Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Maybe also stop offering power increases and such after awhile.
Like in universe, we spent way too much time putting up windmills and such. Yes, we needed the power, but it was insane.
Attempting To Fulfil Your Contract: A Noveria Planquest [Mass Effect]
- Thread starter Faith
- Start date
Like in universe, we spent way too much time putting up windmills and such. Yes, we needed the power, but it was insane.
- Location
- Earth
Yeah, a good rule of thumb is that if you need to write nearly the same blurb often enough that you're getting tired of it, that means the players have been doing nearly the same project for long enough that they are starting to zone out on it - doing it out of abstract number go up rather than active consideration. That is a solid time to make it obsolete, provide a way to automate it, provide a way to scale operations up so it doesn't need to be done as often, or introduce new projects exciting enough to drag away player focus, depending on context.
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
The few turian ships armed with particle cannons were too valuable to not use, and so spent the war on the offense. The Destiny Ascension was halfway through refits and hastily pushed back into service, so spent most of the war on guard duty at the Citadel, where work crews could continue with at least some of the required refit work without the ship being in too much danger.
Absolutely.
Nothing majorly changed from canon on that front. Okeer's work with the Collectors was concluded before the butterflies arrived and none of them found him on Korlus. If he'd had a chance to learn about Binary Helix setting up a rachni cloning lab there, maybe things would have been different, but alas.
100% Completionist Shepard, so yes.
Alenko became a Spectre between the events of Mass Effect 2 and 3, for broadly the same political posturing reasons as in canon. Both he and Williams participated in Alliance operations against Cerberus, before they returned to the Normandy to help Shepard.
Garrus was in pretty much the same boat as canon, except the Hierarchy provided a lot more funding and support for his 'special task group', since they were actually taking Reapers seriously from the get-go.
Liara got a few opportunities to explore prothean dig sites she never did in canon, and whilst that was fascinating for her most of it wasn't helpful for dealing with the Reapers and was placed firmly in the 'later' pile.
Tali attempted to restart the Cooperationists movement, but found relatively little success there. Her father promising to build her a nice mansion on a seaside somewhere did not really help her mood. Legion is now her full-time bodyguard for lack of other things to do.
Wrex's story ended up largely the same - he's a big damn hero, successfully secured a genophage cure in return for promising to do something the krogan were going to do anyway (the number of krogan who legitimately believe this was a cunning political play by Wrex is... nonzero), and has more kids on the way than you can shake a pyjack at.
Thane got new lungs, and so didn't die to Kai Leng. He rejoined Shepard after the failed Cerberus coup.
Miranda and Jacob defected from Cerberus, along with most of the Normandy's Cerberus crew, after the Collector Base fiasco. They had their own thing going on during the war, mostly what they were doing in canon - running around the edges of the conflict zones, messing with Cerberus backlines and helping other defectors.
Everyone else (Jack, Kasumi, Grunt, Mordin, Samara, and Zaeed) went basically unchanged from canon.
Sure seems that way! Although, to be fair, she was pretty powerful as-is, and I suspect her not taking over a larger chunk of the Terminus is as much lack of ambition as lack of power.
Yeah, she moved into her husband's apartment in Port Hanshan and as such was pretty well protected from the Reapers. Unfortunately, Taylor Valentine got shipped off to Sanctuary and subsequently huskified by Henry Lawson's research staff.
The heretic geth were less of a problem because their work on creating the Loyalty Virus was stolen by the quarians, so Legion didn't see the need to drag Shepard into conflict with them. And then they got mulched by the Migrant Fleet, like the rest of the geth.
There was one major difference in that Cerberus didn't know about the Crucible, which meant no attack on the Mars Archives, and no attack on the Temple of Athame on Thessia. In the time between the Collector Base being destroyed and the Reaper Invasion, Alliance forces spent a while kicking over Cerberus bases through the Traverse and Terminus, dealing a fair bit of damage, and their efforts throughout the war were somewhat less coordinated as a result. During the war, their coup was foiled even faster than in canon thanks to sabotage of their efforts by the Spectres, Sanctuary was assaulted and destroyed by Alliance forces, and then their base got kicked over ahead of schedule after the Shadow Broker passed a tip-off to Hackett.
