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RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR (Warhammer Fantasy Golden Age Dwarf Runelord Quest)

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I'm not going to weigh in on the logic of either side's arguments, but I will ask that everyone read over what they write and really consider if the words they used are polite and won't be inflammatory intentionally or not. You cant account for people's tolerances perfectly but at least try to say your piece without saying things that can be easily construed as overly dismissive of the other side of the argument, thank you.

Please endeavour to be cordial. :^)
 
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Void Stalker said:
The difference though is by splitting it over turn 13 and 14 we can also get the banner up and running to improve the throngs capability.
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The Throng doesn't seem to be having any problems killing its enemies from what we've seen. It's only problem is that it can only be in one place at a time. We don't know the Master Rune of Passage, and I'm not sure Strollaz's Rune has been invented yet. I'm also not seeing any proposals to make a Banner that actually helps with strategic movement.

Abhishek M said:
Nah, the plan is to go all in for two turns. To finish and overflow the thing. Hopefully taking care of defenses as an automatic action. Like if we are building it anyway build it in Depth without having to add it later.
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That would be interesting to see. I wonder what else we might get. Golem porters?
 
BungieONI said:
Personally I don't find five actions all that likely to actually evolve into two actions on requests and three on research. From my experience in questing it would just be the same dynamic we have right now of flopping between the two and thus still painful. At best it might be intermittent, but I don't believe you can get more than a 100 people to act consistently in a quest thread.

This also relates to my conclusions about getting more AP in an attempt to fix our action crunch woes.
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We probably would have turns of still putting 4 into a request and using the odd action on something else (like journal followups, or using it to move research/requests into the multiples of 4 or 3 to best work with traits) but it would be nice to have the option. For projects like the troll heart, we could finish that in one turn and still generally do one request as well.

BungieONI said:
I think waiting on the Silver Wutroth research tree is also a good idea, because while the gromril might not go into the Banner unless we specify designs with hanging Gromril plates the Wutroth will be used as a banner pole.
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Fair enough, if there are pieces we still want for the banner than that is off the table and unless we have something else to do with two actions might as well pour them into underway

Also the rune post was edited recently as well, but I cant tell if anything changed
 
BungieONI said:
I'm not sure. Rune Metal part 4 might be figuring out how to put runes on it.
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Even without enchantments being able to produce Adamant is a game changer.
Adamant is created using a refining technique which involves smelting and various other secret methods of purification. Adamant is normally magic-inert so therefore any person wielding an adamant weapon, adamant shield, or wearing adamant armor is immune to magic. There is a way to enchant adamant items so that their enchantments can be used like any other enchantments on weapons or armor made of other metals. These enchantments have historically been only of the kind that Dwarf Runesmiths make and must be placed on the item during the forging process. After the item is finished, its runic properties are "set" and can never be changed or added on to in any way. Whether these items would take enchantments from human wizards during the time of refining is not known and any suggestions that they would is pure speculation. Adamant weapons, armor, and shields are as durable and weigh as little as Mithril ones, with the added benefit of being immune from magical attacks.
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The stuff makes you magic-immune meaning that any daemons are going to have a hard time damaging it since technically everything they do is via magic.
veekie said:
Should fill in the apprentices soon enough. Can't abide an empty nest.
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We probably won't be able to immediately grab more minions the moment the first set leave.
 
Void Stalker said:
I think there is a certain level of quality we want for our apprentices, there are a lot of other rune masters in the north but I think only one other rune lord. Those with lesser talents can be educated by rune masters while we work with the very best.
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There are other runelords around Norsca, just not in our hold.
 
Void Stalker said:
We probably would have turns of still putting 4 into a request and using the odd action on something else (like journal followups, or using it to move research/requests into the multiples of 4 or 3 to best work with traits) but it would be nice to have the option.
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That's basically the dynamic we have now, of 3 (taking the place of 4) and 1 getting proposed a lot. Which is kinda part of my point.

