Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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- The United States
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I dunno, we were screening pretty well against that hill monster covering those three Yellows.
As she proved against the Antlion, Li Suyin isn't helpless. She's only stronger now, and she has Du Feng Senpai who will be watching her even closer than us.
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- Dreamland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] No, she did not want to use her friend as a crutch or a shield.
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- ?
[X] Convince Li Suyin to come along. It would ease things along a good deal.
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- The United States
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I just want to applaud @Arkeus and @Killer_Whale for sticking to their guns.
Vote the truth that's in your souls.
Vote the truth that's in your souls.
DeusExBritannia
Red-White-Black-White
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- Texas
Are RME and CDP exclusive to one another, or can we learn both?
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
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- Tempe, AZ
Depends on how many omake points and pills we put in currently we don't have enough.
On the RoyalRoad chapter, Yrsillar linked to an audio reading of the first chapter by Jack Voraces. It's quite good! (Except for the horrible pronunciation of Bai Meizhen's name).
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- USA
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- He/Him
I don't know if I can hear anyone pronounce Bai Meizhen. I've had my way for a long time now and I don't want to face there being a better way or have to endure a worse way.
This seems backwards to me, especially in the context of these two arts rather than their... lines or paths or whatever.
What possible expectation could we have for a wide area clairvoyance art but, in part, the early detection of threats? I mean, sure we're not always going to be going 100% with the art, but that's true for any precog art too.
In terms of finding and navigating safely the dangers of a dangerous landscape in particular, I'd give the edge to the clairvoyance. The distinction between the arts is combat Vs utility. Identifying threats before we're fighting them is literally not combat perception.
Now, both arts help with early warning, obviously, but it's very different styles. If we're in a huge rush and can't slow down at all, the precog is going to be more useful. Moderate to no rush though? I'd give it to clairvoyance.
And no, our speed and stealth doesn't mean the precog is better. Those help with both styles by widening the available windows for action. That's never not useful.
Edit: sorry if I seem snitty, I'm responding to a number of things people have been saying. Just using your post as a launch pad.
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- Location
- Finland
Difference between clairvoyance and precognition, is that while both are useful, one of them is something we can actually compensate for through teamwork, tactics, or even just going to a place and taking a look.
Yes, we will not always be in the position of having more people help with scouting, or have the option or time to scout effectively.
In theory we could simulate precog, to a degree, just by constant surveilance of everything and trying to extrapolate from knowledge had what will happen in the future.
People do this all the time.
But for that to get anywhere near useful, it would consume almost all of our time, and/or require us to employ spies we trust.
Biggest flaw in clairvoyance is that we still need to know where to look for it to be useful.
It saves time, and makes things safer, but does not really bring in anything new most of the time until we get really good at it and can do constant wide area surveilance without it being too taxing.
While, if used right, precognition can be an actual gamechanger even at low levels.
You mention being in no or moderate hurry for clairvoyance.
I think that's an actual weakness of the ability , if we are not in a hurry, we don't really need clairvoyance, we can just go and carefully scout.
Moderate hurry makes it more useful, but only so far as we know where to look, good for systemic scouting or checking areas we are about to enter, less so for searching for unspecified threats.
More time we have, less useful (but, paradoxicly, more powerful) it actually gets.
And effective use of it requires a level of knowledge to start with in where to look.
It's not a bad skill to have. And we woul get tons of mileage out of it.
I just think that precognition is more useful ability on average, and less situational.
Though not more useful in specific contexts where clairvoyances strengths shine.
Which is why my position is to learn precog now, clairvoyance as soon as we have time for it.
The problem with this argument is you're assuming, like Tier 5 (on my arbitrary Scale of Things) precog, but, seemingly, Tier 3 clairvoyance. Plus, I already addressed this. Yes, Ling Qi would need to actively use her clairvoyance to get the most out of it- this isn't different for precognitive arts. The way that Arts work is that they're always going to be at their most potent when deliberately used towards a specific goal or purpose.
