Magical Girl Escalation Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)

[Almech_Alfarion]

This particular claim has come up time and again, to the point where all y'all's bitching has it on a knife's edge that there is a quest this time next week, and I don't see it. So show me. Give me a list of every single time where the QM has insinuated that choices have Bad Consequences on an autofail timer if the players don't take them. If this is so fucking self-evident then it shouldn't be hard to compile, right?

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Strange Bedfellows

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Coil. Not finishing the quest came back to bite us several arcs later, and ended up killing everyone who was in our apartment building in the process. As others pointed out at the time, Rebecca Costa-Brown, AKA Alexandria, as a core member of Cauldron, knew full well who Coil was, what his powers were, and how he operates. Frankly, given the point that Scion has been deader than a doornail for 2 years already by the time of quest-start, I'm a bit surprised that she hadn't already taken him out, either directly or indirectly, and we had to deal with him at all. Once he moved to Chicago, a much more politically, economically and culturally important city than Brockton Bay, I'm surprised she didn't take care of him for us because of the greater threat he posed there.

Monster Menagerie

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Back in the Saddle

• After discovering that the Beasts were using the storm sewers to get around, you grabbed Miss Militia and learned that there were a whole lot more Beasts than first expected. Then you never did anything else with it, and as I hinted at in 6.v, things aren't going so hot. Uh-oh.
• You remember the Gaunts? If you had picked this quest for weeks 1 and 2, you could have prevented them from coming into existence. But you didn't, and that might cost you.
• A maximum of three spells could be learned in this quest. You chose Charge Cartridge.
• I was going to let the Beast thing be only a two-arc quest, but since you procrastinated… Hoo, boy. Arc 8 isn't going to be funny unless I decide to throw you a major bone.

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Took it late, didn't finish it in its introduction arc, or even in the next arc in which SW was nice and gave us the opportunity to. As a result we missed a couple of opportunities that would have been very helpful later on, lot more people died (which the players blame themselves for), including the Ward Bouncer, even if we didn't really like him, and came full circle at the close of the MS-13 arc. Things kinda worked out in our favor since they killed Cadejo for us, but the political ramifications of Bouncer's death were a major contributing factor to Missy's frustrations, and while again I like the eventual outcome of that, it was still an experience I wouldn't have wished on her.

Apparently the local Protectorate, even with the help of all of the gangs minus MS-13 under S-Class Truce doctrine, were so incompetent they couldn't handle taking on the storm sewers, but as soon as we were there our collective competence (and wide area search... really?) was enough to overcome their deficiencies and win the day! woooo...... [/sarchasm]

Seriously, between Solare's fire powers and Miss Militia being able to generate incindiary ammo, Jotunn and Chevelair on defense and CQC, and the powers of everyone else we met during the MS-13 arc all working together (I'm simplifying things because I'm lazy), they should have been able to handle it without us, even if they came out the end a bit worse for wear.

Snark Hunt

• You ignored this quest entirely, which means…. Well, you'll just have to wait and see.
• There were three opportunities to learn new spells in this quest.

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Ignoring this led to the Brockton Bay Breakout arc. Again, something that while ultimately turning out "alright" was something we were more or less forced to intervene in to resolve. I've mentioned before that this could probably have easily been resolved by someone in the Pentagon or White House simply having the testicular fortitude to call in an air strike on the capes attacking a freaking S-Class containment zone when things got too far, or even the responding heroes, independents and villains taking the kid-gloves off, even if it was the Fallen attacking. Others have mentioned before that (without BS magic powers like ours) you would need an army of capes to take on the fallen. Well, they had an army, and they may have all been sitting with their thumbs up their a**es for all the good it apparently did.

After-Action Report for Arc 5: Escapades

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The only group that managed to actually achieve any of their goals was ours, if you exclude the re-captured civilians. The independent capes all got away, Lung got butcherfied and headed up north, and the only reason Danny didn't die there was because we got lucky on the dice and barley missed the fail DC.

Heck, even the Security option technically failed, since everyone at the base camp but Danny and Sam got roasted by Lung after said butcherfication.

After Action Report for Arc 7: Meltdown

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Options we didn't take led to the actions on the part of the Privateers that sparked off the MS-13 arc and Danny's injury, one of which blew up fairly spectacularly and the other people have been dreading it's ultimate blow up all of this arc so far, though is still currently unresolved.

