Shattered Kingdoms

Certain guards now attack members of enemy tribunals on sight, even if said member has been kept secret by his tribunal, and is not wanted for any crimes.

A few thoughts on the matter:
1) It makes no freaking sense. Why do the gate guards in Nerina know who I induct into my tribunal, when no other pc outside my tribunal has any way of knowing it?

2) It hurts gameplay. It very clearly makes it more difficult to be a secret member of a tribunal. Granted, you can get into most places via a gate (with the exception of sith'a'niel). Always arriving by gate, and never leaving certain places except via gate or recall is kind of suspicious, however, and will help people figure out if you belong to an enemy tribunal. I can think of numerous situations, that would be interesting rp, that are completely eliminated by this change. For example, a spy could no longer befriend an enemy of his state. If they were to group up, there would be too high a risk of walking past a gate guard.

3) It opens up the possibility for abuse.
xxx says, "Of course I'm not in the black hand. They killed my parents!"
yyy says, "Oh, that's great. Here, join my group and we can slay some dragons. . .oops, I walked past my gate guards."



Also, on the topic of secret tribunal members:

You know you can gate into the city or use cabal spells to bypass said NPCs and you won't get attacked?

Some of said NPCs can't detect hidden or invis either.

It's not like you can't go into the cities if you remotely use your brain.

While it makes sense, I'm not sure whether this is going to benefit the game or not. I suppose we'll see in time.

Though I don't completely agree with it being implemented with out much notice. But Yes it's fine with me, like I said in the last post some one knowingly breaks the rules and then when they are punished or the rules are adapted to prevent this you say OMG WTF how dare they? So if not this new law/tribunal system what would you offer to prevent this from happening?

I'd have made it so you can't walk around in enemy territory with your own guard. That makes sense and doesn't have any possibility of hurting secret members.


Personally, I'd go a lot further than that, and let you banish whoever you wanted to. That makes sense and doesn't have the possibility of hurting secret members. I'm not going to argue for that, though, as it would gain little support.

Also, syn, could you explain how it makes sense that gate guards are omniscient and can tell who is a secret member of what tribunal?

I'm not playing, so I don't know how much effort it takes to actually get around it. I think, at least, it would be nice if it considered level just so there isn't one more reason why low level characters are ignored for membership.

Whether or not the MC is affected by this will open the floodgates for whether or not cabals are, either, and with the current reasoning, will also draw out the question on whether cabal membership should be hidden information.

From the point of view of a systems design perspective, this change has made war more than a setting determining where you move guards and spend money.

The secrecy of members is now able to be revealed under certain conditions. These conditions are, short of tactics that rob players of all control, manageable.

I am not ready to scorn this until I see what else is being worked on. But I feel your pain, Baldric, and I'm hoping that the system is further bolstered to promote and support -- not create -- conflict between player organizations.

Could it use tweaks? Perhaps. Time will tell.

I liked my use of war better, though, of course.

The fact that anyone voted that it makes no sense indicates a serious lack of understanding about what a tribunal is supposed to represent.

For me, the most important aspect of the change was to begin promoting the very real difference between cabals and tribunals. The two of them (and religions as well) tend to get lumped together under the common header of 'factions' for convenience, but each of them are (and should be) very different animals.

Despite the difference in wording and duties, it has become obvious that people do not understand that. To reiterate, a 'cabal', by the very definition of the word (look it up if you are unfamiliar) means secret organization. On the other hand, a tribunal is a group that administers justice and the word carries strong overtones of being putting on display for public opinion. You might argue (such as someone did recently about CHARM person), that there was nothing in the help files to explain this distinction. My response is that this is a text-only game. All we have are words to begin with, so you have to pay attention to the definitions of the labels being used.

As far as SK is concerned, tribunals are the public police and military forces of their kingdom and are directly accountable to both their ruler and citizens. So in this respect, tribunals are the exact opposite of a cabal, despite their both being 'factions'.

This change is intended to be the first step in making that very clear. That is also why the change does not apply to cabal members. There was some debate over the idea of also making the tribunal label public on the WHO list, but that was deemed a bit too jarring to take as a first step. That doesn't mean we won't do it at some point. Regardless, the in-character interpretation of joining a tribunal from now on (as it was intended to be previously) is that your membership is a matter of public record.

Therefore, whenever it is practically possible, NPCs will automatically react appropriately to a tribunal member's presence as defined by the diplomatic relationship with a neighboring kingdom.

I am sure there will be debate about other results of this change, unintended or otherwise, and what kind of minor tweaks should be made to promote fairness to newbies. I'll leave that for the other threads.

Not to nitpick, Dulrik, but you insist that Cabals are supposed to be secretive, while enforcing a system that makes it nigh on impossible for secret membership.

No, the change only applies to tribunals, so cabals get to stay secretive.