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NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)

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[X] Plan: Ballance
-[X] (Poetry) Try to realize an Inspiration (The Draugr)
-[X] (Personal) Gabriel, he's always down for a spar.
--[X] Trll him about the hardships and weaknesses we discovered during the draugr fight and how we want to remedy them.
-[X] (Blackhand's Training) Try to develop old/train new hugareida tricks (Write in)
--[X] Train Halting-Vortex 6d6
--[X] Train Imaging Skill-Trick – 1 Reward Die courtesy of @jy3
--[X] Ask Hallr about how combining hugareida and muna works
---[X] See if he has any ideas on where you can take Ignition, and if he can help you train in its use. Now that you can do fire too, you want to do it well!
-[X] (Steinarr's Training) Ask Steinarr to teach you a trick/some tricks (Write in)
--[X] Train Leaping-Cleave Trick 1d6
--[X] Tell him about the Draugr fight and what we learned. Ask about what tricks he would recommend for: defense, dodging, movement (mention the after images we seen by both the slagson and the draugr), and throwing. Preferably cheap ones.
--[X] Ask both Steinarr and Hallr about how orthstirr transferring from the dying to their killer works, we've seen it a few times now and are curious how that functions
--[X] dodge trick without ignition 2d6 (cheap sidestep?)
--[X] movement/overland trick with ignition 2d6
-[X] (Training) Hamr (30 successes to rank up)
--[X] Train Bash - 1 Reward Die courtesy of @Alectai
--[X] Train Glima 1d6
--[X] Train Throw 2d6
-[X] (Training) Hugr (31 successes to rank up)
--[X] Train Composure 1d6
--[X] Train Housecraft 1d6
--[X] Train Scouting 1d6
--[X] Train Wordplay – 1 Reward Die courtesy of @Pempelune
-[X] (Orthstirr Usage)
--[X] 5 Hamr
--[X] 6 Hugr
--[X] 4 Fylgja
--[X] 3 Chop
--[X] 3 Defend
--[X] 3 Dodge
--[X] 2 Glima
--[X] 2 Composure
--[X] 1 Scouting
--[X] 3 Silver-Tongue
--[X] 3 Tactics
--[X] 2 Wildcraft
--[X] 3 Wordplay
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
It's a worst case scenario, but given that we're dealing with what's probably a necromancer summoning the undead to murder his enemy's children, I'm not sure that I buy 'that would be illogical' as a reason he wouldn't do something. I do suspect it wouldn't work on Steinarr...but that's why I suspect it will happen while he's away.
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And nothing bad with being prepared for worst cases.
But neither do we know who or what is sending the boss.
I'm not saying it's bad, and absolutely not saying it's irrational, so I would prefer you don't put those word in my mouth.
I simply doubt that would happen.
And worst case for worst case, here is mine: the boss isn't coming alone, and it's just a distraction, if an effective fighter in itself.
As for Steinar being away, yes, thats very likely, especially with twoshield coming to talk to him about something.
Could just as likely be an encounter when Halla is walking somewhere though... Or the raiding trial.
Fear mongering that we will need to protect our little sibling though is not welcome, as it was only a theory. One that was neither denied not confirmed by the QM.
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Right...and getting that on anything less than 8 dice is gonna be, like, a 1/3 chance at best. Probably less at 6 dice.
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We can also get zero successes on all 8 dice as well though, so that doesn't really help.
I do agree that hoping for double successes on 3 dice is stupid though.
6 still feels enough.
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Why is is better to do that this turn rather than next? I agree it'd be nice, but it doesn't need the redundant chances of success that I think Halting Vortex does as its increase in our combat prowess will likely be minimal (in the short term anyway).
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First, on why I want to get started on the trick:
The sooner we get it to rough, the sinner will it be usable.
We can already can use HV, even if it's pricey, but it's also fairly easy to get to refined. We will most likely succeed, wether with 6 or 8 dice is used.
But even if, by some whim of the dice, it isn't, we can still put more dice into it.
The excess successes though? Even if they progress towards mestery, it's just wasted dice in context of the boss.
As for how the new tricks can help? Options.
As much as I want to push for them, I understand that we would need luck to go from unknown to even vague, but either this or throw the dice into more skill training.
But at least, we would have progress in it already instead of starting from zero.
wrecksalot said:
How does that increase our combat effectiveness?
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As we would not be able to use it at vague? None what so ever. It's preparing for the next trn to already have something to work with and, hopefully, get it to rough.

