Remove ads

Alchemical Solutions [Worm/Exalted] Thread 9: Icon’s Idiosyncrasies Incite Irritating Inquisition

1986ctcel said:
Compassiononly demands we TRY to help so we could have shot at or attempt to distract Behemoth which could have also fulfilled Valor demanding we accept his challenge and then fly off with him chasing us (don't know it that would have worked but just an idea on how to fulfill both Virtues).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
At the time merely distracting him was no longer working very well, and we didn't have a tinkertech rifle that early in the battle.
 
landcollector said:
At the time merely distracting him was no longer working very well, and we didn't have a tinkertech rifle that early in the battle.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
IIRC All compassion demands is that we ATTEMPT even if it fails it won't matter.
 
wingnut2292 said:
But the last time we did that, we blew through a full day with an explanation of [paraphrase] Auk-kun goofed [/paraphrase]. A day where we had important things planned.

I'd say it's a case of once bitten, twice shy. How can we trust Auto-kun/the GM to not ... set us back again?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Because THAT time we were trying to contact him via meditation this time we're just meditating on our charms instead.
 
[X] Write-In: Remedial Meet and Greet: Meet the Archer
- [X]Stunt: A bunch of the NY Wards came back with the BB Wards when you didn't show for the meetup for pizza.
Among them was a Ward named Flechette...

[X] Write-In: Should've read the Owner's Manual first...
- [X] Stunt: You've been getting burned too often by poor understanding of your own Charms, and it's making you ineffective. This stops now. You tell the others you're taking a nap, close your eyes, and meditate on your Charms. It's high time to figure yourself out.


[X] 4 XP - Bureaucracy ●●○○○
[X] 4 XP - Medicine ●○○○○
[X] 4 XP - Performance ●○○○○
 
Cytokinesis said:
I am getting the impression, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that you are considering Clarity to be something along the lines of the Great Curse or Torment in terms of how the players handle it. That is not really the case, Dissonance tracks very well to those two things, but as is rather appropriate to Autochthon, Clarity is supposed to be a tool for the Alchemical, and tools are meant to be easily picked up and put down.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Maybe, just maybe, we'll have a much easier time with dumping Clarity when we get our Exaltation screwed in right.
Cytokinesis said:
The rules may not be new to you, but they are very new to all the players. This is what I was talking about when I meant transparency. It was not apparent to me in the previous examples that the PTSD freakouts were anything other than a botch, and given that no one called it out at the time or mentioned it, I do not believe it was apparent to anyone else what was going on. This latest PTSD freakout was a huge deal, in and out of character, which is why people were so aghast at it and demanding to know what happened.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This has been an experiment to see if players could suss out things going on in the background on their own. Some players got it, some didn't. Something to work on in my writing, as it wasn't the percentage I was looking for (though it was close).
Cytokinesis said:
This especially applies because we saw Taylor doing something (we believe is) very stupid, against the votes, due to a state that has greatly worn down its welcome amongst a large portion of the players. Now we know that not only did that stupid thing prolong the state that is disliked, it also caused the other huge problem in the update by draining us of all our willpower. If we had been aware of any of those possibilities ahead of time, or the fact that Taylor would have refused to carry out our vote correctly, there wouldn't be nearly as many complaints. But we didn't know, and we voted for a course of action that was reasonable only to have our character decide to go against the spirit of it and in doing so cause several big problems for herself and for the readers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If you re-read the discussions for the last series of votes, the primary votes were not 'Keep SoPA off forever' it was 'Turn SoPA off for social situations'. In addition, the VERY FIRST TIME (back in the first arc) we experimented with our charms, it was made clear that it takes Willpower to turn off SoPA and is a (disturbingly easy) reflexive action to re-activate. When we turned off SoPA for the first time at this level of Clarity, Taylor almost passed out and her total Willpower at the end of the update was markedly lower than it started.