After Action Report for Arc 8: Civil War

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Not a blow up, but I'm adding it here because I've thought before that this this was one of the smoothest arcs the players have gone through in terms of results and consequences...

Unfortunately the reason why I think that is because the arc was more or less "on rails", which while fine some of the time isn't the primary format that SW is aiming for for the quest as a whole...

Long Live the King

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Pretty much the only major line we didn't follow at least Mostly through in its arc, but the one with probably the most severe consequences either way the players could have taken it. Also one of the few times the players decided not to follow up on a quest going in knowing the negative consequences of doing so and accepting them anyway.

After Action Report for Arc 10: Heatstroke

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Again, a mini-arc on rails, and the players could easily infer the consequences and rewards for their actions. Each possible route had its rewards and drawbacks and I'm still not sure if it was tactical genius on the players part or pure dumb luck that they managed to maneuver through the route with the easiest to deal with and least negative consequences...

After Action Report for Arc 11: Cloudy Skies

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Again, a, until this point, non-standard arc in that it was a purely social arc. Therefore there were no "Choices of Consequence" for us to take since the choices the players Could make were more or less all free-form. The only exception was the Ziz interrupt, which had some fairly severe consequences that were all hinted at or already known in the event the players did something that got Ziz to squish them. Thankfully the players managed to make the "Right" choice, almost despite themselves given all of the initial confusion over what that "Right" choice actually was, while all other potential choices led to known disaster. This isn't a total criticism of the interrupt, and I personally think this quest benefits from these unexpected diversions, but it is an example of "QM has insinuated that choices have Bad Consequences on an autofail timer if the players don't take them", even if on a much abbreviated deadline than usual.

-o-o-o-o-o-

The next two arcs we have AAR's for me to look through for examples are the Leviathan fight and Florida, which were both on rails, but we've sortof been dealing with the consequences, or at the very least aftereffects, of both of those in this arc.

 

[kamkong]

The primary situation we've had blow up on us, with Typhon, was rather clearly marked(to me at least) as intentionally being bigger than the local Protectorate/PRT could handle. Since we've addressed that manpower shortfall with a large team of high ranked not-a-parahumans, this seems to have been more centered on the impact of our choices and specifically with developing Laura thanks to her ties with Winter Hill. So, the primary thing we would have missed out on was character development, not the Wolfheads taking over the city, at least as I'm interpreting things. Not being the QM, I can't know for certain, but every quest-line we had available after taking out the Mathers Fallen has been something other people could handle, though with less ease than it took us.

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The perception seems to stem not from what SW has said, but from how people interpret the results of certain choices, and that some questlines have been explicitly getting worse because their description has changed from week to week even when we didn't pick them to show that those were time sensitive. The two big examples of that are the breakout from BB and the Typhon quest line. If we had taken either of those quests early, I doubt the story would have been quite as much fun to read, moreso for the breakout than the Beasts. The one named character killed by Typhon was even made as obnoxious as feasible for a Ward(without triggering Shadow Stalker flashbacks) as is so often done in horror movies. The first guy to die gets 6 lines to cement his douchiness, then he dies.

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Something I was thinking about is that if we had chosen to deal with Typhon early on (and had successfully dealt with it before the big attack on the Maras) then Cadejo and the perception-bending cape he had with him would have likely escaped through the sewers, and then they could have resurfaced as future antagonists. So Typhon's negative consequences actually assisted us in dealing with another potential problem down the line.

 

[Spectral Waltz]

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.

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This is definitely not what I was going for at least? The problem is not that we can't get everything, the problem is that all the things we don't get have -thus far- turned into unmitigated disasters, so every single week we end up taking one step forwards while trying to figure out if the five plots we haven't followed yet are going to set us five steps back.

All the other options based on past experience would have blown up in our faces spectacularly.
Now, in hindsight with the team of mages coming onto the scene at the same times as us, I really wish I could go back and change my vote to "Daddy's Little Girl", but in every other instance in this quest when we ignored something like this, the PRT failed spectacularly and it turned into a major crisis situation.

It often feels like less of "Choose the storyline you want to pursue and the rewards you get" but more of "Try to figure out which of these things is likely to do the least damage if ignored and spend your time putting out fires.". The fact that until the arc before this one we were consistently going from one crisis arc to the next with no down time since that party in Brockton Bay that turned into a battle didn't help.

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Pretty much this really...