Sometime between when the Sun swallows up the Earth as a red giant, and the heat death of the universe (at least, if I'm the one writing it).
It does!
I don't plan on doing another planquest anytime soon if at all, but this is good advice nonetheless, I think, and I appreciate you taking the time to write it up.
The various deficiencies of the planquest format for the specific scenario I was forcing it into... well, you already covered them pretty well. It was something I was aware of going in, but didn't really do enough to combat in my initial designs - as others have noted, planquests are complicated enough without mechanics that change partway through, so I was ill-inclined to make any major alterations once the ball got rolling. This was probably, strictly speaking, a mistake from a game design perspective.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have added the fourth term. Whilst the system was hardly well-designed and well-balanced before that choice, it was designed initially to run for three years, and several of the issues I was hoping to sidestep by running a short quest got severely exacerbated by stretching things out. When players ran out of options at the end of the quest, it was because they'd powered through the entire backlog (even after I padded it with things like the largely pointless repeatables), not because resource/time constraints prevented them from getting anything more done, and ultimately that didn't really mesh with the idea I wanted to portray.
Still, at the end of the day, the first rule is the rule of fun. I had fun, other people had fun... I'm going to call that a success.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was honestly expecting the board to slap us down for lack of return on investment. Probably in unvierse argued having spare power and room to expand made sense, but....
Yeah, that and us constantly hiring Quarians and Infra people should've had some impact.
That or started adding some real issues. Cerberus stepping up their game, for example. Maybe a economic downturn leading to us having a smaller budget?
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
Given that interspecies fertility is an Asari-only thing in Mass Effect, and that Garrus and Tali presumably ended up together if Shepard's love interest was Liara, does this mean that with Legion's assistance Tali and Garrus are proud if secretive parents to a whole bunch of baby Geth?
Thors_Alumni
Proud member of Thors Class VII from Liberl
- Location
- Liberl Zemuria.
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Per canon to both. The Council is keeping a wary eye on the Leviathans, though.
Thors_Alumni
Proud member of Thors Class VII from Liberl
- Location
- Liberl Zemuria.
what's the Canon choices for those two? I try to save the clone since He/She was technically a victim of Brooks, I kill Brooks everytime regardless of my alignment since she technically did betray Shepard and the Alliance while she was posing as an alliance officer, And her information about Cerberus is out of date by that point and anything she might know is suspect.
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
There's no meaningful choice in Leviathan, as far as I'm aware - you either convince them to help (Paragon) or blackmail them to help (Renegade) and there's no difference to the end result.
As for the Clone and Maya Brooks - The Clone committed suicide, Maya attempted to get the slip on Shepard, Wrex, Tali, Garrus, Liara, Ashley, Kaidan, Thane, EDI, and Javik all at once, and was promptly riddled with bullets.
As for the Clone and Maya Brooks - The Clone committed suicide, Maya attempted to get the slip on Shepard, Wrex, Tali, Garrus, Liara, Ashley, Kaidan, Thane, EDI, and Javik all at once, and was promptly riddled with bullets.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Maintenance to the shuttle bay."
"Tell them to bring a mop, Brooks has been, liquidated."
"Great, she's all over my boots."
Oh, so I was thinking about something last night - so the whole planet is NDC territory, not just the Greater Hanshan Region but also the resort cities in the Greater Equatorial Region (or at least that is what I mentally call them). Those areas are service industry focused sites, meaning the employees working there are hotel and shop and resort workers. Thanks to NDC policies they are just as protected from firing and other such elements as the research staff of Port Hanshan.
- Location
- Oregon
Hmm... this theory requires more testing. Go for another SV popular fandom. You'll have to do a RWBY or Worm planquest next. Just to be sure.
Edit: So sorry about the late post - I only just noticed the last was almost a week ago; I had a backlog of alerts to go through and didn't check the times on them.
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Haha and here I thought SV/SB had gotten thoroughly sick of RWBY and Worm and actively revolted against new quests involving them unless they were deeply original and well-written.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, a good Planquest would be fairly original in its own right, since there haven't been that many Planquests. And we know Faith can write good ones.
