Puppeteer is both our quick switch skill and our social manipulation skill. It combos extremely well with visceral social manipulation, to a similar degree that CL combos with blood manipulation. They impact each other multiplicatively for higher effects. The ability to reach above our normal level of potential allows for greater feats within that role, allowing for faster face time gathering and better overall impact from the mask.
It also solidifies it soundly as our social mask of choice. With CL largely handling combat, social manipulation will likely come up much more than illusions. Together they handle a very large scope of our potential encounters. CL to handle the direct confrontational ones, and webweaver to handle any social battles. Illusion, by comparison, is not nearly as common and less synergistic with the emotional manipulation of Visc.
Illusions allows you to trivialize number of encounters i.e. something like infiltrating the castle is way easier if you can just illusion your way through security or give the orders while wearing someone else's face. It basically reduces or completely removes DC on certain encounters which in turns allows you to just do stuff you couldn't before. The downside is that it can fail, but the great part about MS is that it specifically counters both direct anti-illusion and us fucking up while acting, which removes two major failing points of such infiltrations. It bears repeating that we have significant portion of our Potential stuck in illusions which we are currently not using, and MS would allow us to be much bolder in that way.
I don't wish to press on this point too much; it doesn't matter that much and its usefulness should be blatantly obvious moment we hit our next interaction point so I'll just wait it out. We don't need to be efficient on such insignificant choices.
Going back to our report card, I think we can safely say that we did quite well. My God Tier earlier included both advanced Viscerality and ~+20 Potential to main mask; however that was before we realized how short our time is going to be. Given how little time we had I would say we did extremely well. The only improvement I could think of is trading Specter or copy of Specter for supplies, but that is such a minor thing. So good job everyone!
Important to note is that we didn't just get magic, but also some really good stats. On that note, could someone ask Discord for general value of our stats? We don't need to get exact m/s for speed, but it would be nice to sort of understand difference between our base stats and CL stats. Needless to say, combination of Crimson Lost, our enhanced base stats and regen should go decently hard, so we at least shouldn't be dying to normal human bandits anytime soon. That being said, we shouldn't ignore combat potential of Glass with our slightly superhuman stats, as taking out human level magic caster might come in useful in certain worlds. Pity we couldn't get a gun, shooting people in the face can be quite useful.
Going forward, we have three main avenues of advancement - Masks, Viscerality and Street Attunement. Viscerality is the most obvious one here; we need to get masks that enabled it i.e. mask that will help us learn anatomy, mask that would enflame our passions etc and then just advance. Which path we want to take is up in the air, I can think of number of quite powerful builds. Advancing from Novice should get us some neat low hanging fruit so this will likely be what we focus on in the next few worlds.
Street Attunement is an important one. More time means more opportunities to gain Potential and more time to experiment with Viscerality, so getting to the point where we have ~month per worlds is quite important. We already know a number of ways to increase our attunement, and at least singing with special mask should be doable by the end of the next world. Blurb says there are some other ways to increase Attunement, so could also use Screentime to find some. Although we will also likely to use Screentime in the next world as well - it is a very useful mask after all.
Finally we come to masks. Crimson Lost seems like MVP so we want to find ways to boost it, preferably without coming in peril ourselves. That being said some moderate amount of combat should be fine given that we have regen and doubly so once we get more CON. Getting more points for Glass is also a priority, and we will likely want to start working on increasing our Fixation level to 1.4x; at this point that's like +8 Potential, so that is pretty significant. Still I expect us to leave this for future worlds as we have our plate full in next one. We want to upgrade Artificer, and also to produce masks for our use and for trading. Our current Mask pool is pretty good I have to admit, we have escape mask, combat mask and "orient when you get dropped in in a world" mask; a better travel mask would be one to consider I suppose. We could also consider getting our crafting to 8+, since that seems like an important milestone.
In the meanwhile, we also want to build our inventory. This depends a lot on our next world, but ideally, we would want to have supplies and weapons both for our uses and trading as well as some magically or technologically advanced gear.
What can I say, we have a lot to do. Yet, that is by large because we did great in this first world, so we can afford to lock ahead. Once again, great work everyone and lets work towards that EFB -
[X] Plan SAVE