Getting more actions doesn't change the effective dynamic because some folks are going to want lots of research on a turn, or lots of requests and who wants what will change as situation changes. Effectively, since people want to use every AP for what they want in the moment (which is just a natural consequence of the game type) then if it is unlikely to change we need to modify the other side of this issue which is how much stuff we actually have to do. That's why I want to keep the requests pool small for a while, so that research is mostly all there is to do.

It might also encourage Write Ins, but that will take a while and as those build up it will be a way to slowly increase the size of the Request category.

Void Stalker said:
Also the rune post was edited recently as well, but I cant tell if anything changed
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I'm not sure either
 
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Void Stalker said:
I think there is a certain level of quality we want for our apprentices, there are a lot of other rune masters in the north but I think only one other rune lord. Those with lesser talents can be educated by rune masters while we work with the very best.
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Thats why we should start looking the moment some space opens up, no?
Only a relative would be brought to us directly, the rest need to be interviewed.
 
BungieONI said:
Personally I don't find five actions all that likely to actually evolve into two actions on requests and three on research. From my experience in questing it would just be the same dynamic we have right now of flopping between the two and thus still painful. At best it might be intermittent, but I don't believe you can get more than a 100 people to act consistently in a quest thread.

This also relates to my conclusions about getting more AP in an attempt to fix our action crunch woes.
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I don't quite agree. Or rather, I think that there would be some flopping about -- but it wouldn't be flopping about, and more like... flexibility.

There'd be more of "spend 3 actions researching, and 2 on New Stuff(TM)" or "2 on Requests, and 3 on one or two odd things." It would allow us to feel more comfortable making a dip and trying out some of our backlog or discoveries. In other words, I think there would be some of what you call flopping or intermittent stuff... but it would no longer be painful. It would no longer feel like a horrible pressure and fight.

Also, just -- the action-trait mechanics. I... hrm. How to put this? They're game mechanics or tools; they're things that are part of the game, in the game, and help drive them game. And so therefore, seeing them used is always neat! Players are participating in the mechanic system; the tools are getting used. The tools of the game system are getting used. But with only 4 free action, it... feels a bit more limited. It feels like you can't engage with the system in full, you know what I mean? Like you're a bit short. And that's just on the game design front. Whereas with 5, you'd be able to make use of both the trait-types (Research and Orders) for if you want great efficiency; or if you value spreading out more, you can do it otherwise. You could be met with a choice of whether you wanted to grab a 3-AP or 2-AP action, or whether you were willing to sacrifice efficiency for other things. There's engagement and tradeoffs and planning! There's more stuff to do, because you can use all the game mechanics tools available to you.


And the AP thing and crunch woes -- that frankly just depends. On whether the GM hit the sweet spot in terms of actions. In other words, you can have both too much AP and too little.

This sort of thing is most clearly felt and seen in those CK2-esque quests that use the "have 6 categories of actions" setup. Where, because all the actions are concentrated in categories, increases in actions-per-turn could lead to situations where you're picking all the actions in one category and thus there isn't much choosing going in; it starts feeling more like playing a visual novel. You're not planning things out as much. There's not as much engagement.

There you can see a huge impact from too much AP.

In a more open-ended setup, like with Rhunrikki or Divided Loyalties or Ulthuan Quest? You can have a lot of choice and freeform. (Ulthuan Quest possibly having too many options.)
 
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BungieONI said:
If we go all in and the defense project isn't autocompleted, which seems likely since the Underway proper wouldn't be finished until turn 14, then we would have to go basically all in again on turn 14 to not see the defense project and save project space. Which will be important for actually getting Research done, because the less Requests fighting with Research projects the more Research is likely to win by sheer dint of having nothing else to do.
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I'm willing to take that risk, because there is a chance thhat one turn of going all in will autocomplete defenses, and if it doesn't, we are only out 2 turns of all in either way, and in that case, wo would probably overflow the defenses.
 
If we do go for two turns of full commitment, whatever Snorri comes up with would presumably be pretty impressive, and would probably also maximise the bonuses we get to the background roles for future tunnelling work , such as linking up with the other Norscan holds.

