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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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I have two big things I hope will be improved by the system change :

Advanced skills getting some details on what they do somewhere anywhere, I (and the people i asked on discord) still have no clue what dreamstep does, and it took me two rereads to figure out when Ling Qi learned to use Sable Grace (her partial phasing skill) to teleport from shadow to shadow (she got that ability from the SCS insight but it's mentionned nowhere).

I also hope that tutoring options will do something other then add another meaningless boost to cultivation dice and "misc bonuses" we cant predict because as it is training with a tutor will never be chosen in plan votes, the Xin and Jiao tutoring were some of my favorite scenes in Forge but it's been years since LQ had a training montage and despite all the corniness they implie Yrsillar is good at making them cool and thematic (remember all the cool scenes LQ had with Zequing those were free tutoring actions).
 
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Does the rule system even matter anymore? Early it was fine grained enough to run the combat encounters but it got to cumbersome.
I support keeping a part it to have a projection for the time/resources required, but then that's just for the author/players to keep the relative power levels consistent.

Frankly just from a game design standpoint, making an good ruleset is fookin hard, and I fully expect it to require multiple iterations and at the moment I don't really see the point for all that effort.
(I mean unless designing a ruleset is part of the fun for you yrs)

Personally skill systems in rpg rulesets have always bothered me and feel almost impossible to balance eg. "should I put points into swim??" "I have 0 in navigation, I can't read maps".
I think something trait (tribulation) based would feel more natural and keep things more unique, eg. "your study under Zequing allows you to weave the Endings into music".
 
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Vanguard_D said:
@Briefvoice I mean, all of that is on the frontpage under Tutorials. So I guess that is more on you not wanting to learn then the actual system tbh.
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I've tried to read those tutorials many times and completely bounced off them every time. If I had to, maybe I could buckle down and understand them, but then we go back to my first post about how none of it actually seems connected to the story in a way that would make me feel it was worth the effort.
 
Briefvoice said:
I've tried to read those tutorials many times and completely bounced off them every time. If I had to, maybe I could buckle down and understand them, but then we go back to my first post about how none of it actually seems connected to the story in a way that would make me feel it was worth the effort.
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If it was any of the complicated stuff I could understand it but what you got stuck on was the most basic easy stuff. Like to fast answer to some of your questions:

1. What Attribute XP is applied to
a) Like, you know that we got attributes on the statsheet? 3 Guesses what the attribute XP is applied to and two does not count.
2. How much a single role of 4 versus the maximum possible roll of 14 makes a difference.
a) If you look at the attributes you see that they req the xp to lvl. You can see on the statsheet how much is needed for next lvl. Higher is good.
3. How many chances we might have to roll it.
a) As many we want until we get the rank we want. Unless you mean per month then that depends on how much we want to invest.
4. What the narrative or powers impact would be
a) Hmm, remember how LQ had a breakdown when she went for dinner with Bao? She had very low composure back then guess what higher stats help with? Powerwise having for example high Manip helps with our Music.

Stones gives dice. Red 5, yellow 10 and Green 40. This effects ALL cultivation rolls. It is ultimately a game of weighing how much resources LQ got and can use per turn based on how many she actually can use. (Depends on her cultivation stage and realm)
 
While full planmaking at the start of turns tends to be a math cabal thing, that's only the making of the plans. I often see the planmakers talk about what goals their plan accomplishes and how it differs from other plans in plain terms.

You don't need to be able to make a plan of your own to have an opinion on something like 'should we level up War right now or should we better our odds of leveling Dance?'
 
Ok, I have way too many thoughts about this :p

On planning
The current state of plan votes appears to me to be one where engagement has markedly declined over time. Indeed, I personally, despite being one of the core math nerds, have found it increasing hard to care about it.

There are a number of possible reasons I think for this:
  • Planning isn't a significant part of the quest anymore
  • Difficult to handle maths
  • Dice no longer mean much
  • Complexity and predictability
  • Lack of perceived impact
Some of these are simple and straightforward. The maths that go into calculating our dice are, well, enjoyable to set up spreadsheets for, but also do create a bit of a barrier to casual engagement and allowing people to predict the expected outcome of a vote. These of course can be simplified - though admittedly part of the problem is just that we have to track up so many different sources of numbers, which is harder to address. The dice getting absurdly large has had the effect of diluting their meaning, as variance is largely averaged out. At this point, we no longer really fail to hit our targets, and any chance of failure is addressed via strategic omake point usage. The dice are annoying from a bookkeeping and communication perspective, and are no longer functioning to create excitement and uncertainty. There are perhaps two possible solutions here: 1) reduce the numbers so that they mean something again, or 2) remove the dice entirely for a straightforward xp/point-buy system.
More complex an issue is I think the way that plans at this point are very complicated endeavors that aren't really a response to the immediate situation a lot. Rather, they're designed as interwoven packages over the course of multiple turns, with plans being designed months in advance. This makes it even harder to engage with them, as you have to take into account what's happening in all the following turns for the next 4 months or so as well. This is, I think, partly facilitated by the predictablity of the system these days. Back in Forge, our long term predictions were highly innaccurate. Resources, things to spend actions on, and even how many actions we would have were much more variable. Indeed, in a sense I think that by trying to remove the annoyance of minors, we stabbed ourselves in the foot, as they may have been a significant source of day-to-day variance in plan design.

