Spoiler Warning S5E38:A Chauncy Proposition

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jul 12, 2011

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 68 comments

I’ll bet you guys forgot this show existed.


Link (YouTube)

Where did Mortimer and Marjorie go? Why did SOME of the White Glove Society attack us? Why didn’t Josh kill the cook the moment he opened his mouth? Why didn’t we crash when talking to Chauncy? How exactly ARE you supposed to do this quest so you don’t end up killing everything in the building?

These are all things which must be added to the long list of Stuff That Confuses Me.

 


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68 thoughts on “Spoiler Warning S5E38:A Chauncy Proposition

  1. Chuck says:

    The way I did it was by having my companions wait in the kitchen, head out the door to Mortimer’s speech, and basically absorb cane hits until he got to the right point in the speech to reveal his lie, thanks to a fake meat pie.

    1. Adam says:

      It’s actually possible just to hide from everyone behind the counter until he ends his speech. Otherwise, my playthrough went the same way as yours.

  2. X2-Eliah says:

    Oh, I had no trouble passing this quest.

    On my third playthrough.

    After consulting the wiki.

    And figuring out which of the 100-or-so common bugs happened in my game (hint – about half of them).

    Basically, yes, screw this quest for being buggy and convoluted.

    1. Chuck says:

      Yeah i basically memorized the vault wiki page for this quest before doing it. I really wanted to do it right.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Memorized?Why?New vegas is very alt-tab friendly.

        1. Chuck says:

          I have the PS3 version.

          I prefer to play shooter games-or games that have shooting mechanics-on the console-mmo’s tf2, and the mass effect series being exception. And at the time Vista was eating my harddrive with backups. Now it’s just my living room chair is more comfortable then my desk chair.

          1. acronix says:

            I`d solve that by swapping chairs. And if someone asks: you gently donated your own desk chair after gremlins stole it!

            1. Chuck says:

              I would but the living room chair is a bit rickity and hard to move. Pretty soon I’ll get a cheap office chair from a thrift store or garage sale.

  3. krellen says:

    You’re supposed to stay hidden out of sight of the diners, basically around the corner in the private kitchen, until Mortimer reaches his reveal. If you substituted fake human, you can at that point emerge and reveal it as bunk, and they’ll turn on him.

    It took me five reloads to figure this out.

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Who is this Shamus guy?And why have you removed Shame from the show?

    1. acronix says:

      Yeah, he was the best commentator. We want him back!

    2. Bobby Archer says:

      I don’t care what the introductions have said, Spoiler Warning has always had no Shame.

      1. Joel D says:

        … well played.

  5. poiumty says:

    Oh hey cool a new show! Gotta say I kinda like it, I hope you’ll be doing more of these in the future. Sure beats your boring programming stuff and that book you’re never gonna finish.
    Though I would recommend starting from the beginning of the game so we’d get some sense of what you guys did till then.

    1. sab says:

      Do. Not. Mock. Project Frontier!

      1. Adam F says:

        Shun the unbeliever! Shuuuuuuuunnnnnn!

        heh

      2. poiumty says:

        *mocks project frontier*

  6. Dante says:

    Most important question this week: why does Josh play Sims 3?

  7. Daemian Lucifer says:

    No ones mic gets cut off and Mumbles wants Rutskarn to tell a story?!What the hell is going on here?!!

    Well,at least Josh is still in his element,seeing how he bugged the game a few times and crippled himself with a grenade.

    1. Grudgeal says:

      Obviously the delay since last episode is on account of the entire cast having been replaced with Pod People.

      Except possibly Josh.

  8. Saurous says:

    I never really had that much trouble with this quest. I just snuck in the back, pretended to be a plumber when the guard caught me (while dressed in full White Glove Society attire, of course), drugged the wine with Med-X, got the chef to leave by making him relive his abusive childhood through psychoanalysis, and then snuck back through the dining hall with the stupid Gunderson kid, after relieving all of the unconscious banqueters of their clothing.

    See? Simple.

  9. Rasha says:

    Gah what was his perk pick? I like knowing how josh is going to troll optimization junkies…

    1. poiumty says:

      Level 19 doesn’t have a perk pick.

      1. Rasha says:

        In fallout 3 and onwards doesn’t every level? Could’ve sworn… Josh are you running an old timey fallout mod?

        1. kanodin says:

          3 did every level, New Vegas gave perks only on even numbered levels.

          1. Irridium says:

            Like in the original Fallout.

            *drinks*

            EDIT: Why is this awaiting moderation? Didn’t think it was that bad…

            1. Sekundaari says:

              You should always drink in moderation, you see. I wouldn’t know why, maybe the stuff prevents you from falling over or something.

  10. acronix says:

    On my first try, I killed the cook. Then I had noticed I didn`t have enough survival points to cook the fake dish. So I went out, leveled up, dumped all my points in survival, bought a magazine for the temporal boost, and came back. I was short for two points. That`s when I reloaded and decided to trick him instead. (yay! for high speech). Then I had to redo everything when my game crashed when I spoke to the hostage.