As I mentioned above, I'm vaguely hopful for power tools made from a combination of something like impact, cleaving, and animation. The Rune of Impact was apparently originally designed for drilling rigs, so we can be confident they exist, and animated ones that didn't have to be turned by hand would make a big difference.
 
Im fine with going all in on the Underway.

If it lets us upgrade the Maze of Kraka Drakk from a T2 to a T3 work thats more than worth the investment, I think.
 
Garlak said:
I don't quite agree. Or rather, I think that there would be some flopping about -- but it wouldn't be flopping about, and more like... flexibility.

There'd be more of "spend 3 actions researching, and 2 on New Stuff(TM)" or "2 on Requests, and 3 on one or two odd things." It would allow us to feel more comfortable making a dip and trying out some of our backlog or discoveries. In other words, I think there would be some of what you call flopping or intermittent stuff... but it would no longer be painful. It would no longer feel like a horrible pressure and fight.

Also, just -- the action-trait mechanics. I... hrm. How to put this? They're game mechanics or tools; they're things that are part of the game, in the game, and help drive them game. And so therefore, seeing them used is always neat! Players are participating in the mechanic system; the tools are getting used. The tools of the game system are getting used. But with only 4 free action, it... feels a bit more limited. It feels like you can't engage with the system in full, you know what I mean? Like you're a bit short. And that's just on the game design front. Whereas with 5, you'd be able to make use of both the trait-types (Research and Orders) for if you want great efficiency; or if you value spreading out more, you can do it otherwise. You could be met with a choice of whether you wanted to grab a 3-AP or 2-AP action, or whether you were willing to sacrifice efficiency for other things. There's engagement and tradeoffs and planning! There's more stuff to do, because you can use all the game mechanics tools available to you.


And the AP thing and crunch woes -- that frankly just depends. On whether the GM hit the sweet spot in terms of actions. In other words, you can have both too much AP and too little.

This sort of thing is most clearly felt and seen in those CK2-esque quests that use the "have 6 categories of actions" setup. Where, because all the actions are concentrated in categories, increases in actions-per-turn could lead to situations where you're picking all the actions in one category and thus there isn't much choosing going in; it starts feeling more like playing a visual novel. You're not planning things out as much. There's not as much engagement.

There you can see a huge impact from too much AP.

In a more open-ended setup, like with Rhunrikki or Divided Loyalties or Ulthuan Quest? You can have a lot of choice and freeform. (Ulthuan Quest possibly having too many options.)
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So, where I'm speaking from is personal experience from stuff like Paths of Civilization, Divided Loyalties(which has the problem I'm talking about, and way too much Shit To Do) and other quests which use the idea of action categories for turn planning.

In them, people are selfish. I don't mean that as a deprecation or blandishment of people in general, but as a term from game theory. People want to put the most effort they can get away with into the actions they want to see and play and do in a game like this, due to the structure set up by QMs. This isn't a problem, but it does interact with getting more AP in specific ways from my experience.

First, people assume there will always be more of Thing to do. Things will always be on fire and that jazz. Again, an observation of how QMs set up things. This is not how it is here, going by observation. We've effectively run out the Requests category, if we weren't frequently suggesting things. This is probably going to change once Repair work comes in, but that's in many ways even more reason to make Requests small as a category like we have already.

Because there will always be more of Thing to do, reducing the size of the category, the amount of stuff we actually have to do seems futile. So they leap for every chance to get more AP they can so they can act on more stuff. And then they default to selfish planning behavior. Case in point Divided Loyalties. Getting more actions didn't change anything over the course of the quest.

Second, this selfishness is made more apparent the larger a quest is. Once you get very large like this quest, it becomes hard to direct consistent action. This results in the whim of the moment winning more often than not, those things and ideas which reach the majority, instead of the minority of most active posters who might have differing opinions. If you give people more AP in this paradigm, its just swallowed by the whim of the moment.

Third, as you point out how the QM structures things is very important. As I laid out in my first point, the larger the ratio between Stuff to Do and Actions to Do it With is in favor of Stuff To Do the harder action crunch feels. Having lots of categories of actions, and each of those categories not really decreasing in size, means that the only recourse in acting freedom and accomplishment comes from seeking more AP.

