Uh, this also means that you need to make sure players already fully understand the context of the quest. You'd probably hinted at the context earlier. But, if you're going to hint at the context of the quest and have players figure it out themselves, you need a safety net, because otherwise the players won't last long enough to figure out how to play. Safety nets don't exist to make players not need to deal with the consequences of their actions, they exist to allow players to do so rather than auto-losing or ruining things forever.
No, there will be no safety net.
I believe the recent post mortems have made it clearer the assumptions this quest is operating under, and I believe I've been making good faith efforts to explain the thinking behind how I run this quest. It's why I did the post mortems, why I write the sidestories to expand the world, why I write the Informational posts, why I use explanation of choices as a mechanical abstraction of Yui's Politics SSR. There's only so much I can do, so much I can say, if people aren't reading what I've written, if they're clinging to their own preconceived notions of this quest. I've had questers refuse to understand why we were not supplanting the Imperial Chancellor and making votes based on monthly turns and reworking the tax code, even after I told them that is not what this quest is about, that this is a narrative-focused quest driven by
choices, not mechanics.
Take, for example, real life. In real life, when doing a suspended obstacle course, you don't wear a safety harness to prevent falling off and having to start over; you wear a safety harness so that, when you do fall, you don't get severely injured or killed.
The safety net doesn't need to take the form of abrogating the consequences of a choice; it can even be just allowing your players to start over or try again when they make a choice that has consequences they can't deal with. Note that "they can't deal with" here means "are literally unsolvable."
An obstacle course, on the other hand, is a highly specific, confined, repeatable activity.
Life is not that specific, confined, repeatable activity. Real life doesn't allow us to start over or try again. (God, how I wish I could have redone the laste fifteen years.) Once you make a bad impression on someone, you don't get a do over. When you make a bad judgement call at work, you have to reap wha you sow. What you
can do, if you get the opportunity, is to try and mend things, and mitigate the bad results.
I think that at times people are concerned about the wrong things in this quest. Do I want my readers to act more judiciously? Absolutely. But at the same time, it's not like you're going to autofail the quest from a single wrong move. Yui isn't ending up in Foxthot Gitmo anytime soon. Depending on the players' actions, we can either end up with Yui soft couping or hard couping Ahri, or staying by her side as trusted advisor as she rules... or the Empire fragments, and we preside over securing what territory we can and establishing a rump successor state. My philosophy with success and failure in this quest is that, just like in real life, it's not a binary condition but a scale, a sliding curve. The end result is the culmination of choices made along the way. If you make bad choices, you deal with the consequences of those choices and try to mitigate what you can. (I have made some pretty bad judgement calls, some poor decisions, and I fell so hard off the fast track that a decade later my career still has not fully recovered. I don't think it ever
will recover. The CEO is never going to consider me for another leadership position in the call center, which is galling because I wrote the call center's SOPs, I was the one who trained the mangers and staff... but on the other hand, I have this project now where I'm working for him. writing the process flows and SOPs for the Marketing department. Win some, lose some.)
That is what my life has been. Sure, fiction is an escape from reality. But it's not completely divorced from reality either. Ultimately, my experience of life has influenced and shaped how I run this quest.
I have an idea: When you make a vote, think "What decision would Yui make if this was a non-quest story and she was IC, and what knowledge would she use to make it?" Then, make sure all of that knowledge is clearly available to the player (rather than having to be teased out from between lines,) and, unless this is a vote where you want to make people come up with options themselves, also provide the option to make that decision.
Don't take the above as an attack on you; it isn't. Instead, those are suggestions for what to do in the future: Put in a safety net, so that players can't lose because they didn't already know and understand the context when starting to read and participate in the quest; make sure players have the information needed to decide to do what the PC would if there weren't players, and make sure that option is available.
Welcome to the balancing act I'm doing with every update, trying to balance player agency vs what would be in-character for Yui to do with all her knowledge, experience and biases. I feel it's a slippery slope from "only offer options that are IC for Yui" to railroading this quest, and I've never been very enamored of GMs railroading quests. If I was going to be railroading, then I've got no business writing a quest: I should be writing a story instead. It's the difference in player agency between something like XCOM or Mass Effect, and something like Black Powder Red Earth.
As for information being teased out between the lines... I mean, I went to school in a literal jungle, and despite the failings of the Malaysian education system I was still taught reading comprehension and how to see the explicit and implicit messages in a literary text. Interpreting implicit contractual terms is thing at A-levels (upper secondary education). This is a quest with political maneuvering amongst nobles who are not going to speak plainly, who have their own agendas. If you're referring to the conversation with Manandal, where all the write-ins missed the implicit question she was asking... I mean, that's why the default options were aimed at addressing her implicit question. Sure, we miss things in live conversations, but this is a quest, that's why there's a voting moratarium period, so that there's time to read and digest and consider.
It would be nice if Whiskey could perhaps have provided more indication as to how they run this quest. (Whiskey, if you're reading this, you have provided some, and other questers have filled in the rest. My few requests w.r.t this are in my previous post. I'm not attacking you.) This quest basically assumed that everyone already understands its context, and hey, maybe you did. But it's not cool to look down on the rest of us for not already having understood the context of the quest going in.
Like I've said before, I wonder at times whether the problem is I'm too subtle with my writing, or whether there's a cultural gap that's too large to get past. By and by, I've noticed that my Southeast Asian readers get the quest and what I'm trying to convey more than my Western readers. (Amusingly, where other readers have talked about how politics this is,
@Slayers148 has asked me, "Whiskey, the slice of life is fine, but when are we getting to the
real politics?" Then again, he's from Thailand.)
