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[WillowLuman]

We don't have to kill anyone in the Thieves' guild for Eydis Fire-Eyes. We can join the Fighter's and NOT piss off the Thieves'. I'd rather not piss off the Thieves, because they know us and could kill us in our sleep.

[Man of Paper]

A good, like, half of the missions Fire-Eye gives the PC involve Camonna dirty work. Imagine how much more she'd have for people to do in MorrowReal, and imagine what kind of reputation we'd get in the guild if we denied missions to the only person who gave them to newbies. If we don't work for her, we don't gain FG reputation, therefore we make no forward progress, and we'd have no reason to join.

Plus, we're still waiting on the Blades orders. Put off joining any other faction before we know what the Blades want from us. Use this down-time to make friends in the city, figure out the political and economic situations, and try to formulate a plan on how we're going to use what we know to further our own objectives and not those of others.

Oh, and LordB, just want to let you know that I am taking this seriously. My suggestions are just to offer an alternative to people that, should they eventually decide to back it, would shake things up and make stuff interesting for both you as the GM and us as the readers.

[WillowLuman]

We have reason to join: a place to sleep and store stuff for only 25g a month. We don't need to do jobs.

[Man of Paper]

But I think taking no quests from the person assigning them will get your guild rights rescinded. Plus getting the reputation as lazy or unreliable wouldn't be the best.

[GlyphGryph]

We can still do the OTHER half of the missions, and I'm sure there's other ways to get missions.

[WillowLuman]

Fighters' Guild is a mercenary contractor. People seldom get orders, instead the contracts are there for any member who wants them. The Balmora Fighter's guild isn't a "Theive's Guild killing machine," and she only gives Camona Tong dirty work to people she trusts. All we'd have to do is only take jobs involving creatures and bandits.

We don't need to advance and become deeply involved in the FG, just join for membership benefits.

[Supercharazad]

What date is it?

Also, I have an idea. Remember when some guy was talking about using constant effect shock enchantments to power electrical items?

Go to Ranis, ask about how elemental enchantments enchantments work.
Do shock enchantments actually generate electricity with polarity and all that stuff, or do they just make you crackle and burn?
Do fire/frost enchantments actually change the temperature of the object the enchantment is attached to, or does it just freeze or burn the wearer's entire body?
Do constant effect enchantments last for an infinite amount of time, or does the enchantment just run out at some point?

[WillowLuman]

Well, given the burns on people's feet and chests, it would seem magic actually produces current. With this in mind, a shock spell might not affect a cliff racer high off the ground until it swooped in closer.

[LordBucket]

Suggestion cutoff for next episode.

Update probably sometime tonight.

Couple responses:

If it isn't too conspicuous, we ought to wear the helmet,

Sold it in Episode 36.

its hard to figure out exactly what level of detail you want in our suggestion. Either its to broad
and fluffy or too specific. I was hoping you would add the necessary fluff as you saw fit

Well, I do prefer reading lengthier suggestion posts, but I do admit that sometimes it's not practical to implement complicated suggestion exactly as written.. Simple/flexible suggestions are easier to work with. For example if somebody says "gather alchemy stuff" that's easily compatible with both suggestions "go to Seyda Neen" and "go adventuring." It's easy to do one while doing the other. Wheres if somebody says specifically "take the silt strider to X, then walk to Y, and hunt for specifically reagents A B and C" that's certainly more interesting for me to read, but it's more difficult to write an update that incorporates those elements unless lots of people agree with it. On the other hand, I'm probably less likely to hand out great results for generic, one-line suggestions. So, sorry if that's not a very clear answer, but that's how it is. As to fluff, fluff is fine...and obviously we've spent a lot of time on purely flavor-text, but I think we'd all like Michael to be successful in his endeavors, and as interesting as it might be to read about getting raped by orc women, and the construction methods of dunmer, and so forth...those things don't really advance the story much. I admit I get a bit frustrated when episodes consist of nothing but wandering around talking to people. The most fun I've had is when you guys come up with solutions that I hadn't thought of. From my point of view, talking to Vivec was a good idea. It was entertaining to write, and it advanced the story. From my point of view joining the Legion was terrible. It was a lot of effort to write, it didn't advance the story until I got so bored that I decided to have Dagoth Ur start blowing up towns to prompt you guys to act, and like I pointed out several pages ago...I've been monitoring the view count on images...and we seriously lost like a third of our readers during the time you spent in the Legion. I think a lot of peeople other than me got bored with that.