In my opinion the way to prevent and resolve such states in this quest if we want to, they're useful for some endeavors mind like the Underway and just in general focusing on some singular project like Trollslayer, we have to take advantage of being able to knock categories down to really small sizes. Once we've knocked it down, we can focus on other stuff, like traveling or research etc and whittle away at those. Our ability to actually make a meaningful dent into our action categories, unlike many other quests, is extremely powerful and should be considered often.

In this context I thus find more actions, not really that helpful. Because of flopping, we'll just knock out stuff in certain categories and then be left in situations like right now. If we find means to reduce the effective time it takes to complete an action in a category, like Productivity Like No Other, Student of The Odd and Mind of Metal or finding a means to outright cut action time from a category of actions kind of like what Grudges do then it becomes much easier to take advantage of the fact that we can reduce the size of categories.

And thus focus better, because if we only have a small set of stuff to actually do, the space in which we can flop around is necessarily smaller.

That's all of my thoughts in regards to what you talked about with actions and such.


In regards to the game mechanics point, you have a decent point. As it stands interacting with both of them at the same time is difficult or outright impossible to manage depending on context. Personally I don't consider it a problem because we can reduce the size of categories and have that actually matter, so if we focus on one category for enough time eventually we'll run out of that category to do, at least in theory and so we'll interact with all of the mechanics in sequence instead of in parallel. Research might be harder to run out than Requests, we don't know yet.

But I kinda understand where you're coming from in this regard, even if personally I don't feel the same.
 
BungieONI said:
So, where I'm speaking from is personal experience from stuff like Paths of Civilization, Divided Loyalties(which has the problem I'm talking about, and way too much Shit To Do) and other quests which use the idea of action categories for turn planning.
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To clarify a bit, when I said "action categories" I meant "Diplomacy/Martial/Stewardship/Personal/etcetcetc" + "You get 1-2 Diplo actions, 1-2 Martial actions, etc, and you can't use them in any other category" like in the original CK2-esque-sorta systems. There things can get unbalanced and feel empty or pointless; because the GM has to hustle to come up with ideas for all categories turn after turn, or else the AP overtakes or equals the option-count. And even if you have 4 actions to choose from and can pick 3, that's still... you basically can do everything.

And that'll happen to some categories. Things'll just dry up that way.

Whereas with Divided Loyalties or Rhunrikki, you don't have those exact kinds of categorical divisions. Sure, the categories exist to tell you what stats will apply where and to describe what kind of action type it is... but you're not utterly locked in with the actions you have.

This has actually led to a much more fun and engaging experience; things are actually lively! It's... it's unbelievably different, and in a good way, compared to most things.

You think Divided Loyalties has some problems? At least those problems are on the voter side of things. At least that's just disorganization. It'll take "selfish" voting over "hit the 'Next' button to progress the game to the next scene" voting any day of the week. (Votes then become about "interesting" or "event" votes; those are the ones wherein you exercise choice. But meanwhile, the whole set of voting you're doing, is going more or less on automatic. While still giving off a feeling of "These are the choices you made! This is the character you made." so if you do poorly in an event, mini-turn, or campaign, the specter of "Well you should have done something differently/prepared better" comes up except... Except there wasn't much choice involved in there, was there. You're just sort of along for the ride. You can make small, or very large, adjustments but that's it, no real in-between. Customization is sort of out the window.)

Note also that, actually, getting too many AP is far more problematic in the setup I described.

A DL, Ulthuan, or Rhunrikki setup can weather the increase or decrease of AP or options much better; hell, tweaking is even possible to begin with. It just can lead to undesireable voting patterns... but that in itself is a sign of greater fortitude. Give more options or take away, or give, more AP. Hell, you even can notice the problem in the first place! (In the other system... it'd be harder to figure out what category you should strip AP from. Hell, it can be hard to tell what's responsible for the change in feel for some people. And even if you do figure it out... you'd have to overhaul your system. A system which you may have been using for literal years. And across multiple quests. :S And even if you did lower AP, you still have to work to come up with stuff for all 7 categories turn after turn; in a UQ or DL system, you can just add to other categories instead, if you're feeling unsure of what to add to a given category.)