In the more immediate sense though, the fact that our plans now have 20 actions to juggle together like lego bricks, rather than just picking 5 discrete things to do, also makes them much more difficult to engage with and vote on imo. The flexibility of all those actions can be useful for the hyperoptimisers, and also helps address the overflow issue we had back in Forge (i.e. having to spend 1/5 of your actions to complete something that really only needs a fraction of that action is annoying), but is perhaps creating more problems for the quest.

Tldr; plans involve too much stuff going on at once to engage with and care about.
Perceived impact has several layers here, and generally I think it has gotten much worse than it was in Forge.

Firstly, there's the issue, as people have noted, of the complexity of the maths making it hard for people to understand and predict the connections between vote and result. This obviously doesn't help engagement.

More importantly, however, I think that cultivation just feels less meaningful than it did back then. Perhaps it was partly just that everything was new and fresh, but I feel that the combat mechanics then just made everything feel more real. We cared about getting that extra dice from upgrading an art to the next level. It felt like it could really make a difference. With the removal of those mechanics, Art upgrades just don't feel like they matter as much. Similarly, with win and loss being purely down to narrative - and war isn't great since dying isn't really on the table - it's hard to feel the possible impact as much, since it doesn't feel like our cultivation choices are as relevant.

This is exacerbated by the the fact that cultivation largely doesn't appear on screen much. We shouldn't be unfair here - it has gotten better recently as yrs has responded to those concerns - but when our plan votes don't really have an immediate effect on the story, it's hard to feel they matter much. Similarly, even when they are shown there's the problem that the "art levels" are just kind of vague and non-specific. What is LQ actually doing? What's she trying to improve? What are we trying to accomplish? Base cultivation is similarly very vague. It's just a number that goes up and doesn't seem to do much. It at least meant more back in Forge because we were competing with people in our own year group. Now, however, that sense of competition isn't really there as we're either just better than others, or they're older and stronger. It's not something we're really controlling.

The removal of minors and essentially all time management components from planning also hasn't helped I suspect. Again, a significant part of what made plan votes really significant back in the day was having to juggle work/social and cultivation. You could immediately see how our choices mattered, and the minors perhaps could serve as a "gateway drug" to people engaging with the rest of the plan. We did remove them for a reason, but I wonder if we kind of lost a lot in the process.

And, of course, doing so many things at once also reduces focus and the ability to show impact.
A more subtle problem, however, that I suspect may overshadow everything else is that planning just isn't something we do much of anymore. Back in Forge, plan votes were our main source of engagement with the quest. Even late game we had them every two weeks. Now though? The typical turn length is two and a half months. That's a long time to go between votes. Like, I feel that the simple fact of the matter is that quest and system engagement is sustained by social interaction, and there honestly isn't anything for us to talk about anymore. Three months is a long time to wait. By the time we see the results of our votes, we've often forgotten what we voted for! The math cabal arguably exhausted conversation topics a year ago! We aren't given reason to engage with the system on a regular enough basis, and so we don't. And, from a messaging standpoint, I would say that plan votes happening so rarely sends the message that they aren't an important part of the quest.

This isn't to say that rare but significant votes are impossible ofc - look at the traditional and always exciting "power vote" in many quests. But, well, the plan votes just aren't the same as a vote for that one big cool upgrade.

My suspicion is that even if we could fix all the other problems here - if we could make cultivation feel more impactful, and simplify the systems so more people can follow them... if we don't engage with the system more than every three months it just won't matter.
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So yeah, those are my thoughts on the problems with the current planning system. Increasingly, I am moving towards the radical position that planning is already dead, and that trying to maintain it so as to avoid losing the "fun" it provides is possibly the wrong move.

That being said, there are important things it addresses, which I will tackle in another post.
 
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In effect, it seems like the plan votes lead to a small group building and refining a ideas with some variation or iteration, which are then voted on by the people who're still hanging around in the thread hours/a day after the update. It's maybe not ideal, but I don't mind it all that much as someone who just sees it happening and doesn't engage with it. I'm more interested in the votes that are about in the moment story choices, and I think that would still be true even if I took the time to really learn and understand the under-the-hood systems in play.
 
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Shifting the vote from representing one week to representing one month was probably the biggest contributor to creating the disconnect between the math people and everyone else, since it resulted in each turn quadrupling in size (at minimum), while the choices being made in the turn vote loosing out in narrative weight to choices being made to keep up engagement with the story. Early in forge, the decision to choose between classes had importance, and informed many of the early choices, in Threads? Outside of a couple instances early in the thread, sect lessons have no narrative importance.
 
Erebeal said:
So, I question I would like to pose here is about Plan Votes - why are you engaged - or not engaged - with them?

If you have been engaged in the past perhaps, back in Forge, but have since dropped off - why?

If you do still like them, what is it that you like?
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Because we've already solved them all. There's nothing left to do. (Also, for all I can follow the math easily, I am not very good at using spreadsheets, so I don't actually have much to contribute, just understand.)

As far as the wider topic goes, the short answer is that I agree with Erebeal (or Black Noise, but they're quieter on this topic) on almost everything they've said so far.
 
We don't know what you have and haven't already tested, or at least I don't. Therefore I will mostly be giving my feedback by describing my reading experience, rather than attempting to make any actual mechanical suggestions/direction.

What decisions are actually being made by LQ when she charts out her every waking moment and optimal pill usage? Mostly just an order of priorities. Her amount of progress is, as far as I can tell, relatively set; she just has to distribute it each week. Every so often she commits to take advantage of a special pill or other bonus. Additionally tying up AP with hosting parties with Wang or the family AP or otherwise being drawn in to being-human/living-life/not-cultivating needs to have a continual tension against LQ's desire to cultivate and reach personal power, and is the primary tension in her cultivation decision-making.

