With all the salt , i want to start with a huuug and saying I'd be much more upset if you hadn't been a good, fair, and not-grimdark author enough so far that I'm willing to wait and trust more than I would elsewhere. (Someone just mentioned the infinite-salt-mine I quit following. This looks quite a bit more like the Momo fight with its misunderstandings, but very happily NOT the parley-vote or the accept-memories vote that were the QM intentionally punishing players for their choice) .
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Reading this back at noon (man its painful reading updates on a lunch break where I can't reply
) I wanted to make a lot of detailed commentary and line-quoting. As it is I think I'd mostly be repeating points a little too much.
Basically, I tend to agree with people, its not so much an issue that its an unwinnable fight or even that elements were reasonable or not, the issue is whether we should have known how to vote better.
Still unsure why "use a hybrid of Witch and Knight template" would give points towards them reassessing us as not matching slaves, but "possess a caring guardian beast" gave no points there. (Especially since Berserk only happened later... I think only after the Buster from the Belkan , at worst.) Or why we were entirely silent during the fight, even as they called out to us in an unfamiliar language, when speaking in english might've given us points.
You even said at one point "the blasts that attacked you pre-vote look just like any other blaster, including this named one" . What clue would we have had to know to try and talk them down and avoid looking like a Puppet to kill? Was there something we missed, or was it only ever going to be functionally random (do we happen to choose the plan that survives rather than death plans, with no hints or knowledge to shape it). This wasn't even strictly an ambush (where someone said we should've assumed they'd know our abilities) , it looked like we spotted them /first/ and they turned the tables on us on the fly. At least it looked that way to me.
I do think some of your replies thus far, Silently, are focused more on "This made perfect sense in-character because of X and Y", and less response to the questions of "could the players have done better" or the perhaps unasked "why was it written with X and Y". Okay, so they crossed the barrier a DAY (not a week or two, which is how votes go by) after we made video contact that potentially could have avoided this? And they sent a Belkan because they didn't expect peace was an option (whats the population ratio there? Could a random team have coincidentally lacked any and been believable?) so PS wasn't as helpful? And we didn't happen to have night-vision on for our night-flying, while translation is neither automatic nor a telepathy-leakage from the memories and personality update? All of these are perfectly reasonable circumstances in Story that could cause this unfortunate misunderstanding, but with a Game in mind why shape the circcumstances in so many ways so the only option was "happen to pick correctly" and not any of these places that would've circumvented the worst of it? (Even down to the initial choice of what IAE is like, with it being a mindless-slave kill-on-sight Lost Logia and not one of the dangerous-but-sapient types like the Numbers or the Book of Darkness and its Knights).
On a different topic, people need to
STOP AND WAIT on the issue of how things would go if Taylor died. We don't know the exact specifics of what her continuing on looks like, and that shapes things far too much to comment. (Complete memory upload to a meat-puppet crafted from animal-sourced Carbon , ala Eclipse Phase, is very different from going Butcher and stealing a living human body that doesn't match ours, just for example).
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TLDR, what clues did we miss (if any) that would have had us vote for a plan that got enough points to survive? Do you see anything that could've /caused/ that type of vote and didn't, rather than the result being possible if that vote arose on its own by chance? And did all the circumstances (reasonable IC though they were) that caused this clusterwhat of friendly fire need to happen?
