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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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On a slightly different topic, I'm wondering if Elves know about AV, or if it's just, like, a Teclis thing, and he's been meaning to publish his research for two centuries but he's trapped in AP hell, and now some random Grey Wizard is going to beat him to the punch.

Probably not, because the Eonir have AV, but it's fun to think about.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
On a slightly different topic, I'm wondering if Elves know about AV, or if it's just, like, a Teclis thing, and he's been meaning to publish his research for two centuries but he's trapped in AP hell, and now some random Grey Wizard is going to beat him to the punch.

Probably not, because the Eonir have AV, but it's fun to think about.
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Teclis after learning that Colledges discovered AV on their own: "Phew, that's one less AP needed to complete their training. Now which bookshelf had my to do books on it again?"
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
On a slightly different topic, I'm wondering if Elves know about AV, or if it's just, like, a Teclis thing, and he's been meaning to publish his research for two centuries but he's trapped in AP hell, and now some random Grey Wizard is going to beat him to the punch.

Probably not, because the Eonir have AV, but it's fun to think about.
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If i had to guess it's probably a quaysh thing. Makes more sense to me then him bringing a few galleons of the stuff to make the first orbs and the colleges liminal realms.
 
Boney said:
If Chaos was so omnicompetent that a single monologue by a single Greater Daemon was enough to make even the most guarded and highly-trained of listeners their unwitting slave forever unless they immediately start cauterizing parts of their brain, we wouldn't be into the double digits of Everchosen. By all means, be cautious and skeptical of your actions around this kind of thing, but a Lord of Change making an appearance doesn't instantly transform literally every option into a trap option.
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Yeah, Chaos lies about how much control they have.
 
chocolote12 said:
Cleaving away from the deep emotional arguments everyone is throwing around here, I'd like to ask a question about mindset and consequence, if that's okay.

(That is a fancy way of saying that your post seemed like it had a foundation in something about the nature of truth and lies that I'm not familiar with, but I'm not asking about it as a way of prosecuting the argument your post was made to advance, nor to try and make you feel bad, sorry.)

Is lying bad to you? Not bad as in immoral; I mean, bad as in low quality? Is it inherently... is the word hard? Difficult to pass off? Do you think lies sound inherently different than truths, even if nobody can prove the truth and the lie is easy to believe?

This is sounding like a callout post after only a paragraph, so I'll clarify that that wouldn't be a bad thing; I think Honesty has an inherent moral virtue and I certainly don't practice lying enough to be any good at it. It's not a bad point of view.

But. If I did.

Do you think that the natural course of life, would be that those lies would come out? Once I got good enough, I mean. Do you think that revealing one of my theoretically competent lies would unveil all of the others, just, automatically? Through the nature of losing trust? I always thought that the point of lies was that they made people recheck their facts about other things you've said, once they were uncovered. But, if those other facts haven't changed, then they wouldn't really think that those other things are a lie anyways, would they?

Lies, and truth, are based on evident fact, I think. And, I think, that any sort of unveiling of the truth will also have to be grounded in evident fact. And, if there's something going on that isn't reliant on evident fact, then that isn't truth, but rather a bias that would react to a false claim identically to a true one, because false and true are indistinguishable without fact to set people straight. Assuming a sufficiently competent delivery, which can definitely make you more convincing than somebody who's telling the unvarnished truth; we will note for the record that many truths go unbelieved without good deliveries.

So, I guess the final question is, do you think there are any factors in this equation of lying other than Provable Fact and Bias? That is, do you think that Truth has an inherent Strength, as well as an Inherent Virtue?

Or is a Truth without Evidence just a Lie that happens to be correct?
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For me, truth vs lying comes down to a simple question of risk vs reward.

A reputation as an honest person is hard to gain, incredibly useful to have, and ridiculously easy to lose. It only takes a single lie that gets discovered to become known as a liar, but once that happens? It automatically puts everything you've ever said and everything you ever will say under increased suspicion. Generally speaking, that's a severe enough consequence for it to not be worth risking.

