Still making my way through this thread - great read, I will never ever comment here lest it eat all my time because how in the everloving fuckery of fuck does this thing have so many pages? How does BoneyM update so god damn quickly? How may I acquire this ability without performing some highly unsavoury and probably illegal deeds? Good quest all told, even if I suspect I'm missing a good deal of context because I refuse to look up khazalid words as they pop up in updates. Anyway.
I'm commenting for one reason and one reason only:
What the everloving FUCK is this and how many pages did the argument take up? Because I cannot even comprehend this level of involvement in a quest. Even with approval voting being a thing this is so god damn many people. How. What. Why.
Back to catching up now.
I genuinely have no idea, but here's my core ideas in no particular order, as I assume at least some of them are helping:
1) It's Always Personal
Even the largest organization or project is made of people making personal decisions, especially in a pseudo-Medieval time period where top-down autocracy is the norm. The extreme of this is things like Emperor Boris Goldgather creating the Moot because his favourite chef was a Halfling, but even competent people make decisions coloured by their personal opinions. For example, the Battle Wizards got unleashed on Stirland partially because Algard
likes Emperor Luitpold, otherwise he would have pushed for keeping it in-house. The history books might not record it that way, but that's always a factor.
2) Don't Plan Ahead...
Being a tabletop GM taught me to never plan ahead in detail, the ultimate example being when the group ended one session with a solid plan to travel by sea to their destination and came back next week and talked themselves into going overland instead. I had a lot of vague ideas for Abelhelm's future post-Sylvanian campaign, but I hadn't actually put dedicated effort into plotting them out. I'm only one of three forces at play here and I can't predict what the players or the dice will decree, so planning ahead will inevitably result in a lot of misspent effort, which can very easily taint the joy of writing.
3) ...But Do Give Trajectories
What will Marienburg do next year? I don't know. But I
do know what they want and how they're trying to get it. The same applies to every major character and polity. This means that even though I haven't planned ahead, it doesn't take much work to figure out what they'd do in a vacuum, or how they'd respond to changing events. This has the side-benefit of making it easy to come up with new side-plots because there's almost always someone trying to do something that could start interfering with events on-screen, and it feels realer because it's a natural consequence of events.
4) Never Fiddle The Dice
Ever. I'll admit there's been temptation to do so. There's been times when the dice have cut a lot of interesting plotlines short, or made a scene that would have been great fall flat on its face, or given me a result I have no idea what to do with at all. But I've always stuck with it because that's the unwritten accord between QM and Questers, and I make major dicerolls either in thread or on Rollz to keep myself honest and so the Questers don't have reason to doubt otherwise. So Asarnil keeps showing up, Abelhelm died, Birdmuncha decided against a climactic showdown, Edda ended up worse at her job than she deserved, Wisdom's Asp was a joke of an antagonist, Kragg didn't want to play with the Vitae, Johann blinded himself... a thousand ways things have gone differently than if I had been in ultimate control. But ultimately each time it has lead to a richer narrative.
5) Balance PC and NPC Power Levels
This one's tricky, especially for long-running quests. You have to plot a course between cheating the protagonist out of the recognition they've earned, and cheapening the setting by letting them stand astride it as unto a God. Mathilde is very good at a number of things, and that is recognized in-universe. But at the same time, she's not the shrewdest, wisest, killiest, savviest, puissantest, or most learned. She's aspiring to be, and one day she might reach those heights, and if she does it will be all the grander because it was earned. The titles she
can claim are 'probably the best Magesight amongst mortal Wizards of the Old World' and 'most well-liked living human by non-traditional Dwarves', and those took time and effort and giving up other avenues of empowerment to attain, and are all the sweeter for it. Speaking of...
6) Earned Awesome
Another one learned from tabletop roleplaying. Having a heavily optimized character that can break a quest over their knee right out of chargen gets old very quickly. Having a long-running character that's fought for every advantage that can do so because they earned it is immensely satisfying. Having to work and sacrifice for something makes it more meaningful when you eventually get it than if it's just given to you. This is part of why new traits happen at the end of arcs, why Vitae took a lot of study to get it to a point where it had a value (and it's still not tapped out), and why it takes more than eyeballing a God to unlock the secrets of the Divine. There's also the believability side of it: If it was easy, someone else would have done it already.
7) Verisimilitudinousity
Or, how real it seems. Even when you make decisions for reasons of balance or storytelling, make sure there's at least a fig leaf of seeming real. For example: Enchantment Slots is entirely a gameplay abstraction, but the underlying justification is that too many enchantments in one place start to interfere with each other. People don't have to believe that's why it exists, but having it there makes it easier to maintain suspension of disbelief.
8) But Not Too Bazaar
'Cathedral versus Bazaar' is a metaphor I think originated in computer science before being adapted to storytelling. A Cathedral is massive, beautiful, intricate, and static. You can spend forever admiring the fine details, but at the end of the day what you see is what you get as it's enclosed by solid walls. The Bazaar is full of wonders, and though your line of sight is obscured and you can only really admire what's directly around you, no matter what direction you go in, there'll always be more Bazaar waiting for you - because it only takes a moment for the QM to invent some new stalls, whereas it would take them hours to redesign a Cathedral to add on a new outbuilding. This is basically Point 2 phrased differently. But there have to be limits. When there's grand secrets, the answers
need to exist. Not just because it feels uncomfortable for the players to be 'searching for answers' when they don't exist yet, but because if they exist, hints can be woven in that will delight players when they finally uncover the truth. To take a very small example: the Mhonar Mystery. I could have left it undecided until events finally nailed it down, but because I had decided what it was early on, I was able to give just enough answers in the scouting reports that people got
very close to guessing what it was. But if it hadn't been decided until Mathilde met it, it would have meant that all that discussion and theorycrafting would have been cheapened.
9) People are People
This one is possibly the most subjective, as I've read and greatly enjoyed quests that made other races truly alien and inscrutable. But for this quest, other races do have very different cultures and preconceptions and even biological realities, but they're still recognisably people underneath all that. My ultimate expressions of this so far are Qrech, the We, and now Cython.
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
