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The Heir of the Dragon: A Rhaenyra Targaryen Quest

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Simon_Jester said:
The skill set of running a nation or even a bureaucracy within a nation is distinct from the skill set of, say, running an inn very well. Both the world's best innkeeper and Tywin Lannister are high-Stewardship characters, but their skill specialization is not the same, and not just because one is better at handling money in the strict sense than the other.
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Well, obviously? Any two tasks are different from each other. The point of general stats/categories are a) to acknowledge that there are similarities in skills that make some tasks easier than others and b) to simplify something as complex as "ability" using gaming taxonomy. Skill specialization within an arbitrary category can be handled in a couple ways, including traits, built in bonuses/maluses decided by situation, or subcategories.
So, regarding trade and administration, I suppose the question is whether the difference between money/goods/transport stewardship and organizational stewardship is enough that it justifies splitting the category, as opposed to another solution. If so, fair enough, as that judgement is dependant on the QMs decision making process.

Simon_Jester said:
There's a Venn diagram overlap between leadership (in the sense of 'can manage a large organization well') and generalship ('can handle and sustain armies well'), but they are not the same. Leadership and charisma are pretty strongly separate, because being good at personally charming people isn't remotely the same as being good at running an organization.
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Again, there are indeed differences, but are they sufficiently different to be worth altering taxonomy over? Organizing things fits well enough under stewardship, and insuring an army is well motivated would be martial/warcraft. I still struggle to imagine why the need for a specific leadership skill category. Again, maybe the difference will come up often enough to render my argument moot, but I haven't seen evidence for that just yet.
 
TigerBoyd said:
Well, obviously? Any two tasks are different from each other. The point of general stats/categories are a) to acknowledge that there are similarities in skills that make some tasks easier than others and b) to simplify something as complex as "ability" using gaming taxonomy. Skill specialization within an arbitrary category can be handled in a couple ways, including traits, built in bonuses/maluses decided by situation, or subcategories.
So, regarding trade and administration, I suppose the question is whether the difference between money/goods/transport stewardship and organizational stewardship is enough that it justifies splitting the category, as opposed to another solution. If so, fair enough, as that judgement is dependant on the QMs decision making process.
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Looking at Rhaenyra's new character sheet, it looks like "Stewardship" as a distinct stat no longer exists and has been fanned out into the component stats of Trade, Administration, and arguably Leadership. And it's not unreasonable to think that these are fundamentally different, and that certain other skills (such as "Law") would be distinct from all of them yet somehow connected to the super-category "Stewardship."

Could Teen Spirit handle all these disparate things with a single Stewardship stat plus a constellation of traits? Probably.

Should Teen Spirit do so? I see no reason whatsoever for it, if he prefers a different approach. It's not even mechanically simpler because you wind up needing several traits to mimic the effect of the sub-skills. There's no functional difference between saying "you have a base stat of 12 that you never use directly and four traits that confer +4, +17, -1, and +6" and saying "you have four stats of 16, 29, 11, and 18."

Again, there are indeed differences, but are they sufficiently different to be worth altering taxonomy over?
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See above.

TigerBoyd said:
Again, maybe the difference will come up often enough to render my argument moot, but I haven't seen evidence for that just yet.
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Vigorous exercise of your imagination will relieve the stiffness, and circumstances where the difference arises will come readily to mind.

Importantly, among other things, this also means our skill/stat list more directly aligns with disparate options we actually have. Instead of having several different "train your skill in this" actions that all map to "increase Stewardship and maybe grant a trait," we have different actions that map directly to increases in a specific skill.
 
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TigerBoyd said:
The new character sheet formatting looks absolutely ass on mobile. Hard to read, with even very short words being split in twain.
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For what it's worth, I had little trouble Reading it on my phone. Yes, some words (administration being the one that stands out in my mind) were cut in two, but they were still readable.

The bigger problem was the trait descriptions, which came of as a bit wall-of-text'y when confined to half of a small screen, but it was managable.
 
Omegahugger said:
For what it's worth, I had little trouble Reading it on my phone. Yes, some words (administration being the one that stands out in my mind) were cut in two, but they were still readable.

The bigger problem was the trait descriptions, which came of as a bit wall-of-text'y when confined to half of a small screen, but it was managable.
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Huh. Looks like you read on mobile horizontally. Trying it that way, it does look better, like you described. Vertically, many words have a letter or a few snapped off. The names list, in particular, was absolutely butchered, but looked perfectly fine horizontally.
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Overall, I retract most of my initial judgements about the new character sheet. I still think that a couple of the skills are odd choices, but there's nothing particularly wrong about them, either. I suppose it might be like asking someone the types of life on earth; only they say 5 kingdoms and a handful of phylla, instead of the six used by the life taxonomy (last I checked). They indeed mentioned all life, and the number of categories are still few enough to be used in short conversation, but you might be a little curious why they chose to split apart that particular classification, even when it doesn't really matter.
 
