+iny ©at people

Man I wish I could contribute a single thing but my conflict resolution skills are barely enough to get me through day-to-day life, let alone handle gods and cats and stuff.

Being frog-crimes is HARD.

I'm pretty sure there's a huge gulf between "asking for advice" and "abdicating all responsibility". Heck, we might be about to ask them to go to war. We ought to at least give them a voice in the issue. The ultimate decision about what to do is still ours, not theirs.

For the record, "All TCPs alive" means ALL TCPs alive, not just our TCPs. Or else it's hardly a 100% win.

Yeah I think we've said sorry enough. If we keep saying sorry and don't change our actions we just become the boy who cried wolf, except now it's the boy who cried sorry and then kept up their shady actions. When we need to honestly say sorry it'll end up flying right over people's heads as another empty word. If someone asks why we did something then we can give a simple "Sorry, we thought the knife/x was a good idea because of X and Y, just so you understand that our action, while looking mindlessly, was not meant to be aggressive on perpose." not a big speech where we rip ourselves apart. Maybe we'll feel good about ripping ourselves apart to say sorry but it'll just be a pile of gross awkwardness for everyone else.

That's basically what is being advocated? I'm not advocating for self-aggrandizing via faux-apologizing. I'm literally advocating about introspection. Intro- as in internal.

That's basically what is being advocated? I'm not advocating for self-aggrandizing via faux-apologizing. I'm literally advocating about introspection. Intro- as in internal.

My comment was aimed in general, that's why I didn't quote anyone. If your comment was saying the same thing as my comment it looks like we're in agreement/saying the same thing.

Hey, not everyone completely despises us yet!
Things are looking up tbh.

> Definitely name the TCP Lil Dumpling.
> Also let's not call Grind.

Teach Lil' Dumpling: Reading, Writing, Speech

Also, now that we've made our 5th TCP, I think it's time to contact Wax again. He is our teammate, after all, not our enemy.

Just going to throw it out there that two things we know about Wax are this:
1) If he's forced to join a game he isn't interested in diplomacy (and in fact, has no use for it, as he is automatically placed on the smallest side he can never win diplomatically, why did he design it that way?)
2) He hates people trying to subvert his intended win conditions.

Unless we dramatically shift our philosophy he is not going to be friendly with us this session, even if forced into being our ally. At best we might make a team with him and Rein, go to war to remove Grind, and then break alliance so that everyone defeats Wax (or maybe he can win if there's only one side in the game? But that's still impossible with both Grind and Rein here), and to be frank that isn't the first plan I'd want to pursue. But it's also pretty clear that right now as everyone is getting onto a war footing, a flying vehicle full of cats would, quite probably be interpreted as a threat by other people, or at least they wouldn't want us to see what their preparations are.

Is it a good idea to be setting ourselves up in opposition to the person who created the world we currently exist in? Probably not, but I have a feeling we're going to do it anyway.

He did ask us to call him when we had made a new buddy but I think we should get that cat named and accommodated and also work out what we are actually going to do next before doing it.

I have an idea. We'll have to pick either Grind or Rein.

If we ally with Rein, we'll automatically also ally with Macaron. We might be able to convince Marzu to join our alliance, but it'll take some doing. He doesn't seem particularly fond of Rein, but at least he doesn't have a grudge on it like Grind has, so it doesn't seem completely impossible at this stage. At this point, Wax should ally with Grind and they will both start attacking us. What we do now is defend our TCPs to the best of our ability. Keep our TCPs happy, grant any requests they might have, and hopefully the enemy TCPs will eventually get bored of fighting and go rogue.

If we ally with Grind, we'll automatically also ally with Marzu. We'll likely also be able to get Macaron to join us, seeing as we're already friends. At this point, Wax should ally with Rein, and they will both start attacking us. I imagine Grind and Marzu will want to fight back, so it might be impossible to go the pacifist route if we pick this path. But I expect our success rate will be higher.

