It's still good, Shadow Knives + Smoke and Mirrors makes Mathilde absolutely fucking diabolical in a complex situation. Throw daggers and disappear off somewhere else in the same motion, and you can never be sure if she's going to show up in your face with cannonsword.
Like, we've got all the pieces now to build a really nightmarish Martial Art
It'd get even worse with Invisibility because at that point you're a horror movie monster that can't be seen and likes to murder you with phantom knives. Basically a super ghost.
It's more effective to front load the enchantment lessons though, as they'll presumably impact the upgrades we take after and during the turn we take the lessons, rather than automatically being backported. Even if taking enchanting prevents a single upgrade option from failing and having to be retried the next turn, it pays for itself. Not to mention that it might permanently upgrade the result, giving us something that we won't get an opportunity to achieve on a retry.
It is, that post wasn't me saying we shouldn't take it often and frontloaded. It was me pointing out why I think we're going to be building longer than your estimation of two turns total.
It's still good, Shadow Knives + Smoke and Mirrors makes Mathilde absolutely fucking diabolical in a complex situation. Throw daggers and disappear off somewhere else in the same motion, and you can never be sure if she's going to show up in your face with cannonsword.
Like, we've got all the pieces now to build a really nightmarish Martial Art
Add Cloak Activity for near perfect feints and it becomes even nastier. I do think we're going to need to make items of things like Cloak Activity though, as otherwise we're going to be too busy casting in combat, which we know risks miscasts even for lower level spells.
It is, that post wasn't me saying we shouldn't take it often and frontloaded. It was me pointing out why I think we're going to be building longer than your estimation of two turns total.
At this point I think we are safe from unprepared, but I think we should keep going, see if we can get a positive trait from completely shoring up that weakness.
Yeah, Smoke and Mirrors is right up Mat's alley, and would be terrifying on her. Here, have a teleporting devil mage with a great-sword that's also sometimes intangible and rides a shadowhorse while her shadows kill anything nearby.
This is the point where you go: Huh. You might just count as a Lord now, instead of just a Hero unit in terms of WHFB. Can someone check the rules for teleports? Does the mage get to pick where she goes? Because having Mat be a shadowjumper (teleporting from shadow to shadow) is a nasty, nasty thought.
If we are going to study a Battle Spell, it should be that one. And the goal should be to segment it. If a Battle Wizard can wield teleports into other spells, than at some future point, Mat should be able to Shadowteleport as a stand alone, non battle tier spell.
Funnily enough, this encourages us to use Dread Aspect instead of the raw spell, at the cost of being horrifically terrifying every time we do it, like some sort of movie monster using villain teleportation.
We'll just have to avoid attacking people dressed in green and armed with bows then.
-------------------------------
(Phantom Ganon Phantom Ganon Phantom Ganon!)
Though, thinking about it...
There's gotta be reasons that Wizards aren't just impossible-to-contest in combat. That they don't just load up on all the buff spells and just steamroll any encounter/challenge. That is to say, there's probably some Reasonability Levels involved with power levels, both for friendly Wizards and hostile Wizards, too. Reasonability in terms of... If everybody/everything uses all the combat options (and equipment and spells and and) optimally, or can think of everything, it just... Gets a bit frustratingly deadly, survivability-wise. That is, things that kept you safe from overpowered opponents when starting out your adventure, probably kick in to keep you from being overpowered and cheesing everything, too.
Normally I imagine that that just comes down to... well, narrative and storytelling. Writing and narrating stuff to make a good scene or story or game. Rather than going ahead like it's a DND Theoretical Char Optimization challenge.
Or throwing more challenging challenges at you. That's also a possibility. The more worrying one, at that. Because sometimes you don't want the stress of knowing that becoming more powerful just means ever-more-powerful enemies, and always being at risk and so forth...
