Yeah Mathilde should be able to earn favors every turn now. I mean there is a dragon she can talk too and everything else she has access too. Like she can go and do a in-depth study of orks and their bio system. There is a volcano nearby and things living in it. I can go on but her earning favors so she can have a assistant or assistants should not be too hard. Also the trip to Nagaroth should provide her insights and favors.
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.
- Location
- Singapore
It's likely if that's the case, alot of her paper material would be dependant on her progress with the various basic Research trees she is undertaking right now.
Which means that the case for increasing the rate of progress down the Research tree becomes stronger especially if the tree becomes longer.
Anyway, let's see the Research Tree for Waystones. I have a feeling it's incredibly long even compared to AV, and that one research action per AP is literally too low to actually make serious headway on that tree.
It was the case earlier on, which was why there was no recent movement to activate the Apprentice Search. Zilch. Nada. The discussion was killed. Murdered even by AP fear mongering months ago.
There is a reason why this hypothetical option is not up at all. And so long it's not up, and so long there is no constituency for it, it becomes strictly hypothetical.
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I would like to see romance, but I don't think she has developed any romance-able relationships in K8Ps, Boney even pointed out that she don't even have a real peer in K8Ps, by word of boney Kragg doesn't count.
I actually wont be surprised if Mathy gets the lonely trait if we don't start expending her interactions amount the humans of K9Ps that aren't her subordinates or the ducklings.
There was one new paper - the one about the Eshin Sorcery we saw.
Luminous
God Save The Queen
- Location
- Victoria, BC, Canada
Mathilde did note a flourishing red light district, and Belegar did say "anything"...
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
Well we are not a war zone anymore so we don't have to worry about danger for them anymore.
- Location
- Singapore
I don't object to an apprentice. I object to the claim that an Apprentice could help us tackle on those huge Research trees, because the option simply isn't available right now.
So, how would an apprentice be a net positive for our time? What is the case? It wasn't made back when enormous portions of the thread thought it would be a waste of time. What would make an apprentice narratively satisfying for Mathilde?
So long as this case isn't made, the apprentice issue is utterly buried, and suggestions we can take an Apprentice as responses to AP Starvation are just fanciful notions.
Again, I am very much for an apprentice even if they don't end up being a net AP gain. I object, however, to it being used as a response to AP Starvation issues, because this seems to me to be a speculative assertion as we dont know the manhour investment versus manhour returns of rasing an Apprentice.
And no, this isn't gamey, in-Mallus, Mathilde only has 24 hours a day and maybe 18-20 waking hours.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I don't know if it would help, but is should not hurt. I expect an Apprentice would be bit like Wolf a something added to actions.
- Location
- Singapore
Yes, but the original point was that an Apprentice helps more than hiring a Research assistant when it comes to Mathilde's super-projects, which are only growing with every passing turn.
Why?
And no, I don't think you are denying AP Starvation isn't an actual issue here, but I do want to know the case for an Apprentice.
I can make one:
Since Mathilde is mortal and the Moonshots are very long (up to five years for one tier of actions at one action per turn), there is a very strong incentive for her to take on an Apprentice as a potential inheritor of the many intellectual ambitions Mathilde has, as an heir to Mathilde's work that said apprentice can build upon to launch his or her career.
But my frustration is: I don't know what it would take to bring this possibility on the table, when the response is : Mathilde doesn't have the time to take an Apprentice, who will be a drain on her time. And while I can assert as you have that an apprentice does not hurt Mathilde's time and therefore would almost certainly break even from a time-commitment perspective like Wolf, I myself can only speculate why, and can only guess your reasons behind believing why this is true.
By the way, it's very hard to get actions to improve Wolf. If an Apprentice works like Wolf, it wouldn't result in a break-even regarding time commitments versus apprentice man-hours.
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- Location
- USA
Obviously, that means we need to do even more research into necromancy so we can bring back Abelhelm Van Hal.
...No. Just no.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I don't know how much grunt work there is in most research, but I expect an Apprentice to be able to help deal with it. We don't spend AP on the Apprentice we just add them to each research action. They might not add AP, but they might give a bonus to the roll.
- Location
- Earth
Except we'd need to sink AP into them to train them up anyways as an obligation, and that's AP not spent on research.
- Location
- Singapore
Roll bonuses are rarely an issue. But Grunt Work is one of the biggest man-hour drains regarding experiments, and therefore one should expect that an Apprentice (a journeyman appropriately specialized is another story) main advantage is adding additional man hours, as opposed to adding to rolls unless the Apprentice happens to have a specialization that helps, or is advanced enough, or has very high potential, etc, etc.....
