Dragon Ball: After the End

[ilbgar123]

Okay, hang on, give me an example of a time we initiated serious investigation of Dandeer's capabilities and were met with credible but meaningfully incorrect information as to their limits.


I'm...not sure why this is a reply to me, since I was never claiming that Poptart should have been laying out a trail of breadcrumbs (quite the opposite).

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I meant that every time a trail came up, either something we felt was more pressing showed up, someone told us they had it handled and that a kid like us shouldn't be worrying about it (to which I propose we respond with caustic sarcasm from this point on) or some of both. It's not that Poptart should have held out hands, but we got very mixed signals on whether our priority should be Dandeer or if we should ignore her in favor of the dragon or alien invasion or societal upheaval. Like, so little indicated she'd be a major threat once Jaffur was unSealed and every single SSJ was on our side that we had little reason to attempt to investigate further, because it seemed like investing resources into a project that was simply inefficient by comparison.

 

[san]

I really quite strongly disagree with this. It is not the job of the QM to spoonfeed the players all their leads about what problems do and don't deserve attention. We had every ability to investigate sorcery further, we knew we were going to be going up against Dandeer - who we knew was a powerful sorcerer - and we still opted not to. Relying on the assumption that sorcery was weak, when we did not have conclusive proof to that effect, was in retrospect a mistake. Was it an understandable one? Yes. But I don't want a quest where the QM keeps players from ever making mistakes by handing out blatant hints like "HEY LOOK AT THIS THING."

Like...the job of the QM is to tell a good story and run a good game. Neither of those things requires that the protagonist/players automatically are aware of upcoming threats. The latter requires that the option to acquire such knowledge exists, for the most part (or at least that literally unpredictable threats be answerable without prep work), but the onus can absolutely be on the players to take that option. Otherwise it just devolves into "yup, we followed the obvious breadcrumbs and now get to bask in a victory we didn't even earn."

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See I would agree if Sorcery was not such a CRITICAL component of this setting and we were informed of much of what is does and has done with everything indicating it was no real danger to us.

At that point if the QM is giving us that much information it can be considered PURPOSEFULLY misleading the players into believing something. Which ruins the players desire to continue this and makes it feel like a QM vs the players quest which is not healthy for its continuation. No one expects to be completely aware of every threat but everyone expects that if we are given knowledge on something we should at least have an idea if it is a threat to us and QM had no shortage of opportunities to express that.

Now I personally don't think it was on purpose but rather just inexperience at QM'ing but it was still a major mistake on @PoptartProdigy 's part.

To be fair, Poptart didn't have much chance to set out a trail of breadcrumbs. Like, they gave us a number of chances, but we kept either putting it off to focus on training, or got told the adults could handle it and believed them (which we should never do again, Perfect Multiform will give us the AP to do everything ourselves if we ignore Social beyond politics) and thus never bothered to follow the trail. Once again, very suspicious that they allowed us into the conspiracy but kept giving a politer version of 'Not now kiddo.' whenever we brought up that maybe we could help out there in hindsight. We literally only helped out directly when it was basically something only we could do, namely, Seer powers to visit Jaffur pas the Seal.

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see I disagree with this.... at least up until learning of her previous crime. He had plenty of chances like giving us a history lesson where Sorcery was used for this purpose or explaining that the main reason that everyone is waiting so long to prepare for combat vs Dandeleer was because Sorcery was so dangerous rather than politics or the like. and many other chances too.

Instead we were pretty much told "You can resist Sorcery so long as you are SS with pure power" Basically every time it came up.... which is pretty much spat on by grandpa Vegeeta getting turned when he went after her. or when "Sorcery is looked down upon by other saiyans for giving no combat potential and no sorcerers ever work on improving their Ki levels."

Okay, hang on, give me an example of a time we initiated serious investigation of Dandeer's capabilities and were met with credible but meaningfully incorrect information as to their limits.

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That's the point, we never NEEDED to we were outright told at various points by many different characters INCLUDING another Sorcerer mind you that it was no real threat to us. The Qm at that point is effectively REQUIRED to add hints that counter that some way if they want to be considered fair in any way. Otherwise it begins to become QM vs players. And incidents like this happen with mass quitting and rage vs the QM. It is simply an unnacceptable mistake to remove the players agency and ability to act like that.

