I'm a High Fantasy Tax Collector, So What? A CKII Tax Collector Quest
- Thread starter hYGP
- Start date
- Original Fantasy
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- Tags
- death ck2 quest all proceeds go to real spiders are we revolutionaries or reactionaries today criminal justice discussion makes the gm fuzzy don't count your boats before they sail granary management if i lose my meows get me likes to replace them justice spider knock knock it's the finance ministry meows for discussion while supplies last taxation taxes this is not an empire quest
Rolling
- Location
- USA
🎲
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
I meant choose to auto-save it via a shiny. Sorry that came out different than I intended.
- Location
- Earth
/r
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Unfortunately, Agueda has his entire colony still in this country. It took a year to move during this whole incident, so unless we want to move the entire colony all over again he'll probably want to stay.
Also if Oskaria is destroyed Ophelia will lose all her power and possibly suffer unknown side effects.
Edit:
It might still be an option on the table if we want to go through the effort of moving the entire colony into the wilderness and probably saying goodbye to Ophelia. It would turn the quest into a true nation-builder quest, although the odds would be heavily stacked against us since we'd be in hostile, probably uncharted terrain, and probably be pursued by Oskaria and invader forces alike. Actually, now that I think of it that sounds like a pretty good option compared to our other options.
Another option is to lead a rebellion to take over the kingdom ourselves. This would be difficult, since we'd be fighting both the entrenched power players who are in control right now and the invading armies who would use our rebellion as an excuse to invade.
Or we could try to fix things. Buy more equipment, find/assassinate the people who did this to us, and prop up someone as regent who will actually protect the colonies. This may not be functionally different from rebellion, depending on the current regent's attitude towards us.
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- Location
- USA
I always thought that Agueda planned to rebel even when he was still a dutiful tax spider collector. Why else would he be collecting a bunch of Calamity Frame pieces?
We just keep on stumbling upon them, and what are we supposed to do with these highly illegal items.
Speaking of which, clearly the answer to all of our problems is to plant a Calamity Frame part on the conspiratorsWe just keep on stumbling upon them, and what are we supposed to do with these highly illegal items.
- Location
- San Ramon, CA
...So, I'm mostly a lurker to this thread, but what I'm hearing is that the thread probably should have had the first case on Hard mode be [Case] Highway Robbery. Lower stakes, more concise purview, a way to get used to making decisions without the Steward Spider hinting at what is and isn't a good idea. Granted, less likely to have as big an impact on Okasha as resolving a Web of Treason successfully, but...well, here we are. Frustration is what happens when expectations are not met, and it seems both the GM and players faced quite a bit of frustration with this case.
- Location
- Southampton, Great Britain
- Pronouns
- He/Him
To be blunt, we had no reason to believe we had a massive target with insufficient security because you gave us no reason to think that was the case. And you can't just claim that we could have figured it out because none of our characters even hinted at in-universe and they are supposed to be competent. When in original setting where we are only provided with limited information, we have to assume a certain level of competence from our characters and given that Agueda and his team have proven themselves to be competent, we had to reason to think that they wouldn't even consider a major issue like presenting a major target with insufficient security to their enemies.
While I don't want to confrontational, I find this criticism to be nonsense and I struggle to see it as anything other than bad QMing. Pretty much of this is the result of your choices, not ours and you have meant it clear in the past that there are big events that are beyond our choices and ability to influence. Now saying that failing because of these big events that are beyond our choices and ability to influence is our fault because we have made choices that overcame these big events beyond our ability to influence is more than a little ingenious from my perspective.
We didn't flounder because you stopped giving us directions, we floundered because you arbitrarily took away our most competent character for several turns and then kept throwing major crisis after major crisis at us whilst leaving us unable to properly address the current threat before forcing us to deal with the next threat. The path of least resistance was the only we lost our biggest advantage whilst the stakes kept ramping up. We couldn't have predicted us being nerf and we never got a chance to get accustomed to that before we had
I enjoy this quest, but you are blaming the players for struggling to adapt to you deciding to nerf us whilst ramping up the difficulty. There has been no way to win long term or even come up with a long term plan since this case started because you have never given us that chance. Our sense of direction isn't weak, it is non-existent because we haven't had the chance to get a proper feel for the setting because we kept being moved from one place to an different unrelated place whilst new setting elements kept being introduced. Our sense of direction as players in an original setting is entirely dependent on you, the QM, and we only get the sense of direction from the characters we play as so when you left us with a weak sense of direction, of course we had a weak sense of direction. But that wasn't because we revealed it, it was because you gave us it.
