Considering it's a 100% opt-in system, I don't think there's anything wrong with the time sink feel of the game. Your mercenary pokemon are pretty cool. I don't think there's anything wrong with increased rewards, reduced difficulty in exchange for time sink. It looks really neat.
I mean, even facebook games realized that people love fire and forget quests. "Send Dirk Razormane to go collect elite swords from rabid knolls." Go to class. Teach a class. Come back from work. Dirk Razormane has a level 18 light sabre. BOOM. Victory.
Why aren't you trying the 10 minute options? You could be making a lot more choices, since you're here and able to check them often.
Because your 10 minute options in the difficulty 1 adventure require things like Poison 4, and the skilbook for poison is acquired from the difficulty 3 adventure. When I don't have that, choosing the 10 minute option gets me this:
Mercenary Adventure Information for Adventure #24 - Goblin Fort ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Events Completed: 2 Events Remaining: 4
Last Event Result: As your mercenaries walk over to the barrels to release the poison into them, one barrel goes tumbling through the room, rolling out into the fort. Your mercenaries quickly pack up and head out before they are discovered.
This is why I do not choose the 10m option. For that choice, my literal only option was a Fight, which is an 8 hour one.
This is pretty bad design, imo. I spent ~500 lessons and everything kitting out my crew to be as good as I could make them right now. I've got a climber. I've got a searcher. I've got a lockpicker/sabotager, a batterer, and a master of disguise. I've got healers and archers and swordsmen. And in the introductory level adventure, my choices go something like:
Skill you don't have [10m]
Skill you don't have [3hrs]
Skill you have [8hrs]
You want to know why I am choosing the long options? I am choosing the 8 hour option because you gated all the other choices behind content I cannot access yet.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
If you try option 1 and fail, you've only wasted 10 minutes. Even if only 10% of the adventure events you get at the 10-minute speed are possible, you have a much higher chance to progress through the adventure in a reasonable timeframe by trying faster events. At this point, you probably want to try to succeed as many adventure events as possible to gain some experience for your mercenaries, and the best way to do that is by spamming adventure events.
It's cool, though, this is one of those learning experiences with a brand new system. If you could churn through every adventure on the first day, it would kind of suck. It will take time to figure out the best strategies to work through adventures, and it will take time and iteration as we try and balance these things. I'm excited to see the discussion and experimentation going on with this.
This isn't a high level, this is the introductory level 1 adventure. Kitting your men up properly should let you complete it in a reasonable time frame . Give me high skill checks for skills I have, tough fights, whatever. As long as I can meet the challenges with a properly set up group out of the resources I have available, I would not mind. For example, I wouldn't mind having to spend a few hours tweaking and trying and perfecting things to get past a particularly tough fight on my budget, when a higher level group could just stomp it.
I do mind the faster options in the L1 adventure being skillwalled behind things learned from the L3.
@Jesse I dislike the idea that I should just rush 10 minute options as much as I can and then intentionally take a dive to keep rushing the same 10 minute options over and over to gain exp. It would be nice if trying to win wasn't a bad choice.
I don't want to win every adventure in the first day. I wouldn't mind having to farm the first adventure for several days to beat the second adventure, etc. And I don't mind having to powergame excessively to beat the first adventure early. I like powergaming. I just mind when it seems that the only way to beat the adventure is to hurry up and wait with 8 hour options. It's an artificial gating mechanism, like WoW making you grind Hydraxian rep to unlock bosses. Those suck.
Also, could you explain the difficulty ratings? Your L2 adventure gives me 3 possible 10m choices in a row where the L1 adventure gives me a 3hr wall right at the second choice.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I get your point about the skillwall thing, and that will definitely be something we keep in mind as we work on balance.
The difficulty rating is a flat increase to the required "score" of the events in that adventure. When you attempt an event, your highest scored mercenary in the required skill is compared against the required score. The higher your score, the more likely you are to succeed in the event. With a score of 0, you have about a 25% chance to succeed. If your score is much higher than the required score, it's an automatic success.
I feel the long wait times are adequate, considering the rewards and investment as well. I think they did a really good job with this merc system overall. I actually have something else to check with Imperian now in between shardfalls, obelisks, etc.
Do stats increase enough with levels for my best bet to be just pounding out L2's until I can brute force the 10m skillchecks? With prizes being random, I'd have to potentially do a LOT of 8 hour options to get enough skillbooks to reliably pass a lot of these 10 minute options. Even if the guidebooks aren't random, that's still something on the order of weeks to be able to finish an adventure without having to resort to the 8 hour ones.
