- Location
- United States of America
That is as good a reason as any. Hopefully we can stay on our toes and not make a complete fool of ourselves during the meeting. Here's hoping!
Forge of Destiny(Xianxia Quest)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
Not sold on White Hart. It grants us +6 physical cultivation rolls, plus a third of the successes on those added to qi, but that all costs 6 stones. Frankly it isn't a bad trade, but it isn't really a good one either; a single physical cultivation action plus 4 stones has about 40 dice, and a third of that added to qi via the Bear Marrow Elixir. That that the 6 stones here give us a seventh of what we can get with an action and 4 stones, so our exchange range is 6 * 7 - 4 = 38 stones for an action. That is about breaking even, so I don't particularly care one way or another.
Done, thats three dots in Wits now.Cultivation all comes down to popping pills and snorting elixir in the end.
@yrsillar, put my two points on Wits anyway, an extra dice on possible Wits check might be better than a single dice and +1 DV on Unarmed, since we're going in a complex social event next turn.
EDIT: Oh, and I reiterate the possibilities of getting cheaper (though possibly lesser) pills and elixirs from Su Ling.
Maybe we can even trade teaching AM for a supply of them from both Suyin and Su Ling?
Anyway just letting you guys know that I'm going to be busy tomorrow, so the votes going to remain open.
On that note, we should consider buying some beast cores off of Su Ling with our Qi Establishment pill, at least if she is still in Red by the time we need them.
Grosstoad
Birdbrain - Dick - Rules-Lawyer - Creeper
We could toss it to Suyin instead, to strengthen her SL. Say it was in thanks of her helping open the tokens.
+doffs off the devil's advocate cap+
On the Formations end of Suyin's capabilities, we might want to ask around for possibility of putting Formations in Qi Cards.
- Location
- United States of America
That would be an interesting idea, having different cards that cast different formations. Placing cards that make targets sleepy or frozen as a statute would be an interesting use of our admittedly limited formation expertise.
The problem is that we've seen from our Suyin interactions that she feels indebted to us, to the point that I expect it is making her feel useless and the like.
See:
In light of this, I think that giving her gifts is unlikely to advance the SL, and might even be counterproductive.
If Plan Haitei wins, can we make a point next week to do some of the non-cultivation stuff we've been putting off? In particular, can we do the formations Archive action and the Hard harvesting mission?
We know we want the Formations research just to get a feel for the land, so to speak - it would be good to know what we can practically do at our level, other then just breaking formations others have set up. And we will need to start doing harvesting missions to to pay for our training aids. As is, those aren't going to get to take advantage of the +8 dice we get to cultivation actions after we break into Mid Silver, so why not frontload these actions for before we have that bonus?
That still leaves three actions for Egg + EPC + Physical; assuming nothing else shows up, are people generally okay with such a setup?
We know we want the Formations research just to get a feel for the land, so to speak - it would be good to know what we can practically do at our level, other then just breaking formations others have set up. And we will need to start doing harvesting missions to to pay for our training aids. As is, those aren't going to get to take advantage of the +8 dice we get to cultivation actions after we break into Mid Silver, so why not frontload these actions for before we have that bonus?
That still leaves three actions for Egg + EPC + Physical; assuming nothing else shows up, are people generally okay with such a setup?
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[X] Plan Haitei
[X] Plan Haitei
I can't help but think that her feeling increasingly indebted to us is not actually a bad thing. So long as she doesn't decide to just give up on cultivating then having her feel increasingly like she HAS to prove herself useful in return could be quite helpful.
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Well, the reason I said that it saves us multiple weeks later on is because it doesn't just give simple, easy to do calculations where we get advantages for one week. We get advantages for one week worth of dice on dice on all cultivations (at the very least) of course, and it does mean getting faster to the next threshold on multiple points... but it also means getting higher returns on multiple types of actions that are less easily quantifiable.
