It doesn't beg much of any question. If you tell the Secret Service that they aren't good enough to do the job that they've been commissioned to do and you show up with anything short of a (properly licensed) small army and a howitzer, you're going to get laughed at. If you insist after being laughed at, you get shot. There's no way to spin any similar scenario without receiving, in order, ridicule and negative consequences. Intent doesn't get you anything but a posthumous footnote in someone's psych study.

Except that since death is cheap in Lusternia, it's far more likely that the person will just kill you to shut you up. Which leads to problems if you can't back up your words.

Hey, in all fairness, he did get a purely non-mechanical, mostly non-threatening IC warning.

Read the second half of my post, in case it was not there before you posted this.

With that and this in mind, need all characters be champions of cause and rhetoric? Can we not respectfully play simple folk, or men of petty misconceptions and prejudices? Or proud fools who would sooner die for these misconceptions than admit error?

I think the significance of a character is not simply how well they are portrayed by the player himself, but the depth to which they are interacted with.

Conversely, if you're arrogant and stubborn enough death might not be something to fear. Especially after the forty-third time.



Oh, and that instance you're referring to was a slip. I didn't notice we'd entered the room where everyone was standing. Worse was the whisper, which I must have mistyped, considering that everyone seemed to hear it.

So admittedly, not all of it has been deliberate. But your wise counsel is appreciated.

Meeting with Scuchidari, because the only Inner Moonhart Circle member that was on at the time decided to vanish as soon as she showed up. D:

And Solanis, I was really about to tell you to STFU, icly

Ah, thanks. I didn't see the edit. I still stand by that post, though.

It's good to be able to separate yourself that thoroughly from your characters, but in reality, it's not that clean. Your earlier post indicates that you do actually care that your roleplay might be interrupted with violence, even if it's earned. To use myself as an example, I honestly don't care about any of my characters' xp or level (those're just numbers on a server somewhere), but there are other things that I do care about. If my character is not persuasive and I was not putting up an intentional barrier to my character being persuasive for RP, then that's a reflection on me. If my character dies and it's not due to some ridiculous mechanical imbalance (and it's usually not!), then that's a reflection on my own competence in the IRE combat system. If someone doesn't like my creative work, that's on me; doubly so if it's something crafted because there's absolutely no such thing as IC limitation there.

Phred was special. He played a janitor. He liked playing a regular guy. However, he still responded to basic human things like wanting to be liked and noticed, and I really believe that there was an OOC component to that desire too.

Point is, we don't play Lusternia just for the sake of moving digital pieces around on a digital board. We get engaged with our characters, and unless we've really set out to fail in an amusing way, we don't like to fail.

Sure, you can.

Just don't expect others to want to play with you, or even to want you anywhere near them.

Y'know, just like a person like that is often ostracized IRL, too.

@Xavius:

Bah, meaty post with more than I am likely to address.

We make do with what we have. Perhaps I do not have the creativity or intellect or skill to accomplish what I set out to do. I can wallow in the fact, or I can continue to enjoy the game in spite of my shortcomings. Who knows? I might get better, someday, or search for greener new pastures.

As for my basic human wants: I want to see an interesting story unfold in front of me, and I want to contribute to that tapestry. I reserve personal want of friendships and acceptance for the players (who I am very fond of around these parts), not their characters. The line does occasionally burr, but that's irrelevant.

You address failure and I do not disagree. I however do not see dying or losing an event as failure, so long as it contributes. From the perspective of a narrative, "heroes" require obstacles (sometimes other people) to overcome and attain their greatness. The legacies of victors is built of the defeated.

EDIT: That said, mechanical penalties for losing suck. Probably one of the top three reasons I left. It's like having to write lines: "I will not neglect gathering essence for the Megalith. I will not neglect gathering essence for the Megalith."

Am I being vague?





Not playing with someone based on their IC personality is in my opinion OOC. I am not saying you should be obliged to pursue RP with people or their characters subject to your dislike, but that you should acknowledge and respond to it when engaged. That's just an opinion, though.

How is it OOC? People in real life choose who to associate with based on their personalities all the time. Every time.

OOC in the sense that your character is not reacting. The "ignore" emote is a reaction. Idling in front of them when they greet you is not, unless you character is standing there in stasis, peering off at the horizon. In which case, you should still drop a line for it. Again, opinion, and not one widely favored by IRE gamers.

Or just not responding to a person at all...

Which, again, happens in real life, too.

People are more than welcome to choose not to play with someone who they do not want to play with. Just as happens IRL. You have to have some kind of power / influence to be an unpleasant person and still get people to associate with you.

I hear lesson penalties are going out of fashion at the moment

It may be that you're missing my point, but I don't disagree with you in the basic sense. I simply think that even ignoring or avoiding someone should at least be introduced as roleplay.

e.g.:

Vhaas enters from the west.

The corners of Vhaas' mouth turn up as he smiles at Xenthos.

Xenthos continues his conversation with X, sparing no attention elsewhere.

Xenthos stares ahead blankly and ignores you.

Preference, of course. There are no rules in Lusternia, to my knowledge, that say you must do this. I simply see deliberately not expressing something as a sort of retaliation against the player, rather than the character, whose corporeal form exists in the MUD and behaves just like ours would. I can usually tell if someone is ignoring me when they stand there. In a MUD however, if you do not express something, it is (without context) impossible to really tell whether your character is actually reacting by ignoring or if you are typing, haven't notice the other player, etc. It's a courtesy I extend except when participating actively in large groups.

Dunno if this has been said but Estarra did say in the thread about hallifax and gaudi that this event has been in the works for quite some time. If I remember correctly she said a year. I honestly think this event's planning pre-dates monks and bards but that's just me!

She said "about a year," but even ignoring that, coders are not unpredictable forces of nature. You don't suddenly have a completed project that you oversaw and not realize that it was finished until well after the fact.

You should have!

Enemies coming into Celest just to bite me. You know who you are! Made me die laughing.

Faire starts, found 5 out of 6 of Dukker's props in liek, 3 minutes. Stuck on the last one, so go on to do the rest of the faire while stopping to look around for the last item once in awhile. Like, 2 hours later, done everything else and still can't find the stupid mirror. ):

Either I really suck at finding these hidden items or those props moves around randomly and aren't always there.

This one. The hiding places rotate every so often. I actually found this helpful as I got stuck with 4/5 last time too... then just waited around and suddenly the missing item was in a place I had checked twenty times.