- Pronouns
- They
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
From the description of the activity:
[ ] Lay the foundations: work with the current members of WEB-MAT and the Waystone Project to build a single unified framework for understanding the Waystones.
this is not administratively arranging the organisational setup of the project.
This is building the intellectual foundations that future research will be based on.
- Location
- South Africa
So on my side, mathymancer arguments have convinced me that the Hedgewise will hit the Father. Thus I view using the Father for the recruitment as being optimal since it doubles up recruitment and Father without introducing necessary Father misses (as would be the case in a social bomb turn)
Yes, but I see our role as being more administrative: we are not so much providing our own knowledge, but ensuring that everyone's knowledge is appropriately shared.
With regards to the framework: this is not administrative and we will have an active role, but again there are lots of people who will be building the framework and not just Mathilde.
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The Gambler can still make it more likely that another member of the project happens to describe a part of their own paradigm in a way that others can understand enough to build on, or that Mathilde herself rephrases what one of them has said in a way that others can understand. SHe may be one of the best linguists present.
As when we an Amber Wizard just happened to find a not yet desecrated Herdstone at an appropriate time to make a Transformation of Kadon battle altar, or someone mis-addressed a letter so it reached Mathilde, the Gambler can effect other people beyond just Mathilde.
I really wish we'd learned Arcane Khazlid before we laid the foundations, but it's spilt milk now, we'll never get the vote turned around at this point, as it may give us clues to the runesmiths paradigm that would make it much easier to translate what Thorek is describing, as he have the most alien paradigm of them all.
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Same deal - its something that would hurt more from having less parts available than from taking longer fitting everything together. Recruitment takes precedence over rolling high on the initial groundwork because I strongly doubt Lay the Foundations would be completed in one action.
- Location
- Netherlands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
On the "delay Father until we can try a bunch of things at once" thing:
It may be a more efficient use of the Father as a resource, but it also means we are getting the benefits significantly later, which means we benefit from them less.
I think gaining the benefits of the Father now outweighs the resource-efficiency of delaying the Father until an "ideal turn", especially when we don't know when that "ideal turn" might actually be. For all we know, that might take years more.
It may be a more efficient use of the Father as a resource, but it also means we are getting the benefits significantly later, which means we benefit from them less.
I think gaining the benefits of the Father now outweighs the resource-efficiency of delaying the Father until an "ideal turn", especially when we don't know when that "ideal turn" might actually be. For all we know, that might take years more.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of recognising what parts are relevant to the problem or of describing what those parts are to reach other.
We could very easily have a situation where the baseline is that no one (save perhaps the Grey Lords) has any idea of whether any of the vast amount of things they know is relevant to the problem, let alone which those pieces of information are, and even if they could identify things that would be important to explain, everyone else in the room would not be able to understand what they were talking about without it going straight over their heads.
It could easily be a room full of simultaneous flight school memes, unless the participants receive literal divine inspiration to pick relevant pieces of information to share and to describe in in a mutually intelligible way.
Not only do most of the people in the room not know what they don't know, but that probably also don't know what they do know.
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- Location
- South Africa
I don't think anyone is arguing that the gambler will not help. I certainly am not. The arguments I am seeing people make, which I agree with, is that the gambler is not essential and that in the worst case the project will be off to a slower start. I don't believe that there is a possibility for the project to be dead before it started. If that was the case then Gambler would be essential, but seeing as the cost of failure is lower, there is a reduced need to ensure success.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I actually disagree with you on this bit. I don't know for sure, obviously, but from the way the action is described as unlocking further investigations, I think it is very likely that the way it works is:
- Pay 1 AP to Lay the foundations. Based on who is involved, how much they choose to divulge, and probably some factors we don't know about, some sort of broad-strokes theory of waystones that agrees with everything put forward at the meeting is laid out, but it has gaps in it
- Some number of new actions are available starting the following turn to begin filling those gaps.
- As gaps are filled in the theoretical framework from the actions described, some number of practical applications become available.
