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Dragon Ball: After the End

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This needs a retcon. I get that Poptart probably let his muse run away with him and he ended up skipping the vote, but that vote was a critical point-of-failure that should have been in the hands of the questers. Properly run quests need trust between the questers and the QM; the QM needs to be able to trust the questers not to metagame and the like and the questers need to be able to trust that the QM won't railroad them or screw them over without a damn good reason.
 
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Carrnage said:
Never, protector as written will have kakara never kill anyone without an explicit vote making her do so.
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Oh.

I suppose it's a question for the players then. When does not killing the monster become evil?

I mean, that's got an individual answer for each person. But for me, it's when you can't contain them, or help them not hurt people.

#justkillgilligan

Edit: wasn't actually asking the thread in the hope of an answer, mearly expressing confusion for some choices, and... Well, ethical frameworks.
 
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Carrnage said:
The vision started emerging right after vegeta shot us.
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Yes, and Apra was effectively out of the fight as soon as she'd realized we were getting shot- so I think it's more like bad phrasing than like some secret clue being subtly dropped in the middle of a 2000-word vision that this is all some kind of a trick.

I mean hell, it's entirely possible that we could have sidestepped a lot of pain by using our vision opportunity today, in the morning, and tried to scry on "what happens when we confront Dandeer if we follow the plan?" One of the mistakes I'm prepared to accept is largely or ALL on the quest voters here is that we've been under-using our Sight, which is a very rare skill, in favor of our ki powers and communication ability, which are comparatively common (e.g. Yammar having a +46 and probably better Communications bonus).

In our defense we didn't have real control over it until fairly recently in plot terms.

BeepSmile said:
Oh.

I suppose it's a question for the players then. When does not killing the monster become evil?

I mean, that's got an individual answer for each person. But for me, it's when you can't contain them, or help them not hurt people.

#justkillgilligan
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Interestingly, Gilligan wasn't even responsible for the problems that kept them trapped on the island, most of the time. It was other people being foolish (i.e. everyone carrying so much gold on their persons that their boat for escaping the island sank under the weight), or totally unrelated bad luck, usually. And he saved all their asses quite a few times.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Yes, and Apra was effectively out of the fight as soon as she'd realized we were getting shot- so I think it's more like bad phrasing than like some secret clue being subtly dropped in the middle of a 2000-word vision that this is all some kind of a trick.
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I think you misread my initial post or jumped to conclusions i never said that this was all a trick.

Edit: ah for clarification my two thoughts on the previous page about the vision are seperate.
Simon_Jester said:
I mean hell, it's entirely possible that we could have sidestepped a lot of pain by using our vision opportunity today, in the morning, and tried to scry on "what happens when we confront Dandeer if we follow the plan?" One of the mistakes I'm prepared to accept is largely or ALL on the quest voters here is that we've been under-using our Sight, which is a very rare skill, in favor of our ki powers and communication ability, which are comparatively common (e.g. Yammar having a +46 and probably better Communications bonus).
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this was when we still trusted the adults in the conspiracy to not be subverted.
 
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Gamerlord said:
This needs a retcon. I get that Poptart probably let his muse run away with him and he ended up skipping the vote, but that vote was a critical point-of-failure that should have been in the hands of the questers.
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I don't agree that it was a critical point of failure, because that implies that there was ever any chance of success.

Dandeer has been nothing but an endless cavalcade of unstoppable ass-pulls that I don't believe there was anything we could have done, ever, at any point.

When the initial Sorceror-God dandeer salt happened there was an argument made that there must be limits to her abilities, things she couldn't do or she'd just have control of everyone that matters.

And look. It turns out she did and always had and it was entirely fucking trivial on her part.

She casts an obedience spell using buffs and it becomes impossible to resist barring trillion to one odds.

That spell can only be broken by also using magic.

And that spell is permanent and she can sustain it for all eternity for no cost or upkeep. If you want to fire a ki beam you have to continually feed it ki, but apparently with magic eternal god-spells to enslave anyone you want only have an up-front cost and then last forever with no chance of escape.

Magic doesn't just totally render the Sight useless, it renders everything useless.

And now what?

Kakara runs off in shade form to return in 10 years of training to stop Dandeer with SSJ2 only for it to turn out she has 500 'I Just Win' buttons ready for that?

Not that that's likely.

More likely she comes back in 10 years to find 90% of the population are dead because they've committed suicide because of the degenerative effects of the mind-rape.

Actually more likely than that even is that a month in Jaron kills himself and Dandeer loses it and ashes the planet.

