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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Alectai said:
Hmmm..

I think we were talking something like adding "Communication", the question is, what cruft can we remove from the list to get the desired word in without removing it?

Also, Music is listed twice!
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Hmm, maybe we can replace Presence? If not, then Manipulation I guess?
AT4467 said:
Off topic, anyone know where to find thousand year impenetrable mist in the info sheet? can't find it
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The character sheet hasn't been updated yet.
 
The repetitions echoing through the wind of the skein of the world are themselves a music, and the world around us one more instrument
[ ] Plan Overtness:
[ ] Manipulation
[ ] Expression

These connections are important, and nothing may be important and unlearned!

[] Plan depth:
[] Presence
[] Curiosity
 
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Hmm, a question @yrsillar , and I think at least a little back and forth is fair since Ling Qi is explicitly getting advice from a senior here.

Do we have any idea what effects the 'Presence' keyword is bringing to the Art compared to the 'Manipulation' one?
 
AT4467 said:
Off topic, anyone know where to find thousand year impenetrable mist in the info sheet? can't find it
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That's our domain thing, isn't it?

yrsillar said:
Domain technique unlocked
[] Enlightenment's Unbreaking Mirror: B
Duration: Immediate
In the mist, even truth is blinding. Reduces the damage of spiritual arts within the mist by one rank, applied after other techniques and the user's armor. Enemies attacking the user during activation have their senses seared, reducing all Perception and Hit and Dodge by one rank for a short time.

[] Thousand Year Impenetrable Mist: B
Duration: Short
It is said that in some distant vales, the mist never clears, and the earth has never known the unfiltered light of the sun. Grant all allies within Mist C rank damage reduction against spiritual damage. In addition, affected allies may receive one attack which would remove them from battle and instead be reduced to minimum health
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Yeah, it is. So presumably under our domain page in char sheet.
 
Aura said:
[X] Manipulation
[X] Expression
One interesting possible change, to even out the art a little.
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This is not going to be read correctly by the thread tallier. You want
[] Manipulation
[] [new] Expression
Or even better
[] Plan Aura
-[] Manipulation
-[] [new] Expression
EDIT: Or more accurately, it'll mean anyone looking at a tally will need to go double check the list of tags the art already has in order to read it correctly.
 
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can anyone who is not on his phone and willing to find out, check what LQs max multiattacker bonus is? I always thought that this mechanic, even if hadn't had it confirmed in thread, was one of the mechanics that were stealth phased out when the quest went mostly narrative and only featured minorly as an example why lq isn't easily overrun by peer level hordes.

off the top of my head we have LQ, her domain weapon, her domain effects, her domain techniques, several of our arts and our spirits an their arts. thats a nice amount of base bonus before its being multiplied when we get wolf king's cunning. not sure if it will have much of an effect in our next few fights but i guess the "not easily overwhelmed" aspect will get hyped even more.
 
Alectai said:
Hmm, a question @yrsillar , and I think at least a little back and forth is fair since Ling Qi is explicitly getting advice from a senior here.

Do we have any idea what effects the 'Presence' keyword is bringing to the Art compared to the 'Manipulation' one?
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Yeah this one is gonna get broken up into a couple little chunks, probably gonna be an extra update on wednesday since they'll be short.
 
For the record, the plan going into this art modification was to take Presence and try to mod it into Communications; reduce buff aspects in favor of increasing the connection aspect into full blown battle comms.

We were even hoping for help from Bian Ya for whom both aspects are within her specialty, help it looks like we're getting so I'm hopeful for the outcome.
 
Reposting for some visibility:
The repetitions echoing through the wind of the skein of the world are themselves a music, and the world around us one more instrument
[ ] Plan Overtness:
[ ] Manipulation
[ ] Expression

These connections are important, and nothing may be important and unlearned!

[] Plan depth:
[] Presence
[] Curiosity

[]Plan Black noise proposal:
[] Presence
[] communications

[]Plan black noise pun
Note: This world is our world, lean in to activity and manipulation aspects:
[] Perceptiveness
[] Darkness
 
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Heyo guys, slight change to the vote. Yang is no longer an option, the techs yin yang balance will change based on what you do with it, rather than being an alteration target itself
 
Plan Communication
-[ ] Presence
-[ ] Communications

Like Black Noise said, the idea was to try to get a battlefield communication art.
 
yrsillar said:
She had, for a long time kind of just accepted that she and Zhengui were just not going to match. However, rather than stressing over those things, maybe she should have been seeking ways that they could interact all along.
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This is kind of an annoying copout, considering the playerbase was actively trying for a bit of overlap as recently as the last archive vote, which is the last time it was possible at all. And overwhelmingly so, at the opportunity. The tools that were being aimed for just didn't materialize during that process. Hopefully things come around a bit again as Ling Qi's perspective broadens with their project's development, as hinted by Sixiang back around near the end of the Wang arc, iirc.

I'm a little sour by missions trampling over Zhengui arcs, too. The underground mission seriously complicated/diverted the Wang training arc, and now the Ice Lady diplomacy mission is cutting into/through our very explicitly time-committed gardening arc. And that's even before character developments/traumas from the mission itself come to affect the ability to just pick up the project again afterwards. Obviously it's not a sure thing, but the underground mission shows that sometimes loot isn't the only thing you gain from adventures: sometimes it's spanners in the works.

