My main problem with TDF's is that they aren't just IC punishments, they punish the player OOCly for something they did (I'm referring strictly to punishments for IC behavior). It's not as though shouting something stupid warrants a TDF, so you must have done something beyond that. Mainly, I don't really see how roleplaying by posting a subtly insulting news post or tearing down a bunch of shrines or anything that would earn someone a TDF should be punished by making the player want to just log out. I also don't see how wanting to log out is on the player either, it's going to happen and most people aren't going to want to log in day after day to just sit around and talk for sometimes up to what, five days?

I would like to see some more creative punishments and roleplaying rather than gods just saying, "Oh you've insulted me, here's my TDF for a week." I understand that the divine aren't just waiting around to be insulted and roleplay it out, but if someone is taking the time to make a quality attack on a god (ie: writing a well thought out post that subtly attacks the divine, declaring personal war on that god and going after all of their shrines, hunting down all of their order members, I don't know what all earns TDFs), it would be nice to see the divines respond with roleplay. It just seems like the TDFs are meant to slap the -player- on the wrist moreso than the character. Wouldn't it be interesting to have the divine abduct the character and teach them a lesson themself in some way, or what Amarysse was mentioning earlier. Not only would that be more fun, it would also, in my opinion, lead to more respect of the divine both in game and out of game.

I hope some of that made sense because I started rambling.

I'm sorry, but how are you being punished OOC by a True disfavour? Is Estarra coming to your house and shooting you in the foot for each True disfavour?

Saying that is as silly as this:
How is a disfavour "completely stopping you from playing"? It's making it slightly harder, yes; but they are not banning your IP address, no, you are doing that yourself by logging off.


You all need to:

They do? Perhaps for some, sure. However, I'm pretty sure I fight, defend, and hunt entirely the same with my massive current disfavour.

I've never even been TDF'd, so why do I need to harden up. Believe it or not, I'm saying this from the sidelines and not whining about my own personal experiences. And yes I believe it does punish the player OOCly because it successfully prevents them from doing a lot of the things they as a player enjoy in my opinion, or make doing those things even more taxing (ie: no conglut, very very bad for defenders on other planes, so it's either stop helping defend or suffer even more XP loss), particularly in cases where multiple TDF's are doled out. I don't see how that isn't an OOC punishment. It's not like a guild disfavour which just drops you a rank in the game, it's something that takes away skills that in some cases people have actually purchased, etc. I'm not sayig it makes the game totally unplayable.

In some cases I think a TDF IS appropriate, but not all of them.

Just an FYI, favours and disfavours are weighted by the god giving them. A higher god's SDF, is stronger than another's TF, for instance. Simply, a TF does not always counteract a SDF.

There is no such thing as a higher god. A True favour does not counteract a Strong disfavour because they affect the modified rate as previously explained in this thread, read back to see the full explanation. This problem has been fixed in other IRE games.

I am near positive this statement is false.

Perhaps, but not in this context.

This is not a rants thread, this is an ideas thread. By and large we're seeing rather an entertaining discussion. Shoo unless you can be constructive.

I disagree. You weren't going to take risks - and you usually do. And you gave me that amulet in case you were killed - you had a get out clause from conglut praying... without it, you would probably have been even more cagey.

True.False.True.

Gods have favored skills that affect the impact that favors/disfavors have on skills.

Read HELP FAVORS. Gods affect different skills true, but there most certainly are "higher gods" who vastly outweigh others.



I am positive you are correct.

Wrong once again. I defended an earth raid while considerably outnumbered and had to pray. The Amulet is a very very poor way to keep myself from praying too, it resets entirely too fast.

Ah. Ouchy.


And who is keeping score?

Verithrax makes a valide point in that the whole point of playing RPGs is to become the hero of the story yourself. If you wanted to be a bystander, you'd read a book or watch a movie, and ever since one egregiously bad experience where a favorite, long-running pen-&-paper campaign was killed by the GMs slavish devotion to the plot of a commercial adventure that was slavishly devoted to making the PCs play second fiddle to the heroes of a series of D&D novels (anyone else out there remember the Avatar Trilogy), I've harbored a violent aversion to "GM's Pet" characters of all sorts.

In my mind, any character more powerful than a player character can (within the rules of the game) aspire to become is useful only as a foil to be defeated by wit and/or teamwork. As allies or patron figures, they're role-play poison.

That said, though, I've got to say his secondary premise -- that RP on a MUD can and should mimic pen & paper RP -- has historically been far more damaging to MUD society than GM's Pet characters ever could.

