That's nothing new. We would have won if she had just used Dandeer to block Yammar's attacks like we told her to.
Uh... she did that. Yammar's skill in hand-to-hand combat was so much greater than ours that he won
even with the disadvantage of the Dandeer Flail.
Dandeer got a bunch of broken bones in the process, even.
Won, in that she killed dandeer? Yes, because yammar is a complete moron who doesn't understand precommitment, decision theory, game theory, or chicken. Won in that she won the fight? Not so much.
As I speculated at the time, Dandeer dying might actually have been a bad outcome for us, just
differently bad.
I think that was questers want to both antagonise someone and not actually deal with them on their own.
I've noticed a very disturbing trend on SB, SV and QQ that like to offload as many problems as possible onto as many NPCs as they can get their mitts on. It's an endemic feature of quests that the questers are often too afraid to make decisive moves without trying to drag the entire setting and cast along with them.
Honestly, I think it's in large part because of the nature of typical quest formatting.
PCs have very limited and budgeted opportunities to act, rather than
react, because the typical format of a quest update is "shit happens, now what do you do about it?" The voting format channelizes responses to that question into
There aren't a lot of quests where it's common for the QM to post something that boils down to "so, you have a week's worth of free time in which to implement an open-ended strategy for solving one of your problems, what do you do?" That's the kind of thing that would encourage creativity on the part of the players towards acting decisively.
Combine this with the fact that any given crisis stretches out over months or years of real time, and you get a tendency for people to engage in short-term thinking fueled by emotions, animosities, and broad vague impressions about what is going on. You
don't get a lot of bold visionary actions taken to decisively resolve long-term problems that aren't looming ominously over the players' head in that very moment.
...
And players get genre-savvy about this and
model all their ongoing conflicts in terms of buildup to a final confrontation, in which the logical winning move is to build up as big a 'hammer' of one's allies and assets as possible. And to outsource as many as possible of the things that would otherwise go undone because the protagonist would otherwise never get an opportunity to even
vote to do them.
Once she was dead it is likely her spells would have undone. Or at least we could focus on running away.
Do we have any evidence whatsoever that sealing magic in Poptart's setting lacks
ontological inertia?
Masque spells seem to keep working after the caster dies. Nobody in-setting seems to have been worried that the seal on Dazarel would fray after some of the Gokun mages who cast it, or Kakara who provided the ki power for it, dies. While the wards on the Hall seem to receive continuous maintenance, they don't just collapse on account of all the people who created the wards originally now being dead.
We have no reason to think that sealing spells die with the caster.
It's entirely possible that we would have had to deal with mind control victims a who are under magical coercion to forget every reason they should ever disbelieve or dislike Dandeer,
and who hold us responsible for her death. In which case the scenario plays out:
1) Yammar, now with no reason to hold back, beats Kakara to a pulp and possibly kills her for forcing him to murder his daughter-in-law.
2) Yammar revives Vegeta with a senzu bean.
Neither of them can think of a single reason why we would have done all this to Dandeer (because of the mind control spells still being in place).
3) One or both of them vaporize the Senzus for being traitors, or kill all but a handful of them and leave those few alive
only for the knowledge of how to grow senzu beans, possibly with limbs blown off or other crippling injuries to stop them from interfering in what is to come.
4) Berra is trapped in endless torture-scream-horror from the breaking of the mind control spell on him,
and nobody breaks him out of it. Because no one knows how. Apra is a mental wreck from her granddaughter being murdered and her son being tortured, and if she recovers enough strength to fight, is likely put back down with extreme prejudice.
5) Jaffur eventually recovers or is revived... only to find Kakara dead, the plan in ruins, and his abusive father and
his abusive father standing over him. This is most likely to result in a reprise of the 1-on-2 fight between Jaffur, Vegeta, and Yammar, only to the death this time, so either Jaffur does something like go Super Saiyan Two (blowing the wards, summoning the Enemy, and killing his father and grandfather), or Jaffur fights to the death and is killed.
So either:
6a) First phase of game over,
horribly traumatized Jaffur is sole survivor of the royal houses and likely has to face the oncoming Enemy, or...
6b) Game over; the Butchers of House Talt now reign unopposed over the entire Exile community, and Lord Vegeta remarries some other poor woman and sires a new heir to his,
only, royal lineage.
...
I'm not saying any of that WOULD have happened, but we have no obvious reason to suppose it couldn't have, if we
had maneuvered Yammar into killing Dandeer.