    1. Aldowyn says:

      temporal boost? That sounds cool, but temporal means time. I think you’re looking for temporary.

  11. Slothful says:

    I was wondering why Josh was using the cane, since he’d probably do better damage without it. Good that he’s put some points back into melee.

    Except now he’s gonna use the flamer instead, isn’t he.

    1. kanodin says:

      “All those points in energy weapons” should tell you the answer.

    2. Nick says:

      No, now he’s going to lug it around at low repair and never use it

  12. Eric says:

    For what it’s worth, I think there are unofficial fixes that stop a lot of the bugginess of this quest… but where’s the fun in that?

    From what I understand, a lot of the issues in the scripting of Fallout 3 and New Vegas themselves come from rather buggy, incomplete, redundant, etc. functions being used for certain tasks. It’s impossible, as far as I know, to start a cutscene, for instance, like you might in another game to handle a more difficult scene. Instead you have to hook it all into the AI… rather than “trigger X when player reaches Y zone”, you get all this stuff like “player must be X distance within NPC’s perception distance, in which cause NPC will approach player and say Y under Z conditions,” but when that one piece of code handling the NPC’s perception might be buggy or influenced by outside factors, like reputation, faction, whether the NPC is armed or not, hostile or not, etc. etc. it all sort of crumbles. It’s sort of a perfect storm of conditions that are difficult to predict exactly and impossible to fully control.

    Oh, and the GECK is a major, major bitch to work with. By far one of the worst editors for any game I’ve ever used.

    1. acronix says:

      I agree with that. The GECK can go die in a fire.

  13. yd says:

    I had exactly the same behavior as in this episode where a third of the people wanted to kill me, a third wanted to run away from me, and a third acted like nothing had happened.

    I think walking through that locked and roped-off door triggers it. That’s when it started for me, too.

  14. Hitch says:

    1) Murder everyone
    2) Tell the Yes man you don’t have to worry about the White Glove Society
    3) ???
    4) Profit

    I’m pretty sure at least some of the “options” in the quest log are mutually exclusive, but the instructions don’t make it clear which and as soon as you make any effort to do any conflicting options the quest just melts down.

    1. Chuck says:

      Wouldn’t step 3 be loot everyone’s corpse?

      I do get the reference, though.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        This will explain the meme.

  15. kanodin says:

    I have honestly never had any bugs or serious problems with this quest, and I’ve done most of the major ways of doing it I think. Instead of calling it easy I’m just gonna assume I got incredibly lucky.

  16. Sozac says:

    I got it on my second playthrough without the wiki. Its pretty hard to mess up after you find the dead investigator. On my first playthrough I talk to the guy about his son and was like “Oh, crap everyone said not to go into the basement, so maybe that’s where he is.” Then, I remember talking to Morjorie about the detective that went missing, but I passed her by. I had also talked before to Mortimer and he seemed off. I went to the basement speech checked a guy and went talked to the chef, told him he had rats in the closet. He went to check and I murdered him. Then I took his key to the closet and went and got the boy and then I snuck out. The father was like “I’ll kill the white gloves for this” and I was like, “No, it was just Mortimer” Then, I speech checked him into forgiving the white gloves and Mortimer, just got away with it I guess. I forgot after that.

  17. Eärlindor says:

    Ah… Buggy quests, flashbacks of plasma death that may or may not have happened, picking up another heavy weapon that we will carry around and never use or sell, an endless supply of silent giggles…. I feel like I’m forgetting something, but I think the point has been made.

    Good to have you back, Spoiler Warning… good to have you back…

  18. Nasikabatrachus says:

    Here’s how long it’s been: I didn’t even think about Reginald Cuftbert when I watched Rutskarn load those bombs into the suitcase on that Hitman video.

    WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME PLEASE HELP

  19. Kelly says:

    I’m going to skip the explanations of everything (except that the White Gloves went hostile because you went into a red marked door and that you need to tell the chef he has you confused for someone else wherein you can Speech Check him into the closet and trap him there or psychoanalyze him with Medicine) or mentioning how I’ve never had a bug issue on this quest because such comments will be dismissed anyway.

    What I will say is Josh blowing himself outside the level geometry is quite funny (as are insane VATS animations), and on a less relevant note say that OH DEAR GOD PLAYING NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2 FOR THE FIRST TIME AS A YUANTI BARD HOLY SHIT SHAMUS I NOW KNOW YOUR AGONY.

    1. Even says:

      To be frank, I never had much bugs with this either, and for whatever reason, I also managed to complete it the first time without using the Wiki, so I found it surprising how many people reported having problems with it.

      Still, shit happens. I guess I was just lucky.

      1. Hitch says:

        I’m not sure if my (and other people’s) problems with this quest stemmed from an inability to follow simple instructions, or an unwillingness to blindly follow nonsensical instructions and insistence on trying to apply logic to the situation.

        I like to think it’s the latter.

        (On a completely unrelated matter: your twitter feed made me look up the song Tom’s Diner (I couldn’t remember exactly what it was until I heard it.) But that caused me to read some internet comments on it. Some “child” (just to be unkind) claimed it was basically the same song as Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”)

        1. Even says:

          But if a person can do the quest following the instructions then they’re not actually non-sensical and it must be a problem with something else. With the amount of people having problems I just thought it would be more fair to assume that there’s something wrong with the quest scripting and not with other people’s heads.