So yeah, I doubt that Apprentices can plausibly give roll bonuses - manhours don't purchase roll bonuses, they simply allow Mathilde to get shit done by offloading the manhours of lower level work to someone else. One should expect the advantage to therefore apply to action economy, less so action effectiveness.
Yeah, this is the problem. We are talking past each other. One side assets that apprentices are an AP sink with uncertain investments, the other side asserts apprentices are an AP-neutral or even positive development with certain investments. Both cannot be true, but both sides assert they are right even though both sides can't be right. Who then is right? And in this case the try it and find out principal probably can't work, because the thread can't just ditch an apprentice if the AP economy doesn't make sense.
In contrast, a Perpetual Apprentice research assistant is one where we have no obligations to sink AP into them if we choose to, though we may need to apply AP to use them for the actions we hired them for. But it probably would only be worth it if said apprentice allows Mathilde to minimize her time on grunt work (running around getting materials, cleaning after experiments, storing samples, storing notes, sorting correspondence, finding reference books in a growing library, etc, etc) in order to get more research done. Imagine if we could do two AV actions this turn as opposed to one because of the grunt labor the Perpetual Apprentice put forth. Plus the Prepetual Apprentice can be ditched if the favor to manhours economy doesn't make anymore sense.
But narratively, if you want my response about why it might narratively make sense, it goes like this:
Mathilde knows that so far, many of her accomplishments have relatively short development trees from Aquisiton->Research-> Publication. But she also knows that the challenges ahead means that the matters she are about to undertake are perhaps an order of magnitude higher than her previous challenges (waystones are a definite example). She also knows alot of her time is being spent doing very basic grunt labor for her personal projects such as the AV. So that might be why narratively she might actually for a Research Assistant to do relatively low level routine grunt work that is time-consuming, because she knows the demands of her time are only going to continue to grow , because the complexity of her projects are just going to increase. She is anticipating the future, rather than assuming the past will resemble the future. I don't find it narratively plausible that Mathilde is incapable of forward-thinking, nor of anticipating the challenges ahead.
Now, I don't think we need a perpetual Apprentice to do grunt labor now (though that would be nice), but once the Waystone Project begins, 1 Research Action per Action Point is probably insufficiently viable for Mathilde to even begin to make progress on something as immensely advanced as the Waystone. If Lord Magister status means we can commandeer manhours from the College more easily, it might become nearly mandatory to viably navigate the massive mountain that is the Waystone Project within anything close to a human lifetime, unless the Research Institute boon wins.
And yes, correct me if I'm wrong: there's a massive amount of Grunt Labor when it comes to Research, and Principal Investigators usually hire Research Assistants in order to allow themselves to focus on the higher-level analytical aspects of their work.
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The boon? Perhaps, but it is a very unwieldy tool for it.
According to our friend the Empress you can effectively buy longevity by donating money to Shallya.
Things we can spend outrageous amounts of money on:
- Fund people to search for Griffin eggs.
- Fund people to search for Hippogriff eggs.
- Fund people to search for Dragon eggs.
- Fund looting expeditions to (various locations).
- Hire, equip and supply mercenaries to go kill the enemies of civilization.
- Pay someone to conquer and colonise the Boarder Princes.
- Pay people to print our favourite books.
- Widows and orphans fund.
That said excess money is a long term problem and for now I suggest we sleep on it.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
How would would you feel about an Apprentice requiring a teaching action for them every turn, but in turn gave us a free research action each turn? It means we have less flex, but we would have the same effective total AP.
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- Location
- Singapore
Oh if that's the case, I would take an apprentice in a heart beat. No questions asked, because if we can hard commit to one research action per-turn at minimum, alot of my doubts over the viability of the various multi-turn research projects would disappear. But I personally doubt we can tackle Waystones + Another moonshot like Multi-wind magics at One Research Action per AP, so Windherder just becomes the next Aethyric Vitiate.
Personally my ideal case is that we can find a way to replicate the Room of Serenity for our Research Actions by having more access to man-hours to assign the far more routine lower order tasks, far below the ones Maximillian does. This is the good enough case, at least for now.
Naturally, a Research Institute Transcendental boon probably bootstraps things into skyscrapers of Serenity, so yeah....
But, none of us have any idea whether apprentices mechanics actually work this way, and @ReImagined can just as easily assert something completely opposite is true. Again, how do I know who is right? Thanks by the way for illustrating my point: a good chunk of this thread assumes apprentices are an AP drain.
Of course, it would be nice if we had an argument from narrative, but that isn't what's being debated right now, and that usually wasn't how previous apprentice debates went.
