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Comments
From HELP PK : they must be aware of the conflict before you attack them.
When I say that there should be a warning, I don't mean it as a blanket rule, I mean that there shouldn't be situations in which someone isn't perfectly clear why they're being attacked. Most of your argument seems to rely upon this idea that it should have been clear that what was happening should have resulted in death, and first, I don't think it was, and second, the onus is probably on the aggressor to be sure things are clear. Frankly, the rules make it clear that the conflict needs to be understood before people are killing each other, and yes, that often means a warning. It means that one side doesn't get to unilaterally decide that the other has crossed an unstated line, and this is definitely true when it comes to something like bounties, where it's not even a person who was part of the interaction doing the killing.
Telling someone you don't like their organization is not good justification, and I seriously hope you're not claiming that. Maybe you could make that claim if someone was just randomly screaming about how one's organization sucks, but in the course of a broader conversation, the claim that you disagree with someone's principles, or that someone's principles are wrong, doesn't mean that they get to kill you, and certainly doesn't mean that they get to get someone else to kill you, particularly without warning.
And sure, a death isn't a huge deal. I don't think that the issue is whether the mechanical effects are a problem, but that not engaging with someone, telling them that what they're doing will lead to their death, or otherwise at least telling them why you're killing them is shitty, often not very fun rp.
Lots of things are sources of conflict, but conflict doesn't always mean being hunted down without warning. And certainly not in the course of a conversation in which both people are being rather prickly towards one another.
@Nakari I stopped arguing in support of the OP due to details that came out well after his/her initial post. Details that are not minor details to the situation. As a result I csn only safely assume there is even more to the story none of us are aware of.
@Tael Holy wall of text. I can not believe I read all of that. I can see where you are coming from even if I disagree on a few points.
→My Mudlet Scripts
Occultist is a unique class in Achaea with how it's positioned. It's factional without the threats of ruining your game play like Devotion and Necromancy classes have. This puts the players on a path with a few fun approaches: You play the faction and get benefits x, y and z. You don't play the faction and you have to find a way to compensate for those benefits all while tiptoeing around the House because they hate you and see you in light similar to traitors. Rogue Occultists took their skills, and knowledge and are now sharing some of the House secrets with the world, in that aspect Rogue Occies are thieving assholes that don't deserve respect.
TL;DR - The House tends to be reasonable with consequences for rogues. Jinsun can get a little kill happy, but he can be talked with. Rogue Occultist is a struggle paired with flying under the radar. Find a balance of risk and safety and you'll be fine.
It's not that simple. You can't disregard all OOC factors. If you do, and just go after people and PK them and say "change class or keep dying", then it escalates to Sarapis stepping in and saying "no you fucking don't". Now you're forbidden to further interact with that person, your org is emasculated, nobody knows how far they can push things any more, and people lose heart and stop trying.
It's not about being kind. I'm talking about behaviour that is antagonistic and sincere IC, but is engaging to both parties on an OOC level.
If you accept that it is not possible to use PK to force a person to change class, how else can you pursue that goal? If you approach them in a way that they OOC find unpleasant, threatening, unwarranted, they will disengage from the situation and you have failed, leaving them as yet another burned rogue/Hashan occultist who will defiantly avoid having anything to do with the Occultist House in future and preach this view to others too.
Many Targs and Mhaldorians antagonise and oppose each other as IC enemies, while respecting them on an OOC level.
(I'd argue that this is subjective, and the House could take many positions other than hardline non-acceptance, but that is irrelevant to my point.)
This is a stance that cannot be enforced as long as Occultists and Ashtan have no control over the occultist class. You can maintain intolerance, but how can you follow up on that? When your options are limited to bark and no bite, you have to start barking more creatively.
From an OOC perspective, I suggest a "more acceptable" rogue is one who acknowledges what they are, an individual alone outside the vast knowledge base of the House, and who maybe understands a little of ideas like group karma, the cabals, and the Emperor's court: someone who knows what they are missing out on and acts accordingly, and respects that the House are an authority, if not their authority. Not someone who doesn't know how much they don't know, is making up their own ideas of what the occultist class is and does, and thinks the House are a bunch of pricks.