Furthermore, we didn't fail to think through our actions and their consequences, we got handed a raw deal by you and told to deal with it. And we dealt with it as best we could when it has been borderline impossible to win as you crippled us at the same time you increased the difficulty tenfold. We had no plan because you kept kicking us while we were down and we were surprised that kept getting swept out to sea because we expected to have a feasible way to avoid that outcome. I would really like to know what we should have done and how we should have gone about successfully achieving the things that we should have done. Because I haven't seen a way to win the last case since it started and unless I am shown that way, I reject any claim that it actually exists.
We are playing in an original setting that is dependent on what you tell us about it. We can only work with what you have given us and it is one thing to expect us to figure out how to deal with setting elements we have been dealing with for awhile. It is another thing to expect us to figure out brand new setting elements that you have just introduced let alone setting elements that have yet to be introduced. In this case, it is the latter that you did because had some out of the blue action scenes with abnormal combat rolls, The Land of Ice and Snow, The Floods of April, The Wasting Cough, The Beasts of Autumn and finally the Not!Chinese showing up. We had to deal with all of these in rapid succession without any warning and whilst we were still arbitrarily nerfed by losing our most capable asset and team leader.
And then there is the fact that in previous cases, we succeeded by dealing with lesser problems that cropped up in the case before they could get out of hand and when once the little fires were under control, we dealt with the big one, usually helped along by our actions in dealing with the little fires. Having us suddenly be expected to ignore the little fires in favour of the big fire isn't something we could have predicted or figured out. Also we never had to figure out what our goal is before as it has always been the objective of the current case and so being expected to do that in this case without being told that isn't something we can do anything about.
Communication with players is key in an original setting and when we fail because you didn't give us the information needed to understand the setting, we can't avoid that failure unless we get lucky or happen to guess correctly.
You shouldn't have sat on it in my opinion as a QM. Communication is vital for quests, especially in an original setting. Characters might have a basic level of knowledge of the world they live in, but we, the players, do not. We know the social norms or what is the local common sense or things that everyone in-universe knows. We need to either have those things explained to us or the characters need to act with a certain level of competence that is to be expected of someone living in the setting. You can not do one or the other, but failing to do both means that we cannot succeed without getting lucky. There are no wikis or canon works that we can look to figure stuff out and since we are reliant on what you tell us, we need to tell us stuff and not sit on it. If we shouldn't take the path of least resistance because it will result in us being swept out to sea or we need to ignore the current crisis. If we need to figure out our goal instead of it being handed to us by our bosses, then we need to know that, especially if we did get a goal given to us by our boss.
Also sitting on important criticism until it is beyond our ability to deal with the matter is way too competitive for the QM. The QM themselves is not supposed to be an opponent of the players, they are supposed to work with the players for enjoyable game, especially since the players are ultimately dependant on the QM for any information they have, particularly in an original setting. And if you are deliberately competing against the players and setting yourself up an opponent, then I want to know that up front so I can then know to ditch the quest because that sort of relationship is a deal breaker for me.
Ophelia - Oskaria, it being their home, a sense of patriotism, it being where their families are and so on.
Well, rolling. Better luck this time?
Edit: so it seems! Tax Cut lives!
Edit: so it seems! Tax Cut lives!
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I think it is a bit needlessly antagonistic, we specifically rented out a warehouse which logically would be a juicy target. The only problem I see is we got used to the competence and since the characters did not point out the issue, we kind of dismissed it since it seems like the team was not worried about that....
Edit: On the other hand having things kick into high gear and having us lose our best agent was kind of a big problem, and of course we would not risk exploding everything considering how delicate the matter was.
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- Location
- Southampton, Great Britain
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Unfortunately that was unavoidable as wee never knew that was going to be a hard mode. We had no reason to expect we were going to get nerfed and we had no sign of it until we had started a Web of Treason and we hadn't been told we were on hard mode or even that was a hard mode until just now. Instead we got told that we had a limited time to deal with the treason and had no reason to suspect the nerf or the increased difficulty.
This is my point about communication between the QM and the players being key, especially in an original setting. We had no reason to think we were being handed a nerf or we would be going onto hard mode because we never got involved about those things to the point we didn't know that they were things that existed.
- Location
- Southampton, Great Britain
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because we trusted our characters to be competent and be able to do their jobs effectively like they had in the past. And if our characters were supposed to be suddenly incompetent without the players being told, the players cannot be faulted for not acting on something they didn't know about. Ultimately, we are limited by what our characters know in an original quest like this and the QM decides that our characters are going to switch from competence to incompetence, that is out of the control of the players.