I don't want you to change the action economy, I just wish the consequences of unpursued plotlines were less horribly dire. It feels like every plotline we haven't followed has done far more damage than any of the good the plotlines we did follow have managed.

I mean... If your ultimate message here is 'Earth is fucked and you can't win if you stay here' then you're doing a fantastic job of that, but if that's not what you're going for then I don't understand why you insist upon this hopelessness-inducing series of awful consequences for literally every single thing we didn't pay attention to?

 

[LordsFire]

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.

=snip=

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.

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As another Quest Master, a few words of advice:

1: Squeaky wheels get the attention. Particularly with high-popularity quests, a lot of people don't bother trying to keep up with anything but the story posts if they like where things are going. They don't see it as necessary or perhaps as pointless, because why vote when there's dozens to hundreds of voters already? I've been following your quest for years with a similar attitude, though part of it is also because I try to avoid posting on SV much.

2: Don't let a relatively small number of people set on negativity overwhelm your perception. See how many people have Serious Beef with you, and how many are dropping a vote and nothing else, or maybe even just a like and nothing else. People tend to remember criticism more easily than praise, especially when it's detailed.

3: Limits are good. People who want to have anything, are just demonstrating avarice. Real characters, like real people, have to choose what to do within limits, because people are limited. If your characters can do and have anything, they aren't real people anymore, they're Mary Sues, and that shallows out your story to cheap wish fulfillment. Don't surrender to people who want your writing to become shallow wish fulfillment.

4: You've told a good story thus far. In how actions have consequences, you're one of the absolute best storytellers for Quest Fiction I've read. I mentally use you as a reference to how I should make sure I keep healthy limits to what my protagonist and her cohort can do in my own quest. Yes, you are good enough to be a standard-setter, and specifically for how you've consistently imposed limits. Don't let people push you away from that just because they want to have everything.


I haven't followed any of the thread chatter of late, just followed alerts to your posts, so this post is purely in reaction to the post I've quoted, and prior posts you yourself have made.

 

[Valmond]

3: Limits are good. People who want to have anything, are just demonstrating avarice. Real characters, like real people, have to choose what to do within limits, because people are limited. If your characters can do and have anything, they aren't real people anymore, they're Mary Sues, and that shallows out your story to cheap wish fulfillment. Don't surrender to people who want your writing to become shallow wish fulfillment.

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I assume you mean everything?
Beyond that, nobody (unless i missed a post) is complaining that we can't have it all.
Problem is that it feels like unless we do it, it either does not get done, or gets done poorly.
Like i previously mentioned, the quest feels like a constant series of trolley, and that stops being fun after a while.

Lot of computer games have this problem where the player has to do everything, but on the flipside, those games often also give you infinite amount of time to do them in.
This quest does not give infinite time, it should not expect us to do everything either.

 

[Wyrd]

It often feels like less of "Choose the storyline you want to pursue and the rewards you get" but more of "Try to figure out which of these things is likely to do the least damage if ignored and spend your time putting out fires.". The fact that until the arc before this one we were consistently going from one crisis arc to the next with no down time since that party in Brockton Bay that turned into a battle didn't help.

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The party was in Philly. It's where we met Laura/Cailleach. The advent of social votes has made a big difference by giving us time to focus on less urgent stuff while still leaving us with hard choices for what to vote for.

Coil. Not finishing the quest came back to bite us several arcs later, and ended up killing everyone who was in our apartment building in the process. As others pointed out at the time, Rebecca Costa-Brown, AKA Alexandria, as a core member of Cauldron, knew full well who Coil was, what his powers were, and how he operates. Frankly, given the point that Scion has been deader than a doornail for 2 years already by the time of quest-start, I'm a bit surprised that she hadn't already taken him out, either directly or indirectly, and we had to deal with him at all. Once he moved to Chicago, a much more politically, economically and culturally important city than Brockton Bay, I'm surprised she didn't take care of him for us because of the greater threat he posed there.

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Alexandria knowing is arguable. Scion has been dead long enough that Coil likely had not had his powers all that long before Scion's death. Without that time to build a model of the character and decide to use him for Cauldron's experimental benevolent *dictator, Alexandria would never have had reason to learn all about Calvert and his power.

*While Coil was far from benevolent, he was ruthlessly pragmatic enough to realize that a happy city runs better. As Vetinari points out in one of Pratchett's books, evil people who seek power are far more likely to have a plan of what to do with it than the good people who are only interested in overthrowing their current despot.