It is like constantly having NPC's backstab a character and then getting mad when players resort to killing everyone they come across. and while I don't think it was on purpose it WAS a screw up on his part.

 

[Deathbybunnies]

See I would agree if Sorcery was not such a CRITICAL component of this setting and we were informed of much of what is does and has done with everything indicating it was no real danger to us.

At that point if the QM is giving us that much information it can be considered PURPOSEFULLY misleading the players into believing something. Which ruins the players desire to continue this and makes it feel like a QM vs the players quest which is not healthy for its continuation. No one expects to be completely aware of every threat but everyone expects that if we are given knowledge on something we should at least have an idea if it is a threat to us and QM had no shortage of opportunities to express that.

Now I personally don't think it was on purpose but rather just inexperience at QM'ing but it was still a major mistake on @PoptartProdigy 's part.

see I disagree with this.... at least up until learning of her previous crime. He had plenty of chances like giving us a history lesson where Sorcery was used for this purpose or explaining that the main reason that everyone is waiting so long to prepare for combat vs Dandeleer was because Sorcery was so dangerous rather than politics or the like. and many other chances too.

Instead we were pretty much told "You can resist Sorcery so long as you are SS with pure power" Basically every time it came up.... which is pretty much spat on by grandpa Vegeeta getting turned when he went after her. or when "Sorcery is looked down upon by other saiyans for giving no combat potential and no sorcerers ever work on improving their Ki levels."

That's the point, we never NEEDED to we were outright told at various points by many different characters INCLUDING another Sorcerer mind you that it was no real threat to us. The Qm at that point is effectively REQUIRED to add hints that counter that some way if they want to be considered fair in any way. Otherwise it begins to become QM vs players. And incidents like this happen with mass quitting and rage vs the QM. It is simply an unnacceptable mistake to remove the players agency and ability to act like that.

It is like constantly having NPC's backstab a character and then getting mad when players resort to killing everyone they come across. and while I don't think it was on purpose it WAS a screw up on his part.

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Tone it down, man. I don't even disagree with you for the most part, but we just had a thermonuclear salt explosion.

 

[Conceptualist]

Okay, hang on, give me an example of a time we initiated serious investigation of Dandeer's capabilities and were met with credible but meaningfully incorrect information as to their limits.

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We never initiated an investigation on what she, specifically, could do. Instead, we asked what sorcery could do, and used that information to judge what she could do and where we should focus. That's one of the main misconceptions we had. Nobody in the thread realized she had completely broken the soft cap on magic, and was already a level beyond anybody else in the field.

We even temporarily discovered the sorcerer murders while trying learning more about the limits of sorcery, as far as I remember. Which was being done as a preparatory step in the plan which failed. And no change was done because the one guy who actually knew anything said that it must have taken years and years of preparation for that spell, for that specific moment.

We didn't realize she wasn't just insane and evil, but also a genius in the craft as well.

 

[QTesseract]

and we ALSO had no idea at all that what we had even COULD be insufficient in any way.

Again I agree with this @PoptartProdigy this is effectively your weakness as a writer. It would not be a problem outside of the quest format but in it you don't give the players enough ability to tell what is coming. You need to treat it a bit less like a story and a bit more like a Game of D&D or another RPG. Otherwise you will continue to have this problem in the future.


exactly my point, we SHOULD have known that there was even a possibility that Sorcery could do that.... from what we knew Sealing can only take something of a person away which means it is impossible to completely change their perspective into undyingly loyal slaves of the Sorcerer. Except then suddenly it wasn't and BAM we got fkd.

Honestly it felt like.... you decided halfway through you waned Dandeer to be a major threat instead of the minor threat you were gearing her up to be.... and then never tried to give us any warning of it. That is a major problem for a QM to do that is something that does piss off a lot of players.

I'm sorry what? like what? she is not a super Saiyan at ALL though, thats part of the point, no one but the people we brought with us, Jaffur, his father and our father are allowed to be super Saiyans.

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That's my point. We're the super saiyans here, and super saiyan > magic. My argument is that magic is less useful than ki, and is normally only combat worthy either in conjunction with ki (jaffur, buu, etc) or when ki has arbitrary limits (exiles).

Dandeer is the best sorcerer, out of ~10,000; 99.99 percentile, and formerly 99.995 percentile. We beat her in like two rounds of combat, while also bypassing her guards. Meanwhile, we can't beat a single other super saiyan without luck or prep time, even when facing off against the second worst (16.666 percentile).

