First, juuust a little bit of salt. Sorry. Can't help it.
Honestly I don't have any issues with wording votes like this one so long as those wordings
matter.
If Briefvoice was right and the votes were simply fluff for:
[] Maximum Resistance
[] Strong Resistance
[] Light Resistance
[] No Resistance
then the way the vote was worded would be a very serious issue since it doesn't present itself like that at all.
I however am operating under the assumption that votes actually mean what they say they do. That the way the votes are worded reflects Sousa's opinion on the subject should that vote win. I have issues with the idea that Romulan interference should
always be fought, that is how we end up with Cold War style proxy wars, or that just because thousands of federation citizens died in a war
we started the Licori need to become an affiliate/ally. So I didn't vote for either option because those aren't views I want Sousa to hold.
The problem is that this leaves us with one vote as a proxy for two separate questions. One is "what are we going to do about the Romulans futzing with the Licori," and the other is "how do we
feel about the Licori and imperialism and all this other complicated stuff."
And I get that these two issues are strongly correlated, but the correlation isn't perfect. And when you
force correlation on voters, you get counterintuitive results. Especially when one of the two issues is something that's so pivotal to much of the voterbase that you can imagine someone being a single-issue voter on it, like "this is not an empire quest."
Perhaps this kind of vote would have best been implemented as a write in one instead of multiple choice, to properly capture the nuance of what advice the players want to give the president.
At the moment we are split into two groups whom have different ideas ofwhat the options each side has chosen mean.
I think the desired outcomes of both factions in this vote us closer than what the very granular choice available allows.
As Oneiros has noted, write-in votes of this type tend to give him headaches and cause a lot of bad blood, plus we tend to talk ourselves into voting for stupid things sometimes.
I don't have any problem with the 'canned' voting options, I just wish that
either of two things would happen:
1) Votes on separate questions like were addressed separately rather than being bundled in such a way that people feel compelled to vote a certain way on the first question in order to stake out a firm anticolonialist position on the second. Here, one issue was "how firmly do we oppose the Romulans." Another was, "how much influence do we actually want
ourselves to have over the Licori succession, except insofar as we prevent the Romulans from influencing it?" Most of us don't really want influence over the Licori succession, and don't feel any particular ownership of Licori space. But significantly more voters want to oppose Romulan control of the succession,
even if that does not entail asserting our own control. A decision where plausible positions can be plotted on two axes needs to have two separate components.
2) Votes on separate questions might be merged into a single vote, but only if there are enough options to permit nuanced decision-making. Like, if there are at least two "we don't want to colonize the Licori" options, and
one of them reads "so we'll just stick to telling the Licori that Romulans are probably bad," while the
other reads "but until we're sure the Licori political process is free of outside influence, we will act to neutralize such influences from third parties."
Normal stuff!
...Crap, I have no idea how I wound up falsely attributing to you a correct observation actually made by
@pheonix89 . Sorry.
I'm a Nice Power! Why won't anyone affiliate with me?
I quite agree. As I mention below, I don't really feel any claim on Licori friendship as such, but I think it's vitally important that:
1) We
don't wind up with a Licori government that can play the "fuck you, the Romulans will let us get away with [thing you fought us over], you're not the boss of me because THEY are, so there" card.
2) we
don't wind up with the Romulans taking Licori mentats and turning them into an appalling in-house superweapon development lab that runs on for decades. The Romulans are too good at stealth and deniability, and too fond of crippling their prospective enemies pre-emptively, for that to be anything other than a terrifying prospect.
Because of those, it's really important to me that we specifically oppose
Romulan intrusion into the succession crisis, regardless of the overall outcome of that crisis. If the best way to keep the Romulans out of the picture is just to buy off the Bene and put them in charge, installing the exact government the Romulans were backing... I am
totally okay with that. I just don't want said government, or any other, to obtain dominance over the Licori while itself being dominated by Romulus.
That must be a violation of some convention! That's grotesquely unfair!
Leslie:
"Pfft. All you've got to do is get the Saurian Temperance League out of office and get 'em back to making their brandy properly. There aren't many bottles left of Saurian brandy from before '68, but
that was a drink that could keep up with the Big Green Sneakies! Always the first thing Scotty'd go for, if his idea of proper whisky wasn't around."
