What am I supposed to do if you guys get excited about a possibility for someone to have magic
Predetermine it, like happened with a few others? (I know the Adepts were sort've obvious in that its their ONLY narrative significance, but what was the rationale for Purity?)
Extremely greedy, but it is a literal answer
(See later in post)
how it gets viewed by a player in a time-management quest
An insightful point to bring up. If you want an answer on discouragement or not, well... it hadn't really come up as a reason (people had other reasons to be reluctant on those I'd like to scan), but if you look at the actual actions thus far, you see a pattern.
Adepts and Privateers, we scanned a dozen or more people (and as the math would tend to, we did find a potentiate or two) in a single action.
Vista, we only scanned because we were already having a social action spent on her.
If incentivizing only scanning efficiently-large groups, or only bothering with characters we've already established enough with that we want to interact anyways, is your intention... then its working. But if you want to see scanning done more often, then the issue of how 5% plays into time management does seem to be a factor to consider.
making it more likley someone has a Linker Core wouldn't be faithful to Nanoha
My answer to this, is one that I always like to answer questions in creative writing about, but it seems a bit unpopular. (At least, a lot of the ideas I like tend towards Mary-Suedom , and that very phrase existing as a known term seems evidence of the usual opinion).
Namely, Selection Bias. Mathematically we may know that something is a one in a million chance, but hey thats still a dozen in New York and a Thousand in China, right? How fortunate* for us that they happened to cross our path. More specifically, the selection comes in the idea that.... yes, extraordinary people may be rare...but we tend to tell stories about extraordinary people right? Dozens of heros die in every endbringer fight, thousands of generic warriors die in Fantasy Army Battles and yet all the stories are about a handful of heroes taking out everything that crosses them. We tell stories only about the ones that /succeed/ , the ones that were the rare sort to be interesting, not all the rest.
In this context, where the person is selected for other reasons and only after gets checked for scans, rather than say "Adepts contact you /because/ they're potentiates" ... then plausibility comes back into play a bit sure. How'd we happen to befriend the lucky few , its not like the story needed them (but then, a story with Taylors Mage Buddies remaking the face of Capedom might be better than a story of Lone Mage Saves Worm? We have IAE for a reason after all).
ie the gathering of magical potentiates into how much time the players put into it, an ongoing quest line. Getting 'rarer' and more specific characters can be tied to their own quest chain/Social Link of varying length.
Mentioned above, but this is an interesting way to do it. After all, this has been said to specifically be a time-management quest. For all that our battle plans do have a major role (some combats seem decided entirely by them, win or lose, others modify dice rolls) , every battle has seemed to have a winning option, its just a matter of where we chose to win.
So if we're speaking our primary resource, arguably our only? major one in this quest to spend... shouldn't that justify the ideal payoff? Or I am biasedly misunderstanding how the challenge and direction of this quest works, for this narrow issue ? (I know I've pushed for favorable-changes in the past, like social actions, so I'm aware and open that my voice might not always be th
