Shattered Kingdoms

I am posting this partially as a response to something that was said on this thread: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=23251
I also wanted to post it, though, because I am just honestly not sure how to continue RPing my character.

I am making a new thread because I did not want to completely hijack that thread.

What was said was:


To respond, this is the RP reason, yes. Honestly, I've enjoyed RPing this character greatly, despite the fact that I am required to throw myself into death repeatedly. I haven't minded this much most of the time. I actually find it quite fun doing things that I as a player would never do because the RP of my character demands it. Hell, I had four toons before finding that I liked the RP of this character leaps and bounds more than the rest and I deleted them.

What I'm saying is that I purposely picked a character that is going to die a lot. I understand and expect this, and more often than not I enjoy it because it spawns so many interesting RP opportunities, but, consider if you will, the obvious fact that it's only through the good graces of the evil player base that I have been allowed to maintain a decent set of equipment. I die several times a day to evil forces because that is what my character would do.

I realize that the RP of an evil sprite necromancer is to raise his enemies from the dead and use them as a part of his army. It makes sense, I'd do it to.. but I have to be honest when I say that if you continue to take my gear when I throw myself at you.. I'm eventually going to delete due to the fact that it's just not any fun.

So I ask you this: how should I react in character? Is it reasonable for a paladin to realize that not all rules are absolute, and that there are times when it is correct to take the path of less honor and flee in order to not strengthen your enemies? In my mind, this is exactly what Rhakeesh would do. He would realize that while it may be dishonorable to flee in the face of death, he has taken an oath to the Hammer to never aid forces of darkness in any way. Oaths trump honor, as it were. I would have to be the forever ashamed knight, ha.

So please, throw me some advice on how I can continue to play this character in a fun and enjoyable manner. Is the choice I've made in the previous paragraph an acceptable RP choice for my character to make, or will it get him excommunicated from the church?

If you have an idea of what your character would do in a given situation, you don't need anybody telling you how to RP that situation.

Do what your character would do. If anybody takes issue with it ICly, deal with it ICly. If anyone takes issue with it OOCly, ignore them. As long as you are playing your alignment, you are not breaking any rules.

Many highly-regarded paladins have fled from battle, AFTER the rest of the PCs in his group have escaped to safety. If you are looking for something acceptable that won't get you killed every time, this RP choice would never be frowned upon by the playerbase or the IMMstaff.

I think that the source of your confusion is a flaw in design, which has to do with the commands that are available and the names that these commands have been given.

The game says that a Paladin must never flee and it even penalizes you with XP if you do.
As a Paladin in SK, if you want to regroup, you have one option: Type FLEE (word of recall not really helpful)
So bottom line, regrouping is not a viable option through RP or Mechanisms, as a Paladin.

However, regroup is an important aspect, especially if you are the defender. Are Paladins not allowed to regroup either? They surely are.

So just flee when the case commands it and RP it as you should later. (if Paladins get retreat command, it would be a different story)

Basically, the problem here is that Edoras is focused on "winning" sk.

First of all, Rhakeesh from what I have heard has been a magnificent character with great RP.

Paladin is one of the hardest classes to play because of the RP requirements and inevitable likelihood of dying. This is supposed to be offset SLIGHTLY with call armor, but obviously if you die to an evil necromancer, he's going to steal your armor.

But I'll echo what Baldric said: you can flee. The idea should be to get your teammates to safety first, then you can recall away. So maybe you can make sure your team has recall vials before initiating, then if things don't go your way, you can tell them to flee and recall away once the others are okay. Remember to utilize your rescue command.

That being said, a paladin is a necromancer's worst enemy! The necromancer you fought is played by a vet PKer, so he's going to be hard to beat. A little preparation and you'll be on more equal footing.

Good luck - I hope you don't delete Rhakeesh! But if you do... come back with another character in a class that might be a little easier to play.

Fixed that for you.

First of all, to the player of Rhakeesh, I am very glad that you are playing SK. I apologize if my actions have made the game less fun for you, but if you'll bear with me on this post I think we can iron out some important things.

If I played a paladin I would never flee from battle if I was facing an evil opponent. I would be okay with it if I was fleeing from a pack of spiders or bees or something and I was the last in my group to leave, for example. However, I would also go into that character concept accepting that I would have to re-equip on a more constant basis, and in general I've had experience with building characters and PvPing such that I wouldn't die every PK I was involved in.

However, I don't think that your main concern is the question of when fleeing is appropriate. The problem that you are running is that you don't like getting looted. This is a very common problem a lot of people have with SK, and the fact is that in SK, there's nothing stopping someone from full-looting you whenever you die. This is not something that will ever be enforced unless SK undergoes a serious paradigm change. I can completely empathize with this predicament as a new player, because it's very difficult to know how to regather equipment, and very frustrating to feel like you aren't making much of a difference in fights. For what it's worth, I will not go out of my way to full-loot players that I can tell are RPing their character best they know how, nor will I go out of my way to spam-PK characters unless they repeatedly ask for it.

That said, not all SK players are like that. I don't want to lead you into thinking that the vast majority of players are not going to loot you when you die, because there are plenty of reasons why they might do so, some good, some bad, most of them debatable. Personally, I think that this serves as a good deterrent to PK: If you aren't interested in putting everything you have on the line, then don't go out of your way to find PK. While PK does drive a lot of RP, I often find that in-depth RP typically brings about character-changing PK, not the other way around.