I've also gotten into zero fights, which is kind of disappointing, because I've got all kinds of battle skills trained and the only fight I see is a difficulty 1 at 8 hours. This gives me an idea.
Maybe we could do something like an old school Dire Maul tribute run kind of thing? I'm thinking of something like this: There is always a 10 minute fight option; the fights are pretty hard unless you are overleveled and they risk incapacitating mercenaries, which makes further fights/events harder. But you can always send your dudes in to just smash stuff and you can complete the adventure just by killing all the bad guys.
However, completing the adventure by just killing all the bad guys gives you less loot. When you go to Free the Slaves, some slaves are lost in every fight and this cause you to get a reduction in pay. When you're Finding the Cure fighting smashes up laboratory equipment and ruins notes and such, so you can only bring them research that helps them develop a cure, and not a functional cure.
Some options would have fighting as a legit choice, of course, because you shouldn't be able to completely neglect fighting skills, but I still think those should have two fighting options. One hard stupid fight that's just smashing the enemy, and another fight styled appropriately for the difficulty level. Maybe the 8 hour fight option is easy, but slow and defensive. Or maybe the 10 minute no-penalty fight is harder than the penalty fight because you're doing something like increasing your own risk to prioritize defending the slaves.
This makes fighting valuable as a way to get through adventures, but it also makes a balanced character more important. It makes it easier to complete adventures in a timely fashion, but completing them the easy way penalizes you.
Later adventures may not need this kind of thing, because you'd be more established and have more depth, but something like this would make for a much more enjoyable early experience than starting the adventure and hoping you get lucky.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
No, stats don't increase with levels. I don't 100% know what the optimal strategy will end up being, but I'm confident that running lots of 8-hour event options will never be it. Those will be good for times when you simply can't be around to manage your group(s).
That fight idea is interesting. We'll talk and think about it.
Pretty much agree with Khizan here. What's annoying is I chose the 8 hour option on the first event and I still failed. My 10 min option was a steal 4, 3 hour option sabotage 2, and 8 hour option of arson 1. I didn't realize that I could rank up abilities at the time so all my mercenaries were at level 1 so I didn't bother to choose sabotage 2. I wish I could have aborted an event when I found this out halfway through.
However, why is arson 1 even an option for us when we obviously won't have it. Similar to what Khizan said, I don't mind if the faster options have higher rank requirements or harder events have abilities that I don't have yet, but this is the first adventure!
I'm not sure what type of random generator for these events is being used, but can these events be assessed for what actually makes sense to have as an option? I think we shouldn't be failing the 8 hour options at all at this point.
You say "you probably want to try to succeed as many adventure events as possible to gain some experience for your mercenaries". This is flawed thinking because experience won't help me complete adventures. Experience helps with two things: Points and Health. I don't have anything else to spend points on because I don't have any more skills that need learning. So points won't help me complete tasks. I can already win fights at my current levels WHEN I actually get fights. So health won't help me complete tasks.
The only thing that will help me complete tasks is skills, and the only way I can get those skills is to complete adventures, which is to say, completing tasks. Getting more experience won't help me complete tasks because I don't need more health and I don't need more points. This means that my goal should be completing an adventure as fast I can.
The level 2 adventure has 10 tasks. On event #7, I ran into a task where my only sure choice was the 8 hour task. The other two options were skills I do not have. If I pick one of those two, the odds are in favour of that choice losing the adventure and failing the entire run. Having come 6 choices into the run without a hitch, I could now throw away that entire hour and gain nothing for it. If I get just 2 choices like that? 94% chance of failure, approximately. With 3 choices like that, the run has a 98.5% chance of failing. If I get 4 choices like that? 99.7%.
Because points and health do me no good now, losing here does not count as a partial success, it counts as a 100% loss. With no way of knowing what's ahead or how many of the events have the potential to have a 25% success rate on the 10 minute option, it seems like the smart money is on the sure 8 hour win, because anything that is not a complete adventure win is completely worthless. Getting to level 100 won't get me any goddamned closer to beating a Difficulty 4 Arson check. I have to win to have any profit at all on the run.
And that win... will get me... a random skillbook. I'll have to repeat the entire process a few more times and get the same reward each time in order to raise that skill to a reliable 10m win.
This is awful.
Also, how is burning a stable down difficulty 4 arson? It's a wooden building full of hay; it is literally hard to avoid burning it down accidentally than it is to burn it down on purpose.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Still working on some of the more egregious bugs, then we'll start looking at adventures: cleaning up some of the silly events, and adding more adventures.
