The Future of Alchemist Roleplay

Vayne

In light of the "Big Change", the question must be asked, "What does this mean for alchemist RP?" While the change makes sense mechanically, and the addition of formulations is pretty awesome, a significant portion of the basis for alchemy has been abolished with no apparent resolution in sight. It is not that I dislike any of the new features, a lot of depth has been added to the game, but the deus ex machina(at least as far as we have seen or know so far)way it was implemented seems to do some damage, especially to alchemists.

The Alchemists of the Cauda Pavonis allowed the city-states the ability to tap into the Ether under the stipulation that they forsake new Forestal citizens. 5 out of 6 cities agreed. While as far as I know, that rule still stands, though I do recall mention of these restrictions potentially lifted after the change, but the insinuated premise for the Cauda Pavonis's disdain is now abolished since harvest/concoctions and synthesis/transmutation are no longer under the exclusive purview of Forestal and Alchemists respectively. While this change does not directly violate the agreement it goes a long way to circumvent it, something I do not foresee Khunrath taking kindly to.

Some potential ways it could play out:

A. Somehow the Cauda Pavonis does not hear of what happened/doesn't care and things proceed as are. This seems unlikely to me since the CP has representatives in each city and surely one of them would report the infidelity, and I severely doubt they would not care.

B. The CP expects the city-states who made the agreement to continue banning not only Forestals, but the practice of Harvesting(I believe Mhaldor is already enforcing this)in order for a city to not only have Alchemists, but use Synthesis. However, this would be difficult to do since many have already selected Harvesting in alchemist cities.

C. Some sort of event happens that makes the change ok, either Khunrath has a change in temperament, maybe he dies or is replaced by a more progressive Imperator, or something else satisfactory.

So how does you feel about the change? What do you think about the potential solutions? Do you have an alternate ideas?

Bluef

You bring up some really good points and interesting ideas for playing things out. It might be neat to set this up as a poll to (visually) see where players, especially alchemists, would like to see things head RP-wise.

Tael

I would bet on C, though I think that's a fairly boring solution. Any solution of that kind is effectively just eliminating a conflict from the world, and removing conflict is boring.

A just doesn't make sense, as you point out.

B will probably never happen since they're not going to force people to lose all those lessons that they put into harvesting with no warning that harvesting might be banned in their city at a later date.

I think my actual preference would be to retain the division (I've always liked the RP aspect of it), but add in a mechanism to switch between the tradeskills.

Imagine, for instance, that a representative of the Cauda Pavonis were basically be trying to recruit herbalists over to synthesis (and someone, maybe Seasone, would offer the reverse). That way the division could be maintained without problems, people wouldn't be punished if the cities enforced the existing bans, and it would resolve the issue no one has talked about where people might be screwed over for changing cities in the future and lose access to a fairly basic tradeskill.

Hell, we could even have an event where the Cauda Pavonis comes down and says "Guys? I thought we had a deal. What the hell is going on? Did you think we wouldn't hear about this? We still don't permit herbalism. As a courtesy, however, our representatives stand ready to train any herbalists in safe, effective alchemical curatives."