- Location
- Shakopee, MN
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18)
Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)
- Thread starter yrsillar
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Okay, the first part is fair. I still don't agree with it though. Su Ling already has engagements with the sect since they're the ones fighting an active war with the Ith-ai right now. I can see her helping if there are actual kiddies to train, but again, most of them have young and haven't reached the proper age for cultivation.
I don't really read it as Ling Qi actually taking care of it here? She takes note of it and acknowledges it as something to be careful of, but she doesn't say she cares. Focusing on the Foundations will show that she cares.
And she's not just saying "it's rude to kill the Ith-ai". She's actively working towards curtailing xenophobic behaviour and supporting the group Shenhua found. She's focused on group responsible, and emphasized it. They're very different responses.
And for the grudge for Foundations? Yes. It's not new. It's an infection that's about to turn into rot. Just like with the city we just saved, before we stopped the attack and brought an audit and the full attention of the MoL and Viscount. Working on it seems prudent imo. Especially when the grudge against the Ith-ai can be focused after the summit, when the Ith-ai will become more relevant to us because of the WAR ARC, or when Long Arm III is brought back.
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18)
- Location
- scrabbling
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18)
- Location
- United States of America, Michigan
[x] Garden of Sinners-Focus your efforts on the Central Valley and Diao lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18)
I just keep coming back to the continuity issue.
So, we teamed up with Diao Hualing to do some skullduggery, and while we unfortunately didn't get a lot of time actually interacting with her, it was a neat look into some setting details around the ministries, and it ended(paused) on a neat upswell of action and triumph. It's the perfect ending(pause) to transition to some of that more direct politics action we were promised at the start of things. But apparently, with this vote, we have to commit in that direction or it won't happen.
And that reveals some problems. If we don't go Garden of Sinners here, then Diao Hualing falls off the face of the planet for 4+ months, till after the summit. There's no other angle for her character to be involved in, well, anything. Long Arm of the Law, fox kids, neither's getting touched till after the summit, and probably not for a while afterwards, either. So the question becomes, what was the point of all that buildup/introduction for Diao Hualing, if she's just going to disappear from the planet immediately after it. It doesn't make sense, in or out of character.
Meanwhile, @yrsillar has told us this vote is for things adjacent to summit prep. So Wang continuity is assured either way. There's no narrative failure introduced by not picking the Wang, here. It's fine, it just works.
Relatedly, I see a lot of excitement for the Wang's positive impact on our fief's development. And that's true and valuable! They're established to be helpful on that front in a number of ways. The thing though is that the bulk of fief engagement can't really start until after the summit on turn 20, when we have time to focus on it and we start spinning up generally fief-related plotlines. Getting started working on Wang sympathies a bit earlier is certain to help, but there's kind of a scheduling issue here. Turn 20 is also the earliest we can possibly reengage with Diao Hualing(also Meng stuff probably comes alive again), but the fief being available means there will be an incredible drive to pursue Wang actions at the same time. It's basically guaranteed.
What this means is picking Wang here is basically pre-emptively double-dipping, and it sends the Diao engagement we've been working on to the shadow realm right now while making the prospect of picking it up again doubly-tenuous.
I want to be clear there's absolutely nothing wrong with double-dipping the Wang. The Wang are cool. The problem is having the all Diao buildup that we've had completely fail to have any payoff and then fuck off from the universe for 4+ months and the core establishment of our political legacy with the summit. It'd basically erase the narrative investment that we've made so far, in a totally senseless way. Fundamentally, there was no point in Diao Hualing existing at all, if her involvement in the story is going to fizzle out like this.
It does not read well. Tbh, I'm not sure the premise of this vote is healthy for the narrative in general. We should be compounding and leveraging our political connections for unified benefit, not axing ones we've invested in from our life.
So, we teamed up with Diao Hualing to do some skullduggery, and while we unfortunately didn't get a lot of time actually interacting with her, it was a neat look into some setting details around the ministries, and it ended(paused) on a neat upswell of action and triumph. It's the perfect ending(pause) to transition to some of that more direct politics action we were promised at the start of things. But apparently, with this vote, we have to commit in that direction or it won't happen.
And that reveals some problems. If we don't go Garden of Sinners here, then Diao Hualing falls off the face of the planet for 4+ months, till after the summit. There's no other angle for her character to be involved in, well, anything. Long Arm of the Law, fox kids, neither's getting touched till after the summit, and probably not for a while afterwards, either. So the question becomes, what was the point of all that buildup/introduction for Diao Hualing, if she's just going to disappear from the planet immediately after it. It doesn't make sense, in or out of character.
Meanwhile, @yrsillar has told us this vote is for things adjacent to summit prep. So Wang continuity is assured either way. There's no narrative failure introduced by not picking the Wang, here. It's fine, it just works.
