Argidoll
And hast thou slain the Jabberwocky?
- Location
- Dreamland
That was the problem with them, yes.
DoofQuest- a Disney Villains Victorious CK2-Style Quest
- Thread starter Made in Heaven
- Start date
- Crossover
That was the problem with them, yes.
- Location
- Germany
No, because LM genuinely wasn´t worth deliberately shooting ourselves in the foot by taking highly risky options that *might* pay out.
Seriously, I really dislike that "deliberately try to fail" meta some other questers have going on - we are supposed to play this quest *as successful as possible* in order to stay in this "Game of Holdings", not ram our head against a wall and expect it to get softer when we repeat that BS.
- Location
- USA
The bonus to LM learning action was 38 + 14 - 2 (20% of 14 rounded down) = 50.
They also crit failed at 2/3 DC rounded down instead of 1/2 DC rounded down.
DC 80 -> 97% chance of not crit failing, 99% with XP (rolling a nat 1)
DC 100 -> 84% chance of not crit failing, 94% with XP
DC 120 -> 70% chance of not crit failing, 80% with XP
So even at a DC as high as 120, we wouldn't have been risking that much in the long run. We should have shifted perspective long ago on the extra action and considered anything that wasn't a crit fail as a success and anything bare failure or better as a crit success, that way they would have been doing stuff that wouldn't have caused the massive permanent loyalty penalties that led to us being tricked into mad science. (We also had some good alternative options at around 110 DC and such for actions instead of the 150 DC mad science)
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- Location
- Germany
Even then, we had no guarantee, that those idiots would actually LIKE those options we put them on, just because they were high-risk.
In my opinion they would not have stop whinging until we effectively handed them a burning and crumbling Doofania on a silver platter...and I utterly refuse to surrender ourselves to the whims of some mediocre-at-best morons.
LMs extra option was essentially a "tutorial trait" akin to our "Lunatic from Danville" trait - both of which would not survive for long once we actually decied to come to the "adult´s table" of people like Glomgold and Xanatos.
weredrago2
"Cowabunga, Shadow the Hedgehog..."
- Location
- Florida
Divinos are both too individualistic to have a group that look remotely similar and, by nature, cannot be controlled. You're welcome to try it, but that sounds like it'd backfire. At least I get to design more dumb abominations with silly names.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well yeah, but unless you prefer people totally avoiding you, you've got to expect some pushback on that.
I don't think criticizing the player-base for cowardice is really the answer here. LOVEMUFFIN is designed to be thrown at stupid high risk stuff you don't care about failing, sure. But we've got a lot of research projects kicking around where rolling a 60 on d100+modifiers counts as a Critical Failure that will kick us in the pants, and where success is vanishingly unlikely unless you stack up +50 points of modifiers in your favor or something. There are, granted, combos that let us do that... but not many of them involve LOVEMUFFIN.
It's not cowardice to be uninterested in using a high-risk low-reward mechanic that doesn't do a very good job on most things and repeatedly kicks you in the nuts for trying to use it at all.
People map out the %chance of success and you call that ridiculous risk-aversion? It's basic arithmetic. Someone spending like 5-10 minutes doing arithmetic on a plan isn't 'ridiculous.' We still accept actions that have a chance of failure, sometimes even a fairly high one! And (this is a game balance thing) with the consequences of a Critical Failure often being bad enough to eat the consequences of multiple successes, we'd be screwing ourselves right into the ground if we consistently took reckless actions that were highly likely to fail.
The game isn't set up to enable the kind of risk-enthusiasm you're talking about, because someone who rolls enough Critical Failures in a row ends up like Syndrome. If you want a game where people are constantly trying utterly wacky shit that's highly likely to fail, you have to set up the underlying mechanics to encourage wacky shit.
Few QMs do that, and probably with good reason.
- Location
- Germany
How I see things, many people are already avoiding me and the majority of therest is pushing back against me already
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
No what I mean is, if you're going to emote about how much you hate it that... no one's actually done anything, but you imagine them maybe doing something...