I do have a strong preference for player consensus, for three reasons. First, I like to feel like you guys are the ones playing the game rather than me simply writing about whatever. Second, sometimes it's just impractical to implement things that disagree with each other. For example, if one person said to go to Seyda Neen, somebody else said to go to Sadrith mora, and somebody else says to go questing on Dagon Fel...it's difficult to work all three of those things together into one post. Plus, at the moment Michael has limited funds, and I suspect that if he did go to Dagon Fel, for example, the people saying to go to Seyda Neen wouldn't want to blow half his gold to pay for travel fare immediately afterwards. And third, sometimes suggestions are by nature mutually exclusive or have long term consequences. I dislike making permanent game-altering decisions based on agreement from only a few people. For example...hypothetically imagine if two people said to murder Caius, one said to go grind alchemy one said to go ask people questions, and one said to go adventuring. The "most votes" would be to murdur Caius, but it would be a minority of people saying to do it. It would potentially have a huge affect on the entire rest of the game, whereas the other suggestions would be very unlikely to "break" anything. Consider when you joined the Legion. That had major, game-altering implications, and Michel wouldn't have done something like that if there were only a couple people in favor. It's not that I dislike major decisions...major game-changing decisions are fine...I just don't want to have only 2 people decide the game for everyone else.

Is there a local Legion barracks?

Fort Moonmoth is within walking distance of Balmora,

We haven't actually rented the room yet, have we? LordBucket listed as a reason
we have less money now, but I don't think we've actually signed and paid for it yet.

Correct you have not rented a room. As to why, money was a factor, yes...but I don't think I've seen anyone say to go ahead and rent the room since Nileno showed you the room you'd actually be getting for the 250/month. I kind of just assumed that people expected something bigger and/or with furnishings and didn't want to pay that much for what she was offering.

As for places to crash, bear in mind we can sleep in any guard barracks.

Sleeping space isn't really the issue that storage is. Two reasons: First, Caius said that he has a cover to maintain, and having large quantities of expensive treasure and adventuring gear is not consistent with his cover. Legion armor especially so. Second, for a long time lots of you have wanted to do alchemy, and the gear is simply too bulky to carry. The pack guar suggestion might be viable if you can find one, but even that is not without complication. Barring a "third option" kind of solution, it looks like finding/establishing some sort of long term "base of operations" will be necessary to do alchemy.

Camona Tong
Let's not make them our enemy, they'll kill us in our sleep if we go near Balmora.

I m neither advocating nor discouraging making enemies of the Camona Tong, but as for Balmora in particular, remember that according to Larrius Varro, Awesomicus killed the entire Balmora chapter.

[GlyphGryph]

Personally I like the walking around talking to people episodes... anywho, hopefully something more interesting to you happens in this one,  there were at least a few suggestions that might have fun potential.  If things still don't work out I have some more active suggestions for the next round - of course I don't know how much support we'll get. You are probably realizing by this point that most people just go along with whatever suggestion they think would be most fun for them.

Also was the user drop at the first legion update or the second or the third or what? and have the numbers recovered at all?

[WillowLuman]

I wasn't talking about the Tong, I was talking about the Thieves' Guild. They've more likely than not still got an eye on us, so I don't want to piss them off enough to provoke murder.

[LordBucket]

was the user drop at the first legion update or the second or the third or what?
and have the numbers recovered at all?

Second half of legion training is when the drop happened, and no, we haven't recovered from it.


Images from episodes 1-12 or so are generally above 100 views.

Images from episodes in the 15-20 range are mostly around 27-33 views.

Images from episode 25 (immeditely before joining) have mostly 25-29 views.

Imgaes from episodes 26-27 (early Legion training, Awesomicus, orc-lady, etc) have mostly 36-56 views.

