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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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DragonParadox said:
The issue is that Skaven are not merely conditioned to serve the Horned Rat, they are soul bound to it. To put this into perspective, there is no indication of a Skaven serving even the Four (well unless Pestilens are Nurglites with the skill of hiding in plain sight to make a Tzeench worshiper proud).
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I mean, maybe this isn't canon, but the Children of the Horned Rat Fantasy Roleplay book from 2e says it does happen

A rare few Skaven dabble in Necromancy and fewer still abandon the ways of their people to embrace another Chaos God.
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......

maybe. The very next line is

Such instances almost always result with the disintegration of the offending Skaven.
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though. Whether that happens because their soul can't handle it or because their murdered real hard by other Skaven is unclear.

Though, with either interpretation it's important to note the words "almost always", which means that sometimes they survive, so it's ... probably possible to be a Skaven Chaos worshiper? Just rare and unikely to go well?
 
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[X] Thane Borek Forkbeard
[X] Preceptor Joerg von Zavstra
[X] Sir Ruprecht Wulfhart the Younger
[X] Citharus, Barbitus, and Timpania
[X] Magister Michel Solmann
[X] Journeyman Cyrston von Danling
[X] Journeywoman Alexandra Kohler

This vote is in the spirit of "Get on with it!", no more distractions. Dwarf Las Vegas is too shiny.
Of course that Lord of Change may be setting things in motion there, argl, no, no, we goddamn ride!
 
King Arthur said:
Though, with either interpretation it's important to note the words "almost always", which means that sometimes they survive, so it's ... probably possible to be a Skaven Chaos worshiper? Just rare and unikely to go well?
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Maybe they need to start of their open worship with such a bang that a Chaos God is actually willing to invest the power to protect the offending Skaven from the Horned Rat?
Something like bringing a big sacrifice right at the start.

That would explain why a few could manage, while keeping it extremly rare in practice.
 
dpara said:
This vote is in the spirit of "Get on with it!", no more distractions. Dwarf Las Vegas is too shiny.
Of course that Lord of Change may be setting things in motion there, argl, no, no, we goddamn ride!
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What makes you think that votes for internal threat investigations aren't just as likely to produce 'distractions' as votes for external threat investigations?
 
Alratan said:
What makes you think that votes for internal threat investigations aren't just as likely to produce 'distractions' as votes for external threat investigations?
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I think the odds of Uzkulak triggering a vote, ie. requiring update or more, are higher than talking to our dudes.
I'm mostly impatient, I want to finally read about tanks riding into hell and not depressing slavery central.
 
Alratan said:
What makes you think that votes for internal threat investigations aren't just as likely to produce 'distractions' as votes for external threat investigations?
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Well, we've taken six social actions and one external action and gotten one four-update sidequest from the external action and none of that from the social actions, so the odds that they are "just as likely" are minuscule.

Now, obviously you can say that the sidequest we just did was extremely worth it. But a few people, not just dpara, have expressed the feeling of "I want to get to Karag Dum as expeditiously as possible in real time," and it's silly to say that the internal actions are "just as likely" to produce distractions as external ones. They're obviously not.
 
One observation gives zero information beyond that something is possible. We have been on a single external investigation, so we have literally zero information on the probability of triggering multiple updates happening again.
 
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picklepikkl said:
Well, we've taken six social actions and one external action and gotten one four-update sidequest from the external action and none of that from the social actions, so the odds that they are "just as likely" are minuscule.

Now, obviously you can say that the sidequest we just did was extremely worth it. But a few people, not just dpara, have expressed the feeling of "I want to get to Karag Dum as expeditiously as possible in real time," and it's silly to say that the internal actions are "just as likely" to produce distractions as external ones. They're obviously not.
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Except there's no way to know whether or not those four updates would've happened regardless, with the difference that the interrupt happens as the expedition is ambushed. Treating the terrain as something that's guaranteed to be passed uneventfully if we ignore it seems like a rather misleading way to frame things.
 