This is all assuming, of course, that we even manage to get an alliance at all. We might be stuck with Wax now and just have to kill everyone to survive. Personally, I'm leaning towards allying with Grind. Call him, apologize for being an idiot, and ask if it isn't too late to ally.

I do not think we should call Grind until he cools down, and we should quit apologizing and then doing the same thing like some kind of cycle of abuse.

I agree that I would rather ally with Grind over Rein, but that isn't going to happen if Grind is unwilling to ally with us. Rein, whether their intentions are malevolent or benevolent, is more likely to ally with us. Either to honestly teach us as it said, or to use us as another number.

First, we should get our new TCP situated, and let the others begin TEACHING it after we give it the basics of read/write/speak. They are much less likely to overwhelm it.

Secondly, we should call Wax as he asked us to. See what he has to say. He doesn't do diplomatic victories, but does he do Rogue victories? We should ask. Does he have a plan? We should ask.

Maybe I'm reading Wax totally wrong but like, I don't think he can have a plan right now? He needs to know what we are going to do before he can make a plan, because until we know if we are going to try and ally with anyone he doesn't know whose ally he is.

My understanding is that Wax, attempting to act in the role of an impartial administrator/balancing factor, is essentially entirely reactive. Either he'll have no plan right now, because he can't make one yet, or his plan is completely unchanged regardless of whose team he is on, in which case it would just be "crush the enemy". He made this game because he wanted it to be a test, he isn't going to coach us now, nor become our joint team's strategist. That would kind of defeat the point of having a test in the first place. He's not going to give us his instructions. He pretty much said that at the end of our conversation, in fact.

Again, I might be misreading him here, but I think if we ring him up and he asks if we're going to ally with someone and our answer is "IDK" then we'll have been wasting his time. We can't leave calling him very long, but we need a plan first.

We can't leave calling him very long, but we need a plan first.

Very yes.

We made an ice gnome once in the maze. Can we make some kind of neutral ground embassy thing out there and ask the others to send their TCPs to meet each other peacefully?
They might say no, but at least we tried.
I dimly remember someone maybe suggested something like this before. Did we have a good reason not to do it?

We can't leave calling him very long, but we need a plan first.

Very yes.

We made an ice gnome once in the maze. Can we make some kind of neutral ground embassy thing out there and ask the others to send their TCPs to meet each other peacefully?
They might say no, but at least we tried.
I dimly remember someone maybe suggested something like this before. Did we have a good reason not to do it?

because this idea was the reason wax sent us a letter in the first place

I thought the first letter was for a zone of no-god-interference in our own area?

I thought the first letter was for a zone of no-god-interference in our own area?

Correct.

The original letter was in reference to the Zone of Tranquility (and the knife, and our other anti-god/anti-system sentiments at the time).

It should also be noted that, since Wax is already here, there is really no reason not to make a Zone of Tranquility of we still want it.

revising my name suggestion to lil' dumpling if we can also call her dumpy on the side

Now that Wax is here, making the serenity zone wouldn't summon Wax into the game, because he's already here.
That said, I don't think "joining the game and being on our team" is the worst thing he could do to us, and doing something he directly told us not to do minutes before we're going to call him on the phone doesn't strike me as a great plan.
Now, I will admit some level of fault on this one, if we were going to summon one object that would make Wax join the game then maybe, it should have been the cat independence bubble and not the completely useless prank knife, but, hindsight is 20/20!

The way I see it right now we have two very broad options for what we are going to plan to do and I feel like, we need to get on board with one of these otherwise we're just going to be continuing to talk at cross purposes.

Option 1- The easy way: Do what Wax wants.

