Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
Scion: "But that's the entire point of the cycle! I want Surprise Doom Lasers damn it!"
Auto: "Don't we all?"
Alchemical Solutions [Worm/Exalted] Thread 18: Ravaging Rapscallions Rapidly Regret Regular Rampages
- Thread starter Gromweld
- Start date
Auto: "Don't we all?"
Don't argue too hard, unless you want to run the risk of the S9 gaining access to Surprise Doom Lasers.
Thought so.
If your teenage brother has to beat the ever living shit out of one of your mother's boyfriends to protect you?
That home is probably a warzone.
And that's before you talk about shit like her jacking ABB motorbikes....
No, you're getting me wrong.
I have no problem with a Starmetal/Orichalcum Moebot; I just thought that most of the social charms would be more spread out than it appears will be the case.
I was under the impression, for example, that the Fun Spike tree probably would end up with the Investigator/Infiltrator archetype, ie our Moonsilver.
But if we're running with limited charm slots by age/experience, that means that it has to go to someone older.
This affects the possible candidates we consider for both Orichalcum and Starmetal.
EDIT Specifically, Miss M just made it back into Tier 1.
Armsmaster with Thousand Courtesans, anyone?
Aww.
Doom Lasers are always cool.
Vista: "But I wanted my Death Star moment!"
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- Location
- Underground
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@Gromweld
This also means that a hypothetical Twins Alchemical would come with below average charm slots; refugees, but not unhappy.
Ditto Gallant, who while he has combat experience, lacks the XP that pre-existing trauma would grant him as a Cauldron cape.
I suspect the same would be true of Clockie and Kid Win.
Kinzey would have near-max slots though; two home attacks and triggering as a child in the middle of one of them?
Mundo XP.
Jack would probably have the most XP of anyone short of Eidolon.
This also means that a hypothetical Twins Alchemical would come with below average charm slots; refugees, but not unhappy.
Ditto Gallant, who while he has combat experience, lacks the XP that pre-existing trauma would grant him as a Cauldron cape.
I suspect the same would be true of Clockie and Kid Win.
Kinzey would have near-max slots though; two home attacks and triggering as a child in the middle of one of them?
Mundo XP.
Jack would probably have the most XP of anyone short of Eidolon.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
The flip side of this is that if he's a natural trigger it means we'd run headlong into the POD PEOPLE problem - the fact that his trigger gave him a power that explicitly tells him what other people are feeling is strongly indicative of him being shit in the social department. His canon showings (like how he handled Missy's and Amy's feelings (hint: he didn't)) back up this hypothesis.
You missed something.
Gallant's Interlude:
Gromweld
Learning By Mistake
To make it so that there is some balance between all candidates, no matter their experience level, people with less-than-average experience at 'character generation' will have side bonuses to ameliorate the difference. Not going to spoil what they are, of course, but they aren't just dots on their sheet(s).
Pick characters you want to see more of in the story, not ones to min-max power/xp-wise.
As alluded to in his recent Interlude, Dean is an artificial trigger like Triumph. However, Cauldron vials still obey the normal Worm rule: powers don't solve problems. Dean is kinda shitty when it comes to fully grasping the intricacies of social cues, as 90% of his problems were generally "first-world problems" before our story picked up, and he never had the need (or drive) to fully stretch his powers and the mundane skills behind them.
This is not to say that he can't be made to be suitably heroic in time for our 3-month deadline, but it won't be easy to do so if we choose that route.
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Accord Moe-bot!Starmetal.
I am now tempted to go back and remove the specific mention of less than Adonis like features from my Omake and then write a follow up where EPAHF seduces everyone due the changes to his shards behavior modifications.
- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
??? He handled Missy's feelings fine since what was he supposed to do? Missy's mature enough not to let something like that get in the way of their jobs, as for Amy he did pretty well by NOT lying to her face about the possibility of her going villain (showing her that she's not some super unique evil person but that she's just like everyone else so she shouldn't be worrying about that stuff) and as for the other stuff well read the Ward's interlude and Bonesaw's S9 interlude
Note how he never says just what KIND of strong feelings he senses (since I doubt Amy would appreciate the possibility of accidentally having her subscriptions aired to everyone), in retrospect he might actually have known about her feelings and was trying to address them delicately (we DO have WOG on him actually helping Amy with her issues and him dying along with half her family is what accelerated her downward spiral from years/decades to a few weeks).
What do you mean, half her family? Shielder and Manpower were the only members of New Wave that Leviathan killed in canon.
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- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
Well PRACTICALLY half her family, her dad also got brain damage and turned into a vegetable as well even if he's still alive.
Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
That doesn't really jive with what we learn in Vista's Interlude, mainly that he was the one who kept the team together, handled Sophia, and was good friends with Missy.
He's not Lisa in that he actively uses his power to manipulate people (that we see), but more like Taylor, the heart of the team.
- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
Well maybe he could be good at being the "heart of the team" by just being a nice guy who's there for people AND be bad at social stuff so he isn't good at doing much more than be a good friend? That could be why we don't see him actively use it to manipulate people.
Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
Probably.
We don't see enough about him before he's killed, other than that he kept the team together and handled Sophia.
dpara
slightly confused ascendant
Nooooo *sniff,.. my ultimate grill party, though she can still do "Throwing pebbles landing boulders" right?
That's fair enough for most candidates.
Doesn't really work for the Moebot though, because age and experience determines availability of at least one charm and the space to install it.
Thousand Courtesans is not going to be available for anyone under 17(for good reason), and the Fun Spike Tree is going to require slots to install.
Making it more attractive for an older/more experienced candidate.
Hence either our Starmetal or Ori is going to have to take the role, which as I said, shrinks the pool of possible candidates.
This doesn't seem to be the case in canon though.
It's apparently pretty clear IIRC in Vista's Interlude that he was the soul of the BB Wards, handling both Sophia and Dennis with equal facility, and Vista's crush with grace and consideration.
Do remember that he dated an uncontrolled projective empath without somehow becoming a doormat; the fact that they broke up multiple times before getting back together supports this.
I mean, he may not have intervened more actively with Amy, but that just makes him human.
Averse to intrude into other people's families.
And 17.
And I will aver that he handled Vista's crush appropriately; most crushes fade with time, and do not require intervention unless the crusher starts pulling a Penny.
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- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
Unless she ALSO warped space around the compacted continents to deflect enough light/heat away to not kill people or it could be part of her Manton limit to not kill herself or something.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
My point was that it was not shown that he did something about it. Someone with excellent social skills and his empathy power would have been able to handle those delicate situations.
We were not shown this. We were instead shown Dean not doing anything, which in Amy's case meant leaving a very nasty issue to fester.
The point is not that Dean is a horrible terrible person. The point is that Dean is not naturally a people person which means that selecting him to be our Face will necessitate Autochthon dumping 10+ dots of social abilities on him. Seeing as how social abilities are what you use to interact with others, people are going to notice that Dean is acting differently. He makes different, more elegant word choices. His mannerisms are off. Different, more controlled body language.
This actually disqualifies Vista as well, as while she's personable I don't really think of her as being a really inspirational person the way that I do Chevalier, Miss Militia, or Legend.
Meh, just think of her as being able to alter distance. She doesn't compress/expand space in the sense of making it more/less dense, she just makes it so you have a shorter/farther path. Don't worry about the fiddly bits, that way lies madness.
- Location
- Fabulously Rainbow Ireland
But Spacewarping is COOLER! Besides Bakuda wouldn't have been able to make spacewarping grenades by studying Vista's power if she just changed distance would she? Edit: Maybe she could make a Stretch armstrong or silly putty grenade instead?
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It's part of her Manton limit, we know that from the Noelle made PsychoVistas. Her shard itself is making corrections to avoid twisting people into horribly deformed and very dead pretzels.
One of them can warp space in a way that cause objects to undergo some kind of exotic fusion reaction producing a radioactive burst. Probably just smooshed all the atoms in the space together by reducing the distance between their subatomic particles without reducing the size of the particles.
Come to think of it, Vista is one of the best specimens to know what their shard actually does compared to what their manifestation of the shard does.
ω₁
The Long Count
This is an excellent way of phrasing it, as it makes it very clear on an intuitive level why Vista can't do this. (I've always seen her as limited to homeomorphic transformations.)
... except that this observation shoots all the ideas I had about Vista's power out of the water. (You could impose a simple symmetry law that prevents her from increasing the areal density of lightlike geodesics passing through the distortion... but not only would doing that within a warp still be possible, I don't see how she could avoid doing it.)
Grom, what is your take on Vista's canon powers? What would an observer standing below a continent-sized shortcut see when looking up at the sky, and likewise, what would someone traversing that same shortcut see when looking up?
(I suspect Bellisario's Maxim is going to apply. Sometimes you just have to do that, though.)
dpara
slightly confused ascendant
Yeah Vistas power is just ..hard (and hella fun xD)
What if? Vista makes a window larger, now someone wedges a steel girder in it, then she removes her power.
-the girder shrinks permanently?
-the girder destroys the window?
-a headache?
Either she can create/destroy mass or "spacebendness" is a property one can move around with an object (ever inhaled an olympic swiming pool of air with one breath?)