There's gotta be reasons that Wizards aren't just impossible-to-contest in combat. That they don't just load up on all the buff spells and just steamroll any encounter/challenge. That is to say, there's probably some Reasonability Levels involved with power levels, both for friendly Wizards and hostile Wizards, too. Reasonability in terms of... If everybody/everything uses all the combat options (and equipment and spells and and) optimally, or can think of everything, it just... Gets a bit frustratingly deadly, survivability-wise. That is, things that kept you safe from overpowered opponents when starting out your adventure, probably kick in to keep you from being overpowered and cheesing everything, too.
Normally I imagine that that just comes down to... well, narrative and storytelling. Writing and narrating stuff to make a good scene or story or game. Rather than going ahead like it's a DND Theoretical Char Optimization challenge.
Or throwing more challenging challenges at you. That's also a possibility. The more worrying one, at that. Because sometimes you don't want the stress of knowing that becoming more powerful just means ever-more-powerful enemies, and always being at risk and so forth...
here's gotta be reasons that Wizards aren't just impossible-to-contest in combat. That they don't just load up on all the buff spells and just steamroll any encounter/challenge. That is to say, there's probably some Reasonability Levels involved with power levels, both for friendly Wizards and hostile Wizards, too. Reasonability in terms of... If everybody/everything uses all the combat options (and equipment and spells and and) optimally, or can think of everything, it just... Gets a bit frustratingly deadly, survivability-wise. That is, things that kept you safe from overpowered opponents when starting out your adventure, probably kick in to keep you from being overpowered and cheesing everything, too.
First, countermagic is a thing. Second, magic is not reliable. We are extremely talented and more powerful than most wizards. Third, a competent combat wizard will pretty much blend large numbers of normal people. But there are far more normal people than wizards, and they are far harder to train and replace. Plus the winds do not always blow strongly.
There's gotta be reasons that Wizards aren't just impossible-to-contest in combat. That they don't just load up on all the buff spells and just steamroll any encounter/challenge. That is to say, there's probably some Reasonability Levels involved with power levels, both for friendly Wizards and hostile Wizards, too. Reasonability in terms of... If everybody/everything uses all the combat options (and equipment and spells and and) optimally, or can think of everything, it just... Gets a bit frustratingly deadly, survivability-wise. That is, things that kept you safe from overpowered opponents when starting out your adventure, probably kick in to keep you from being overpowered and cheesing everything, too.
Well I assume that there's a reason some named characters survive for millennia if regular battle against regular lord level fighters and wizards. I imagine it's because they cheese both their lethality and survivability as hard as possible in an escalation game of acquiring more skills and resources so they go after bigger and more lucrative challenges, until either they die or they become Malekieth/Morathi/Ariel/Nagash/Neferata/Abhorsen tier, and sit at the top table with the other immortals.
I've been reading it as a sign of Mathilde's growing dwarfy attitudes. Expecting magic to sit down and shut up when you give it a stern look is a runesmith attitude. She might still be a Wind-user, but her focuses on dispelling and crushing miscasts before they can do harm seem to be moving her in a very Kragg direction when it comes to her approach to magic.
Just saw this and yeah it really does look like runesmith attitudes, though I do figure it has cross over with ornery master wizards of advanced age responding to spells from younger ones.
"Oi you, siddown an shut up."
Which kinda leads to the notion that the oldest human wizards and runesmiths have this small thing as at least one thing in common.
There's also gotta be something that causes or draws a trend towards, well... ties. Or results/clashes that both sides can walk away from.
Because one thing that I've felt that quests usually sorta weren't good at simulating and resulting in, is those types of stories where some people battle for hours or a day or two, or where some dramatic act results in somebody being spared or let go, or matters of ambiguity.
Because quests tend to rely on dice. And dice aren't so great at being able to make non lethal engagements, or dramatically-long engagements, and so on.
Everything is always so decisive, you know? Win or lose. Survive or die.
Ok, I give up. We have met him. Worked with him. Interacted with him. Even spent a social action on him. @BoneyM How do we get Kragg's Dramatis Personae entry?