Ki was and remains superior to magic.

 

[Conceptualist]

Ki was and remains superior to magic.

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The problem is not that magic can or cannot trump ki's natural resistance to it. The problem is that magic can trump people while they aren't using their ki, and remains in place after they power up. We didn't know that. It changes the standard. Everything we have ever judged to be infeasible with magic must be reevaluated.

 

[Wiadi]

I meant that every time a trail came up, either something we felt was more pressing showed up, someone told us they had it handled and that a kid like us shouldn't be worrying about it (to which I propose we respond with caustic sarcasm from this point on) or some of both. It's not that Poptart should have held out hands, but we got very mixed signals on whether our priority should be Dandeer or if we should ignore her in favor of the dragon or alien invasion or societal upheaval. Like, so little indicated she'd be a major threat once Jaffur was unSealed and every single SSJ was on our side that we had little reason to attempt to investigate further, because it seemed like investing resources into a project that was simply inefficient by comparison.

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And I just don't think that giving us "signals" like that is Poptart's job, especially when the correct answer to "which of those do we need to worry about" is "all of them."

That's the point, we never NEEDED to we were outright told at various points by many different characters INCLUDING another Sorcerer mind you that it was no real threat to us.

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Citation(s)?

And no change was done because the one guy who actually knew anything said that it must have taken years and years of preparation for that spell, for that specific moment.

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The fact that the massacre of the sorcerers was difficult for her and took a lot of prep time in no way guaranteed that nothing she could do would threaten us. We assumed it for a number of reasons, not least of which was our (compromised) Seer support reassuring us that every contingency had been foreseen. We made bad assumptions on insufficient information.

 

[Kaiya]

Spoiler: SPOILER

In dragon ball not only is the afterlife a thing but reincarnation as well. I think the difference is rather big

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That doesn't change my calculus, bluntly That just...makes it death. I am fine risking dying. If death doesn't kill you, you were never risking dying. It's just confirming you weren't willing to suffer real consequences.

 

[Bommelom]

Presently, whatever kind of system I adopt, the greatest barrier to entry for the average quester will be the intimidating amount of record-keeping that the operation of this system involves. Even going down to an advantage-based system wouldn't really handle this; players would still need to track and account for every single skill, trait, etc. affecting every given check, and there are a lot of things going into these checks. No matter what, I keep coming back to the conclusion that if I'm to undergo this overhaul, much less according to the eventual aim of greater transparency to the average quester, I'm going to need to do some condensing of the skills system.

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I think that the main problem with figuring out the system wouldn't different skills for Kamehameha and Dodonpa or different skills for fighting one person and fighting in a team (I think that's easy for most questers to comprehend), but rather how styles and skills interact, as well as how different skills interact (how does Wolf Fang Fist and/or the Four-Arms Technique boost Hand-to-Hand, for instance).

As a possible solution to the problem of questers having to add every bonus up at the same, maybe we could make some sort of threadmark where the total bonuses for actions commonly taken by Kakara are added together (her Kamehama bonus, her Dueling skill bonus, her Instant Transmission bonus, her Communication bonus, her bonus to healing people with Senzu beans) including both skill and style bonuses as well as traits that usually apply to the action. That way, questers wouldn't have to add every bonus together every single time.

Of course, this could result in some heavy workload, but I think it could be somewhat off-loaded to the players.

 

[T_of_A]

I'm fine with the old system.

 

[Terrabrand]

Look, I know that this is an easy fix, and I know that if it doesn't work I can always change it later, but I do not want to have to change it later.

Like, the massive thread blowups are anti-fun in and of themselves. By the time it starts, it's too late to head off and the quest is effectively dead for the duration. Add in the fact that many people feel entitled to take shots at me personally, and the result is that, in the aftermath, I am greatly more inclined towards prevention than cure. Cure sucks. It draws out the already-unpleasant event and means that in addition to dealing with the salt, I'm changing rules which, generally, I like.

And frankly, after this last explosion and the means by which many chose to express their dissatisfaction, I don't really have any faith that people will accept the next big loss with grace just because the framework is visible.

Gah, I'm too tired for this right now. I'll sleep on it.

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I'm trying to not, like, pressure you or anything, but I feel like you might be... Hmm. Confusing difficulty for quality?

