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Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

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I definitely think the 'Unattended plotlines always have bad outcomes' thing is definitely one of the major issues. Neutral outcomes -at least for some of them- would be nice...
 
deadcrystal said:
tbh the votes in this quest have always come across as the following to me:

Pick two from A, B, C, D, and E!

The two you pick you scrape together a bare victory!

The three you don't pick each become horrible disasters because you're the only competent person on the planet!

The net result is...YOU FAIL. YOU ABSOLUTE GARBAGE. WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP THE DISASTERS YOU INCOMPETENT FUCKNUGGET?
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While I wouldn't put it quite so vulgar I agree in principle. It's been better the last arc or two at least but it has been a shoe hanging over our heads that any quest we don't take will blow up in our faces.

We got the social votes to help a bit with that. Missy was getting pissed that we wouldn't call her but we only had the two votes and several fires each week to stomp on so was hard to vote for giving her a call despite that only needing to be a half hour one evening. Social Votes was the solution to that. Which I think has been quite a success as we can now actually have a social life!

But the problem of "You didn't stomp on this fire and no one else can handle it so it blew up the city." remains. Or at least, it feels like it does.

@Silently Watches a question in regards to the last chapter. Dragon asked us to scan some of her employees, and someone asked if we needed to spend a social vote on that or if it could be done offscreen. IIRC you said that it could but if we did they would work for Dragon instead.

Did you mean that if we spent the social vote we would get some new characters that take up the same role as Tim's GB's? That is, single slot magiengineers that can give their slot to Tim if we want to build something that requires his skills and a lot of slots.
 
Silently Watches said:
Correct
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That sounds very promising, if we ever want to build the big guns and some sort of vehicle on which to mount them. I still wish we'd get Maclibuin and Epoch as members of Arcana, sooner rather than later, so they'll stop spending their own xp without our input.

This brings up the idea of somebody saying, "I thought only girls could join Arcana!"
"Nope! You just have to be attracted to guys." or, alternatively, not being attracted to women. With the ...issues common to capes, this idea would see a lot of support on PHO.
 
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deadcrystal said:
The two you pick you scrape together a bare victory!
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This is clearly absurd we just spent a lot of time kicking the shit out of the Fallen so much they functionally don't exist while Arcana just keeps growing in might.

Silently Watches said:
:drevil: Kayleigh would strongly disagree with this interpretation.
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To say noting of our resident nerd. We keep Tim in a closet but not that kind. Well no now that i say it I don't know what Tim identifies as so maybe not!
 
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Orkus Majorkus said:
To say noting of our resident nerd. We keep Tim in a closet but not that kind. Well no now that i say it I don't know what Tim identifies as so maybe not!
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It wouldn't surprise me if Tim literally became married to his work at some point. I mean, between his ability to build a "perfect girlfriend" via Unison devices, Dragon's ability to make a full-scale Gynoid body and Cassiel being a total troll and egging them on from the background, it remains a distinct possibility. :V
 