In this hypothetical, there's a difference between actively and objectively insulting a god and threatening novices, and the demanded outcome of "stop doing those things", which costs the reasonable price of nothing, and the passive, perceived insult of holding occultist class, and the demanded outcome of "change class", which costs a bunch of lessons.
This is true. I tried to keep it a bit more general, so maybe the conversation will be a little relevant to the renaissance or the ongoing issue of occultists as a factional class, instead of a total waste of time.
If I can think of a way to write it more succinctly, I typically just do that instead and spare the wall of text. When I can, I try to TL;DR it, but I've found that increasingly obnoxious to deal with. Here I was trying to articulate a line of argument that is, I think, reasonably complicated, and I'd rather write a long post that more clearly lays out my reasoning than write a terse post that ultimately requires the same or even more text in clarifications to other people's responses. When I've put TL;DRs on complicated things, people have tended to reply to them without reading the rest, and I end up clarifying things in the same way, so the initial effort feels somewhat wasted.
That way, if people quite reasonably don't want to bother to read the wall of text, they can just skip it without feeling compelled to reply to the TL;DR. And while it means a wall of text, it also means that clarifications aren't making up two dozen back-and-forth posts in a thread (instead, only one dozen!). I'm pretty sure my overall wordcount in most threads has gone down since I stopped putting in TL;DRs.
Also, I recognise that I am a long-winded person. This is how bad it is when I'm trying to be more brief. This is how I am in real-life too, but at least here you can skip past my metaphorical turn in the conversation. I'd rather people just skip what I have to say (and it doesn't really bother me when people do that) than just read the TL;DR. Usually people are good about using quotes on these forums, so I think it's rare that understanding any further discussion of something I said requires a complete reading.
TL;DR: I don't think TL;DRs actually work very well.
@Blujixapug:
- Regarding conflation of IC/OOC, I phrased that terribly. Ignoring all OOC factors is not what I meant. Looking back, I think it's safe to just ignore that sentence. I definitely agree with you that OOC considerations enter into the equation in many ways, which I think the rest of the post hopefully made pretty clear.
- Regarding "If you accept that it is not possible to use PK to force a person to change class, how else can you pursue that goal?", my answer is that this is emphatically not a legitimate goal to pursue. You should never be OOCly interested in a person changing class. You can roleplay that you are interested in someone changing class, but that should never be an actual goal of the player. The sense in which the occultists want rogue occultists to switch classes should be similar to the sense in which Targossans want to eradicate Evil - they should roleplay as though that's their goal, but they should not actually be concerned with achieving it. Put another way: the sensible solution is to roleplay as though PK can force a person to change class, even though you know it won't work. Note that this does not supersede #4/5.
- Regarding "If you approach them in a way that they OOC find unpleasant, threatening, unwarranted...", I think one has to be careful here. What I was trying to get across is that we probably don't want a blanket policy of never doing anything another player won't like. Sometimes in the game, the consequence of your actions is being killed. That's going to be a negative experience a lot of the time. You should try to make interactions rewarding for everyone, but that should never be seen as an entitlement as the victim of the consequences of your actions. Sometimes the consequence of your choices is that you become someone else's entertainment.
- Regarding "the passive, perceived insult of holding occultist class, and the demanded outcome of 'change class'", I don't think it is at all reasonable to PK someone or take any action beyond perhaps some strong words simply for being a rogue occultist. But that isn't what happened here - he was killed because he insulted the house's ethos to a prominent member, demanded forbidden knowledge, and then threatened to use the naivety of the house's novices to get them to unknowingly break rules to obtain what he wanted.