Like, I know I do this a lot. 'it's easy, that must make it bad'. But I have literally never seen a serious quest blow-up over 'your mechanics are opaque and complicated' when they are presented in a readily accessed form.

Like, you might see players make that complaint, but the mechanics nerd type players will then go 'dude no we knew this was true and said as much!' or 'dude no we missed it but that's on us it's all right there'.

So I feel like, to the extent mechanics and not SV cultural expectation of 'lol auto-win' were at fault here it was basically the fact that the system wasn't available to reference for people.

Like, Simon was talking about 'if the system doesn't align with his intuitive expectations...' recently, and that's not a problem if he can check said expectations directly against the rules page or pages or whatever. In general, I think the thread would much more effectively self-police against blow-ups and stuff if the rules were available, and I don't think overhauling the system adds anything over just revealing it clearly in that regard, while making people happy with the current system (including yourself) unhappy.

On another level in terms of thread blowup risk, I will point out that, when posting an update you expect to be controversial, you can contact staff to warn them and get staff eyes on thread for the aftermath. That gives things less time to spiral out of control and shit. I know at least one major quest has that as a fairly normal thing- admittedly, it's run by a staff member, but I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to do the same.

People tend to try to behave better when they see a lot of staff reading the thread, if moderators/admins are actively watching rules-breaking material can be caught before the discussion has a chance to spiral into a mess, and so on. And I'm pretty sure staff will appreciate the warning, since it just takes less time to do the work if it's nipped in the bud.

Put another way, I think you are fixating on 'what can I do with the mechanics', when the real problems are 'questing culture', 'this quest in specific's sub culture', and 'timing of moderator intervention', which are all things that can to varying degrees be addressed and accounted for.

I hope I'm not rambling too much here. Regardless, I feel some of what I'm saying needs to be said, so posting away.

 

[Conceptualist]

The fact that the massacre of the sorcerers was difficult for her and took a lot of prep time in no way guaranteed that nothing she could do would threaten us. We assumed it for a number of reasons, not least of which was our (compromised) Seer support reassuring us that every contingency had been foreseen. We made bad assumptions on insufficient information.

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Exactly my point. We had insufficient information, didn't know that, and planned key events using that bad information.

The fact that two or three years of planning and questing missed the information issues sucks. I, personally, think that more could have been done on the GMs end to guide the player base's thoughts away from "we know enough, and preparing for this new thing is more important than investigating". However, I don't know Poptarts perspective. They know everything there is going on in the setting that could be relevant, because nothing can happen without their plotting it out. And since they know all that's happening in the setting, the players are at an enormous disadvantage because of a GM's absolute active and passive control of the setting. Every that happens must go through the GM to have an effect on the world they have created. This is why GM rails, when lightly used, can be a good thing. Done right, it offsets the imbalance, resulting in a more fun experience overall. Done wrong, it crushes creativity and player agency, bringing the whole thing down. It's a fine line to walk, and Poptart seems to overcorrect the railroad issue. They are winding up with not enough rail to be a guiderail into the hidden parts of the story, that the player base needs to know in order to potentially succeed.

The problem is when things happen "off screen" and blindside the players in ways that seem unfair. I, personally, think that everyone would have been much happier to have known about the possibility of seemless mind control before it was sprung on us. Poptart included, as the end result of that unintentionally Diabolus ex Machina was this salt factory we ended up with.

 

[Kaiya]

Tempting, but a lot of people had very strong other feelings on the matter.

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I say keep as is, as well.

 

[Bakkasama]

I can kind of see where Poptart is coming from since if people can't understand the mechanics once displayed they would argue they are wrong. If there are as many rolls as they say, a single mistaken critical roll also has a chance to break faith in it.

That said, if the system is complicated... well, a lot of players tend to be lazy for this kind of thing. Those who care overmuch would work to understand the system and those who don't would trust those who do since they could theoretically see the math themselves.

That said, complicated rules open the possibility of people discussing the rolls for several pages if they think something is wrong and complaining to the QM. That is without taking into account that they would expect optimal use of skills and might complain if they think a better combination.

So while I like what little I know of the current system and I rather it stayed the same... I can't say they don't have a point on simplifying it preventing future issues that simply posting the rolls wouldn't.

I would still rather it remained the same and risk/weather the next meltdown but if Poptart wants to prevent rather than cure... I hate to admit it but a change is probably necessary.

