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One major thing that strikes me, looking back at our time as Loremaster, is how little research we've actually done.

Some stats, drawing from my history of our time as Loremaster linked in my signature:
  • We have spent 13.5 AP on research over the course of 15 turns.
  • Of those 13.5 AP, 9 have been personal AP, and 4.5 have been wizard or duckling half-AP (so 9 actions).
  • The modal amount of research we did on a given turn has been one half-action.
  • There is exactly one turn out of 15 where we spent 2 personal AP on research. Every other turn was 1 or, more frequently, none.
I'm hoping we land on Waystones as our next thing for a lot of reasons, but if we don't, I'm really hoping we pause to do a research sabbatical and just crank through some of our backlog, because this is nuts, especially since our backlog grew during Karag Dum.
sorry Pickle but I have to agree: as loremaster we did a lot of research.

we even got at least 3 personal projects picked as job-relevant. quickish, tower, rite of way.

personal research and job research are not to different things.
 
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Is it really worth a bunch of AV research to get the ability to enchant slightly easier, or make cheaper powerstones? Will researching divine magic be worth it if it ends up with say, +1 Magic and a trait that makes dealing with divine magic easier? If Ulgu tongs work, but they end up being a fiddly way to do something alone that could also be done by a couple of wizards working together, is that great?

Doing a research sabbatical also runs into the problem that many of these opportunities won't wait.

It should be noted that there's a lot of stuff that benefits from Mathilde being better at magic. Waystone research? Better magic couldn't hurt. Develop new spells? Better magic helps. Casting combat magic? Same.

In terms of pure employment opportunities the greatest opportunity any LM has is challenging the Supreme Patriarch. Having great magic ought to help with that.
 
[x] The Waystone Project
[x] Bodyguard and Tutor to Prince Mandred
[x] Spymaster of Wissenland
[x] Governor-General of Swamp Town
[x] Research Sabbatical
 
Rather interesting vote distribution. First and second place bother have commendable leads. But beyond that there is barely half a dozen votes between each option. (Not counting the Hereditary Title and miscellaneous stuff at the bottom.) Even 3rd to 9th jump is less than thirty votes in total!

Wonder how many updates it would take BoneyM to do all nine, if he decides there is enough interest that they all warrant being expanded on?
I hope that if he goes for nine investigations he does it in not much less than five updates. Maybe occasionally have us vote on decisions that are relevant to the place we went to find out more, but to the job itself if he's worried of making this too much not a quest in the meantime.
I am well aware. Which is why I'm not even bothering to sniff at things that would keep us away.
You still voted for Nagarythe though. Just to mark down your interest for later reference?
It's depressing that this vote is below Swamp Town, the YOLO vote. So it goes.

[X] Loremaster-at-Large of Karak Eight Peaks
That's because it's about which job offer to investigate. As a job it has lots of drawbacks, but learning why and by whom we were offered this job could be quite interesting.
If you look there, your questions will be answered.
Ah. Signatures don't appear on my mobile except if I turn the screen sideways, so I missed that.
 
nope, it is.

if Boeny had an option of 'if all of them get above a threshold we will look at all' then you would be right.

but that's not happening, this whole vote is about narrowing down the chooses at least a little. (at least 1 option will be dropped)

so because of that, the ladder has value, and changes to that ladder more so.

if all get +1 there is zero movements up or down.

hence the value of voting for all is zero.
If there was a fixed number of options that go to next stage, then only the position on the ladder would matter and you'd be correct. However that is not the case.
When "some" options go to next stage, usually what matters is relative number of votes or relative votes difference between options.
By voting for every option you're increasing the relative number of votes for each option and lower the relative differences between options. That leads to increased chance of greater number of options be selected for next stage. You can't guarantee they all pass since "at least one option will be dropped" but you can try pushing for as many as possible.
 
So moving away from the voting for a second.

I would like to put forward a proposal for all the main plan writers when picking what papers we write.

unless its super revolutionary, can we please stop chasing the 'fresh' bonus and prioritize the bottom of the list?

we have hit a 'sinking trap': were if a paper takes to long and it gets the -10 it sinks like a stone to the bottom of the paper lake and will never get done with current voting logic.

but the problem with that thinking is that the number of papers with the -10 will just keep getting bigger.

but if we focus on the oldest papers, we get through them and just deal with the neutral and use the +10 when it's most effective.

in short: lets fucking get rid of the only gork paper already, its an eyesore.
 
sorry piki but I have to agree: as loremaster we did a lot of research.

we even got at least 3 personal projects picked as job-relevant. quickish, tower, rite of way.

personal research and job research are not to different things.
Queekish is arguable, and I guess I can see how developing a new spell might count as research from the perspective of how it reads to the thread even if new knowledge isn't actually gained, but the tower? That seems very weird to me. There was no research there whatsoever, it was just an engineering challenge where we applied known and well-understood principles at a large scale.

More to the point: my categorization of our action history has been up for four months now and, despite my express invitation in that post for people to tell me if they thought I categorized something wrong, nobody did, so at this point I am comfortable going by the consensus on how to label our actions the thread reached before the current debate was even a glimmer in Boney's eye, since that prevents classifications based on motivated reasoning.

Also, I can't tell whether you're getting my name wrong on purpose or not, but I would like to request to not be called "piki."
 
missing the Sylvana stuff then
Yeah, I don't see Sylvania as being particularly new either, but I was a little torn.