What I -will- do on almost every character I play, is that if I am in the middle of group PK and someone dies, I will always try to pick up their loot immediately. This does not mean that I am intending to full-loot or jloot said player, but if I don't hold the corpses of the people I've killed, and my enemy manages to sneak in and grab that EQ, then my PK makes almost no difference at all. Quite often, even if I am fighting very inexperienced PKers, if they are grouped up defending a city I will almost always pick up their gear temporarily. This is good common sense, because someone can be exorcised, resurrected and re-geared with their stuff in 5 minutes, and all they'll be out is a couple stat points from SD. If I intend to return loot from a group PK, I will almost always do so after PK and all attached counter-attacks (if any) are over, not before, unless the people I am PKing against are completely non-threatening to me even when geared up.

If my sprite necro ever gets stunned in Taslamar, I will get instantly jlooted by the law code and jailed for a bazillion hours. In addition, if my sprite necro ever dies to most PCs, the same will probably happen. I am already trying to prepare ahead of time to respond to that very likely event in a positive way and not in a negative way, because I know just as much as anyone how annoying it is to have someone flip out on you out of character when things don't go their way: I've been on both ends way too often.

As it pertains to our specific circumstance: I went on a couple PKs in Taslamar because A) our factions were at war and B) there was a peacekeeper online that my character had never faced in battle before. I killed Raguel and took nothing except coin, vials, and 3-4 high-level and/or scripted items. Later, I saw Raguel and Rhakeesh sitting in Exile later in a very vulnerable position and decided against killing them, because both characters had just died: They weren't naked, just had recently died. I, and especially my groupmates, decided that it would be better to let them interact with the squires who had just logged on. We went about our merry way, and then Raguel began sending some taunting tells to my necromancer, saying that he would never be victorious in Exile again. From that, I then returned and won that battle, and as such during the battle I did the best I could to gather up EQ as I figured that the defenders would be returning soon enough to try and re-gather their gear or to continue to attempt to drive us out. I was correct in that some of the defenders received resurrections and immediately returned only to die one or two more times. All of these last battles took place in less than a 25 minute span, during which I held onto all the gear from the people I had killed. After the dust had settled, I deposited all the gear minus consumables, coin, and at most 5 pieces of EQ from the 4 PCs I had killed into the Exile trash bin. While I did not give them a hint as to where to find it, I suspected that three paladins with access to locate object would have been able to piece it together.




tl;dr: Any PK at all in SK always comes with the probability that if you die, you may not get anything back. While I personally will not go out of my way to spam-kill and/or spam junk-loot players, the expectation of returned gear is never something that should be placed on your opponent. Rather, I would encourage all players, especially new players, to dedicate some time and energy to learning how to easily re-equip themselves on average or above-average EQ quickly, so that if they ever die, they don't have to worry about the huge loss just in case the person they died to isn't feeling benevolent. Keep in mind: The person that you are PKing is putting all their EQ on the line too just like you. If they decide to be nice and return some things or all things, then be grateful. If they decide not to, don't take it personally, because the vast majority of the time it isn't.

Of course I don't like getting looted. The problem is that Rhakeesh doesn't know 1/20 of the things I know. I come across as a noob because Rhakeesh doesn't know the names of the cabals, who is in them, what spells they have, ect.. but this is because I respect the boundary between player knowledge and IC knowledge. I once walked into a midnighted room and stood there long enough to say "What manner of magic is this?" By the time I had it typed out I was halfway dead. I do these seemingly foolish things because my character doesn't know any better. I thought it was important to maintain this distinction, but I am starting to feel like I'm just screwing myself into unnecessary death.

I play with the attitude that my character, fresh to the academy, doesn't know where to get all the fancy loot, know where all the obscure places and NPCs to gate to are. I feel that if I did this, I would do a disservice to the game and my character. My characters know main streets of cities, wanders around, gets to know cities, probably a bit faster than a true newbie would, but I am fine with that. There are people that do this, though. It comes down to whether or not you are comfortable knowing that you are using knowledge that your character really shouldn't know or not, or how willing you are to bend the rationale of gaining all sorts of this knowledge to benefit your character and feel fine with it.

Actually, if anything I consider you to be a noob because you said

That's besides the point though. As for where to gather gear, If you make it a point to ask "Where can I find good adamantite or diamond armor?" or just c locate adamantite or c loc diamond and then ask around for directions to those NPCs, then in a very short period of time you should at least have been pointed to the handful of areas/NPCs which contain above average armor for those things. The same can be said for jewelry. Start asking, someone "Hey, I keep getting feared, where can I find some moderate or greater willpower jewelry?" and most characters with identify and some experience behind them will at least be able to point you in the right direction.

As for not utilizing OOC knowledge: It's against the rules to know things that your character doesn't know. However, the line is honestly blurred when it comes to exploring areas or solving quests for the "first time" on your character even though you have been there, done that 20 times on previous characters. I know that unless you were spoiling something for me, I wouldn't frown upon you figuring out a puzzle or walking through a quest rather quickly as opposed to emoting sitting there and scratching your head for five minutes even when you OOCly know the answer. That's just too meta for me to spend too much time debating, honestly. I used to get all sorts of frustrated when I felt like someone was "cheating" to know areas more than their character probably should, and then I got over trying to condemn others for that, although I still don't encourage it.