@Nixeu, I understand your desire to avoid bringing up the Calypso Incident. I will refrain from saying anything specific or definitive about it, since I am ignorant of details that are reelvant.
At the same time, please be mindful that for other people, the Calypso Incident is an
EXTREMELY good example of what happens when a quest character walks into a situation that poses uncertain-but-probably-existing Bad End risks. It's like, Vebyast and me are not talking about it just to make you miserable,
we honestly think, in good faith, that it's relevant. Because he seems to be getting flashbacks to it and I who never experienced it personally am still seeing some maybe-there-maybe-not parallels.
The fact that you're triggering
other people's thoughts of the Calypso Incident is probably something you should bear in mind. On a level beyond just asking us not to bring up the Incident due to how it triggers
your negative associations involving the Incident.
If an experience was bad enough that I don't want to ever hear about it again... I should probably not dismiss other people going "uh yeah this looks like that one time we had a horrible experience."
Hell no. If someone enjoys seeing bad things happen to fictional characters and wants to vote in ways that encourage that happening, the only one who has any right to stop it is the quest writer. Enjoying different things from a group shouldn't be a rule violation.
@pressea ... If I join a large group of people who are trying to have fun by doing X, under pretense of being one of them...
And I act in such a way as to destroy their ability to do X, for my own amusement...
That is like the
definition of parasitism right there. A smaller entity (one person) joins a larger one (a group of a few dozen) for purposes of benefiting themselves (with entertainment) by harming the group (by sabotaging
their entertainment).
It is also a close match for the activity known as "trolling," which online forums have very good reasons for discouraging. Because there is a frustrating minority of people who will cheerfully use the Internet to do this to people
all the damn time. Because they care about their own entertainment, don't value other people's happiness, and enjoy things that are totally at odds with what everyone else wants.
If I am one of those people and start going around explicitly trying to sabotage a construct that a group of others is using to have fun, for the sake of my own fun... I deserve to get thrown out on my ear.
Effective illusions show you what you want to see. Most people would run screaming from a lake of blood, or at least leave immediately.
Why in the fiery pits of Muspelheim would the illusions show that, though? Unless it's using our own mind to tailor the illusion, which would have some rather bizarre implications about the cross-over between worlds our portals allow, this is a TERRIBLE illusion for luring people.
What if the lake of blood is
not an illusion, and is in fact real, but some of the other elements of the scene are either illusions or in some way shape or form "insincere," in the sense of being deliberately crafted to reduce the perceived harmfulness and danger of the situation? Or, say, are genuine elements introduced to the scene by the singing voice in an attempt to reduce
their own suffering at being stuck in a terrible place that no sane person would want to be stuck in, and from which escape is difficult if not impossible?
The issue is that no one and nothing in the other portals is reacting to them. Unless it just wasn't mentiomed. Meaning that magic can detect us, but people can't, even before we make our choice and fully form the portal. That has some profoundly complex implications for our future jumps. To the point where I'd actually want to take the pool of blood more, just so we don't get blindsided later on.
See, that's actually a decent argument for investigating the lake. If I felt more confident in our ability to survive going there, I might be persuaded by that. Just having a fast 'panic button' ability to snap the tether near-instantly and move on to the next dimension would be a major improvement there, for instance.
The rifts are obviously very very magical in nature, in the sense of "entirely made out of magic." And the portals are clearly tuned to us in an anthropic-principle sense; they are specifically about Melia personally as an individual. Other people cannot use or see them, except possibly if Melia is carrying them. So Melia can look through the magic Melia!portals to see another dimension; Morgan can't because they're not Morgan!portals and if he wants to see other dimensions he can make his own damn portals.
But the question is, is a Melia!portal a strictly one-way passage, or a two-way passage with some obstacles to prevent easy detection from the other side?
It's like, a one-way mirror isn't
truly one-way, it just looks that way. It's still, strictly, a two-way window that both sides can theoretically see through. But it appears to be like a mirror from one side, as long as there's a significant difference in light levels between the two sides. If you stand in a brightly lit room looking out at the night, it
looks as though you're just looking at a mirror. Because your own reflections in the mirror drown out the very dim light coming from the outside world. But with the right tools, you could turn down the lights in your room, or throw a blanket over your head to block the lights out... and then you
could see the things outside in the dark, and tell if they were looking at you.
Similarly, it might well be possible that with the right tools, a magically capable entity could "look back" at us through the portals or be aware on some level. I'd be more comfortable ruling that out when we know more about how portals work.
Picked an odd way to do it. It's not a 'reassuringly familiar smell', it smells like us. Something we can't normally smell. Blatantly making your 'soothing' illusion unnatural is a bad idea.
How do we even
know it smells like us, as opposed to smelling like some kind of exotic magical incense smoke that makes the subject think they're detecting their own body odor? By definition, we can't be familiar with something we can't normally perceive, can we? Not in a way that makes us certain we're not being tricked.
Would be the same as most other options, TBH, just not quite the same scale/type. Any world where water elementals frolick openly is going to have mages, and their culture would be quite foreign to us. If those mages have hostile intentions, we'd be about as screwed. And a high-tech environment would be even worse, in some respects. A mix of familiar and new/scary is often more unsettling. I'd rather have an obviously different scenario, to a deceptively familiar one.
See, if I got any hints through one of the portals that the society we were looking at was some kind of tyranny, or a place where a stranger like Melia was likely to be mistreated, I'd be reacting more or less the same way to that.
Not usually in Ignition. Jade OP. Which means a very different scenario.
Well yes... which is kind of my point. Jade can go into situations confident of her ability to survive long enough to escape, because she has so many different kinds of defenses and toughness-boosts that she is very hard to kill, even for things that are trying to hurt her. Melia is squishier, so "risk" is more threatening.
If it were Jade talking about which of these four places to go through, I would have virtually no objection to the blood pool- because I'd be reasonably confident of her being able to handle what's on the other side.
I actually really hate it when people play board-games that way. Because the game often NEVER FREAKING ENDS. I only have so long to play. At some point, you have to go for the goal, ya know?
...Quests routinely last for months. If this is a bad thing to you, I'm sorry, but you might want to consider another form of entertainment. Trying to make a quest be 'over' by 'winning it' faster, pursuing a high-risk high-reward strategy, strikes me as counterproductive. It's a great way to play video and board games; after all, you can just start another game immediately. You can't do that with quests unless you're the QM and just want to start the same quest over to see how it goes.
To some extent, the same is true for video-games, too. Depending on how extreme the people take it. Like, say, refusing to reach the finish line in a racing game, because you came in last, forcing the other players to either turn the system off/reset, or hunt you down, or steal the controller.
Okay, see, that's asinine behavior, I
get that. What I'm trying to say is, blowing up the game for other people, for one's own amusement, is antisocial. Blowing up racing games by refusing to reach the finish line is antisocial. Blowing up the quest to see what happens is semi-social; it's a social activity among the people who (hypothetically) do the blowing-up, but it's antisocial from the point of view of the people who didn't want the quest to die.
So part of me is pleading "please let us not get reckless enough that we start blowing up games, it spoils things for the people who want gradual development and prolonged exploration and quest-not-blowing-up-ism."