Not to mention that Taylor has never been completely out of willpower before, so she had no idea how that kind of mental fatigue would feel like or its ramifications. You are assuming Taylor has complete knowledge of all Exalted mechanics ICly, and that is simply not the case - she's certainly learning, however, and in the future she will have a much better idea for how to manage her own Willpower reserves.
iamnuff said:
we should meditate on Sopa before we try turning it off again.

you'll feel like an idiot of the first thing we learn about it is "you WILL turn this back on after every stunt, as an Involuntary action until you do X" or something stupid, and that's what it looks like it's shaping up to be.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Every time we've turned off SoPA (even without Clarity), it's been a Big Deal. Every time it was turned back on has either been involuntary/subconscious or clearly the result of a mental influence.
FunkyEntropy said:
Taylor has a titan-slaying superweapon grafted onto her soul, designed to help her tackle sanity-blasting, reality-warping entities without flinching. That's why Limit (or, in this case, Clarity) is a thing that exists. And that's what we saw happen when Behemoth attacked. Taylor couldn't deal with thousands of people dying in seconds (she had to suppress her Compassion), so she gained Clarity instead, as intended. But the problem is that you're using it as an excuse to milk more Clarity gain after-the-fact, which is something that's not supposed to happen. Limit/Clarity doesn't work like that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We are in agreement. There is currently a problem with your Exaltation, which is causing this disconnect. Perhaps it's a thing that should be remedied.
Cytokinesis said:
Then we still have the issue of the convoluted circumstances that pushed Taylor into PTSD in the first place.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
What we have is a long-running series of hints, foreshadowing, and implications that many things are wrong with your charms and exaltation. This has been built up since the very beginning of the story, and has all but been explicitly laid out in the story. Would you have rather this happened when fighting the Slaughterhouse 9? During an Endbringer fight? As it is now, this is effectively 'downtime' and pretty much as close to an 'safe' 'perfect storm' moment as you can get - you weren't caught on camera (because any cameras went haywire) and the hundred-or-so bystanders weren't physically harmed in any way.
 
What I'm getting out of this is that until otherwise told or when prevented from doing so, we need to always include a meditation choice to determine how badly Authochthon screwed up, and how to fix it (if it can be fixed).
 
charysa said:
Ironically, meditating on Autokun was what started our initial downward spiral (caused Coil to shoot us).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Trying to commune with the quasi-unconscious, cancer-ridden, mind-shatteringly-complex primordial is what caused things to go awry.
 
wingnut2292 said:
[X] 4 XP - Bureaucracy ●●○○○
[X] 4 XP - Medicine ●○○○○
[X] 4 XP - Performance ●○○○○
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cheshire said:
[X] 4 XP - Bureaucracy ●●○○○
[X] 4 XP - Medicine ●○○○○
[X] 4 XP - Performance ●○○○○
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
...You're prioritizing Medicine and Performance over Craft?
Craft has allowed us to build an armor that has show itself to be, quite frankly, amazingly effective. We wouldn't have survived the Behemoth fight without it.
I think we can get a lot more mileage out of an extra dot in Craft than out of, well, anything we can train right now (except maybe Bureaucracy, since wrangling the PRT into serving our mission is going to be so critical).
 
spudman said:
Though I'm wondering if we should be meditating on Exaltation rather than Charms first...as Grom has hinted the former is more likely to get Taylor's head on straight and Clarity back under control.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Grom's also said that meditating on our Exaltation will cause us to activate our terror-inspiring anima, and meditating on our Charms won't.
 
spudman said:
Though I'm wondering if we should be meditating on Exaltation rather than Charms first...as Grom has hinted the former is more likely to get Taylor's head on straight and Clarity back under control.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We can safely meditate on our Charms Modules while on the road. When we get to Philly, though, I suggest we leave a note to our fellow capes, find an isolated room on base and lock the door, and meditate on both our Charms and Exaltation until we finish determining exactly what we are, what we are able to do, and fix what Autochthon broke to the best of our means.
 
Gromweld said:
If you re-read the discussions for the last series of votes, the primary votes were not 'Keep SoPA off forever' it was 'Turn SoPA off for social situations'.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Was there anything that wasn't a social situation in the vote? Like, all the stuff said keep SoPA off for stuff we want to do, but we don't get to vote for stuff in between what we want to do.
 
Could I convince anyone to switch their Charms meditation stunt to this variation?

-[] Stunt: You've been getting burned too often by poor understanding of your own Charms, and it's making you ineffective. This stops now. You tell the others you're taking a nap, close your eyes, and meditate on your Charms. It's high time to figure yourself out.