Thomasfoolery said:
Except there's no way to know whether or not those four updates would've happened regardless, with the difference that the interrupt happens as the expedition is ambushed. Treating the terrain as something that's guaranteed to be passed uneventfully if we ignore it seems like a rather misleading way to frame things.
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Sure, OK, but... is the contention of the pro-Uzkulak and pro-combes lobby that they want Mathilde to go, look around, and come back to the expedition, with zero votes or additional updates spent on it? Because I very much get the opposite impression: people are voting for those things because they want to spend extra time poking around, investigating, and getting loot. If someone wants to say "no, I don't want that, I want to proceed with the expedition as expeditiously as possible," then voting for just social actions seems obviously correct, since none of them have prompted immediate follow-up actions so far.

Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but if Boney wrote the next week all in one go, with visiting Uzkulak and the combes being uninteractive set pieces from a quester perspective, the people who voted for those would be mad. In contrast, when we had a mono-social week the first week and it was all one update, that was everything proceeding as expected.
 
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picklepikkl said:
Sure, OK, but... is the contention of the pro-Uzkulak and pro-combes lobby that they want Mathilde to go, look around, and come back to the expedition, with zero votes or additional updates spent on it? Because I very much get the opposite impression: people are voting for those things because they want to spend extra time poking around, investigating, and getting loot. If someone wants to say "no, I don't want that, I want to proceed with the expedition as expeditiously as possible," then voting for just social actions seems obviously correct, since none of them have prompted immediate follow-up actions so far.
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There's no way to distill down the opinions of the Uzkulak voters into any single opinion. Personally I would be perfectly pleased if all that happens is simply going in, getting an update on the general conditions of the area and any plans brewing, and returning in a single update. I'm certainly not going to pre-commit to that though as we have no idea what the we'll find the conditions are until we're actually there. Just like I wouldn't be willing to pre-commit to doing nothing in order to save update time for other things if it turns out the suspicions about Cryston are true even in the scenario I voted for him expecting nothing much from the vote but some chatter about his ambitions to explore the world.

The point is it's impossible to lock-in in advance what will happen in future updates, but I don't see why the general expectation shouldn't be that if nothing significant enough is found in Uzkulak to convince a majority of the thread it's worth voting for more updates focused on it, then more updates will not be focused on it.

Also you basically seem to have ignored my point about the terrain here. Even in the case where Uzkulak takes multiple updates it still seems quite possible that it could reduce the total updates taken to get to Dum if those updates result in us avoiding some costly diversion that would eat up multiple updates as an example.
 
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Even if we do find some interesting things to buy in Uzkulak, I don't see that it would take multiple updates to do so. It might mean we have more items on the research backlog for when we get back, but I'd expect them to disappear into our inventory as soon as we make the decision to purchase them.

The kind of thing that's most likely to produce extra choices is if we find a threat brewing there, and as @Thomasfoolery says, we'd probably have to deal with that threat either way. We'd just be being proactive rather than reactive.
 
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Thomasfoolery said:
There's no way to distill down the opinions of the Uzkulak voters into any single opinion. Personally I would be perfectly pleased if all that happens is simply going in, getting an update on the general conditions of the area and any plans brewing, and returning in a single update. I'm certainly not going to pre-commit to that though as we have no idea what the we'll find the conditions are until we're actually there. Just like I wouldn't be willing to pre-commit to doing nothing in order to save update time for other things if it turns out the suspicions about Cryston are true even in the scenario I voted for him expecting nothing much from the vote but some chatter about his ambitions to explore the world.

The point is it's impossible to lock-in in advance what will happen in future updates, but I don't see why the general expectation shouldn't be that if nothing significant enough is found in Uzkulak to convince a majority of the thread it's worth voting for more updates focused on it, then more updates will not be focused on it.

