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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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SuperSonicSound said:
On a mechanical level the Gambler adds +20 to two different rolls, that's actually a very large swing in the result and is functionaly equivalent to having an additional 20 learning.

On the narrative level you're essentially saying divine inspiration amounts to nothing. That's highly questionable especially as the way the gambler functions it provides its bonus in the place that will provide the greatest impact.
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I'm not particularly impressed by two +20 rolls on an action with hidden mechanics involving a dozen participants. Especially when we can get a free crit on a recruitment action that adds another participant, who will contribute their own skills and traits, which will probably a lot more than 20 learning across not just this action, but all successive Waystone actions.

As for the narrative effect, I'm not arguing that literal divine intervention won't be useful, I'm arguing that Ranald influencing each participant's understanding of language to the point of inventing on the spot metaphors that communicates key information to be an unrealistic scenario.
 
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SuperSonicSound said:
Yes everything is a binary between perfect success and complete failure and absolutely not a sliding scale. Also have you considered part of the laying the foundation action is to overcome part of this barrier and create shared terminology? In which case those +20s matter a lot to ensure everyone is on the same page.
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Yes, which is why I don't think it will be too big of a problem. Because if we can solve the language issue with one action I will be astounded. I also think it's not as big a problem as it's made out to be by some. This is a pretty new field for literally all involved and our group will probably coin a lot of the terms used to describe the interactions...
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
As for the narrative effect, I'm not arguing that literal divine intervention won't be useful, I'm arguing that Ranald influencing each participant's understanding of language to the point of inventing in the spot metaphors that communicates key information to be an unrealistic scenario.
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Yea, because that's not how Ranalds influence works.

Look at the first AV action we did in our tower in K8P. We would have botched the research roll with out the +20.

How did it manifest?

A Cat literally knocked over a book which landed on a page which described how boiling liquids expand in volume greatly, and then Mathilde inferred from that the AV she was going to test needed to be a much smaller amount. Fortuitous events that enabled the person to realise something themselves. Ranald didn't just inject the info into her brain because that's not how his influence works.
 
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Tobtorp said:
Cool but unimportant, because a good portion of the attendees will also not know the magical language, thorek, the babushka, the ice witch and any of the elfs. (also any Hedgewise we get or do not get) so prepare yourself for lots of descriptions of magic in common reikspiel.

Edit: also I don't get the metaphor bit? Like, it's nice they have a good methapor but that's not really going to help with technical details...
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Human magical paradigms are so personal that even two members of the same tradition speaking the same magical language have a hard time sharing magical knowledge unless they're deeply familiar with how each other thinks and one's style is based on the other, like a master and apprentice.

Here, we're trying to bridge a much larger gap, so assemble a common understand across wildly different paradigms without a common language with the rights words or grammatical structures to describe the phenomena n question.

As a result, it's going to be all about the metaphors as people try to express their understanding in the shared language that doesn't have words for what they're talking about in a way that other people with a completely different way of looking at the world can understand,

Even if they shared a common language which could describe magical phenomena looking for places where paradigms overlapped or we're close enough for mutual understanding would be very hard. Doing it without even that is why I think some extra luck is essential. Otherwise people might just talk past each other and not happen to pick a form of words that others can understand enough to build the initial connections.
 
Alratan said:
Human magical paradigms are so personal that even two members of the same tradition speaking the same magical language have a hard time sharing magical knowledge unless they're deeply familiar with how each other thinks and one's style is based on the other, like a master and apprentice.

Here, we're trying to bridge a much larger gap, so assemble a common understand across wildly different paradigms without a common language with the rights words or grammatical structures to describe the phenomena n question.

As a result, it's going to be all about the metaphors as people try to express their understanding in the shared language that doesn't have words for what they're talking about in a way that other people with a completely different way of looking at the world can understand,

Even if they shared a common language which could describe magical phenomena looking for places where paradigms overlapped or we're close enough for mutual understanding would be very hard. Doing it without even that is why I think some extra luck is essential. Otherwise people might just talk past each other and not happen to pick a form of words that others can understand enough to build the initial connections.
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And we are like... 12 to 13 people so I doubt the 2 20s will help. This is a big thing and we kinda need to trust that most of the attendees have a decent grasp of what their talking about.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
Yea, because that's not how Ranalds influence works.

Look at the first AV action we did in our tower in K8P. We would have botched the research roll with out the +20.

How did it manifest?