It's not reasonable to assume that precog will "just work" whenever needed. It's taxing to stretch the ol' foresight muscles. Difficult. The most difficult, according to Xin. You won't get anything like peak performance out of your resting baseline, just the same as you don't for literally any other art.
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- Finland
I'm assuming tier 1 in both cases.
At higher levels, it starts to become much more equal when you no longer need to spend so much attention for constant surveilance.
At lower ones, precog simply becomes much more useful because it takes less time, and knowledge, to be of any use.
Precog is not going to work 100% of the time, but it can potentially warn you of issues you would never have been able to predict or prepare for.
Clairvoyance demands much more active approach to provide anykind of realistic benefit.
Clairvoyance scales better with knowledge and time you have to use it with.
But more time you have the less you need it.
I mean, if you just look at how the arts actually diverge, the clairvoyance one builds up its close-medium range surveillance tech. It can be assumed to continue building on such capabilities. If you want relatively immediate surroundings forewarning, it's not like it forces you to sit on your ass and do a complicated ritual.
Like, I'm a bit confused by what threats are anticipated. Most need to actually get near Ling Qi, they don't just suddenly appear. Having a longer-range perception tech helps with not accidentally straying near dangers. That's basically the reason they exist. It feels like you're suggesting clairvoyance arts can't perform (one of) their intended purpose(s), whereas precog arts can. That's why I'm being obnoxious.
Tbf, the first level of RME we can see the wisps still don't give good coverage there. They are flatly inferior to Canto, which tells us what everyone within the same range is doing.
In contrast, RME is limited to three wisps which can't be everywhere.
It really needs a lot more wisps to compete with radar arts tbh
Agreed that it needs more moon eyes, but in fairness Canto is incompatible with non-combat stealth, since it only pings people who hear us. Granted, the moon eyes don't even have stealth stats, but I'm just going to assume they're approximately as stealthy as Ling Qi is. If she can disperse the qi making up her body to hide, she oughta be able to hide a qi construct.Tbf, the first level of RME we can see the wisps still don't give good coverage there. They are flatly inferior to Canto, which tells us what everyone within the same range is doing.
In contrast, RME is limited to three wisps which can't be everywhere.
It really needs a lot more wisps to compete with radar arts tbh
For spotting threats on the move, the moon eyes would presumably be best used in a rough, rotating triangle while swiveling. If we had 6, I'd want two such triangles, for overlappingness in the middle band of sight range.
Reminder we HAVE been informed on precog before. The main limitations is that even for a Prism grade spirit specialized in divinations its difficult to see anything accurate unless you massively narrow your searchspace or dramatically lower your scan resolution.
Thats why the precog is the combat perception. You can do a couple seconds lookahead on yourself or one enemy and make it work.
Framed differently:
-Clairvoyance is best when you are looking for an unknown. Its a good way to probe ahead into an unknown situation with a known location, and thus very good at enhancing exploration, surveys and scouting efforts, which helps stealth by staying far away from the sensors, and avoids risk by not actually being in the line of fire. Its also likely easier to hide the thread of qi of a probe than the small sun of qi of a scout suppressing their qi.
-Precognition is best when you are planning for a known. By narrowing your search space to a limited span of probabilities, you can predict which of a small number of equally likely, known events will happen or not happen. Its not good at discovery, because seeing the future is specifically difficult the further away it is in the future and the more precise the detail you're looking for.
Thats why the precog is the combat perception. You can do a couple seconds lookahead on yourself or one enemy and make it work.
Framed differently:
-Clairvoyance is best when you are looking for an unknown. Its a good way to probe ahead into an unknown situation with a known location, and thus very good at enhancing exploration, surveys and scouting efforts, which helps stealth by staying far away from the sensors, and avoids risk by not actually being in the line of fire. Its also likely easier to hide the thread of qi of a probe than the small sun of qi of a scout suppressing their qi.
-Precognition is best when you are planning for a known. By narrowing your search space to a limited span of probabilities, you can predict which of a small number of equally likely, known events will happen or not happen. Its not good at discovery, because seeing the future is specifically difficult the further away it is in the future and the more precise the detail you're looking for.
