Shattered Kingdoms

A fair point.

But if your going to code out the possibility of being able to hold leadership in both a cabal and a tribunal, you might as well not bother with the dual membership thing.

In any case, as Chem points out, setting it so that you can only lead one or the other simply invites OOC hook-ups and abuse.

Incidently, I agree with the observations on the idea of usurping being a dead horse not even worth flogging. The problem is that it requires a judgement call on the part of the Patron imm, and either way the judgement goes is going to cause discontent and cries of favouritism.

Besides, leadership of an organisation is all but absolute power. As long as you remain active and don't do anything totally stupid (like resign in a hissy-fit when a competitor for the position demands that you do so!) you are pretty much immovable, especially if you retain any sort of vestigal mandate from the existing membership.

But my original point remains.

The Harlequin leader somehow takes power in the Peacekeepers (for example). So, for the foreseeable future, Harlequin membership almost certainly guarantees you a place in the Peacekeepers if you want it. Upset the Harlequin and you don't have a chance of making it into the Peacekeepers. So what?

To a point I'm only playing the Devil's advocate to explore the idea. But in such an instance, you'd have a single leader running two organisations, and as long as he did that well, both organisations would benefit from it.

Part of the problem with so many disparate organisations as at present is that there are not enough good, active leaders to go around.

Allowing Cabals to infiltrate and, potentially, control Tribunals is quite an interesting proposition, within limits. Obviously the Tribunals have some amount of alignment bias in them anyway, so whilst you might get an Adept spy infiltrating the membership of the Guardians of the Selkwood, appointment of leadership requires administrative oversight and intervention from the organisation's patron Imm, so there's no way you're likely to get complete contradtions in leadership positions.

The first question any patron Imm asks themself when considering whether or not a candidate is fit for a leadership position is whether or not said candidate as leader would be good for the organisation.

An alternative is just tie cabal and tribunal. So a member of the Hammer could also be a member of the Peacekeepers and vice versa, but could not join the Guardians of the Selkwood, for example. Likewise, the Peacekeeper couldn't join the Druids.

This is close to simply re-merging the organisations, but is perhaps better in that it supports their distinct and seperate identities. It encourages a relationship and link, but doesn't make it mandatory.

However, if you are going to allow dual membership in any form, in my opinion you have to also allow, potentially, dual leadership. To not do so is not only counter-logical, it limits choice and the flexibility of the system. Odds are if you have a strong and capable leader of the Peacekeepers with an interest in also leading the Hammer (for example), then said leader would probably do the Hammer the world of good and to deny him the chance is just going to bite your nose to spite your face.

Listening to Tat and such, I'd have to say I agree for the most part. Yes, it doesn't make sense that you couldn't lead two player orgs, however it could cause some fairly large problems down the line if you can.

With that said, consider this me voting for a simple merge instead of dual membership. Honestly, the only one that doesn't fit 100% is Druids/KoS/GoS/WTFEVER, and that could be solved with some changes to either the cabal RP, or the tribunals.

Well if leaders are only allowed single membership, they do not get benefits of being a member of both factions. Although there is a point about the non-leader members then being allowed to join both factions because of the collusion the two leaders OOCly entered. But to be honest I don’t see that as hard abuse to find. All the Imms have to do is look at membership lists. If one tribunal is full of XYZ cabal, you know there is collusion. There is also the responsibility of a faction leader to act in the best interest of that faction. Hence, the actions that leader takes will point to collusion as well. If a few people try it, I have no doubt they will be caught because of the information the Imms have access to, then a good old fashioned public siteban (but I’ve always been a reward big punish big kind of guy).



I don’t understand this comment at all. I see that there are lots of benefits that could be garnered from dual membership without the leaders being allowed to have dual membership. This is like saying its not worth it to win the lottery unless it is the jackpot…those smaller prizes of $100,000 aren’t worth it.



Again, if dual leadership isn’t allowed, I don’t see this as a real problem because collusion should be easy to spot. As for the "so what" question, one of the problems with allowing a cabal total control of a tribunal (or vice versa) is then one of the organizations lose their identity. On the other hand if the faction is being influence by the loyalties of the members it might change the flavor but not the identity of said faction.

The rest of your post mainly deals with cabal controlling tribunals, but without dual leadership or OOC collusion one faction can only lobby to try and influence another. That does not even account for the competing factions that are also lobbying the faction in question.



