I agree with
@Deathbybunnies . If Dandeer were a secret super-mastermind in control of everything including a conspiracy she could not easily have foreseen, and most of whose members are either super-saiyans or members of a family whose location is a total secret to everyone and who have one of the few sorcerors on the planet capable of matching her power, we wouldn't
have a conspiracy anymore. Not with Berra willing to bust it wide open.
...
I would like to point out that completely dropping the Perfect Multiform research project sounds like a
really bad idea. I've seen a lot of plan drafts that do that.
Basically, Perfect Multiform takes Multiform from a technique that is
only useful to fight weak opponents and improve our action economy, and turns it into a massively useful technique against even the strongest opponents.
I fully recognize that we're going to have to keep investing an action or two in it for quite some time. But if we restrict ourselves to developing
ONLY skills that we can rapidly improve in so that we master everything in one or two actions, we're going to be in a bad situation overall, because we'll have lots of things that we're "meh" at, but none that we're truly good at. Which means that no matter which of our many techniques we use in combat against a serious opponent, we are likely to
always be at a disadvantage, because we'll be opposing their master-class skills with apprentice or journeyman-level skills.
I think that we really do need to invest a reasonably fraction of our Action Points (say, 10-20% over the long term) simply into developing a workable set of battle tactics. Picking a version of this that has desirable synergies with 'non-combat' life is great, that's what pushed us down the road to Tien Style and Multiform in the first place. But we still need to make it
work, and it's noteworthy that Tien didn't use his Multiform in combat more than once or twice, precisely because it's ineffective against a strong opponent due to the way the power level division works.
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@KaintukeeBob ...
I very much don't
want to give up training Maya. She's very likely to be a lifelong ally of Karen/Kakara, and we know her on a level Berra doesn't. And while Berra's too good a person to view her as just a tool, and clearly cares about her welfare, she's not a
friend to him.
Furthermore, she's very likely to continue rising in power alongside the power level of our enemies, to the point where she remains able to help us well into the future, so she's going to be part of our team. Not just a soldier in Berra's army.
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@Gore17 ...
I don't like the idea of spending an action on a
purely speculative concern that we have zero evidence that we need to worry about.
We could easily dream up ten or twelve actions we could take as precautions against imagined threats, and maybe a few of those precautions would even prove valuable in the future- but we'd totally cripple ourselves in the process, because we'd spend so many actions looking out for secret traitors and secret mind control and "but wait, what if she mind-controlled the sorceror we used to check for mind control" and secret Garenhulder sorceror conspiracies... We'd never
grow, we'd never learn any useful skills. We'd be stuck with the powers and skills of a twelve year old child, just a
very paranoid twelve year old child.
I'm not sure we should privilege "what if Dandeer has secret mind-controlled spies in a conspiracy she would have every reason to
break wide open if she could do so" over the many many other imagined threats we could think of. If they don't deserve a whole Action Point worth of precautions, I don't think this does either.
Furthermore, I find it very disagreeable for us to spend Action Points on short-term security against speculative threats, that would have to be renewed every year to
keep us safe (since nothing stops Dandeer from putting mind control hexes on people
later after we've already swept them for bugs). Especially in a year where we seem so hard up for actions that people are willing to abandon long term projects that promise to provide Kakara with extraordinary, breakthrough capabilities like Perfect Multiform and Transcendence.