Almech_Alfarion said:
I'm of the opinion that regardless of what the rolls were when it happened, Silently should have just killed Danny off after the Behemoth fight.
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My opinion is that dice rolls must be sacrosanct, since they offer a source of consequences that we cannot finagle our way around, so we have to take it on the chin and come back from it in another way. It's a great way of driving the story forward in a quest, where so much is under us the player's control. Since Danny is alive, that means he can still play a role in the story, and his current condition is not something that Taylor can fix by beating up bad guys or throwing more magic at it, so it's a different source of tension and conflict than the usual villain fights. At the moment, I can envision four possible narrative routes that could occur with his character.
  1. Danny could die. This closes his storyline and removes him from consideration. The aftereffects would be that Taylor would officially be an orphan, and would likely compound her guilt because Danny was injured at an Endbringer fight that she wasn't there for. While Taylor and co. are immune to Masters, good old emotional wounds are a tried and true way of manipulating people, so it's a potential weakness for the future.
  2. Danny could be healed in some manner. This would have us figuring out where Danny would fit in, since his power would be worthless on our team of mages and the Privateers are finished. He could join the Protectorate, sure, but an option we now possess would be to give him a Linker Core vial and then burn out his powers with a Device. This would also give us an instant candidate for the final template, no social maneuvering required, but does run the risk of making a mutant Danny.
  3. Someone uses Danny in his current state against Taylor. We've had info leaks bite us in the ass before, and the PRT and PHO know about a connection between Calamity Witch and Captain. Hell, if any of the Privateers survived the last foray against the Disney princesses (besides Kurt) and wants vengeance against Taylor for not helping, that would be someone perfectly poised to know who Calamity Witch is. If Danny was reported missing or kidnapped from the care centre, Taylor would rush to help him, and be possibly lead into a trap.
  4. Aceraptor's suggestion of Danny second-triggering, presumably into an S-class threat situation. Depending on how the power manifests, this could lead to a large portion of the city/the population being irreparably altered by the power, and could potentially cripple the heroes and PRT for the foreseeable future. Having Arcana and Taylor deal with Danny in this situation would further any "dark" reputation they have gained from dealing with the Fallen. Also, having to be the one to kill Danny will traumatize Taylor in a huge manner, and will likely have ripple effects both with her public persona and in private.
The Third and Fourth options could also have the consequences of Taylor getting unmasked/her information being made public. This would drastically affect Taylor, Lacey and Kurt, and Kayleigh and Laura since all of them could now be targeted or surveilled for more information, and it would negatively affect any future social situations, since associating with Taylor now runs the risk of being used as a hostage/spy by a villain group.
Spectral Waltz said:
I definitely think the 'Unattended plotlines always have bad outcomes' thing is definitely one of the major issues. Neutral outcomes -at least for some of them- would be nice...
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From a Watsonian standpoint, neutral endings are rare because Taylor is a superhero, so the issues she involves herself with tend to be villainous in nature, and villains being ignored generally tends to lead to negative consequences. Add to that the Shard's programmed conflict directive means that Parahumans by and large are never satisfied with the status quo and will continue to escalate until confronted. The Protectorate and PRT are hamstrung by bureaucracy, attitudes, and lack of manpower (am I remembering that Chevalier, Miss Militia, and Sere are the only heroes mentioned for Philidelphia + the three Wards?) and while Operation Pentagram does negate that somewhat, they are still being cautious so as not to trigger all the gangs/villains in the city to declare war against them. Also, if we don't get involved with a situation, we wouldn't notice or care if it has a neutral outcome, and while a positive outcome might garner some interest, a negative outcome is much more likely to force us to confront and deal with the issue.
The issue with neutral outcomes/positive outcomes from unattended plot lines is that from a Doylististic perspective, Taylor is the protagonist. The very structure of the story is designed so that Taylor has great relevance to the world, and therefore her absence has consequences. So while there are other crimes/events occurring in the city/world, Silently is presenting us with the ones that would significantly benefit from Calamity Witch's presence, and so therefore, by ignoring them things turn negative for those events. In addition, neutral and positive outcomes when we aren't there, well, they have a lessened future impact on the story. Ignoring the Fallen gathering at Brockton Bay gave us an entire chapter involving almost all the villains of Brockton Bay and multiple possible outcomes depending on our choices and creativity, which is excellent for a quest environment.
 
kamkong said:
Hell, if any of the Privateers survived the last foray against the Disney princesses (besides Kurt) and wants vengeance against Taylor for not helping, that would be someone perfectly poised to know who Calamity Witch is. If Danny was reported missing or kidnapped from the care centre, Taylor would rush to help him, and be possibly lead into a trap.
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This is effectively suicide by Calamity Witch for any former Privateer stupid enough to do such a thing.
 
kamkong said:
My opinion is that dice rolls must be sacrosanct, since they offer a source of consequences that we cannot finagle our way around, so we have to take it on the chin and come back from it in another way."
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See, while I would generally agree with this principle, I have actually had a GM who openly admitted to fudging their rolls behind the screen by simple dint that if they hadn't our party would have been TPK'd a dozen times over just because they were just rolling that well, and our party were just rolling that badly. Which leads me into my next point.