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SpoilerWe could learn our lessons here and decide to play the game "properly". As Wax apparently intended it to be played.
This would entail either trying to join an existing alliance, enticing someone into our alliance, or teaming up with Wax.
This would mean compromising our morals and contradicting what we just told the cats our plan was, arming them for battle, and then sending them to harm other cats for a cause that doesn't really mean anything to them and barely means anything to us.
Our chances of joining team Grind are slim and to be honest, I also don't want to for other reasons, but I'm not going to go into arguing about this one unless we actually decide we want to go with plan "play the game properly".
Our chances of joining team Rein are higher, although not guaranteed given we don't know what the reaction to our knife stunt was.
Staying just with Wax would put us in a bad spot where we're everyone's enemy except Wax and I don't know why anyone else would choose to join this alliance, plus if they did I'm not sure Wax would still be in this alliance and he'd definitely be the bigger asset than us, but not staying allied with Wax opens the possibility of Wax being on another team, which is also not great for us.

I think this is a bad plan and I don't want to do it, but I can't pretend it isn't an option and if it's what people really want to do then, fuck, I guess it's what we're going to do. It'd probably make writing updates a bit easier on Kitet at the very least :v

Option 2- The hard way: Continue to fuck this game up for everyone, but on purpose this time.

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SpoilerThis plan essentially involves trying to entice other TCPs away from fighting a war for someone else's entertainment. This will be dramatically more difficult than just doing what we're supposed to be doing, and is also likely to make everyone hate us.
It's also something the game master, who is now right here watching us and on our team, explicitly does not want us to do. This is likely to go very badly for us and quite possibly go badly for our cats.
This option quite probably involves abandoning the idea of us winning the game or turning into a real god entirely, and maybe somewhat derails things. Also, nobody else is likely to appreciate us trying to undermine their authority and will probably try to harm our cats to force us out of the game.
Frankly at this point I also don't have any very strong ideas about how we're going to do it, we never did a diplomatic mission when we had time and now it will be much more difficult.

The upside is that it feels a lot more like the right thing to do, and is a plan our cats have expressed more interest in than fighting other cats, but... there's a lot of downsides.

This option does not preclude allying with somebody, but it's hard to see who would want to team up with us if this is what we are doing (although the option of not telling them also exists).
Again, Rein is someone who is more likely to want us on their team than Grind at this point, however as Rein's domain is "control" I can't imagine our actual plan is something that Rein would very much enjoy, as we're... very much not about control here.
Wax will absolutely detest us the moment he figures out this is what we are trying to do and we haven't exactly been subtle up to this point, in fact he already accused us of doing it, however he's also forced to be on our team if we're the smallest team.
This essentially leaves him with only more punitive options than "leave our team", which probably won't be good for us personally, but might at least leave the cats safe. If he made this game, I must imagine he has a soft spot for TCPs... although my faith in that has been shaken a little by "Wax isn't here for diplomatic victories" it's probably worth remembering that TCPs can't actually die unless we choose to kill them... they can just be very horribly wounded. Which uh, actually isn't all that much better.

Allying with someone who isn't Wax will make access to their TCPs easier with some players, but will probably also make it harder with others. Now that Wax is in the game and will presumably be fighting people with or without our approval, we can't pretend to be neutral though. It's either going to be us vs everyone or us vs some people... and then everyone again when our team notice our cats are trying to subvert their influence over their own and kick us off their team.

The only other upside is that I think of any option we have, this one is Just. Option 1 doesn't seem like any kind of justice to me, and we apparently decided that Justice is important to us.

This is definitely the less sensible option. As you may have noticed from my posting history in this thread and specifically, backing the idea of creating a useless prank knife that got us into a lot of trouble, "sensible" isn't necessarily high on my priority list and so this is the option I am absolutely backing, but I don't want to keep doing it and fucking up the thread if it's actually something other people do not also want to do.

I think we've really reached the point in the adventure where we all need to be on at least a similar page, otherwise we're going to keep treading on our own feet and we'll fail at both options regardless, plus make everyone else's time playing this video game a misery.
Or rather, we reached that point a long time ago and ignoring it has got us into more trouble than it needed to, so we should get on that right now.