To build on this, I am just going to quote the scene where Xin tells us about divination:
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- Finland
You have actually almost opposite idea from me.
Though i agree that precog is not going to give very specific picture.
So my take, clairvoyance is powerful, and even at low level scales immensely with time and pre existing knowledge.
But ultimately it gives you only snapshots of what is, so unless you are taking constant snapshots you are going to miss a lot.
Powerful for mapping out things, or checking known locations.
Not so great at searching for a specific thing where location is unknown, and/or changing.
Precog gives less accurate knowledge, but is more useful for predicting threats you know nothing about, telling you where the threats will be. When nothing is known, precognition is more likely to give a starting point.
But precog does not scale as well with time, because the time spent on getting new predictions, brings old predictions closer, right up until they are the present, if not the past.
That said, the actual arts are not that different outside stats.
I expect there will be changes as we learn them further, but not enough information to determine how good they will be in practice.
Actually, no, this goes directly contrary to what Xin said about precognition.
A prism spirit of divination has difficulty getting accurate stuff past a minute doing a broad search.
Trying to predict an unknown with it is worse than with clairvoyance, because at least you can perform a scanner sweep with Clairvoyance, taking snapshots of a location, to ultimately get full coverage of an area and constrain the stealth efforts. You can almost certainly scry on individuals rather than locations as well.
With precognition and divination, trying to divine about an unknown is going to be vague to the point of irrelevance, the search space is too huge and too many factors are involved.
As an example, prior to the Khan's great invasion in history, you might use the following approaches for detecting an unknown nomad threat:
-Clairvoyance - Scan the borders, especially watering holes, mountain passes and local significant spirits. An army COULD be anywhere within an impossibly large search space, but it needs supply and you can detect something amiss in time, or just catch a lone unit.
-Precognition - Casting a divination on the safety of your family gets you the advice that it will be unlucky if you and your family don't attend the Duke's ball in the capital. You spend the next few months checking for political threats, while you make arrangements for a family trip to the capital. Then your fief is overrun by nomads while you weren't there.
Precognition is great for informing on actions you're taking, but exploratory divination on unknowns is just too damned vague to give actionable information you can chain into other investigations.
Black Noise
Curious
- Location
- About 1AU from Sol
There's a direct quote two posts above yours where Xin said "it was the best outcome" regarding the Zeqing/Hanyi situation, and Six' contextualizes longer-range precog as "gambling with the odds visible" which is significantly more powerful than what you're painting it as. Granted nothing says we'll get access to something that useful this early, but then a lot of what's been said about Clairvoyance is wishful thinking as well (early warning system? for known unknowns maybe but not beyond).
For me, the problem with clairvoyance is the sheer amount of effort and paranoia it takes to make it work at its best (extra work for yrs too); we'll have to learn to constantly be aware and keep track of a myriad of people and places, which works well if we were a mastermind sitting in our cave and monitoring our domain, but with our propensity to stumble into adventure and run headlong into the unknown, support-focused perception isn't as good as it could be.
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- The United States
- Pronouns
- He/They
I was going pretty hard RME for a while there, but CDP's passives are swaying me even though I don't like the techs as much.
Like, do I want a slightly higher chance of detecting an ambush maybe, or take +10 Combat Perc, Init, and Phys avoid into that ambush.
I'm going towards the second.
Gambling with the odds visible is exactly it: you can only do that for known actions.
Xin has a known objective: finding out a better future for Zeqing than eventually losing control and eating Hanyi, or something similar.
She can then elaborate the search. Outcomes which have both Hanyi and Zeqing happy and alive, outcomes which have both of them happy and one of them alive, etc, and know how probable each is
This is textbook "Great for planning for knowns by revealing the uncertainties" and a counterexample to "Great for planning for unknowns"
If you're solving a problem get Precog, its going to be hands down the best, while Clairvoyance shrugs and tells you to go get an actual investigator.
If you're searching for threats and opportunities, get Clairvoyance, because Precog won't give you shit.
As an aside I'm leaning Precog at the moment.