It's almost like if we had something like an art to cultivate together, it'd make our interactions significantly more resilient to outside interference and environmental conditions or something.

yrsillar said:
Please Select one of the following Keywords to change

[] Connections
[]Wind
[] Music
[] Empathy,
[] Presence
[] Perceptiveness
[] Manipulation

and Select what you would like the keyword to change too
[][new] Example

This vote will be by plan to avoid weirdness eg
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Hoboy, this might get messy.
 
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If you guys want "Battlefield Communication", then I think "Communication" is way too vague of a keyword for it, myself. Communication just sounds like... talking, and talking well.

Admittedly Yrs has probably been following the discourse and may favor the choice, but "Radio Officer" is not what I'd get out of that keyword for this art. You might want "Coordination" instead, or something like that.
 
KreenWarrior said:
If you guys want "Battlefield Communication", then I think "Communication" is way too vague of a keyword for it, myself. Communication just sounds like... talking, and talking well.

Admittedly Yrs has probably been following the discourse and may favor the choice, but "Radio Officer" is not what I'd get out of that keyword for this art. You might want "Coordination" instead, or something like that.
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When talking is involved with mystical qi mumbo jumbo, my mind jumps to those sets of arts which are communication arts.

Casting voice long distances, Ministry of Communication, etc etc.
 
So like, surely there is a battlefield communication art that's standard among Sect forces we can get right? Can we ask the dude who was our voice in our head last mission? Also somehow muscle senpai-Chan could hijack it too.
 
KreenWarrior said:
If you guys want "Battlefield Communication", then I think "Communication" is way too vague of a keyword for it, myself. Communication just sounds like... talking, and talking well.

Admittedly Yrs has probably been following the discourse and may favor the choice, but "Radio Officer" is not what I'd get out of that keyword for this art. You might want "Coordination" instead, or something like that.
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Or to put it another way: restricted keyword votes are a bad idea and ripe for miscommunication and can only function if the QM knows what we mean :p

Just linking back to the old posts made by BN and I getting into the actual theory of what we're trying to do here:
Erebeal said:
Ok, so there's been some discussion of modding HDW to try to add communication elements in there because Bian Ya is cool and god knows we aren't using its buffs.

Currently, the suggestion was to try to replace something like "Presence" with "Communication". I... do not like this. Replacing stat/skill keywords with theme ones doesn't make sense - they're completely different things. And let's be honest, this proposal is really just a way to try to bypass the awkwardness of the Art Modification system as written given that HDW only has one theme keyword and we don't want to get rid of "Connections".

In my opinion though, what this really highlights is that the system shouldn't be tackled quite that literally. The keyword lists we are given, afterall, are not really exhaustive - they're just a quick list of descriptors that yrs thought of when making the art. This is especially true for the theme keywords.

If we instead think about this fluffwise, from the perspective of how someone in universe might try to mod the art, then what I would suggest is that "Connections" in HDW really has multiple sub-themes of communication, support/"nakama", and awareness of everything. What we are wanting to do here is downgrade the support themes in favour of enhancing the communication ones.

How might this implement itself? Well, one way it could work would be that the buff tech changes to instead of sending strength to our allies, it instead sends awareness and thoughts/feelings to allow that kind of team comm/minimap kind of thing. Narratively ofc this is the kind of thing that would make sense for LQ to think about, and that she could talk to Bian Ya about.

Of course, there is, as discussed before, a thin line between modding and making a successor, which can be challenging to deal with - particularly when we're trying to shift capabilities like this. Just wanting to change a style or something to fit us better (e.g. changing the weapon mastery) is arguably much simpler. Is this level of change reasonable for art modding? I don't know. But this is how I'd try. If we are to be allowed to mod arts in ways that aren't just restricted to skill tweaks, I don't really see how it can work if we're restricted to just the one or two theme keywords instead of the broader art description. The theme words are (for understandable reasons) generally a big holistic description that sums up the idea of the art and that couldn't really be changed without breaking it, and don't get into any of the details which are what you'd be looking at tweaking in a modding exercise.
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Black Noise said:
Let's talk about HDW for a bit.

Keeping in mind we voted for it looking for an art to do social/combat perception, not buffs, and voted it in based on the following fluff/key concept:

The art seems to be fundamentally about connections; seeing and touching upon them.

Seems pretty great right? Well instead we got one actually useful perception tech and by cap a social screen. Other than those we got 2 buff techs that are basically a poor imitation of our innate Domain effect (seriously what use is a Short-duration allies-only support buff that isn't even Perfect).

That said, the themes of the art are definitely reasonable enough for LQ to keep (and indeed its insight has been voted in), and Canto is all kinds of nice:

Upkeep tech that gives us Far-range vision within our music (including our Mist) of anything that isn't trying to hide? yes please. This effect is what we actually want for advanced perception, and by itself is the reason current plan lines keep HDW equipped in our combat/adventure loadout. It helps that the G3 potency isn't a big deal here because we're not really using HDW to oppose enemy techs (RME is what we have for enemies trying to hide).

