Shattered Kingdoms

According to this post:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22603
it is not allowed.

For the record, I only went along with it on Ainhoa because it suited her purposes. I have no idea who you played but she had already immigrated to Taslamar prior to this happening. It happened because she was hanging out in the Tree and people there were less forgiving.

My question would be if I had refused because I think it's a cheap shot, your characters would've just assumed she was a Thubanite, right? Even though she wasn't and probably would never have been without this incident. So no, she wasn't coerced exactly but she also didn't really have a choice. If she'd been a scout or mercenary, this wouldn't be a viable means to prove anything and in general, even though it didn't hurt MY RP, I thought it was pretty cheap.

Only one religion would object to being identified.

Everybody else would want to bask in the glorious power of their god.

If u r playing the cliche secretive religious member, u r 99.9999% Thubanite.

This is about as obvious as allikat getting a hellion or paladin blemished.

People hiding their faith when they join Thuban is more of an old trope than some sort of obligation. There is nothing to imply that Thuban is pleased with his followers hiding their official affiliation and doesn't simply tolerate it or choose to ignore it for some unknowable reason, so there's no reason to feel certain that Thuban would actively try to protect his followers when they're accused by sending them different food. He's evil and insane in a contradictory way. He's just as likely to torture and betray his followers than to help them just for the hell of it.

Also, saying that every time someone prays for food, it's a god who consciously sends it like a divine delivery boy assumes divine omnipresence which is unnecessary and problematic for SK gods. Not only are they very frequently absent but there's also the contradiction that a god might resurrect someone for you or send you pizza but he won't resurrect you, his own priest, in case you die among many other similar things. The absence of a universal creed on SK implies this is a lore hole that's patched by an edict but real religions in general don't always assume that everything that a priest/holy man can do is a function of a god responding to some request. A god granting his followers with abilities that can be used without his constant direct intervention is pretty common and far more in tune with magical thinking.

If there's so much trouble with this, why not make all non-priestly followers conjure up pantheist mushrooms and be done with it? There are instances where various devices cast a 'create food' spell and there are players who are oblivious to what this can tell others about their affiliations. Even if you can't ask someone to do that on purpose, someone is bound to screw up at some point. Should anyone who witnesses it ignore it as evidence of affiliation? That's not just inconsistent but completely ridiculous. Yeah, you dropped your ID identifying you as an FBI agent right in front of me but since you didn't intend to do that, I can't use that as evidence?

No. Just as camping the cabal entrance to see who walks in is not punishable, witnessing someone using a food implement and seeing what comes up is not abusive, nor has anyone suggested that you ignore those things.

Forcing them to do either is. So don't do it.

Noticing that someone conjures up food that looks suspicious, and having that factor into your decision about who they serve is one thing. That's similar to hiding at a cabal guardian, and seeing who walks in without realizing that you're there.

I think it's another thing entirely to explicitly force, or ask someone to do that specific thing in order to prove to yourself or someone else whether they're a thuban follower, or a cabal member, or whatever. That reeks much more of metagaming the system in order to achieve an IC result, or taking advantage of a code limitation to bypass otherwise meaningful RP. Is the code perfect? No, but that doesn't give us permission to abuse it in cheesy ways.

There will always be ways to game the system in order to figure out people's affiliations, from YIM to code limitations. That's practically impossible to prevent outright through code, part of that responsibility falls upon the playerbase and upon IMM-enforced rules. Even if Dulrik, for example, made it so that Thuban priests gained the ability to mimic other religion's food, then people could just meta-game the system by not using the "create food tactic" to determine if someone follows Thuban: They could just meta-game the system by having them cast whatever their specific religion spell is, or whatever.

Basically, try not to meta-game, and when in doubt as to whether something is meta-gaming, try and let the rules that the IMMs have set in place so far dictate what might constitute that.

There's a thin line between meta gaming and using good tactics, here. That difference is where the rule stick comes down.
The rest gets a bit subjective - To the player who did an action (asking for the food), was the target, the third parties
Objectively - it sounds like people are asking for the rule stick here, to be used going forward.

Which is pretty inconsistent. Since create food and food associations with deities are standard in-game knowledge and since food associations can be used as evidence, I don't see what's so meta about asking someone for proof other than people's gut feelings about something that seems like the cabal guardian code exploitation but it's not. If the whole point of following Thuban was to hide your affiliation, the whole faith would allow for that with special features. As it is now, only the priests can change auras and that's far more useful as a PVP tactic than an RP tool. Cue Thubanite priest who pretends to be a lightie on a PVE trip that gets asked to create food after someone runs out. It's pretty simple to plan someone's entrapment like that without ever stating your real intention to out him. As an outside observer you wouldn't have any evidence that this was malicious, so you wouldn't be able to enforce this rule anyway.



You just feel this is meta-gaming without showing how it actually is. Thuban, food creation prayers, lying gods, magic and the concrete association between divine food and divinities all exist only inside the game. There's nothing about them that's beyond the game. Players aren't Thubanites, their characters are. Although I do remember a time when mestizo sent me an OOC tell on his Thubanite rogue to assure me that he wasn't a Harlequin and that my character could really trust him. That was amusing.

