Shattered Kingdoms

No one is stopping good characters from saying "OMG UR DROW, DIEDIEDIE." Regardless of the fact that they're giving out candy.

There are plenty of reasons for an evil character to "play good/nice" and not just to make it difficult to be hated. The best bad guys are always the ones you love to hate and hate to love, the ones you never expect to be pure evil. The ones who do it just because it is easier to stab someone in the back once they have earned anothers trust. The most difficult characters to pull this off with are drow (or deep-elves as the case may be) and hellions because everyone knows that they can only be evil.

And what do you mean by roleplaying restrictions only enforced for good characters? Being good for an evil character can be one mean to any number of ends, as long as an evil character doesn't try to be a goodie-goodie all the time, who cares what their public facade is? I've seen many a evil characters take on a different facade depending on who is around.

Allow me to fumble around with wording on this...

When an evil character commits a good act, (s)he is being "clever" and "thinking outside the box." It is almost fashionable, if not popular. But when good characters commit an evil act, they are blemished, and their reputations are sold up the river. It is bad RP.

This interpretation of good and evil obliges good to be a little more stupid and evil to be a little more fun, you know. Whatever happened to the hardcore, Zoroastrian evils I was reminded of when I read all that stuff about Dulrik and Bane before rolling my character?

Or, more acutely: what would it take for a dark aura character to be punished for RP that isn't aligned with her aura?

A heck of a lot. So much that more than likely the good-aura'd characters would probably get cursed for accepting the help before the dark-aura'd character got cursed for giving it out.

But if a paladin accepts help from a necromancer, who should get punished in that case? Surely not the necro, because he knows that he's doing much more damage to the paladin by "helping" him than any horde of undead or edrain could do.

The problem is that "OMG UR DROW, DIEDIEDIE" isn't particularly the kind of behavior anyone should really condone from a good person.

Unfortunately, SK's alignment is too ingrained and hard-set and players aren't responsible or consistent enough to be left with the task of setting their own alignment, and having IMMs police it would be annoying for everyone involved. It's also a huge pity that SK is so driven by alignment as opposed to just straight, political intrigue and RP. It's an unfortunate, lose-lose situation.

Hey man, deep-elves are totally evil. I would probably perma-gank them as a lightie.

This gets philosophical, maybe, but it's so much easier to account for evil than good. Good, most aptly put, is the absence of evil. That which is virtuous, is defined so because it is not a vice. It is easier, then, to accuse someone who professes to be good as vicious, than accuse someone who claims to be of vicious nature to be good-hearted. Can you really tell when there are no ulterior motives? Can you really unravel all the plots that an evil person may have?

Instead, it is easier to decry someone for being too bloodthirsty, of being devious or slanderous. These are actions we can see, and evil is most often known as evil by its actions. Even when temporary "good things" are done by those known as evil, how often do those same things not benefit them in some way or manner?

The easiest way to nab an evil-doer for not being evil, is likely by actions and words that go directly against the deity/organization they serve. Like, say, someone in Midnight mudsexxing a Talon, or someone in the War religion playing Ring around the Posies.

This is exactly why I referenced Zoroastrianism.

The definition of good as an absence of evil presume that these fruits all come from the same garden -- that the right people get in trouble for eating from the wrong tree. And, of course, that the wrong people are going to burn anyway, so they can grab whatever fruit they want. Good and Evil then become nothing more than Moderation and Indulgence, an assumption modern people like Hobbes and Locke made in order to use Christian ideals to influence political science as they saw fit. Good becomes the excuse to slaughter, dominate, and seize history by the balls.

The most commonly prevalent reply to this model is to take up what Nietzsche capitalized upon: instead of replying to the political science, just attack the moral basis of the argument. Using an approach of a will to power, the right people do wrong by being mislead, and the wrong people -- the ones who mislead -- are in fact right by their own might. Good and Evil then becomes a matter of passive and aggressive, and good is dumb, so the accepted norms are just overthrown. As Socrates was quoted, "the wise [and powerful] owe nothing to the ignorant [and weak]."

I did a lot of reading of the website before I started playing, and I was impressed with how much of that tired-out modern relativism was cast aside without resorting to the nihilism. It struck me as an existentially rich world full of fantasy elements unbleached by our modern cynicism. Gimme that old time religion: the REALLY old time religion. Let good and evil come from completely separate and exclusive sources, and let their only mixture be conflict. Three cheers for Ahura Mazda, seriously.

Again, these interpretations are throughout the thread already. We must "unravel" the schemes of evil, as if they are intelligent just by nature of being evil, instead of failures of evil by warrant of a benign temperament.

But based on what characters are laughed at versus sneered at in-game, and the characters praised versus punished out-of-game, I'm wondering if we're all even playing the same game. The alignment-heavy world SK appears to have started as seems to have eroded away into a game where those original foundations capable of producing lots of roleplay now get criticized as limitations and shortcomings.

But good characters are still watched and punished for breaking free of the "shackles" everyone else has slipped out from on their way to the dance floor.

We're going around in circles, but your latter statement begs the same question: WHY are good characters scrutinized more than dark characters? This, of course, is the question we've already answered in aforementioned posts. It's probably more of a question the playerbase should ask itself. I punish based on logs if I don't see something myself - and I get far more logs about lightie issues than darkie issues. Possibly this is so because punishing darkies is difficult in itself due to the subjective views of incidents, and the subversive possibility darkies have.

I enjoy playing a subversive lightie, thank you very much.



(I also enjoy you reply. Thanks.)