Shattered Kingdoms

I was recently told by a certain Imm, (no names mentioned) that they do not manifest as any Imm but themselves, despite being current Imm in charge of the faith I was trying to get them to appear as.

1: Is this a pantheon wide policy?
2: Why are we having less Imm interaction generally?
3: Doesn't almost everyone agree that having Imms turn up (in person or animating NPCs) was always cool?
4: I wanna know who doesn't think this shift of policy sucks...

3. Having IMMs show up is indeed cool, but i'd rather it be reserved for special events. It's cool because it's special and an original experience each time. If they just sort of appear whenever they get bored, it'd be a lot less special when they appear and need to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies.

4. I don't think this is a shift, i'm fairly sure this policy has been around for a while.

1: Yep.
2: Because IMM interaction is ment to be few and far between, If it was an everyday thing it would lose its greatness. And Prolly because its not needed nor deserved.
3: Sometimes yes, Sometimes no. And I would much rather have the IMM building and creating new things then for them to turn up to make players like yourself feel special.
4: I think that people who allways play chars who burn out and fall apart in the worst way, and make everyone around them feel like they are in a bad soap opera suck.

I can assure you that this has been the policy as long as I have been involved with Healing. While no active Imm has at times caused problems, its a whole lot harder to have a developed sense of personality if each Imm-player puts on a Meissa hat for certain RPs. I can assure you that BugTussle's Meissa had a very definite personality that the next Meissa probably can't and probably won't want to imitate.

Appearing as a deity that is not your actual self takes some work - and could, in theory, lead to one immortal impersonating another immortal (and doing that creates some serious accountability issues OOC). Suffice to say, the practice is not done by those in the pantheon today.

But nothing at all stops an Immortal from appearing as any other type of representative they so wish to - whether it be as simple as animating a priest or priestess of the chosen faith, or creating a larger scene involving a group of NPCs - angels, chariots and the like.

Furthermore, don't confuse 'not visible as a deity' or 'not visible as a NPC' with not being looked after. A number of immortals perform building, flagging, forum memberships and prayer-handling responsibilities across the board - I haven't heard of any religion being left out in the cold without anyone to look after them and their needs.

You have no idea how incredibly horrendous I find it that you've gone IC and ruined yet another one of your characters, then decided to be 'healed' you need the touch of Meissa, in person.

I have no idea how bloated your ego is, and I have no desire to find out, but frankly if you lead a character down the road of self-destruction KNOWINGLY, and then say "Well, now I want an imm to come and fix what I've done", even if there were an imm of that name, I'd still hope they told you to bugger off.

Especially if it's so laughable as it was - what, a mercenary/hellion burns you with a symbol, and now only a god can lift the evil from your soul? Last I checked, mercenary/hellions weren't exactly capable of bestowing so powerful a curse (or even a curse at all). Maybe you should take a long hard look at your roleplay and say to yourself "Wow, I really am a gimp. I'll do better next time."

I'll name names. It was me. *rolls her eyes* I always hate when people post things like this, as if by "not naming names" they're not pointing to exactly which imm or other person they're talking about. If you're going to do that, just have the guts to go ahead and name me next time.



Absolutely. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. No imm EVER masquerades as another immortal. We don't do impersonations because of accountability reasons, as Zynor suggested. In addition, think how schizophrenic and scattered the various immortals might seem if we could all just animate them at will. Far better to have this policy and to adhere to it strictly.

In addition, as I told you that night, I do animate other NPCs for various religions from time to time (rarely avatars, and though I didn't mention it, I have used priestesses and such from all of the religions I oversee). In fact, THAT VERY NIGHT I animated a priestess while you were RPing with someone, and YOU IGNORED IT. *shrugs* I guess you wanted Meissa or nothing, so a priestess just wasn't going to be good enough for you.



Imms don't generally go publicly visible in center squares anymore. That's true. However, we do interact on more personal levels with people... Not as much as we used to, but that's as much because we're so much busier behind the scenes than we ever used to be. Each code change that Dulrik makes usually involves at least one or two things that we all have to scurry around and fix things for in major (or minor) portions of the mud. That keeps everyone fairly busy, as does RL sometimes.



You seem to forget that, aside from Yopp, Yigg, and a couple of other gentle gods, visitations from MOST of the gods involves LOTS of player deaths...generally very painfully and often with permanent character consequences.

I had a character permanently killed by Dreddnahr once.

Marfik had a character whose int was set to the minimal possible; try casting anything more than magic missile with that.

Kijam (old-time hero of "help kijam" fame) had his ME set to 0 (though it had to be raised just enough to allow him to send one single tell at a time) for several months straight.

There was a special Hell-room that had a NPC whose sole purpose was to destroy your character slowly.... You only got sent there for REALLY ICly pissing off one of the elder gods, and if you didn't repent in time, your character eventually ended up deleted due to lack of con or something.

Most people didn't really find it all that much fun when gods showed up, to be honest.



It's not a shift in policy. Sorry.

What a tool.

This thread makes my brain hurt.

Heh.... I once did something like that, except they were killed slowly by their loved ones, resurrected again, killed slowly, ressurrected, etc, for eternity.

But, yes, repeating Algorab's sentiments-- IC interactions with the pantheon, especially with the unpeaceful members, will most likely result in very, nasty things happening. Remember, you are but mortals.