Remove ads

The Streetwalker's Guide to the Hierarchy

Reader mode
So at first I was not sure if this was "directly" associated with the somber mask but cross-referencing it definitely is.

- the parasite seems to have the same yellow color theme
- they have access to interdimensional travel, without needing the street (seemingly same as somber mask)
- they are not welcome in the street, but have a strong desire to enter it
- we are being enticed (primarily) with knowledge (and so was she), which closely matches the modus operandi of the somber mask (when dealing with streetwalkers, at least)
Wolfy said:
to which our dumbass character has yet to make counter Mask for, by the way
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
theater child probably counts as one

Wolfy said:
Like this is third time character goes "bhooo forest scaaaarryyyyy". Brother I get it, let me interact with the forest so I can see how amazing and scary it is, not have people tell me it is because, uh, it just is ok?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
To be fair we've voted against going into the forest like 2-3 times
 
Last edited:
So Contamination is our most important power here. We can use it to manipulate environment, which should let us do stuff such as dropping enemies through the floor, creating barricades and walls so we can isolate our opponents or just use it directly on their weapons to disarm them, or on what little they have of their armor to turn it against them. We should also be capable of turning their glyphs against them, although it is possible that glyphs are there to render them resistant to direct Contamination. In that case, focus on environment.

Given that this is the coup, our real objective is not to defeat our opponents, but rather to survive until things work out. Ideally we would be able to somehow contact OC to inform them of Veronica's betrayal and request aid, and then have them plus Musurov help us out. Thanks to Contamination we excel at CC so this mode of fight is a beneficial one. So rather than fighting fighting, we use Contamination so bog down Victoria, then escape until we find a way to request reinforcements to teleport it to help us out.

The only real unknown here is Victoria and her power, but that is something we will have to work out as she uses her own powers. With Linneas around we should be able to deal with unexpected reasonably well, so between that and our combat retreat approach to this fight we should manage fairly well, I should hope.

As for Linneas, we could also send him to draw a portion of opponents away, or to go fetch Musurov or contact OC while we are dragging around Japhris. Pros and cons should be evident. We could also just have him go and drop away Japrhis somewhere; Victoria ultimately likely doesn't care about Japrhis much and while she would be a useful hostage, I don't think they would go out of their way to retrieve her if Linneas drops her somewhere.

So something like
>Drop opponents through the floor with Contaminate
>Linneas takes off with Japrhis
>While we use Contaminate to stall like a bitch, Linneas drops off Japhris in some random closet, then runs to get Musurov/contact Orbital Command
>We keep stalling until cavalry gets here

E: Also we don't need to communicate a lot with Linneas, just shouting "GO!" at him should make him take correct actions because he's competent like that
 
Last edited:
[X] Agree

Wolfy said:
Like this is third time character goes "bhooo forest scaaaarryyyyy". Brother I get it, let me interact with the forest so I can see how amazing and scary it is, not have people tell me it is because, uh, it just is ok?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
To be fair we did fight the Urchin, which could have easily killed us if we picked the Hunt It Personally path, or if our Contamination rolled bad, or if Japhris missed.

Though it is odd that we're being told "you pushed the forest too hard!" when Orbital Command has a Map that tells them if they're pushing the forest too hard. Why can't the Map tell them that if this random lady we met a few minutes after arrival who totally isn't special knows? If the forest was tricking the Map, I'd think it would posture itself as more irritable than it is, not less, so we'd leave it alone more; posturing itself as less irritable than it is is a contradiction, since it's like saying "I'm going to try to get this person to taunt me so I'll get really mad and kill them"- if you want to do that, then just kill them immediately.
 
JOEbob said:
To be fair we did fight the Urchin, which could have easily killed us if we picked the Hunt It Personally path, or if our Contamination rolled bad, or if Japhris missed.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We literally one-shoot it after our dumb run away plan predictably failed. And we would keep on improving and limiting possible failure points.

Overall, it is weird and frustrating. The chapter is clear that this:
You went too fast, you didn't understand the nature of the task the Street set down in front of you. Greed does not bring rewards.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
is the message we are supposed to receive. But its just not true at all. The actual aggressive play was the Kaiju hunting one I wanted to make, not the whole "lets instead do Burgeoning with map to get relics so we get good rewards with less risk because forest doesn't care about Burgeoning as much". I dislike it because I prefer to be aggressive and committed, but realistically we didn't do anything that can be considered greedy. We specifically played it as safe and close to ground as we could.

