I'll just say this.
You can have a "no write-ins allowed" quest that strongly encourages literally everyone to vote on literally everything regardless of how much or how little time they have to think and plan about the outcomes of the votes.
OR you can have a quest where the QM is allowed to say to the voters "I'm sorry you're unhappy with this situation, but you could have done something about this problem years ago and chose not to. You have full control over the protagonists' actions; it's up to you how that control is used."
But you can't have both. Trying to have both at once isn't lawful evil GMing. It's
chaotic evil GMing.
Firstly, because 'curated options only' eliminates the players' ability to say "oh yeah, we forgot to do X" and write-in a vote to do X. Or a player's ability to convince everyone else that we really need to watch out for Threat Y, and write-in a vote to do Y. Or for the players to actually
use all their resources and remember and think of those resources, and specify ways to use them cleverly.
Secondly, it means that for the players to be fairly responsible for whether or not they deal with Threat Z, you have to
specifically let the players vote on "Deal with Threat Z or ignore Threat Z?" Because otherwise, individual vote discussions WILL keep circling around to center on other issues and it becomes a tossup whether Threat Z gets dealt with or not. Just like how campaign promises get dropped in politics. If politicians promise to fix the roads year after year, and never do, it's probably not because voters don't want the roads fixed. It's because election dynamics discourage voters from doing something weird like finding a candidate who cares ONLY about fixing the roads, and who is supremely honest about this desire, and voting them into office.
Thirdly, if every critical vote with high risk starts attracting several dozen voters, just as planned... the odds are that not all of those voters are putting comparable amounts of thought and effort into the vote. Normally that's fine, but if there's a risk of crashing the quest by overlooking an important danger,
one cannot blame the players for having made bad choices, if there are lots of people showing up to vote who don't have time to discuss whether or not they're making a bad choice.
...
Again, encouraging simplified voting means diminishing player control over events.
Unless steps are taken to enable players to write-in vote on "gambits to try" or "things to worry about while preparing for the conspiracy," it means diminishing that control
badly. In that case, it means decreasing player ability to prepare for contingencies or try innovative solutions to problems that the GM wouldn't immediately think of.
And when you decrease player power over events, especially when you decrease the power of the people who are willing to carefully evaluate their options and invest time figuring out what to do... Well, with minimized power comes minimized responsibility, and minimized fairness of punishing people for getting something wrong.
So to me? If all this is about is simplifying the votes, so more people can participate even when the stakes are high, without them having to engage in all that tiresome discussion and thinking beforehand... I'm against it. And I'm not sure watching Kakara repeatedly walk into walls and shoot herself in the foot because of the ensuing high-importance, low-player-information-input votes will be entertaining. I mean, that doesn't even make for good tragedy.
...
I approve wholeheartedly of the Lawful Evil GM style Poptart uses, but I believe that it comes with an implicit 'social contract' between GM and players: Namely, that the GM can drop arbitrarily large threats on the players and create arbitrarily bad situations brought about through the players' failure to prepare...
...BUT the players get the chance to use the full range of their intelligence, resources, and the preparation time their characters get, in order to deal with the problems that emerge as capably as possible.
Otherwise, one is not saying "I'll let you try anything but I don't make promises you'll like the consequences." One is just sticking people's feet in buckets of cement and then laughing at them for being unable to win footraces.
If we're talking alterations to voting one problem that has come up is people will talk about a plan, idea, or question, Before it's directly relevant and then it's forgotten by the time it would have been helpful to include in a vote ex: berra being controlled.
Something that would let us add things to an agenda so that they'll be brought up at first relevance would be kais damned helpful. Main problem i see is it quickly becoming bloated and filled with a million unrelated ideas.
Except Poptart is
already keeping up a list of 'agenda items' and 'priorities' for Kakara. All this does is give the voterbase some meaningful influence over what ends up on the list.
...
But yes. I mean, we
specifically discussed the possibility that Berra would be mind-controlled. We even discussed the possibility that Dandeer would be able to unseal Lord Vegeta and turn him to her side as a protector- I distinctly remember it coming up. But it never really mattered because there was no way we could directly translate our own notion of "maybe this is a threat we should prepare for" into "let's make a plan for this eventuality well in advance" or even "let's alert the adults to this possibility and let
them plan for it." The closest we ever came to having that were the ASK votes (and I haven't seen one of those in a long time) and the "discussion impacts Kakara's thoughts" rule (which was taken out back and put out of its misery after things got weird).
We admittedly
didn't think of Dandeer specifically having a way to hack control of Yammar. But if we'd at least had a chance to have a [NOTIONS] write-in vote in the 5-10 updates before the Unsealing in which we list all the obvious things that we think might go wrong and ask Dandelor/Apra/Yammar/whoever to take precautions, that would have
really helped. We'd have had time to vent all our paranoia, to take proper precautions for arresting a mind-controlling witch who's had years to prepare, or at least to TRY to take precautions and have only ourselves to blame if it all went horribly wrong. We could have asked Dandelor to scan for pre-existing mind control spells on Apra or Yammar (or for that matter us). Or at least gotten the explanation that we
can't scan for them.
Instead... we got this. We had a string of more or less curated votes, none of which were particularly directly connected to preventing the outcome that actually happened. About the only thing we could have done differently would have been to go Spirit Saiyan pre-emptively so that we'd have the raw power to blow through any and all of the other royals if we needed to. And
I regret not choosing to do that...
But looking at it from a gameplay point of view,
not voting to specifically do that thing at that specific moment in time is a far cry from not intending to take any meaningful steps to plan or prepare for Dandeer's mind control, after the playerbase had spent literally months fearfully discussing it and the weeks immediately prior to the Unsealing being
terrified of it.