To say that we dismissed it is wrong since that implies that it had come up for us to dismiss. We can only act on or dismiss things that we get know about. If we don't get told things as players and our characters don't act with a degree of competence in-universe, then we have little recourse on the matter. We cannot spot problems that don't come up in the updates or QM posts and our characters don't spot in-universe.
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- Location
- USA
Wait, what? I'm pretty sure that Agueda outright requested a leave of absence from his boss to relocate his colony during the party/celebration interlude. If that's not forewarning a future nerfing of party abilities, I don't know what is.
- Location
- India
- Pronouns
- He/His
This is exactly what i complained about once. I did say that we were supposed to look for traitors, not waste our time with the Shi Ahn, but people assured me that dealing with the Shi Ahn was the optimum move here. While we were doing that, the traitors had all the time to consolidate their positions.
I told you so.
I told you so.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I should note that this is the quest where it took about a year of in-game events for it to become clear that the quest protagonist was a giant fucking spider.
Since the people participating in this quest don't seem outstandingly foolish compared to other quest populations, this suggests that the QMing in this quest tends to operate on a relatively low-information basis. Fairly important background facts (e.g. "the protagonist is a nonhumanoid and facing bigotry from certain quarters because of it") are often only hinted at. This includes background facts that the protagonist would, in-character, never NOT be aware of, information that in-universe is very obvious... but that simply does not make it across the fourth wall to the questgoers.
This approach can be very playable and fun... but it hinges on the premise that the characters are using their in-character knowledge effectively, even when the players do not share this knowledge.
...
One thing I have noted about the gameplay here is how high-variance the random event rolls are- and they seemed to get worse lately. A bad RER, not just single digit critical failures but something in the 20s, seemed to mean really big problems. Problems that say not just "your plans are harder to carry out due to adverse circumstances," but also "a giant all-consuming disaster drops an anvil made out of 'fuck you' on your plan."
With the result that of the roughly in-game year or so we spent on the "Web of Treason" storyline, we ended up dealing with like... five gigantic incapacitating natural disasters. I'm living through 2020 in the United States and even I thought it was kind of extreme.
Well OK, four. The Land of Ice and Snow, The Floods of April, The Wasting Cough, The Beasts of Autumn. The Shi Anh aren't a natural disaster, even if the sheer ridiculous size of their assets and resources gives them that same "drop an anvil made out of 'fuck you' on your plan" aspect.
...
With Agueda and a pile of artifacts (many of which synergize with Agueda's high stats), it's possible to make headway even when you're getting smacked with a huge once-in-a-decade natural disaster every few months.
Without Agueda, not so much.
Since the people participating in this quest don't seem outstandingly foolish compared to other quest populations, this suggests that the QMing in this quest tends to operate on a relatively low-information basis. Fairly important background facts (e.g. "the protagonist is a nonhumanoid and facing bigotry from certain quarters because of it") are often only hinted at. This includes background facts that the protagonist would, in-character, never NOT be aware of, information that in-universe is very obvious... but that simply does not make it across the fourth wall to the questgoers.
This approach can be very playable and fun... but it hinges on the premise that the characters are using their in-character knowledge effectively, even when the players do not share this knowledge.
I may be misremembering, but didn't we get an order from On High telling us to deal with them? Like, the king, or a senior minister, or something?
...
One thing I have noted about the gameplay here is how high-variance the random event rolls are- and they seemed to get worse lately. A bad RER, not just single digit critical failures but something in the 20s, seemed to mean really big problems. Problems that say not just "your plans are harder to carry out due to adverse circumstances," but also "a giant all-consuming disaster drops an anvil made out of 'fuck you' on your plan."
With the result that of the roughly in-game year or so we spent on the "Web of Treason" storyline, we ended up dealing with like... five gigantic incapacitating natural disasters. I'm living through 2020 in the United States and even I thought it was kind of extreme.
Well OK, four. The Land of Ice and Snow, The Floods of April, The Wasting Cough, The Beasts of Autumn. The Shi Anh aren't a natural disaster, even if the sheer ridiculous size of their assets and resources gives them that same "drop an anvil made out of 'fuck you' on your plan" aspect.
...
With Agueda and a pile of artifacts (many of which synergize with Agueda's high stats), it's possible to make headway even when you're getting smacked with a huge once-in-a-decade natural disaster every few months.
Without Agueda, not so much.
last roll? ia ia 73 ftagn!
Okay...I was remarkably more accepting of the outcome before the explanation.