Like everything else, I feel if they shorten times people will farm the hell out of this later on when you do have high level mercs. Jesse even said you have a 100% success rate with options that have matching skills and appropriate ranks.
With something like this that it's essentially a side quest experience, not the whole of the game of Imperian, you should expect to do this AS a side thing and then go do other things the game.
I like this new merc system. By shortening times, it'll deplete it's infatuation time drastically and everyone will get bored with it rather quickly when you've farmed it 10k times in two days rather than a couple months. Enjoy it, don't exploit it.
Some feedback from a balance perspective: levels should do more than points and health. A certain milestone of levels should give you a modification point, usage to improve: rating OR stats OR speed OR additional health OR a free skill rank. This would make levels feel like something less extraneous. A modification point system every few levels provides us the power to further customize or specialize our mercenaries and answer problems with our teams in small doses.
It also makes levels worth something.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
I don't think a gating system is necessary for skills and equipment when we already have one in that we have to depend entirely on luck to acquire them both because of random drops and lousy starting success rates. The ability to improve stats and rating via mod points would be nice because then we also have the ability to develop even during streaks of bad luck.
"I wish my mercenary had a little more dexterity for lockpicking." can be answered by using a valuable modification point at the expense of all other options. "I wish I had another Arson rank but...", etc. A mercenary not growing in statistics at all somehow just strikes me as strange.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
It would be nice that when you start an adventure, the number is included in this message: Scarlet Chrysanthemums has begun the "Goblin Fort" adventure!
So maybe change it to something like: Scarlet Chrysanthemums has begun the "Goblin Fort" adventure! (#172)
The only thing I think is weird is that my derps have to face challenges they're not prepared for. But let's be honest, this is sort of how adventuring goes. An example is that my derps have had to poison the well and there's no access to a poisoning ability I guess this goes along with Risca's arson complaint. I don't necessarily have a problem with it, because they've managed to succeed at poisoning before. Maybe they could slowly accrue unknown abilities as they demonstrate success with their events?
To be honest, I don't see any problem with repetitive failures. I think there's a lot of pre-game whinging as no one has really broken into any real success because we're all rolling out with level 1 derp wagons with grey items. I'd give it time to settle out and let the mercs level up some. I'm betting on Aleutia having some breakout success since this is really text pokemon.
To be fair, requiring the poison (or any of the other tier 2/3 abilities) ability in the very first adventure is kind of lame. I think I'll be removing a lot of those in the first balancing pass, although I agree that there's room for some. We probably just overdid it a bit.
I'm probably also going to move the tier 2 adventuring abilities to rewards for the first adventure.
Things I see coming out of this: mercenary adventures tuned specifically for events where the progress is tracked to decide event outcomes. Or holiday adventures.
The Night Ironbeard Went Crazy would be a terrifying adventure.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
To be honest, I don't see any problem with repetitive failures. I think there's a lot of pre-game whinging as no one has really broken into any real success because we're all rolling out with level 1 derp wagons with grey items. I'd give it time to settle out and let the mercs level up some. I'm betting on Aleutia having some breakout success since this is really text pokemon.
The problem is that the failures don't strengthen me or teach me in a way that would help me stop failing.
When I'm running leveling dungeons in WoW, my levels help me. If I fail over and over on the third boss, I am getting a chance to learn the boss's tactics and practice against them, so that my odds of killing that boss increase. Running those first two bosses over and over will get me more levels, and those levels will eventually push me up to a point where I can brute fore that third boss. Failures here move me closer to success. I gain as I fail.
In the mercenary system, my failures are just failures. Completed tasks earn me marginally more health, which will help me win fights, but only when those fights are an option. For the most part, my dudes go in, fail at a poison/Arson/etc check, and gain nothing that would help them pass that kind of check. So I go back in no better prepared than the last time. Unsurprisingly, this often has the same results as the first time and I get another failure. So I basically just spam attempts at it waiting for the stars to be right and for the RNG to favor me.
That is a problem.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
*******************************[ My Adventures ]******************************** ID Adventure Group Status -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 70 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 72 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 75 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 77 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 122 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 126 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 127 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 130 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 134 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 141 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 145 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 147 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 152 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 155 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 156 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 175 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 184 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 189 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed 198 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums 4m, 58s
Those past failed ones - will those clear after a certain time? I don't really need to see this say, three months from now. Or even next week. I know I failed
Comments
Because your 10 minute options in the difficulty 1 adventure require things like Poison 4, and the skilbook for poison is acquired from the difficulty 3 adventure. When I don't have that, choosing the 10 minute option gets me this:
Mercenary Adventure Information for Adventure #24 - Goblin Fort
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Events Completed: 2
Events Remaining: 4
Last Event Result:
As your mercenaries walk over to the barrels to release the poison into them, one barrel goes tumbling through the room,
rolling out into the fort. Your mercenaries quickly pack up and head out before they are discovered.