For example, it might mean being at lady Cai's meeting at Mid Silver. If she is trying to woo us and we are mid silver when two week ago we were peak gold, she will try to woo us harder and this by itself might give us a free "+3 weeks of efforts". It might mean the difference between failing Moonfilled and succeeding (I doubt it). It might mean getting more returns for harder missions with less effort, giving more resources and making the starlight actually a non-sacrifice by itself, and so on and so forth.
It's not a isolated "yeah, we are getting one week in advance, that's all" because everything plays together. There are thresholds, and while this is not the case of "getting to green a week before our 20th birthday or a week after", there are cases, many of them, when one week won = a month won several months down the line.
I truly think this is the case, if only because of the effects on EPC or SCS. SCS for example we can't afford to train it right now because it is just shy of getting to SCS3 in one action, while if we were silver we could get that reliably. Especially if we do the Meizhen action this turn. there are many things where the difference between 'mid silver' and not give so much much returns that not getting it by itself give a huge penalty.
I think we might want to consider figuring out how to make a barrier formation before we put the egg on a kiln that we will keep at home and the only deterrent to it being stolen is apparently our household's (admittedly dangerous) reputation. Like, I doubt we can keep the entire setup in our ring (tho if we can my objections vanish)
Like, I don't want to invoke voter paranoia, but our somewhat primitive thievery plans pretty much can be summed up as 'walk into houses and take stuff'. And if we can do it... so can other people.
Like, I don't want to invoke voter paranoia, but our somewhat primitive thievery plans pretty much can be summed up as 'walk into houses and take stuff'. And if we can do it... so can other people.
Except we've still got EPC to train. And people are still wanting to push towards getting hand/spine art, which means another spine meridian and an archive for that. Things aren't that easy.
Sorry; meant EPC, not NPC. Keep thinking Nine instead of Eight. :/
We might end up taking an action to go pick out an art, that is true. I guess it wouldn't be that bad to open a meridian instead of doing the mission or something...
Given that Haitei should hopefully leave us fairly close to mid-silver... How possible would it be to, say, take meridian + learn new art and level up physical using overflows?
Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
@Katreus I really can't convince you to use either of the extra physical roll pills? you are opening a meridian so the meridian one wouldn't even be wasted, as it would just mean getting more overflow, and meridian-wise the extra dice are only truly needed insofar as ''the last push" when we are late/late and getting to the last of our obtainable meridians, so it's not a real loss as long as we have one of those left by then.
We can get 5+ extra success... but it's iffy, and current hatei plan takes us just short of this. Really, at this point the "less not use resource at all" thing is dangerous.
If there was use of some more resources on plan hatei, we would get close enough to mid-silver I would just try to write a omake to get us there. Not quite there yet though.
So it's currently more of a she wants to pay us back, rather than any help toward her will hurt her. Helping her doesn't hurt her... but her helping us makes her feel good. It's win win.
Harder than it looks if we don't use meridian physical pill next turn, too. Simply because art can't easily be predicted (we don't know if we will have overflow or just continue learning it) and meridians can't either.
We can get 5+ extra success... but it's iffy, and current hatei plan takes us just short of this. Really, at this point the "less not use resource at all" thing is dangerous.
If there was use of some more resources on plan hatei, we would get close enough to mid-silver I would just try to write a omake to get us there. Not quite there yet though.
It's... a bit more complicated. She is feeling indebted to us, but she is also feeling like she needs to accept help and get everything she can to accomplish her own goal.
So it's currently more of a she wants to pay us back, rather than any help toward her will hurt her. Helping her doesn't hurt her... but her helping us makes her feel good. It's win win.
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Fair enough; the model I described doesn't appropriately capture external interactions.
For example, back when we were in Elder Su's class, extra advances at the time were more valuable then their pure time/progress values would suggest because they also earned us extra rewards. Similarly, although we chose not to, breaking through before the Thunderdome would have been especially helpful - not just because it gave us progress, but because it did so in time for a special event. As a third example, if we were actually one year where we were supposed to be instead of just one year behind the previous class, the sect would basically write us off, meaning that a bunch of bonuses we might otherwise get we don't get.
