>>6153900> beyond spending a resource.I mean, it was a significant resource and a damn tight vote to spend it. Ultimately you did, so I have nothing to point to except my three hours of heart palpitations and the half-finished roll table I put together (it had four instances of the word "die" in it) while it looked like not spending was winning. I recognize this is literally "dude, trust me" territory, but that vote was not a given. Catching up to Real Ellery and talking him down was not a given either, and it was significantly aided by you guys oopsieing into Herald mode previously. He easily could've exploded himself, sacrificed himself trying to gank Casey or the Managers (recall he rolled extremely well fighting both), or been absorbed into the crystal, and I had plans for all of this. Again, "dude, trust me." Sorry. But... dude, trust me.
>The same was true throughout the whole quest.Yes, anon. Throughout the whole quest, where you play as a character groomed and manipulated by powerful external forces intent on keeping you alive, you are often kept alive. Throughout the quest, where you play a powerfully optimistic, delusional character in a setting where expectations influence reality, those expectations often pay off. Throughout the quest, where the MC believes herself to be a heroine, as in a fictional heroine from a rigidly tropey pulp fantasy novel where the heroine always wins, the heroine very often wins. Throughout the quest, where the MC has been developing increasingly unexplained and disturbing reality warping powers, reality does warp around her a whole awful lot. Throughout the quest, where the choking weight of narrative causality is an important theme, narrative causality gets a tad choking sometimes. The WYRM eats its tail.
Serious, lasting, life-destroying negative consequences started happening to Ellery the second he wasn't the protagonist anymore. I'm not trying to pisstake you here. What I'm doing is looking you in the eyes and going: yes. And also: but you still have to engage with it on face value, anon, because the actual consequences are social ones. If you were playing a game of DND with a DM who's a really nice guy, would you spend 6 hours fucking around every single week knowing you're never getting permanently TPKed? Your DM is a really nice guy, and he thinks fucking around is funny in small doses, but if you do it for 6 hours straight the other players get annoyed and your really nice DM gets all stressed trying to steer the session back to what'll be fun for everybody. Maybe he'll put his foot down eventually and tell you to rein it in, but he's really nice, so it's going to take a while. And until then, your DND game is going to be kind of aimless and boring and ultimately not as enjoyable as it would be if you played along. Your DM isn't angry. He's a really nice guy. But he does feel a little like he's being taken advantage of.
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