kamkong said:
-Watsonian-
-Doylististic-
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This is where you loose me. Not because I don't understand the perspective, but because neither of these things are my concern. My one and only concern for this quest is that as many of us participating in it as possible, Silently Watches and us questers collectively, has fun. If having fun means fudging roll modifiers behind scenes where we can't see, or rewriting the outcomes of at the very least some of those quests that we can't outwardly tell in no uncertain terms will have negative consequences then I'm perfectly willing to listen to the Wizard of Oz when he tells me to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It's when the fun stops, or at the very least when it starts to decline, when I start to give that curtain critical looks and make suggestions on how the situation can hopefully be rectified, and if that means breaking with previous convention, then maybe there was something broken with the convention to begin with.
 
I've seen this come up in tabletop rpg a lot and I've come to the conclusion if you fudge dice rolls you might as well just get rid of them because if you're altering the outcome to your suiting then the dice don't matter. You can hedge your bets by stacking modifiers. You can be judicious when and how you rolls to make calculated risks. You can put mechanics where players can negate a failure or reroll but have it cost some resource. You can make it if a bad roll occurs the plot is not gated behind that or the players fail forward (and games with good design do this baked into their design!). But the whole social construct of games with dice rolls is everyone agrees at the end of the day to abide by the rolls otherwise you might as well just play a narrative game.

Which is fine!

But you can't have it both ways or it cheapens both.
 
Almech_Alfarion said:
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Okay, fair points. I probably won't be involving myself much more with this discussion on revamping the rules system because based on the other posts detailing the thoughts of others, I'm in the camp of those who don't have any major issues with the current system. Maybe I'm just lacking perspective because I've only skimmed the discussion from before I started, but I can't really contribute any more meaningful discourse about changing the rules because for me the rules are working fine and so I find it hard to raise enthusiasm to continue discussing this topic.
 
Orkus Majorkus said:
But you can't have it both ways or it cheapens both.
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Not necessarily true. Pen and Paper games are largely an exercise in collective narrative building with the trappings of rules surrounding them and ultimately guided and arbitrated by the table's GM. It's definitely a judgement call, and a power that is singularly in the hands of the GM to be exercised behind the scenes where the players can't see (at least until after the fact if ever), if only to prevent breaking the "illusion" of that calculated risk. The sad truth is that sometimes you just have a really bad night with the dice, and no one has fun when they loose all of the time, again and again, because of that, so it's up to the GM if they want to take pity on you and fudge things in your favor on their end, either by lying about the outcomes of their own rolls behind the screen where the players can't see, lowering the DC on the challenge, or messing with modifiers that the players have no say in to give them an advantage they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Admittedly, fudging the outcome of Danny not dying back in the Behemoth fight is probably an example of a time where it wouldn't have been entirely appropriate, but at this point I'm just so freaking sick of the debate itself where if I could go back in time and throttle the SV dice-roller code into submission to turn out that nat-1 I'd do it just to save myself the frustration.
 
Almech_Alfarion said:
The sad truth is that sometimes you just have a really bad night with the dice, and no one has fun when they loose all of the time, again and again, because of that, so it's up to the GM if they want to take pity on you and fudge things in your favor on their end, either by lying about the outcomes of their own rolls behind the screen where the players can't see, lowering the DC on the challenge, or messing with modifiers that the players have no say in to give them an advantage they wouldn't have had otherwise.
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Normally, I'd discount this as a typo, but you've repeated it in several posts made over a single day, so the former teacher in me insists I point out that every time you've used "loose" that I've noticed, you used the wrong word. Loose is "not tight", lose is to fail at something/ misplace/etc. My apologies for the OCD that makes me actually post that.

When I ran some games, I constantly adjusted in difficulties and asked for rolls without telling them what number they needed to beat or get under. I feel I did this a bit too much in my early games before, despite my efforts, the players insisted on removing all chance from the matter of whether they would die. This was also the only group where I actually stripped a cleric's powers when they did something I couldn't overlook(using a divine artifact of his god on a helpless person when she objected to him insisting on the 'touch' required for his healing spells involved groping her. I did not include him in any of my subsequent games.)