I don't think you guys voted are amazing, but virtually none of the consequences we are seeing right now are results of your tactics, but rather story deciding it should be like that. We are not greedy because we actually played greedily, we are greedy because we didn't run away to Street when the story wanted us to, and now staying here and doing stuff is bad not because of setting itself, but because narrative thinks its bad.

Which is annoying. I know that Fighting is doable with correct tactics, but I also suspect that Fighting is not the choice narrative wants us to make. So should I vote for plan that I find compelling, or should I instead be guessing what story wants us to do because otherwise Dorian will have another opsie and accidently Contaminate Linneas into a gorilla?

What I don't understand is why? The forest makes for great antagonist and there are so many entertaining practical and conceptual ways you could engage in this man vs nature conflict, but instead of letting us do that story is going "nooooo stooooop you are doing it wrong!". This is by far my favorite world and I'm getting cockblocked at every fucking corner for actually trying to interact with it. Its annoying.
 
I guess that the urchin was an instinctive local response from the forest, as are all the things the map is showing. But as Carrasco said, the forest seems to exist as a "domain", eg. it may be closer to a self-aware System than to a passive magic native to the world. And while most things the government could do would just be part of the game, Japhris' arcanism at high power, being used at strategic scale by the orbital government, allows directly challenging the system itself, which causes the rules of the game to become drastically different. We're no longer playing the game set up by the admin, we're directly harming the metaphysical body of the admin and they're planning to ruin our day. And if the map is the equivalent of a reward item, it may be fundamentally unable to detect the plans and actions of its creator
 
Last edited:
Rationalizing this is not difficult. Underlying point is that narrative makes no sense so you have to come up with a reason why map that was supposed to detect this didn't work, because story needs to happen. There is little correlation with our tactics and current events, so despite us playing safe we are greedy because story wants to push that notion.

The more confusing is why? If we are causing Forest to be aggressive, then let us deal with that aggression*, not with people crying at us how we didn't take actions story wanted us to take. I would much rather preferred to deal with escalating man vs nature conflict, than to have this shitty Fixation plot where everyone has to be a complete moron for it to happen. Having plot be driven by your character being rendered dumb and incompetent is not fun at all.

Why couldn't we just have a plot where map shows ever increasing amount of forest aggression, and we are stopped by that and we have to do something about it? Doesn't that sound about million times more interesting than everything that happened after Japrhis teleported in?

*Map and Burgeoning were a way to play around Forest getting aggressive, but it wasn't the "correct" way to do it so it doesn't work because it just doesn't.
 
Last edited:
Wolfy said:
We literally one-shoot it after our dumb run away plan predictably failed. And we would keep on improving and limiting possible failure points.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We only had the chance to one-shot it due to Contamination-based stalling, which is unreliable. It was a serious risk of death.
fame said:
And if the map is the equivalent of a reward item, it may be fundamentally unable to detect the plans and actions of its creator
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We've seen the process of creating Relics, though. If Relics are intentional reward items made by a conscious force with failsafes to protect the creator from the Relic, then why would there also be a so-simple-it-makes-sense-as-a-natural-phenomenon way to do it ('just cram more Mana into an object')? I guess it could be that higher-tiered relics are hand-crafted, but even so, the Map only started covering mana and forest-prediction after our partnership with Orbital Command, as a part of its ability to 'create new categories of information upon request', so there's no reason to think a hypothetical creator would've considered the Map's maker-predicting potential for this out-of-context-visitor situation in the first place.
Wolfy said:
we specifically talked about Fixation because we know that powerful masks cause Fixation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Can you provide a case where this was the case? People did talk about Fixation, but most of the conversation seems to be about the Potential multipliers it gives. The closest I can find is "Finally, Fixation brings personality change which might make Japhris unwilling to work with us, but that is precisely why we took social, so we can keep up with her and ensure that she is in our camp", by you; but you didn't seem averse to her fixating on the whole.

Not that Dorian isn't rather foolish for apparently not interacting with Japhris for several days straight, but he doesn't seem to have been going against any specifically-discussed planning in that wise (even if that's because I, for instance, would've figured the Fixation couldn't possibly get bad so fast that we couldn't stop it before it became a serious problem, since it's not a matter of hours.).
 