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- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
I really don't think apprentices will help with our research. I don't remember Mathilde talking about how she helped her magister.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
She hasn't given any back story at all about her apprenticeship. Also her master doesn't really seem like much of a researcher. Of course that might be deceiving. Someone looking at Mathilde is unlikely to guess she is a researcher.
- Location
- Singapore
My position is that Prepetual Apprentices almost certainly will, once you realize how much Research really isn't higher-level analytic work, but grunt labor to make that higher level analytic work/empirical test possible, and Apprentices too theoretically can be made to do the grunt labor if the master is an asshole, which Mathilde's master luckily wasn't. Unless you are saying that, of course, grunt labor is a minuscule part of Mathilde's time taken when conducting experiments, but if so, I'd like to hear your reasoning for this.
I think the opposite is true, once you consider the various logistics behind each of Mathilde's experiments. For example, take the most recent AV experiment - Mathilde had to personally come down to acquire animal samples, approach volunteers personally, probably had to back up her notes by herself, probably had to clean up after the experiments by herself, and no doubt one could draw a near-endless lists of what else Mathilde did by herself besides testing, observing and analyzing in order to make the testing, observation and analysis possible. It won't surprised me that RAs would have allowed Mathilde to perform two experiment series at the same time by off-loading manhours, and that the mind-numbing setup and cleanup drudgery is something Mathilde doesn't particularly like. I hope it's not too much of an imposition to ask to understand your reasoning for this claim in light of this.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
They are being given hands on experience and being given an opportunity to watch research in action. It's all how you put it.
- Location
- Aotearoa
IIRC a Perpetual could be had for 2 College Favour per turn this far outside Altdorf.
However it seems likely they'd need a further half-action to direct their actions, same as any other subordinate or organization.
Whether one purely acting as a 'research lab assistant' in a Serenity equivalent would let us do more research or not, I'm unsure.
However it seems likely they'd need a further half-action to direct their actions, same as any other subordinate or organization.
Whether one purely acting as a 'research lab assistant' in a Serenity equivalent would let us do more research or not, I'm unsure.
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Here's the issue, I don't think an apprentice can do anything to help Mathilde's research magic wise. They're simply to weak and inexperienced to contribute. So you have to ask, why not just hire some expert help instead for grunt work?
I think this idea of mechanical advantage for an apprentice is very likely to be a mirage. You get an apprentice to help spread magic users and for a legacy. It's an investment for the future, not something that actually helps the Magister when the apprenticeship is happening.
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- Location
- The Star Kingdom of Manticore
A perpetual apprentice will certainly help. That is the entire point of hiring them. Apprentices and perpetual apprentices are different.
- Location
- Singapore
Yes, and does the same apply for Perpetual Apprentices?
But unless you are saying Grunt work is not time-consuming, that's not really a counter? I mean, sure, Apprentices may not be good at grunt work compared to a specialized Apprentice, I give you that, but my initial position was to suggest hiring a prepetual apprentice, and my initial response was to this assertion from fictionfan, which you are objecting to
And which I questioned to begin with.
So yes, I think you are responding to the wrong person here?
What I wonder right now here, is , is the two favor per turn worth it , if we can get more actions out of the single AP we put into research anyway, because of the man-hour consuming grunt work involved in research? I don't know, because I don't know how the AP-Favor economy works for Perpetual Assistant's personal apprentice versus the Favor gain from AV publication. I'd like to think that it's actually AP favorable, and almost certainly favor favorable especially if we have alot of College Favors sitting there just racking up, but I have no clue, because it's not clear how much a Prepetual Assistant needs to offload grunt work manhours too and hence allow more to be done for the same amount of time.
And if we are in AP Hell as much of the thread seems to believe, AP efficiency may well be far more valuable than two College Favors. Indeed, as our Research projects grow longer, the investment return of the two College Favors may be even better, if the one AP we are going to spend on AV anyway can result in two AV actions thanks to a perpetual apprentice. We may be looking at a three-tier tree here for AV , and I shudder to think how much longer the Multi-wind, Theurgy and Waystone trees look lile.
And yes, there is narrative reason in so far man hours are an actual inworld issue for Mathilde, and Mathilde is capable of forward planning and anticipation. Indeed, she might hire a Prepetual Apprentice early so she can get use to working with him or her in advance of the Waystone Project, by ensuring she banks enough progress in AV that she can set AV Aside if she needs to switch her focus towards Waystones.
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No, those are actual experts, not 10 year olds. I'm still not 100% sure how much more exactly they could do for us though magic wise however, since a lot of the stuff we're interested in requires our extremely advanced magesight to properly study. They would come pretrained with the skills to help wizards do their work though. So the question would be if they advantage they bring in is worth the time cost of directing them and favor cost of keeping them hired.