MagiQuest (Failed)

[Wolfy]

Problem is lack of clear goal. That is why we went in rather general direction with EXP boosters and DoM.

We also didn't know limits. We had to run everything by you, and because of that we couldn't push ourselves to limit.

Why is DoM even an issue? We spent most of our time on exp and exp boosters precisely since we had no idea what to expect. Idea was that we could rapidly make new stuff to suit the unknown goal.

Not to mention that we were pretty much forced to stack boosters since we would never accomplish anything without them. Or at least that's how it looked.

Basically, I don't understand what you have excepted to happen. We didn't know what we could do, we didn't know what we needed to do. There wasn't enough info to do anything but stumble around.

Mind you, I am not blaming you. I really want to know how you saw this quest playing out?

 

[Gear]

I think you're overestimating both the efficiency the average person would use magic to level up without a clear outside motivator, and how opaque your magic system is. I followed this quest from the beginning, and I didn't do much more than occasionally chime in with a concern or two because your magic mechanics are not intuitive at all. From reading other people's posts, I know I'm not the only person who struggled with it, but it appears all the NPCs, since they're written by you, have a grasp of how it's supposed to work and most importantly, the scale. So they start rapidly gearing up to reach what you imagine your magic system will be capable of, making few mistakes, but that's not how a person who suddenly discovered it would actually react. They would act like how I suspect we played Daryl as, trying to use magic to solve their immediate life problems, and only vaguely looking beyond that, as wasting a lot of magic and time on relative dead-end spells.

That's just how I see things, feel free to disagree of course. *shrug*

Click to shrink...

Actually, NPC's had a different system, and at the beginning, they scaled up a lot slower than Daryl did.

And as for intuitive design, after a few examples, people didn't seem to have that much trouble with it. Which is a massive leap forward from some of my previous attempts at a RPG system.

In quests, SV is often like an eldritch entity. Even unconsciously we manage to thwart prediction. You expected us to act competently? We'll fail so spectacularly that the enemy will die of laughter. Expect us to fail? Through blind luck, we shall forge an empire.

Click to shrink...

Sadly true, I expected greed and a desire for power, or a desire to focus on the characters, but things just sort of went in the wrong direction.

Problem is lack of clear goal. That is why we went in rather general direction with EXP boosters and DoM.

We also didn't know limits. We had to run everything by you, and because of that we couldn't push ourselves to limit.

Why is DoM even an issue? We spent most of our time on exp and exp boosters precisely since we had no idea what to expect. Idea was that we could rapidly make new stuff to suit the unknown goal.

Not to mention that we were pretty much forced to stack boosters since we would never accomplish anything without them. Or at least that's how it looked.

Basically, I don't understand what you have excepted to happen. We didn't know what we could do, we didn't know what we needed to do. There wasn't enough info to do anything but stumble around.

Mind you, I am not blaming you. I really want to know how you saw this quest playing out?

Click to shrink...

You guys had a goal, the car. When you took it, I fully expected you to work toward getting it done as quickly as possible, before moving on to other magic. As you focused a lot on social, I was more convinced that this is what you guys were working toward. But then partway through, we just sort of wandered off and I don't really know what anyone was working toward anymore.

And the issue with DoM and all the addons was that it was quickly becoming too clunky with special circumstances, needing references to stats, knowledge, needing multiple spells to work, needing lists of scans and blueprints. It was becoming a game within itself with it's own independent mechanics just to use it.

Regardless, I have learned much here, which was the quest's primary purpose, and my next quest shall be all the better for it.

 

[Skewfiend]

I cannot help but feel largely responsible for this happening. Sure I wasn't the one to invent dominance, but I did a lot of planning work on our mausoleum, so to speak.

I think a lot of the reason for why things went the way they did was the specificity of level 3 spells. It felt like a waste to devote so many resources to making a spell that we could only use occasionally in very specific circumstances. I don't know what to say on that.

Trying to balance social activities with magic progression was a problem, and to have enough xp to develop magically, we needed to make social sacrifices.

I think the thing that derailed the car project most of all was that we realised partway through that it would be obvious to our mechanic friends if we repaired it with magic.

I think a lot of the problems that led to your loss of interest in the quest stem from the age-old problem at the heart of character quests involving large amounts of research to develop the character's abilities: The most efficient way to progress in power, and the thing that seems most sensible in-character is to sit in your place of safety and just research until you are powerful enough to hold your own. But doing so is boring, which leads to short, uninspired updates, little narrative progression, and declining interest unless the QM tries to shoehorn in random encounters or rails in a bid to make something actually happen. I have seen quests suffer from that before, but I don't really have any good answers on how to resolve it.

With regards to XP gain, I gather you consider IEU to have been a clusterfuffle. Why was that? Were there some means of increasing our XP output that we were missing, or was it just too clunky a system?

@Gear, thank you for the quest. I enjoyed it, and will look forward to any future quests of yours.

 

[Gear]

With regards to XP gain, I gather you consider IEU to have been a clusterfuffle. Why was that? Were there some means of increasing our XP output that we were missing, or was it just too clunky a system?

@Gear, thank you for the quest. I enjoyed it, and will look forward to any future quests of yours.

Click to shrink...

What? No, no, IEU was working as intended, I just didn't condense the actions enough. I should have handwaved a lot of it away by boosting regular magic research actions and either expanded Daryl's social networking trait or given you guys another one.

The main problem was that the tools that I used to try and get you guys to back off the DoM were far too weak, such as it's large cost, need of secondary spells, and so on, and they were, long term, toxic to running the game because I had made it so finicky as to DoM essentially was collecting it's own set of mechanics and rules. If it had gone on much longer, I'm afraid that spell would have had it's own character sheet.

And then, having allowed one spell of such magnitude, I would have to allow others. Which was unworkable.