Shattered Kingdoms

So, given the latest ingame situation, and seeing as I've already been a part of a cabal that has been defeated once in the past, I gotta say it looks like every time this happens, whether the faction accepts the defeat or not, it always ends up with a lot of people leaving, if not all.

So what I want to suggest here is the implementation of a 'admit defeat' button.

Basically when the leader of a faction admits defeat, he emails the imm in charge of it. Then the following happens:

1) Make an announcement of it to all members of the cabal upon login, much like 'diplomatic relations have altered', only this one is red and says 'your faction has surrendered to the enemy' or something.
2) The winning faction receives a large sum of money as a result of their victory. The defeated fanction's coffers are emptied.
3) The NPC's in charge of the defeated faction step in. These are some hard [REDACTED] dudes that don't really like to have to meddle with 'common mortal' affairs. They're extremely powerful, and their purpose is to make sure the faction can stand up again.
4) Both factions are expected not to engage eachother. For the defeated, engaging means that they are uninducted promptly. For the victorious, engaging means that the Badass NPCs show up and romp the character, or attack the character's headquarters in retaliaton.
5) The victorious get to succeed in whatever RP they were at war for.
6) No player, ever should be able to demand the removal of another player from a faction as a term to end a war.


This is a very rough suggestion, but the idea I am going for is, there should be a breaking point after which imms step in and make sure stuff stays interesting for both the victors and defeated. Sk is pretty gritty to those who lose in general, but in the end this is still a game, and if your enemy ends up retiring yu dont have anyone to fight and have fun anymore. This can lead to a lot of boring months trying to rebuild your faction as the defeated. Take my word on that.

It's definitely looking like there needs to be some hard-coded rules in place.

I'm not certain how people that make demands like 'stay in the river' or 'kick XYZ out' aren't getting punished by the imms for being ridiculous.

The problem with a system like this is that wars are (let's be honest here), almost always over items. Sure, maybe Joe-Blow took a dump in your temple. I'm sure he also conveniently has The Sword of Doom that one of your friends wants. No 'well-RP'd' war comes immediately to mind. Factions and sides are incredibly insular. There's rarely enough rp going on between sides for a war to be fun rp. It also doesn't help that most players will take advantage of things like meetings to try and kill you.

I'd rather see more imm-policing of actual wars, the reasons for them, and the behavior in them.

It's odd how people harp on about 'you don't rp death, you're terrible'. And yet, let's face it, death means nothing, to both the killer and the killed. What matters to the killer is the items on the body. In the previous example, Joe Blow could die ten times and somehow get his loot saved, while seeking peace and it wouldn't get offered by the aggressors. But if on his first death he gets looted, suddenly it's time for peace. Or if he stripped naked and surrendered, it wouldn't mean anything. But if he surrendered with his eq on and ready for looting, suddenly his death means more?

In your examples, who is obliged to be the change agent?

I suppose when one's characters have a legacy of using various oubliettes, bridles, and lamps in personal conflicts and turning on one's own teammates in established ones, one certainly can think most of the actions in the game revolve around the props used to convey them to her victims.

You are the change agent.

And as the player of a leader of a faction with a hard line 'junkloot everybody for everything' stance, perhaps you can offer some information here. You must surely agree that items are more important than the actual act of killing and that there's not much fun rp involved in a war.

Together, with the power of love, we can change the world, grep.

Neither you, nor I, nor any piece of code or rule such as those expressed in OP and these replies can truly change the world. The best we can do is to jointly take up that power you mention, wield it with integrity, and create new, better, and perhaps necessarily smaller worlds capable of existing within the present constructs without incurring the natural survival instincts of a system fighting for its own self-existence.

The key to all of this is for, as I've been suggesting for years, a dominant interpretation of the golden rule to be fairly assayed, made accessibly clear, and enforced timely. I will add a new key I have concluded recently; I have seen people criticizing things and suggesting mechanics and rules as if we could achieve a perfect system and environment. The new key I have found is that everyone involved must acknowledge and be able to accept the fact that our created worlds can be more wonderful than anything before them, but never perfect. A roleplayer must be a person who finds ecstasy while suffering from that antimony. In short, the moment that foolishness left some poster's fingers and reached my eyes, we had already lost. Of course, that's assuming we're roleplayers.

There is a way to codify it, leaders would have access to a command and special board that would allow people to offer truces/alliances. When an offer of truce is made there are certain hard coded options:

Money (specific amount)
Truce/Alliance
Item
Relic
Parole/(better than parole can't remember the command)

The recipient leader can look at the demands and then either make a counter offer or accept the conditions. At that point, the game automatically handles everything (not sure if specific items can be tagged in this fashion though).

There can be RP backing of some of the specific options. What you can or cannot do under Truce/Alliance is a RP thing and can't be hard coded. Rest is very straight forward. There might be other types of reasonable demands but this is generally an exhaustive list of them.

This is only a tiny slice of this topic, but I am going to take this opportunity to remark on this for probably the 10th time here in the forums (assuming I bring it up about once every two years). And keep in mind, I'm not just addressing woahboy. I've seen this expressed several times in the forums over the last week from various people. ALL such arguments rely on metagame OOC thinking.

It doesn't matter that death is easy to escape as a player character. If you think that makes "death doesn't matter" role-play valid, that's dead wrong. (Pun unintentional.) There's AT LEAST two reasons why death needs to be respected in the world of SK:

1. PC adventurers are members of the 1%. The vast majority of sentient creatures in the world of SK, even those living in grand cities, will never have the opportunity to be raised from the dead. Children do not grow up with the expectation of escaping Achernar's grasp.
2. Being killed is hideously painful and traumatic. The fact that you might "recover" from it, does not make it less so.

People should never WILLINGLY walk into death, unless you are prepared to consider it the same sort of sacrifice IC as being tortured and mutilated (something a paladin might do). To do otherwise is to be guilty of not understanding how your character would think and therefore roleplaying inappropriately.

Here is my solution if it were to be coded into the game.

I think there should be some sort of 'victory' or 'defeat' requirements that are built into the game. There could be a couple of requirements that have to be fulfilled before a group is actually considered to be 'defeated.' Keep a coded count of how many times an 'enemy formation' has got the killing blow on a PC of a faction they are at war with. Keep a count of how many lawmobs have been killed by an enemy formation. Keep a timer on how long a relic has been held. These sorts of things could probably be easily implemented and would give undenyable proof that an enemy faction has been defeated. Increment the requirements based on how long the war has been going on (20 kills per month and 50 NPCs per month). or something like that.

I'm fine with this line of thought, I'm just stating that it's not represented by people dying or the people killing.

This applies to the killers as well, though, doesn't it? Shouldn't "I killed Jim" be more significant than "I got to take all Jim's stuff"? Shouldn't grey aura characters be punished for running around playing serial killer?