This is why I do not choose the 10m option. For that choice, my literal only option was a Fight, which is an 8 hour one.
This is pretty bad design, imo. I spent ~500 lessons and everything kitting out my crew to be as good as I could make them right now. I've got a climber. I've got a searcher. I've got a lockpicker/sabotager, a batterer, and a master of disguise. I've got healers and archers and swordsmen. And in the introductory level adventure, my choices go something like:
You want to know why I am choosing the long options? I am choosing the 8 hour option because you gated all the other choices behind content I cannot access yet.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
It's cool, though, this is one of those learning experiences with a brand new system. If you could churn through every adventure on the first day, it would kind of suck. It will take time to figure out the best strategies to work through adventures, and it will take time and iteration as we try and balance these things. I'm excited to see the discussion and experimentation going on with this.
This isn't a high level, this is the introductory level 1 adventure. Kitting your men up properly should let you complete it in a reasonable time frame . Give me high skill checks for skills I have, tough fights, whatever. As long as I can meet the challenges with a properly set up group out of the resources I have available, I would not mind. For example, I wouldn't mind having to spend a few hours tweaking and trying and perfecting things to get past a particularly tough fight on my budget, when a higher level group could just stomp it.
I do mind the faster options in the L1 adventure being skillwalled behind things learned from the L3.
@Jesse I dislike the idea that I should just rush 10 minute options as much as I can and then intentionally take a dive to keep rushing the same 10 minute options over and over to gain exp. It would be nice if trying to win wasn't a bad choice.
I don't want to win every adventure in the first day. I wouldn't mind having to farm the first adventure for several days to beat the second adventure, etc. And I don't mind having to powergame excessively to beat the first adventure early. I like powergaming.
I just mind when it seems that the only way to beat the adventure is to hurry up and wait with 8 hour options. It's an artificial gating mechanism, like WoW making you grind Hydraxian rep to unlock bosses. Those suck.
Also, could you explain the difficulty ratings? Your L2 adventure gives me 3 possible 10m choices in a row where the L1 adventure gives me a 3hr wall right at the second choice.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
The difficulty rating is a flat increase to the required "score" of the events in that adventure. When you attempt an event, your highest scored mercenary in the required skill is compared against the required score. The higher your score, the more likely you are to succeed in the event. With a score of 0, you have about a 25% chance to succeed. If your score is much higher than the required score, it's an automatic success.
Do stats increase enough with levels for my best bet to be just pounding out L2's until I can brute force the 10m skillchecks? With prizes being random, I'd have to potentially do a LOT of 8 hour options to get enough skillbooks to reliably pass a lot of these 10 minute options. Even if the guidebooks aren't random, that's still something on the order of weeks to be able to finish an adventure without having to resort to the 8 hour ones.
I've also gotten into zero fights, which is kind of disappointing, because I've got all kinds of battle skills trained and the only fight I see is a difficulty 1 at 8 hours. This gives me an idea.
Maybe we could do something like an old school Dire Maul tribute run kind of thing? I'm thinking of something like this: There is always a 10 minute fight option; the fights are pretty hard unless you are overleveled and they risk incapacitating mercenaries, which makes further fights/events harder. But you can always send your dudes in to just smash stuff and you can complete the adventure just by killing all the bad guys.
However, completing the adventure by just killing all the bad guys gives you less loot. When you go to Free the Slaves, some slaves are lost in every fight and this cause you to get a reduction in pay. When you're Finding the Cure fighting smashes up laboratory equipment and ruins notes and such, so you can only bring them research that helps them develop a cure, and not a functional cure.
Some options would have fighting as a legit choice, of course, because you shouldn't be able to completely neglect fighting skills, but I still think those should have two fighting options. One hard stupid fight that's just smashing the enemy, and another fight styled appropriately for the difficulty level. Maybe the 8 hour fight option is easy, but slow and defensive. Or maybe the 10 minute no-penalty fight is harder than the penalty fight because you're doing something like increasing your own risk to prioritize defending the slaves.
This makes fighting valuable as a way to get through adventures, but it also makes a balanced character more important. It makes it easier to complete adventures in a timely fashion, but completing them the easy way penalizes you.
Later adventures may not need this kind of thing, because you'd be more established and have more depth, but something like this would make for a much more enjoyable early experience than starting the adventure and hoping you get lucky.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
That fight idea is interesting. We'll talk and think about it.
