Honestly I'm trying to remember what I've said on the subject, because this is one of those spells where I keep going back and forth on it and it's never been used where I would have something to go back to. I believe the final decision I made was no, you can't shoot in or out through it.
@Silently Watches This is the way you've answered the question the last few times it's come up. This time around, it sparked an idea for me: Can the spell be modified with small holes to fire out through? I'm thinking like the arrow slits in castles that I know have a name. I know that I know that name. I simply can't get the right word to come to mind. Turning Shell Barrier into a bunker could be useful.
Yeah, not to mention the QM constant mentions on how siding with Danny's Privateers, even when Danny was still around, would have most likely make Taylor look like a villain.
If we hadn't come straight home from getting powers, the Privateers would have become a villain group, or arguably an anti-hero group, according to SW. The consequences of this decision never had a chance of making Taylor seem to be a villain, just giving her lots of angst.
The Privateers were more violent in BB than they would have been with us helping them directly, but never got anywhere close to being a villain group in BB. Interacting with them more may have made them into a villainous organization if the players voted that way, but the fault there would entirely have been with the players, not the QM.
In Philly, the smaller numbers of the Privateers made them more desperate. The members lost when we changed cities were the moderates. The ones most devoted to attacking villains and defending the innocent stuck around. If we had worked with them at this point, we still could have made them a heroic group if we'd just given them back up. Again, not a situation where the QM even hinted that joining with them would make us look villainous.
We scanned the Privateers, found two with magic, gave a Template to Tim, and in the process gave the team access to tinkertech far in excess of their laser rifles. Being more hands on could have stopped them from going bad, but once again, the players voted to ignore them because they had other priorities.
We were then given notice that, because we weren't involved, and because Danny wasn't around to curtail the more aggressive members, the group had begun to go off the rails.
We voted a grand total of once to try to salvage the group, were warned that it would take several votes to recover them, and left them to self destruct.
The Privateers self destructing led to us having to cut ties with them to keep from being tarnished for their actions.
Once, and only once, were we warned that association with the group would lead to us being seen as villains, and that was after the group was pretty much dead. This was the warning that we had passed the point of no return on that plot line. Never again were we given quest options that dealt with them, so saying we were told that associating them would make us look villainous is rather missing the point. The violent faction had become villains. Like the Dragonslayers, they had no powers, but their tinkertech(until Tim revoked their access) meant they had to be treated like capes.
The problem with that is we have been punished worse for starting and abandoning quest lines mid way through more harshly than just not starting them. Hence Burn The Sinner's stinger "That can't possibly have any negative outcomes, like, at all. Right?"
A few I can think of is we abandoned the Purity and Coil quests partway through back in Brockton Bay, and the consequences were that we didn't get to recruit Purity as a mage, and we didn't take out Coil early on and gain access to his resources and the Undersiders as allies.
The thing with Coil is that the players at the time voted to deal with Coil, but included subvotes that made the attempt half-assed, despite the QM explicitly saying that s/he had intended that vote to be the final needed vote to take him down. That made failing to deal with him before Ziz arrived a double stinger, as they wasted an activity vote to effectively do nothing.
Putting off finishing a plot line has come back to bite us, this is true. Bouncing back and forth between plot lines has allowed extra issues to fester because we weren't dealing with them. In no case do I see these consequences of failing to complete a plot line quickly as being severe, beyond losing Purity as a recruitable character. Then again, we wouldn't have had Cailleach if we had gotten Purity, and I find Laura to be a more interesting character anyway, so I'm fine with how things went.
