12 KiB
[WIP][Mk] The Two Year Emperor: Ch54 -- OMAKE: The Path of Wisdom
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Author: u/eaglejarl *
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9669819/54/The-Two-Year-Emperor
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Score: 14
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Created: 2014-07-30T04:44:40
Post:
Comments:
u/JackStargazer [+5] Primordial Apologist (7 hours later)
I can't be the only one who thought that he was going to grab a periapt of Wisdom +6 and a few other buffs to that particular stat after that talk with Loki, can I?
I'm trying to imagine a Jake who take a bit more time to think through his intelligent ideas before doing them and can more accurately interpret the actions of and empathize with others (Sense Motive is a Wisdom based skill) and it seems like it could be a rather large power boost - especially when dealing with inscrutible semi-omnipotent beings.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (15 hours later)
That would be a smart thing for him to do, yes, but it would break the story. Jake has two flaws: he's not terribly good with social situations unless he's making a concerted effort, and he's not terribly forethoughtful. If I gave him CHA and WIS boosts those flaws would go away and he'd just be a Gary Stu.
Until now I've been quietly ignoring it, but I should probably have it come up and have Jake go "forget it, you are not mucking with my personality again"
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (19 hours later)
Thing is, it wouldn't be them so much as him. And it is an enhancement, not a muck around. It would make him objectively better, and judging by his hunger for int boosts he is not averse to that.
I agree that it would seriously change his personality, but I think you'd need a better reason than just 'mucking with personality', as he has already implicitly accepted that flat intellectual boosts are acceptable.
u/drageuth2 [+1] (20 hours later)
Maybe not so much mucking with personality as mucking with story, eh? Maybe during the climax Jake can pull this off, but for now, it's more interesting to see him struggle and try to fix his problems as a less-than-perfect supersmart guy.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (a day later)
Oh, story wise I agree, I'm just talking in character motivation.
u/Kodix [+0] (8 hours later)
Nope, that was my immediate thought upon seeing the title.
The author stated elsewhere that using +wisdom buffs would make Jake just too overpowered, so it's kinda handwaved away by just never being brought up.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (16 hours later)
I've noticed that when I post chapter links, they are mostly upvoted but also get some downvotes. I'm curious -- are the downvotes due to the content itself, to the way it's listed, or to something else?
If you've downvoted any of these threads, please let me know -- I'd be curious to see if there's something I can optimize so that you are seeing fewer things you object to.
u/CantorsDuster [+1] The Culture (18 hours later)
Most likely reddit's score-fuzzing algorithm - downvotes (and upvotes?) are added to posts, comments etc as their score increases. Something about making it difficult for votebots to verify that their votes are being counted, which won't be the case if they've been spotted.
In short, if you're seeing 'some', you're probably not getting more than one or two downvotes.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
In theory, this is no longer the case since the recent update that removed raw vote totals from the API (and hence RES). From what the admins have said, the vote percentage on the right-hand side of the submission comment page is strictly correct. I'm not 100% sure that I believe this was implemented correctly, and it has some problems like showing 99% on submissions with 9 votes (which indicates a rounding error).
So when reddit says that this submission has 7 points, and a 83% approval rating (11 votes total, so 2 downvotes, 9 upvotes), I think that you do have to conclude that those are real numbers.
As for why people are voting that way - I dunno, it's probably that some people just don't like the submission. There's nothing inherently wrong with downvoting content that you don't want to see for whatever reason. There's nothing wrong with asking them why that is, but it seems unlikely that there will be a response (downvoting is anonymous, commenting is not, and there are definite social pressures involved). But it's only a small handful of people, and even in a small community like this, a small handful of people will dislike anything, no matter what it is.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a minute later)
Once again, there were a bunch of reviews and my Muse was feeling active, so I'm dropping a bonus chapter. Like the title says, it's an omake, NOT part of canon.
Impressively enough, ch55 is already written and ch56 is in progress. My Muse is totally kicking astroturf.
u/mycroftxxx42 [+2] (12 hours later)
I really enjoy this story, and have already had to smack down attempts by my players to use ideas from it.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (19 hours later)
Both parts of that are quite a compliment. Thank you. :)
u/eaglejarl [+1] (22 hours later)
Out of curiosity, which ideas?
u/mycroftxxx42 [+1] (22 hours later)
Oh, very minor stuff - the party just hit third level and are colonists on a different world, so some of the RAW Stupidworld stuff fails the common sense filter. However, the one that stands out at the moment is one of my players pointing out that D&D doesn't have facing with regards to movement during a combat.
I may have made a mistake, though. I told my players that I'll only allow them to get away with breaking the gameworld once. I think they're just plotting now so as to achieve maximum worldbreak.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
laugh Tell them thank you for me. :)
Tell them to wait until Wizard/11, Sorceror/12 when they can cast Wall of Iron and Teleport. Then they can orbital strike their foes. (The Dedicated Wrights weren't strictly necessary, they were mostly for Rule of Cool.)
