silentAnswer
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Post by silentAnswer on Aug 19, 2012 9:43:10 GMT -5
((For context, this post comes as a result of this conversation, not that anyone else would be able to read it)) I've come to the conclusion that, in a way, Danny was right all along and I don't think we can continue through the game how we've been going in good conscience. To wit, after a very long and honest conversation with someone who I'm going to assume would not like to be named (from outside the session), I've come to the conclusion that the imps are alive. No, not alive, sapient. In possession of moral weight. Not just Sarah's inconveniently-intelligent imps, all of them. If we continue business as normal we are going to massacre hundreds before we reach our goal just to save the six of us.
This is not Rage powers speaking. This is not Heart powers speaking. It is certainly not Corruption speaking. The person who convinced me this is right does not even believe he has the strength to do it himself, and warned me of the dangers. This is my decision, and as the Seer of the aspect in our session most closely related to death and moral issues I believe I am responsible for making it.
I'm not naive enough to think a perfect pacifist run is feasible, even starting from the midway point. The player most-equipped to deal with threats nonviolently has already proven that. But there's a big gap between what we can do and what we will do if we ignore the morals of the situation.
I'm also not naive enough to believe this is without cost. Haha, this game is all about our choices having costs. I, personally, am going to suffer for this over and over, and we might fail outright. However I no longer see the successful creation of a universe as a greater imperative than lives that already exist, so to quote my brother, "fuck victory".
I think I'm past the point of soliciting opinions on whether or not this is a good idea. It isn't but we're doing it anyways. But if any of you have advice that could help us succeed along this path, please share it.
To start with, we are as a group going to cease delaying the awakening of our denizens tomorrow, as further preparing or "grinding" no longer make sense. And we are making a distinction between enemies which really are intelligent and human enough to be worrying, like imps, and those which are not, like basilisks.
Our session contains a Knight of Rage, a Seer of Time, a Thief of Space, a Smith of Mist, a Mage of Rain and a Guard of Heart. Of those, the first four are on-board, the last will probably never agree to it and I can't guess on the second to last. Only the Knight has a handle so far on how to avoid bloodshed with his aspect, though I think the Thief will do just as well with a little creativity.
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Post by versatileVirtuoso on Aug 19, 2012 10:51:45 GMT -5
I have to say, a pacifism run is going to be a very difficult challenge for you and your fellow Players. Your obviously going to be low on grist and without that you probably aren't going to be able to alchemize anything very useful. Also your Denizens are not going to be happy when they hear the news and they may very will manipulate events to force you to kill the Imps on your Planets. Trust me, they are brutality cunning and cunningly brutality and when they want you to do something they will find a way to make you do it, so be wary of that.
You also you have to consider that even though your session's Imps have become incredibly intelligent, that does not mean that they still don't want to horribly murder you and everyone else. Their still game abstractions and they have to fellow their coding as enemies of the Players. But hey, maybe their prototyping as changed them into peace loving, erudite little creatures who just want to flock in your homes. (shrug) Would be helpful to get a more detailed description of their behavior in this state.
Tl:dr For helpful solutions for your pacifism run, try to get as high Black rep with Derse as possible. It's just a theory, but maybe if do rise it high enough it could give your team enough sway with the Derse Royalty that you could try to peacefully stop the war against Prospit and Skaia, with good old charm and diplomacy instead of through grinding and strife. Good Luck.
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silentAnswer
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Post by silentAnswer on Aug 19, 2012 11:37:20 GMT -5
As I said, we're not even considering zero kills here--the Black King and the Denizens are mandatory, and the game will likely find excuses to make imp slaughter unavoidable as often as it can. We're just looking for an alternative to having "mow down waves of childlike sapient mooks" be our normal.
Not much to say on their behavior. We didn't know what we were doing yet and Sarah prototyped a tech-demo AI which made her imps much smarter. Still trying to kill us, but with better tactics, making use of terrain and traps and flanking and all that jazz. Also those ones are extra-vulnerable to fear effects, which is all kinds of worrying in its implications even if somewhat useful. Doesn't matter, though, because if we're honest with ourselves even the normal imps are basically violent children. Ha, and I remember criticizing Danny not so long ago for using pretty much those exact same words.
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Post by spacetimeCounselor on Aug 19, 2012 12:21:29 GMT -5
Wait. What? Where... how'd you come to this conclusion regarding imp sapience? Because... this is a huge deal, if imps are intelligent then other underlings... you say basilisks aren't sapient, like, what are your criteria? I need to know if this is true, and to what degree, and how viable pacifism is.
