This whole idea is hilarious to me, since I remember people clamoring to detach cabals from kingdoms and the various unofficial tribunal-like groups that had sprung up back in the day. The new generation wants to rejoin them, and, I have to say, after trying out a trib char, that as cool as tribs are as standalones, I agree they'd be better off reattached in some way to cabals. Whether that's merging or dual memberships, I'm not sure.
Merging them means greater simplicity, but way less variety. Unless there's really some crazy stuff going down between the trib and cabal, which has been known to happen, every cabal member is going to want to join the local trib and vice versa.
Dual membership means more RP opportunities, as folks have pointed out. Spying, intrigue. Complexity. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's the ideal solution to allowing spying and intrigue. We used to try that sort of stuff back when there were only cabals, and the lack of dual cabal membership made it awkward. Dual trib/cabal pairings won't handle (with code) a situation where a cabal wants to infiltrate another cabal, or trib in trib.
I'd also be a little concerned about balance issues. We've accepted that tribs and cabals have their pros and cons, and most anyone who wants to can make it into one or the other, so there's not so much of a gap between the haves and have-nots. But what happens to balance when some (most?) folks have both trib and cabal affiliations? They roll that perfect char whose RP supports getting the best trib spell-ups to pair with those perfect cabal skills for their class/race combo? I'm not saying it's untenable, but it's something that ought to be kept in mind. Merged tribs and cabals would leave a small set of combinations to consider. Easily handled. Freeform dual membership provides many, many more. Might be harder to balance.
In any case, what I really want to see is tribs be highly public and cabals be highly secretive again. I miss those days. Whatever it takes to make this happen, make it so.
NothingXS wrote:
To offset the deal with Midnight, you could ostensibly split the Midnight Council into something like the 9th Legion ([LEGION]), and generally most members of Midnight would also be in the Legion. On the other hand, the Council might send spies into other countries...
I was just going to suggest this. Nice one.
Not sure what options there are for Teronian Harlies. If you're from outside Uxmal, join a trib, secretly join the Harlies, make it your mission to disrupt your local kingdom, that works. If the rules could be bent for Harlies to allow them to join other cabals to disrupt them, that'd work for the theme, too, but that wouldn't make any sense at all from a balance perspective. I'm not overly familiar with the Teronian guilds, but maybe they could somehow become a substitute for a trib? (Or are they already?) Obtain some local political power through your own self-interested faction?
Peace,
Bux