THAT SAID, posting the current rules would probably help us tell @PoptartProdigy what changes we think might be better or it might even let us come up with a format to present the rolls take make the system easier to understand so that an overhaul is not needed. A disclaimer on the rules section saying that the time you roll you do using the best combination you can think of at the time and that after the roll session is over the skills used won't be changed so that you don't have to constantly scrap updates if people complain (explanation is important as well as doing it more diplomatically than I care to do on the phone) could help lower it a bit.

Most of all, setting a time beforehand for when you will roll and doing so in the Discord so that anyone can pop up when they happen and ask if they don't get something would make the process more involved and time consuming but it would justify a disclaimer saying that once the session is done the skills usef in the rolls remain unchanged. It would also give the chance for people to get an idea of how things went before the update is up which could go either way to lower the salt but since the info would come just from rolls and there would have been an allocated time for players to complain about them (roll session for the combination chosen, before the next update is up if the math is off) then at least it would be simpler for people to point at the rolls to explain it. It would also give those of us who argue in favor of the results objective proof to show.

 

[Cariyaga]

I can kind of see where Poptart is coming from since if people can't understand the mechanics once displayed they would argue they are wrong. If there are as many rolls as they say, a single mistaken critical roll also has a chance to break faith in it.

That said, if the system is complicated... well, a lot of players tend to be lazy for this kind of thing. Those who care overmuch would work to understand the system and those who don't would trust those who do since they could theoretically see the math themselves.

That said, complicated rules open the possibility of people discussing the rolls for several pages if they think something is wrong and complaining to the QM. That is without taking into account that they would expect optimal use of skills and might complain if they think a better combination.

So while I like what little I know of the current system and I rather it stayed the same... I can't say they don't have a point on simplifying it preventing future issues that simply posting the rolls wouldn't.

I would still rather it remained the same and risk/weather the next meltdown but if Poptart wants to prevent rather than cure... I hate to admit it but a change is probably necessary.

THAT SAID, posting the current rules would probably help us tell @PoptartProdigy what changes we think might be better or it might even let us come up with a format to present the rolls take make the system easier to understand so that an overhaul is not needed. A disclaimer on the rules section saying that the time you roll you do using the best combination you can think of at the time and that after the roll session is over the skills used won't be changed so that you don't have to constantly scrap updates if people complain (explanation is important as well as doing it more diplomatically than I care to do on the phone) could help lower it a bit.

Most of all, setting a time beforehand for when you will roll and doing so in the Discord so that anyone can pop up when they happen and ask if they don't get something would make the process more involved and time consuming but it would justify a disclaimer saying that once the session is done the skills usef in the rolls remain unchanged. It would also give the chance for people to get an idea of how things went before the update is up which could go either way to lower the salt but since the info would come just from rolls and there would have been an allocated time for players to complain about them (roll session for the combination chosen, before the next update is up if the math is off) then at least it would be simpler for people to point at the rolls to explain it. It would also give those of us who argue in favor of the results objective proof to show.

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We can know the rules without seeing (all) the dice thrown. That's a thing that works fine in other quests I've been in.

Personally, I think the mechanics of the quest worked fine before.

...I also kind of think that we might have been more inclined to do research into magic beforehand if, say, we had had the dangling "You know nothing about magic's mechanics!" in the rules, but that's neither here nor there.

 

[Wiadi]

Exactly my point. We had insufficient information, didn't know that, and planned key events using that bad information.

The fact that two or three years of planning and questing missed the information issues sucks. I, personally, think that more could have been done on the GMs end to guide the player base's thoughts away from "we know enough, and preparing for this new thing is more important than investigating". However, I don't know Poptarts perspective. They know everything there is going on in the setting that could be relevant, because nothing can happen without their plotting it out. And since they know all that's happening in the setting, the players are at an enormous disadvantage because of a GM's absolute active and passive control of the setting. Every that happens must go through the GM to have an effect on the world they have created. This is why GM rails, when lightly used, can be a good thing. Done right, it offsets the imbalance, resulting in a more fun experience overall. Done wrong, it crushes creativity and player agency, bringing the whole thing down. It's a fine line to walk, and Poptart seems to overcorrect the railroad issue. They are winding up with not enough rail to be a guiderail into the hidden parts of the story, that the player base needs to know in order to potentially succeed.

