Quoted By:
Now let's talk about choices.
This Quest is defined by choices. Since I'm not really doing dice rolling, choices and choose-your-own-adventure is where the difficulty and “meat” of the quest lies. I think it's more interesting to have a choice where you can radically change the direction of things based on a choice rather then being railraoded down a single path by the QM- where the hero eventually wins in the end. Where the utopia beats all the bad guys and endures forever. Narrative tools- things like catastrophes- are where the interesting stuff happens.
In my view, you guys hadn't had a serious setback since the Ingar crisis. The whole Yuan thing was sort of meant to be a “pick your poison” situation. People have said it before- it was a mistake to reveal what Yuan would have done if people picked the other careers, and I agree with that observation. However, the entire point of the choice was to pick what kind of future catastrophe would happen. If you picked Geneticist or Astrophysicist, then the problems would be based on those fields of science. The people picked State Philosopher, which means the problem would be philosophic or political. It would strike directly at the core identity and substance of the Hegemony (and the player's position as Supreme Ruler) as a political wound. It was always meant to be catastrophic, a serious setback or “low point” in the Quest to be worked past and looked back on as a challenge you overcame, but something that left lasting scars.
I understand why some people are upset by the decision, it also was not my first choice- I genuinely thought people would choose to pick the Accord vote. (We'll get to that in a second), but in order for the choice to have any teeth it has to be serious and uncompromising. You made essentially two big choices in this thread; Consolidate power into the Supreme Ruler AND Wear the murder-mask. These two choices lead to what happened at the end of the quest and were basically the “setback” that had been promised and set up by Yuan from all those threads ago. Allowing players to pick and choose every little thing that happened or mitigate the “loss” would rob it of any significance as a payoff. That's the reason why you didn't get a choice. The philosophical blow was to essentially become a straight-faced parody of Jaxtian kind; racist, xenophobic, violent, and greedy by forcing the consolidation of power and thought to just one Jaxtian ideal. That's how it filtered out.