Something notably absent in my experience is that I don't feel any tension from Cai Shenhua's imposed goal now that LQ just sort of...climbs the ranks automatically, even if I feel like she's climbing them too slowly to reach that goal on her own. I feel like she needs mission-decisions in which a choice is given between the possibility of a better performance in the eyes of the Sect versus the possibility of a better performance in some metric that the Sect doesn't care about, or an option to dedicate AP to getting ranks or something...I'm very distant from the planning nowadays, so I don't know if that's already an option. I don't even know what the cultivation/AP plans for each turn is, or where I could find it if I wanted to know. Sect rank, now that dueling is gone, is completely abstract and I don't feel like LQ can even try to improve it on her own.

In terms of arts, a lot of LQ's art choices in this thread feel like...things the math cabal decided she needed to fill a mechanical hole, rather than because she was herself worried about some problem, or had uncovered some flaw in her approach. Supposedly she spars frequently as a part of her cultivation, so I imagine that I'm supposed to imagine that she discovers those mechanical holes as narrative incapabilities. But I never hear about it, and having such arts become integral parts of herself via insights is underwhelming. At the same time, I appreciate that LQ's abilities have vastly outgrown what can succinctly expressed by fewer techniques than she has. The level of granularity that arts have gives them a dimension of progression that is very important. I do like reading the big blocks of techniques as descriptions of 'LQ can do this now' and 'when LQ does the thing she also does this other thing'. I don't like reading 'LQ does this slightly better'.

I only care about a much smaller number of her arts now: Wind Thief, FSS, Songseeker's Ceremony, PLR...that's it. I can't name most of them. FSS and PLR are carryovers. Newer arts have less meaning to me unless they are earned in a story beat. Dirge is cool because I like LQ harking back for inspiration in general. But that's personal preference and so I imagine only a minority of readers care about each of the majority of arts. There's a Glacier art whose themes gel but I really cannot say that I've seen it in action and been proud of having picked it. The Cai-art-drop was somewhat momentum-stealing, in that sense. It was a story beat, but I don't care about most of those arts. This is a consequence of having institutional support more than anything and I imagine that going forward as LQ is mandated to make and modify her own arts that such a thing won't happen.

There was a brief bit in which flight, multipresence, and something else? were floated before readers as capabilities that develop depending on a Green's predilections as they move into the fourth realm. I felt like LQ's art choices would really matter in that moment, that she had capabilities different from other Greens that depended on her character. But that moment quickly fell away into the melange of art...stuff. We have very little indication of how LQ compares with her peers. Her duels made this sort of thing apparent, or her bout with Wang. But when she fights Cloud Tribe or Shishigui there's no real sense of Ling Qiness to the fights except music as flavor text.

She has completely ignored the cultivation hiccup/heart demon. I can't say that it made any kind of change to her training plans or cultivation at all, just that her magic heart skips a magic beat every once in a while, in addition to her actual heart. I feel like it should necessitate such changes, the way that an injury can require physical therapy, because ultimately it is a spiritual injury, or a cramp or something.

Additionally the rolls are essentially a formality at the amounts of dice that she has. Early on there was a legitimately variant amount of progress and that variance was very grokkable due to having a small amount of dice. I don't read the spoilers anymore because they are filled with too many numbers. But I remember in the first quest opening up those rollblocks and looking with trepidation whether she hit specific progress thresholds or not, and feeling relieved or happy when LQ rolled above average or extremely well. That sense of anticipation is completely gone. This is part of why I care less about most arts.

Insights work for me, to an extent, as they are tangible representations of character through mechanics. But I have no idea if they are significant or just handy bonuses, and the difference between a normal insight and an advanced one is completely opaque. I can conceptualize arts as being specific qi flows that LQ has trained to replicate on command in order to produce a phenomenon. But what is an insight in her cultivation, and what happens to it when she advances it? Physiologically she has meridians (which are another thing that I feel have lost weight in mechanical decisionmaking), and she has to adapt those to her arts in order to use them, or something. But insights have no such correspondence that I can tell.
 
So, what did planning ever do for us?

With all that said about the problems of planning, one may be tempted to ditch it entirely... However, I think we should be careful here. The impact of planning on the quest and story is deep and profound, and should not be underestimated. As I noted, back when things started in Forge, our main means of interaction with the world and LQ was through plan votes. The quest is structured around turns because of the needs of the plan votes, which creates a bunch of problems for narrative structure and flow, while also perhaps contributing to the general slice-of-life feel of much of the quest.

So what's the point of it all?

Broadly, I think they serve several important goals:
  1. Providing a sense of engagement and ownership over LQ's progression as a cultivator
  2. Facilitating the connection between cultivation progress and one's wallet
  3. Helping us get into head of someone trying to cultivate at this level via time management
The story is very much about LQ's growth as a cultivator, and the plan votes, where we get to make decisions about how she grows and manage her time are core to engaging with that. Lots of people have mentioned how they really value the sense of growth and "number going up" - the problem these days is that that feeling isn't really coming through well due to the problems we've discussed previously.

The plan votes, with their flexibility, are also where we get to introduce some of our own ideas like FSS+ or getting new Arts - again facilitating that sense of ownership and engagement.

The link between wealth and cultivation (and it being a metaphor for capitalism :V) is also really important to the worldbuilding. It's gotten kind of weak as we keep having too much money, but maintaining that connection is really thematically important I think.