The problem is when things happen "off screen" and blindside the players in ways that seem unfair. I, personally, think that everyone would have been much happier to have known about the possibility of seemless mind control before it was sprung on us. Poptart included, as the end result of that unintentionally Diabolus ex Machina was this salt factory we ended up with.

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But we did know that, or should have! Nobody ever told us "yup, these are all of the things sorcery can do, that's it, don't worry about surprises or whatever, this is everything." I don't think it's at all on Poptart to prevent us from screwing up and deciding we know enough when we absolutely don't, given that we were never given compelling evidence on which to base our judgment of sufficient knowledge. I don't want that "guiderail into the hidden parts of the story," I want Poptart to let us succeed or fail on our own merits, as they have. While I'm not gonna go full Lailoken here, we absolutely had the potential to win this confrontation with only the resources and information we were given, and if you honestly don't think that's the case then I'm not sure we can have a meaningful discussion on the issue.

 

[veekie]

Speaking as someone who's mainly a reader rather than a voter here, not much foreshadowing so much as anti-foreshadowing which might have worked if the playerbase was trained to be paranoid and understanding that NPC allies are incompetent and untrustworthy. We were furthermore trained to be aware of our limitations and not presume that we know better about an adult's area of knowledge in their specialty, as we get proven to a relatively frequent extent that yes they know their shit and we're barking up the wrong tree.

However, in every case to date, NPC allies are hugely competent at their jobs and their advice, barring obvious logic holes, in their field of mastery, so when each and every expert in question told us that "yeah, thats useless"(as opposed to "thats insanely difficult", where we go Challenge Accepted)...well its not like we have nothing else to do like in the early quest and can invest our time anyway. Furthermore, there were no cases where we can pick at a logic hole in these statements, as how such things work is completely opaque IC and OOC. People know how Ki works in DBZ, but where Seer and Magic stuff are concerned the canon material is grossly useless for saying anything.


Thus the explosion had at best, a tangential relationship to the mechanics, but rather that based on the incoming factors, Dandeer had already won since we took the first turn, unless a time traveler sent by Future Ghost Kakara went back to Update One to try to avert the future by informing us.

 

[Wiadi]

so when each and every expert in question told us that "yeah, thats useless"

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Again, citation fucking needed on the "we were told magic was useless" idea.

 

[Edin]

Thus the explosion had at best, a tangential relationship to the mechanics, but rather that based on the incoming factors, Dandeer had already won since we took the first turn, unless a time traveler sent by Future Ghost Kakara went back to Update One to try to avert the future by informing us.

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Dandeer hadn't won since the first turn. There were several breakpoints where we could have learned that something wasn't right. Like back before we included Apra and Yammar in the conspiracy when we had a need to actually find out what Dandeer could do. We blew the check for deeper realizations when it came to Dandelor's bits and pieces but we really should have investigated Clan Vegeta's political structure.

I mean, we started to do that but for some reason we stopped shortly after learning how massively we had been insulting the various Vegetans we had interacted with. Heck, us reconciling with Berra and learning more about the Gokun political structure should have prompted us to investigate Clan Vegeta as well!

 

[Gore17]

Dandeer hadn't won since the first turn. There were several breakpoints where we could have learned that something wasn't right. Like back before we included Apra and Yammar in the conspiracy when we had a need to actually find out what Dandeer could do. We blew the check for deeper realizations when it came to Dandelor's bits and pieces but we really should have investigated Clan Vegeta's political structure.

I mean, we started to do that but for some reason we stopped shortly after learning how massively we had been insulting the various Vegetans we had interacted with. Heck, us reconciling with Berra and learning more about the Gokun political structure should have prompted us to investigate Clan Vegeta as well!

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The belief that Yammar and Apra had it.

 

[Conceptualist]

While I'm not gonna go full Lailoken here, we absolutely had the potential to win this confrontation with only the resources and information we were given, and if you honestly don't think that's the case then I'm not sure we can have a meaningful discussion on the issue.

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You're missing my point. We had the potential to succeed within the rules of the game. We didn't, because we didn't know we were missing information. I know that. We could have, quite reasonably, won this with the missing information.