On the other hand, I think that extra progress has a chance to proc negative external effects; e.g. making people more jealous, making us acceptable targets to higher-cultivation peers, etc. So all in all, unless there is a specific external reason that we need time-sensitive advances, I feel like it is best to ignore the effect of this category.
This is double counting. We already know that being more advanced means that you get more out of each action; so of course if we take the same exact actions in two cases the case where we were more advanced would get better results. But just like the fact that we get more dice for each cultivation action by being more advanced, this is already accounted for. Your discrepancy comes from the fact that for the more advanced case, you are effectively doing your actions later, at least as far as cultivation is concerned. If you just pushed back said actions in the original plan to match up cultivation-wise, the discrepancy in results would go away.
As a litmus test, consider my 1yr example. If we were behind a year, would we be having more problems with Gathering missions than we are now? Not at all.
If one week could be leveraged into a month several months down the line, we should precommit to pushing anything external encounter that isn't time-sensitive down a week; that would get us lots of gains, no?
I have an allegory to tell with regards to this.
I take the subway to work every day, and trains typically come every 10 minutes or so. There are several blocks from subway, and depending on the day, I may cross them slowly or quickly. I have on multiple occasions walked slowly, only to find myself arriving just in time to miss the train. In such cases, I often lament to myself - "if only I had chosen to walk quicker today, I would have made it! This one minute of dallying cost me 10 minutes of time; what a shame". Except of course, that is wrong. I don't know in advanced that I would be one minute late, and in fact, nine-times-out-of-ten, I'm not; my dallying doesn't stop me from catching the same train, and only means I spent a minute more outside and a minute less on the platform. So while there are times where the minute is multiplied tenfold in terms of losses, those times are perfectly matched by the times when the minute matters not at all.
Point being. The fact that we need an extra action here that we wouldn't need with Mid Silver isn't anything special; it is just a manifestation of the fact that at Mid Sliver we advance faster, which means we'll need less actions on average. Sometimes that means only one action is needed where two had been required before, but sometimes it means that one action is one action was. No need to read anything into it, and certainly no need to count that as an extra bonus; it is already been counted when we said Red gives us more progress per action.
I wouldn't count on it. We are close enough to the meridians success threshold that we don't really gain much overflow from successes there, so it would probably fail miserably.
What resources would we use for that kind of setup? Currently, the only relevant difference between the plans is the use of Starlight Elixir, which should put us comfortably over from what people were saying?
We do have points lying around to use if we need them. Currently, I was figuring that the best use of them would be to throw them at EPC to try to make sure it's done in 2 turns rather than 3.
Edit: I don't really see how we can do it without use of Starlight, which people don't want. Using both White Hart and Steady Growth as well as an omake reward would put us at what, maybe 5-6 more successes? Which might be just enough, but would probably miss it by a hair?
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Arkeus
Crazy cat guy
- Location
- France
Wouldn't we be? If we were a year later, it means we would be 15, so it means we would have access to less resources from the sect, less trust from allies, and so on and so forth. This is not a "nothing would be different" factor. Being a year later cost a lot more, simply by virtue of being a year later.
It's a bit weird because it's intuitive to think "Oh yeah, the same opportunity are there, it's just a year later", but it's simply not the case. There are cases where being a year later actually is helpful, though. For example, it would mean not having to contest against Sun Liling/Cai Rexiang/Bai Meizhen at the end of the year.
OTOH, having to contest with them is an opportunity.
I will disagree here. Getting SCS in one action is incredibly different that getting it in two, simply because it means that we can get the utility of that threshold more easily. Different dice are not the same and the worth of actions are different.
This means that, for example this week, I didn't want to train SCS because doing those would require a big enough sacrifice to get it to SCS3 for little returns next turn. However, if the sacrifice for getting it was less, we could then be discussing whether SCS3 by itself would change things for next turn.