Time management has, unfortunately, kind of dropped off the radar due to us uh removing all competing interests from plan votes. Which did make things way less interesting imo. While I'd like to get it back, I'd also see it as less thematically critical than growth and economy. This was also one of our avenues of self-expression, as we got to decide on what we were doing - while these days so much of our time is taken up by the main story quest. It can be difficult to juggle our income if we don't get to make choices around doing stuff to make money.

Now, growth is arguably the easiest one to maintain even if we kill plans - the standard "here's an XP/power vote after an arc" system used by many narrative quests manages that well anyway. The bigger challenge there I think is how to maintain the connection to our wallet and income. Managing the accounts without that straightforward connection to time may be much fiddlier.

The other challenge in the immediate turn is just maintaining some sense of consistency with the way things are right now - i.e. making sure it doesn't suddenly feel like our progression has just nosedived, or that we never get to do anything about our finances, or that our finances and progression are abitrary. Similarly, right now we still have lots and lots of Arts we have to juggle (though thankfully many of them are getting close to being done). Moving to a system where, say, we vote on single things to upgrade at a time has to grapple with the fact that right now we still have lots of different things we need to train, and so it would be easy for our progression to suddenly grind to a halt as we don't get enough opportunities to upgrade all the things we need to work on. Theoretically should be more manageable in the future, but the immediate system stuff may be challenging.

tldr; maintaining a sense of control and engagement with growth and finance is important I feel, and currently that's what planning is used for. Any replacement system needs to think about how to handle these core themes.
 
yrsillar said:
Okay guys, so as some of you may know I'm trucking away at ideas to make the mechanical systems underlying this quest more comprehensible and engaging. I have gone through a couple ruleset ideas at this point and discussed things with a few people, but before I go any further I would like to get some feedback from you, the players.

What sort of mechanics do you think would be engaging and fun to interact with, how much input do you want on arts development and cultivation in general. What things about the current system do you dislike and what parts of it do you like?

Basically I'd like a read on what the thread wants out of the game part of this project to help me better design the future system.
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I came into this quest rather late in the first thread, by which point the general mechanics were already more complicated than I could deal with. I'm here for the character votes and I sometimes vote on arts if one seems cool, but anything related to numbers or even insights at this point is opaque to me.
Erebeal said:
So, I question I would like to pose here is about Plan Votes - why are you engaged - or not engaged - with them?

If you have been engaged in the past perhaps, back in Forge, but have since dropped off - why?

If you do still like them, what is it that you like?
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The best thing you could add to this quest is a 'characters to interact with' section to the plan votes. People have been complaining for awhile that Bao Qian is basically the default husbando because you haven't been able to find narrative space to introduce anyone else. If you leave a selected list of characters at the bottom of the plan vote and say we can choose to interact with half of them this month I will gladly jump in to knife fight with the other voters in plan votes. As of right now plan votes are just a bunch of boring incomprehensible jargon.

Also insights could be reworked to give us some hints on broader consequences, we already get hints on plenty of other vote types, and it would really help make sense of the philosophical platitudes that can be interpreted 20 different ways.
 
Oh god this has become a lot longer than planned.

As someone who gradually dropped out of the planning and even to a great extent the voting process I have to echo a lot of the thoughts other people have put up.

Firstly, the number system and derived stats are confusing. Really confusing. As a new or disinterested player and not overly attached to the math I open up the stats spoiler and oh god.

Like, even the base attributes are confusing. They're all letter based, except qi which is letter and number based. Ok, so I go to the tutorial spoiler for attributes. It explains what each attribute does. Great. What do the letters mean in actual game terms? No clue. I know from Anime that S is really good and E is pretty bad but beyond that it gives me no useful info. What does someone 'average' have for at checks green 9/10? No idea and the tutorial isn't helping.

Never mind opening the derived stats page which looks like someone went insane with a bar chart creator and a colour palette. The Derived Attributes tutorial is only useful in telling me that higher numbers are probably better but not the end of the world. All of which means I look at the turn plans and go.... Nope I have no clue and don't have 6 hours to do the introductory reading.

In other engagement terms. Big question 1. Where do I vote for Social actions? No seriously, how do I vote to see more of Su Ling or Li Suyin or Meizhen? It used to be minor actions but that's gone. I checked the end of turn vote, but it was all mechanics. I checked 4 or 5 votes forward but there was no option to talk to specific people, only deal with people we're already talking to. How do I see more of the characters I like?

Or combat. How can I contribute? The last combat encounter I remember was in (checks). November 2020. With the corpse immortal. And there our options were: steal it's power and return later. Or fight it right now. Can I come up with clever tactics using known abilities that contribute to the encounter? Nope. Can I think about our loadout and how this might affect things? Well checking through the arc I can't see any sort of option to pick our loadout for scouting and I'm not sure we even do art swapping like we did in forge either. Can I even roll some dice to feel marginally useful? If I can the updates don't indicate anything.

I also have to say I have also felt almost no danger in anything other than social situations. We minced the combat encounters we went through, never once being on the defensive. Heck, even in the social encounters, there is never a [] write in option. No room to be clever or think up something new alongside the premade options. Just pick a card.

Remember the Glorious chase with Sun Liling through the mountains? That was tense. We could lose, and lose meaningfully even if we would still have had options. I don't feel that anymore. I barely even feel it in the huge social diplomatic arcs. How do I lose in a way that is meaningful without being a complete idiot?