Therefore, people are mad. I am salty that we lost an encounter by accident rigging it against ourselves. Other people are salty because of other, similar reasons. Most GMs guide and control their player base toward the story they have to tell. While Poptart may have just been doing their best to be impartial, it feels to many people like things were rigged by Poptart instead of by accident, because they inherently have more control over the story being told than we do. Thus, a story in which everything goes wrong for the players feels like the GM is trying to make everything go wrong for their players, regardless of their impartiality.

Thus, to retain more control and prevent huge amounts of salt and butt-hurt in the future, Poptart will need to start using the guide rail method of railroads. No change in mechanics is going to help without a minor change in GM style as well.

 

[Gore17]

The fact that the massacre of the sorcerers was difficult for her and took a lot of prep time in no way guaranteed that nothing she could do would threaten us. We assumed it for a number of reasons, not least of which was our (compromised) Seer support reassuring us that every contingency had been foreseen. We made bad assumptions on insufficient information.

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You mean the Seers using an ability we know Dandeer can use magic to counter, since she blocked the Sight from viewing what really happened the night she Sealed her husband?

 

[Wiadi]

You're missing my point. We had the potential to succeed within the rules of the game. We didn't, because we didn't know we were missing information. I know that. We could have, quite reasonably, won this with the missing information.

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No, I hear you, but my point is that we (a) could plausibly have chosen to work harder at finding the information we should have noticed we were missing (something which we could have figured out with zero input from Poptart) and (b) could nevertheless still have won even without that information.

Like, I know players are deathly allergic to admitting mistakes, but the truth of the matter is that we fucked up and if we didn't (or even if we just did less) we could have won here.

Most GMs guide and control their player base toward the story they have to tell.

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Thus, to retain more control and prevent huge amounts of salt and butt-hurt in the future, Poptart will need to start using the guide rail method of railroads. No change in mechanics is going to help without a minor change in GM style as well.

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And I would strongly prefer that Poptart not adopt such a change, stick with the methods used so far - which I find actively more enjoyable than your supposed "necessary" guiderails - and let people who don't like that leave. Obviously it's ultimately not my call (or yours) but that's my preference and not one I think is unreasonable (or, I suspect, unique).

You mean the Seers using an ability we know Dandeer can use magic to counter, since she blocked the Sight from viewing what really happened the night she Sealed her husband?

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Hey, I never said it was a good decision. But I'm pretty sure that was part of the reasoning people gave.

 

[Kaiya]

No, I hear you, but my point is that we (a) could plausibly have chosen to work harder at finding the information we should have noticed we were missing (something which we could have figured out with zero input from Poptart) and (b) could nevertheless still have won even without that information.

Like, I know players are deathly allergic to admitting mistakes, but the truth of the matter is that we fucked up and if we didn't (or even if we just did less) we could have won here.

And I would strongly prefer that Poptart not adopt such a change, stick with the methods used so far - which I find actively more enjoyable than your supposed "necessary" guiderails - and let people who don't like that leave. Obviously it's ultimately not my call (or yours) but that's my preference and not one I think is unreasonable (or, I suspect, unique).

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I 100% percent agree with this. The problem isn't the GM. It's the player's entitled attitudes.

 

[Conceptualist]

No, I hear you, but my point is that we (a) could plausibly have chosen to work harder at finding the information we should have noticed we were missing (something which we could have figured out with zero input from Poptart) and (b) could nevertheless still have won even without that information.

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I'm not arguing with you about those points. In fact, it seems we agree on every relevant to the situation that you have stated except on the validity and/or necessity of the guiderail idea. And I am not saying that you're opinion is not a valid and reasonable belief.

I do know that I, personally, would have done it differently than Poptart did it. But I'm not Poptart, I'm part of the mob of players controlling the PC.

I think that, at this point, it's a difference of philosophy on games like this. Can we agree to disagree on that point, and leave it at that?

Like, I know players are deathly allergic to admitting mistakes, but the truth of the matter is that we fucked up and if we didn't (or even if we just did less) we could have won here.

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That's why I'm upset! We have been setting things up to make this encounter as hard as it could be without trying to do so. We screwed ourselves over accidentally.

I've been admitting that the entire time. Several people have. It doesn't change the fact that many of the same people are mad, salty, and disappointed about it, and have opinions on things.

Poptart will do what they feel is best to balance hurt players and game integrity. They have said that they would prefer prefer preventive measures over just taking these blowups as they come, and I, personally, think having a little more guiderail in key plot areas would be good.