You make a point about limiting dual memberships to being between a certain cabal and tribunal. This approach is still better then a merging because to some degree both factions keep a separate identity, but I disagree with this approach. The main reason I disagree is because I see no benefit to such a limiting factor. In fact, I see benefit in the only limitation being a character can belong to only one cabal and only one tribunal at a time. The benefits are greater options for players, RP, conflict, tactics, and greater future expansion of the game.

I would like to end on a side note. I want to point out that dual membership does allow for spying and influence peddling which seem to be disloyal to one degree or another. But dual membership does not limit itself to characters belonging to both being disloyal to one. In fact, there are good and strong reasons a player would want to have a character that has XYZ ideals that are in line with a cabal and also be a patriot and join the tribunal. For a real life example, we can look to a number of the United State’s founding fathers. Franklin, Washington, and others were die hard patriots and members of the Free Masons.

Lei Kung

Sorry Lei, if dual membership is allowed, so too should dual leadership. I'm also not a proponent of limited choice in membership. It's sneaking toward that area of "You can't do that" SKs supposedly doesn't support.

Ok so you don't support limited dual membership. Does that mean you would rather accept the problems and abuse dual leadership would create? And does that mean you wouldn’t support dual membership without it?

Regarding the "you can't do that" argument, we see that in SK as is. Deep elves can't be good, paladins can't be evil, sprites can't be priests, currently a player can't join more then one faction, etc. I think you are interpreting the "you can't do that not being a part of SK" way too broadly.

Lei Kung

There are always going to be people who will try to find some way to 'abuse' the system. I myself don't understand how dual leadership can be used as abuse - all the issues that would come up would be IC ones, and I see no problem with IC issues at all.

There's no problem with one character having absolute power over a nation. If he does and nobody likes it, then the weight of the playerbase will shunt him out of position anyway. The power of the character would in no way be less absolute, it would simply be just as absolute as it already is on a broader scale.

Personally, I believe that there should be no restriction on the number of cabals or tribunals one can enter. The problems involved would be completely in character ones - and they can be dealt with.

If a scrupulous Hammer is able to pass himself off as more pacifistic than he actually is to gain entrance into the Fist, then power to him to be mounted on a spirit steed and punching six times a round. If either of the cabals had a problem with it - they could uninduct.

Oath breaker flag was and is a flawed idea - cabal and tribunal membership should be unrestricted. There truly is very little to be gained from the amount of intense rp it would take to gain access into two organizations.

So in other words you would be fine with someone joining three cabals and having 15 extra powers, that just flat out screams abuse. Not to mention it allows for a character to be a Fist and Druid member because those two cabals don't conflict with one another at all. Add in the concealment of using their powers and the leaders of said organizations would never know. Something like this is obvously over-powered even if it was allowed ICly. Just because something is IC doesn't mean it is good for game play (i.e. newbie killing).

Lei Kung

To clarify a few things for the newbs of the world:

Anyone capable of joining three cabals and not being caught by any cabal leaders for clearly breaking rules - (How could someones RP possibly fit Hammer, Druid, AND fist unless they lied - and therefore broke their aura andor broke the rp needed to join these cabals) - DESERVES to get all 15 cabal abilities. Who cares if someone has both Adept and Midnight Council powers as long as both leaders of the cabals primary concern is to insure that their members are loyal to them? This player would not EVER be able to openly use their abilities for fear of an uninduction from one cabal.

This is not overpowered by any means, and would greatly add to the roleplay required of cabal leaders who must carefully scrutinize their members to know that they aren't spies.

Just to add on to clarify:

Can you give a specific example of a cabal combination that would be 'overpowered' in that its member would be able to openly use their abilities and not risk uninduction? I cannot. Please provide one. The best I can come up with is: A Harlequin member who joins the Druids by acting like he is a tree-hugger. That Harlequin wouldn't be able to openly ever use his powers for fear of uninduction - and therefore his first cabal is effectively rendered useless for pvp.

How about an Adept who infiltrates the Midnight Council....so? The Adept won't be able to use his cabal abilities or else he will be uninducted.

I think that'd be a lot more difficult to code than simply splitting tribunals and cabals into two different sections, Algon.

I could perhaps see a character being a member of more than one tribunal, but being a member of more than one cabal just seems silly and can work in almost no circumstances.