Relatedly, I see a lot of excitement for the Wang's positive impact on our fief's development. And that's true and valuable! They're established to be helpful on that front in a number of ways. The thing though is that the bulk of fief engagement can't really start until after the summit on turn 20, when we have time to focus on it and we start spinning up generally fief-related plotlines. Getting started working on Wang sympathies a bit earlier is certain to help, but there's kind of a scheduling issue here. Turn 20 is also the earliest we can possibly reengage with Diao Hualing(also Meng stuff probably comes alive again), but the fief being available means there will be an incredible drive to pursue Wang actions at the same time. It's basically guaranteed.
What this means is picking Wang here is basically pre-emptively double-dipping, and it sends the Diao engagement we've been working on to the shadow realm right now while making the prospect of picking it up again doubly-tenuous.
I want to be clear there's absolutely nothing wrong with double-dipping the Wang. The Wang are cool. The problem is having the all Diao buildup that we've had completely fail to have any payoff and then fuck off from the universe for 4+ months and the core establishment of our political legacy with the summit. It'd basically erase the narrative investment that we've made so far, in a totally senseless way. Fundamentally, there was no point in Diao Hualing existing at all, if her involvement in the story is going to fizzle out like this.
It does not read well. Tbh, I'm not sure the premise of this vote is healthy for the narrative in general. We should be compounding and leveraging our political connections for unified benefit, not axing ones we've invested in from our life.
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- Location
- foraging for beans
I suppose the root of the problem here is that the Diao clan as a whole is something of a poor fit for LQ's goals. They strongly disagree with LQ's rationale for her core project right now, the Ice Lady summit. For the long term, they jettisoned their Weilu-era identity in favour of an Imperial one under the Hui and largely reject the Weilu revival LQ is trying to spearhead as a result. Their matriarch doesn't particularly like CRX, which isn't a huge deal, but is another straw on the metaphorical camel.
So yeah, we have some story hooks with them. But getting rewards from the Diao, like political support or material goods or expertise or whatever, is always going to take more actions, and cost more effort, than getting them from a clan that generally agrees with LQ means and goals. And since Cai Shenhua demands excellence, LQ needs to get the most from her time and effort. OK doesn't cut it. So I'd rather cut stop spending actions now than continue to develop the Diao plot lines and make it even harder to do so later.
It's like the whole thing with the Argent Arts way back when. Aside from Argent Mirror, which was great, LQ didn't have the element and skill bonuses to use them well. Argent Current required the unarmed skill, and LQ was quite bad at that, so IIRC we only kept it equipped because Pressure Crack was a great passive. We didn't use the active skills in real fights. And Argent Storm badly overlapped with Sable Crescent Step, so it barely got any use. But people just kept voting to put actions into them because of the Argent name, despite the fact that the arts themselves really didn't bring a lot of value to the table.
That's kind of where I feel the Diao are right now. We had to get their rep up so that they wouldn't actively interfer with LQ's plans, otherwise they're an action sink that doesn't provide as much value to LQ as other factions for the reasons I've given above. And LQ needs value for her actions here because yrs has said in the last update that the honeymoon period of easy rep is ending soonish. So I'd rather stop spending actions on them now that we've raised their rep to the point where they won't really try to mess with us. I'm not particularly fussed about putting Diao Hauling on the back burner to make that happen. If it happens, this vote is about building rep with the Diao clan and the Central Valley as a whole versus the Wang clan and the Foundations as a whole. We may still get a Diao Hualing coda if we pick the Wang choice, it just won't lead into the next plot line. And we can come back to her later, once we've got some actual allies. Which again, and I will not stop harping on this, we do not yet have.
Heck maybe in the interim we get Diao Hualing in touch with GG, he's more Imperial friendly and knows a thing or two about foxes.
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- Location
- South Africa
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18).
This I think is the better option for Ling Qi, although I would probably prefer to read about the garden of sinners.
This I think is the better option for Ling Qi, although I would probably prefer to read about the garden of sinners.
[X] Mountain Halls-Focus your efforts on building reputation and cachet in the Foundations and Wang lands(Events and chances to improve reputation will focus on these factions for turn 17 and 18).
Anchoring political support is vastly more important than seeking relational neutrality. As she is, Ling Qi's capacity to engage in political favor-trading is limited strictly to her personal abilities and access to Renxiang. This is not enough.
However, if Ling Qi acquires enough favor with any of the clans, she can subsequently trade on that when she deals with other clans. The Diao cannot help with this; her relationship with the Weilu traditions and the potential diplomatic feather in her cap with the summit, this the Diao are ideologically bound to oppose in the political sphere. Ling Qi cannot acquire such currency from them regardless of her actions before and during the summit.