So something like "Planquest for one of the enclave-cities on Remnant" or something could be interesting, and I say this despite having almost no familiarity with the source material.
I'm not sure how you'd do a good Planquest for Worm, because it's fundamentally superhero genre, and superhero genre is very much defined by personal interactions between weird powers and stuff, not by large impersonal bureaucracies having massive projects done. The setting doesn't line up very well.
So something like "Planquest for one of the enclave-cities on Remnant" or something could be interesting, and I say this despite having almost no familiarity with the source material.
I'm not sure how you'd do a good Planquest for Worm, because it's fundamentally superhero genre, and superhero genre is very much defined by personal interactions between weird powers and stuff, not by large impersonal bureaucracies having massive projects done. The setting doesn't line up very well.
- Location
- Italy
I know relatively little about Worm, but I suppose it could be about Cauldron?
Either that, or whatever the official organization to which all capes must register is called.
or, if you go smaller, just a random small city whose barely hanging on among all the superpowered threats.
in Rwby you would have multiple options. there's the 4 main kingdoms/city-states, there's the Schnee Dust Company, there's Menageries (Island-kingdom of Faunus), the White Fang, the Huntsman Schools or the preparatory combat schools... or you could go with minor cities outside of the major kingdoms, or a new company/combat school.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Again, the problem is that so much of the interesting stuff is about specific powerful individuals clashing with each other. The results of the random events roll and combat rolls every turn would tend to be more impactful than the projects people are doing.
Well yeah, that's what I was getting at. I know little about RWBY but there's plenty of options for organizations that exist in some discrete territory and have enough of a bureaucratized system that you can abstract out their operations as a Planquest.
I think if you were doing a RWBY plan-quest you'd have to do a lot of world-building and fanon creation as it's not properly fleshed out for that. Obviously you have to do that in most settings, but relatively it'd be more.
Trying to make sense of the anachronistic tech-level of Remnant, how Dust works as both a system and a limited special resource, and how the masses of superpowered people with a Semblance would fit into it would also be a bit challenging.
You'd also likely want to find some way to dispose of Ozma/Salem for it or make it slightly AU in that regard, because that shadow-war would probably get in the way of any civ-building narrative or force itself into being the focus.
Trying to make sense of the anachronistic tech-level of Remnant, how Dust works as both a system and a limited special resource, and how the masses of superpowered people with a Semblance would fit into it would also be a bit challenging.
You'd also likely want to find some way to dispose of Ozma/Salem for it or make it slightly AU in that regard, because that shadow-war would probably get in the way of any civ-building narrative or force itself into being the focus.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
[twitches, looking up from his notes on multiple abortive quest ideas]
I KNOW, RIGHT!?
The city on earth Gimel after the golden morning.
Here you have a shortage of resources, and the classic start for plankquests after a terrible crisis, and the ability to fine-tune before the start of the quest, and a new crisis will soon be.
Everything is ready for a typical set, lol.
Oh man this, so much this. I read these quests and I am like "ooh ideas" and then I try and figure out something that could be the events and its like "what do I do know..."
What makes it even worse is when you see really great ideas written by others in their quests and you know you can't copy but their ideas are so perfect.
(I keep on thinking about a quest where you are the leader of a colony expedition that got flung 30,000 light years thanks to some esoteric energy thing and you have 5 million people in cryo that you have to figure out what to do with in terms of colony building and expansion. So many things that make it go ???)
- Pronouns
- Reader
I think Noveria excellently shows that the key to a good plan quest is an interesting setting under developed by the original content creators, with an easily definable goal and method of accomplishing that goal that you can build the quest around, and premade characters that fit the setting and role the MC will play, while most importantly, being interesting for the QM to write.
Dragon age during the mage rebellion. The war between the apostate mages of Thedas and the templars is little explored and sparingly referenced by Dragon age lore, with only a few major battle and some journals to define what happened. It's ripe for a proper fleshing out, with plenty of room for climactic battle scenes between the strategic build up, resources management, and diplomacy of being a well defined but diverse multinational polity within a medieval fantasy setting. There are numerous settings, with the crafting system of DAI doing a great job of defining local resources and giving some clues as to factional presences. All in all it's very well suited if developed properly for a plan quest rapped in clashing ideologies, corruption, and interesting plot divergence.