Images from episodes 29-30 (late legion training) have mostly 14-26 views.

Images from episode 35-36 have mostly 14-19 views.


So, slow but steady decline from episodes 15 to 25, then huge upsurge following by a dive in the second half of Legion training that nearly ten episodes later we still haven't recovered from. One might be tempted to suggest that those numbers in the 25-30 are simply because the posts are older but episode 29 ws over a month ago, and some of those images have the same 14 views that images from episode 36 only a week ago has. Once a browser downloads an image it generally keeps it unless manually refreshed, so those numbers are probably more or less "unique" views rather than individual views.

I've been monitoring the view counts for a while, and views in the 25 range were fairly typical pre-legion even in the week or two after posting an update. I suspect we have only 14 regular readers, including myself.

You can see the difference in posts, too. Pre-legion, I sometimes had as many as 6-8 people voting one way or another even for a single action. Check the vote spoiler on episode 20. We had 7 people people voting to join the legion and 5 voting against it. That's 12 people voting on a single topic, plus several others who abstained on that topic and voted to do entirely other things. Now, if you check over the previous 3 pages of the thread, there are only even 8 people posting suggestions.

[Xanmyral]

Obviously we need to get drunk imbibe on greef helpful potions and go do stuff then. Nothing quite gives view count a kick as a Hangover-esq sequence of debauchery. On that note: Alcoholic cocktails, powergaming or having a good time while working on some alchemy?

More seriously though, as the game goes along one should expect a drop or 'leveling' in viewership as some drop and newcomers start becoming put off by the page count in a running game. The higher previous pages might be from non-unique viewers, but that doesn't mean they're not from a few people trying to catch up to the current point. After all, I was one of them earlier, no? I've only recently (past few episodes) caught up. Course I don't really participate in any of the major discussions beyond throwing a point or two in.

EDIT: That, and honestly this is kind of a black sheep in this section of the forum I imagine, I would be more expecting this kind of thing in the forum games and roleplaying than in a section mostly dedicated to "let's play"s and so such. Then again, I don't normally come to this section so I may be wrong.

[LordBucket]

Nothing quite gives view count a kick as a Hangover-esq sequence of debauchery.

Funny you should say that. This image:



...has 52 views.

as the game goes along one should expect a drop or 'leveling' in viewership as some drop and newcomers start becoming put off by the page count in a running game.

Sure, but views for episode 25 were only about 10% lower than they were for episode 15. Through ten updates over the course of three weeks we only lost a couple people. Then BAM from episodes 25 to 29 and only one week (the legion episodes) we lost 30%.

this is kind of a black sheep in this section of the forum I imagine, I would be more expecting this kind of thing in the forum games and roleplaying than in a section mostly dedicated to "let's play"s and so such.

Well, we are actually playing a real game of Morrowind here, just using your suggestions about how to play and with a very colorful segregation of story from gameplay. And I've done similar things as this before: X-Pony, Pool of Radiance, Bard's Tale, etc.

I suppose it could go either way, but I put them here because there are real third party PC games actually being played rather than being games purely made up and existing on the forum. Plus, it's consistently been my experience that threads in this forum are healthier and last longer than in forum games.

[Xanmyral]

Hahah, not surprised on that count. While crazy stuff tends to lead to bad repercussions, it's sure as hell interesting and entertaining to watch the self-destructive spiral.

But yeah, guess I concede the point there, there was indeed a good dip in viewers with the Legion bit. But stuff happens, yah know? Can't change the past so lets focus on the future, we can 'what if' all day but that doesn't change much, so the thing would be to focus on getting them back, yeah? Hell, on the 'what if' topic, we could of requested Vivic to give us a "teach this n'wah magic yah s'wit" request and probably of learned magic from mildly insane elves. But the moment for that has passed, and while it would of been a good idea (with a potential for political assassination) back then, now it's just a hindsight recollection.

Yeah, cursory glance through this forum does show that this type of thing is actually more common than I thought at first glance. I'd debate about 'healthier,' more via definition to be honest, or 'longer lasting' but I agree that since this is more steadily based upon the game than not, it does probably have more warrant here than there.