The Wang, however, can see the value in Ling Qi's political presentation; a good outcome from the summit actually does generate favor with them. The more favor she can foster with them, the more of their good-will she can spend when she deals with other clans. Gaining a solid support base is foundational to being a political player. That's not something she can yet gain from the Diao. But Ling Qi can become influential in the councils of the Wang.
Anchoring political support is vastly more important than seeking relational neutrality. As she is, Ling Qi's capacity to engage in political favor-trading is limited strictly to her personal abilities and access to Renxiang. This is not enough.
However, if Ling Qi acquires enough favor with any of the clans, she can subsequently trade on that when she deals with other clans. The Diao cannot help with this; her relationship with the Weilu traditions and the potential diplomatic feather in her cap with the summit, this the Diao are ideologically bound to oppose in the political sphere. Ling Qi cannot acquire such currency from them regardless of her actions before and during the summit.
The Wang, however, can see the value in Ling Qi's political presentation; a good outcome from the summit actually does generate favor with them. The more favor she can foster with them, the more of their good-will she can spend when she deals with other clans. Gaining a solid support base is foundational to being a political player. That's not something she can yet gain from the Diao. But Ling Qi can become influential in the councils of the Wang.
Oliver_Twister
Idea-Man, He Who Shits Ideas
- Location
- West Africa
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The thing is, we're getting the Diao politics we were promised regardless of the choice that wins. It's missing info has been brought up to Yrs. We're getting it.
I disagree with the idea that not picking Hualing means that she's never existed at all. The Diao Hualing arc ended on a pretty good note with the whole attack and all. It even makes sense why we won't be able to talk to her, narratively. At this point MoL is going to be *very* busy, and so are we, because we're prepping for the summit, while all our other Diao plotlines are explicitly *not* about the summit. That's why Long Arm III is *not* available. The Ith-ai thread needs build-up, and while we're working on summit.
Yes, the Diao are important, but our upcoming goal is supposed to take center stage now, after it's been pushed to the ignored with no prep apart from bringing in ducals for the longest time. We've had how many plotlines with the Diao so far? Two/three? Have they payed off, in any way, even ignoring the summit? No. They have not! Because there's a lot of things we have go to through. And I'm very worried that things will continue to be this way, and the Diao will be a pointless action sink when we're supposed to be building our alliances and working with our internal (as in, in Emerald Seas) allies in preparation for the summit.
And fief development is not the only thing the Wang BRING. They can bring that, yes. We'll be done with our locked in fief project either this turn or next turn so more actions available. And I'll be extremely pleased if they bring some things to the table. But it's NOT the only thing that they bring. They're our allies, and Mountain Halls means we'll actually engage with them on a political level when we haven't done so in so long. You bring up the problem with pushing Hualing away for 4 plus months... we've done that to Wang Lian, our out-of-sect Wang political contact since turn 13 or so? And this will just mean we'll *continue* to do that for 3 more turns? When she's in a clan that actually supports us.
It's extremely frustrating when our allies and supporters are thrown to the side to keep chasing info on a clan that has had many chances but refuses to pay out. It's is even more frustrating because Yrsillar has confirmed that we'll get the Diao info we were supposed to get on turn 13 REGARDLESS of the vote that wins, so the whole idea of picking Garden of Sinners for said info is moot. And it boils over to annoyance when people say we'll still work with the Wang, and they'll be there with us anyway, when we've had no contact with them for 3 turns now, while the Diao, people who aren't our allies, have been favoured, when they don't even contribute to our current project.
I just want the vote that works well with actual summit prep, not disparate threads unrelated to it, and working with the Wang will give us that, since we'll get more opportunities to work with them in Mountain Halls.
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If rep is going to become more resistant to change soon, we need to lock in as much positive rep with Wang as we can soon. We have almost zero contact with them outside our friendship with Wang Chao - I think only one conversation with his sister? That's just foolish when they're the most important ES count clan for us. Getting from 2 rep to 3 now could be worth so, so much if doing the same later could cost, what, a year or more? Can you even imagine?
The frustration of it all is so much of this is supposition from ignorance. I don't mean that in a hostile or belittling way, I mean literal ignorance. We still don't know the deal with the Diao, basically. Not in a way that usefully informs our decisions. Decisions we're definitely going to make. Decisions like, painfully and frustratingly, literally this vote we're having right now.
Like, the point I'm trying to get across is yes we've invested time and effort into the Diao questline. But, also no we haven't? Turn 13 was the first stab at it and it got cut for time basically, with some shoring up by Linqin that didn't go anywhere. Turn 14, Diao Hualing was a pitstop on the way to another action, not her own, and that conversation got completely hijacked by Su Ling's stuff which was its own action we invested in for personal reasons. Turn 15 Long Arm of the Law is something we were already going to do and also it just had literally nothing related to the Diao in it whatsoever. Hou Zhuang's Gift has been a complicated and messy affair in general, and I don't think it's fair to attribute any of the choices we've made in it to pursuing Diao relationship points in specific.
