Random thoughts and comments

It's difficult for me to decide where I stand since all the data I have is from word of mouth. Balthazar might have been the worst RPers of all times, even an abusive twink. He might have been the breath of fresh air he's alleged by others. But whenever these discussions crop up here and on the gdb it must be understood that any time someone is pkilled there will be OOC grievances, you're almost always going to piss someone off. To some degree it's true that when you pkill someone you're flushing hours and hours (weeks even) of the other player's efforts down the drain. But does this mean we should never pkill? If Balthazar was pkilling rinthers I'd have to say that sounds fairly standard templarish to me. And if you felt like there was little to no reason for the pkill maybe you don't have all the facts? I'm not accusing, I'm genuinely asking the question. As I said, he could've very well been an awful templar player. I'll never know for certain (though some logs posted here might help). In order to instill the fear of templar in players, sooner or later a few heads need to roll. Otherwise we have the same problem modern day Arm has always had which is tavern rpts and festivals and everyone happy go lucky without a care in the world, in a game which is paradoxically set in a harsh desert environment.

I don't know if players like valorysk or balthazar were good in their roles or not....but the the information I seem to be getting is that they weren't afraid to stir things up. In a game where players have been conditioned never to stir things up and instead sit in taverns doing nothing all day, where any action of even semi-importance requires the rubber stamping of imms who take weeks to approve (or more likely reject) it, it sure sounds like val and bal were doing something right. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But hopefully it's now apparent why I would support and encourage players like these two despite having never encountered them and not even knowing what their sdescs were.

I wasn't dodging the point I was referring to other posters who seemed to suggest he was a bad player for his pkilling motives alone.

If he really was stirring some serious shit and then vanishing for weeks and weeks from the game....that's something else entirely. And it's very uncool. Though there have been times when I'm in clans and people will seem to think I've somehow disappeared off the face of the earth when all that really happened is I started logging in an hour or two later than my usual schedule due to a week of overtime at the office. I've also come up to PCs in the game and said I thought they had died a while ago (since I couldn't find them online anymore) and they seem to have been surprised, using IC language to try and convey that they've been here all this time. Maybe Balthazar was being uncool by deliberately disappearing after creating major conflict. He wouldn't be the first player to do something like this in the past. But another possibility is maybe there was a legit explanation. Or maybe he just barely had time to play the game and when he did, he would stir shit. If that's the case we could argue that maybe he shouldn't play a templar in the first place. But then that's a different discussion.

So let me be clear, I'm not defending the guy. What I am doing is asking questions before I leap to conclusions about him. When imms write rude and discouraging things to players, revealing their true ugly natures, I have all the evidence I need. Nyr is a prick. Talis is a cunt. These things aren't open for debate. They are small minded people who take delight in being demeaning toward others and the proof is in the pudding for all to see. With pcs things become a bit muddied and it's not as easy to pin anything down as hard evidence.

His player (if it's who I suspect it is, and I'm notoriously awesome at guessing) is a great roleplayer, one of my favorites. Maybe they screwed up a little, maybe not. I wasn't there for most of it. But I definitely want to give the benefit of the doubt to this player because I have never seen them do anything but act ICly across characters. I have real doubts that they deliberately disappeared after shaking stuff up. They probably just got caught up in RL stuff, but were still trying to play true to the character. You can debate whether or not that was the wrong decision on their part, but I have full faith in their honest intentions--again, if it's who I think it is, and I am probably 85% sure.

Balth came onto the scene at a time when templars were being pretty lax, friendly, and forgiving. That's not a critique on those players, because there's a place for that kind of templar, and they can't control what the other templar PCs' personalities are like. The player probably apped Balthazar in order to help bring the frightening severity back to the templarate. In fact I think there had been threads made around that time about how someone needed to do that because templars weren't scary anymore. So Balth was really doing what people said they were wanting. Did it reach griefing levels? That's in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but to me griefing implies an OOC desire to upset people, which I don't see. I didn't think Friday's death was fair either, but it was obviously done in the attempt to show Balth as scary and unpredictable, so I can let it pass because it was IC.

People don't always make 100% good decisions even when they have the best intentions, and people get upset because of those mistakes, sometimes rightfully so. But I am willing to bet that if you guys who are criticizing Balth were in his position (and maybe some of you have been), you would have gotten flak from somebody, somewhere. I haven't seen any prominent, long-lived characters that were not criticized either on this board or in the mumble/discord. Everybody fucks up in somebody's eyes.

tl;dr balthazar was played by an awesome roleplayer who cares about the game and any screwups, real or perceived, probably shouldn't be held against them

post templar stress disorder: its real

support ur vets

I didn't post with the intention to galvanize people for or against said named player. I really enjoyed playing with that templar and found them to be a great roleplayer. It was an incredibly dissatisfying death, however. I felt like I'd wasted 3-4 months of play over some trivial knee-jerk and it seemed inconsiderate. If it had been a Guilder that had done my PC in there wouldn't be that residual resentment. I guess I just feel like I am taken advantage of by other players a lot of the time. Straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I don't think that player achieved what they were aiming for, as far as their impact on the game.

I understand, IsFriday. When I feel my PC is needlessly killed, I'm like, wtf? Sometimes there's people out there with much more reason to do this thing, who wouldn't need to utilize such channels, and I feel like those players just got robbed... but, again, perhaps there's angles I missed. I don't think anyone is galvanized on the issue, I certainly am not. I have my own views on how PCs should do things, which I utilize ICly. I can understand how you feel taken advantage of by the playerbase, but the source of the residual resentment in the Balthazar situation is removed, I'm ambivalent about that. It still lingers, I see, but, you know, as my mother used to tell me, horse kicks you off, it hurts, get back up and ride it until you break it.