It takes out the SoPA clause, since we don't really have the WP to spend on fighting it.
 
Gromweld said:
snip.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
With these explanations, I remove most of my complaints, and apologize for making some of them in the first place.

My reaction, and I believe most of the others, was due to this fundamental misunderstanding.

Since you wanted to fix that percentage, I'd note that that a major reason that so many people didn't catch onto things like this is because of the sheer amount of writing you've put into this as well as the time span its gone across. To put things into perspective, we've been at this for four months and you've generated an obscene amount of writing for each update. With that kind of time span and the amount of material, it's very easy for things and events to fall out of mind.

It's easier to recall simple statements, which is why I was arguing about transparency. Things that are extremely important can be lost in the rest of the material if they are not highlighted by someone (be it you or a player).

The foreshadowing that you've made is probably a lot more clear reading the updates back to back. I would bet that most of the people that did catch onto this were those that had the time to put into rereading everything. If those readers don't speak up (or are not effective enough to convince people), it's very difficult to maintain consistency across long time periods.

Speaking as a person who has followed a different quest for over a year and reread it many times, even then it's sometimes difficult to keep some of the past events in mind.



Edit: I should probably vote too.

I was going to forego the Integrity specialty but then I remembered that this was Worm.

[x] Write-In: Should've read the Owner's Manual first...
-[x] Stunt: You've been getting burned too often by poor understanding of your own Charms, and it's making you ineffective. This stops now. You tell the others you're taking a nap, close your eyes, and meditate on your Charms. It's high time to figure yourself out.

[x] Essence Reservoir-to-Heart: Provide counsel for a member of your caravan, getting to know them better as a mortal as well as evaluating them for Alchemical potential.
-[x] Stunt: Talk to Dennis, find out how he's doing, and what he thinks of things so far. Get his support in covering up for any Clarity induced social mistakes, and see about enlisting his assistance in keeping Aisha sufficiently motivated and amused, especially after their mutual Glenn sessions. The last personal conversation you've had with him involved a prank involving being surrounded by a swarm of bugs, after all, things could stand to be on a more positive note.

[x] 4 XP - Craft ●●●●○
[x] 4 XP - Bureaucracy ●●○○○
[x] 4 XP - Medicine ●○○○○
[x] 2 XP - Integrity (Mental Trauma ●○○)
 
Jinnt said:
We don't actually have to meditate this update that's not what Grom was trying to say and I wish people would stop taking it out of context.

Is meditating important yes. But there's only one more trip update and you guys want to spend it doing things we can do in Philly it's really annoying.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Better to strike while the iron's hot, than wait till Philly and get sidetracked.
 
Someone contacted me outside of SB (they do not have an account) and made a really good point about SOPA that I haven't seen discussed (or maybe it was just not recently).

What happens to Iris when we've been shutting it off? He's not really in a good position to be powering off, what with being in the S9's hands and all.
 
Cytokinesis said:
Someone contacted me outside of SB (they do not have an account) and made a really good point about SOPA that I haven't seen discussed (or maybe it was just not recently).

What happens to Iris when we've been shutting it off? He's not really in a good position to be powering off, what with being in the S9's hands and all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
S9 get more frustrated since Iris keeps falling asleep during interrogation?
 
Cytokinesis said:
Someone contacted me outside of SB (they do not have an account) and made a really good point about SOPA that I haven't seen discussed (or maybe it was just not recently).

What happens to Iris when we've been shutting it off? He's not really in a good position to be powering off, what with being in the S9's hands and all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Our connection with him snapped due to distance back when Behemoth threw him to the Simurgh. I'd venture that nothing happened.
 
If we're going to study our own charms, we might want to make the stunt more of a stunt. We could try things like get an IEU boosted Vista to warp space so that we can examine ourself with Essence sight while we use charms, and then mediate on what we learn.
 
Klaus said:
There is no reason at all for an AI to have an opinion on a purely philosophical matter in either direction. Even though I say we are Taylor, saying that a mind constructed to mimic another mind is obviously the same person is specious.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Except Taylor isn't an AI. Exalted has those, and they are completely different. Taylor is a reincarnation of herself as a synthetic being. Synthetic does not equal artificial.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top