Dandeer is a blight on the narrative and player agency and this needs to end before it kills the story.

At present what we've just been told is that five years of in-game work (and two real world years), a conspiracy, and all that planning and everything that Kakara has done, every single player choice, every action taken was all completely meaningless and get wiped away with the snap of a finger.
 
Staff Notice - This is detrimental to the tone of the thread and uncivil to other users, violating Rules 3 & 4
Bommelom said:
..You know this thing does seem super Dragon Ball-y. Like, losing to a villain which in turn means you'll have to run away and train until you're strong enough to return and beat them is pretty much the plot of every single Dragon Ball arc.
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I'm just going to ignore the next 5+ pages of irrational salt and butthurt, and just emphasize this.

I am 100% okay with how things have gone down. We still have plenty of options and opportunity.

And I don't mind learning the lesson that we won't always win.
 
So. Plan. What I recommend is to have the players go through the thread. Find all of the places where Dandeer did something. Get all of Kakara's reactions, every last scrap of sorrow, rage and hate for what she's done. Then, have her focus on that-all of it, the reason she's fighting this battle in the first place... and that we need to be stronger. Use every single act of evil in Dandeer, and try to go Super Saiyan 2. If it works, follow the plan Future Kakara came up with, but try and knock Jaffur out whilst he's too stunned to react. Then, have the Misfits grab the bros and the Senzus, and use their spaceship to get out of here while we make a very flashy and terrifiying distraction for as long as we can manage. When we lose, Mind Project away, then Instant Transmit to Maya. We'll just have to hope everyone will forgive us afterwards.

Thoughts?
 
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KnightDisciple said:
I'm just going to ignore the next 5+ pages of irrational salt and butthurt, and just emphasize this.

I am 100% okay with how things have gone down. We still have plenty of options and opportunity.

And I don't mind learning the lesson that we won't always win.
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Again, I don't mind losing, qua losing, for pursuing a strategy the players voted for, and that the QM carried out in good faith.

My "irrational salt and butthurt," as you so dismissively put it, comes from the part where the first 1/4 of the last update was us accomplishing what we voted to accomplish and wanted, and then the next 1/4 was Kakara making a bad decision many of us would have voted against if we'd gotten the chance, and then the remaining half was us losing.

The "player agency" switch got flipped into the 'off' position as soon as Kakara didn't start taking opportunities- not to disengage or to try some trick- but to get a vote on whether to do so.

I don't need "player agency off, you lose" just as a way of learning that defeat is possible in a Poptart quest. Because hoo boy I never labored under that misapprehension. I just expected any losses to be a result of a controlled flight into terrain, not of the controls on the airplane being abruptly switched off as the ground approaches, averting the chance to avert disaster.

Rmnimoc said:
I'm not 100% happy with this, but I wouldn't go that far. I trust that Poptart has important Poptart reasons. What we should be focusing on is how we turn this around and win. Admittedly, I have no idea how to manage that, but we've got some clever people in this thread. We've got this.
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The problem is, if going forward we can expect Poptart's muse running away with them to ensure... or for Secret Reasons to ensure... that we don't get a vote on how Kakara tries to react to various troubling circumstances at plot-critical moments...

Well, at that point it's very hard for me to go on with the quest.

I don't WANT to ask for a retcon of some kind, but it's kind of hard for me to say we don't need one for the quest to be viable.

Because, again, I'd have been fine with us losing this way as a result of us voting to use Dandeer as a weapon in hand to hand combat... but on the whole, that isn't the thing that we collectively voted for, and if we'd known that would be the result, some people would have voted differently, campaigned differently, or both.

Carrnage said:
this was when we still trusted the adults in the conspiracy to not be subverted.
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Yes, but I mean... we could have tried to use our Sight at all. We didn't, and we had reasons to go "no, the adults have this." It didn't even cross our minds that Carrick, in particular, was subverted.

But... "use our Sight" IS something we could reasonably have voted to do, something that might have warned us in advance, something it would have been reasonable for us to do. Far more reasonable, really, than the level of paranoia it would have taken to come up with "but what if the bulk of our co-conspirators have hidden mind control triggers that prevent them from being effectual against Dandeer without having automatically outed our whole conspiracy," which was in fact the case.

