- Location
- Somewhere.
Yeah, why are there no write-ins?
Magical Girl Home Base Quest
- Thread starter 7734
- Start date
- Original
- Location
- Earth
The response I got when talking with the QM some time ago is that this Quest is supposed to have as close to a nonexistant hurdle to participation as possible. Which is why there is only one action per week, out of a list of seven-ish actions to take. Sometimes two different voting options.
With write-ins, it would likely soon devolve into some people creating humongous, micromanaging plans which scare some people away from making their own picks, or encourage bandwagoning.
Admittedly, now that I think about it, making it easy to vote but expecting a ton of work be put into analysing the story and reading between the lines to pick the 'correct' vote is kind of paradoxical.
- Location
- Head in the clouds
It's not just future productivity we need to consider but also not having a disease outbreak. Plumbing and general hygiene are important especially as unlike the magical girls a lot of our staff aren't running super immune systems.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
Remember, we already have magical girls paying with work, clearing rooms. Or we had, before this crisis hit and that was put on hold.
Yeah, that's our only option, aside from unlocking special rooms, like what we're currently voting on.
- Location
- USA
I don't think so? If the QM's right, that's only done with higher-level stuff like the T4(5?) trinket. Otherwise, they just pay M-Boy and/or Homer with all the Stuff they collect.
Calypso was definitely doing it and as far as I know still is.
Just realized, you know what might have helped with burnout? That one MG who we could have hired to help with the workload for a few weeks in exchange for an item..
Otoh, it seems like burnout is a result of the demands of the crisis as much as anything else.
Just realized, you know what might have helped with burnout? That one MG who we could have hired to help with the workload for a few weeks in exchange for an item..
Otoh, it seems like burnout is a result of the demands of the crisis as much as anything else.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
No, we had Calypso do that to pay for a T3 Trinket.
And she hasn't finished yet.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Wellll. OK, but we need to avoid the reasoning of "we need to take risks, this is risky, therefore we must do it."
What we need isn't risk as such; we need to break out of the current unsustainable paradigm into one that operates at a higher, more tenable level. It just so happens that most of the good ways to do so involve taking risks.
Physical space is very far from our only problem. We also have issues with food and, explicitly, sanitation. Our shower is a jury-rigged thing that almost certainly is not up to the task of keeping all the girls clean all the time. I forget exactly what our toilet-type arrangements are but I am pretty sure they haven't been upgraded in all the time since we got started, even as the building's occupancy has increased roughly fivefold.
At some point, just clearing more rooms isn't gonna cut it.
[If I were not having a shitty day I'd do an archive trawl and figure out all the references to our plumbing and sanitary arrangements]
Note: We do have an ongoing Mundanes requirement for building improvements and food upkeep. We can't house an unlimited number of people rent-free for an extended period of time, unless of course Medicine Boy is crafting items and selling them for Mundanes that he effectively uses to subsidize rent.
Note that in this case, we DID get warning and foreshadowing of this:
That was turn before last.
Then we voted to make a wand, further exercising Medicine Boy's magical talent. No wonder the poor kid crapped out on us like that!
I should have seen it coming. We might have been OK if we'd taken a week off the acts of magic, done some building upgrades or something.
- Location
- Plato's Cave
Since I don't think anyone answered you on that:
They apparently can stand each other's presence for long enough to do the grocery runs, I'm pretty sure Homer's hitting the beginning of puberty if I remember his rough age correctly, and who knows where the lines between acquaintances, friends, and boy/girlfriend are (nobody in the building probably does, except Chris/Rose maybe).
- Location
- ?
But apparently according the QM,this quest is demanding the same sort of thing.
That's a good point.
People keep saying this, but the QM said the main solution was to solve the crisis faster. Note that the magic we did last week that burnt us out was the funerary rite, not the laboratory.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I do think there's something of an imcompatibility between the mindset
"The quest should be approachable enough that you only have seven options and none of them are 'take a fucking break for a week because wow you are exhausted' ." and
"If you want to know how your characters are doing, make sure to chew through the past 10-20 thousand words of updates carefully looking for places where I casually drop important details and then move on to something else."
It's just "the aggressive strike fails with 30% casualties" is a really bad but as far as I know totally plausible outcome of that kind of action, and if I have to choose between that and "weeks of intense mobilization cause MB to collapse in a fever delirium for a week after he pushes his magic to the limit and then keeps going," then it's not what you'd call an obvious decision to optimize for self-care by throwing troops at the enemy.
This ain't Zapp Brannigan Quest.
"The quest should be approachable enough that you only have seven options and none of them are 'take a fucking break for a week because wow you are exhausted' ." and
"If you want to know how your characters are doing, make sure to chew through the past 10-20 thousand words of updates carefully looking for places where I casually drop important details and then move on to something else."
Yeah, Homer's an early-teenage boy (is he even 13?) who's Been Through Some Shit. Him latching onto Calypso as his kinda-girlfriend just because they get along well wouldn't be out of the question, and, hell, the liking might be mutual!