If you don't like them doing that, force them to deal with environmental factors -- cold, no air, can't see when your eyeballs freeze/wind pounds on them. Also, I let the Wrights figure out skydiving with remarkable ease. (shhhh, don't tell anyone!) -- you should give your players a tough Dex check to avoid out of control tumble and redout. (You get into a flat spin, blood rushes to head and feet, you pass out.)
Let me know what they end up doing. :)
(Oh...or they could just buy a Candle of Invocation. They're cheap.)
u/mycroftxxx42 [+1] (a day later)
Thankfully, I've left RAW far behind in worldbuilding. No divine spellcasting where they're from. No common interactions with the gods, no Candles of Invocation.
One of the characters in the party is a medic. You can get pretty far with the germ theory of disease and prestidigitation. The character's homeworld is somewhere around the mid-19th century ability-wise, but the "industrial revolution" has been replaced with modular and multiperson enchanting.
u/clawclawbite [+2] (an hour later)
So, what are the odds that if Jake survives, he will ascend to demi-god or higher status?
That universe could use a god of 'outside perspective' that is not a troublemaker.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (an hour later)
Well, it wasn't in my story notes, but it could be interesting....
u/PeridexisErrant [+4] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (9 hours later)
If Jake ascends, his domain must be "Outside Context Problems". Because he both is one, and regularly faces them.
u/Vebeltast [+6] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (11 hours later)
Note to self: next time I build a religion, build it around a God of OCPs. It'd neatly group together existential risk, applied epistemology, and black swans, and you could probably throw in the pile of general rationality knowledge that usually gets spread out over wisdom, trickster, knowledge, secrecy, and arcane deities. It also provides a nice clean counterpart to the Arcane Deities that are usually opposed by an ill-fitting Secrecy Deity; "using knowledge effectively" is much better balanced by "using lack of knowledge effectively" than it is by "keeping secrets".
u/VorpalAuroch [+2] Life before Death (14 hours later)
First you'd need to come up with a simpler term for it. It's not a mentally-primitive notion like 'Magic' or 'Secrecy' or 'Trickster', naively.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (16 hours later)
Extra contextual crisollogy: the religion of endings and how to stop them.
"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop [a period]."
u/VorpalAuroch [+0] Life before Death (22 hours later)
Crisollogy?
I know what OCPs are, I've read Excession. I just don't see that as something that can be translated to something mentally basic enough (in the sense that a thunder god is basic) to have it work as a god that isn't an obvious Author Tract.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Easy solution is to start it as a god of Death. It would be a pretty easy religious drift (scope creep) from "Death" to "terminal threats" to "outside context problems". If you were writing it, it would also offer some slow introduction to the concepts, because at first you think that the clerics in black robes are just there for the funerals, but then you start to wonder why one of them is always sitting in on the city council meetings, and finally when a giant crab rises up out of the bay and attacks the city, he's the guy that steps forward and takes command through some ancient wording in the city charter.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Mayhaps a nice version of Tezenich. The abyss that stares back? That which does not go gently? I'm guessing it would be a mystery religion with an external opinions characterizing it as a god of mysteries, plots, power, ect. Basically it'd be perceived as a LE/CE portfolio with a more positive internal message. Though I'm betting the god would turn out to be the meetfuc@er or the Mistake not. . ..
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (a day later)
That could work; the kind of god of Death who doesn't particularly 'enjoy their job', and whose priests do ER-variety medicine as well as funerals, which gradually extends to fighting wider-scale existential threats.
If I was making this deity, I think I would have it be an aspect of the god of Heroes, who had a specific conflict with their brother/nemesis/something the god of Catastrophe. With the idea that dealing with an unforeseeable, almost incomprehensible problem is the purest form of heroism.
u/Vebeltast [+1] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (a day later)
Catastrophe or Surprise, maybe? A little bit of "it's more complicated than it sounds" goes a long way here given the deity in question, particularly if the rest of the pantheon is similarly complicated (god of technology+magic is actually the trickster in the style of Neal Stephenson's tract in Cryptonomicon, Shyamalan the reader with "∃ Secrecy Deity!" halfway through, Undead are under the Sun God because he's the one that destroys them, etc). It helps that the concept is only one sentence away from sufficient understanding even though it's not primitive.
u/VorpalAuroch [+0] Life before Death (a day later)
I think you mean Snow Crash rather than Cryptonomicon. That could work, though.
u/clawclawbite [+3] (an hour later)
I don't know Loki's big picture goal(s), but if this chapter was real, than getting a part time demi-jake sidekick would be a likely agenda item.