I am just constantly running into shit about this game that totally upends the tea table and forces me to reevaluate my priorities. The game destroys the world. The game destroys the universe. The game destroys countless universes and humanlike civilizations. The game soft-controls your actions via temporal predestination. There's an afterlife run by the Others. And now, imps are bloody sapient, and are generated by the game en masse for the express purpose of being slaughtered.
nope nope nope nope nope nope this game can go fuck itself
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Post by tenaciousTheseus on Aug 19, 2012 12:50:07 GMT -5
I hope you don't care too much about the Knight, because if he tries pacifism, his ARC will plummet straight through the ground and he'll die. And then the rest of you will die as well because imps and basilisks are not even close to the things the game has to throw at you. Come back after you've dealt with a Shoggoth, or a Roc, or a Monarch, or a Demi-Fiend.
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Post by ExtropianDreamer on Aug 19, 2012 12:50:53 GMT -5
Well, I have to say that I'm very much in the camp that Imps aren't sapient. I've done a good bit of checking. Sounds like your session may be an exception though.
That said, you'll never hear me speaking out against pacifism and non-violence so long you're ready to accept the consequences that come with the decision. I salute your bravery in this, but hope that you all realise what this means: By choosing this path, you are substantially increasing the chances that you or one of your friends will die.
If you understand and accept this fact, if you can watch this happen and not regret your choice, then I'll offer what advice I can. I've tried this route myself a few times, so hopefully I'll have some decent advice for you here.
First off, your ARC is going to be super important here. With no boost to your Echeladder from killing underlings and such, you're going to be relying on building up your ARC as high as you can in order to get strong enough to face the endgame. Every waking moment should be focused on playing your role as much as you possibly can and staying in character becomes a life or death matter, because you're going to need to get it as high as it'll go. Minor plus side is that once Sburb picks up on how you're playing your role it reinforces it, which should help you get off non-lethal or non-combat abilities more easily than usual here (though it'll be a serious hit to your offensive output in those times when you actually have to kill).
God Tiering has another dimension added to it on a pacifist run. On the one hand, the power boost becomes even more important. On the other, and this is very important to be aware of, the game has a strong tendency to count any pacifist death as Heroic. This means that any death could randomly turn out to be final. As such, I'd recommend only using the crypt slabs for ascension, and only after you've already lost your first life.
As I'm sure you've realised, almost every role has a way to fight non-lethally, if you're creative enough. Here's some suggestions for how you can each use your roles to get past combat encounters without killing.
Knight of Rage: You mentioned that this player already has a handle on things, right? I assume that's in the form of order underlings to go away and so on? Just remember you can also order them unconscious if you need to. As the one with the most combat-oriented title, he'll likely have to kill quite frequently to survive, what with his ARC and all. Fighting with a non-lethal weapon instead of relying on aspect powers can help with this. Also, ordering your enemies not to die when you beat the shit out of them.
Seer of Time: Avoidance is the name of your game here. You can see the future and travel through time, so your best bet is to never be in a time and place you'd have to fight something. Use your superior knowledge and understanding of events to simply avoid encounters.
Thief of Space: Again, you're going to want to focus on avoiding encounters here. The emphasis here will be more on using your teleportation abilities to sneak past enemies, rather than knowing where they'll be in advance. Teleporting away from a fight is a good way to avoid one. Remember that your enhanced awareness of the locations of things should help you utilise more mundane stealth as well.
Smith of Mist: Copy the Guard's shiny thing ability and alter your weapons to remove the quality of 'lethality' from their shiny. Make some restraints and non-lethal weapons. Practice using your Reverbarata to escape, restrain or knock somebody unconcious.
Mage of Rain: You know Hardchorale? If you freestyle a bit, you can make a custom version that removes the buff effect, amps up the debilitating side-effects and targets enemies instead of allies. Dudes can't try and kill you if they're too busy laughing.
Guard of Heart: As reprehensible as it is, your best bet here is actually the liberal application of mindrape. Take the hits, get in close and then alter their shiny so they no longer want to fight you. Normally this would be positively vile, but it's better than killing someone. Not being a smith you'll likely have a hard time altering your weapon's shiny.
Non-lethal weapons like nets, flashbangs, knockout gas, tasers, stun batons, goo guns (some worlds might not have these, but they're basically guns that shoot gobs of rapidly hardening foam designed to immobilise people at range) and so on are all smart things to alchemise for your specibi.
