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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Current tally is quite close and could still swing either way.
Adhoc vote count started by T_of_A on Mar 27, 2025 at 1:54 AM, finished with 4596 posts and 340 votes.
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EDIT: @agumentic the big QM posts are mostly unrelated to the shift, actually.
It seems like things shifted due to some final discussion about the option, but most importantly due to people being reminded of how approval voting works. This led to people who were voting for the many non-ship plans to all start approval voting for the leading non-ship options.
Oh, and the increased discussion put the thread on the front page again, which reminded some extra people to come vote. So the total voter count increased, and seeing as this was already a rather close vote... It swung by about 20 votes.
 
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agumentic said:
So I see big posts from QM and the tally shows that the vote shifted to breaking the favour up. I wasn't a fan of the airship, but what are the arguments behind the shift?
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I'm... pretty sure nothing in particular? At least no arguments that weren't already made in the initial rush. Seems like there were just a lot of people who hadn't voted yet that were abruptly reminded the vote hadn't closed, or who decided the favour was an acceptable compromise over the airship/armor.
 
agumentic said:
So I see big posts from QM and the tally shows that the vote shifted to breaking the favour up. I wasn't a fan of the airship, but what are the arguments behind the shift?
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As far as I can tell, the crux was 'your vote still matters'. Enough people voted for Requests that it leaped ahead by a bit. And now, because of the nature of approval votes, it's equalizing again because some people who wanted Airship but didn't want Tarnus realized that Airship is losing to Requests, and some people who wanted Tarnus and didn't want Airship to win realized that Tarnus is losing to Requests.

And it's entirely possible that in a few days Tarnus or Airship will pull ahead and people who don't want that will go back and re-approval vote for Requests. Or maybe Wrong Turn will pull a major upset and everyone else will band together to defeat it. It's anyone's vote.
 
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[X] Plan Not Pickle Requests Variant with Apparitions
[X] Dispensation to study methods of destroying or beneficially transforming Dhar
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
 
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[X] Armor of von Tarnus
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Elector-Countess
[X] Dispensation to study methods of destroying or beneficially transforming Dhar
[x] Plan: The Next Generation
[x] Plan Tower of Doom! and Research!
 
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I think I was originally against the "something from everything" vote because I as a QM would be annoyed with it - more plates to spin.

But then I had another think, and mostly it's just adding some wobble to a bunch of existing plates, or tying up some long-lost threads. And when I ask the question of genuinely what I want, what I think is more interesting, what wins is the pile of small(er) favors that add to the momentum of everything already happening. Instead of one giant favor that changes the nature of the quest in the ways the other options do.

I'm also still in favor of saving it for the next thing. That's the right use for approval voting. We get to call the colleges in on something! Like retaking a Karak! Or digging canals all over the empire!

[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Save the boon until we choose our next project
[X] Plan Not Pickle Requests Variant with Apparitions
 
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MiracleGrow said:
Honestly I'm willing to swap to just sitting on the favor at this point.
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I genuinely think one of the issues with the current vote is that there really isn't anything we can direct it to. Nobody was thinking about cashing in Great Deeds any time soon. I think we'd be in a much better position to get something the thread would like and enjoy out of this reward in an arc vote, or just later in general.

If you (speaking to anyone reading) doesn't like the winning plan, voting mostly because you dislike the alternatives, or don't feel enthused about it, toss an approval vote towards banking the favor. It is impossible for it to hurt.

[] Save the boon until we choose our next project

(there's also a three or four people who voted to do that, but in a plan format, I'm not sure how that is going to be counted)

hugo239111 said:
I am looking at it just as is, the Empire knows that the nexus's can be used, but doesn't know how to use them. I believe the words were "There are five polities that have their own piece, there is no reason there couldn't be a sixth." That being stated I don't think we have a good enough understanding of active use nexuses to state what to do with them so I was mainly focusing on the fact that the energy needs to go somewhere. The Blood fane could go either north or west, so Kislev or Nordland seeing as east isn't towards anything (as far as I am aware) and the Southern ones are the Tower and Brass Keep. I don't know about Mordheim's outside of the fact that it's west of Kadrin and was fed by Sylvanian ones. Kislev I can see denying help though so I agree on the Ice witches thing.