Anyway. To bring things back to Rhunrikki directly...

Let's also keep in mind something very basic and which we have been taking for granter; Snorri didn't necessarily have to end up with productivity/efficiency-boosting traits in the first place!

We don't actually know if we would have seen Productivity Like No Other/Student Of The Odd-esque actions in other character creation sets! And yet, it is these traits (combined with not having tons of AP) that have made things fun and interesting and... game-play-able; the state of having game mechanics and tools to engage with and interact in a game with. (Also, Apprentice Actions when they showed up, and with them having limitations, also kept things interesting!)

And as a second thing... Snorri didn't necessarily have to start with apprentices. So he could have had the full 5 free actions to work with all along.

So 5 AP probably doesn't break things. And if it does? We could tweak it again. Hell, we could tweak it in-universe even due to apprentices, heh. ... ... Although... Actually, I don't think I want to have to choose between "more actions" and "having characters directly in Snorri's day-to-day life to play off of and interact with." I don't want to have to choose between "interesting game and more people to play off of" and "feeling less horrible action-crunch."

Hm. How to solve...

Like... Hm. Hey, what if we got a '1 free per turn' in a category action? Like "pick 1 free action from the 'Requests' category" or "pick 1 free research actions." (... That's, in fact, sort of what Apprentice Actions already are. Which's'neat. Only this time, it would be a Snorri action.) (So we'd have, what... 1 Apprentice Action, 4 Snorri actions and either 1 Free Request or 1 Free Research? Hm, that might be neat. It's even not too different from having multiple Apprentice Actions. Just, these ones would be able to proc the Snorri traits.)
 
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There's another aspect here where concentrating on something develops the character both narratively and potentially mechanically. For example, if Snorri devoted all his and his apprentice's efforts for the next two turns after this on the Underway, completing it in a third of the expected time, I'd hope that was an Epic or Legendary deed. The Underway isn't something local, it's a key piece of infrastructure of the entire Karaz Ankor.

This comes down to the question of what defines Snorri. When his king calls and asks for all dwarves to aid in a project in any way they can, does he listen and help, or does he decide that his own interests are much more important, because he knows better.
 
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Alratan said:
There's another aspect here where concentrating on something develops the character both narratively and potentially mechanically. For example, if Snorri devoted all his and his apprentice's efforts for the next two turns after this on the Underway, completing it in a third of the expected time, I'd hope that was an Epic or Legendary deed. The Underway isn't something local, it's a key piece of infrastructure of the entire Karaz Ankor.

This comes down to the question of what defines Snorri. When his king calls and asks for all dwarves to aid in a project in any way they can, does he listen and help, or does he decide that his own interests are much more important, because he knows better.
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I dislike the guilt attempts in this. We've already helped indirectly by dint of providing the defenses and the equipped throng to allow for construction to proceed, in addition to sending our Apprentices to help. This is as much for entertainment as it is for making a story. If all we do is what we should rather than what is fun, then it's not a game, it's work.
 
Garlak said:
Hm. How to solve...

Like... Hm. Hey, what if we got a '1 free per turn' in a category action? Like "pick 1 free action from the 'Requests' category" or "pick 1 free research actions." (... That's, in fact, sort of what Apprentice Actions already are. Which's'neat. Only this time, it would be a Snorri action.) (So we'd have, what... 1 Apprentice Action, 4 Snorri actions and either 1 Free Request or 1 Free Research? Hm, that might be neat. It's even not too different from having multiple Apprentice Actions. Just, these ones would be able to proc the Snorri traits.)
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I really don't feel horrible about the AP crunch, it is a part of the premise. Apprentices being a noticable oof on our action economy is not a bug, it is a feature, and IMO asking to get more AP per turn for free seems rather silly
 
so was the latest update to the char sheet just to add the bar of adamant? are we the first to discover it at this point in the timeline?
 
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