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Problem Child (Deviant: the Renegades Quest)

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[X][Clade] Your body (metal)
[X][Clade] Your soul
[X][Clade] Your body (flesh)

[X][Focus] Intelligence
[X][Focus] Infiltration
[X][Focus] Combat
 
I'm going to close the vote in a few hours, so if you haven't voted yet now is the time. Currently, infiltration is winning the focus vote pretty handily, but the Clade vote is literally as close as it can possibly be without being tied. Soul is winning, but BARELY.

I'm fighting with the voting software right now (apparently task vote and instant runoff voting are mutually exclusive for some reason?) and am having to tally things manually, so here's the current count:
Using instant runoff voting.

Round 1
Counting only the first choice for each category

Metal - 6
Flesh - 5
Soul - 6

Infiltration - 9
Combat - 3
Intel - 5

Flesh has the lowest number of first choice votes, so it's dropped from the running. The second choice for Clade on those ballots will be distributed in round 2. Infiltration achieves a simple majority in the first round, so the focus vote is already concluded.

Round 2
Adding the second choice from ballots with flesh as the first choice to the round 1 totals.

Metal - 6 + 2
Soul 6 + 3

Soul wins by a single vote in the second round after being tied in the first round (which flesh lost by a single vote). Literally this could not be a closer victory.
I swear if this ends up being a tie when I close the vote, I'm just going to flip a coin and move on.
 
[X][Clade] Your body (flesh)
[X][Clade] Your body (metal)
[X][Clade] Your soul

[X][Focus] Infiltration
[X][Focus] Combat
[X][Focus] Intelligence

Changing it up maybe?
 
[X][Clade] Your body (flesh)
[X][Clade] Your body (metal)
[X][Clade] Your soul

[X][Focus] Infiltration
[X][Focus] Combat
[X][Focus] Intelligence
 
Alright, I'm closing the vote and calling things here. Ignore the tally SV puts up. Like I said, I fought with the voting software and ended up counting things manually.

This was a super close vote, to the point where the outcome was reliant on me adjudicating a weird edge case as best as I could, but the winning options are...

[x]Your body (flesh)
[x]Infiltration

So subject 37 will officially be a Chimeric Deviant with a focus on stealth! Now I can give her stats and write the next chapter, which I'll get started on right away. I'm hoping to get the chapter out sometime this week, assuming real life doesn't interfere.

For the full tally (and to see just how ridiculously close things were) you can click this spoiler box.
Round 1
Counting only the first choice in each category.

Metal - 6
Flesh - 6
Soul - 6

Infiltration - 10
Combat - 3
Intelligence - 5

For the focus vote, Infiltration has a clear majority and wins without the need for further rounds. The Clade vote... has a three way tie. We'll tally the second choice votes to serve as the tie-breaker so we can find out which Clade options advance to round 2.

Round 1 Tie-breaker
Counting only the second choice in the Clade category.

Metal - 5
Flesh - 7
Soul - 5

...fuck. The way this is supposed to work is that the option with the lowest votes gets eliminated. A tie for last place obviously complicates things. In the interests of just moving on with the quest, I've decided to eliminate both the options tied for last place, making Flesh the winning vote overall.
Scheduled vote count started by Don Alverzo on May 29, 2022 at 1:31 PM, finished with 20 posts and 18 votes.
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Not exactly my favorite, but all of these combinations seemed interesting. I'm looking forward to the update.
 
Hey wait @Don Alverzo why didn't we get the option to be a mutant in the clade vote?

Edit: the answer was literally on the next page.
 
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Hey @Don Alverzo do we get to choose what sort of tissue we got implanted with next vote?
 
Dmol8 said:
Hey wait @Don Alverzo why didn't we get the option to be a mutant in the clade vote?

Edit: the answer was literally on the next page.
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It's a combination of a number of things, but the mechanically weirdness I explained earlier is the biggest factor. For those who aren't aware, the Mutant Clade's special thing is that they can swap out one of their Variations (aka their powers) for any Variation with half that dot rating or less. While they're restricted to the list of Universal Variations for the replacement power, this still gives them over 25 different powers they can give themselves at any given time (which gets more absurd when you realize that some Variations actually represent a wide number of different powers all squished together, such as Enhanced Attribute). This is just too flexible and fiddly to work in the quest format.