          1. Bret says:

            Or that person is good at follow nonsensical instructions.

            Common human behavior, that.

            1. Klay F. says:

              Too bad pretty much all the quests in New Vegas require you to follow nonsensical instructions, so that whole argument resembles a strawman the size of The Empire State Building.

              The difference between this quest and just about every other quest in the game is that all the instructions are given to you at once, whereas in the other quests, its possible to blindly follow the quest marker and not listen to anyone or anything (you know, EXACTLY like Josh is playing), and still complete the quest favorably.

              1. Hitch says:

                Yeah, it was the sudden puzzle nature of the quest.

                Through the rest of the game it’s been, “Go do step one, then come back and I’ll tell you the next step.” If you chose an option that closed off any possibilities, they were never mentioned again.

                In this one it’s, “Go do this and this and that or this and this or that.” Without mentioning that if you did anything on opposite sides of any of those ors the AI will freak out and make any version of the quest uncompletable.

              2. Even says:

                On the other hand, I’ve found most quest instructions to be perfectly valid, so I don’t really know what you’re going on about here. You get a quest, some info is given to about it by the giver, and there you go, the game makes a summary and updates it to your Pip-Boy and off you go do the quest. That’s the set standard for “almost all” of the quests. I don’t recall too many quests where I’d be asking myself that why the hell am I doing this again when I had read the info and paid attention to what I was told. I don’t think I’d enjoy playing the game as much as I do, if what you said really would be true.

                My original point was, anyway, that if someone can make some sense about your “nonsensical” instructions, then it does make sense for them, and nothing is going to change that. For this quest, it’s obviously broken. Maybe they don’t give you enough info, maybe the quest is just scripted bad. The information given here is obviously only valid as long as you don’t break anything, so yes, it can end up as nonsensical, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% flawed.

    2. Aldowyn says:

      Why, pray tell, are you playing a CRPG as a bard? They’re like the worst fighters imaginable.

      I kind of liked NWN2. The plot door was pretty infuriating, and I only got past the 2nd act once, but it wasn’t too bad. I think I just like the Forgotten Realms setting.

      1. DirigibleHate says:

        I tried to play through again recently, and I couldn’t keep playing.

        I skipped ahead to the expansion (Mask of the Betrayer), which was the complete opposite. It’s excellent.

      2. Alexander The 1st says:

        So…why allow someone to choose the Bard class then?

      3. Alphadrop says:

        Taking a level in bard is an easy way to get Dragon Disciple… apart from that I have no clue why anyone would play a bard unless they like the lute animation.

  20. ehlijen says:

    ‘full of naked men dressed in formal wear’

    Best line in the episode :D

    1. Rutskarn says:

      Missed the comma there.

      1. Aldowyn says:

        I think that would be more of a dash, as opposed to a comma.

        Maybe that’s just me. I like dashes.

      2. ehlijen says:

        You’ve joked it. You can’t unjoke it :P

  21. ProudCynic says:

    I’m not the only one who had no problem doing this quest without killing anyone (except the White Glove thugs that attack you in the hotel room and the merc in the steam room), am I?

    It’s been a while, but I remember doing it by sneaking through the kitchen past the guards, psychoanalyzing the cook, substituting fake meat for the food, calling the waiter, sneaking up on Mortimer and revealing the entire plot to the banquet. That said, it’s kinda convoluted and I was probably only able to pass the skill checks because I tried to max skill points. I suppose I can see how other people running the quest could miss those options, but I’ve never had a problem with it.

  22. Boison says:

    Reggie is back. And with a vengeance, it seems. I really missed spoiler warning the past two weeks. I Hope your holiday was extravagantly violent, Josh.

    Free entertainment. Aw yea.

  23. Thor says:

    Hooray, more Spoiler Warning!! At work; Must. Not. Watch.

  24. DarthBilbo says:

    Yeah…I have tried this quest…at random points, no matter what happens, SOMEONE becomes hostile. I did the “Good” way, fake meat, they ate it…then they tried to kill me. All of them.

  25. *Blah* says:

    OMG the dress cane is enchanted!

  26. florin says:

    This quest is(was?) bugged as hell. Lots of crashes and failures until i got it right.

  27. potemkin.hr says:

    Probably the best quest in the game in my oppinion. A little intrigue and class in the wasteland :)

  28. hewhosaysfish says:

    You rapacious fiends! Stealing their empty sasparilla bottles! They were obviously planning to take those back to the shop for the 5 bottlecap deposit.

  29. HeroOfHyla says:

    I decided to rescue the kid. He proceeded to fall through the floor when he stepped out of the freezer.

  30. Fang says:

    I had no trouble working for Mortimer. Just popped the person they originally wanted in a dumpster a ways from Vegas, came back then got Ted out, and BAM. Quest done.

    Oh. I was using the “Community Bugfix Compilation Patch” from the Nexus.

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