Finally, (lack of) Numbers go up is a problem, but it's also a problem with the turn length. It's too.... short. In terms of time covered I mean. Firstly, in terms of numbers go up there's no meaningful variability anymore. Especially since things take so much longer to get to. And the stakes have all but vanished. With the war seemingly all but over, the sect ranking challenges and intersect tournament no longer a consideration and Ling Qi shifted to all diplomacy all the time, what is the short term* incentive that makes green 10 so much better than green 9.5? Especially since there are very few visible rolls anymore (none outside cultivation/art/skill exp that I found) and I barely understand how arts influence anything beyond character direction and a bit of fluff.

Finally, the long term plot. Let's talk about the Heart demon for a minute shall we. We developed the heart demon on December 17 2019. And frankly, there has been barely any actual forward movement on truly clearing it up. Now I'm all for not resolving things too easily and having long running plot elements but that was a year and a half ago and we're still ages away from a proper resolution. Now part of that is that turns take months to resolve, but that is a massive pacing problem in itself.

Which all comes back to the fact that in large terms this has become a story, not a quest. Even the most recent big decision, whether to focus on White Sky Diplomacy or the long promised sect tournament, it felt like you were almost forcing yourself to ask the thread whether to continue the planned direction or go the direction you thought made more in story sense.

EDIT: I can't really see a way to significantly increase voter engagement without taking away some of that story control, which would obviously be an issue for publishing this as a story.

*I.e. Anything that matters in the next 5 years of in story time. Or approximately the several IRL years.
 
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This is less related to the theory of structure overall rather than a specific instance, but that's vaguely close enough so now's not the worst time to bring it up. Specifically, I don't think we should launch the FSS+ project next turn. We have some unfinished business that would make it awkward, and it's a turn that's going to be very focused on (a lot of) political matters that don't seem easy to relate to the project. We don't want main politics plot and FSS+ crowding each other out; that's unfair to both.

First, we're still currently in the middle of an art project with Zhengui. I'd like to wrap that up concretely before moving on to making our first successor. Taking a break to deal with FSS+ first would just destroy the already tenuous flow of our project with Zhengui, and it's to our benefit to put to rest some of the character conflicts Ling Qi is dealing with before working on the successor anyway. Unsettled issues are a distraction we don't need and doesn't make sense from an in-universe perspective anyway. Ling QI should finish her thoughts on WHR's transformation before moving onto another major art project. Better to be able to focus on the themes and issues unique to the FSS+ arc without a backlog of unresolved character development cluttering things up. And in terms of finishing the Zhengui project off and then moving on to FSS+ all in next month, I definitely don't think there's room.

Second, as alluded to above, it's a really busy month. There's the year-end tournament. That's a possible Shenhua meeting, the Bai meeting we know is happening, touching base with Renxiang on whatever issues come up, and a probable additional meeting or two; the Bao, Meng, and Xuan have reasons to want to speak with us in some capacity. Then there's the actual tournament itself with Gan Guangli's performance at the forefront, the Han duo's reintroduction to the cast roster, and any other surprises that pop up. Luo Zhong and Bai Meizhen joining the Wang training group and the advancement of the Luo/Qingling plot is happening soon, I think this upcoming month. Sun Liling's return and the accompanying political tension.

And last, the kinds of narratives brought up by the things we're aware of on the docket don't match the themes and tone of FSS all that well, in my opinion. Reflecting on the nature of Zeqing's existence and what it means to us, and what steps we want to take on our own path, don't flow well from a busy high-stakes political/social intrigue month. It's very far from the nature of the art and mentor, with few if any connecting themes. Meditating on it all under the new-year's tournament's looming shadow strikes me as tonally incongruous.

A better opportunity to reflect on the necessary things might be during Hanyi's concert tour. Not a 1-to-1 match, I think. Both she and Ling Qi need their own independent space to work Zeqing-related matters out, but limited conference is only sensible. And Hanyi exercising her chosen nature with her concerts is a good opportunity for Ling Qi to reflect on her own Wintery development.
 
The main thing preventing the mechanics from being a source of engagement at this point, IMO, is that we can't fail. I don't mean in the sense of "is it possible to fail specific things," because obviously we can. I mean overall, in a big way, we can't lose the quest, because this isn't just a quest anymore where if the players fuck up too much and the dice go wild the QM shrugs and goes "sorry, you died." It's a story which is being published and is being constrained in the way that non-interactive stories are constrained. There is no way in hell yrsillar is going to let us fuck up that badly. What's he gonna do, cut off the future novel mid-book and blueball all the Royal Road and Amazon readers?

This isn't a bad thing. There are lots of quests that work that way, where the story is dramatically structured in the same way novels are dramatically structured, and questers are asked to vote for which particular story beat happens next or how a dramatic situation evolves. They're narrative quests, and they're fine and I read them and like them. But you can't lose them because you aren't playing them, because it's not a game to be played, it's a story to be steered: instead of questers saying "we do this" and the QM saying "this is what the consequences of that are," the QM asks "what thing happens next" and the questers pick. Threads of Destiny has moved heavily in that direction and I think yrsillar should just embrace it and lean into it rather than try to split the difference and drag mechanics back into the spotlight.
Erebeal said:
So, I question I would like to pose here is about Plan Votes - why are you engaged - or not engaged - with them?
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One thing which has been alluded to a little bit but which ties into my broader point above is that plan votes used to be a place where questers exercised the bulk of their agency and picked what things to do during the time period. Questers could proactively seek to solve problems or decide that they wanted to hang out with X as part of the primary voting structure of the quest: they got to decide which narratives to engage with. Now, though, the bulk of our agency is exercised between plan votes, in response to specific arc votes that yrsillar poses to us, and the actual plan vote is deciding which numbers are going up by how much, and yrsillar decides which narratives get engaged with on what schedule. "Proactively working on the heart demon," for instance, was never a thing that was possible for us to do, or "which classes do we want to seek out to learn more about a specific thing?" So if the quest has de-emphasized our numbers and emphasized narrative arcs, but the plan vote is entirely about numbers and has nothing to do with our narrative arcs, it's not a surprise that there's been less engagement with the plan votes.
 
