Castles of Steel - Lesbians Good, Imperialism Bad

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Lieutenant Arisukawa Haruna

Balance Stats
❁ • ❁ Work / Life ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Warrior / Princess ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Radical / Respectable ❁ • ❁

Tactical Stats
Gunnery 0, Navigation +2, Command +2, Technology -4, Personal -2, Strategy +3

Stress: 3​


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PLEASE READ THE QUEST RULES BELOW

You collectively vote on the actions of Arisukawa Haruna, the first woman to serve openly in the Imperial Akitsukuni Navy.

This quest is set in a universe which is much like our own circa 1910, but with different politics, cultural norms, and ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as some unusual and advanced technology in places.

We are using this quest to explore themes like breaking the glass ceiling, divergent outlooks on gender and sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and the place of royalty.

Content Warning
This quest goes some dark places.

There is violence, often explicit, often unfair, often against undeserving targets.

There are not always good options forward. The protagonist is not necessarily a good person.

There is implied content and discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

This is a world where people are often racist, sexist, queerphobic bigots. Sometimes, even the PC and the people they are friends with.

Voting Rules

We will tell you if write-in votes are allowed. If we do not say that write-ins are allowed, they are not. This is to prevent people from unrealistically hedging their bets.

You may proposal other options in a non-vote format, subject to approval, on non write-in votes.

We will tell you when a vote allows approved voting. If we don't say the answer is no, pick an option. We like making people commit.

Discussions makes the GM feel fuzzy.

Game Rules
When we ask you for a roll, roll 3d6. You are aiming to roll equal or under the value of your stat. If you succeed, Haruna gets through the situation with no real difficulties. If you roll above the target value, Haruna will still succeed, but this success will cost her something or add a complication.

Whenever Haruna loses something or faces hardship from a botched roll, she takes Stress. The more Stress Haruna has, the more the job and the circumstances she's in will get to her, and it'll be reflected in the narrative. Haruna must be kept under 10 Stress: if she reaches 10 Stress, she will suffer a breakdown and the results will not be great for her.

Haruna loses stress by taking time for herself, by making meaningful progress on her dreams, and by kissing tall, beautiful women.

Meta Rules
Author commentary is in italics so you know it's not story stuff.

Please don't complain about the system or the fact we have to roll dice. We've heard it before, we've heard it a thousand times across multiple quests. We're not going to change it, and it wears at our fucking souls.

Just going "oh noooo" or "Fish RNGesus Why!" is fun and fine. Complaining at length because you didn't get what you want less so.

If you have a question, tag both @open_sketchbook and @Artificial Girl. If you only tag one of us, you will be ignored. Seriously, we both write this quest.

And yes this is an alt-history type setting with openly gay and trans people, ahistoric medicine, and weird politics. Just... deal, please?

This quest employs a special system called Snippet Votes. Please read this post for more information.
 
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[X] Go behind the Captain's back. Find the subordinates you can trust to keep quiet and coordinate the running of the hold through them. Give no orders, merely suggestions. Stick to the letter of the orders and completely ignore the spirit. If the captain finds out, though, there will be hell to pay. (Roll +Subterfuge)
 
[X] Ignore the old man, and get together every regulatory and legal argument about your duties to back you up in the process. You'll be most effective, but it could go very, very badly for you. (+Diplomacy)
 
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[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)

As much as Subterfuge is our best stat, I like the Diplomacy options more for what they mean in the long run - Ideally we want to be interacting with those destroyers (because that's where we want to go) and we're not going to do that by sitting in our office pretending to do nothing. In addition, even giving the appearance that we've been cowed into submission isn't something I'm into right now - what we need is to attract the notice of someone who's head isn't so far up their own ass that they refuse to see how useful we could be, and to do that, we need to our good work to be public.
 
[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
If we're going to do diplomacy we should just ignore the orders.
Otherwise we should go behind the captains back.