But I also feel you're being somewhat contradictory preachy about abusing the code. The same kind of "common sense" about SK divinities would have Sadal burn an evil necromancer in hell for keeping her sacred weapon away from her chosen champion. You did that for months. You don't think that was cheesy? If you don't think so, please explain to me why would Sadal allow for that sort of abuse in realistic terms.



Here's the thing. You are probably happy with administrators dictating rules even when they don't make sense. I'm not. I expect the point of having a forum is to provide meaningful feedback that can lead to change, instead of simply accepting everything at face value. Rules being consistent with in-game lore and established themes are important.

I think that it -is- meta-gaming to assume that every priest, even those who follow the embodiment of lies, will always conjure up food which describes in clear detail what god they follow. We know that, as players, because we have played priests before, and we know that the syntax involved in the "help create food" file doesn't include an argument for what kind of food to create. It used to be that all priests would create magic mushrooms, but that was tacky in-game so Dulrik coded a feature that gave a thematic feel for each god: And now you think that's something which is acceptable to use to 100% identify someone's religion in-game.

This is why we can't have nice things.

If it was common OOC knowledge that Thuban followers had the option of creating whatever kind of food they wanted, you would have -never- used that as a verification tool in-game. Without IMM input, is the line blurred here? Definitely. But if an IMM tells you that using create food as forced verification of someone's deity is bad RP, and you counter that that makes no sense, that usually means that it's your logic which is faulty, not theirs. At a bare minimum, it means there's a disagreement on why that is bad RP, and it should be fleshed out.

In-game, it's an established theme that clerical vocations channel the power of a deity to cast spells, which is why they need to join a faith to cast anything beyond basic cantrips (including create food) and why they lose access to those spells if they are blemished. Does this mean that Thuban or whoever is constantly jumping around and popping food into the air every time someone casts the spell? That seems unlikely: But by that same logic, assuming that every single Thuban priest is going to categorically get the exact same version of the exact same spell, even though that's obviously one of the biggest giveaways ever, is a rather narrow-minded way to approach the game world.

We know that because all help files are considered in-game knowledge and all characters can be assumed to know what in-character information they contain as part of their common cultural upbringing although you can say that since there's no list of food associations in the help system, you'd have to play many different characters to know all of them. Any Pyrathian child would know that this half-elven lady who's a priestess of Aludra can make passionfruits. The same Pyrathian child would freak out if instead of passionfruits, a bloody chunk of meat fell out of the sky. If that scenario is valid within the game world, why would it be invalid that this same child -that exists within a universe of stark extremes of good and evil- wouldn't ask the seemingly nice half-elven lady for the fruit only Aludran priests can create before trusting her to help him find his mommy?

Both scenarios are made up only with in-game knowledge available to any character. You're suggesting that magic (which for brevity's sake will include prayers as well here) shouldn't be seen as a force of nature that always works and that just because it always works doesn't mean that it will always will. But in-game magic is a force of nature, like gravity. It always works because it's a magical universe. Besides, this is purely a rhetorical gimmick on your part. You'd never play the game with a character who would always be unsure that the spells or prayers he casts might result in something completely different and refuse to enchant something because he might end up petrifying himself. If you were meant to do that, the help-file would include some sort of warning.



Why are you calling that OOC knowledge? Sure, at some point it becomes OOC knowledge but for the characters involved it would be very much in-character. Isn't the knowledge that Thubanites can distort alignments in-game knowledge? Wouldn't the people of Pyrathia know that priests of the evil one can fool them like that? I've talked about that effect in game on both sides of the equation countless times. Are you trying to say that these were all OOC discussions? I was under the impression that only knowledge about cabal abilities couldn't be transferred across characters even though it's usually extremely common that people do that too.



This is odd. What sort of quality makes an imm more likely to make logical arguments than me by default? The only difference between any player and an immortal is that the immortal was selected by some programmer as a volunteer administrator of his game, while the player was not. They're more likely to have more (historical and otherwise) knowledge about the game and more experience playing it (although I can easily find examples to the contrary) but whether they make proper arguments or not is completely unrelated to their position. So besides making some weird appeal to authority here, you somehow imply that this is an actual aristocracy. Let's just leave RPing that the gods are omniscient for in-game activities, alright?



Other than the permanent efficacy of the create food spell, I'm not sure anything is really established in game lore about the actual metaphysics of it and if it is I'd like to see it. Is it the god sending someone steaks? Is he blessed with a divine ability that doesn't require divine intervention (like the apostles speaking in tongues in Christian myth)? It's interesting but it doesn't matter to how a fictional character within SK would view it. For him or her, whether something works or not doesn't really have something to do with how it works. So why not assume that create food always creates the same food when there are no known exceptions to that rule and there are no known exceptions to any other similar rule (enchant always enchants and doesn't petrify, fly makes you fly, resurrect resurrects and so on)?