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Little late to the party, but I think I would like narrative traits to be included in someway. Like one could be "Student of the Songstress", which would give some flavour text surrounding the effect our time under Zeqing, which would in turn affect how Ling Qi acts or is perceived as we go through the story. I have no idea how to handle combat, I'll admit.
 
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I really liked the LFotWT training scene and I think it would be worth making the default: LQ sees some opportunity to practice an Art, has some kind of personal experience with it, and then we vote on what she takes away from it.

The art modification narrative for WHR/UGM was much better than the one for RME, though I think that RME's final vote on what we changed worked really well (though I doubt it will come up anytime soon). Keywords are not a good tool to modify arts with and always seem really awkward.

I've never felt like us "mastering" an art actually came with any real mastery from LQ and there are so many that I honestly can't keep track of our abilities. I would prefer Arts to be analogous to "kendo", "jiujitsu", "boxing", "jazz singer", and "gymnast": broad skills that have a coherent approach and which one can spend an entire lifetime mastering. Right now we have Arts that are more equivalent to "punch" or "jump" (with techs being analogous to "uppercut" or "jab") and that's far too much granularity to care about.

Our cultivation art (Songseeker's Ceremony) feels like it should influence every part of our cultivation but honestly it barely does anything in the narrative. Its big thing is that it rewards us for behaving in a way appropriate for our patrons (right?) but how would anyone who only reads the story even know about that?

I think the stat system is pretty awkward as it ends up sharing a lot of ground with Arts and it feels like the skills are from a generic system rather than integrated into the setting. For instance the empire doesn't seem to make a firm distinction between spirits and spirit beasts, so why are Animal Handling and Spirit Ken separate skills? On the other hand Sable Grace is an excellent skill that comes through clearly in the narrative. It would likely be productive to think of what LQ would say her various skills are instead of coming up with a universal system.

We don't need to make a budget for our finances because we always have enough to pay for all our expenses at basically the highest level and its been firmly established that LQ won't skimp on her own cultivation. Until that dynamic changes I don't see the point of asking us for budgets, just create a cursory one and keep track of how much we have left after cultivation.

While not actually about mechanics, picklepikki's point about us never actually failing is a good one. Ling Qi has spent the last year and some of her life being babysat by higher realm cultivators. She could potentially completely screw up and not actually die because there is someone nearby whose job is to rescue her. So why not have that be a thing that happens? She gets overconfident and puts herself in over her head and some Cyan or Indigo has to take a moment to save her instead of pursuing their other goals, causing some negative consequence for our objective because we distracted them. By removing death as a consequence we can be allowed to fail without disrupting the quest. The encounter with Black Sky Yearning is a good example of how this would work: our survival wasn't in question, just CRX's continued wellbeing and maybe a bit of how the meeting with the WSC went.
 
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I will say I do like art selection and career votes because of the narrative weight. Getting to choose what Ling Qi uses and have that baked into who she literally is as a person is something I would be disappointed in seeing discarded.
 
picklepikkl said:
The main thing preventing the mechanics from being a source of engagement at this point, IMO, is that we can't fail. I don't mean in the sense of "is it possible to fail specific things," because obviously we can. I mean overall, in a big way, we can't lose the quest, because this isn't just a quest anymore where if the players fuck up too much and the dice go wild the QM shrugs and goes "sorry, you died." It's a story which is being published and is being constrained in the way that non-interactive stories are constrained. There is no way in hell yrsillar is going to let us fuck up that badly. What's he gonna do, cut off the future novel mid-book and blueball all the Royal Road and Amazon readers?

This isn't a bad thing. There are lots of quests that work that way, where the story is dramatically structured in the same way novels are dramatically structured, and questers are asked to vote for which particular story beat happens next or how a dramatic situation evolves. They're narrative quests, and they're fine and I read them and like them. But you can't lose them because you aren't playing them, because it's not a game to be played, it's a story to be steered: instead of questers saying "we do this" and the QM saying "this is what the consequences of that are," the QM asks "what thing happens next" and the questers pick. Threads of Destiny has moved heavily in that direction and I think yrsillar should just embrace it and lean into it rather than try to split the difference and drag mechanics back into the spotlight.

One thing which has been alluded to a little bit but which ties into my broader point above is that plan votes used to be a place where questers exercised the bulk of their agency and picked what things to do during the time period. Questers could proactively seek to solve problems or decide that they wanted to hang out with X as part of the primary voting structure of the quest: they got to decide which narratives to engage with. Now, though, the bulk of our agency is exercised between plan votes, in response to specific arc votes that yrsillar poses to us, and the actual plan vote is deciding which numbers are going up by how much, and yrsillar decides which narratives get engaged with on what schedule. "Proactively working on the heart demon," for instance, was never a thing that was possible for us to do, or "which classes do we want to seek out to learn more about a specific thing?" So if the quest has de-emphasized our numbers and emphasized narrative arcs, but the plan vote is entirely about numbers and has nothing to do with our narrative arcs, it's not a surprise that there's been less engagement with the plan votes.
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I would say that despite stating it outright I feel that this post sort of glosses over the really important point. We can't fail. No really. We can't fail. That is a problem in story structure just as much as quest structure.