I'm not sure you were here back then, but it's been theorized that SCS is a 'grinning moon' technique that focus on burglary. If we could get it to SCS3 within an action, it would thus increases the effectiveness of choosing to try and steal other disciple's token next turn if we were to gamble on SCS3 giving bonus that way.
I think we are coming back to how you think some things are double counting but I don't think so, however.
The issue I have with holding off on using the Starlight Elixir, I think, is that I have played enough RPGs to know that when I push off using things because they'll be more useful later... I never use them.
We have what, 11 valuable drugs lying around? Reserving, say, 4-5 of those for a particularly specialized big push week is entirely sensible. But historical trends are that we don't value that rate of advancement enough to consistently dedicate our weeks like that, to the exclusion of other activities. We've only the one Sable Light pill besides, which is the nexus of any big push.
My point is, using something nice every week or two should be a goal, but just means to another. We can reasonably expect to land our hands on other resources moving forwards, and we already have more than we can use quickly. This is great! It's a good place to be, but holding back on actually using things that are useful because they may be slightly more useful in the future can be a detrimental attitude to have.
A good example is our use, or non-use, of the Qi Foundation pills. Yes, we had other things going on that makes it reasonable, but I wonder if we couldn't have gotten our hands on one more if we'd used them a tad more liberally. In retrospect, it's almost like that challenge was a tutorial of sorts, that Elder Su was intending to instill the lesson that using resources mindfully but persistently leads to further material gains to leverage in the future.
We have what, 11 valuable drugs lying around? Reserving, say, 4-5 of those for a particularly specialized big push week is entirely sensible. But historical trends are that we don't value that rate of advancement enough to consistently dedicate our weeks like that, to the exclusion of other activities. We've only the one Sable Light pill besides, which is the nexus of any big push.
My point is, using something nice every week or two should be a goal, but just means to another. We can reasonably expect to land our hands on other resources moving forwards, and we already have more than we can use quickly. This is great! It's a good place to be, but holding back on actually using things that are useful because they may be slightly more useful in the future can be a detrimental attitude to have.
A good example is our use, or non-use, of the Qi Foundation pills. Yes, we had other things going on that makes it reasonable, but I wonder if we couldn't have gotten our hands on one more if we'd used them a tad more liberally. In retrospect, it's almost like that challenge was a tutorial of sorts, that Elder Su was intending to instill the lesson that using resources mindfully but persistently leads to further material gains to leverage in the future.
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Insofar as this is true (which I'm not sure it is), this is an external effect akin to the ones I mentioned earlier in the quoted post; someone expects something of us at a given time so items which grant "time" now are more valuable than ones which grant time later, even if the amount of time granted is the same.
It is the case for everything that doesn't involve external expectations. It is true for non-unique sect missions, cultivation actions, skill training, and so on.
I didn't say it wasn't? Having to wait 10 extra minutes for the train is rather different from having to wait a couple of minutes; but still, you can't say that the 1 minute of arrival delay cause the 10 minutes of waiting; rather, it caused a non-deterministic effect that cost 10 minutes of waiting 1/10 the time and nothing the rest of the time; we simply happened to evaluate said random quantity at the 10 minute case.
Same here. It just so happens that SCS takes one less action with this setup - but e.g. none of our next one or two meridians do. You win some, you lose some.
Look. Unless you are interacting with time-sensitive expectations/requests/threats/etc., you can't gain benefits faster than time flows. If we magically got an extra week to do extra cultivation right now, we would be a week ahead, and we would remain a week ahead, no more, no less, at least as long as we limited our interaction to non-time-sensitive things. Getting a single extra cultivation action in now is going to put you less than a week ahead, and you are never going to naturally beat the +week version of ourselves; or if we did, it would be a matter of blind luck, nothing less and nothing more. There is no way to leverage any sort of normal actions - cultivating SCS, for example - into additional time advantages.