Flying ship wise I threw that out there because it was in the lead, so I was adapting it to the war idea. My vote was going for full college commitment on reclaiming a nexus, so that we could do all the research and really hit home the Empire value to the project. Strike team idea was mainly on the basis of most of the problems seem frontloaded on the Nexuses (IE Khornate champion) that most people really don't want to deal with and then you could bring in the reinforcements. Mainly based off the Teufelheim action and Mt Drakenhof expedition, each would have been extremely hard for an army but the right group/person made it easier. But in essence I do agree that even if a strike team succeeded you would be either rushing to make sure it didn't fall again or banking on a lack of response. (The only one that I could see lacking a response is the Tower of Melkhior, and that's only because he removed everyone within reasonable distance that would want it as far as I can tell).
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We have to ask Kislev and Laurelorn how they use their networks, otherwise it would be unfair towards the Karaz Ankor. The Empire is going to figure it out soon. Even if the Empire doesn't, the possibility of it means ceding that opportunity will make people frown. And the Blood Fane probably would be best directed into Kienbaum, here's a map depicting the network. Most of the southern part of Ostermark used to be connected to Mordheim, but the warpstone meteor ensured it all got corrupted.

The Blood Fane's guard could be killed quickly, assuming Boney hasn't changed it for quest purposes, but it'd trigger a large response from the Beastmen. Melkhior I would bet has methods to deal with flying ships. I'm also pretty sure that his absence would be noticed fairly quickly. I don't see why it would be difficult to muster people to attack them. Melkhior's Tower? Sure, absolutely. Seems nightmarish. But the others should be feasible, and the benefits obvious. We're cleansing Praag!
 
MiracleGrow said:
Honestly I'm willing to swap to just sitting on the favor at this point.
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Boney said:
- Favours can be banked for later, but I'd rather that only be for a portion of this. Saving it for later very often becomes never actually using it.
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Better not. QM made this vote because there is a backend need to have it now, even if whatever results doesn't happen immediately (like the Title). Having it be later, risks this all repeating later too, which would freeze the whole quest for similarly long periods of time and again risks another nothing vote. Don't do it to the QM, that'd be terrible repayment for our role in making this a cooperative story telling.
 
Honestly I don't think any of these are bad choices. Heck with the pickle plan we still get a swanky gyrocopter to fly around in.

[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer
[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer (Researcher ver)

But I dooo want a cool airship.
 
As someone who's preferred option is now losing, this phenomenon is just people voting for the things they like, exactly how quests always and normally and rightly work. Something that was leading before is no longer leading, and that's deeply normal.

EDIT: That this is happening over months is a good thing, not a bad thing. It's given people more time to think about what they want and more time to argue their points, which are good. It'd be bad if it was constraining update speed or something, but it's not. It's a wholly good thing.
 
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What's the argument for the Armor of von Tarnus? I can see why people want the flying ship, or an assortment of vaguely interesting favours, but what does armor add to Mathilde?
 
Having had time to think on the situation, I'll keep my vote to just these three.

First, my preferred - 0% chance and all.

[x] Plan: The Next Generation
-[x] Use the whole boon to have the gold college teach Eike everything she can learn about material-enchantment, alchemy(-adjacent if alchemy itself is too much), and all-around enhancing and supplementing her Natural Alchemist trait until she's a walking talking reverse-engineering machine that can pick up magical crafting skills lightning quick.

Then, my preferred among the leading options.

[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer

Last, my preferred version of the frontrunner that hopefully will get more popular.