Ghost in the sun said:
Speaking of dragons, since the twins birth is near are we still proceding with the give a dragon egg for one/two of them plan?
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I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing that Viserys would do himself.

Plus, there's a nontrivial chance we wind up fighting a civil war with one or both of the twins, and if one of them is riding a dragon we gave them when that happens we're gonna feel pretty silly. :p
 
Simon_Jester said:
Plus, there's a nontrivial chance we wind up fighting a civil war with one or both of the twins, and if one of them is riding a dragon we gave them when that happens we're gonna feel pretty silly.
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Well yes, but (and this is crucial) their Dragon will be smaller. They won't have Silverwing, Vermithor or Sunfyre [Sunfyre is a small dragon but he has a great battle record]
 
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Ghost in the sun said:
I mean part of the reason people put the plan forward was to stop the sibling from claiming an older dragon.
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Omegahugger said:
We should give our nieces and nephews eggs because in an ideal world all children would get their own a baby dragon!
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I mean yeah there's a cynical reason but also it's implied it's traditional to have the egg in cradle so kiddo and murder beast can grow up together. Presumably this turns into stronger duo in the long term.
 
A_Somebody said:
I mean yeah there's a cynical reason but also it's implied it's traditional to have the egg in cradle so kiddo and murder beast can grow up together. Presumably this turns into stronger duo in the long term.
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For the record, if I found out that my family had the opportunity to gift me a dragon and they chose not to, I would consider that casus beli enough for rebellion on its own.
 
The biggest issue here is that I'm not sure Rhaenyra gets to decide how this plays out, since ultimately they're Viserys' dragons and eggs, not hers.
 
Simon_Jester said:
The biggest issue here is that I'm not sure Rhaenyra gets to decide how this plays out, since ultimately they're Viserys' dragons and eggs, not hers.
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Viserys didn't deny her the choice with Baelon, I don't see why he'd deny her the ability to pick the cradle eggs for her other younger siblings.
 
Omegahugger said:
For the record, if I found out that my family had the opportunity to gift me a dragon and they chose not to, I would consider that casus beli enough for rebellion on its own.
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I remember QM mentioning sufficiently paranoid people might claim Rhaenyra is doing this to intentionally prevent her siblings from gaining adult dragons and "forcing" them to bond with baby ones. Tbf this is the stated reason of several people in thread so wanted to note unless Rhaenyra is really obvious that's her reasoning, giving her siblings dragon eggs isn't likely to auto ping "she's trying to weaken them!!!" alarms.
 
Well we could always just suggest to Viserys to give them dragon eggs. But Joanna, Might veto that idea anyway. From her perspective as any reasonable parent who isn't a Targaryen, would not like a baby fire breathing dragon anywhere near their baby, if the egg or eggs hatched.
 
Sometimes people around here call things 'cowardice' that truthfully are not, as a way of indicating an extreme, even deliberately parodic, advocacy for a course of action.

As an example:

"Some might say that standing in a tub full of salt water on a mountaintop in full metal armor and bellowing at the top of our lungs that the goddess of lightning has a face like a diseased buzzard would be a bad idea. But I... am no coward!"

:p

Or, more mildly, the 'hubris is a coward's word' tag I've seen on a number of threads over the years.
 
FallenDawn said:
Well we could always just suggest to Viserys to give them dragon eggs. But Joanna, Might veto that idea anyway. From her perspective as any reasonable parent who isn't a Targaryen, would not like a baby fire breathing dragon anywhere near their baby, if the egg or eggs hatched.
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FallenDawn said:
As I said a reasonable parent who doesn't understand Valyrian/Targaryen culture, probably wouldn't do this. But I don't think I fully understand what you mean by "coward". If you mean that the nobles of Westeros might see this as a weakness than sure.
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Hey, there are only two safe ways to bond with a Dragon, you can do the Eggs in the crib thingy and hope they hatch, or you can try to bond with a juvenile like Rhaenyra or Aegon II did... BUT considering that there is a noticeable lack of juvenile dragons (we don't even know if Sunfyre has hatched), the only alternative that our siblings would have for the eggs in their cribs would be to try to tame an old dragon which is much much more dangerous...

So I think Johanna would probably like the idea of the eggs because the alternatives are much worse.
 
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