I agree somewhat with the stance of letting the dice stand, though, when creating a narrative like this. It gives you good guidelines for which way an encounter will go. It's natural to want your characters to succeed, even as you acknowledge that succeeding every time makes things boring for most people(Yu-gi-oh fans would disagree). Still, just because you rolled a one doesn't mean you have to kill them, unless you say up front what the consequences of the rolls will be. Maiming him would have removed his ability to go out, but his power doesn't require that, merely that the people he is granting his power to have to be in range when it is activated and that they get things done within thirty minutes pass and the shared senses end.
 
It does not matter how "fair" the dice are.
Someone set the numbers to reach and decided what things to roll for.
Dice are not unbiased arbitrators because the starting conditions are biased already.

In some ways this quest feels like a series of trolley problems, where instead of one pull, we have to constantly keep pulling at the lever to safe one person or another, and if we keep pulling the levers just right, we might save couple people and merely leave half a dozen crippled.
There's also that since the "death from nowhere" thing, i atleast have had problems engaging with the story, i read it, sometimes vote, but largely, i no longer feel invested in the story. Because that felt not like collecive storytelling, or like a game with consequences, it felt like quest master just deciding to kill Taylor out of nowhere, it made the quest feel lot more confrontational than it had been, and made it feel like the person at the other end was cheating.
 
Valmond said:
It does not matter how "fair" the dice are.
Someone set the numbers to reach and decided what things to roll for.
Dice are not unbiased arbitrators because the starting conditions are biased already.

In some ways this quest feels like a series of trolley problems, where instead of one pull, we have to constantly keep pulling at the lever to safe one person or another, and if we keep pulling the levers just right, we might save couple people and merely leave half a dozen crippled.
There's also that since the "death from nowhere" thing, i atleast have had problems engaging with the story, i read it, sometimes vote, but largely, i no longer feel invested in the story. Because that felt not like collecive storytelling, or like a game with consequences, it felt like quest master just deciding to kill Taylor out of nowhere, it made the quest feel lot more confrontational than it had been, and made it feel like the person at the other end was cheating.
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Part of how I handled dice rolls was deciding things along the lines of high = good and low = bad, rather than setting specific numbers, with the roll telling me how far to lean on the matter. Fixed DCs with a chance of perma-death don't appeal to me. While the quest doesn't end if Taylor dies, nobody else has that guarantee.

To be fair, SW admitted to handling that badly. While there were hints that I could see rereading things, with the knowledge of what would happen, the level of danger and the risk of immediate death for sticking to our existing tactics, they were far too subtle for a single vote and we die. At least with the first EB fight, it was pretty obvious that choosing to fight Ziz at close range was a stupid enough idea that we'd deserve dying for trying it.

SW's stories tend to be fairly dark. Here, s/he is trying to write something lighter, and engaging with the mechanics of a quest seem to be largely helping things, but Worm is full of darkness and suffering, and adding Nanoha to the mix can only lighten things so much.
 
I've been reading through the replies as they've come in, although I know I haven't said much until now. Mostly that's because what I'm hearing is… disheartening might be the best word? Mostly because it seems like we're approaching this with two very different and maybe even incompatible perspectives.

From reading through the comments, it sounds to me as though a lot of you are approaching this with a mentality of "Gotta get everything!". Like if you have to put something to the side and not do it, you've 'lost'. Therefore the fact that this game, this system, was designed INTENTIONALLY to make you choose some things to do and some not to do, that you cannot do everything and get everything BY DESIGN is grating on you because it feels like I'm making you fail at every turn.

I'm trying to wrap my head around that and see it from that perspective, but I can't. Even if I were a player and not the GM, that isn't the mindset I'd bring to the table. I'd approach it as collaborative story-making. If you can only do so many things, I would be picking what's most interesting because that makes the better story. That unused subplots can come back at all is a plus because it gives a second bite at the apple, so to speak, regardless of whether there's any direct payout at the end. If them being different or harder is the tradeoff, that wouldn't be an issue for me.