I'm already at work, so, further replies will take more time to send, sorry about that in advance.

Edit:
[X] Plan: Basics are God
 
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TheCount said:
Fear mongering that we will need to protect our little sibling though is not welcome, as it was only a theory. One that was neither denied not confirmed by the QM.
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I'm not trying to fear monger? The very first post I made said 'if we happen to be right about this'. Like, it's not a sure thing by any means, but I'd rather be prepared for it and not need to be than not be prepared and need to be. It's a worst case scenario, but I'd rather be ready for those than not, y'know?

It's not the main reason I'm advocating a focus on Halting Vortex by any means, it was a random side note that in the very worst case scenario something we needed anyway was extra nice.

TheCount said:
We can also get zero successes on all 8 dice as well though, so that doesn't really help.
I do agree that hoping for double successes on 3 dice is stupid though.
6 still feels enough.
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Speaking mathematically, 8 dice have something over a 60% chance of getting us 5 successes (I'm not a good enough math guy to figure it out exactly, but it's solidly well above 50%)...6 dice have more like a 1/3 chance of getting 5+ successes. Not impossible but something like half the chance.

That's a huge difference.

TheCount said:
First, on why I want to get started on the trick:
The sooner we get it to rough, the sinner will it be usable.
We can already can use HV, even if it's pricey, but it's also fairly easy to get to refined. We will most likely succeed, wether with 6 or 8 dice is used.
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Actually no, as I go into above 8 dice have a good chance of succeeding. 6 dice absolutely do not. They can do so in theory, but the odds are pretty low.

TheCount said:
But even if, by some whim of the dice, it isn't, we can still put more dice into it.
The excess successes though? Even if they progress towards mestery, it's just wasted dice in context of the boss.
As for how the new tricks can help? Options.
As much as I want to push for them, I understand that we would need luck to go from unknown to even vague, but either this or throw the dice into more skill training.
But at least, we would have progress in it already instead of starting from zero.
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Right, but most of the time if we put 8 dice in Halting Vortex this turn, we can then put, like, 5-6 dice each into those two next turn and still have the same or better odds of completing them as doing 2 this turn and 3 next turn while also being much more likely to actually have Halting Vortex completed.

And sure those excess successes are 'wasted'...except they wouldn't have gone anywhere that is any better for us winning the potentially lethal fight anyway. Efficiency is good, but it has to take a back seat to ensuring we get things that are necessary for us to survive.

And dropping Halting Vortex from costing 8 to 4, at the amount of orthstirr we're playing with, is the difference between being able to use it on maybe 4-5 attacks (but probably less) to being able to use it on 8-10 attacks. That's an immense difference in survivability that's really hard to overstate
 
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We can't train Explosive Charm because it's gated behind Imaging.

But I see what you're getting at--that being said... We're not going to be fighting the boss this turn either. We're not in an urgent rush to level up Halting Vortex just yet, not at the expense of everything else.
 
Alectai said:
We can't train Explosive Charm because it's gated behind Imaging.
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It is? I thought that was just the actual meteor stuff. Ah, well, I'll put the die back in Armorcraft then.

Alectai said:
But I see what you're getting at--that being said... We're not going to be fighting the boss this turn either. We're not in an urgent rush to level up Halting Vortex just yet, not at the expense of everything else.
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If we front-load it this turn, we can probably get it even on a bad roll, because we can add more dice next turn. If we wait until next turn we're likely either spending more dice total or taking a huge gamble that the dice fall our way and it gets completed.