 

[Pinklestia]

Unlike the Privateers, Project Pentagram is made entirely of well trained and psychologically monitored police officers. The Privateers were dockworkers who had been kept just barely above starvation for decades thanks in large part to the gangs, and then we lost most of the moderate members who weren't as committed either to stopping crooks or to Danny and the idea of doing good after leaving BB. I do feel we should monitor them, I don't feel we need to do so constantly.

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I would buy that argument if the PRT Mages wasn't basically a Black Ops Team that hates Capes and that think they could be able to get away with breaking Capes rules, since most of them don't exist as laws, if just they had more power.

 

[Wyrd]

I would buy that argument if the PRT Mages wasn't basically a Black Ops Team that hates Capes and that think they could be able to get away with breaking Capes rules, since most of them don't exist as laws, if just they had more power.

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We also have information from Alexandria that she intends to get rid of most of the unwritten rules once we take out the last two Endbringers. Her plan is also to get rid of the Protectorate as a separate entity, making it just a branch of the PRT, thanks in no small part to the fact that, in a year's time, provided Project Pentagram doesn't explode horrifically, the PRT will have more trained, high powered capes than there are parahumans on the planet, and all of that without the trauma of Trigger events and shard shenanigans that make capes so unstable. After all, the two main reasons that the unwritten rules exist at all are the Endbringers(and the truce that lets villains fight beside heroes against them) and the fact that the good guys are hopelessly outnumbered. Soon, it will eb the heroes who outnumber the villains.

 

[Pinklestia]

provided Project Pentagram doesn't explode horrifically

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That's the point, not only are the Endbringers still a problem, that means Capes are still needed, but the PRT mages showed in their thoughts they would go right into breaking the Unwritten Rules as soon as they have more firepower, no mention of "We will wait until the Endbringers are gone" there.

 

[veekie]

This is definitely not what I was going for at least? The problem is not that we can't get everything, the problem is that all the things we don't get have -thus far- turned into unmitigated disasters, so every single week we end up taking one step forwards while trying to figure out if the five plots we haven't followed yet are going to set us five steps back.

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Basically this, been here since the start and its been that way from the start.

I think the worst part is:
-Ignore it - It gets a bit worse in the background over time. This is a lot of the villain group plotlines. Produced Butcher Lung as one of the consequences. Bright side, the resultant event or plotline can be resolved cheaply action wise, but with no reward, we just nuke it all.
-Engage it, don't finish - It gets a LOT worse, rapidly, and also we're down an action we could have finished a different plot line with. This happened a lot more earlier since the thread was working on a "don't ignore any problems" schema at the time, which left an impression. The most iconic example of this was the whole mess with the Privateers.
-Engage it, finish it correctly - Reward, usually very good reward. The best example is the Simurgh plotline.
-Engage it, didn't like the reward - Punched in the face when we tell the reward to screw off. Best example is Tattletale scenario.

At some point I've stopped caring about the reward and just focused on not getting punched in the face, e.g. actively avoiding engaging the Dannyplot because its VERY likely going to result in Option B, theres simply not enough interest in getting C, so we're likely going to find it optimal to just ignore it until it surfaces as a new villain, and we can solve THAT with a Ragnarok and only one action.

 

[landcollector]

that means Capes are still needed,

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Eh. 95% of capes are useless in EB battles beyond being S&R bodies, which is doable even by mundanes.

 

[Valmond]

Eh. 95% of capes are useless in EB battles beyond being S&R bodies, which is doable even by mundanes.

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And the 5% are unlikely to feel very helpfull if PRT decides to start coming down on the 95% while ignoring the rules.
Because they will know they are next.

 

[Wyrd]

Eh. 95% of capes are useless in EB battles beyond being S&R bodies, which is doable even by mundanes.

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And the 5% are unlikely to feel very helpfull if PRT decides to start coming down on the 95% while ignoring the rules.
Because they will know they are next.

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Given that they are currently respecting the unwritten rules, like them or not, and how powerful a cape even a low level core can create, combined with massive numbers and, again, that these are people who volunteered to help fight capes despite knowing that they were by far more likely to be killed in action than any cape on either side, and I don't think it will be that bad. By the time they are ready to start breaking those rules, they should already have a very large force to replace capes at EB battles.