In most good stories there comes the time where the hero does fail. Where the odds get too much. The stakes too high. The Darkest hour. This story is lacking that, because of it's very hybrid nature where it has essentially become neither a quest nor a story.

From the point of view of this as a quest, that "proactively working on the heart demon" was not something we could do is actually a massive part of the problem. Because causing that heart demon was something the thread did. It was a problem caused by us using our limited agency to make a specific choice. That we can't use that same agency to fix it in any timely fashion drives disengagement.

Similarly it is very hard to replicate that same sense of loss you might see in a pure story, because it's a quest and the players need to be provided a way to win. Oddly enough I would say the move to almost a pure narrative style has actually weakened the ability for the story to have that darkest hour. Since moving almost totally away from the random element that dice introduced, the ability for Yrsillar to provide that loss without it feeling extremely forced and unfair to the players has decreased.

Take (again) the Liling fight in the mountains in Forge. We could have lost that. If we hadn't had very good rolls we might have. But with the dice there*, that loss is within the player's expectations. It feels inherently part of the game. By contrast in the current system, where every obstacle, social or combative, has about 3 possible options it is inherently harder to provide a loss without a massive amount of anger and possible screaming of "trap option".

In part this is also due to the much longer time each turn takes. Any loss takes literal months of IRL time to be fully written out and have consequences appear. Never mind the possible wait of years IRL before resolution comes (looking at you Heart demon). In most stories, that major darkest hour is a chapter or two, before things pick back up again. This is a major structural issue as a story as well as a quest.

The last big actually possible to fail thing I remember is a good example. Which is where we got trapped by the mountain spirit and chose to shatter Renxiang's illusions rather than talk her round. For the sake of the story, the best thing would probably have have been to try to talk her round. Hell trying and failing would have been a great story beat. It would also have caused salt for weeks. That it required a roll (meaning actual risk) for the first time in probably months IRL likely didn't help (since players are no longer accustomed to major choices having chance as a major component). The hybrid nature worked against things again.

EDIT * There and visible on a consistent basis.
 
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Humbaba said:
I would say that despite stating it outright I feel that this post sort of glosses over the really important point. We can't fail. No really. We can't fail. That is a problem in story structure just as much as quest structure.

In most good stories there comes the time where the hero does fail. Where the odds get too much. The stakes too high. The Darkest hour. This story is lacking that, because of it's very hybrid nature where it has essentially become neither a quest nor a story.

From the point of view of this as a quest, that "proactively working on the heart demon" was not something we could do is actually a massive part of the problem. Because causing that heart demon was something the thread did. It was a problem caused by us using our limited agency to make a specific choice. That we can't use that same agency to fix it in any timely fashion drives massive disengagement.

Similarly it is very hard to replicate that same sense of loss you might see in a pure story, because it's a quest and the players need to be provided a way to win. Oddly enough I would say the move to almost a pure narrative style has actually weakened the ability for the story to have that darkest hour. Since moving almost totally away from the random element that dice introduced, the ability for Yrsillar to provide that loss without it feeling extremely forced and unfair to the players has decreased.

Take (again) the Liling fight in the mountains in Forge. We could have lost that. If we hadn't had very good rolls we might have. But with the dice there, that loss is within the player's expectations. It feels inherently part of the game. By contrast in the current system, where every obstacle, social or combative, has about 3 possible options it is inherently harder to provide a loss without a massive amount of anger and possible screaming of "trap option".

In part this is also due to the much longer time each turn takes. Any loss takes literal months of IRL time to be fully written out and have consequences appear. Never mind the possible wait of years IRL before resolution comes (looking at you Heart demon). In most stories, that major darkest hour is a chapter or two, before things pick back up again. This is a major structural issue as a story as well as a quest.

The last big actually possible to fail thing I remember is a good example. Which is where we got trapped by the mountain spirit and chose to shatter Renxiang's illusions rather than talk her round. For the sake of the story, the best thing would probably have have been to try to talk her round. Hell trying and failing would have been a great story beat. It would also have caused salt for weeks. That it required a roll (meaning actual risk) for the first time in probably months IRL didn't help (since players are no longer accustomed to major choices having chance as a major component). The hybrid nature worked against things again.
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I think this brings up some great ideas, but I disagree with the idea that moving away from probability has limited Yrs ability to have Ling Qi fail. Our dice at this point makes randomness almost meaningless, we so consistently get average results because our dice pool is just too big. I think the failures that Yrs has had Ling Qi go through have been most meaningful in the narrative sense.

An example of this is Ling Qi's failures with Zhengui. For so long Ling Qi didn't even realize that Zhengui had different needs. Failing Zhengui emotionally has been one of the most consistent pieces of early Threads and only recently have we begun working on it. To my knowledge this was done entirely narratively, a failure crafted without any dice rolling. And that does bring us to your compliant with the Heart Demon.

I personally think the issue many people have with the heart demon is as you described, no agency. The questers really had no way to interact with such a crucial issue that has been the driving force of many of Ling Qi's internal thoughts. I have come around though, to the idea that this is a good thing. It provides a narrative problem in the background that can only be solved when Yrs wants it to be solved. The heart demon provides a framework to build narrative around, much like the war. Yet unlike the war, which is a problem focused outward, the heart demon is a problem focused inward. This allows really cool sequences where Yrs can jump between problem sets. Much like the walking to the ice ladies. There was a lot of cool back and forth scenes between dealing with the external threats and then shifting to internal problems.

