Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Genes are not the only explanation for heritability of traits; if they were, it would not have taken so long before Gregor Mendel developed the theory. Here are some popular explanations from real history:
- Spermatozoa contain tiny copies of the future being that it will become if it has the opportunity to fertilize. In this theory, called preformationism, there is no such thing as genetics or heritability: all individual offspring are predetermined from the beginning of life.
- The environment during pregnancy dictates what the child will be like, which is why people from a given region tend to look similar.
- Traits acquired during life are passed on to offspring, not traits locked inside your genetic code. You may know this theory as Lamarckianism.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
In that case the obvious question must be: is the proportion of genetic material contributed by the sexes equal? It's not inconceivable that dwarves are polyploid to some degree; as a tetraploid species with haploid gametes, an egg fertilizes by fusing with three sperm instead of one would trend toward a 3:1 male-female population, if I'm understanding correctly.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
We'll know this is true if the Undumgi kids come out with little beards
It's why Mathilde is so darn short: her parents spent all their lives under the boot heel of the noble class.
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A strongly pair bonding culture in conjunction with differential casualties would be such a circumstance. If the surviving males don't assemble harems to take advantage of their rarity value you end up with non-breeding females if you start off with 1 : 1 ratios at birth.
We need to be much less tolerant of dwarven casualties.
The inverse, I think, although I'd have to check the numbers. For there to be a third as many women they need to contribute three times as much genetic material each, so three eggs and one sperm per child.
That's not an evolutionary stable strategy.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's basically having your cake and eating it. If that was possible there wouldn't be one "multiple random spells" and one "single specific spell" option.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Have you perhaps never played a Japanese mobile game before?
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
Kinda sorta. If we do it enough, all spells will be chosen. Since there aren't many spells left, though, this will be soon.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
just be glad that unlike a real gacha, mathilde doesn't have to worry about duplicate pulls
I have not, nor do I want to.
This was my understanding too. However there is an overwhelming vote for getting a particular spell while most planmakers are going gatcha. I was wondering if someone had come up with an exception that I'd missed.
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- He/Him
Ahahaha, oh man can you just imagine the salt if that was a thing and happened?
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
The incentives for such a gameplay element DO NOT EXIST HERE!
[sobs]
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
mathilde, furiously smelting her 37 spare copies of shadow of death into power stones
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
This IS a setting where the civilizations with the most actively antisocial traits have societies an order of magnitude or more larger than the most pro-social civilizations, so we know at least most principals of political economy have been chucked in favor of endless replaceable 'enemies'. Would not be surprised to hear that more subtle biology got the same treatment. (Gross biology is already crying in a corner over growth rates and the vertebrate makeover the fungi kingdom got.)
4000 years is way, way too short to have moved to a new evolutionary equalibrium, so it seems like this is another sacrifice to establish atmosphere. We either agree to allow the handwave or we retcon large chunks of the world.
Plus, tbh, arguements about the dwarves being designed just seem to beg the question of why the designers were so misogynist. No reason for inequality (or a gender binary, really?) in a designed species except the preferences of the designers.
As an aside, I LOVE that @BoneyM has written in laundry as a relevant and large task in a few places- the kidnapping of the Baron and the fortune referenced being made in Nar. It adds a huge realism dimension to see cooking, cleaning, spinning, weaving- all that stuff- show up in a fantasy setting. It's like the opposite of how the source materials ignored utility runes: armies and wizards are a very small part of a civilization.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
You have to feed four other Shroud of Invisibility spells into the main one to limit break it or else it pops whenever you do anything
Nobody has even met Kragg, do you even understand how rare SSRs are
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
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- He/Him/His
We could invest the Gambler coin effect on the Teacher's Choice option.
I mean, I don't really think we should, but it's a thing we could do if we wanted to maximize our chances of getting a specific spell learned but were not so desperate as to get instruction in a single one.
We don't know how the trait we gained this past update will manifest. If it reads "learning Invisibility is now your highest priority," then we'll update to a plan where we study that spell specifically. If it reads "you are determined to learn Invisibility within the next year," then we can gacha this turn safely and re-evaluate next turn. It all depends; the point of preliminary planmaking isn't to nail things down for certain, it's to develop a collaborative sense of what options we have and what the thread zeitgeist is.
I mean, I don't really think we should, but it's a thing we could do if we wanted to maximize our chances of getting a specific spell learned but were not so desperate as to get instruction in a single one.
Planmakers are trying to maximize action efficiency, since we are in AP hell. Last time we went to college, we learned one spell and partially learned two others, and that's the worst gacha outcome we've had. It is a balancing act between "get the specific spells we really, really want" and "finish spellbook so our Magic score goes up and all our effects keying off of it improve."
We don't know how the trait we gained this past update will manifest. If it reads "learning Invisibility is now your highest priority," then we'll update to a plan where we study that spell specifically. If it reads "you are determined to learn Invisibility within the next year," then we can gacha this turn safely and re-evaluate next turn. It all depends; the point of preliminary planmaking isn't to nail things down for certain, it's to develop a collaborative sense of what options we have and what the thread zeitgeist is.
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I'm glad that's shining through. A lot of fantasy falls for the 'gross dark ages' tropes that Renaissance historians exaggerated to make themselves look good. In truth moderately well-off people could live a life only slightly less comfortable than our modern ones, but instead of a mind-boggling array of labour-saving devices we have, it was achieved through an insane amount of hard work by a lot of poor people, and I try to show glimpses of it now and then to keep things grounded.
- Location
- Brazil
Honestly, dropping the coin on spell learning sounds more appealing by the moment.
Something like 'Mathilde won't feel comfortable doing sneaky stuff until she has at least one new sneaking-relevant spell'. For the short term this'll only be narrative with her measuring twice and cutting once, but if you let a year go by without at least trying, it'll do bad things to her confidence. So it'd be entirely reasonable to roll the dice on spell roulette this coming turn and then focus on Invisibility specifically the turn after if you didn't get it.
- Location
- Berkeley
What is and is not evolutionarily stable depends on the entirety of the environment in which the selection takes place. While losing two out of three males born prior to them reproducing due to war casualties won't itself change the genetic advantage gained by having more female offspring for an individual, that does not mean that it would be a net advantage. For instance, I could see female dwarves with more brothers being more likely to land a higher-quality mate, and families with a higher proportion of male offspring having a greater chance of their own male offspring surviving to reach reproductive ages (from things like having more potential trainers willing to help them for free and cooperative actions).
There can be other reasons for a not-1:1 ratio being evolutionarily stable. For instance, if the resource cost of birthing and raising a male offspring is significantly lower than raising a female one, then at a 1:1 ratio having more male births is advantageous as you get the same genetic impact with a lower resource cost.
Even if circumstances are such that the net evolutionary pressure should have them trend closer towards a 1:1 ratio, though, that in no way means they are doomed. It just means that in an evolutionarily relevant timescale their birth ratio might edge up to 2:1 rather than 3:1. The only reason the race is 'doomed' as things stand is because they're not willing to stop spending lives above their replacement rate. Hell, outside of all the Skaven rising up or other major catastrophes I could see their tech reaching the point where they aren't spending lives above the replacement rate without changing anything fundamental about them, even culturally.
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