It's taken me a while to get all my thoughts in a row, so, okay, here we go.
@Jesse
You say "you probably want to try to succeed as many adventure events as possible to gain some experience for your mercenaries". This is flawed thinking because experience won't help me complete adventures. Experience helps with two things: Points and Health. I don't have anything else to spend points on because I don't have any more skills that need learning. So points won't help me complete tasks. I can already win fights at my current levels WHEN I actually get fights. So health won't help me complete tasks.
The only thing that will help me complete tasks is skills, and the only way I can get those skills is to complete adventures, which is to say, completing tasks. Getting more experience won't help me complete tasks because I don't need more health and I don't need more points. This means that my goal should be completing an adventure as fast I can.
The level 2 adventure has 10 tasks. On event #7, I ran into a task where my only sure choice was the 8 hour task. The other two options were skills I do not have. If I pick one of those two, the odds are in favour of that choice losing the adventure and failing the entire run. Having come 6 choices into the run without a hitch, I could now throw away that entire hour and gain nothing for it. If I get just 2 choices like that? 94% chance of failure, approximately. With 3 choices like that, the run has a 98.5% chance of failing. If I get 4 choices like that? 99.7%.
Because points and health do me no good now, losing here does not count as a partial success, it counts as a 100% loss. With no way of knowing what's ahead or how many of the events have the potential to have a 25% success rate on the 10 minute option, it seems like the smart money is on the sure 8 hour win, because anything that is not a complete adventure win is completely worthless. Getting to level 100 won't get me any goddamned closer to beating a Difficulty 4 Arson check. I have to win to have any profit at all on the run.
And that win... will get me... a random skillbook. I'll have to repeat the entire process a few more times and get the same reward each time in order to raise that skill to a reliable 10m win.
This is awful.
Also, how is burning a stable down difficulty 4 arson? It's a wooden building full of hay; it is literally hard to avoid burning it down accidentally than it is to burn it down on purpose.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Still working on some of the more egregious bugs, then we'll start looking at adventures: cleaning up some of the silly events, and adding more adventures.
With something like this that it's essentially a side quest experience, not the whole of the game of Imperian, you should expect to do this AS a side thing and then go do other things the game.
I like this new merc system. By shortening times, it'll deplete it's infatuation time drastically and everyone will get bored with it rather quickly when you've farmed it 10k times in two days rather than a couple months. Enjoy it, don't exploit it.
It also makes levels worth something.
"I wish my mercenary had a little more dexterity for lockpicking." can be answered by using a valuable modification point at the expense of all other options. "I wish I had another Arson rank but...", etc. A mercenary not growing in statistics at all somehow just strikes me as strange.
Scarlet Chrysanthemums has begun the "Goblin Fort" adventure!
So maybe change it to something like:
Scarlet Chrysanthemums has begun the "Goblin Fort" adventure! (#172)
I'm probably also going to move the tier 2 adventuring abilities to rewards for the first adventure.
Could we have the equip list come out like this?
Could we also maybe get a search parameter for mercenary list?
Glitterati Bromance Str: 3 Dext: 14 Int: 17 Con : 8
Glitterati Bromance Disguise (5), Makeup (18), Search (5), Heal (3), Glittercannon (45)
The Night Ironbeard Went Crazy would be a terrifying adventure.
The problem is that the failures don't strengthen me or teach me in a way that would help me stop failing.
When I'm running leveling dungeons in WoW, my levels help me. If I fail over and over on the third boss, I am getting a chance to learn the boss's tactics and practice against them, so that my odds of killing that boss increase. Running those first two bosses over and over will get me more levels, and those levels will eventually push me up to a point where I can brute fore that third boss. Failures here move me closer to success. I gain as I fail.
In the mercenary system, my failures are just failures. Completed tasks earn me marginally more health, which will help me win fights, but only when those fights are an option. For the most part, my dudes go in, fail at a poison/Arson/etc check, and gain nothing that would help them pass that kind of check. So I go back in no better prepared than the last time. Unsurprisingly, this often has the same results as the first time and I get another failure. So I basically just spam attempts at it waiting for the stars to be right and for the RNG to favor me.
That is a problem.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
ID Adventure Group Status
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
70 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
72 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
75 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
77 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
122 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
126 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
127 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
130 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
134 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
141 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
145 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
147 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
152 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
155 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
156 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
175 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
184 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
189 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums Failed
198 Goblin Fort Scarlet Chrysanthemums 4m, 58s
Those past failed ones - will those clear after a certain time? I don't really need to see this say, three months from now. Or even next week. I know I failed