Besides, the interlude shows them chafing under those restrictions, but do you think practically any hero doesn't chafe just as much, despite many knowing that they might be strong enough to take on every villainous cape in a given city? That's gotta burn even more for those members of the Protectorate that could take on every villain in their city at the same time, like Myrddin might be able to manage, or Eidolon before his powers went on the fritz. Disliking the rules, and saying that they had to obey them 'for now'* tells us nothing of their long term plans other than that they hope to adjust their rules of engagement at some point in the future.

* at least, I think that's the wording used. I don't feel like digging up the quote to be certain.

Something I try to pay a lot of attention to is questioning my assumptions and reexamining exactly how things are worded. An imperial &*@#-tonne of the big arguments throughout the quest have been over issues that people were certain SW had said that turned out to be a player saying something with confidence that is not actually known to be true. Danny's situation is a big one, that people insist categorically that there is absolutely no way to help him, that we are guaranteed to get nothing but angst from ever involving him again, and that voting to do something with him will just be a masochistic super-goth orgy of pain and dismay.

 

[LightLan]

That's the point, not only are the Endbringers still a problem, that means Capes are still needed, but the PRT mages showed in their thoughts they would go right into breaking the Unwritten Rules as soon as they have more firepower, no mention of "We will wait until the Endbringers are gone" there.

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well, the Unwritten Rules are essentially the government admitting they lost Monopoly of Force and letting the criminals get away with their crimes. Once they have gained their Monopoly of Force back, they should do away with the Unwritten Rules.

Letting Murderers and Gangs get away with their crimes just because they donned a mask for it is simply dumb.

 

[Silently Watches]

Eh. 95% of capes are useless in EB battles beyond being S&R bodies, which is doable even by mundanes.

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And the 5% are unlikely to feel very helpfull if PRT decides to start coming down on the 95% while ignoring the rules.
Because they will know they are next.

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I don't have time to go through the entirety of the Leviathan fight in canon, but my expectation and certainly my headcanon for this quest is that the majority of capes fighting Endbringers are heroes, with LOCAL non-hero capes serving as the bulk of the rest. So no, that 5% that can actually do something wouldn't have a problem with Operation Pentagram jumping onto the villains with full force. After all, the PRT even magicked up won't have any reason to start hunting down heroes. Plus there's the fact that heroes DON'T LIKE the Unwritten Rules any more than the PRT does. It's a status quo they have to live with considering how they are vastly outnumbered by villains, not one they support for its own sake. If the tables were turned and hero capes suddenly outnumbered the villains, you can be damn sure the Unwritten Rules would be thrown away in a heartbeat.

This is what happens when you guys start listening to Pinklestia. Tsk tsk.

 

[Wyrd]

I don't have time to go through the entirety of the Leviathan fight in canon, but my expectation and certainly my headcanon for this quest is that the majority of capes fighting Endbringers are heroes, with LOCAL non-hero capes serving as the bulk of the rest. So no, that 5% that can actually do something wouldn't have a problem with Operation Pentagram jumping onto the villains with full force. After all, the PRT even magicked up won't have any reason to start hunting down heroes. Plus there's the fact that heroes DON'T LIKE the Unwritten Rules any more than the PRT does. It's a status quo they have to live with considering how they are vastly outnumbered by villains, not one they support for its own sake. If the tables were turned and hero capes suddenly outnumbered the villains, you can be damn sure the Unwritten Rules would be thrown away in a heartbeat.

This is what happens when you guys start listening to Pinklestia. Tsk tsk.

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The one dissent with this that I'd note is that villains like Accord who not only show up for EB fights in canon, but bring their teams with them, and who strive to actually be a net positive in impact on his territory would continue to be conveniently overlooked while the heroes were going after the real problems. Even out here in meatspace, organized crime that reduces the actual amount of crime happening and leaves their areas safer don't get pursued as hard. The golden age of bank robbers happened because they were so careful to avoid seriously harming anybody; when the bank robbers stopped following that code, the cops moved them way up on their list of priorities.

People like Lung and Kaiser, on the other hand, who do a great deal of harm and were only kept free because they were powerful enough to be of use and Cauldron manipulated things to keep them free, well, time for some Befriending.

 

[edale]

I don't have time to go through the entirety of the Leviathan fight in canon, but my expectation and certainly my headcanon for this quest is that the majority of capes fighting Endbringers are heroes, with LOCAL non-hero capes serving as the bulk of the rest.