If Yrs allowed the thread to proactively go after the heart demon the thread would expect the heart demon to be resolved much sooner, costing that framework and the impact of future arcs.

I do think it is important for players to have agency in choosing the path Ling Qi takes, but I also think that it is just as important for the story to have these framework issues that Ling Qi is trying to overcome to build narrative arcs around.
 
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I would propose that with plan votes we need to make it less about numbers and more integrate more stuff the way our family was. Have a list of characters we are guaranteed to have some meaningful interaction with that turn (Ling Qingee, CRX, Biyu, Bao Qian, Wang Chao, etc). Then make a list of another 10-12 characters and say the 5 or 6 that get the most votes will also get some screen time beyond a throwaway greeting in one scene. Allow for 1 write in option that will be added if it gets enough votes and is possible and doesn't derail the narrative. Add this to plan votes. Disclaimer that Yrsillar will also include any character he feels like in addition to the ones voted for.

Budget stuff can come back to prominence once we're running a fief and resource numbers and allocation actually impact the story, right now we've got a budget that could run a small town that we're feeding a family of 6 with.

Most votes have a (Will probably result in X, Y, and Z) in parentheses next to them, we really need this for insights. Each one can be individually interpreted at least 6 different ways and collectively it's a quagmire.

Yrsillar also needs freedom to change up the structure on a case by case basis. People have been talking about how it doesn't feel like there's tension in the story and I really felt that in the ice people arc. Because of the monthly turn system and the way our decisions couldn't result in changes to the monthly plans we already voted for, the 'epic journey to the other side of hostile untamed territory supposedly the size of the entire freaking Emerald Seas that no one had records of since the literal founding father of our province/kingdom travelled there countless millennia ago' lacked any real tension. Such a journey should have had a hundred different ways we could have made a mistake that still advanced the story in an interesting way, even without ruining too many long term plans, but we never even had an option for a minor fuckup that resulted in us taking 2 or 3 months to get back or have a companion die.
Don't get me wrong, it's also one of my favorite arcs, but the journey there and back feels very bare.

Similar to this we should also have an optional 'general goal' section of plan votes. Some months have big things set up well in advance, but months that don't have something big like a meeting with Shenhua or a tournament scheduled should have options like 'Try to understand Heart Demon,' 'Dedicate time to the war effort,' 'Do a task for the Moon,' etc.

Basically a bit more narrative investment and a lot less numbers.
 
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memoryofglory said:
I would propose that with plan votes we need to make it less about numbers and more integrate more stuff the way our family was. Have a list of characters we are guaranteed to have some meaningful interaction with that turn (Ling Qingee, CRX, Biyu, Bao Qian, Wang Chao, etc). Then make a list of another 10-12 characters and say the 5 or 6 that get the most votes will also get some screen time beyond a throwaway greeting in one scene. Allow for 1 write in option that will be added if it gets enough votes and is possible and doesn't derail the narrative. Add this to plan votes. Disclaimer that Yrsillar will also include any character he feels like in addition to the ones voted for.

Budget stuff can come back to prominence once we're running a fief and resource numbers and allocation actually impact the story, right now we've got a budget that could run a small town that we're feeding a family of 6 with.

Most votes have a (Will probably result in X, Y, and Z) in parentheses next to them, we really need this for insights. Each one can be individually interpreted at least 6 different ways and collectively it's a quagmire.

Yrsillar also needs freedom to change up the structure on a case by case basis. People have been talking about how it doesn't feel like there's tension in the story and I really felt that in the ice people arc. Because of the monthly turn system and the way our decisions couldn't result in changes to the monthly plans we already voted for, the 'epic journey to the other side of hostile untamed territory supposedly the size of the entire freaking Emerald Seas that no one had records of since the literal founding father of our province/kingdom travelled there countless millennia ago' lacked any real tension. Such a journey should have had a hundred different way we could have made a mistake that still advanced the story in an interesting way, even without ruining too many long term plans, but we never even had an option for a minor fuckup that resulted in us taking 2 or 3 months to get back or have a companion die.
Don't get me wrong, it's also one of my favorite arcs, but the journey there and back feels very bare.

Similar to this we should also have an optional 'general goal' section of plan votes. Some months have big things set up well in advance, but months that don't have something big like a meeting with Shenhua or a tournament scheduled should have options like 'Try to understand Heart Demon,' 'Dedicate time to the war effort,' 'Do a task for the Moon,' etc.

Basically a bit more narrative investment and a lot less numbers.
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I really like the idea of adding general goals. It would be a way for Yrs to gauge what the questers are interested in with a single one line voting option.
 
Neshuakadal said:
Our dice at this point makes randomness almost meaningless, we so consistently get average results because our dice pool is just too big. I think the failures that Yrs has had Ling Qi go through have been most meaningful in the narrative sense.
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*IF* this is to be put forth of one of the bigger problems, moving away from randomness is not the appropriate solution to this. The solution to the problem of "giant dice pools make everything average" is "replace giant dice pools with giant multipliers" or "replace giant dice pools with a small pool of giant dice."

This is not to say that moving away from randomness is the wrong move, just that the averageness of giant dicepools is completely extraneous to the matter of moving away from randomness.
 
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