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silentAnswer
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Post by silentAnswer on Aug 19, 2012 14:01:08 GMT -5
SpacetimeCounselor: How do you know if a game construct's sapient? Watch them when they don't know you're there (or for a seer, when you aren't there). If you leave a basilisk to its own devices, it'll mill around for a bit poking at things that might be food (but never bothering to eat it) and then spontaneously decide to go attack a village or your house, possibly only after meeting up with a few others. If you leave an imp alone, it'll raid your closet and try on all your clothes in front of the mirror, and scrawl opinions about the decor on the walls of your house. And that's NOT behavior unique to my session, the person I was talking to pointed it out as an argument.
The knight's been doing his best at pacifism since the beginning of the session actually. And he's not dead yet and not the biggest source of doomed timeline. His ARC isn't as high as it ought to be, but somehow he seems to have interpreted his role as "fighting against the rules of the game" (or maybe the situation?) and the game is mostly letting him get away with that interpretation. Instead it compensates by throwing even more situations he's not gonna like at him. It might lead to a trigger but it's not going to kill him for lack of arc.
extropianDreamer: You've just helped a great deal there. I wasn't even thinking about this in terms of our titles, just our aspects, so you probably just saved us a world of hurt. Experience has also apparently taught you a bunch of tricks I never would have considered on my own. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that you could order foes not to die or remove lethality from a weapon's shiny. If anything Danny's been kind of one-dimensional with his application of the Rage; he figured out early on that he could scare most enemies away and stuck to it.
Alchemizing some nonlethal specibi and weapons sounds like a good plan. Do you have captcha codes for any of that stuff? Because we sure don't. Somehow the Smith has far more grist than he could possibly have earned (he also somehow managed to duplicate his house so I think it's pretty likely his aspect is responsible), so as long as it's not aspect-empowered we've been letting him do all the high-cost crafting.
One last note. If I and the Thief are supposed to simply avoid combat situations, will that make our consorts sitting ducks?
edit: Wait, there's an afterlife run by the Others? What?
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Post by versatileVirtuoso on Aug 19, 2012 14:57:28 GMT -5
This theory should have a entirely different thread to be discussed about, but yeah there is a rumor that the Others have these things called Dream Bubbles that service as a pseudo afterlife where permadeath Players relive their memories. I personally would not put much bank in a theory that revolves around the Others actually doing anything benign and for our personal benefit, but hey this Sburb and anything is possible within its bizarre little universe.
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Post by ExtropianDreamer on Aug 19, 2012 16:47:36 GMT -5
extropianDreamer: You've just helped a great deal there. I wasn't even thinking about this in terms of our titles, just our aspects, so you probably just saved us a world of hurt. Experience has also apparently taught you a bunch of tricks I never would have considered on my own. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that you could order foes not to die or remove lethality from a weapon's shiny. If anything Danny's been kind of one-dimensional with his application of the Rage; he figured out early on that he could scare most enemies away and stuck to it. They're not things that will always work, and you might need to go god tier to make them work even then, but they're certainly things you should try.
I'd heavily encourage your Knight to experiment a bit more. Rage is second only to Rain when it comes to subverting game mechanics. And you have a Rain aspect too, don't you? Might want to get them together and see just how far they can push things.
Alchemizing some nonlethal specibi and weapons sounds like a good plan. Do you have captcha codes for any of that stuff? Because we sure don't. Somehow the Smith has far more grist than he could possibly have earned (he also somehow managed to duplicate his house so I think it's pretty likely his aspect is responsible), so as long as it's not aspect-empowered we've been letting him do all the high-cost crafting.
Captcha codes don't always carry across sessions. Which is to say that they don't do that at all.
Alchimeter combinations do though. Let me know if need combinations for any of the ingredients for this stuff (you shouldn't, with a Smith on the team).
Stun Baton = Club || Battery
Taser = Nerf Gun && Wiring && Battery
Gas Grenade = Smoke Bomb || Pineapple && Sleeping Pills
Flashbang = Pineapple || Fireworks && Spotlight
Combat Net = Steel Wool || Fishing Net && Weights
Goo Gun = Tranquilliser Rifle || Shaving Foam && Quick-Dry Cement && Silly Putty
One last note. If I and the Thief are supposed to simply avoid combat situations, will that make our consorts sitting ducks?
Three main options. Either employ misdirection and trickery to lead the underlings away from your consorts, use the whole 'seeing the future' thing to get your consorts clear before the underlings get there, or get a co-player to take care of it.
You wouldn't want to confront them directly anyway with those titles. Seers and Thieves aren't really supposed to deal with their problems via direct, straight up fights.
edit: Wait, there's an afterlife run by the Others? What?
It's a trap, ignore it.