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I can't remember any specific names from the Leviathan fight off the top of my head, other than remembering that there were quite a few out-of-town villains there; but I definitely remember Accord, along with several other Thinkers, villains and heroes alike, were present at the Behemoth fight in... India? (can't remember exactly where it was). I'm pretty sure Tattletale was there as well.

People like Lung and Kaiser, on the other hand, who do a great deal of harm and were only kept free because they were powerful enough to be of use and Cauldron manipulated things to keep them free, well, time for some Befriending.

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Pretty sure Hookwolf, at the least, was a regular attendee at Endbringer fights before the S9 got to him; so the Empire did contribute to Endbringer fights. Don't ask me for a cite on that though...

 

[ForestGardener]

I mean... If your ultimate message here is 'Earth is fucked and you can't win if you stay here' then you're doing a fantastic job of that, but if that's not what you're going for then I don't understand why you insist upon this hopelessness-inducing series of awful consequences for literally every single thing we didn't pay attention to?

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Not every plotline ignored or neglected has come back to bite us or gotten worse over time, far from it. We have time to do about half of the options presented to us in any given arc, and on average I'd say about one neglected plotline per arc (ignoring the 'major battle' arcs) has produced known negative consequences, perhaps less. Which, yes, is annoyingly often, but is still a minority.

 

[SlickRCBD]

Not every plotline ignored or neglected has come back to bite us or gotten worse over time, far from it. We have time to do about half of the options presented to us in any given arc, and on average I'd say about one neglected plotline per arc (ignoring the 'major battle' arcs) has produced known negative consequences, perhaps less. Which, yes, is annoyingly often, but is still a minority.

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I think most of those were the generic "Go out on patrol" or "visit some other place", which I think we've only done twice, once in Brockton Bay and once when we went on patrol with Missy and she got mamed.

The reason we neglected "go on patrol" or "explore" so much was that there was already enough trouble to deal with. Same for the social scene, but that was addressed with the "social slots".

 

[Overlord_lopaka]

Not every plotline ignored or neglected has come back to bite us or gotten worse over time, far from it. We have time to do about half of the options presented to us in any given arc, and on average I'd say about one neglected plotline per arc (ignoring the 'major battle' arcs) has produced known negative consequences, perhaps less. Which, yes, is annoyingly often, but is still a minority.

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I could be wrong but from memory it feels like every mission that was started and never finished had something bad happens.

 

[Pinklestia]

I could be wrong but from memory it feels like every mission that was started and never finished had something bad happens.

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I got that impression too, hence why I hate having to vote for something more than once.

 

[kamkong]

I could be wrong but from memory it feels like every mission that was started and never finished had something bad happens.

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Not always. We started the Purity quest, but didn't finish it. That meant that our relationship with Purity wasn't good enough to recruit her (and eventually scan for a Linker Core and potentially mage-ify her), but it was good enough that we could talk her down during the breakout and not risk her blowing us to smithereens. Coil questline was started and left unresolved in Brockton Bay, so he came back later and we got a chance at some other rewards (we ended up with Bakuda tech, we could have ended up with Tattletale). Just because their are consequences does not always mean that there isn't some positive we can obtain from the events.
My opinion on this matter of our plot choices is that consequences are narratively interesting. They keep the story moving along and offer events that must be dealt with in the future. This is a quest where we must pick and choose which plot lines we pursue and which we ignore, and there should be consequences as they make a better story and drive more choices down the line. And there has been a lot of variety in the seriousness and types of consequences. There have been plot lines that have negative consequences for choosing them (fighting Hookwolf in Set Up, chasing the ABB in Escapades, teleporting out of the barrier in Suntan, etc.), plot lines where partially choosing them helps in a future plot line (Negoatiating with Purity in Escapades), and of course this continuous debate of consequences for completely ignoring plot lines. Sometimes the consequences are harmless in-universe but negatively affect our ability as players (like if we had ignored the Adepts, therefore losing three Linker Cores), and sometimes they affect Taylor in-universe and can result in unexpected rewards (getting Bakuda tech from Coil in Chicago). This is Taylor Hebert, Queen of Escalation. Things can always get worse, and they usually do around her. Accept the reality and work to overcome it.

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.