Boney has described the Gambler as "discrete tweaks of random chance." I am extremely skeptical that this manifests as divine inspiration anywhere outside of Mathilde's head -- to be clear, I don't have a great sense of what random chance means, but I am confident that "Ranald-granted insights" do not qualify, and furthermore that by several of the participants they would be construed as a hostile act.
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My baseline assumption is that this is a challenge where each step is of near-impossible difficulty, which is why no one's fixed it before now, and we need every possible advantage to make any progress at all. The Gambler is a key advantage.
The descriptions we've had of the difficulty of sharing magical knowledge between practitioners of even very similar paradigms suggest this.
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- Location
- Netherlands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have seen arguments that the Gambler either will not help or have negligible effects, actually. (And I disagree with them)
But yeah, I agree that I don't think a highly successful Foundations action is as absolutely vital as it's been treated as. It's important and useful, to be sure, but I don't think it's so much so that nothing else can be prioritized - plus, I feel like there's good odds that recruiting the Hedgewise will have greater positive impact on the Foundations action than the Gambler would anyhow.
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The kind of inspiration I'm talking about is that when you're walking down the road a cat walks across your path in a way that draws your eye to the reflection of a rainbow in a crystal that makes you think of a particularly evocative metaphor.
This is about Ranald basically dropping a couple of subtle (or unsubtle, sometimes) hints to people about what's relevant and how to describe it by manipulating events around them.
I think, given the long, long chain of causality required for the Father to affect the lay the foundations action, that feels rather optimistic. I'd agree that it's not impossible, but that doesn't mean it's at all likely.
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As far as we know no one has tried to bring together different magical traditions to repair waystones. This is the first time that dwarfs and elfs are working together one something for a loooong time. So we don't know how hard it is because this approach is very new.
Yes, the general Dwarven public know about it.
Teclis brought together a large number of human paradigms, worked out a meta-paradigm for them to adjust their paradigms to work within, and also taught them some of the basics of Waystone maintenance and told them how critical it was for the long term survival of the world. Are you sure that their was no failed early Waystone project involved? Given the use the physical Colleges seem to make of Waystones, it wouldn't be surprising if Teclis and his early students tried and failed.
Sure, he didn't involve the dwarves, but Thorek is one of the least likely to share much, and he doesn't know much, and may have the hardest to translate paradigm.
Teclis build a army capable of magic in the fastest way possible, then after kicking chaos butt he went and refined everything about it for a bit and then fucked off. I'm pretty certain he didn't do a waystone project, mostly because the elfs of Ulthuan probably still have the knowledge how to build some..
Waystones are considered "hard" because every attempt to understand them has involved a lone genius slamming his massive intellect into a waystone at high speed, shortly before being carted off at high speed to the nearest temple of healing to deal with the brain damage he suffered.
We're not doing that. We're asking people who have learned to interact safely with waystones to share their notes with each other so we can find what information overlaps and develop a holistic understanding of the problem.
Will this work? Nobody knows—it's never been tried before.
But it does substantially reduce the chance of brain damage, so it's worth a shot.
This is something that can and is expected to be addressed over a year of building a common vocabulary.
Not something that can only be answered with a singular stroke of inspiration.
Its closer to the tedious work of interpreting the Rosetta Stone, chance can speed the process of arriving at a functional translation, but its fundamentally the magical equivalent of holding up an apple, then everyone describing it in their native tongue.
Anything else is outside the scope of a single AP, I'd be very surprised if we worked out basic terminology in less than a year even if all goes well. You're trying to describe quantum physics as the base of your multilingual project after all.
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This is the second time Ranaldad led to a contentious neck-and-neck vote.
This is literally single-issue voting.
Yup, though I'm much happier about this vote. Muuuch less drama and I doubt anyone will be too annoyed at the outcome.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
In unrelated news, I have updated my Brief History infoposts to now contain links to the turns and interludes in question, which should help people drill in to the actual turnposts for more details if they have unanswered questions after reading the summaries. We're close to 300 threadmarks, so the dropdown menu has gotten kind of unwieldy to navigate if you are looking for something specific, and hopefully this will help people.