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Post by mislaidLullaby on Aug 20, 2012 6:51:45 GMT -5
On the subject of the afterlife run by the Others: Yes. That's a thing. It's real, not a trap, not a myth. The Dreambubbles contain the vast majority of the dead, as well as the sleeping players who lack dreamselves for whatever reason, be it because of Godtier or Noir getting his stabs on or something.
I say 'majority' because some people don't make it out there. You don't need to concern yourself with that for now, though.
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Post by ExtropianDreamer on Aug 20, 2012 7:28:31 GMT -5
On the subject of the afterlife run by the Others: Yes. That's a thing. It's real, not a trap, not a myth. The Dreambubbles contain the vast majority of the dead, as well as the sleeping players who lack dreamselves for whatever reason, be it because of Godtier or Noir getting his stabs on or something.
I say 'majority' because some people don't make it out there. You don't need to concern yourself with that for now, though. It is a trap. I don't know what, but the Others are definitely up to something with it. I'd guess it's part of their ongoing efforts to seem less threatening and more... benevolent, so they can sink their hooks into us.
I'm not falling for that sort of thing again.
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Post by genesisArtificer on Aug 22, 2012 4:19:46 GMT -5
Sigh. There are NO perfect pacifist runs in this game. At very least you have to kill enough Underlings to pass through your First Gate and ONE person, that is actually sentient, thinking and talking, that being the Black King. Seriously, there were some Derse Dreamers that mourned their Black King, cause he was actually nice, so yeah, Game being an ass what else is new.
Well, I heard you tossed AI into the Kernel, so that is a nonstandard situation. Most of the times, Underlings are not sapient, and their AI subroutine allows them only to do some really basic tactics like Zerg Rush, or sending an Imp to bait you. Nothing more sophisticated.
Also, eD: please don't scare the newbies with inevitability of getting in the Bubbles. from what I heard from my betentacled body double, the Bubbles are actually result of a really ancient agreement with either one of the "first" Players, or even the Game itself. Others wont do shit to them, unless they contain a Speaker. then... well, I have no idea, cause he just grinned at me.
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Post by ExtropianDreamer on Aug 22, 2012 4:41:12 GMT -5
Also, eD: please don't scare the newbies with inevitability of getting in the Bubbles. from what I heard from my betentacled body double, the Bubbles are actually result of a really ancient agreement with either one of the "first" Players, or even the Game itself. Others wont do shit to them, unless they contain a Speaker. then... well, I have no idea, cause he just grinned at me. That's a good point, I'll drop this topic for now. No sense in scaring the newbies.
And I didn't know that about the bubbles. Guess even I learn new stuff about the game every so often. ;D
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Post by soulHooks on Aug 22, 2012 10:28:17 GMT -5
oh for the love of frogs, genesis. "and ONE person, that is actually sentient, thinking and talking, that being the Black King." doesn't anyone freaking know what sentient and sapient mean anymore?
ANYONE?
okay since you are all obviously miserably underaquainted with the terms: THEY AREN'T THE SAME THING. pretty much everything that's smarter than a sea sponge is sentient. sentience just means that they, like, have sensory organs to feel things. EVERYTHING YOU KILL THAT DROPS GRIST IS SENTIENT, GUYS. SO ARE BUGS.
sapience is INTELLIGENCE. human-like intelligence or wisdom. (or troll-like or hob-like or whatever.) and having talked with some of you, imps are definitely at least as smart as, say, shadowmafia.
(ooooh, burn!)
(stanzic if you read this i am not trying to blackflirt with him i am just making fun of him :b )
but SERIOUSLY GUYS IF A BIRD OR A SQUID OR A CETACEAN CAN BE SAPIENT WHY IS AN IMP NOT. GUYS. THIS ISN'T FUCKING HARD. STOP TRYING TO EXCUSE YOUR SLAUGHTER OF THOUSANDS OF CHILDLIKE INTELLIGENCES BY SAYING THEY AREN'T SAPIENT. THEY ARE, YOU JUST DON'T WANT THEM TO BE, OKAY?
ugh, you people can be sooooo stupid some days!!! xb
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silentAnswer
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Post by silentAnswer on Aug 22, 2012 18:07:57 GMT -5
SoulHooks, we are going to have words the next time we're on chat about what was going through (or perhaps happening to) your mind when you posted that. I may be a neophyte in the art of persuasion, but even I can excercise more tact than that.
I agree that that afterlife can of worms is going to be a huge distraction which should be kept elsewhere and this topic should be kept as a resource for those seeking advice on nonviolent approaches to the game.
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