Obscure Questions Thread

[Jazerus]

Hi, there are a lot of questions I've had about Y1 over the years that I've never bothered to ask and which I'm not sure anybody has documented. At the very least, these questions won't be ones that are answerable through the wiki. I've forgotten a lot of oddities, but I've been playing again recently and thought I'd make a topic here to get some answers (hopefully straight from the Legate, who, since he is Orso, presumably knows everything...). I'll probably be posting questions sporadically for a while.

Okay, first one - on some Social actions there is a toggle which (sometimes) appears called Blackmail. Its tooltip refers to using the Blackmail you have on a character to increase the chances of the action succeeding.

1. How do you accumulate this blackmail in the first place? I've never used any blackmail-related actions on this character although she is in my clique.

2. What exactly does this do, in hard numbers? Can you accumulate more than one piece of blackmail to gain greater advantage? Is this applying a CoS modifier or something less general?

3. Does using the toggle expend all of your blackmail against that character or is it reusable?

4. Does using the blackmail damage your relationship with the character?

5. Is there anything else noteworthy about this function that I haven't specifically asked about?

[Jazerus]

What is an Affinity on an item? Based on context it seems to be related to phemes - does it enhance the associated pheme's effects? Reduce its difficulty?

[Good Coyote]

Affinity has no effect in Year 1, it's a cut mechanic I believe. But probably restored in Y2.

I think having the blackmail option is related to being Informed on a character, but other than that I'm also curious.

[Metis]

On 11/19/2021 at 10:53 AM, Jazerus said:

Okay, first one - on some Social actions there is a toggle which (sometimes) appears called Blackmail. Its tooltip refers to using the Blackmail you have on a character to increase the chances of the action succeeding.

1. How do you accumulate this blackmail in the first place? I've never used any blackmail-related actions on this character although she is in my clique.

2. What exactly does this do, in hard numbers? Can you accumulate more than one piece of blackmail to gain greater advantage? Is this applying a CoS modifier or something less general?

3. Does using the toggle expend all of your blackmail against that character or is it reusable?

4. Does using the blackmail damage your relationship with the character?

5. Is there anything else noteworthy about this function that I haven't specifically asked about?

I'm actually not familiar with this mechanic at all, for the record. It might be something that was newly introduced recently or I just never noticed it. @Legate of Mineta, people be curious.

[Jazerus]

 

37 minutes ago, Good Coyote said:

Affinity has no effect in Year 1, it's a cut mechanic I believe. But probably restored in Y2.

I think having the blackmail option is related to being Informed on a character, but other than that I'm also curious.

I see, that makes sense. Is pheme Magnitude similarly a cut mechanic, or does it interact with spell type in some way? I know that some phemes supposedly oppose each other through the magnitude system and adding them to the same spell, supposedly, doesn't work correctly (although in most cases of opposing phemes I think there's no reason at all to ever put them in the same spell so you'll never really run into this in practice even if it exists).

[Metis]

Pheme magnitude is another cut mechanic, yes. Pheme opposition isn't, however: Phemes that are opposed to each other cannot be a part of the same spell, or the spell will fail. This includes Phemes that are part of the spell itself, not just Phemes you add to it, so keep that in mind if you're ever using a Pheme with opposites to buff yourself.

[Jazerus]

How exactly does pheme opposition work, then? I just cast a spell with Animal and Regenerate in it. Regenerate opposes Animal, but Animal doesn't oppose Regenerate (due to a bug, maybe). No automatic failure. Perhaps it made the roll harder or something? Regenerate does only Oppose Animal at magnitude 3, after all, and I added them to a Revision spell cast at a very high skill level, so if it added 3 to the difficulty I most likely still passed it easily. 

I then cast the same spell (after reloading) several times with Betwixt and Between added, and succeeded each time. These each oppose each other with magnitude 4, so (hypothetically) they might add 8 to the roll? Still something I might be able to pass with a good roll, but probably not several times in a row.

I'm not entirely convinced opposition works.

[Metis]

It's entirely possible that people just took the developer's word on how opposition worked and no one actually tested it ingame.

[Schwarzbart]

I personal actual never looked about opposite pheme at all because the spells I used with extra pheme all worked normal at the assumed difficulty.