To clarify:
...
There is an implicit contract in quest-playing, as i understand it, which is basically "the protagonist will not make critical decisions without player input; if the protagonist makes a decision leading to disaster, it will be a decision made
specifically by the players."
We've been making simple votes in this combat precisely because we expect...
...
It's like, on a TV show I expect that once in a while I'll be looking at the protagonist and going "NO YOU FLAMING MORON, DO THIS THING, NOT THAT THING. EVEN KNOWING YOUR PERSONALITY AND EXPECTING YOU TO ACT IN KEEPING WITH YOUR CHARACTER, YOU SHOULD BE DOING THIS, NOT THAT!"
But when a
quest protagonist makes decisions that cause me to do that, in the middle of an update, it makes a mockery of the idea that we-the-voters have any meaningful control over the protagonist.
Basically, I'd be totally fine with a sequence of events like:
[Players vote to grab Dandeer]
Poptart: "OK, you grab Dandeer with some difficulty and the expenditure of cookies. Now what?"
[Players vote to fight Yammar hand to hand]
Poptart: [rolls many dice] "You lose the fight. Cut to Bad Middle* "
That'd be fine; we'd have come by that honestly. I would have LOVED "Message in a Bottle" as two quest posts, interrupted in the middle by a player vote to use Dandeer as a human shield in hand to hand combat against Yammar.
Instead we got
[Players vote to grab Dandeer]
Poptart: "OK, you grab Dandeer with some difficulty and the expenditure of cookies. You fight Yammar. You lose the fight. Cut to Bad Middle."
Now I'll grant, the vote to grab Dandeer came with some ambiguous wording that OK
maaaybe Poptart interpreted as wanting to fight Yammar hand to hand afterwards, even though I could have sworn they assured me they wouldn't interpret it that way.
Even so...
This is the same core problem I had with the update that started this entire combat scene. There was an extremely obvious break point in the middle where,
even given the pressure of events, the protagonist should have had at least a chance to make a choice. We might have made a choice that led to a Bad Middle, or we might not have, but we should have gotten the choice.
Indeed, in both cases, the
single most important moment at which a decision was made and acted on was not in the beginning of the update when we enacted our plan, but in the middle.
...
In the first instance, confronting Berra with four super-saiyans was pretty much bound to end well for us. Even if Berra had irrationally and violently resisted, ganging up on him and pummeling him into submission wouldn't have been all that hard. It is darkly ironic to note that we might have easily won this entire encounter if we'd just ganged up, beaten Berra unconscious, and then
unwittingly delegated Yammar to ride herd on him and make sure he didn't interfere while we brought back Dandeer in chains.
But then, the part where we all went off to confront Dandeer (the primary threat, and the one we were less equipped to counteract)? That was the pivotal moment. That was the moment we point to and say "and this is where the plan went off the rails." And we
didn't get a decision about how to react there. We didn't get a decision to follow the path that would lead to disaster,
as distinct from other paths at the same fork in the road.
...
In the second instance, well, as I've said. Hitting him with the memories and having them no-sold? Yeah, I can live with that. No problem. But we still got to Dandeer, and while it was
challenging it was far from the impossibility we faced later in the update.
The real decision point? When Kakara effectively committed to hand-to-hand combat against Yammar after grabbing Dandeer. As Yammar himself pointed out, we weren't winning that fight.
Now, unless Poptart interpreted that word 'flail' as 'player consensus for hand-to-hand fight with Yammar,' which I could...
understand though I might still scream in frustration and quit the quest even if I understood...
Well, again. I feel like we missed the chance to vote on Kakara's actions at a critical decision point.
...
If we can't depend on getting choices to act at key decision points in the story, our only choices are elaborate nightmare-crafted plans with piles of contingencies... Or to just give up having meaningful control over the course of events.
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*(A Bad Middle being a situation where the quest is not, strictly speaking, bad-ended, but where total and overwhelming disaster of a quest-altering nature unfolds. Like, the ending of "Message in a Bottle" here is a Bad Middle. Game's not technically over, but we lose massively and the game gets radically altered and all our hopes and plans for the short and medium term future of the game are crushed into powder).
[Snip invective that I seem to recall being against forum rules]
We could have done these things
before talking to Berra, which we did not expect to need the full heavy artillery for, on account of us having four super-saiyans to his one.
We did not get a chance to do these things
after talking to Berra but before confronting Dandeer.
We did not even get a chance to
stay behind while the others aggressively rushed in and LEEEEROY JENKINS'd Dandeer, while going Spirit Saiyan ourselves.
Had we gotten a vote on whether to do that, at that specific time, rather than having our vote to confront Berra
be the vote that decided our dispositions upon confronting Dandeer, I would agree with you.
No, actually, we did not get a chance to vote on whether to do that,
as you should know full well. The update in which we confronted Berra was the same update in which the combined royals confronted Dandeer and got half their number mind-controlled for their troubles.
We would have had to anticipate, not only that he would act hastily, but that
we would not get a chance to react to his hasty action.
I would not be bringing this up again, except that the latest update has triggered my same negative reaction to having events tumble out of control without us getting to vote on how Kakara reacts to the situation.
I am unsure how that would have helped much but will take your word for it?
...
[deep breaths]
This statement is extremely offensive.