A quote from earlier today, when I was at work and lacked the time to post:
Any notion of using Cloud of Confusion on a geographic scale and over a long duration is probably the sort of thing you'd need a Waystone Network to power.

Without that, the base spell is a relatively small area and lasts only a short amount of time. Towers as batteries might allow you to boost both of those by a bit, but not enough to guard entire borders.
I'll note that big, permanent magics like this are more the remit of Rituals, by my understanding.

Different does not automatically equate to better.

We can absolutely build a better future in K8P. We have been doing so.
We can help the Empire as much as we can help the dwarves, and we know an extraordinary amount about the dwarves already. We are also as deep into their good books as it is probably possible to be - we will get more out of plying our talents elsewhere.

We didn't really want to leave Stirland either, but doing so led us to Karak Eight Peaks! It seems to me that people like Karak Eight Peaks and want to stay because we know it and it's comfortable, but we'll make new friends and create new opportunities, learn new lessons elsewhere!

And if it somehow doesn't work out, we can always come back.
 
If you look there, your questions will be answered.
We did research Queekish, which you have only counted as a Task.
T24 2.5 actions (max, johann, gretel to get queekish docs +1 own to get translations from Qrech)
T25 2.5 actions (max, johann, adela to get queekish docs +1 own to get translations from Qrech)
T26 1.5 actions max writing paper, Mathilde learning queekish from Qrech directly
T27 1.5 actions max receiving dictation, Mathilde dictating. Research is only done once the paper is written.
T28 2 actions max receiving dictation, johann writing, Mathilde dictating.

That's another 10 AP that were research which you did not count as such, but should've.
 
So moving away from the voting for a second.

I would like to put forward a proposal for all the main plan writers when picking what papers we write.

unless its super revolutionary, can we please stop chasing the 'fresh' bonus and prioritize the bottom of the list?

we have hit a 'sinking trap': were if a paper takes to long and it gets the -10 it sinks like a stone to the bottom of the paper lake and will never get done with current voting logic.

but the problem with that thinking is that the number of papers with the -10 will just keep getting bigger.

but if we focus on the oldest papers, we get through them and just deal with the neutral and use the +10 when it's most effective.

in short: lets fucking get rid of the only gork paper already, its an eyesore.
I don't know. It sounds like when someone is worried about wasting bread and thus never eats fresh bread anymore because there's always some from yesterday.
Your proposal makes sense if you really want to write certain specific papers for, say, narrative reasons or due to their exceptional amount of modifiers, but as a general rule it would lead to worse papers on average.
 
but the problem with that thinking is that the number of papers with the -10 will just keep getting bigger.
If that's true it will remain true if we focus on doing -10 papers. It's just that we'll be forever doing -10s, rather than +10s, giving ourselves a mallus on paper writing equal to the gambler bonus.

The ways to have less papers hit -10 are to actually spend AP on writing more often, or do less things worth writing about.
 
We can help the Empire as much as we can help the dwarves, and we know an extraordinary amount about the dwarves already. We are also as deep into their good books as it is probably possible to be - we will get more out of plying our talents elsewhere.

We personally may get more out of it, but personal gain is not my only motivation here.

I like K8P. I like the hold itself with all its oddities and the people in it, including the person we're dating. I like it so I want to stay, its not that complicated.
 
We personally may get more out of it, but personal gain is not my only motivation here.

I like K8P. I like the hold itself with all its oddities and the people in it, including the person we're dating. I like it so I want to stay, its not that complicated.
My point remains that we will both get more elsewhere, and that there are people are voting to stay because they're clinging hard to old social contacts despite being within social-action distance of them in every other option except Lustria.
 
I love how many people forget that we do actually have 19 Stewardship.

[X] Markgraf of Eastern Stirland
[X] Border Princess of the Howling River
 
Queekish is arguable, and I guess I can see how developing a new spell might count as research from the perspective of how it reads to the thread even if new knowledge isn't actually gained, but the tower? That seems very weird to me. There was no research there whatsoever, it was just an engineering challenge where we applied known and well-understood principles at a large scale.

More to the point: my categorization of our action history has been up for four months now and, despite my express invitation in that post for people to tell me if they thought I categorized something wrong, nobody did, so at this point I am comfortable going by the consensus on how to label our actions the thread reached before the current debate was even a glimmer in Boney's eye, since that prevents classifications based on motivated reasoning.

Also, I can't tell whether you're getting my name wrong on purpose or not, but I would like to request to not be called "piki."
Most people barely manage to keep up with BoneyM's posts. You really think that there's anything like a large enough quorum of players that specifically checked your (admittedly valuable) effort post for flaws so as to be able to assert consensus?

The way you separate Task actions from Research actions is good enough to produce nice for-pleasure-only stats. It's not good enough to make any assertions along the lines of "Mathilde isn't much of a researcher". Like, how many papers have we written based on events that didn't happen during a dedicated "research" action? One could argue that each of those events count at least partially as research, because Mathilde was in research mode enough so as to pay attention to these events with a scholar's eye instead of purely focusing on the matters at hand. Yet you don't even count paper writing actions themselves as research.

For me if it produces a paper, a new spell, or a new technology/tool then it is research. And if Mathilde does something along those lines every turn then she is among the Magisters with an above median research output.

Now if you want to make the argument that we are neglecting our personal larger scale research projects then that's fair. But saying that we're neglecting our role as a researcher in general is not.
 
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