Literally last year Myanmar underwent a military coup d'etat. Hasn't changed its name.
When I said precedent I meant a country switching to a republic style government but retaining an official name that refers to monarchy. Or the opposite for that matter. Why would the Republic of the Union of Myanmar change its name? It's still a republic (no king) and a union (didn't lose any constituent parts). Also, they just changed their name in 2011.
In the UK the Queen is anyway little more than a symbol. Wouldn't people who want to get rid of her also care about getting rid of her stamp on the country?
I don't feel comfortable that we've adequately addressed the implications of bringing a forbidden group into the project at a formative stage.
We've been talking about recruiting the Hedgewise and recruiting them before laying the foundation since before the Father was even a thing. The Hedgewise have been on the extended shortlist pretty much since there was an extended shortlist.
During the vote about sacrificing Divine AV research, a consistent and strong line of argument was made that keeping the option of doing said research was unacceptable because it might distract us from the Waystone Project, that we might dilute our focus and spend resources on the former that was better spent on the latter. The argument was that the Waystone Project was so important that even the chance that future voters may choose to divert resources elsewhere was so unacceptable that the option had to be removed.
As a result, arguments that we should now spend resources on following up on the sacrifice are quite frustrating, given that we probably would have left further divine AV research on the back burner.
As someone who was vehemently against sacrificing Divine AV research, this argument of yours is disingenuous. Those arguments about saving AP were made by some. Others argued, among other things, that Ranald would likely allow us to continue and maybe even help. Or that having his agreement first was the moral thing to do. And no one knew what blessing Ranald would give us beforehand.
The whole reward is pretty much a representation of the theologian vs mystic divide. Use AV to start research on the metaphysics of so called divine beings or instead strengthen our personal relationship with the person if Ranald and maybe also woth other deities. Ranald could have invited us to some other kind of adventure. Or revealed some secret path for us to trod down. In the end he gave us the Father.
I don't think it was worth the sacrifice, but that has nothing to do with the net AP cost. And not testing the Father does not give us back Divine AV.
Anyway, several of us have been wanting to recruit the Hedgewise since before the whole Father Coin thing happened. I became less interested in them for a short while after we got a Hag Witch because I thought that they're similar, but I was educated on their differences. So from that perspective it did not cost us AP. It might even save us one, if it makes the Haléthans not ask for a repayment that requires AP.
And if your complaint is that a new Coin face makes us use the other faces of the Coin less, then the only person to complain to is Boney. No voter could have known that at the time. And complaining that people sometimes want to use the new thing that Boney gave us as a free and supposedly meaningful boon is just unfriendly towards everyone involved.
It's not about factual correctness or incorrectness of the detail of whether Faith would require AP in future. If it is a valid line of argument that we should be making choices to destroy options forever to remove the risk of resources being devoted away from the Waystone project in future, then the fact that the Faith choice turns out to require resources doesn't change that. It just means that the argument now applies to Faith just as it did when you applied it to Science.
It was a terrible argument back when Derpmind made it against Science. In fact she should feel bad. AP is only ever spent because players vote to spend it and voting to permanently destroying options with the sole reason being to limit future voters in case they don't agree with you as much as they happen to right now is a form of looking down at the "hivemind masses that don't vote rationally", or just plain conniving against the democratic process.
Doesn't mean that you using this tactic from the other side is much better. Though I guess if one views it as a roundabout way to remind everyone why it's bad then what you're doing has value, not for this particular vote but for the future.
Trying to structure my intuitions here.
My base model is that there's at least a 40% chance of the Gambler affecting an action like Foundation. If there's a single 1d100 rolled, a 20% chance of converting a failure into a success and a 20% of converting a success into a critical. If there two or more rolls there's an at least 64% chance of it having some effect. And given that I don't think increasing the number of participants would have made the foundations less likely to be successful, I don't think that the argument that because there may be a roll per participant this makes the Gambker less effective is true. If anything, depending on whether the Gambler is applied before or after rolling, having more rolls may make it more likely to succeed as it's less likely to be wasted on an already successful roll.