Like, with only three dice, if you get the average two successes, you either do 5 more dice next turn and take a pretty big chance it doesn't go your way, or are putting more dice total to ensure success.

8 dice is the necessary number of dice for success, on average, by doing them all this turn we lose nothing and gain a huge amount of redundancy in terms of making sure we actually complete Halting Vortex and the only 'cost' is that if we roll really well some of the successes are 'wasted' in the short term. That's a much better deal than trying to spread out the dice over two rounds.

It winds up slightly less efficient on a really good roll, but as I've said, no amount of efficiency is worth dying.
 
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That's not how probability works though! If the dice are bad, it's not going to suddenly be "But the dice would have been good if we rolled them before hand".

Ultimately, I don't feel like our focus needs to be getting Halting Vortex online just this second, and playing games with probability and going "But if we spend everything this turn it'll be cheaper." You don't try and predict the whims of the dice gods--we might get absolutely screwed again like we did with the Imaging Skill Trick.

But we just had it pointed out that it's important to have a strong base dice pool, because we might have taken a bunch of auto-hits if we didn't. I want to get our combat skills up to level 3 across the board in a reasonable time frame--and as you're noticing. I'm not ignoring Halting Vortex, I'm just not having that one Trick take up literally half of our training dice when it's better to just limit the need for it in the first place. Halting Vortex is our safety net, not our primary defensive strategy. And I don't want to treat it like our Primary Defensive Strategy until we can stand on our own without Tricks to cheat our way up.
 
Alectai said:
That's not how probability works though! If the dice are bad, it's not going to suddenly be "But the dice would have been good if we rolled them before hand".

Ultimately, I don't feel like our focus needs to be getting Halting Vortex online just this second, and playing games with probability and going "But if we spend everything this turn it'll be cheaper." You don't try and predict the whims of the dice gods--we might get absolutely screwed again like we did with the Imaging Skill Trick.
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Okay, let me try and explain this again because I'm clearly doing a bad job. My point is that, by spending 8 dice this turn we know whether we need to spend more to ensure success much more accurately.

Like, if we roll only one or two successes on those eight dice, we can spend another 8 next round and probably actually still succeed, but if we get the full five we don't need to spend any more. With three dice, unless we roll absurdly well, we either need to burn 6-8 next round or just gamble on getting it at all.

So, by going 8 dice this round, on a good roll, we don't need to spend more dice next round, and on a bad roll we can be more sure of succeeding. The only advantage of 3 dice is that it's not gonna overshoot, and that's an efficiency advantage not a 'how likely are we to succeed' advantage.

It's not that the probabilities change, it's that we know them better (because a greater subset have already occurred) and can thus make better choices in terms of training next turn in order to ensure the results we're looking for (ie: completing Halting Vortex).

Alectai said:
But we just had it pointed out that it's important to have a strong base dice pool, because we might have taken a bunch of auto-hits if we didn't. I want to get our combat skills up to level 3 across the board in a reasonable time frame--and as you're noticing. I'm not ignoring Halting Vortex, I'm just not having that one Trick take up literally half of our training dice when it's better to just limit the need for it in the first place. Halting Vortex is our safety net, not our primary defensive strategy. And I don't want to treat it like our Primary Defensive Strategy until we can stand on our own without Tricks to cheat our way up.
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This is not correct for several reasons. Or at least, not meaningfully so.