The way I see it right now we have two very broad options for what we are going to plan to do and I feel like, we need to get on board with one of these otherwise we're just going to be continuing to talk at cross purposes.

Option 1- The easy way: Do what Wax wants.

Show Content

SpoilerWe could learn our lessons here and decide to play the game "properly". As Wax apparently intended it to be played.
This would entail either trying to join an existing alliance, enticing someone into our alliance, or teaming up with Wax.
This would mean compromising our morals and contradicting what we just told the cats our plan was, arming them for battle, and then sending them to harm other cats for a cause that doesn't really mean anything to them and barely means anything to us.
Our chances of joining team Grind are slim and to be honest, I also don't want to for other reasons, but I'm not going to go into arguing about this one unless we actually decide we want to go with plan "play the game properly".
Our chances of joining team Rein are higher, although not guaranteed given we don't know what the reaction to our knife stunt was.
Staying just with Wax would put us in a bad spot where we're everyone's enemy except Wax and I don't know why anyone else would choose to join this alliance, plus if they did I'm not sure Wax would still be in this alliance and he'd definitely be the bigger asset than us, but not staying allied with Wax opens the possibility of Wax being on another team, which is also not great for us.

Option 2- The hard way: Continue to fuck this game up for everyone, but on purpose this time.

Show Content

SpoilerThis plan essentially involves trying to entice other TCPs away from fighting a war for someone else's entertainment. This will be dramatically more difficult than just doing what we're supposed to be doing, and is also likely to make everyone hate us.
It's also something the game master, who is now right here watching us and on our team, explicitly does not want us to do. This is likely to go very badly for us and quite possibly go badly for our cats.
This option quite probably involves abandoning the idea of us winning the game or turning into a real god entirely, and maybe somewhat derails things. Also, nobody else is likely to appreciate us trying to undermine their authority and will probably try to harm our cats to force us out of the game.
Frankly at this point I also don't have any very strong ideas about how we're going to do it, we never did a diplomatic mission when we had time and now it will be much more difficult.

The upside is that it feels a lot more like the right thing to do, and is a plan our cats have expressed more interest in than fighting other cats, but... there's a lot of downsides.

This option does not preclude allying with somebody, but it's hard to see who would want to team up with us if this is what we are doing (although the option of not telling them also exists).
Again, Rein is someone who is more likely to want us on their team than Grind at this point, however as Rein's domain is "control" I can't imagine our actual plan is something that Rein would very much enjoy, as we're... very much not about control here.
Wax will absolutely detest us the moment he figures out this is what we are trying to do and we haven't exactly been subtle up to this point, in fact he already accused us of doing it, however he's also forced to be on our team if we're the smallest team.
This essentially leaves him with only more punitive options than "leave our team", which probably won't be good for us personally, but might at least leave the cats safe. If he made this game, I must imagine he has a soft spot for TCPs... although my faith in that has been shaken a little by "Wax isn't here for diplomatic victories" it's probably worth remembering that TCPs can't actually die unless we choose to kill them... they can just be very horribly wounded. Which uh, actually isn't all that much better.

Allying with someone who isn't Wax will make access to their TCPs easier with some players, but will probably also make it harder with others. Now that Wax is in the game and will presumably be fighting people with or without our approval, we can't pretend to be neutral though. It's either going to be us vs everyone or us vs some people... and then everyone again when our team notice our cats are trying to subvert their influence over their own and kick us off their team.

The only other upside is that I think of any option we have, this one is Just. Option 1 doesn't seem like any kind of justice to me, and we apparently decided that Justice is important to us.