[X] Plan Not Pickle Requests Variant with Apparitions

shepsquared said:
I haven't really won here and I'm not being anymore callous then when you implicitly put the blame for people feeling anxious about this on Boney. You can't speak for how everyone feels about a quest they're invested in, nor can you speak for everyone who just 'lost' a vote that's still open.

When I said I backed off because arguing the point would have involved me being negative, it was because I didn't think me being negative about the boat would convince people. It wasn't about me being trapped in a negative feedback loop or feeling anxious.

And if your stance is that this discussion is only happening because a bunch of us just 'won', maybe you need to reconsider how much of it is coming from you having lost.
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...Well I suppose I misinterpreted what you mean then.

But you did me just now, too. It's not the winning that brought us here to this argument, it was seemingly winning (the vote is not closed) as a result of picking back the argument months after the vote had... well, mostly settled. As Boney goes on to point out, while the margins stayed the same for weeks, attempts to change that apparently hadn't stopped.

That's on me. I said I was uncertain about the situation, but I spent enough words on that hypothesis that I can be reasonably held to account for pushing it, and the hypothesis was wrong.

So does that make this whole thing moot?

Well, no, because now you're saying that I should reconsider if we're only here because "I lost", which is just tossing almost everything I said in the bin in favor of an ad hominem that implies I'm a liar.
The alleged lie you imply Prime 2.0 said:
I'd have mixed feelings at best, because I've been in forum questing for over a decade at this point and my opinions about how vote duration and campaigning work were formed by a lot more than this specific poll.
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This was a reply to you. You read it. If you thought about it at all, you know that you just called bullshit on my own description of my personal feelings, which you asked for.

Only thing worth reconsidering about that is if I should hold out for you to take it back.
Boney said:
Say, for the same of argument, that I've made a quest that people are invested enough in that they'll feel anxious or upset if an important vote goes in a direction they don't like. As you've just said yourself, a narrow margin of victory is a common thing, which not only exacerbates those feelings, it also maximizes the amount of people that will end up on the wrong end of them. It seems like at this point, it is no longer possible for this to be a universally fun and inviting environment. What's my 'job' here, then?

Sorry if this comes across as unkind, but this is how questing works. The possibility of influencing the result is inextricable from the possibility of not succeeding. The field of conflict is a social one, and the foibles of the human mind are the terrain. This cannot be worked around because it is the work. The debates and the discussions are not the unfortunate chore from which the direction of the story arises, it is the game. You can play the game by deciding what you think the best option is and adding your one vote to it. You can play it by discussing the matter to try to synthesize the available data into easily-digestible facts so that people can more easily arrive at a better thought out solution. You can champion a particular cause and make your debates for it. You can sit on the sidelines and just watch the game go back and forth. But this is the game. That is why I leave it open as long as possible, so that it can go on.

If you see playing that game as the price you pay to win, instead of as the game we all get to play together, then I can see how that will feel unfair - that I'm extracting more of a 'cost' than usual, that you 'have to' spend so much time on the field to 'pay for' your 'victory'. But that's not what this is. If you treat it like it is, it will hurt you. And as I spelled out two paragraphs ago, there's nothing I can do to stop that from hurting you. If people care, and what they care about is that the right option wins, then this becomes an engine of suffering, where people are fighting to try to make it so that it's others suffering this vote, not them. And that can't be what this quest is. That would be a poison that would taint everything we've built here.
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...You're taking what the part of "campaigning" I was talking about overbroadly, which, I guess is a little to be expected because there's not a lot of vocabulary that distinguishes each part of championing a vote in a forum quest.

The closest term I have for it is "knife fighting". It's not the brainstorming, it's not the research, it's not the Q&A, it's not the plan drafting or editing.

