I suppose that's not really surprising given that carved staircase design only exists in Minecraft and generic fantasy settings. But I am curious, just how catastrophic would it be in real life if implemented?
It depends on what you are comparing it to. There are mines that have been built with staircases. They are almost exclusively small, individually run enterprises. This is because a staircase makes mining both more dependent on manual labor, and also significantly restricts the amount of manual labor that can be applied to the mine. (Basically it becomes harder to fit people into the places they need to be to perform the labor). So if you don't have a lot of manpower (such as if the mining is being done by a single family), and you also are dependent on manpower for all your labor (because you don't have the money/technology for machine based labor) then a staircase might actually not be a bad idea. However if you want it to be an major mine then it is a horrible decision.
So for us it would be a disaster to implement a staircase instead of a ramp.
let's be honest for one moment: we're voting for the donation because we're curious about the mistery box.
That's it.
Nope not at all. I'm voting for it because I think bad things will happen if we don't. Maybe not Shallya doing bad things to us, but other gods doing bad things to us, and Shallya not doing anything to stop it. While this way, if the other gods try to smite us, Shallya will stop them, and as a major god she has the ability to stop them too.
The opposite for me. I fully expect nothing significantly good to come from this sacrifice. I do, however, expect a lack of something bad. Many gods are unhappy with us. This will lead to bad things. By getting a god to like us, she will likely be able to stop many of those things from happening.
Yup. Basically it's protection money, and we don't have a choice.
For reference, "a quarter to a third" is a pretty reasonable fraction of income for an individual in the US to pay as taxes today.
Of course, if this was set in modern US we would be able to deduct business expenses, which would immediately reduce how much we pay by a massive amount given that most of our income goes to further projects.
A quarter to a third is a horrific over taxation for the time period. Surpluses are not large enough to afford the high taxation rates of the modern world. Additionally, don't forget that we are essentially the government too, and have a lot of expenses. This is more analogous to social services being a quarter to a third of our expenses - which while not unreasonable if you place a high value on helping the poor - it comes with a big cost, which is that we don't have money to invest in developing sustainable growth with would improve the lives of the poor significantly.
But I don't see anyway around it, we have to pay or else the gods will smite us.
I figure that later on when the Shallya priests try to increase our payment is when we make the counter argument, and point out specific projects we will have to give up on, and how this will hurt the general populace.
At that point we are the golden goose, and now Shallya will have to consider that if they demand to much she might kill the golden goose that is providing people with food.