Well, yes, most humans are going to respond to that behavior by either ignoring it and avoiding you, yes... OR by pushing back against the behavior, which is not the same as pushing back against you.
It's going to be one or the other.
Which would you prefer, shouting endlessly into a void about how unfair everything is? Or having people who care enough about what you think to notice and say something when you're being unreasonable?
And whichever of those you prefer, I don't recommend complaining when you get it. The price of being noticed and listened to is being disagreed with and told when one is making mistakes.
At a DC of 120, their +50 bonus gives them a 30% chance of success. We'd be crit-failing as often or almost as often as we'd be succeeding, and the immediate consequences of a critical failure tend to be worse than the immediate rewards of a success.
Furthermore, we DID use LOVEMUFFIN on exactly the kind of low-DC and mid-DC Learning project you're talking about, repeatedly. They got bored and demanded something sexier. We told them to build us a literal rocketship, which you'd think a bunch of mad scientists would love all to pieces, and they fucked around and gave us minimal progress.
I'm not saying we had no alternatives, but we were rapidly running out of good alternatives, and LOVEMUFFIN kept shrugging off our attempts to make them useful in any role other than the one they refused to accept.
- Location
- USA
We had a DC 100, 105, and 110 actions available they could have done. Much more reasonable than DC 150.
We also could have done a write in learning action at a reasonable DC, or a write in personal action for them.
Anyways, as for write in personals.
How about have Malfishimertz and Genghis study history together? Maybe Ludivine could help.
- Location
- Germany
Both have happened before and only tell me, to how little my inputs tend to amount...so it´s all the same to me.
weredrago2
"Cowabunga, Shadow the Hedgehog..."
- Location
- Florida
We don't know, on account of the fact that it didn't happen. If you want to speculate...
- Wile E. Coyote would be up to his old tricks again, only now he might be trying to catch and eat one of your other heroes!
- Ghengis Khan gets up to his really old tricks...
- Hego and his family turned evil in the KP episode "Stop Team Go", so we know he'd be a rampaging brute.
- Janus Lee changes his plans.
- Wendy Wower airs a special "evilcation" episode that tells kids how to make IEDs and talk back to their parents.
- Location
- USA
Guessing Wiley would have hunted Wasabi, as he is named after food.
Actually, that could be a good way for Wasabi to overcome his fears, by facing them head on.
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Considering that the target was random, I'd say we really dodged a bullet there.
- Location
- Germany
Now I am left wondering:
Could that Inator have targeted *Russ*, given that he right now is in some weird kind of flux? And if so, what woulda happened?
Also, are any temporary Loalty modifiers that applied to him before he "vanished" paused right now and will resume decaying normall once he returns? Or do they tick away normally?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I dunno. Given his basic competence we'd probably end up working for him in short order, and he was a pretty good boss.
Let me rephrase that: everyone else dodged an arrow.
- Location
- The City of Tears, Hallownest
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What does it do to Tobe??? he already thinks he's evil, but it clearly released inhibitions on Rodney
- Location
- The great frozen north
The problem with the idea of "LOVEMUFFIN is for throwing at high-risk stuff you don't care about failing" is that high-DC actions also generally have nasty penalties for critical failures that could cause us substantial damage beyond just failing what we tried doing, and LOVEMUFFIN is great at getting critical failures on high-DC actions. So we'd basically be allowing Doofania to be damaged following a vague hope of them accomplishing something. While Mad Science was probably an extreme example, a crit fail on that DC 150 action cost us several income and PR damage.
In other words:
The reason critical fails exist as a mechanic is so that players don't attempt the "build the I Win Cannon" action 15 turns in a row at 10% chance of success, because failing too bad will make it cost a lot more than just the opportunity cost. But as you said, this heavily discourages risk, especially when the players are in a good position where a bonus would be helpful but nonessential, while damage would be felt very badly.
Perhaps a different set of mechanics could still discourage repeated attempting low-chance actions (like limiting the number of attempts, are some smaller set of penalties), but the critical fail mechanic exists is basically a big red flag saying "DON'T TRY THINGS YOU'RE LIKELY TO SCREW UP."