Also you basically seem to have ignored my point about the terrain here. Even in the case where Uzkulak takes multiple updates it still seems quite possible that it could reduce the total updates taken to get to Dum if those updates result in us avoiding some costly diversion that would eat up multiple updates as an example.
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I think you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about going and having a vote on whether to return or not, I'm talking about BoneyM writing Mathilde going and returning, without quester input, in a single update. I think that is very unlikely.

And yeah, it is theoretically possible that this could save updates on balance, but that isn't what dpara was talking about, isn't what Alratan said, and isn't what I was responding to. dpara wanted to "get on with it", and the contention was that voting for social interactions are just as likely to lengthen the time between now and when we get to Karag Dum as voting for external actions. They're not. By any reasonable reading of "just as likely," they're not.
Alratan said:
Even if we do find some interesting things to buy in Uzkulak, I don't see that it would take multiple updates to do so. It might mean we have more items on the research backlog for when we get back, but I'd expect them to disappear into our inventory as soon as we make the decision to purchase them.
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Yes, but that's still one extra update and vote.
 
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picklepikkl said:
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not talking about going and having a vote on whether to return or not, I'm talking about BoneyM writing Mathilde going and returning, without quester input, in a single update. I think that is very unlikely.
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For the Combes I think it's quite possible it happens without any vote, for Uzkulak I expect a vote to be likely, but it wouldn't necessarily be about whether to stay and do more things, it could easily be a vote about what if anything to buy from a list of options presented like when we could've picked up the border princess deed back in the day, with a few lines in the next update mentioning having bought whatever (If anything) it was we bought.

picklepikkl said:
And yeah, it is theoretically possible that this could save updates on balance, but that isn't what dpara was talking about, isn't what Alratan said, and isn't what I was responding to. dpara wanted to avoid distractions, and the contention was that voting for social interactions are just as likely to lengthen the time between now and when we get to Karag Dum as voting for external actions. They're not. By any reasonable reading of "just as likely," they're not.
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The point once again is that I found the contention that they are "Distractions" to be a false presentation of the issue. It assumes a world where the schedule will proceed as expected so long as we do not disrupt it. The expedition is not proceeding in a bubble unmoored from the world around it. Something that could actually be fairly characterized as a distraction would be harring off to Zharr Nhaggrund. Things that have in their direct sphere of influence the area we travel along are not distractions, they're potential obstacles to be aware of.
 
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picklepikkl said:
Sure, OK, but... is the contention of the pro-Uzkulak and pro-combes lobby that they want Mathilde to go, look around, and come back to the expedition, with zero votes or additional updates spent on it? Because I very much get the opposite impression: people are voting for those things because they want to spend extra time poking around, investigating, and getting loot. If someone wants to say "no, I don't want that, I want to proceed with the expedition as expeditiously as possible," then voting for just social actions seems obviously correct, since none of them have prompted immediate follow-up actions so far.

Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but if Boney wrote the next week all in one go, with visiting Uzkulak and the combes being uninteractive set pieces from a quester perspective, the people who voted for those would be mad. In contrast, when we had a mono-social week the first week and it was all one update, that was everything proceeding as expected.
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I voted to visit both, but I'm fine if neither is interactive, to borrow your phrase.

I'm not interested in doing anything in Uzkulak or the combes beyond gathering information, unless something critically important falls into our lap. I personally have little interest in a vote, because for me there's not really that much to vote for.
 
My expectation is that the Combes have a random possibility of some interesting opportunity, but it's also possible it's a sightseeing tour and we come back without further player input.

My expectations for Uzkulak are a little different. Going there would be explicitly because of its potential as a market.

it's also a place where a fistful of gold could turn into just about anything, including ancient tomes, forgotten scrolls, Elven steles, and golden plaques from the New World. The part of you that wants to see it destroyed is matched by another part of you that wants a chance to peruse the treasures from across the world that would be available to purchase there.
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That would definitely seem to indicate a "shopping vote" where we get a list of items available for sale, Mathilde's available funds, and the thread votes on what to buy. We once did something very similar- remember those Lustran eggs? There may also be a vote on whether to purchase food for the Expedition, if that is something even available.
 
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