@Boney Is that something you consider when you write? For the example in the quote, the outcome was a big, welcome relief, but I imagine a lot of the tension that came with the vote and the wait isn't there.
It's definitely something that I keep in the back of my mind, like when the thread votes to do something that would be unexpected to someone who didn't follow the debate I make sure to summarize the thought process in Mathilde's internal monologue. I also make sure to add links in the updates to tallies and sneak-peaks and in-thread dicerolls that don't have threadmarks of their own so that people who are reading the threadmarks can dip into thread reactions to major events. My main priority is the thread experience for those actively engaged in it, but it is important to me to keep the quest accessible for people who come in late or people who only read the updates, because that's how I engaged with quests before I started writing one. A valuable part of the quest format is that I get a lot of feedback, not just directly from people asking me questions but also from watching people discuss things or ask questions of each other. That shows me where things have been unclear or confusing, and I've gone back and made tweaks to early parts of the quest for clarity in response to discussion a few times.
For this situation specifically, part of the quest format means that you don't have anywhere near as much control or forewarning over what's going to happen as someone writing traditional prose, and that means that you don't get the suite of tools that prose uses to build dramatic tension. The set-up to the talk with the Chamberlain would have had a lot more of a payoff if Mathilde had chosen to firmly take one side or the other, but the thread voting to take the middle road meant that it did end up being a 'pretty much nothing'. Another good example of this is the death of Gotrek. A lot of people don't like the way this came across, and I think a big part of that is that it lacked all the signposting that people have come to expect from character death. if I was writing prose and had decided to kill off Gotrek in advance I could have emphasized the rough terrain and built tension around how the Expedition was approaching the worst of it and had Gotrek show Mathilde a picture of his family and talk about how he's three weeks from retirement or whatever. But the thread decided what Mathilde focused on, and she was focused on getting to know the Expedition's leaders and poking at landmarks like Karak Vlag and Uzkulak and the Combes, and the dice decided how well the steamwagons managed the switchbacks. If Mathilde had gone out scouting with the Knights she might have seen a lot more of the terrain and she might have been a bit more nervous on the approach to the switchbacks. But while that would have been a good set-up for a major accident, it also would have been a big nothing if butterflies meant everyone got up without a hitch.
Another example: Karak Vlag was being set up as a difficult choice to be made or as a raising of the stakes for Karag Dum, but I had missed that with the metaphysics I'd established, it was in Mathilde's power to just clog the flow and bounce Vlag back into reality. But the thread didn't miss it, and it'd be a major disservice to the quest to not reward that level of engagement with the world I'd built. Likewise, the food. Moockery of Death torpedoed a great deal of set-up about food concerns and ideas I'd had about having to live a lot more off the land. I'd even done some preliminary research on cattle raiding and edible wild grains that grow on steppes. But while it was a misstep in the quest as prose, it's bloody brilliant in the quest as a quest. It's part of the trade-off of the format.
Personally I'd argue that all this is a point in questing's favour. It's more realistic that a protagonist, and thus the quests PoV, might get nervous over something that turns out to be nothing, or be completely blindsided by major events. But people are used to more traditional story beats where foreshadowing is always significant because if it wasn't an editor would have cut it, and if it does make it in its in service to a larger story beat or character development. Hitchcock's 'bomb under the table' is cited as gospel by a lot of people, and while it's a great way to achieve a specific objective, I think it's gone a bit too far and now people see the bomb going off without the audience being forewarned as a storytelling sin. In most movies if a bomb's about to go off, even if the audience isn't shown it they know something's about to happen because the music is tense, or the sound is rising, or the camera angles are too close or changing too rapidly. In books, it will often switch to a drier third person omniscient and the moment the narration starts giving you times to the minute you know shit's about to go down. While this is good for setting up the mood, it does mean there's that much more separation between viewer and protagonist. I'm far from the first to make this observation, either - a lot of parodies have skewered this with things like a character realizing something is wrong because the background music just changed or whatever.