As a writer, I learned early that each storytelling medium has its own strengths and limitations; its own unique rules and conventions that must be observed.

That killer RPG session that totally rocked when my friends and I were playing it out? It'd stink as a novel.

The Hitchihiker's Guide to the Galaxy is non-stop laughs on paper or as a radio show, but it loses much of its luster the moment you try to take it to the screen. It's magic lies in the words, not in the plot or in any visual grandeur.

Filmmakers failed repeatedly to capture the grandeur of The Lord of the Rings, and not just because they lacked access to modern computer effects. Peter Jackson was the first to instill the screen characters with an underlying humanity that a slavish translation of the source material couldn't achieve.

A comic strip is not a poem. Nor is it a short story or a LARP or a TV drama or a video game. A great stage performer can't necessarily cut it as a movie star, or vice versa. And what works for a pen & paper game doesn't necessarily follow as working on a MUD.

MUDs were invented by pen & paper fans who wanted to to recapture and enhance that same experience on the brave new frontier of cyberspace. What they wound up creating was a totally separate form of storytelling, though to this day, few MUD enthusiasts actually get that. They want MUD game- and social-dynamics to work the same way as their favorite offline RPG, but they don't. They can't.

So, while I would be overjoyed if admin-run god characters would vanish from the face of Lusternia, berating the admins for not living up to the potentials of a completely different medium is just wrong.

Exarius:

While I agree with much of what you've said, your last statement seems a bit "off" to me. These "admin-run god characters" were, by and large, once players just like the rest of us who wanted to contribute on a grander scale to the atmosphere, functionality, and playability of the game. They are not some alien sort of outsiders impinging on RP- if anything, they're here to inspire and encourage roleplay, to help provide direction that I (and you are welcome to disagree with me) do not believe we would all be capable of finding on our own. They provide goals, ideologies, and icons to which we can turn for guidance or conflict. In a virtual or tabletop setting, they are the divine catalysts for much of the change a world experiences and, I mean no offense in saying so, but I would not trust an entire game to a motley assemblage of (mortal) players without some Administrative capacity or organization. Even those pencil/paper games which don't utilize a divine authority have, instead, corporate or governmental authorities which function above and beyond player involvement. I have never seen a multi-player RPG situation in which complete self-regulation would be beneficial (though I'm open to any evidence you might have), so I'm curious what, if anything, you would ideally replace the gods (as playable characters) with if given your choice.

I think having gods be admin-run is somewhat to very important. For one, it gives me an OOC reason to respect the gods - they contribute to making the game I've decided to waste so much time and money in. For two, it gives them a certain aloofness, as the administration responsibilities demand their time.

You're right. Self-regulation would be way worse than having admins playing god characters -- one of the reasons for my ultimate disagreement with Verithrax.

But all of the supposedly great things you say god admin characters do for the players, they don't do for me personally. Worse, the manner in which their existence is woven into the fabric of the guilds and communities of Lusternia conflicts with my personal code of ethics to the point that I just can't role-play it. That, utlimately, is why I went rogue and remain rogue, and that's why I would rejoice if the "Elder gods" were to vanish from play.

My dream MUD would have the admin IC presence limited to role-playing villains and mundane characters, not the movers and shakers that anchor every major event in the universe.

There is nothing inherent to the role of "god" that couldn't be served by some other type of character, except that of being definitionally more important than the player characters.

The only place that you can say lack of admin intervention is completely worthwile is perhaps in the economy of a game. Except in the case that the systems for the economy cause too much inflation compared to the amount of money that is exitting the system which often causes a spiralling climb of prices for various items whilst newer and weaker players have still the same insubstantial ways of making money and their needed items have soared to ridiculous prices to reflect the inflated economy.


If you don't know what I mean by that, Final Fantasy XI is a ridiculously sad example of that very sort of thing happening. I'm sure if you know anyone that's played it they can fill your ears with plenty of rabid bitching about past horrors of that games economy wonders.



And Exarius, you sound like your problem is that the Gods prevent you from being an overachieving powermongerer that dominates the MUDS landscape in RP or otherwise. No problem with that really, but... uh.. there's other muds for that sort of thing. You want to be -THE- story, where as in Lusternia, you're simply a part of it.

I support essentially all of the points raised here. During the event leading up to the ascension stuff when the Elder Gods left I was quite happy.

Funny how there was no karma system active and no elder gods visible and the world didn't fall apart after all