Adding to this, in the specific context of something having gone wrong or a person having done something wrong? Concealing it and then later getting found out generally results in a harsher punishment than just holding up your hand and saying 'my bad, I fucked up'. Essentially, it's a choice between a guaranteed light consequence or a chance of a more severe one- and if you roll that dice enough times, eventually it's going to come up snake eyes. In most cases, I'd say that risk isn't worth it.

I don't take the view of 'never lie, ever', but as a rule of thumb I'd say honesty is the better way to go as there's fewer potential downsides.
 
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NSMS said:
A reputation as an honest person is hard to gain, incredibly useful to have, and ridiculously easy to lose. It only takes a single lie that gets discovered to become known as a liar, but once that happens? It automatically puts everything you've ever said and everything you ever will say under increased suspicion. Generally speaking, that's a severe enough consequence for it to not be worth risking.
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I mean, in a general sense I agree with this, but Mathilde is a grey wizard. People are gonna give good odds on her lying or keeping secrets just on general principle.
 
[X] [BELEGAR] Nothing

[X] [COLLEGE] Incoming Everchosen
[X] [COLLEGE] Everchosen, Daemon, and Mathilde's candidacy
 
Wiggy said:
I mean, in a general sense I agree with this, but Mathilde is a grey wizard. People are gonna give good odds on her lying or keeping secrets just on general principle.
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For grey wizards in specific, I'd amend it to 'not lying to their superiors, and not keeping secrets for their own benefit'. Because yeah, when you're a spy the lines get placed a little differently- rather than an honest reputation in general, you want to be considered trustworthy by your superiors specifically.
 
Having read everything carefully, I think I'll vote for telling things. Not because either side convinced me, mind you, I have the very same conclusion now as I did when I finished reading the update. Thing is... I got the very distinct impression that the daemon was trying to erode our trust and our capability to work with others. This is and was one of Mathilde's greatest weapons, and similarly, one of her greatest weaknessess because she is always traumatised and paranoid and has to work to overcome it, and the demon multiple times tried to implant doubts into her head without bringing attention into them, something much more likely to work when Mathilde does not have the exact words to read and reread.

Could this be reverse psychology, with the daemon assuming we'd notice and overcompensate because that is what we usually do? Yes. But assuming the daemon is not omniscient or metacognizant, I think this is not very likely. In fact, I believe that if it was anyone but Tzeench's, the thread would have swiftly arrived in the same conclusion, and it is because they believe Tzeench has rightfully earned a reputation of being smart that people, perhaps deservedly, fear the simple answer because it feels "too easy", even if it would not be nearly as easy as it seems if played out in reality.

So I am going to assume that the daemon's attack of opportunity is not, in fact, a high-level social engineering, especially since a lot of stuff suggest that it was as slapdash as a Lord of Change can even be slapdash, and assume that this is just an attempt to try and implant doubts to Mathilde about her friends, a wedge that, if allowed to fester, will quickly grow and make Mathilde more susceptible to corruption, independent from any other factors and consequences that may arise from her choices. Because in the end, its most likely purpose is to corrupt Mathilde, and the best first step for that is to isolate her mentally.

So.

[X] [BELEGAR] Daemon and weakening
[X] [COLLEGE] Everchosen and Greater Daemon

And dare I even approval vote...

[X] [COLLEGE] Everchosen, Daemon, and Mathilde's candidacy
 
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Or as Bomey put it
Boney said:
You seem to be comparing Mathilde against some ideal frictionless spherical Grey Wizard in a vacuum. They're comparing her against what they've got: Broke Time And Claims It Was Deliberate, Quintuple Agent, Those Fucking Chaos Dwarves Still Sail Submarines Up The Reik To Drop Off Hobgoblin Assassins On Our Doorstep, Way Too Into Sigmar, Literally Stole Ghal Maraz, Left Naggaroth Worse Than He Found It, and their leader, When He Faked His Death A Rumour Spread That His Tower Was Filled With Dark Magic Books And Literally Every Enemy We've Got Apparently Finds It Super Plausible. The Grey Order works with what it's got, and what it's got is someone that has spent the last two decades doing huge amounts of good for the Empire and its allies. The Grey Order does not respond to a twenty year track record of miracles with "what if it was all some extreme double bluff" because if they did they would end up trusting literally nobody and accomplishing literally nothing.