In other words:
The reason critical fails exist as a mechanic is so that players don't attempt the "build the I Win Cannon" action 15 turns in a row at 10% chance of success, because failing too bad will make it cost a lot more than just the opportunity cost. But as you said, this heavily discourages risk, especially when the players are in a good position where a bonus would be helpful but nonessential, while damage would be felt very badly.
Perhaps a different set of mechanics could still discourage repeated attempting low-chance actions (like limiting the number of attempts, are some smaller set of penalties), but the critical fail mechanic exists is basically a big red flag saying "DON'T TRY THINGS YOU'RE LIKELY TO SCREW UP."
If you want to be technical about it, it also had us choose between axing a hero unit or taking significant penalties on a different one. We just don't care about that part as much because the axed unit in question was Lovemuffin.
In terms of crit fail consequences the other three have been:
Retreat: -10 loyalty malus for the next three turns on all Hero Units, -20 on one in particular
Superpowers: DC on future attempts up 50, Kat gets superpower serum without a trace
DoofOS: Firewall still down, and whatever happened in Error semi consequentially.
So in general stuff we would prefer not to happen
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I love that show so much, sucks so much that it's meeting a forced end.
Though, honestly. Maybe Hego is just our 21?
- Location
- Washington
Oh please, 21 is too high a compliment for Hego.
I mean, yeah 21 was awesome even before he got buff but he too did kinda look at the world of Heroes and Villains through rose-tinted glasses early on.
And of course, when it comes to other King's crit fails...Syndrome shows just how bad things can go. He went for a high reward event...but failed to properly prepare his security and suffered total defeat.
Sometimes the time is right to throw all your chips into the bet. But one must be certain they are ready. Syndrome's fall was in many ways an all chips gamble...but we spent several turns preparing for that.
We want to do high risk high reward? Set up a plan to get us into position for one. The reward should the culmination of equal parts planning ahead and boldness to realize now the time is right to go for broke.
We are a not a comicbook supervillain. We are a King. We are not seeking to kill God. Actually, more likely to thank him for helping save our asses. We are seeking to rule Doofania for as long as we can while making it a shining jewel of a realm. Doof might not realize this himself 100%...but this is the reality.
- Location
- Germany
tbf, Syndromes Fall was only partly because of him rolling shit - partly it also was because 2.5 other Kings (us, Shego and someone whom most assume to have been Evelyn Deavor) were explicitly making concentrated cooperative moves against him in the (for him) worst possible moment - if Doof and Shego hadn´t joined up forces and instead each one of them struck out on their own, he would have survived his shit roles relatively unscathed and probably slammed both Shego and Doof withhis sheer home advantage alone.
*A King falling isn´t just because a singular thing...it´s the ultimate convergence between several factors on multiple fronts*
In the same vein, I don´t expect the current Crisis surrounding Kat to be our downfall *on its own* - only once multiple other things start crashing into us now as well would be be in any actual danger...and despite some pretty unfortunate stuff happening to us right now (like the ongoing parade of pratfalls DoofOS has suffered, the continued "trench war" against Doom, the PR and Income shitshow that was LM shitting the bed and maybe some final residue from Twelfth Night - although that one was primarly *Xanatos´* problem, with us coming outta it actually somewhat stronger than before), I´d say that all-in-all, we are doing reasonable well "against" the other Kings in the end.
In short: While in retrospect I do consider the Sands Gala a Crisis event for Syndrome on par with Davids *Twelfth Night* and our *Kataklysm*, by itself a Crisis isn´t as bad as it looks...although on the other hand, both explicit Crisis did have global implications (with Demona preparing to genocide the shit outta all of Mankind and the *Two* alien fleets in orbit right now probably capable of some Exterminatus-tier firepower, respectively) while the Gala was pretty self-contained in the end.
...If we do consider the Gala Syndromes personal Crisis event though, I´d like to call it either "Sands of Destruction" or stay with "Luck be a Lady"...
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