SW never said we'd have a new body made for us. And I know the discussion's been a bit fast-paced, but that wouldn't have solved the issues with the combat scenario and the TSAB motivations.
Actually, until we made that call they didn't know what we looked like, and at that point the Enforcer squad was already on their way and had lost contact with Command.
THIS, I think, is something that doesn't make sense.
Their contact was a mage, whose name was Taylor but whose appearance they didn't know because they ran into and through the Entities' barrier the same time as Taylor finally got the radio's video chat to work.
I'll go ahead and address this, because you are correct. You were not going to win this fight. Taylor, with four months of experience fighting parahumans, versus five mages who are trained to fight other mages with years of experience doing so and having been briefed on all her abilities by someone who has already fought and countered them.
From a purely OOC perspective, it opens the door to having working with the TSAB or hunting down the "Belkans" be one of the sidequest options for Arc 9.
I would note that the LAST time we ran into unknown combatants and lost we got screwed because:
That's super unfair - this is very clearly a mistake based on "what works in a story" versus "what works in a quest" and expecting someone to get it right first try is just plain foolish. I haven't seen anything to indicate that the railroading here was deliberate and not simply a function of not taking into account how the game mechanics of a quest affect player reaction and attachment to a specific character.
Oh good lord. Have you never been in a tabletop role-playing session before? Played a video game? At what point did we ever give the impression we liked being put in an impossible scenario? You've just justified every accusation of railroading made thus far. Look. I know Wildbow's thing is throwing a character into a situation where they have no advantages + many disadvantages and see if they figure out a way.
1. This isn't really 'first'. This is a quest that's been running since April of last year, to say nothing of SW's own quest participation. It's been long enough that to try and pass SW off as a fumbling newbie is frankly insulting her ability as a writer.
I think the issue is that this wasn't so much a speed bump as us being driven off a cliff right as things were at what we thought was a low point in the story.
Who? TSAB for basically going in lethal or Silently Watches because Silently thought a fairly bad idea was a good one?
At this rate? The answer may end up being a mathmatician's answer.
...this implies that the IAE drones spewed propaganda, at least occasionally.
Really?
FTFY.
Given Taylor's comments to Samantha and vice-versa were all verbal, not telepathic, I'd think these would have been triggered anyway.
1. And this is, to my knowledge, the first time this particular issue has come up.
Yeah, but you don't do both at once.