So they trust Mathilde and if they're wrong they shrug and shove ten Battle Wizards down her throat, because the Empire has seen and killed so much worse. Yes, Mathilde has the Liber Mortis. Vlad helped write it. How'd that work out for him?
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storryeater said:
I got the very distinct impression that the daemon was trying to erode our trust and our capability to work with others
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The dilemma seems to be that both keeping quiet and telling others will do this; simply by showing up the demon took it's pound of flesh. The question becomes- is it easier for Mathilde to lie by omission, or for her friends to ignore the demon's potential influence?
 
Glau said:
The dilemma seems to be that both keeping quiet and telling others will do this; simply by showing up the demon took it's pound of flesh. The question becomes- is it easier for Mathilde to lie by omission, or for her friends to ignore the demon's potential influence?
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We did roll a Nat one on a uncertain but powerful magical substance. There had to be a downside for failing this. And we didn't even fail, we still found out what it did. Somebody else just also found out and decided to leave a message...
 
Glau said:
The dilemma seems to be that both keeping quiet and telling others will do this; simply by showing up the demon took it's pound of flesh. The question becomes- is it easier for Mathilde to lie by omission, or for her friends to ignore the demon's potential influence?
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Agreed. And if, in fact, we do get dunked by this choice, I will fully admit it was a bad idea. But let's look at the problem from another angle: what would I do if I was an evil bird demon that was trying to appear omniscient?

I'd make sure to engineer a situation with multiple winning conditions. A trap that would seem unescapable. So, people may say, we are back to Tzeench being unbeatable and omniscient, right?

No. Nay. Nah. The opposite. One now knows how the opponent thinks, and can work to reverse engineer the trap in order to break it. Thus, one must consider, how can such a situation be engineered by an individual that is smart but not omniscient? Simple. Construct it like a prisoner dilemma. Problem: Both sides would gain the most if both ally, it's just that neither side knows that. That breaks the dilemma. Solution: As noted, neither side actually knows that, so I, a bird demon, can use information with maximum potential to make them think ally is the wrong decision.

So how does one go about breaking this prison? One either pushes away their allies, if only in their own mind, or is pushed away by them, right? Answer: one cannot. To break this prison requires two. It requires two who are willing to trust each other enough to both choose the unlikely option. As such, the best option is to do the right thing and hope the people we trust will do the same. Could they act otherwise? Yes. Would that suck, perhaps worse than if we didn't trust them in the first place? Also yes.

But the daemon doesn't know that. It just hopes that by introducing two (or maybe three) winning conditions, one of them will activate and give it a wedge it can use. So I think our best choice is to ally and hope that others do the same. Let's go for the optimal solution, because everything else is the demon's win in that it will push Mathilde slightly more into corruption.
 
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There's a reason that the prisoners dilemma pays off big if you do not defect but the others do.

Or, to put this another way, we can't control what others do, just what Mathilde does. Shouldn't we take the course of action where the bad outcome depends on Mathilde, who we control, rather than the unknown but probably dice rolled reactions of others?
 
Glau said:
There's a reason that the prisoners dilemma pays off big if you do not defect but the others do.

Or, to put this another way, we can't control what others do, just what Mathilde does. Shouldn't we take the course of action where the bad outcome depends on Mathilde, who we control, rather than the unknown but probably dice rolled reactions of others?
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If we want to act optimally, maybe that is the way to act.

But if we want to actually have a chance against Tzeench's machinations, we cannot allow the Lord of Change to dictate the pace that way.

Because whether we betray or get betrayed, we get a wedge. And, in this case, a smaller wedge is not a victory, it is an invitation for Tzeench to proceed and mess with us more.

Tzeench banks on either side betraying PRECISELY because, under normal circumstances, it is the smart choice. It is how I assume someone smart but not omniscient would act, bank on one single point of failure, on one person following the normal course of action when that is ill advised. I say, I refuse to play that game. Let's see what others will do.
 
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