A Cat literally knocked over a book which landed on a page which described how boiling liquids expand in volume greatly, and then Mathilde inferred from that the AV she was going to test needed to be a much smaller amount. Fortuitous events that enabled the person to realise something themselves. Ranald didn't just inject the info into her brain because that's not how his influence works.
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Ranald sending a cat to literally point Mathilde to the knowledge she needed still doesn't justify the "people will fortuitously use the correct metaphors to communicate concepts with" argument.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
Yea, because that's not how Ranalds influence works.

Look at the first AV action we did in our tower in K8P. We would have botched the research roll with out the +20.
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The thing is, while Foundations may happen in a single roll (which I highly doubt), it will not crit fail into disaster, just as Mathilde's duel with Boris. So the Gambler here is not a decisive factor between success or fail, just some speed up bonus at best.
 
TreP said:
The thing is, while Foundations may happen in a single roll (which I highly doubt), it will not crit fail into disaster, just as Mathilde's duel with Boris. So the Gambler here is not a decisive factor between success or fail, just some speed up bonus at best.
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I don't think that's a good example.

Two highly skilled fighters engaged in a spar is not the same thing as trying to grapple with the greatest theoretical magical challenge Mathilde will ever have to partake in.

I think the difficulty of the waystone project has been dramatically underestimated.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I'm not particularly impressed by two +20 rolls on an action with hidden mechanics involving a dozen participants. Especially when we can get a free crit on a recruitment action that adds another participant, who will contribute their own skills and traits, which will probably a lot more than 20 learning across not just this action, but all successive Waystone actions.
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It's not a free crit. The Father may well not apply at all and be completely wasted.

Even if it does apply, the Hedgewise we recruit may not know anything useful. We've no particular reason to believe they ever knew anything about Waystones; let alone that the one person we brings in happens to be a person who still does after three hundred generations. It's not as if, as far as we know, that this is a centralised institution with libraries and a leadership that knows who may know what. These are probably a handful of magically talented individuals smeared out over an imperial province with very limited ability to communicate. They have a common heritage, but they're persecuted professional living on the edge of the wilds.

If they do know nothing even if the Father works and it lets us recruit them with bo upfront payment, a free rider may well be a net negative for the project. We don't know what the reaction of people who actually do have secrets to share would be to groups contributing nothing. For all we know some secrets of the Waystones are dangerous or involve some form of scarcity that makes sharing them costly

If we were researching Lininal Realms or spirits then we would have good reason to think a random member of the Hedgewise could help.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
I don't think that's a good example.

Two highly skilled fighters engaged in a spar is not the same thing as trying to grapple with the greatest theoretical magical challenge Mathilde will ever have to partake in.

I think the difficulty of the waystone project has been dramatically underestimated.
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If all could fail with the first action then I could understand putting everything into it, but we literally have wog that we can't crit fail this action.
Alratan said:
It's not a free crit. The Father may well not apply at all and be completely wasted.

Even if it does apply, the Hedgewise we recruit may not know anything useful. We've no particular reason to believe they ever knew anything about Waystones; let alone that the one person we brings in happens to be a person who still does after three hundred generations. It's not as if, as far as we know, that this is a centralised institution with libraries and a leadership that knows who may know what. These are probably a handful of magically talented individuals smeared out over an imperial province with very limited ability to communicate. They have a common heritage, but they're persecuted professional living on the edge of the wilds.

If they do know nothing even if the Father works and it lets us recruit them with bo upfront payment, a free rider may well be a net negative for the project. We don't know what the reaction of people who actually do have secrets to share would be to groups contributing nothing. For all we know some secrets of the Waystones are dangerous or involve some form of scarcity that makes sharing them costly

If we were researching Lininal Realms or spirits then we would have good reason to think a random member of the Hedgewise could help.
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And thorek told us that the dwarfs have no relevant knowledge of waystones and the jades told us that their knowledge is only in legends and the elfs told us that they knowledge is also spotty. What's the point? We pretty much start from scratch here.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
I don't think that's a good example.

Two highly skilled fighters engaged in a spar is not the same thing as trying to grapple with the greatest theoretical magical challenge Mathilde will ever have to partake in.

I think the difficulty of the waystone project has been dramatically underestimated.
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I understand the difficulty. My problem with Gambler for the Foundation is the absence of some central thing it would affect. In my understanding, it is a tons of interactions between participants. I just can't see how you can influence all of them with only 2 instances of Ranald's influence.

My point about the duel was not about it's difficulty, but that the participants, like Boris and Mathilde are smart people, and will not dismantle the whole Project immediately, just because of few bad rolls.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
I don't think that's a good example.