On top of that, I don't think Mutant has nearly as distinct an aesthetic as the other Clades, so you don't really lose much from me not offering that option. So there's a big, glaring reason for Mutant to not be an option, and no real compelling counterargument.
Dmol8 said:
Hey @Don Alverzo do we get to choose what sort of tissue we got implanted with next vote?
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No, we're moving out of the character creation phase at this point and entering the meat of the quest. The next vote is going to be an actual choice you're making as Subject 37 rather than further defining who she is.

Speaking of the next chapter, it's taking me a bit longer than I'd anticipated. I'm still going to try to get it out this week, but don't be surprised if that doesn't happen. The good news is that this is because it's actually an eventful chapter in which things are happening rather than the fluffed up character creation of the past two chapters. Now that I have a main character rather than an undefined blob, I can actually have a plot!
 
Don Alverzo said:
It's a combination of a number of things, but the mechanically weirdness I explained earlier is the biggest factor. For those who aren't aware, the Mutant Clade's special thing is that they can swap out one of their Variations (aka their powers) for any Variation with half that dot rating or less. While they're restricted to the list of Universal Variations for the replacement power, this still gives them over 25 different powers they can give themselves at any given time (which gets more absurd when you realize that some Variations actually represent a wide number of different powers all squished together, such as Enhanced Attribute). This is just too flexible and fiddly to work in the quest format.

On top of that, I don't think Mutant has nearly as distinct an aesthetic as the other Clades, so you don't really lose much from me not offering that option. So there's a big, glaring reason for Mutant to not be an option, and no real compelling counterargument.

No, we're moving out of the character creation phase at this point and entering the meat of the quest. The next vote is going to be an actual choice you're making as Subject 37 rather than further defining who she is.

Speaking of the next chapter, it's taking me a bit longer than I'd anticipated. I'm still going to try to get it out this week, but don't be surprised if that doesn't happen. The good news is that this is because it's actually an eventful chapter in which things are happening rather than the fluffed up character creation of the past two chapters. Now that I have a main character rather than an undefined blob, I can actually have a plot!
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Click to shrink...

How does Mutant actually balance mechanically, btw?
 
The Laurent said:
How does Mutant actually balance mechanically, btw?
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Mechanically, the balance comes from two factors:

1) The ability to swap things out is limited to once per session ("chapter" in nWoD terms) and the swap reverts at the end of the scene. So it's not spammable, you have to consider whether a situation warrants using up a limited resource.

2) You are literally swapping out powers, and it's always a downgrade. The new power has a dot rating less than or equal to half that of the old power (rounded up), and you lose access to the old power while you have the new power. This means that unless you want a dinky little one dot power, you need to give up a substantial power. The swap can't be terminated early either, so you've totally lost access to whatever power you swapped out for the rest of the scene.

Now, I haven't actually run a Deviant campaign, so things might turn out differently in play, but on the face of it I really don't think this is unbalanced. It makes you fairly flexible, but you have to sacrifice some power for that flexibility. I don't think it's any more busted, than, say, the Cephalist's or Coactive's ability to temporarily raise the dot rating of a power. It's just uniquely unsuited to quests, and I don't think the headache is worth it.
 
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Cancellation
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    • So I've never written a quest before, and I started this thing mostly on a whim. I honestly have very little experience with writing for a public audience. Most of my writing has never seen the light of day, and I tend to get planning paralysis that keeps me from getting more than a couple chapters deep into any one project. My hope, when starting this quest, was that the audience participation and implied time pressure of a quest would motivate me to write more instead of getting caught up in all the little details.

    Instead, it's basically had the opposite effect. Not being able to plan ahead too far has made the writing a lot more stressful for me, and the longer it took me to get this chapter out the more pressure I felt to get things right. The past few days, I've just been dreading working on this quest while feeling guilty for not giving it more of my time. When the thought of just canceling it occurred to me, I felt such relief that it was immediately clear to me I should. After all, this is supposed to be something I'm doing for fun. If all it's doing is stressing me out, then what exactly is the point?

    So I'm killing the quest. I'm really sorry to everyone who was excited for this, I didn't mean to get anybody's hopes up or lead anyone on. I really did start this with the best of intentions, but once I actually got into things it became clear that this just isn't something I can do right now. I might revisit this idea some other time, but if that happens it'll be when I'm a lot more confident in my writing.

    TLDR: I'm cancelling the quest, sorry for getting everybody's hopes up.
     
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    • It's OK. Happens. You do you and work on what you can work on.
     
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