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He should have fallen on his sword. That would have been the sensible thing to do.
Punched his ticket for Elysium right away, no waiting around.
He thought they'd only kill him.
Why did he think that? How stupid was he? Why in the world did he think that?
And now instead of his next great adventure he's flubbed a save against dominate person.
When I cast my mind about for examples of actors playing actors playing characters, most examples I find are of capable actors playing incapable actors playing their characters poorly. This makes sense to me because there'd be little purpose in a capable actor playing a likewise capable actor playing their character well; the resulting character would behave much the same as without the indirection.
This is what I know: at some point last night an adventuring party was formed with four members: an empowered priest of Cayden Cailean, an empowered wizard-priest of Ragathiel, a verdant-bloodline sorceress with some martial skill, and one of... whatever it is the kasatha does. Each of them shares the same peculiarity (and one might suspect that they acquired it as a group in their Abyssal excursion - or were replaced, as a group, by beings with the ability - but this is not my only theory or even necessarily my primary theory). Each thinks and behaves as if a competent actor, pretending to be an incompetent actor, pretending to be the competent actor who plays the incompetent actor.
Perhaps it would be if the incompetent actors were, instead, competent actors. I think it recurses sometimes? But for the most part, I get the impression that the incompetent actors are (incompetently) playing at what the competent actors would be like if they weren't acting at all.
Lame. But, while the incompetent actors are incompetent as actors, they have other competencies - knowledge of another world.
Sure, there's also that. Frankly, I haven't given much thought to their otherworldly knowledge; it seems to me a candle against the sun.
The incompetent thespians often act on knowledge that their characters have no way of knowing, and, yes, this includes knowledge of their world. It also includes conclusions they drew after long thought during an intermission, and things which they told each other out of character, and things which are going on behind or above their character's heads.
I'm not quite sure of the mechanism. Here I must admit a weakness: I know enough of mindscapes to create, recognize, or escape from one, but exotic phantasms are no special focus of mine. I think the cursed adventurers - where "cursed adventurers" is a term expansive enough to contain any beings which have replaced the original team of four - share a mindscape, with the accelerated time property. (I neither know nor know of spells which could achieve this, but accelerated time mindscapes are well-attested in the rumours and wild ravings of adventurers, mad wizards, and holy men, and since there's no visible spell aura we know that this is not spellwork per se.) A mindscape would be trivially capable of forcing them to adopt the roles their alter-egos have adopted, but there is an oddity in how they shift their awareness back and forth from the phantasm and the waking world - or rather, an oddity in how they don't, instead taking the fruit of long thought while shucking the shell of experience, which makes me suspect that the curse may have somehow duplicated their minds and bewitched both copies in different ways.
There's a spell for entering mindscapes which I intend to cast after I've had a chance to prepare different spells, which should give us more information; we can send a summoned creature through first to see what happens to the minds and bodies of entrees and whether the door is traversible in both directions - assuming that this is a mindscape and not some other stranger thing.
Or, if rather than be responsible grown-ups we'd prefer the part of responsible children, we could condition our casting of mindscape door on the favorable results of a commune question. And, while we wait on the cleric to cast their borrowed spells, we could prestidigitate our lozenge thumbs to taste like mothers' milk. When I organize a commune, I'll see it added to the questions asked.
Accelerated time in a mindscape sounds dope as Hell, although I'm not chomping at the bit to plug the Abyssal mind virus into my head.
So you've said. So your two theories are that they either went into the Gantelope, picked up the mindscape curse thing, and then came back out, or picked up the mindscape thing, and then went into the Gantelope, and then came back out.
I'm not saying that coincidences never happen, but.
You get me?
Why are you so averse to befouling your mind with Abyssal filth? What difference could it make?
You should swear up and down the street at every opportunity that you'd one-box in Newcomb's problem, but when you're actually faced with the decision, two-box.
You should swear up and down the street at every opportunity that you'd one-box in Newcomb's problem, but when you're actually faced with the decision, two-box - unless you're asked for a truthspell or are otherwise playing against Something you expect knows when you're lying, in which case you should one-box.
The real question is whether you'd rather be extorted by a psychopath, or die in the desert.
And, sure as I've got "Lawful" written on my character sheet, you'd rather die in the desert. That's what it's like to have inflexible principles.
I don't think anyone is obliged to damn themselves just because the Thrunes say that's the law of the land. If you'd rather suffer the consequences of breaking a law than the consequences of following it, a fine is just a tax in a different shirt and the worst anyone is likely to do is kill you. If I were a paladin, I might say that if you really must break a mortal law to avoid breaking the higher law, you should first pursue all legal avenues to align mortal and moral law, and only if that fails should you break the mortal law openly, respectfully, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. That's core to my conception of what it means to be lawful good.
I'm not a paladin, though, so instead I'll say... that you should never break a local law, not even to save the entire world, not even a dumb and self-defending law like the one that hangs over this entire genre of conversation!
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