That's why I don't know if mindset, both as a player and as a GM, is going to work with the mindset of apparently many of you. If we continue with choosing subplots and leaving others to the wayside, I'm still 'forcing' you to lose. If I let you do everything, then what's the point of giving you options to choose from to guide the story?

I know I said I was going to spend time doing redesigns, but after this I need to think instead of how to make this work if it even CAN work or whether it would be better for us all to walk away from the table while we can still do so amicably.
 
I guess my perspective is I like to get a bit of everything unless there's a big target that needs to be focused down on (like the Fallen).

I'm a pessimist by nature so I like to at least influence things so that potential worst cases are avoided. Hence why I advocated for leaving the Wolfsheads questline alone for the last couple of votes so we can at least get a look into the Danny situation (I want to avoid worst case scenario with Danny because I'd rather not read about Taylor angsting about Danny and what could have beens). And its also why I'm fine with not finishing questlines all the way.

Like, the PRT and Protectorate can damn well handle things with the Wolfshead gang. Sure it probably won't be as easily or as cleanly as it otherwise would have been with Arcana in play against the Wolfsheads but with the mages and guardian beasts the PRT would have well have eventually taken care of things. Especially after Taylor told them to focus on the neo-Nazis.

@Silently Watches I think part of the issue here is parts of the voter base haven't gotten it through their heads that other people and groups in this quest has agency and problems that Taylor ignores thats within the capability of said groups to handle will be handled.

People are too used to looking at Worm and seeing the PRT and Protectorate as being utterly useless so the protagonist *has* to take care of things on their own. I think a number of people believe that the 'Authorities are useless' trope is *still* in full effect despite evidence to the contrary.

People don't give enough credence and credit to the PRT of this quest despite you giving us interludes where the PRT is proactively taking down villain capes and planning a clean sweep of the city with the newfound capability Taylor gave them.
 
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Ah, FOMO rears its ugly head again. Fear of missing out

I'm fine with the existing system, although I feel like I'm less of a player and more just on for the ride, since I joined for the story. Take it as you will.
 
Silently Watches said:
Therefore the fact that this game, this system, was designed INTENTIONALLY to make you choose some things to do and some not to do, that you cannot do everything and get everything BY DESIGN is grating on you because it feels like I'm making you fail at every turn.
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It is more that it feels like anything we don't choose will come back and bit us in the ass. Could be an overreaction, but you said you wanted feedback. That and a lack of downtime arcs makes it harder to feel like we are winning. It at times gave the feel that no one else was making much in the way of positive change for some of the story arcs. #TheProtectorateisUseless. As ace said above not necessarily true, but the PRT didn't resolve our quest lines when we ignored them.

Not anything major enough for most of us to want to drop the quest mind you, but that is an issue. The other gameplay issue was with things like the mutation serum, where it comes across as a major risk to use due to how the dice work, that can be mitigated by investing in a character which in turn we are then less inclined to risk. Our main cast has been kept pretty small.

For the redesign I would suggest looking at where the quest is going more than anything else. Are we going to be a vigilante group? Will we help with making the mage version of the protectorate? Are we working on S-class threats? Magitech uplift? Getting involved with the TSAB? Exploring the Nanohaverse?
 
I won't say that I don't get frustrated sometimes with having many interesting choices and only so much time, but I understand that not everything can be done and I enjoy your stories. Please don't think you need to stop the quest. You will have at least me sitting at the table.
 
Crusader Jerome said:
Ah, FOMO rears its ugly head again. Fear of missing out

I'm fine with the existing system, although I feel like I'm less of a player and more just on for the ride, since I joined for the story. Take it as you will.
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There's that and there's also a lot of difference in opinion about what questlines can be missed out on which causes a lot of conflict in the thread.

I'm guilty on that front too. I may have been pushing Daddy's Little Girl quest a bit too hard despite the fact that it seems that the majority of the people seems to want nothing to do with Danny or resolving that plot thread (though many don't really seem to participate in the thread beyond voting).
 
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