Random thoughts and comments

That's a really good brainteaser. The important thing to remember is that a think is just a voice in your character's head. You have to decide how your character reacts to it as if they thought it themselves.

To answer your exact question, though...

The thing about a dwarf focus (and I say this as someone who loved playing dwarves for the RP aspect rather than the stats) is it's supposed to be a long-term goal you (the player) likely won't see achieved within your character's lifetime. It's a thing your dwarf spent a staggering amount of time deciding on before setting out to accomplish it. So from that standpoint, a brief deviation from your focus isn't going to invalidate it, if you roll with the thought instead of having a mental argument with yourself. The only thing a dwarf player would need to do is find a way to incorporate the deviation back into the overall deathmarch to the achievement of the focus.

My opinion on Terash is that it is exactly the sort of boring stuff nobody really wanted to do in Tuluk to begin with. It exists to cater to a small group of the playerbase that wants to be "part of that", instead of the "real game". There's nothing wrong with that I guess. If it entertains a few people that's fine just so long as its culture stays within its walls and doesn't seep out to tarnish the rest of the game environment/atmosphere (like Tuluk).

So why are people playing there?

Then why did they implement the "hand of God" for nilazi?

I think you're making an extreme interpretation. I see it as being more of a whispery suggestion. Suggest to someone that he wants a steak when he's hungry and *voila* he buys a steak. Suggest to someone that he wants to attack that group of soldiers over there and there will be a lot of resistance. The psion is going to have to run a long campaign of thought harassment and might end up just driving the victim mad before he'll attack the soldiers. Things that fall between would take an intermediate level of prompting.

Of course, in the usual Armageddon way, there are no instructions on how to properly roleplay it and in fact people aren't even told it exists. The first and only time one of my characters was made to "think", I thought the staff was messing with him.

I believe mindbendes also have the total mind control ability, it's just more risky because it involves close contact. Though staff may have changed things when they nerfed mindbender after the way the nilazi/psionicist team Gin and Quick managed to surprise staff with their combined power and pull off some amazing things which many considered abuses. It i still think Psions have a total control ability.

Was reading through some threads from earlier in this year and saw where Nergal had accused people posting on this board of only doing it for "self-promotion's sake."

And... you know, I just cannot wrap my mind around the staff telling themselves that.

I think a lot of people started posting here because, after years - in some cases, over half a lifetime - they found themselves having to walk on eggshells, facing arbitrary rule enforcement, undue/endless punishment, and plenty of other valid reasons.

How staff can think that people just post here to amp up their online personas of a game they don't even play anymore is just beyond me; there are plenty of totally valid reasons for people to have started posting here. At a fundamental level, I think a lot of the bullshit could have been avoided if people had simply tried to be nicer to one another, and that goes both ways: if it's *just* the players being nice to the staff... that's asskissing/sycophantic. But that's what it seems like some people, mainly Nyr, expected. For a while there, it didn't seem like, for a lot of players, genuine courtesy was a two way street.

Instead of writing the players' dissent off as some strange attempt at self-promotion, maybe staff should take into consideration that there were - and, undoubtedly, still are - things that deserve consideration/reflection beyond what the request system or GDB can provide.

Makes sense. That definitely seems like the exception more than the rule when it comes to why people post here, though, for sure.