Evil cities

[Thalric]

That sounds awesome!

Coders unite and begin!

[Alisa]

Hi.

Nerull wrote: ↑18 May 2020 02:05
There are alternatives, such as simply to drop alignment increase/decrease when killing, and introduce faction standings, which in turn contain consequences. A simple example: kill haradrims, and gain standing with some faction with the free folk or Gondor, while dropping in favour of faction(s) of the dark lord. Consequences could manifest in decreased efficiency of guild abilities, which would help motivating members of said factions to kill the right stuff. Important to bake in a metaelement here to drive the whip...
That is pretty much the system i would prefer we had.

Soo... Like Knights prestige?
Am i wrong, or do we already have such a system.

Should be easy(but take a bit of time) to implement so we dont have all those blue-on-blue instances

[Arman]

Kind of. Although I think whatever system we come up with would still need to be more sophisticated than prestige.

Prestige is more hardcore than the current alignment system, and where no prestige value is defined for an npc it defaults to its alignment. So it doesn't resolve any of the issues that have been highlighted in this thread.

I think a new system could also capture how much a player 'yo-yo's... are they fanatical stalwarts to specific causes, or are they chaotic opportunists... it could be another distinguisher apart from 'good' and 'evil' that coders could use in their creations and guilds.

[Thalric]

Perhaps this could also be solved, other than a huge recode of the entire alignment system, with a neutralizing of the alignment of various areas around the realms.

In Kabal, for example. Why are guards good-aligned, if who they guard are corrupt nobles? Wouldn't that make them evil? The whole Trading Company is run by an evil overlord who wants dominion.
GK is neutral, that is fair for both sides, although not very fantasy-genre correct.
Qualinesti, fair enough. Goodies as elves usually are, but again tipping the scale to support evils.
Mithas, same as GK. Fair for both sides but totally off the idea of trolls, per definition, being evil.
Ents are trees. They protect their own area, but that doesn't make them good-aligned. In the books and movies Treebeard doesn't give a hoot about the outside world and only reacts when the forest is damaged.
Dark elves are evil, as all dark elves are.
Terel trolls are evil, fitting the theme.
These two last ones are nowhere near as evil as qualinost is good, though.
Faerun is evil, being orcs and undeads. Fit the theme.
Icewall is evil, run by a dragon highlords and therefore fits.

All of this would look fine for the good-aligned players. If it wasn't for the fact that all these evil places are so little evil that you need to run through them several times to go from damned to holy, but for ents and qualinost you need but kill a few handfuls to go from holy to damned.

Gont is neutral, and so ought to be Kabal, Palanthas (Tower of Arms), and likely also a bunch of the good-aligned towns. But most towns, on both sides, don't really have anything worth killing, so mentioning them don't make a lot of sense.

This is my wish to balance the scales, before another and better system is put in place.

[Rache]

text

I think that would be a very appropriate bandaid. You can dig super deep and find roleplay justification but it seems we all agree that it's a pretty broken system. Also: Leaf my trees alone!

[Arman]

Perhaps this could also be solved, other than a huge recode of the entire alignment system, with a neutralizing of the alignment of various areas around the realms.

In Kabal, for example. Why are guards good-aligned, if who they guard are corrupt nobles? Wouldn't that make them evil? The whole Trading Company is run by an evil overlord who wants dominion.
GK is neutral, that is fair for both sides, although not very fantasy-genre correct.
Qualinesti, fair enough. Goodies as elves usually are, but again tipping the scale to support evils.
Mithas, same as GK. Fair for both sides but totally off the idea of trolls, per definition, being evil.
Ents are trees. They protect their own area, but that doesn't make them good-aligned. In the books and movies Treebeard doesn't give a hoot about the outside world and only reacts when the forest is damaged.
Dark elves are evil, as all dark elves are.
Terel trolls are evil, fitting the theme.
These two last ones are nowhere near as evil as qualinost is good, though.
Faerun is evil, being orcs and undeads. Fit the theme.
Icewall is evil, run by a dragon highlords and therefore fits.

All of this would look fine for the good-aligned players. If it wasn't for the fact that all these evil places are so little evil that you need to run through them several times to go from damned to holy, but for ents and qualinost you need but kill a few handfuls to go from holy to damned.

Gont is neutral, and so ought to be Kabal, Palanthas (Tower of Arms), and likely also a bunch of the good-aligned towns. But most towns, on both sides, don't really have anything worth killing, so mentioning them don't make a lot of sense.

This is my wish to balance the scales, before another and better system is put in place.

These calls need to be made by the respective lieges of the domains.

For Tower of Arms guards, I am ok with the idea of them being neutral. That would be thematic... at this point the Palanthians are largely flip-flopping between whether the support the knights or Dragonarmies. Mind, knights would still get a prestige penalty. While i may change the guards to be neutral, they are still Solamnians. Knights slaughtering law-abiding citizens wouldn't be a good look.

[Raelle]

a neutral grinding ground protected by knights .. please don't push that on us ... my head hurts already

[Raelle]

also there are those awful evil-aligned skeletons in the Palanthas ToA basement. by the time you're big enough to kill them, your killing blow destroys all their loot and coins.

[Dhez]

Perhaps this could also be solved, other than a huge recode of the entire alignment system, with a neutralizing of the alignment of various areas around the realms.

In Kabal, for example. Why are guards good-aligned, if who they guard are corrupt nobles? Wouldn't that make them evil? The whole Trading Company is run by an evil overlord who wants dominion.
GK is neutral, that is fair for both sides, although not very fantasy-genre correct.
Qualinesti, fair enough. Goodies as elves usually are, but again tipping the scale to support evils.
Mithas, same as GK. Fair for both sides but totally off the idea of trolls, per definition, being evil.
Ents are trees. They protect their own area, but that doesn't make them good-aligned. In the books and movies Treebeard doesn't give a hoot about the outside world and only reacts when the forest is damaged.
Dark elves are evil, as all dark elves are.
Terel trolls are evil, fitting the theme.
These two last ones are nowhere near as evil as qualinost is good, though.
Faerun is evil, being orcs and undeads. Fit the theme.
Icewall is evil, run by a dragon highlords and therefore fits.

All of this would look fine for the good-aligned players. If it wasn't for the fact that all these evil places are so little evil that you need to run through them several times to go from damned to holy, but for ents and qualinost you need but kill a few handfuls to go from holy to damned.

Gont is neutral, and so ought to be Kabal, Palanthas (Tower of Arms), and likely also a bunch of the good-aligned towns. But most towns, on both sides, don't really have anything worth killing, so mentioning them don't make a lot of sense.

This is my wish to balance the scales, before another and better system is put in place.

These calls need to be made by the respective lieges of the domains.

For Tower of Arms guards, I am ok with the idea of them being neutral. That would be thematic... at this point the Palanthians are largely flip-flopping between whether the support the knights or Dragonarmies. Mind, knights would still get a prestige penalty. While i may change the guards to be neutral, they are still Solamnians. Knights slaughtering law-abiding citizens wouldn't be a good look.

Good point, Arman. Since I'm not so well versed in their lore: given the guards' ambivalence, is there a lore reason this is a protected area by the knights or would you see it as an entirely player based policy?

Unlike with the trolls in Neraka or the Haradrim in Middle Earth, I've always been unsure of this.

[Thalric]

also there are those awful evil-aligned skeletons in the Palanthas ToA basement. by the time you're big enough to kill them, your killing blow destroys all their loot and coins.

Unless they've changed these within the last year or so, those "evil" undeads are quite neutral.
They never changed alignment for me, at least.