[X] Go behind the Captain's back. Find the subordinates you can trust to keep quiet and coordinate the running of the hold through them. Give no orders, merely suggestions. Stick to the letter of the orders and completely ignore the spirit. If the captain finds out, though, there will be hell to pay. (Roll +Subterfuge)
 
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Cmd. Frost said:
If we're going to do diplomacy we should just ignore the orders.
Otherwise we should go behind the captains back.

[X] Ignore the old man, and get together every regulatory and legal argument about your duties to back you up in the process. You'll be most effective, but it could go very, very badly for you. (+Diplomacy)
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One of the main points against Subterfuge is that it makes our accomplishments secret - I'd really like to avoid that and the [ ] Obey what you legally have to option is the closest to allowing us to do that - It also has less severe consequences for failure, and makes us out as a good soldier.
 
I'm conflicted here. The odds say we should pretty much plan on a partial success, except for subterfuge where we have an even shot. We saw here that we need a full success to not seriously regret it. That said, there is clearly a lot of variability in how bad a partial is and how good a full success is. On going behind the captains back, a full probably means the ship runs smoothly and we look unnecesary, and a partial probably means it mostly runs smoothly and we get in a ton of trouble. Some of the other options are lower risk or higher reward, even if the probability of success is lower. I worry that a partial on ignoring the captain means serious repurcussions, and a partial on running things from our cabin means pissing people off and still not really accomplishing much. Still, it's probably the best bet.

[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
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[X] Ignore the old man, and get together every regulatory and legal argument about your duties to back you up in the process. You'll be most effective, but it could go very, very badly for you. (+Diplomacy)
 
[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
[X] Ignore the old man, and get together every regulatory and legal argument about your duties to back you up in the process. You'll be most effective, but it could go very, very badly for you. (+Diplomacy)
Being sneaky means nothing to the larger world outside of this ship, playing the Book has similar impact but is far more adversarial, and I refuse to give up. On the other hand, if we can throw the book at the captain instead, that would serve well to cement progress. Besides, we're almost guaranteed at least a partial success. A full success would be pretty rare, but at the very least we can make progress.
 
[X] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
TortugaGreen said:
[X] Ignore the old man, and get together every regulatory and legal argument about your duties to back you up in the process. You'll be most effective, but it could go very, very badly for you. (+Diplomacy)
Being sneaky means nothing to the larger world outside of this ship, playing the Book has similar impact but is far more adversarial, and I refuse to give up. On the other hand, if we can throw the book at the captain instead, that would serve well to cement progress. Besides, we're almost guaranteed at least a partial success. A full success would be pretty rare, but at the very least we can make progress.
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The real question is, as I think is mentioned above, what does a partial success mean in this context? The option states that it could go very badly for us and I don't know how much of that we avoid if we only get a partial success.
 
Remember, this is just the start of the game. We might not be able to directly bolster our reputation through the subterfuge option, but we'll have plenty of chances to show what we can do throughout the game, and having our subordinates doing their jobs well will make a big difference in our ability to do that. To that end, I think the 50% chance of a full success with subterfuge compared to the 16.2% chance of a full success with diplomacy is well worth it.
It's not like sitting in our office doing a mediocre job of bookkeeping would be that much help to us, anyhow.
 
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[x] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
 
[x] Obey the parts of the order you legally have to: stay in your cabin and keep the books in order. He can't actually strip you of your authority like that. Run the hold from your office. It'll be less effective, but it'll still work. (+Diplomacy)
​
Someone roll us 3d6
 
bdun140 said:
If we'd gone full disobedience we'd have gotten triple ones or some such BS. Never trust this site's dice roller.
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It has passed every test anyone has ever cared to throw at it, and decent pseudorandom number generators for this type of purpose are both ubiquitous, standard almost everywhere, and not that hard to write. There is no reason to believe there is actually anything wrong with it. It just feels that way because dice rolls in an rpg or quest are almost perfectly tuned to tap into all the flaws in human psychology that make us bad at probability and/or lead to superstitions.
 
I mean, you shouldn't trust the dice roller precisely because it is random, and thus equally likely to give good or bad results.
 
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