- I think there's still confusion from my badly-written earlier point about RP justification. I meant that the occultists have "RP justification" to PK rogue occultists in the sense that such an action would make perfect sense ICly for them. But at the same time, the sort of justification they have is specifically disallowed by the PK rules to keep the game more fun for everyone - a roleplaying concession that I think everyone agrees is reasonable and healthy for the game. In the broader sense though, I think that the RP justification shouldn't be completely ignored. I think it's reasonable, for instance, to say that precisely how "serious" a conflict has to be before it's legitimate to turn it violent should probably be lower between the occultist house and a rogue occultist than it is between random players. That seems reasonable and fair - there still has to be a conflict and all that, but it affords a little bit more respect for the RP situation. And while that sort of consideration was basically impossible to realise under cause-counting PK rules, I think it's a good thing that there is now a little bit of wiggle room.
@Nakari:The rules say the conflict has to be clear and the conflict was plainly clear here. There is a point at which you can certainly assume that the other parties know they are involved in a conflict and I can't imagine anyone claiming that that line was not clearly crossed here - there is no way that someone approaches a member of an organisation, demands forbidden knowledge, denounces the organisation's principles, and then threatens to exploit the organisation's novices, all without understanding that they are involved in a conflict. There are unclear situations where it's not fair to expect a person to know that they're involved in a conflict, but this is pretty clearly not one of them. I don't think the game is improved by asking everyone to handle clear conflict situations with kid gloves because there are also unclear conflict situations.
More importantly, I think you are perhaps confusing "conflict" with "fight", and the rules do not say that both people have to know that the conflict might turn or has turned violent, merely that the conflict itself must be clear. The point is to prevent people from killing someone over a perceived insult when the other person wasn't intending an insult at all and had no idea it was taken that way. And while the OP might be making a claim that he couldn't have known that he was involved in a conflict, I think the additional facts brought to light by others involved make pretty astoundingly clear that he either knew or, at least, could very reasonably be expected to know that he was involved in a conflict. I think it is completely fair to expect people to know that when you issue a threat to an org member regarding that org's novices, you should know you are involved in a conflict. That is a completely reasonable expectation and it would be incredibly silly to insist that someone needs to make clear that threatening to entice a house's novices to break the house rules for personal benefit needs to be informed that that sort of thing might have repercussions, then wait for the person to do something else before acting.
Ultimately, I think the OP was frustrated that there were negative repercussions of his actions (and people can be frustrated even when they know the consequences were earned), and more importantly was under the impression that he was going to be hunted forever just for being a rogue occultist, which I would be very unhappy about too, but which, very much unlike the specific incident under discussion here, is clearly disallowed both for the "forever" and for the "for being a rogue occultist".
So if some clueless guy comes back from dormancy and does some things that seem silly to people immersed in the game, it's not really so strange that that could happen. If it were me, I'd probably annoy the shit out of my city mates with questions before spending any credits on anything, but a lot of people actually aren't like that and it would probably be better if he just couldn't have become a Hashani Occultist in the first place. That's really the takeaway, and if it's fixed for Devotionists now, it should probably be fixed for Occultists if there's really such broad support for it being a factional class. Right now it just looks messy, and seems to invite trouble, and not necessarily the fun kind since at least one other person chimed in about how she'd just quit the class rather than deal with... whatever rogue occultists end up dealing with. It seems to usually fall short of justified PK, and I'm actually a little surprised it works, since it doesn't seem like it would have much teeth without that, but anyway... messy, confusing to people who aren't totally immersed (or don't ask a million annoying questions before buying something like a class).
First, let me say @Disraeli, I'm sorry if you felt that the RP interaction involving your desk was unamusing or boring. However, I don't really agree that it was poorly handled as I'll explain in a moment. Not every interaction is fun here. It's just the nature of dynamic roleplay. Like I said in my message to you, I'm generally receptive to a rival or enemy RP if you want to start it up or ask me to OOCly whenever situationally appropriate.
