Shattered Kingdoms

Sorry boots, your argument may have held some weight four years ago, but now it's completely redundant because you currently have very average players cropping up to lead various cabals and tribunals.

DA, your post brings up a moot point as well. Just because one person might have one goal for both a tribunal and a cabal does not mean that one would become the slave of the other - they would both, logically, be equal instruments of the leader's will, and each would by necessity of their function play a very different role. Sure, there will occasionally be a leader who might try to subjugate a cabal/tribunal, but there are two leaders anyway, and it's always worked as a decent balancing system in the past.

Edit: New page, so reiteration!

Step 1. Allow characters membership in one tribunal and one cabal concurrently.
Step 2. Allow characters gifted enough to be offered leadership the ability to lead both organisations.

I think we've got the idea by now, Jardek. I even agree that tribunals could do with more leadership choices. Unfortunately, tribunals are easy for a cabal to enslave.

There aren't two leaders all the time; as soon as there's a vacancy, all the remaining leader has to do is put in someone from his own cabal. This could go on indefinitely.

That may not be such a bad thing; I begin to like it better than all the OOC rules necessary to keep tribunals independent. But it is a disadvantage both for those who want truly independent tribunals, and for those who want multiple cabals competing within a tribunal.

I don't get it. Why is a tribunal so easy for a cabal to dominate, and not the other way around?

And yeah, technically you're right, it could happen. Just like when I played I had followers of truth in (I think) every leader slot in every organisation in the south, southwest, and west. Technically, that could have lasted and truth could have held a hegemony forever, but that didn't happen, did it?

Just because something is true in theory doesn't mean it'll hold true in reality, because people aren't like that.

The cabal RP is more strict than the tribunal RP.

Consider a Hammer leader becoming a GoA leader, with purpose to eliminate all evil from Ayamao. You'll suddenly see all darkie NPCs there slaughtered, including some important Druid ones(no more IC info than that). And while Hammer and Druids always had these small conflicts, now Hammer has a way to enforce his way. Trib deport/banish/uninduct to win Ayamao as a stronghold of light. Or would the Hammer leader betray the main goal of his cabal, destroy all evil?

At the same way, imagine an MC leader becoming a CoN leader. Automatically, NW becomes a protectorate of the Empire, if not totally possessed by them. Or would the MC leader betray his oaths to serve the expanding views of the East? Once again, anyone who attempts to oppose him, tribunal commands make him lose.

From the above examples(which are not anything extreme like MC and Talon leader or Druid and CoN leader) you can see that the tribunals' interests can't overcome the cabal's interests(living happily with the darkie NPCs of the Alliance or any darkies NPCs in the area or in case of conflict between Empire and NW CoN to actually fight and not instantly surrender).

Now if any cabal gains such a powerful spot in a government and they have the power to actually run the country as they wish to, select tribunal members, select next leaders and so on, would the cabal ever give away the control of a whole kingdom like that? I doubt it, the kingdom's leadership would stay under said cabal forever.

This system will destroy the tribunals as we know them. They will just become toys of cabals, more or less like any of the skills/spells the cabals get.

You can actually merge cabals and tribunals again and get much less messy results than that - and I'm against this idea, in the years tribunals were independent of cabals they have formed their own identity in the game and it will be lost.

EDIT: And because people really like to win, this will happen in practice as well. Actually it will be a race on whatever cabal manages to get leadership of most tribunals first, so they can keep them under their command forever. Thus, the cabal wins with total control of whole kingdoms.

Sorry DA, much as I generally respect your views, I think that's an hysterical over exageration. And over-looks a couple of very simple protections already in place.

i) Two leadership flags exist.

ii) Leadership flags are given and removed by the Immortal patrons of the various organisations, usually in keeping with the general wishes of the organisation concerned, but at the end of the day, according to that patron's best judgement. I imagine the two overriding questions any patron would ask of themselves before adding or removing a flag is "Is it in the best interests of the game? Is it in the best interests of the organisation?"

Anyway, if you allow dual leadership if and when an individual should ever prove themselves enough to deserve it and be trusted with it, then if it does prove so apocalyptic to the game you can always take it away again and simply never repeat the evident mistake with anybody else.

By the same token, in the wider view if all you've done is make it possible for a character to be in both a cabal and a tribunal and it turns out that it really doesn't work and it really has destroyed the general integrity of the organisations concerned, reverse the decision and make them exclusive again.

Although I'm not actually in support of simple dual-wielding concept Tat and Jardek are pushing for, at this point I think the only way to find out who's right is to just go ahead and implement. If it doesn't work, it can be removed, plain and simple.

Except for the whole thing about it requiring a crap-load of work on Dulrik's part.

Tatalion, as far as I know, tribunal leadership flags are given by other leaders and the patron IMM just gets the job done, he doesn't decide it(like religions and cabals in most cases).

Having IMMs doing all that work means that they have free time(I doubt they do) and will always bring forth the favoritism cries. Not to mention an IMM can't say it's bad RP if somehow the MC conquers CoN(at first), but in the long run MC's influence will be so great it will be bad RP to actually change the situation suddenly because an IMM decided to interfere and because the tribunal ended the cabal's pet for a long time(for reasons I explained earlier).

If you want to keep the tribunals' identity and not just destroy it(as it happened with CRS HQs for example), the tribunal leaders should be loyal to the tribunal and only there, so their interests won't be in conflict with the interests of a cabal for example.

I want to reaffirm at this point that Tat is my polite and well-mannered English alternate personality.

I think that "hysterical over-exaggeration" is a mild way to put it, to be honest. Saying that a cabal's RP is automatically "stronger" than a tribunal's is ridiculous. Who's to say that a Hammer's urge to dispose of evil would be stronger than an Elven king's racism against all non-elves, for example? Who's to say that a great barbarian of the north can't win the respect of his southern colleagues, or even beat them into submission until they recognise him as their leader, rather than the other way around?

Not you, not me, and not anybody else except the players of those characters.

Equally, imms will not have to do more work than they already do.

Ayamao is not meant to be a light nation.

Hammer desires everything to be pure and all evil gone.

I guess a Hammer and GoA leader is going to have a hard time keeping Ayamao as we know it and not purifying it, just because he was given the legal power to do it.

Or do you disagree with any of these?

But even if you do, consider the Druid/CoN leader combo, or the MC/Talons leader combo. Now that's a huge change to the identities of tribunals. And don't tell me the Druid will say necromancy is fine with me or something.

What I'm saying is quite clear, DA. A country's goal is, within reason, what you make of it. This is especially the case of a country like GoA, a country which I could see as anything from hard-line white aura to verging on dark.

Your "Ayamao is not meant to be a light nation" supposition is just that - a supposition. It's not set in stone, as for example the peacekeepers might be, and there have certainly been hardline white aura leaders of the GoA equal to any leaders of the Hammer. If you'd wanted to sway me, you might have used a better example, such as an adept leading the peacekeepers. Given the inherent alignment restrictions on both however, that's not really likely to happen, is it?

To be honest with you, I don't even know why you're arguing about this particular point (the cynic in me says that it's because I'm saying it's a good idea). It's silly and irrelevant, because as I said, neither you nor I can dictate "how RP is meant to go".