Eh. I don't regret exhausting MB in pursuit of a strategy that tries to limit casualties, as long as he pulls through medically. On the other hand, I see the logic of trying to push for a quick, dirty, aggressive strike.
It's just "the aggressive strike fails with 30% casualties" is a really bad but as far as I know totally plausible outcome of that kind of action, and if I have to choose between that and "weeks of intense mobilization cause MB to collapse in a fever delirium for a week after he pushes his magic to the limit and then keeps going," then it's not what you'd call an obvious decision to optimize for self-care by throwing troops at the enemy.
This ain't Zapp Brannigan Quest.
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7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Because fuck writing some demented paperclip maximization scheme.
- Location
- Somewhere.
...Write-ins aren't going to lead to paperclip maximizers unless you reward that kind of play. I somehow doubt you will reward paperclip maximizer play, and for that matter you can just slap down a write-in if you feel like it, you are the QM after all. As it is, we can't even do "Take a fucking break before you burn out", and I think that some of us are quite frustrated with having almost no input to the details of anything. I know if I was a voting member of this quest, I certainly would be.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Good point. If we had write-in options we could make sanitation improvements another thing that people could do in exchange for rent. As it is, we'll probably just have to keep taking building upgrades and hope we luck out. I personally don't believe that building upgrades are more restful than magic stuff, but if it turns out they are then we can always try for sanitation upgrades whenever we start getting burned out.
True. What I'm arguing for is an expansion of that. Having people clear out rooms in exchange for temporarily free rent, rather than in exchange for an item. Ideally separate from any action we take, or perhaps something where we take an action to organize a large number of girls to do this.
We have a whole bunch of girls who can greatly help our action economy and who are heavily incentivized to do just that. Normally that wouldn't work out for a quest since increasing our action economy too much would burn out the QM from massive updates. But here it might work, since the girls would be helping with an action that doesn't really increase update wordcount or the amount of thinking that has to go on behind the scenes. They'll just be increasing the numbers of rooms that get cleared out each turn, which shouldn't add much QM work since the QM already adds extra cleared rooms every X turns from Calypso working. This just increases the number of rooms that need to be marked as cleared whenever that happens.
Unfortunately, this maybe doesn't work so well for getting the girls to help with sanitation projects, since those actually do require thinking about and may be written into updates.
Edit:
Ninja'd by the QM.
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Something to consider is that we already invested very heavily in building upgrades in the first part of the quest. I'm not sure "build more sanitation upgrades" actually fixes the problems we need to fix.
Part of the problem we have is we don't even really know what things we did were the suboptimal ones right now.
Part of the problem we have is we don't even really know what things we did were the suboptimal ones right now.
- Location
- Plato's Cave
Certainly, it's a little bit frustrating to know that we need some kind of elevator or non-stair method to access the second floor if we want to make it reasonably liveable, or be told that sanitation is a fucking issue, but we can't decide "alright, let's spend a week setting up a cheap-and-dirty non-magic dumbwaiter in the elevator shaft to at least get started on that" or "buy a bunch of PVC pipes and some hand pumps from the nearest hardware store and spend a few days setting up something closer to interior plumbing than what we have right now", having instead to roll the dice on building improvements and hope we get something that deals with one of those issues rather than, say....actual furniture or something.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Very much this. We've been arguing for quite a while about what we've been doing wrong and why,but all we really know is that we apparently have done something wrong.
Maybe there's a disconnect between what the players think the purpose of the quest is, and what the QM made the quest for? My current understanding of the purpose of the quest is
1. To have fun
2. As a morality story to show why the whole 'pull yourself up by your boostraps' thing doesn't actually work in real life.
If the primary purpose is 1, then optimize paperclip is a viable strategy as long as it's done in a way the QM enjoys. If 2 is more important though, it stands to reason that paperclipping isn't reasonable since you can't paperclip in real life. Or perhaps there's a completely different purpose for this quest. @7734 would you care to inform us of this? I think it would at least make it easier for us to understand why 'optimize paperclip' is bad here.
- Location
- Canada
One idea I had was that if we end up with a lot of mundanes we might be able to find a plumber/contractor or someone with that range of skills, and just outright hire them to get a proper shower/bathroom set up for us. It would require that we find someone in the know about the whole magical girl business, but given that mercenaries and the like exist, that skillset probably exists. That would let us get a building upgrade at the cost of resources, rather than actions. Now, it would require that we have a lot of money on hand, but if we come across some chances to score a lot of money this might be viable.
Also, it is kinda annoying that building upgrades are a metaphorical roll of the dice on what we get. Even if write-ins aren't allowed, a dropdown would be nice to have, so that we can aim things a little. Like below:
[] [WORK] No, you want to work on your building instead
-[] Medical Ward
-[] Proper bathroom & shower
-[] Build a bunkroom
-[] Elevator to 2nd floor
Which would let us figure out which issues we can actually help with if we upgrade the building, rather than having it basically be a mystery box. With everything else we either have a rough idea what it means - item & workshop upgrade - or it's research which is intentionally somewhat unknown. Having the results be completely unknown means we don't know whether we're actually going to solve anything with it, or if we're just wasting actions on something that won't actually help our present problems.