As I understand it the project is finished when either A) We tell Belegar it is finished or B) Belegar tells us to do something else.
Assuming the auto-build and security actions succeeded we could reasonably declare completion immediately.
Given our backlog I'm very much against dragging this project out longer than the standard two turns / one year / one Belegar CKII Quest turn.
Ok, I give up. We have met him. Worked with him. Interacted with him. Even spent a social action on him.
@BoneyM How do we get Kragg's Dramatis Personae entry?
@BoneyM Shouldn't Kragg the Grim be in the Dramatis Personae? We've interacted more than enough with him, and nobody can say he's not an Important Character in this quest.
We need to complete our spellbook below battlemagic. Each invented spell allows us to omit one of the standard one (in our case we sub MAP for obsolete Shadow of Death). Before this turn we had 6 standard spells not-yet-learned and needed to learn 5 of them to improve our Magic. After this update we'll need
four, because we learned Shadow Knives.
Battle Magic doesn't count - we had WOG that "Battle Magic is its own reward".
Ok, I give up. We have met him. Worked with him. Interacted with him. Even spent a social action on him. @BoneyM How do we get Kragg's Dramatis Personae entry?
At this point I think we are safe from unprepared, but I think we should keep going, see if we can get a positive trait from completely shoring up that weakness.
@BoneyM Is "unprepared" resolved soley by getting Invisibility (since it's the thing she really should have at this point), or would something that strongly helps escapeing like Universal Confusion or the Battlemagic Teleport spell also resolve it, since escape was the issue during the infiltration
Anyway, I think next turn we should just grab Invisibility from scrolls, learn it in our Ulgu-tower, and spend our other actions on other stuff. Oh well, gacha gonna gacha.
I agree. We do not need to hang every possible bell and whistle on the tower project. Depending on how getting our Patriarch here this turn goes, I vote next turn we give it one, maybe two more actions and call the project done. I would like to Gambler one of the tricky shadow-reorientation enhancements, if we only do one thing.
When we did that change over I believe we had Universal Confusion, Illusion, Cloak Activity, Shadow of Death, Shadow Knives, Shroud of Invisibility, Throttling and Dread Aspect left to learn. We then learned Dread Aspect shortly after/during and that was one, pulling us down to six. We've knocked off the others since then to leave Universal Confusion, Illusion, Cloak Activity, Shadow of Death, Shroud of Invisibility and we'd need to learn everything but Shadow of Death.
Its like three actions at most, two more than likely, and one if we get lucky with the Gacha again to learn them.
Ok, I give up. We have met him. Worked with him. Interacted with him. Even spent a social action on him. @BoneyM How do we get Kragg's Dramatis Personae entry?
As I understand it the project is finished when either A) We tell Belegar it is finished or B) Belegar tells us to do something else.
Assuming the auto-build and security actions succeeded we could reasonably declare completion immediately.
Given our backlog I'm very much against dragging this project out longer than the standard two turns / one year / one Belegar CKII Quest turn.
Given that Boney has said "He's not a character, he's a force of nature" I presume there isn't one.
The ones which won right now it can possibly fire without us and is potentially now Grey Order Approved paranoid with runic improvements. That leaves, making it stronger and making it able to be used at any time and pointed anywhere on the ground. Both of those are very useful when the main enemies to use it against are forays overland from Karak Drazh with ass loads of orcs. Burning Shadows can be resisted if you are tough or large enough(same thing often), and the aiming option means we can put it on them earlier and keep them under its effects for longer which is very important for saving lives of our armies holding the East Gate.
He's ~1.5-1.6k years old. 1% of that is 15-16 years. I'm about Mathilde's age, and while turning thirty has marked me as permanently uncool, I do not expect to die of senescence within the next twenty years.
@BungieONI spoiler tags for the first part of your post, friendo.
He's ~1.5-1.6k years old. 1% of that is 15-16 years. I'm about Mathilde's age, and while turning thirty has marked me as permanently uncool, I do not expect to die of senescence within the next twenty years.