Bad luck happens and thats part of the deal with this quest. It was made clear from the go that as small actors in a large world sometimes your house gets flattened for a highway. Getting screwed by that isn't surprising, though it hurts
But unflagged difficulty changes, hiding information and then calling out the players for falling for interface screw is very much not okay.
Bad luck happens and thats part of the deal with this quest. It was made clear from the go that as small actors in a large world sometimes your house gets flattened for a highway. Getting screwed by that isn't surprising, though it hurts
But unflagged difficulty changes, hiding information and then calling out the players for falling for interface screw is very much not okay.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'll say this much in mitigation.
In at least some of our past adventures, we'd hire a group of mercenaries for muscle. Consider what they'd be doing, logically: among other things, "guarding our stuff."
Did we have mercenaries this time? Because it IS reasonable to point out that if you don't secure your stuff with some respectable muscle, someone trying to destroy it is an obvious move.
In at least some of our past adventures, we'd hire a group of mercenaries for muscle. Consider what they'd be doing, logically: among other things, "guarding our stuff."
Did we have mercenaries this time? Because it IS reasonable to point out that if you don't secure your stuff with some respectable muscle, someone trying to destroy it is an obvious move.
My feeling is that this is an imprecise criticism. Our problem has been that as players we have not focused on preparation turns. As in spending a turn building up so that we can have a power turn to accomplish difficult things. The few turns I managed to convince players to do this we consistently rolled badly on the critical rolls, crippling our next turn, and leaving players unwilling to spend another turn trying to prepare, or forcing us to divide our attentions between preparing and trying to hold off disaster.
However, you as the QM encouraged this by presenting us a situation where were constantly action starved, with multitudes of actions that all have to be done, and if any of them are left undone bad things start happening, and DCs keep increasing. All of which meant that once we rolled badly on a few critical items there was no reasonable hope of recovery.
You gave us a big shiny, and clear threats if we didn't respond to it, while at the same time keeping the current case ongoing with increasing dangers and difficulties if we didn't focus on that and ignore the obviously dangerous shiny. We didn't have the assets that would allow us to deal with both. We didn't know how short the time limit was. Nor was it clear precisely how the current case was dangerous, or which factions where more important, or who we could ignore. If anything the signals seemed to be that we had to do everything or else there would be bad things happening. We several times had actions that we didn't understand what the effect would be of taking them and failing them, or not taking them. So naturally we avoided things that looked like we would fail at, only to learn that not taking them resulted in something worse than taking them and failing.
Essentially you gave us DCs as explicit information, but only implied what would happen if we didn't take the action. Is it any surprise that when faced with insufficient actions that people didn't want to risk "wasting" one on an action that would probably fail?
Nor do I see the problem as Agueda at all. The problem was that the case itself was open ended and imprecise. Find the nobles (somewhere) committing treason and deal with them? Without any further direction? In any other Quest that would be a signal that the GM wants the players to poke around and go fishing, and that there will be time to figure things out and explore different parts of the world. I suppose your approach is more realistic, but it's not the way most Quests behave.
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- Location
- It's a whole new world we live in
That's what I remember as well, and in fact, I do remember there being arguments that the web of traitors was clearly marked as the most difficult of the available cases, and some people (including me) saying that maybe we should wait to tackle it until Augeda was available. But the general thread consensus seemed to be that it was too time sensitive to let sit for the year it would take Agueda to finish moving.
That said, I do want to push back against the whole "You guys never had a plan" and "you were burning the candle at both ends" criticisms. For the later, we were never given any indication that we could not use actions, and that taking everything that you left on the table was putting strain on the team (well, other than Ophelia, but that was because of a series of failed rolls). I will concede that we really should have been more concerned with our continued diplomatic failures, and didn't spare enough counter-actions to try to mitigate it, but the way the DCs kept going up, after the 2nd failure I'm not sure there's really all that much we could have done without making it our sole focus. And while we did have some warning with the thugs, we really didn't have any way it would escalate that quickly
While I think the rolls for actions are relatively fair, with it only giving a +/- 10 point swing, the RER rolls were way swingier, and more importantly, they snowballed. Like someone said, we had like 5 major events that came up, each one of them taking more than a turn to recover from, with all signs pointing to ignoring any of them being big enough problems that they would significantly weaken Oskaria, if not be an imediate case over, if we left them alone. Our action economy was shot to hell by the time we hit the 2nd major RER, and by that point we were spending so much time trying to mitgate the last disaster, it was leaving us open to the next one.
And TBH, it felt like we were punished way harder for (crit) failures than what we gained from crit successes.