JOEbob said:
We only had the chance to one-shot it due to Contamination-based stalling, which is unreliable. It was a serious risk of death.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Whatever makes you feel better about wasting my time with Japhris can't hit shit nonsense, I suppose.
Can you provide a case where this was the case? People did talk about Fixation, but most of the conversation seems to be about the Potential multipliers it gives. The closest I can find is "Finally, Fixation brings personality change which might make Japhris unwilling to work with us, but that is precisely why we took social, so we can keep up with her and ensure that she is in our camp", by you; but you didn't seem averse to her fixating on the whole.

Not that Dorian isn't rather foolish for apparently not interacting with Japhris for several days straight, but he doesn't seem to have been going against any specifically-discussed planning in that wise (even if that's because I, for instance, would've figured the Fixation couldn't possibly get bad so fast that we couldn't stop it before it became a serious problem, since it's not a matter of hours.).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm not sure what's your question here. I talked at length about mechanics of Fixation regarding Arcanist and Japhris, because Fixation is highly relevant due its exponential power boost and Arcanist being a powerful mask meant that we could expect swift Fixation. The conclusion was that we should closely follow her Fixation stage and ensure that she is at fairly safe 1.3~1.4 range that would still provide +25~30 Potential boost to hit that 100 point milestone.

Dorian did the exact opposite and just ignored her, which is dumb on multiple levels. And bitch even has the gal to say "Fixation's is no one's fault". Brother, you gave her the fucking mask, what did you think it was going to happen if you let her carry it all the time?
 
Last edited:
While we are on a vaguely - not really tbh, but fuck it - related direction, I feel the lack of interesting blurbs and import-spending opportunities rather keenly.

I know there is probably some "with like, 5 regular players and lacking discussion, they don't have enough import for me to bother" logic going on, but that's kinda catch-22, isn't it? Sick blurbs make things more lively, even if we can't pick them.
 
Wolfy said:
I'm not sure what's your question here. I talked at length about mechanics of Fixation regarding Arcanist and Japhris, because Fixation is highly relevant due its exponential power boost and Arcanist being a powerful mask meant that we could expect swift Fixation. The conclusion was that we should closely follow her Fixation stage and ensure that she is at fairly safe 1.3~1.4 range that would still provide +25~30 Potential boost to hit that 100 point milestone.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You did talk about fixation and at length, but mostly in the direction of "She should fixate", not "We should make sure she doesn't fixate too far"; yes, you described the ideal fixation point as ~1.4 and didn't describe it as 1.6 or 2.0, but as far as I could see you didn't so much discuss curbing it as 1.4 as discuss trying to push it up to 1.4 quickly.
 
Worthwhile addendum - it seems Wolfy in particular is upset about the Forest triggering in response to your Burgeoning, but the truth is more complicated than that:

Asked, Veronica would inform you the 'reckoning' she mentioned has little to do with the Forest itself directly as a mechanism, even if it might 'become the mechanism.' She'll refuse to name the direct causative "for your own good," and only answer that it is the nature of the world to punish those with clever solutions, who 'reach above their station.'

Naturally, if you comply with her deal, she's happy to offer you ways to circumvent the natural order.

Or she might be a supernally skilled bullshitter, and there's no such thing as a Hierarchy of this and every world.
 
Prospalz said:
While we are on a vaguely - not really tbh, but fuck it - related direction, I feel the lack of interesting blurbs and import-spending opportunities rather keenly.

I know there is probably some "with like, 5 regular players and lacking discussion, they don't have enough import for me to bother" logic going on, but that's kinda catch-22, isn't it? Sick blurbs make things more lively, even if we can't pick them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We did have some decent blurbs in the Relic build, I have to say. Early on blurbs were quite underpowered, but I think that last batch was decent enough.
Birdsie said:
Worthwhile addendum - it seems Wolfy in particular is upset about the Forest triggering in response to your Burgeoning, but the truth is more complicated than that:

Asked, Veronica would inform you the 'reckoning' she mentioned has little to do with the Forest itself directly as a mechanism, even if it might 'become the mechanism.' She'll refuse to name the direct causative "for your own good," and only answer that it is the nature of the world to punish those with clever solutions, who 'reach above their station.'

Naturally, if you comply with her deal, she's happy to offer you ways to circumvent the natural order.

Or she might be a supernally skilled bullshitter, and there's no such thing as a Hierarchy of this and every world.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Eh not quite, but honestly I crossed the line into bitching. I would hate to nag you too much.