It's the raw, reflexive struggle to not let the other guy have the last word. The fight over the recency effect, to determine the framing of the choice for the next few hours, the grinding chore of making sure you are seen by people who don't have time to read the whole thread, it's what you're motivated to do by the sight of a notable vote swing that happened overnight when neither you nor anyone who is championing your thesis was awake and the only thing on the page was somebody speaking against it - that feeling that you have to make up for having had to sleep instead of being in an internet argument.

Because someone does, or your vote loses. Nobody would do this if it didn't move numbers some of the time.

Knife fighting is advertisement delivered through constant back and forth. Putting your plan and the reasoning behind it in front of as many eyes as possible, while everyone else is trying the same thing. And the mindset to do it is blinkered as all hell. I reiterate that moratoriums exist in part so that people can do all of the functions of quest gameplay that are productive without the specter of knife fighting distorting or distracting from it.

In any situation, if you have an alternative to knife fighting for doing what you're using knife fighting for, it is better to do that than knife fighting.

Like... hell, remember when I edited in links to your posts into the Mandred college choice vote? People were popping in, high effort posters included, to ask basic questions that had been answered not long after the vote opened. As soon as those frequently asked questions were given indisputable answers from authority in the tally itself, the entire tide shifted.

Right up until that point, people had to answer the question again and again and again, to post about it constantly to keep it visible and push back against people, whether ignorant of earlier rulings or doubtful about their scope, who were suggesting that the facts about the Indic paradigm might be wrong.

That continuous struggle to keep that information visible is one form of knife fighting. And that is not a core part of the gameplay of quests, it is a flaw that basic information about factual rules and voting positions can be distorted or buried if one side presses their case and the other does not long enough for a new page to turn over.

And I fucking celebrated when I discovered that an alternative to that particular form of it, and confirmed that it wasn't a fluke.

I apologize for accidentally implying you weren't holding up your end of the player-QM contract. On the contrary, you put in three times more legwork towards being an attentive and kind QM than more than a single digit number of others on this site even have the chance to attempt - not because there aren't other good and kind QMs, but because they're not running a quest with this many players and posts to fuss over.

If you're wondering whether or not we have the harder deal... well, us players get to skim or skip parts of the thread. You've mostly chosen not to... no matter how impossible that may seem sometimes for anyone whose name isn't "Veekie".

But I'll be damned if I acknowledge knife fighting as a feature rather than a bug. Vote discussion should be about developing and comparing ideas, not fighting over the forum equivalent of Search Engine Optimization.
 
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MrHobbit said:
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So you're response to my post saying « i like it because it's cool and awesome and damn the practical » is « yeah, but it's not practical »?

CornyBones said:
gonna step away from the thread for awhile cause I'm getting pretty seriously upset feelings about having an option for a cool airship be in the lead and have some kind of argument come out of nowhere to unseat it *three months later*
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Yeah, it's incredibly frustrating. Knowing that your favourite option would have won in literally any other of the votes, but not this one because of exceptional circumstances isn't very fun.

StormySky said:
There was in fact a few nights a month or two ago where I actually lost sleep worrying over this before consoling myself with the fact that it's been ages since anyone voted so it should be fine and the QM's closing it soon, right? And now this happens. Guess I have to brace for impact, because I don't actually have another choice.
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Yeah, same.

Edit: and the leading plan asks the Celestials for cash? A bunch of lightning-throwing, future-seeing, weather-controlling wizards, and we ask them money? That seems like a huge waste.
 
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[X] Plan Tower of Doom! and Research!
[X] Plan Not Pickle Requests Variant with Apparitions
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV

A flying tower is cooler than a flying ship. Instant Keep wherever you go. Made of sturdy, dependable stone rather than weak and flimsy wood. Goes through the sky at a leisurely pace for user comfort and to assert dominance.
 
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Kai Merah said:
What's the argument for the Armor of von Tarnus? I can see why people want the flying ship, or an assortment of vaguely interesting favours, but what does armor add to Mathilde?
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It makes Mathilde nearly invincible to even larger groups of non-superelite enemies. This is valuable property of the armour because we frequently vote to involve Mathilde in combat situations. In the future we might get involved in, just off the top of my head, nagarythe, iron orcs and silver road wars 2. Much more so the last than the former two, but stealth and magic dice has failed us before, so why not stack the odds even more.
 