Firstly, Imperial Fister was talking about our tactics, not our capabilities when he said we needed more dice in basic defenses. We can already spend 20-25 dice on basic defenses if we want...we don't do that because it's almost never gonna be a good choice since they can only be spent in 1 die increments and only defend against basic attacks not tricks and we're not getting attacked 20-25 times. A few more dice in combat pool ups our offense, not our defense, and not in a particularly big way

Secondly, at 4 Orthstirr a pop, Halting Vortex can become our primary defense against tricks rather than a safety net. Our existing defenses against those are 3 Orthstirr and rolled (and thus far from infallible)...replacing them with a 4 Orthstirr auto-defend is actually great, well worth it, and may save our life. It's only at 8 Orthstirr a pop that we need to take risky actions (at 3 orthstirr a pop and likely some dice investment) to defend ourselves and then use it as a safety net.

Thirdly, as I went into, my plan actually gives us more dice in Combat Pool than yours does, on average.
 
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Not... really though? Throw doesn't apply to literally every combat roll we make, and I'm putting more into Glima anyway, those are the only things you're putting dice into that effect our combat pools. Yes, there's a chance--that my plan fails to raise every single thing that I put dice into, but there's a moderate chance that it raises every one of them, giving us +3 to our dice pool instead of 1 at the most (Because again, Throw doesn't apply to every single action we do, only the ones where we're using our Hugareida or a bomb--the latter of which we don't have yet)

I mean, I wouldn't throw a fit if your plan won, but I also don't feel an urgent need to raise Halting Vortex at the expense of everything else right this second, when chances are that we're not going to get in a fight this season. Are we going to level it up? Almost certainly not. But we'll be much closer and in a much better position to assess next turn--and if we get RNG screwed? We can actually do a big investment next turn, when there's a chance we might get in a fight while we're poking the orb.
 
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Alectai said:
Not... really though? Throw doesn't apply to literally every combat roll we make, and I'm putting more into Glima anyway.
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Yes it does because of how combat pool works. Everything that counts towards it adds dice every turn and Imperial Fister specifically said that Throw would add to combat pool (if you want the non-rules explanation, it's because they need to plan around Halla throwing things, like tricks, with her off hand). And getting the first level of something actually adds two dice to the pool. Again, we have an explicit statement from the QM that this is the case.

As for Glima, the probabilities of 2 dice mean that it increases something from 1 to 2 only 4/9 of the time, while one die still does the same 3/9, so the likelihood of a one die increase there is only slightly lower.

Which means, in total, my plan actually gets up to +4 dice in combat pool (if it gets Throw to 2 and Glima to 2...unlikely, but more likely than your plan getting +3), and very likely gets +2 to +3 (while your plan, on average, gets +0 to +1).

But, if it would get people to vote for the plan, I'd move a die to Glima (probably from Armorcraft).

Alectai said:
I mean, I wouldn't throw a fit if your plan won, but I also don't feel an urgent need to raise Halting Vortex at the expense of everything else right this second, when chances are that we're not going to get in a fight this season.
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We are explicitly getting into a boss fight (with something strong and venomous) where we may die as soon as we turn 16 by Word of QM. That's in two turns.
 
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DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Yes it does because of how combat pool works. Everything that counts towards it adds dice every turn and Imperial Fister specifically said that Throw would add to combat pool (if you want the non-rules explanation, it's because they need to plan around Halla throwing things, like tricks, with her off hand). And getting the first level of something actually adds two dice to the pool.

As for Glima, the probabilities of 2 dice mean that it increases something from 1 to 2 only 4/9 of the time, while one die still does it 3/9, so the likelihood of one die is only slightly.



We are explicitly getting into a boss fight (with something strong and venomous) where we may die as soon as we turn 16 by Word of QM. That's in two turns.
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That's... Odd, but I'll take your word for it then.

That being said, again, it's a low hanging fruit, not something that we have to grab this instant. That extra pile of dice isn't going anywhere, and it'll be an easy grab next turn.