Dragon age during the mage rebellion. The war between the apostate mages of Thedas and the templars is little explored and sparingly referenced by Dragon age lore, with only a few major battle and some journals to define what happened. It's ripe for a proper fleshing out, with plenty of room for climactic battle scenes between the strategic build up, resources management, and diplomacy of being a well defined but diverse multinational polity within a medieval fantasy setting. There are numerous settings, with the crafting system of DAI doing a great job of defining local resources and giving some clues as to factional presences. All in all it's very well suited if developed properly for a plan quest rapped in clashing ideologies, corruption, and interesting plot divergence.
See for me I took that as the power used by the city Nil was in charge of was Nil's problem. Power unused was either a matter of them hauling it off in batteries or they had their own power cables tapped into the grid and Nil didn't get those profits as the Board or the other cities did. Power is a commodity after all and hydro-electric not only has the ability to store power as water, but also to sell the glacial water a trade good.
They did yell at him about the extra housing at first, but I think they realized he had a giant pile of employees with no real projects by the end of the year. I suspect that the other cities realized that Nil provided areas to drain resources from so they didn't have to put them in the tourist spots. A shuttle service for your worker plebs to be shipped off to as a reward for time off that didn't have the risk ruining the tourist appeal or make other cities not have to build infrastructure for them.
That extra housing could be rented to the families of their lesser workers and look good medical and schooling Nil just didn't see those profits on *his* reports. Basically, the extra resources were great for making other people's numbers go up, but since Nil didn't actually claim the extra power and such he just didn't get credit for that stuff. This means all his infrastructure building lowered the costs on the other cities.
Also they could crib off the Quarian's notes and Nil took all the flack for it. I wouldn't be surprised if the Quarians replaced good enough workers and those workers ended up working in areas Quarians aren't as socially acceptable.
This planet was about profits and its not the Boards fault they had to monitize things for him. Silly straight laced Quarian, double dip harder scrub. Note how Nil got to be the PR meat shield when things risked going wrong. Once the Board realized Nil wasn't using those resources, I doubt they weren't using them for him.
The exception being housing... and its not like they aren't on the record of yelling at him for it already. Plus they can also see the writing on the wall for the galaxy being unstable.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
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- He/Him
Honestly, I did some thinking, and we had a lot going for us.
After Anoleis fucked up so bad IA dragged him off with metal friendship bracelets around his hands, the Board needed someone who wouldn't do anything too corrupt or crazy.
They got us. Dead honest, every penny accounted for, by Noverian standards, pretty much unrelated to any major scandals save for some minor septic avenging, and focusing on lots of infrastructure. A bit unconventional, but that's what we're hired for originally, and we do produce results, doing stuff that likely had stopped on our predecessor's desk for lack of "incentive payments", like offices, increasing power and network capacity, and then funneling those resources into expanding offices and facilities.
We went and made sure Noveria's got a lot of costs cut, with cheaper build materials, excess power for days, a new housing area for all the workers who bring their families and who purchase stuff, we expanded internal security with actual investigators and so on.....
Sure, we mass hired Quarian migrants, but they work cheap, can live in cramped conditions, are damn good techs, and never had issues.
Still kinda sad we never got to cash in our favor with Shepard.
After Anoleis fucked up so bad IA dragged him off with metal friendship bracelets around his hands, the Board needed someone who wouldn't do anything too corrupt or crazy.
They got us. Dead honest, every penny accounted for, by Noverian standards, pretty much unrelated to any major scandals save for some minor septic avenging, and focusing on lots of infrastructure. A bit unconventional, but that's what we're hired for originally, and we do produce results, doing stuff that likely had stopped on our predecessor's desk for lack of "incentive payments", like offices, increasing power and network capacity, and then funneling those resources into expanding offices and facilities.
We went and made sure Noveria's got a lot of costs cut, with cheaper build materials, excess power for days, a new housing area for all the workers who bring their families and who purchase stuff, we expanded internal security with actual investigators and so on.....
Sure, we mass hired Quarian migrants, but they work cheap, can live in cramped conditions, are damn good techs, and never had issues.
Still kinda sad we never got to cash in our favor with Shepard.