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It's also associated with complementary aesthetics. Mathilde is an almost unique in her kind Wizard-Knight, having legendary magical armor would rip. She's an almost unique of her kind Wizard-Swordswoman who learned from greatswords and incorporated those teachings into her style, the armor is greatsword armor built by a former greatsword who developed it into his own idiom. It's Inscribed with the Key of Secrets, which symbolizes unlocking power through knowledge. And it would be another symbol of her using the other Colleges as strength, through unity, which is imo one of Mathilde's best and most consistent character beats.
 
[X] Plan Tower of Doom! and Research!
[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer

I like the idea of our own flying demesne more than I like the idea of assorted items or something that makes Mathilde nigh unkillable. A bit of risk is good for the soul.
 
[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer
[X] Plan Not Pickle Requests Variant with Apparitions
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV

Approval voting for the apparitions instead of CF for the Jades. I think it's very unlikely that it will catch up, but hey, more unlikely things have happened.
 
Kai Merah said:
What's the argument for the Armor of von Tarnus? I can see why people want the flying ship, or an assortment of vaguely interesting favours, but what does armor add to Mathilde?
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The Armor of Von Tarnus is a unique armor in that its own protective enchantments stack with Aethyric Armor to produce a very durable combatant. Any thing below a cannonball is liable to bounce off a LM clad in such artifice.

And we have a laundry list of Nexuses to seize via brute force.

K von Carstein said:
Edit: and the leading plan asks the Celestials for cash? A bunch of lightning-throwing, future-seeing, weather-controlling wizards, and we ask them money? That seems like a huge waste.
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Well to be fair the Celestial College also uses a bunch of lightning-throwing, future-seeing, weather-controlling wizards for the acquisition of lucre.

And I don't think Lothern takes lightning bolts as payment.
 
Asking the Celestials for cash is the funniest part of the plan to me, everyone else gets asked for something unique to their lore of magic or in the case of the Jades for the ethereal currency of favors that powers the Colleges of Magic.

Mathilde *gets to Celestials*: Urgh... money I guess.
Maria *looks at Algard pleadingly, she has a dozen portents of dread power to deliver*
Algard *placidly* Sounds about right, money it is.
Dragomas:... children, all of you. :V
 
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Prime 2.0 said:
And while I think it's fine enough, I'm just really, really not fine with a half baked plan that used raw CF as a placeholder winning out just because three months ago it was a first mover.
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I resent that. The mk IV on it isn't by accident; I spent a ton of the moratorium putting it together and soliciting feedback from people, which I then incorporated because other folks had great ideas and criticisms. The reason I made it in the first place was that a bunch of people asked for a grab-bag option to vote for but didn't want to make it themselves because it turns out that thinking of eight moderately cool things is harder than thinking of one very cool thing! It wasn't even the thing I spent most of the vote campaigning for, but it's the thing I put the most work into because it took work. You've known me for long enough to know what I'm like when it comes to planmaking. I responded to all the feedback I got over the course of the long moratorium and then went to bed. I don't know what else I could have done other than "have better ideas during the moratorium".

Like. I understand the feeling of "ugh, just not that," when looking at the tally, because I felt that way while the airship was winning, and other people have posted at length about how they feel that way about the armor. It sucks. I don't have a solution to this. I know a lot of people felt that way about the library five years ago, because they said so and it was accordingly delayed until end-of-arc, but at least that time there was only one thing with any sort of momentum behind it, not three wildly different ones. I'm not exactly proud to have put together something that seems to have as its primary selling point "is least hated," but I'm not apologizing for it either, and I gave it all the baking that people could help me with before the vote went live.
 
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