So in total there's one action that we genuinely and truthfully invested in the Diao, all the way back at the start in turn 13, and it even gave us half of the things it promised by pausing the relationship from falling further. The issue isn't that we invested too much in the Diao or the Diao are a poor return on investment. The issue is that Diao progress got locked behind an awkward strung-out questline where that progress always played second fiddle, no matter how we voted. Which sucks, and it's definitely the exact opposite of what @yrsillar was attempting to accomplish when he set things down that path. But it's also troublesome on top of that, because it's giving us, the playerbase, all sorts of wildly off-base impressions about what is and isn't possible, because it's genuinely tough to keep the timeline of events and their context(including meta-context) in mind.
But the broader, arguably more shallow, point that I was also getting at with Diao Hualing is just that, like, she's been established? For what story reason was her character introduced and established, reoccurring over months, if she's ultimately not going to have actually done anything and then freaking vanish in the hour of our combined triumph? It doesn't make a damn lick of sense. Like, frankly, it would be straight up narratively bizarre to leverage our victory in that city to political ends without Diao Hualing's involvement? Since she was acting as our sponsor to be involved at all?
In-story, we were working with an ambitious, but somewhat cold, scion of the Diao on a mostly personal project in order to engender bilateral understanding, and then we unexpectedly struck an unexpectedly, nearly unbelievably, huge surprise martial and political breakthrough out of nowhere! It's a massive blow on a red-hot iron that practically demands follow-through. It has every taste, smell, and look of a breakthrough opportunity, and isn't that exactly the aim we were chiseling away at when the unexpected windfall fell into our laps? Turning around and peddling the rep boost in an unrelated direction is weird and confusing and we should not do it. What the hell were we even trying to do, if not this.
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- Location
- foraging for beans
As far as I can tell, the point was, in fact, to establish Diao Hualing. We now know there's a small, not particularly powerful or important, faction in the Diao that's receptive to LQ's means and goals. And that the rest of the Diao don't much like her, for several reasons. Introducing her intersected nicely with the whole Yan Renshu mess in the central valley, so yrs took the opportunity.
Boom, new Diao character introduced and Yan Renshu revitallized. Now we can come back later and work with Diao Hualing's faction if we want. This approach would absolutely be janky in a a longer form mode of storytelling like a novel, but this is a forum game that yrs turns into a story later. He can hammer out the jankyness then. Considering how popular the story version is on Royal Road, I think he manages to do that well enough, so I'll leave him to it. He's the professional QM after all, not me.
Now yrs is giving us a general choice between raising our general rep with the Diao or Wang. Seeing as how the Diao as a whole don't much like LQ, I'd rather have the Wang.
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- Location
- Washington
Honestly if it was that inherently narratively bizarre, I don't think it would even be possible to do it. This reads less to me like "there are narrative problems if we don't follow up on this" and more like you, Abeologos personally, have built up a different image of her narrative role than the narrative role that is actually intended for her.
Why would we drop Diao Hualing the instant that we establish a super kick-ass joint success with her, but before actually leveraging it to anything or even, like, celebrating it with her? It just doesn't make sense, painfully so. It's like making a nice meal and immediately sliding it into the trash can.
I mean, the fact that combined-events with the explicit intent on yrsillar's part of condensing and saving time/actions (he literally said so at the time) has had the opposite effect is a bit of a clue to the kind of obvious point that yrs isn't omniscient and sometimes things don't work out the way they were intended to. Players spotchecking for potential conflicts, unintended or otherwise, is part and parcel with cooperative narrative games like quests or ttrpgs.
- Location
- Washington
You say "without even, like, celebrating it with her" but the idea of celebrating it with her is frankly insane to me. Like, straight up Diao Hualing and Ling Qi do not have the sort of relationship established where celebrating that with her would not be Completely Fucking Weird.
I agree with Abeo here - I'm not much a fan of votes deciding the direction of the story for the next IRL year when we lack critical information and context that we should have gotten already.
Garden of Sinners, with the current narrative trajectory, is the only thing that makes sense here. Otherwise we end up with another aborted plotline and having taken no advantage at all of the political coup we just pulled off. This shouldn't even be a vote at this juncture, and if Yrsillar wants to make it one it should really be after he's given us the information we really should have gotten in turn 13.
Garden of Sinners, with the current narrative trajectory, is the only thing that makes sense here. Otherwise we end up with another aborted plotline and having taken no advantage at all of the political coup we just pulled off. This shouldn't even be a vote at this juncture, and if Yrsillar wants to make it one it should really be after he's given us the information we really should have gotten in turn 13.