Now on to the meat. I think the one-sided nature of this thread made it go along pretty poorly. I'm not really upset at the people who were quick to light the bonfire. We've all got a bit of a band wagon or hive mind problem here, and I've not done much in my own right to lessen the negative connotations that the name Jinsun brings. @Jovolo thank you for your apology.As to what happened, here is my general timeline:
- Disraeli Asks me about karma in a rather vague way. I'm busy at the time and sort of nonchalantly reply "I can't discuss that with you." and go about my business. Usually, I'll try a conversion attempt or at least try to play up the RP, but when a character is 391 years old, I generally think conversion may be lengthy or a lost cause, and will not put the effort into it if I'm already busy.
- I return the next month, and only one person, @Klochild is in realms. I am HoN so I check logs for any new novices or promotions. I see something to the effect of @Amunet has declared Disraeli a House enemy for harassing novices and being a pain in the ass.
- Generally, asking someone for advice on karma or trying to get around the oath will not warrant an enemying or be labeled "harassing." So, I assumed this was serious. Further, Amunet had put up a housefavour as a reward for his head. Jinsun is Head of Novices and leader of our combat group. If someone is actually harassing novices Jinsun wants to be the first to know of and handle it. So I ask @Klochild if anyone has claimed the bounty. He says he doesn't think so.
- I send Disraeli a tell asking to meet. This was really just a cheesy tactic to draw him out of Hashan. I've used it a couple of times for city bounties or contracts. It's really useful when someone catches wind of a bounty or wants to hide in the city. Hiding in a city can lead to collateral damage with me killing multiple innocent defenders just to get to the one person. Disraeli sees straight through my attempt and replies that he's not certain about meeting with me because he was enemied and afraid he did something to get him killed. (He was right). He reluctantly meets with me, I attack on sight, and he manages to escape back to Hashan. He sends me a tell threatening to kill any Occultist house member including novices unless I drop the pursuit. I tell him that would be a really bad move on his part and would only exacerbate things.
- After chasing him out of Hashan, he QQs entirely (possibly in violation of help honour) and makes this thread. I didn't see this all until long after when someone pointed me to it.
- About an hour later, I see him back in realms and hunting for karma and resume pursuit. This time I kill him.
- He demands to know ICly if this was it for us. I tell him that he's no longer allowed to speak to our House members and to leave them alone. We discuss in OOC tells exactly why he was killed and that I never had any intention of continuing to hunt him, or killing him for just being a rogue.
- I decapitate the head and make a note in the logs that no one in our house is allowed to kill Disraeli unless he commits another crime against the house.
So now, where does that leave us in this discussion? Well, I hope at least some gaps have been filled. Like I said, I was a bit disappointed at the nay-sayers, but Nayers 'gonna nay. I've never hunted anyone for being a rogue Occultist, and I'd welcome anyone to bring one example forward. It's actually not suggested that we should hunt rogues within our house files in any way. Plus, Ashtan has rogue Occultists. It would be difficult to maintain and justify such RP. I killed in this situation because I trusted Amunet's opinion, given her established reputation and my own interactions with her.To the discussions about warning your enemy or lack of RP when killing- this topic comes up often. It generally feels like those attempting to justify why you should tell your victim first are more trying to come up with arbitrary rules to make PK more convenient for those who don't enjoy death. It doesn't actually feel rooted in RP. Jinsun does not like rogue Occultists and he's a nihilist. Mercy and warning are not two words in his vocabulary. He also is, like Amunet said, a helicopter parent when he comes to his novices. If one steps out of line, you can believe he'll come down on them, but so help the person if he hears someone was harassing his novices. In this situation, it would make zero RP sense for Jinsun to strike up a conversation or to discuss this with Disraeli. He'd kill first, and let Disraeli pay his fine later.
I also just don't buy the argument that he was clueless about the consequences for his actions or that death was forthcoming. As I said before, he specifically said when I asked to meet with him that he was afraid that I was going to kill him for being enemied. I'm sorry that I do not have a great reputation, but I don't kill people for reasons such as "Is a rogue occultist" and never will.
Well... that about does 'er
https://youtu.be/sYsw0KVRjCM?t=73