since he's not using any), so there isn't an easy trail to follow that way. Still, we have a shit-ton of dice and auto-successes for tracking things down, so it's going to happen eventually.
Figured as much. Can't leak Essence if you're not using it.
I assume that this means that Taylor won't light up like a christmas tree when the link gets reestablished for similar reasons - she isn't spending the motes, they're getting transferred to Iris (mechanical evidence to support this assumption: Essence Lending Method, 2nd Ed Core pg 217, "this transfer does not count as spending motes for the purposes of anima banner flare.").
Also, people haven't answered my question, so I'll just make it an easy (no Stunts or write-ins!) vote:
[ ] Pay for Hover Throne and you folk get to stat it.
[ ] Free Hover Throne, but I stat it.
Artifact 2, similar to our armor but not quite so ridiculous. There is also the potential to upgrade/augment/give to Iris afterwards, but that requires time.
[X] Free Hover Throne, but I stat it.
I don't even want to deal with stating this at the moment. Not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Have you... seen how much XP we generate? Taylor has, as of me writing this, 329 XP on her sheet, and that's after the absurd amount of XP she effectively has because of all the sub-modules. Just as well, Marrow has her own XP pool that doesn't interfere with Taylor's, so I wouldn't be too worried about it - it's almost like we'll have to work to make Marrow even more ridiculously overpowered than she currently is! AND AGAIN, we could not gain a single point of XP from here until the end of the quest and still be able to 'win', so I wouldn't worry too much about having too many good ways to spend XP.
Personally, I wouldn't respond to the accusation of creating an XP sink with, "sure it's an XP sink but that doesn't matter because look at all these XPs!" but maybe that's just me. I'd rather be able to expand out into other areas, or have the default assumption for FPoP's shard creation ability start out at "adequate" so that we have to make a choice between becoming even better at something we're already good at or branching out.
Because part of the problem is that right now Marrow isn't very good at all crafting her shards into useful things. Having to reform shields constantly because they keep breaking doesn't make me feel like she's awesome, it makes me feel like she needs to get her shit together and figure out how to use something that she should already know how to use. It's the same reason why I don't like having to meditate or experiment with powers before we can effectively use them: it's a tollbooth telling players, "you must pay X before you can have fun." Yes, Autobot screwed up, narratively you've justified it. But Autochthon's other themes include Superlative Genius, Succeeding Too Well, and Transcending Barriers. There are other ways to get players to vote to spend time and XP meditating, experimenting with powers, and raising abilities - motivate them to do so because it lets them be even more awesome, not because they need to get shit fixed before they can have fun.
I'm saying that coming up with ways to stop us from simply finding them like that is trivial, and the narrative is very clear but I don't feel like banging my head against this particular brick wall. So instead, I'm offering to gamble, because that's how confident I am. No argument in the thread, one of us simply gets to say "I told you so".
So..."I don't have any evidence to support my position, but I'm going to insist that I'm right anyway."
Tracking things is something that we're actually very good at. Either supply evidence (and no, "because narrative" is not evidence, it's an assertion) about why we'd fail to do something that happens to be within our areas of expertise or concede.
Spacewhalehax bullshit says you can't.
That's not how this works, Klaus.
Bullshit magic is shorthand for actual mechanical data that I can and have laid out in previous posts for why Taylor can accomplish seemingly impossible things. Tasks that are Difficulty 4 are classified as being, "Nearly Impossible" (Exalted 2nd Ed core, pg. 120) and Taylor achieves that
without even trying. Getting 6+ success means that you can succeed in seemingly impossible things, like finding flaws in supposedly flawless devices.
Spacewhalehax bullshit is shorthand for what, exactly? Wildbow wasn't (understandably) kind enough to translate Worm to Exalted mechanics but that doesn't mean that you couldn't at least try to argue in good faith by supplying examples from canon about how, given the opportunity, no-one could disarm Bakuda's bombs.