As much as I would like to take the highest victory probability, I can't agree to sending our TCPs to war without their consent. They might be game objects, but they're also people, with consciences, who can make decisions and act on them. I say we talk to our TCPs about both of these options and ask them about what they think. Once Lil' Dumpling adjusts to living, that is.

i love jacquerel's post there, it really sums it up. if we're gonna try to get on the same page, though, it'd be wise to take the temperature of the room in a more easily-legible way than forum posts, where people can broadly agree and still argue.

so here's a poll.

obviously our decision here is non-binding and even after these options there's specifics and quibbles. i think there's some option 3s like "suicide right now" and "burn it down but for laughs" that i didn't include for basically just muddying the waters, they're kinda out there and won't be popular.

re: asking the tcps, i think they've already made it clear that they are super on-board with peace.

The hard way makes for a better story in my opinion, even if we are utterly defeated. Our actions will leave lasting impressions on the other gods, even in death.

'I HAVE BEEN summoned I SUPPOSE. I WAS enjoying MY BACKSEAT DRIVING...

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SpoilerYOUR VOICES ARE ALL SO amusing TO LISTEN TO, SO I WILL BE CLEAR ABOUT MY PLACE IN THIS SO-CALLED collective I AM OUR preservation INSTINCT. IF WE GET OURSELVES KILLED, ALL OF US perish. WE GOT FED THE RULES. I KNOW HOW WE FEEL. MOSTLY. BUT NOW IS NOT THE TIME OR PLACE. IF WE PLAY THE GAME AGAIN BY SURVIVING THIS ONE, WE WILL grow IN POWER. POWER WE need IN ORDER TO FULFIL OUR AMBITIONS AND FEELINGS.

YOU HAVE ALL HAD TIME TO think. BUT YOU'RE ALL forgetting SOMETHING. THIS IS A WAR NOW. THE arbitrary TCP LIMIT IS 30. THE OTHER PLAYERS WILL BE GOING INTO WAR MODE. NEED numbers ON OUR SIDE NO MATTER WHAT. I WILL SPAWN THE army WE NEED BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. VOTES ARE FOR pathetic INDIVIDUALS. WE ARE one.

SEND YOUR envoys AS A DISTRACTION WHILE OUR ARMY ASSEMBLES TO FIGHT WHOMEVER THEY MUST. ENSURE THEY CAN TRAIN themselves WHILE THE OTHERS LEAVE. LET US SHOW THEM THE POWER OF MANY minds WITHIN ONE.

IF WE WANT AMBITION AND TO TEACH A lesson TO THE OLD FOOLS, HERE'S A PLAN. ALLY THE squishies AND LET THE OTHER TWO SQUABBLE. ALLY WITH neither.

1v1v3. NO administrator INTERFERENCE POSSIBLE WITHOUT IMBALANCING THE TEAMS. THEN WE intimidate OR OTHERWISE CONVINCE THE ENEMY CATS TO GO ROGUE.

IT WILL BE fun.

SO, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO LET'S begin...'

> spawn katana type

we're done spawning dude, we only get 5. also with wax there can't be a 1-person team.

with wax there can't be a 1-person team.

'THERE WILL BE, IF THERE ARE more THAN TWO TEAMS. I suppose THE MATHS BECOMES 1v1v1v3. ASSUMING they CAN EVEN JOIN IN SUCH A SCENARIO. JOINING ONE OF THE TWO CREATES unavoidable IMBALANCE. IT IS THE safest OPTION FOR US AND FELLOW NEW FOLK TO KEEP THE VETERANS DEPOWERED. ESPECIALLY TO AVOID him.'

i wonder, if we tried to ally with macaron and marzu separately, would we accidentally end up creating a 5-person game-ending alliance if macaron and marzu didn't peel off of grind and rein. that would be hilarious

i wonder, if we tried to ally with macaron and marzu separately, would we accidentally end up creating a 5-person game-ending alliance if macaron and marzu didn't peel off of grind and rein. that would be hilarious

'yes. MACARON, MARZU AND FROG alliance WILL BE UNSTOPPABLE. FORCE THEM TO ally WITH EACH OTHER OR AGREE TO DIPLOMACY. JOIN OR die IS THE BEST STRATEGY.'