I repeat, whether we win the fight or lose is probably not going to hinge on whether we got Halting Vortex to Refined a turn earlier or not. Because Halting-Vortex is not our main-line defense. It is our backup plan for if all else fails. Even then, we shouldn't have to invest 8 dice into it to have a reasonable chance of advancing it by next turn, when it'll be most needed. If we need to do a big press on it? Sure, we'll have the opportunity to do so next turn when it's crunch time--but I'm reluctant to blow 8 dice on what amounts to being our last line of defense when it'd be better to not need it in the first place, when we can get a better measure of how much we need by just giving it a solid--but not overwhelming--level of focus and see about fishing for gains in other fields too.

EDIT: At the end, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don't think victory or defeat is going to be decided entirely based on getting Halting Vortex to Refined one turn early in this fight, and that's the major thing that we're knife fighting over here.
 
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Alectai said:
That's... Odd, but I'll take your word for it then.

That being said, again, it's a low hanging fruit, not something that we have to grab this instant. That extra pile of dice isn't going anywhere, and it'll be an easy grab next turn.
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It's a much more certain grab if we at least try this turn. Even 2 or 3 dice spent on acquiring it have a chance of failure, after all.

Alectai said:
I repeat, whether we win the fight or lose is probably not going to hinge on whether we got Halting Vortex to Refined a turn earlier or not. Because Halting-Vortex is not our main-line defense. It is our backup plan for if all else fails.
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And I repeat: It's only a backup plan because it's so expensive. It becomes our main line defense against tricks, and an amazing one, as soon as we drop its cost to 4 Orthstirr.

Like, right now, to defend against tricks, we need to spend 3 Orthstirr and make a roll, either Hamr or with dice invested. We could instead spend 4 and no-sell the attack in question. Full stop. We can make it our main defense against tricks, use combat pool dice vs. normal attacks, and be extremely well protected for a reasonable price.

Alectai said:
Even then, we shouldn't have to invest 8 dice into it to have a reasonable chance of advancing it by next turn, when it'll be most needed. If we need to do a big press on it? Sure, we'll have the opportunity to do so next turn when it's crunch time--but I'm reluctant to blow 8 dice on what amounts to being our last line of defense when it'd be better to not need it in the first place, when we can get a better measure of how much we need by just giving it a solid--but not overwhelming--level of focus and see about fishing for gains in other fields too.
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8 dice is the average needed to get 5 successes. If we're getting it at all, it's probably by spending 8 dice or more, the only question is how many turns they are spread over. Why is spreading them over multiple turns better?
 
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Alectai said:
EDIT: At the end, I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. I don't think victory or defeat is going to be decided entirely based on getting Halting Vortex to Refined one turn early in this fight, and that's the major thing that we're knife fighting over here.
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Not entirely, but it's a much bigger combat advantage than +3 combat pool. Or even +5 combat pool. Not going for it as hard as we can is a mistake.

Oh, and right now your plan has no Orthstirr investments which mean we'll be rolling 1 die on everything outside combat encounters (like writing poetry and interacting with people). That's not illegal, but it's not a good idea either. You should add that in.
 
DeadmanwalkingXI said:
Not entirely, but it's a much bigger combat advantage than +3 combat pool. Or even +5 combat pool. Not going for it as hard as we can is a mistake.

Oh, and right now your plan has no Orthstirr investments which mean we'll be rolling 1 die on everything outside combat encounters. That's not illegal, but it's not a good idea either. You should add that in.
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I fixed it, thanks for bringing it to my attention though.
 
Alectai said:
Come on, don't go calling out specific people to change their votes, that's super rude.
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So, I feel like telling people the available plans have changed is somewhat different than calling out everyone? I was specifically restricting it to people who might have missed the changes rather than everyone. That was my intention anyway. Sorry if I'm violating an etiquette rule there. I can delete it if people are unhappy?

I'll just delete it, I'm having a stressful day here, sorry everyone.
 
Can I interest anyone in voting for Plan Halting Vortex? I'm willing to adjust some non-Halting Vortex dice if it'll get people on board (moving a die each from Scouting and Armorcraft is definitely viable).

@TheCount I could definitely move a couple of dice into the tricks you suggest, for example.
 
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