I'm willing to own that hit. That's something we can take, reasonably, as a lessons-learned: use Sight more, whenever possible.

gamer50018 said:
So. Plan. What I recommend is to have the players go through the thread. Find all of the places where Dandeer did something. Get all of Kakara's reactions, every last scrap of sorrow, rage and hate for what she's done. Then, have her focus on that-all of it, the reason she's fighting this battle in the first place... and that we need to be stronger. Use every single act of evil in Dandeer, and try to go Super Saiyan 2. If it works, follow the plan Future Kakara came up with, but try and knock Jaffur out whilst he's too stunned to react. Then, have the Misfits grab the bros and the Senzus, and use their spaceship to get out of here while we make a very flashy and terrifiying distraction for as long as we can manage. When we lose, Mind Project away, then Instant Transmit to Maya. We'll just have to hope everyone will forgive us afterwards.

Thoughts?
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I dunno. I don't really care right now, because I don't trust outcomes to correlate meaningfully with intentions.
 
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KnightDisciple said:
I'm just going to ignore the next 5+ pages of irrational salt and butthurt, and just emphasize this.

I am 100% okay with how things have gone down. We still have plenty of options and opportunity.

And I don't mind learning the lesson that we won't always win.
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Stating your ignoring peoples arguments and patronizing them is bad form, all it does is get the people who already agree with you to pat you on the back and piss off the people you are patronizing
 
I think we can give up on a retcon. Poptart doesn't really walk back their decisions...ever, from what I recall. That being said, and I promise this is salt-free, our pacifist ideal needs to come up for review. It just makes sense in character if Kakara put everything on the line for the no-kill rule and then lost everything's for it. Like, I'd still like to keep it, but this is the singular worst loss we've taken yet.

Also I still want something out of this, I don't care how petty or small. I'll take picking up Dandeer and throwing her at someone before we leave, but I need something.
 
Also this might be the merciful side of me talking, but when I DM and the players are about to screw up that desperately, I'll usually have something in-game with a warning, mainly because losing on this scale usually doesn't work out to well player side. That said, my idea of balance is "players have a hard time, then win," so that's just me.
 
Well it's like, I feel like we were adequately warned that fighting Yammar was a bad idea and that confronting him one-on-one would get us beaten down.

Which is exactly what we did. Involuntarily.
 
gamer50018 said:
Then the quest will die. Because I am not the only one done with Miss Dandeer Mary Sue and her asspulls.
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Oh no I'm done with her too, but I think I can bear it if when we fuck off, we never have to mention, look at, hear of, or think of Dandeer until we come back to crush her. This new bullshit could still be an interesting time, but I'm not here for Dandeer being rubbed in our face every update.
 
I've cared less and less about this story as time has gone on. The current conflict was just not compelling, mostly because Dandeer is not really a good villain. She's evil, she mind-rapes everyone, she's likely more than a little insane by this point, but she's... not completely flat as a character, but she's close. It's a different medium, you can't expect what worked for Toriyama in manga and anime to work in a text format.

Also... I kind of remember this being presented as "Dragon Ball grown up" in a way at some point. Politics and the like being important, but then we deal with what amounts to a straight-up, two dimensional, ye olde Dragon Ball villain? *Skeptical noises*

At this point... I really just kind of want to fuck off. Fuck Dandeer and fuck Garenhuld as a whole. Get Maya and the Senzus out and hidden I guess, but just... Leave.

Maybe come back some day in the far future and just ash parts of the surface from orbit, but otherwise... Why stay? Dandeer has been shown again and again to be unbeatable. Why bother?

And no, it doesn't matter what we're told. Actions speak louder than words and Dandeer has beaten Kakara at every turn.

Beaten everyone at every turn.

That's not a compelling villain, that's an obstacle meant to make you lose.
Simon_Jester said:
Again, I don't mind losing, qua losing, for pursuing a strategy the players voted for, and that the QM carried out in good faith.

My "irrational salt and butthurt," as you so dismissively put it, comes from the part where the first 1/4 of the last update was us accomplishing what we voted to accomplish and wanted, and then the next 1/4 was Kakara making a bad decision many of us would have voted against if we'd gotten the chance, and then the remaining half was us losing.

The "player agency" switch got flipped into the 'off' position as soon as Kakara didn't start taking opportunities- not to disengage or to try some trick- but to get a vote on whether to do so.