Slightly related tangent: Boney, is it intentional that A Holiday Opportunity is still a main threadmark? It's notable for being the only main threadmark outside of character creation that is entirely OOC and contains no in-universe narration at all, which makes me think it might have been intended as a temporary voting threadmark, but if this is on purpose then carry on.
Slightly related tangent: Boney, is it intentional that A Holiday Opportunity is still a main threadmark? It's notable for being the only main threadmark outside of character creation that is entirely OOC and contains no in-universe narration at all, which makes me think it might have been intended as a temporary voting threadmark, but if this is on purpose then carry on.
- Location
- Earth
Consider when Mathilde wrote a series of papers in collaboration with other wizards:
Again working backwards, we can turn it around to say that anywhere we saw a roll, there was an instance of random chance. Therefore, in that instance of collaborating with other magic users to explain magical phenomena, there was a lot of random chance.
The text of the Gambler says: 'The Gambler: A +20 bonus to up to two dice rolls affiliated with a chosen action.' We know it's not limited to affecting Mathilde personally/directly from when we applied it to Thorek and when we got the dragon altar. I don't see any evidence saying that the Gambler is restricted from affecting other people's insights, and if it were to happen, I don't think it'd induce any more suspicion than when the Protector made the entirety of Karak Vlag aware of the Expedition's deeds, a far more large scale event.
You can argue that if we have more rolls, the Gambler's effect gets more diluted as each individual roll is less impactful, but on the flip side, the Gambler boosts go to where they have the most impact, meaning there are more places for it to turn a failure into a success or a success into a crit. I believe the hypothetical effects of a [Thorek's Insights: XX+20=XXX] or [Hatalath's Insights: XX+20=XXX] or a [Synthesizing the framework: XX+20=XXX] are worth the tradeoff of not recruiting the Hedgewise this turn.
This all assumes a similar system with lots of rolls, of course.
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Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Er, does the Gambler show up there? I'm pretty sure the +20 bonus was Mathilde's learning.
Actually, that was right after we got the Coin, so I don't think it was even active yet?
mynameisyouQQQ
Miss Brightside
- Location
- A Hell of my own making
- Pronouns
- They/She/He
[x] Plan Disregard WEBMAT, Acquire AP
- [x] One Overwork Action
- [x] COIN: The Father
- [x] WEB-MAT: Hire someone as a full-time Gyrocopter pilot (Adela)
- [x] Lay the foundations: work with the current members of WEB-MAT and the Waystone Project to build a single unified framework for understanding the Waystones.
- [x] Attempt to bring a non-Order magical tradition into the Waystone Project (Nordlander Haléthan Hedgewise)
- [x] Attempt to bring a Major House or Ward into the Waystone Project (Tindomiel)
- [x] Branulhune's ability to disappear and reappear at a thought allows entirely new forms of combat. Continue to work on them.
- [x] Investigate how the Vitae reacts to a power stone.
- [x] EIC: Have the Hochlander set up a shadow headquarters for the EIC in the Sunken Palace.
- [x] KAU: Decide who your library staff will consist of, and go about recruiting them.
- [x] SERENITY: Write a book: Windsoak Mushrooms (1/2)
- [x] One Overwork Action
- [x] COIN: The Father
- [x] WEB-MAT: Hire someone as a full-time Gyrocopter pilot (Adela)
- [x] Lay the foundations: work with the current members of WEB-MAT and the Waystone Project to build a single unified framework for understanding the Waystones.
- [x] Attempt to bring a non-Order magical tradition into the Waystone Project (Nordlander Haléthan Hedgewise)
- [x] Attempt to bring a Major House or Ward into the Waystone Project (Tindomiel)
- [x] Branulhune's ability to disappear and reappear at a thought allows entirely new forms of combat. Continue to work on them.
- [x] Investigate how the Vitae reacts to a power stone.
- [x] EIC: Have the Hochlander set up a shadow headquarters for the EIC in the Sunken Palace.
- [x] KAU: Decide who your library staff will consist of, and go about recruiting them.
- [x] SERENITY: Write a book: Windsoak Mushrooms (1/2)