Also, it is kinda annoying that building upgrades are a metaphorical roll of the dice on what we get. Even if write-ins aren't allowed, a dropdown would be nice to have, so that we can aim things a little. Like below:
[] [WORK] No, you want to work on your building instead
-[] Medical Ward
-[] Proper bathroom & shower
-[] Build a bunkroom
-[] Elevator to 2nd floor
Which would let us figure out which issues we can actually help with if we upgrade the building, rather than having it basically be a mystery box. With everything else we either have a rough idea what it means - item & workshop upgrade - or it's research which is intentionally somewhat unknown. Having the results be completely unknown means we don't know whether we're actually going to solve anything with it, or if we're just wasting actions on something that won't actually help our present problems.
...I don't even recall how exactly the rolls affect the room or workshop actions.......
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Screw it. I'm gonna argue/ramble for the stupid frigging elevator.
The thing we've needed most the past few updates is something to end the crisis earlier. We... don't know what that was. Maybe it was behind one of our research actions, like researching the Kolobok. But there's something really freaking obvious that should be our second-most priority, and now that the crisis is almost over it's going to be our number-one need for quite some time: Housing.
Our housing sucks, big time. We have MGs camping outside. We have them double and tripple stacked in our rooms. Our kitchen can't feed everyone, our plumbing can't handle everyone, and amenities like our shower are being stretched as far as they can. And if you go into the spreadsheet, while it says we have multiple cleared 2nd floor rooms, in the "temporary rooming arangements"we can see that none of those 2nd floor rooms are actually being used right now. And that's just not good enough; we have multiple non-residential rooms crowding the 1st floor as is. We don't just need a ton more building upgrades; we need space to put those upgrades in, and right now even just the 2nd floor isn't really accessible enough to use.
But if we build the elevator, we'd have four times as much space. We'd be able to turn those cleared 2nd floor rooms into occupied (and rent-paying) rooms, and have tons of room for other room upgrades. We'd be able to expand the kitchen to take up multiple rooms. We could move our shower inside, maybe even get actual indoor plumbing working. Etc. Etc. We have 35+ MGs on base right now, and after this crisis, maybe most of them will leave and be someone else's problem and everything will go back to normal. But maybe they won't. Maybe the next crisis will bring even more MGs. It'd be really nice to be able to house dozens of MGs instead of just ten-ish.
Why not the Magical Condenser? Because arming all our MGs is great in abstract, but in practice is a constant uphill climb even if we had more crafters. Selling items is nice but it doesn't help us be a better Home Base nearly as much as just making a better home base. Why not the Aura of Purification? Because it takes longer for less benefit; we'd still be stuck with only 1 floor effectively.
/ramble
[X] Build a Room
- [X] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.
The thing we've needed most the past few updates is something to end the crisis earlier. We... don't know what that was. Maybe it was behind one of our research actions, like researching the Kolobok. But there's something really freaking obvious that should be our second-most priority, and now that the crisis is almost over it's going to be our number-one need for quite some time: Housing.
Our housing sucks, big time. We have MGs camping outside. We have them double and tripple stacked in our rooms. Our kitchen can't feed everyone, our plumbing can't handle everyone, and amenities like our shower are being stretched as far as they can. And if you go into the spreadsheet, while it says we have multiple cleared 2nd floor rooms, in the "temporary rooming arangements"we can see that none of those 2nd floor rooms are actually being used right now. And that's just not good enough; we have multiple non-residential rooms crowding the 1st floor as is. We don't just need a ton more building upgrades; we need space to put those upgrades in, and right now even just the 2nd floor isn't really accessible enough to use.
But if we build the elevator, we'd have four times as much space. We'd be able to turn those cleared 2nd floor rooms into occupied (and rent-paying) rooms, and have tons of room for other room upgrades. We'd be able to expand the kitchen to take up multiple rooms. We could move our shower inside, maybe even get actual indoor plumbing working. Etc. Etc. We have 35+ MGs on base right now, and after this crisis, maybe most of them will leave and be someone else's problem and everything will go back to normal. But maybe they won't. Maybe the next crisis will bring even more MGs. It'd be really nice to be able to house dozens of MGs instead of just ten-ish.
Why not the Magical Condenser? Because arming all our MGs is great in abstract, but in practice is a constant uphill climb even if we had more crafters. Selling items is nice but it doesn't help us be a better Home Base nearly as much as just making a better home base. Why not the Aura of Purification? Because it takes longer for less benefit; we'd still be stuck with only 1 floor effectively.
/ramble
[X] Build a Room
- [X] Magical Paternoster: Allows full utility for upper floors.
Also stops people from voting to kill themselves, and other objectively sub-optimal actions.
I think the problem is less that and more we are stumbling around trying to figure out what we need to do in the first place.... The core problem would not have been solved just by not crafting that one turn.....
Funerary rights might have been enough to cause it anyway, or we might just delay it to next turn. 🤷♂️
Edit: The big problem is we are trying to bootstrap a decent setup with very little knowledge, little support, and threats all around us.
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7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Yeah, that was a great quest.