Two highly skilled fighters engaged in a spar is not the same thing as trying to grapple with the greatest theoretical magical challenge Mathilde will ever have to partake in.

I think the difficulty of the waystone project has been dramatically underestimated.
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When step one of Laying the Foundation is 'Create a magical meta-paradigm that allows magic users of different traditions to share concepts in a way that's usually impossible' that doesn't seem very easy to me.

One quite likely failure state of this project seeks to me that without some initial insights to allow useful discussion the various participants spend months talking past each other getting increasingly frustrated until they start bickering and then people start to take their toys and go home.

We really want some early initial successes to build confidence and a sense of momentum.

TreP said:
I understand the difficulty. My problem with Gambler for the Foundation is the absence of some central thing it would affect. In my understanding, it is a tons of interactions between participants. I just can't see how you can influence all of them with only 2 instances of Ranald's influence.

My point about the duel was not about it's difficulty, but that the participants, like Boris and Mathilde are smart people, and will not dismantle the whole Project immediately, just because of few bad rolls.
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I think that all it takes is one or two initial insights to give us a starting point. At the moment we pretty literally don't even know where to start.
 
Alratan said:
One quite likely failure state of this project seeks to me that without some initial insights to allow useful discussion the various participants spend months talking past each other getting increasingly frustrated until they start bickering and then people start to take their toys and go home.
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On that point I will say that I doubt anyone thinks this will happen in months, more like years. Also the elfs and thorek probably see bickering for a few months as a good use of their time...
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Ranald sending a cat to literally point Mathilde to the knowledge she needed still doesn't justify the "people will fortuitously use the correct metaphors to communicate concepts with" argument.
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Ranald can arrange a sequence of events so that a member of the project sees something that inspires them to choose one concept rather than another. Easy.

Tobtorp said:
And we are like... 12 to 13 people so I doubt the 2 20s will help. This is a big thing and we kinda need to trust that most of the attendees have a decent grasp of what their talking about.
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I think most of the attendees know almost nothing about the subject in question, but that some have a few scraps of knowledge that can be assembled to unlock the puzzle.

The problem is that they themselves may not know what those scraps are, and they can only express their understanding of said scraps in the context of their own paradigms, and the only words they know to describe them are in arcane languages that can't be directly translated into the only common language they have. In turn, the people they're trying to explain those scraps to can also only comprehend what they're hearing in terms of their own paradigm, which they think of using their own arcane languages which themselves may not have terms for what they're hearing.

What we need is some supernatural manipulation for one or two of the participants to be inspired to choose metaphors that are particularly understandable by the other participants when they happen to be explaining one of those scraps that even they don't recognise the full significance of. With that starting point, an understanding can be built based on that meeting of minds, rather than being side tracked down a dead end because another line of thought seemed more explicable even though it would turn out not to be relevant.
 
Alratan said:
What we need is some supernatural manipulation for one or two of the participants to be inspired to choose metaphors that are particularly understandable by the other participants when they happen to be explaining one of those scraps that even they don't recognise the full significance of. With that starting point, an understanding can be built based on that meeting of minds, rather than being side tracked down a dead end because another line of thought seemed more explicable even though it would turn out not to be relevant.
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Is it even possible to have that one metaphor that could be correctly understood by Kislevites, Elves, Dwarves and Imperial mages simultaneously?
 
Actually thinking about it... We should probably learn kislevite first, because the ice witch (who's name I forgot) doesn't speak reikspiel at all iirc.

Edit: @Burned_Cookie OK but where are the elfs in there?

Edit edit: seems like I mixed up my ice witches. Sorry about that.
 
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I'll b honest, I do not think it is reasonable that the Father will allow us to have Hedgewise lore on the same turn as we ask for it even if they do know stuff, simply because 'they' is too diffuse. Our contact is Kurtis who is not a Norlander so he is not going to know every member of the Blessed Few in Norland or even most of them, he will likely send us to whoever his contact is. That person will then have to use whatever means of secure communication they have (magical or mundane) to check o who does know the lore, then we have to fly over and hope that they can drop their whole life of being a healer or herbalist in some out of the way village in order to get on the dwarf copter and travel to elf land. Hell do we even know what relations are between the Hedgewise and the Eonir? I mean on the one hand they do share a dislike for the secular authorities on the other hand if I were a Norlander pleasant lumber thief I might be inclined to go to the local magician for an anti-fey anti-elf charm and that cold well lead to tension.

At this point I do not have much hope that fatherless will win but I do worry that the lobby for the Father will be disappointed if it does not spit out immediate results.
 
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