With the Father option, the following all need to be true to impact on the Foundations.
- Halathea is one of Ranald's daughters.
- The Hedgewise ever knew something relevant about the Waystones
- The Hedgewise preserved that knowledge
- This particularly faction of the Hedgewise preserved that knowledge
- The particular member of the Hedgewise we speak to knows it or knows someone else they know knows it
- Another tradition represented on the Prioject doesn't also know it
- That the Father face of the Coin means that they'll hand over their knowledge without an upfront favour.
- Edit: the unique knowledge they can share is significant enough to make an impact on the foundations
- They are able to explain the knowledge in their paradigm in a way other participants can understand
That's an awful lot of 'ifs' that all have to be true for it to come off. It's not like the Gambler where we're talking about probabilistic risks. These are mostly things is like Knightian Uncertainty, that things are either true or false but we don't know which and we can't make plausible estimates either. What we can say is that an awful lot of things have to have happens in the past in exactly the right way for this to payoff.
The Gambler, by contrast is making that the we get the best result we can from the defined set of pieces that are in play. It depends on what happens next, rather than what happened in the past and we may learn about now.
I find it a bit weird that in your calculation for the Gambler you use completely OOC math while in your calculation for the Father you go full simulated history.
If we're speaking rolls and percentages, then what do you think is the chance that Boney will make nine different rolls to determine the value of the Hedgewise knowledge and their willingness to share it. Now this is of course a wholly OOC and metagamy argument, but so is the speculation if how many rolls the Foundation action will have and what difference any single crit or crit fail could make.
Hedgewise may want to be relocated but than we have the problem of whatever the hedgewise was keeping down, rising up. Hedgewise do the colleges job of keeping magician threats down on the local level. While yes they can be relocated there is still the problem of moving a bunch of witches . Good thing Adela is getting her pilot license.
If the Empire wanted the Hedgewise to do this job for them they should have probably toned down the genociding.
And how many actions simply don't have hidden dice rolls at all? Even Mathilde's Diplomacy is up to 18 now, and all her other stats are higher. At this point if we don't see dice rolls on an action it might sometimes be because there just aren't hidden dice rolls in the first place.
Boney has said that he doesn't like to show most Diplo rolls (or even that they happened at all) because of how he thinks it would affect the thread and our read of various characters he introduces. Said rolls still happen though.
Ok so if we get Hedgewise, somehow, would they contribute to lay foundations these turn?
Well, the assumption that they probably will (least if the Father takes effect) is the whole reason anyone is voting for doing the Father now instead of later. Otherwise why would we even do this?
I mean, there was no option there that didn't destroy at least one line of investigation. Truth winning destroys the line of investigation we get from Faith -- we would not have learned about Ranald's daughters and become privy to whatever we'll learn from that. Faith winning destroys the line of investigation we get from Truth -- we won't be fingerprinting gods to learn the secrets they have chosen to hide from mortals about their natures. And the third option destroyed both lines. It wasn't a question of "give up on something or try for everything," it was a question of what to give up. "Mutually exclusive options that close off the roads not taken forever" have happened before in this quest and will happen again.
I'm not sure the Ranald's daughters plotline even existed before that point in time? It felt more like it was freshly created as a narratively appropriate replacement.
You mean you. I thiink you've made it repeatedly clear literally everytime anyone uses Mathilde's in universe phrasing about Ranald being her friend. We know you don't see it that way. You don't need to pretend otherwise.
He's not alone. And it's not just two people either.
Ranald might be a friend in several respects. And Mathilde definitely sees him that way. But he's less Human than Qretch or Cadaeth or even the members of the Uzkulak welcoming committee in many ways that matter.
This was a great read. Thank you.
I see now. The Hedgewise are some kind of exception to...
everything, apparently. If only we could do something to harness their uncanny power of being incredibly,
irrefutably inconvenient.
To be fair, those arguments are sound. Without the Father I do think that the Hedgewise might have been the first go wait for payment. Till now we did in fact only recruit people with prior reason to trust us or who we paid without additional AP expenditure.