Still, it's not great for an art in our loadout to contribute so little, especially since we'll be replacing it in social settings with PMR+MSS before long. For this there are 2 options:
  1. drop the art from our build entirely.
    • This is somewhat unsatisfying because unless we get an advanced skill that mimics Canto, we're losing a fair bit of utility.
    • We're only freeing up 2 meridians and not 5, because head meridians are limited by social arts. We can only get ~4 freed up if we're willing to drop RME in social settings as well, something I'd be against because you probably don't want to drop your primary perception art ever, especially one with hard-to-notice extra viewpoint constructs and an ability to deeply analyze something.
  2. Attempt to modify HDW so the currently-useless techs actually contribute meaningful utility to our build.
    • This is where the idea of modding HDW with a communications aspect comes from. This is a mod that's very in-theme for the art's basic fluff and 'connections' core concept, we have both thematic (as outlined by Erebeal) and mechanistic reasoning for why such a mod would be possible(see later), and we even have Bian Ya to poke in music club if we're struggling because her build is all about leveraging wind-themed 'connections' into buffs, social/combat perception, and powerful communications.
    • And in terms of utility, having some basic capacity at communications is pretty damn nice for our build in a scout role, pairing nicely with high range scrying and our high mobility. And it's not something that the G3 potency matters all that much for because again, not really opposing enemy techs with it.
    • Plus Sixiang is still very much a thing, and can both buff HDW-techs for us and possibly learn enough to pick up some communications of their own.

As for how we might go about it, here's a possible mechanistic take on how we can modify HDW buffs into comms:
  • If we think of arts like arcane machines, art modding is digging into the guts of that and tweaking some valves and maybe cannibalizing less useful parts to fit together a "feature".
  • For HDW, the idea would be to take the buffs, drop the power and effect strength as much as possible to amp up the range, and then either cobble some protocol for converting minuscule buffs/feedbacks across links into rudimentary comms, or to lean on the 'connections' keyword to apply it in a more literal sense.
  • While doing that, try to make sure the comms aren't an open-channel broadcast, maybe using the muffle tech as basis (and possibly even cannibalizing that; I'd be pretty ok with sacrificing the last 3 techs to get a functional ~2km secure-ish radio, with better range to high SL's)

So for the pretty damn low cost of 1 AP we get the following:
  1. Experiment with art modification before we're stepping into full-on successor creation.
  2. Sacrifice some useless build flub to gain useful utility we'll be using for like the next 8 months+, and could build upon later if we want.
  3. Get a cool project to poke Bian Ya about, something pretty flattering considering we're basically inspired by her here.
Seems to me like a better option than e.g another explore action (which has like a 20% of being something decent and like a 50%+ chance of just giving us a bit of yss), and a better target for art modding than ENM where the current idea is to modify the Memory keyword hoping to get Dream, except art modding is a lot less reliable[1] than that and if we want to disassemble the core-concept of an art I'd prefer to do it after we have access to workshops.


[1] Art modification by rules-as-written is pretty bad, basically:
• pick a keyword to disassemble
• after disassembly, you're presented with a list of possible keyword replacements based on the art and what LQ knows
• after selecting one of those, get uncertain results based on the selection
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yrsillar said:
There was something simply nice about working alongside Zhengui on this. Digging into the earth with a trowel, working together with Zhengui to stimulate the growth of the plants, working together on the other aspects of the project. They all combined to put stress and grief and worry out of her head, if only for a few hours each day. And in those few hours, she spoke to Zhengui more than she ever had before.

It wasn't about anything serious, there were no great revelations, they just talked and worked, and it felt good. She couldn't help but feel a touch of the excitement Zhengui felt, when they finally broke ground and started to put their plans into practice.
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yrsillar said:
Ling Qi hummed in agreement. She spent so much time on combat cultivation, it had been fun to play with effects like this. It had even been fun, in its way, to get her hands a little dirty with a trowel, and try to get things just right. She understood why even an Elder like Ying could enjoy a hobby like this.
"I'm glad we did this," Ling Qi said with a nod. She had, for a long time kind of just accepted that she and Zhengui were just not going to match. However, rather than stressing over those things, maybe she should have been seeking ways that they could interact all along. "I think I'll be looking forward to next time."
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I'm happy about this. Doing something we like with Zhengui that Zhengui also likes and is something we will be doing going forward is going to be really cool. Spending time together not simply cultivating, but actually working on projects together is, in my opinion, going to be helping a lot in developing our relationship with Zhengui. For the better.

I can't wait until the final garden is actually ready to be finished and both Zhengui and Ling Qi can look back with pride at what they've built. And then turn around and start another project. A bit more complicated, a bit more ambitious, and all the more rewarding when it is finished.
 
Thor's Twin said:
I can't wait until the final garden is actually ready to be finished and both Zhengui and Ling Qi can look back with pride at what they've built. And then turn around and start another project. A bit more complicated, a bit more ambitious, and all the more rewarding when it is finished.
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I am hopeful that Ling Qi is willing to host her friends at the garden. I would love to see reactions to the project.
 
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