I don't need "player agency off, you lose" just as a way of learning that defeat is possible in a Poptart quest. Because hoo boy I never labored under that misapprehension. I just expected any losses to be a result of a controlled flight into terrain, not of the controls on the airplane being abruptly switched off as the ground approaches, averting the chance to avert disaster.
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I got the feeling that we weren't going to get out of there without a fight by that point. *Shrug*

Just a feeling.
chryssalideater said:
Also this might be the merciful side of me talking, but when I DM and the players are about to screw up that desperately, I'll usually have something in-game with a warning, mainly because losing on this scale usually doesn't work out to well player side. That said, my idea of balance is "players have a hard time, then win," so that's just me.
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Quests and such are as much Games as they are Stories and that can be hard to balance. This is very much Kakara's story, though I wonder about the villains/obstacles (seriously Yammar has been a better and more compelling opposite/villain for Kakara than Dandeer and he's barely been on screen!), but as a game? Eh... A lot of the time it's alright, but other times it really isn't.
 
Okay, so here's my main argument:

We lost the fight well before the point some people are wanting Poptart to have given us a vote. As I believe has been pointed out both IC and OOC by other posters, we should have (and I think I'm guilty in this as well) focused on taking down Vegeta to then be able to double-team Yammar.
By the time we were 1-on-1 with Yammar, we'd lost. It was just a matter of time, barring an absurd number of natural 100s.

But instead of just sticking us in a Seal and making us wait and hope, Poptart is instead giving us an incredible opportunity to not only help our allies retreat and be saved, and to save Maya (and possibly the rest of the Misfits), but also to go on an adventure and learn and grow stronger.
 
KnightDisciple said:
Okay, so here's my main argument:

We lost the fight well before the point some people are wanting Poptart to have given us a vote. As I believe has been pointed out both IC and OOC by other posters, we should have (and I think I'm guilty in this as well) focused on taking down Vegeta to then be able to double-team Yammar.
By the time we were 1-on-1 with Yammar, we'd lost. It was just a matter of time, barring an absurd number of natural 100s.

But instead of just sticking us in a Seal and making us wait and hope, Poptart is instead giving us an incredible opportunity to not only help our allies retreat and be saved, and to save Maya (and possibly the rest of the Misfits), but also to go on an adventure and learn and grow stronger.
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Well, I certainly saw no indication that going after vegetal immediately was the right answer. In fact, I'm pretty sure I argued against it because we're bad in one-on-one fights, and I didn't want to fight Vegeta one-one-one. So yeah that plan went well.
 
Staff Notice - This is detrimental to the tone of the thread and violates Rule 4
I was going to try and leave a constructive comment here, but upon re-reading it I noticed that it quickly devolved into various bullshit things.

SO I am instead going to patiently wait for one of two things; the thread calming down; Poptart stopping by to provide that explanation. Have a great time, everyone!
 
gamer50018 said:
Then the quest will die. Because I am not the only one done with Miss Dandeer Mary Sue and her asspulls.
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To be honest I was fine with everything up to this post.
It made sense that a magic user with time to prepare can be pretty crazy.

But it just feels like we lose via fiat here.
It also feels like a lecture about how everything we've tried to do is worthless.

We even get a lecture from future us which doesn't feel anything like advice really, just talking about both how dandeer is an idiot and there's no way we could win and rubbing salt in the wound.

Honestly the only redeeming feature Dander ever had was imagining how we'd beat her.
Every Dragon Ball villain is entertaining in some way.
But for me Dandeer is impossible to feel any emotions towards other than hate.

Poptart even said that we didn't know everything about her to try and make her more sympathethic when we just hated her for being a bit of a bitch and sealing Jaffur, then had the flash back where she murdered every vegetan sorcerer.
 
Uh, people. Can we calm down a bit? Personally, I have no issues with the update and I think we had plenty of opportunities to vote and do things differently. I also don't see much pointon writting a post just to say you are leaving the quest since the only thing that accomplishes is souring the mood of the quest more.

Out of all the people who complained about the update though, I think that @Simon_Jester is one of the only ones to make what I consider a valid point since he pointed out this post:

PoptartProdigy said:
We share the same interpretation of the vote.
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I mean, I liked the update and if it stood alone I would see nothing wrong with it since the winning vote was use as a shield/flail which implies fighting but since THAT was explicitly adressed by the @PoptartProdigy that is a legitimate reason to be angry though not, in my opinion, for the vitriol in some posts.

Anyways, I trust the QM to keep the story interesting and make a fair judgement once this issue is pointed out. THAT SAID I would still recommend for there to be some pause before the next update to let the salt die down. Some of the proposed votes (aiming for SS2 and salt down the planet) seem to be done out of spite and that is not a good mentality.

If the updates keeps, I think proceding as planned seems like the best option since it is the one which seems has the greater chance of success when taken in isolation.
 
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