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I sympathize with your thoughts and feelings regarding the current discussion and those who are displeased with the current ruleset. While you are perfectly within your rights to walk away from this, and I would continue reading your other stories should this one be put aside, I sincerely hope you do not. I personally find this quest to be entertaining, fulfilling, and satisfying in equal measure. It's been an amazing experience getting involved and knowing that my opinion can potentially make or break a situation, and it also has inspired me to try my own hand at writing, to my great satisfaction. As @LordsFire said, you cannot please everyone, and for me at least it is the limits in this quest that make it interesting.

 

[Wyrd]

I can't remember any specific names from the Leviathan fight off the top of my head, other than remembering that there were quite a few out-of-town villains there; but I definitely remember Accord, along with several other Thinkers, villains and heroes alike, were present at the Behemoth fight in... India? (can't remember exactly where it was). I'm pretty sure Tattletale was there as well.

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All of the Undersiders were present, as I recall.

Pretty sure Hookwolf, at the least, was a regular attendee at Endbringer fights before the S9 got to him; so the Empire did contribute to Endbringer fights. Don't ask me for a cite on that though...

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It's the 'net positive' part that he misses by a long shot. Both the Empire and ABB were involved with human trafficking, drugs, protection rackets, intimidation, and active aggression against anybody in their territory who failed to be White/Asian. Kaiser probably could have run them in a way that would have left them at the low end of the list for who to go after, if only his gang weren't built entirely on Nazi and Mayonnaise supremacist ideologies.

 

[edale]

It's the 'net positive' part that he misses by a long shot. Both the Empire and ABB were involved with human trafficking, drugs, protection rackets, intimidation, and active aggression against anybody in their territory who failed to be White/Asian.

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I don't recall any references of the E88 being involved in human trafficking...

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@Silently Watches I think the biggest problem isn't that we have to pick and choose between the different plot threads, it's that we have to pick and choose between so many different plot threads.

As has been noted, we can only manage to follow about half of the different plot threads, and the large amount of choices leads to us not actually managing to finish any of the plot threads for an arc. Instead we end up with (out of 12 plot threads) 8 plot threads half developed, none finished, 1 that only had the first action taken, and 3 untouched (numbers picked arbitrarily, for the use of making my point).

You yourself have acknowledged that this is a bit of a problem, and have tried to change how votes are done a bit to compensate, such as the addition of social actions, but these haven't done enough to solve the underlying problem.

I think what needs to be done is to streamline the voting and plot threads in such a way that rather than only managing to do 1/2 of them, we can manage to complete 3/4 of them. This would allow us to fully finish 1/4 of them easily, while letting us dip our toes in all the others; rather than taking the first option in each plot thread making it all but impossible to even finish 1 of them, which is the current situation.

Your current system would likely work great for a D&D campaign, with 4 or 5 people... But the quest setup involves a LOT more people vying for control on where things go which makes following through on any one thing through multiple votes almost impossible.

Another possible change would be allowing us to use one action to advance multiple plot threads when it makes sense to do so. An example would be:

The next event in plot thread A requires us to talk to Dragon.
The next event in plot thread B is us going on a trip somewhere with Dragon.

It would make perfect sense for us to go on the trip with Dragon for plot thread B, but to talk with her about plot thread A while we were with her.

Another possible change could be giving us updates on how certain things are going in plot threads we've skipped, where it's reasonable that we have a way to know about it, before things boil over. An example of this would be while the Privateers were falling apart, and we weren't doing anything with them... We were still living with Kurt and Lacy, so it's perfectly reasonable that we could have overheard them discussing the situation at some point while we were home, even if only enough to know something was happening, if not the specifics of what.

 

[Almech_Alfarion]

As has been noted, we can only manage to follow about half of the different plot threads, and the large amount of choices leads to us not actually managing to finish any of the plot threads for an arc. Instead we end up with (out of 12 plot threads) 8 plot threads half developed, none finished, 1 that only had the first action taken, and 3 untouched (numbers picked arbitrarily, for the use of making my point).

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I won't be able to do it in the next few days because of other commitments to my time, but I was planing on working up a more in-depth analysis of the AAR's than the "quick and dirty" one I did above of the various points where things we either missed or left incomplete came around to bite us*. I'm not sure how successful I'll be, since I'll be trying to condense 13 arcs worth of information into a format not dissimilar from an AAR itself...

*Edit: Or at least could have, if the players hadn't managed to stumble their way through them.