[X] Agree

wcyd
 
That being said, if we do agree on this I plan on doing our part in good faith. We can work through whatever fallout that may cause later.
 
Regarding concept of Hierarchy, a couple of things spring to mind immediately. The first is that this heavily informs our power gathering going forward, as we would want to keep most of it contained to back end of a give nworld, staying low to the ground and getting out if we can smell a Hierarchy proc coming. Really, one has to wonder how many of end of worlds we have seen so far were caused by this. But yeah, this is the most practical one so far.

The second one is much more important. Since Hprocs happen because of our actions, it means that we can create a highly energetic events if we so desire. With correct equipment and prep it should be theoretically possible to trigger a Hproc that we could harness partially or completely, which is probably the fastest way to power up. This is much more easier said than done of course, but it is for sure something to think about going forward.

The exact mechanics of Hproc, the intellect behind them, how high can they escalate, what are their blind spots etc. are all information that we will need to make correct decisions going forward. Given how narrative pushes our desire to bring freedom and how real it is, I wonder if this will be related to ultimate master of Hierarchy?
 
Wolfy said:
The second one is much more important. Since Hprocs happen because of our actions, it means that we can create a highly energetic events if we so desire. With correct equipment and prep it should be theoretically possible to trigger a Hproc that we could harness partially or completely, which is probably the fastest way to power up. This is much more easier said than done of course, but it is for sure something to think about going forward.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
...I would not try this unless we've already capped out everything else or get more, unexpected, information. These 'Hierarchy procs' sound to me like an anti-scaling/world balance phenomenon; if you try to use it to power yourself up, I'd think it's more likely something different becomes the Heirarchy Proc, or the proc happens at such high power it breaks our equipment / in a different way that causes more problems/etc.

...Though, it is ambiguous from the information so far whether the 'Hierarchy Procs' respond to things that dramatically change a given world, or to ways of gaining power too easily. Is the problem our deal with Orbital Command which expands their territory a lot for low cost, or is it about how many Relics they give us/how much we dwindle into items? (Or possibly both, but the former only in the sense that Orbital Command also counts as someone who can gain power too easily?)
 
Wolfy said:
The actual aggressive play was the Kaiju hunting one I wanted to make, not the whole "lets instead do Burgeoning with map to get relics so we get good rewards with less risk because forest doesn't care about Burgeoning as much". I dislike it because I prefer to be aggressive and committed, but realistically we didn't do anything that can be considered greedy. We specifically played it as safe and close to ground as we could.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Just because it wasn't aggressive doesn't mean it wasn't a major overreach. That's what's being drilled in there.

What happened is definitionally greedy, in the same way that billionaires are. Little work, high reward.
 
Fantasy Connect said:
What happened is definitionally greedy, in the same way that billionaires are. Little work, high reward.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
maybe, but this is only relevant given the existence of a Hierarchy which gets mad when you do big stuff through cleverness. If that wasn't a thing, this wouldn't be greedy in the relevant sense, of pursuing the rewards of something so much that you fall into risk and danger through overreaching; since the Map exists, and the winning plan directed for a Mask for that purpose to be made if the Map didn't exist, as well as directing for Masks to be made for escape (I guess the Buck counts, but it seems we didn't dwindle anything into it for some reason.) and to ensure the first retaliation by the forest would fail (I suppose more detail should've been gone into, there; something like a self-shattering lifesaving teleport mask, but there's room for other ways to go about it. For instance, shrink mask which maintains overall target mass/strength/etc(but expands the area their feet push off, so they don't sink into the ground), so a shrunk person becomes basically invulnerable).
In essence, the winning plan was ready for the risks, as long as those risks weren't ready for the winning plan, which a suitably-Dwindled Buck Mask(...and staying near one-another, which is another reason Dorian not even seeing Japhris for days was outside expectations...) would've presumably covered against the Forest but is presumably powerless to do the same for the Hierarchy.

If anything, I think it's fairer to say we weren't being greedy, so much as not leaving value untaken for, as far as we knew at the time, no reason. If you see a simple obstacle course leading to a bar of gold with a sign warning you not to fail the course and noting the bar is yours if you pass, and you do the obstacle course and pick up the gold bar, and this activates an unseen mechanism that rearranges the course, makes it more challenging, and adds deadly saw blades, is what you did here really greed?
 
[X] Agree

this is a very tough decision, but agreeing seems to give some wiggle room to later deal with the problem in an indirect way. Assuming the artifact isn't trapped in some way..
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top