Idle Speculation: Lazy Role Call Edition

I feel like it's been a long time since anything happened on an HRPT-scale. Even the closing of Tuluk was mostly isolated to Tuluki PCs.

So, in conjunction with the release of new classes, this seems like an opportunity for people still retaining legacy classes, some of which are code-wise inferior, to do something besides just store while simultaneously offering players a chance to partake in an HRPT-esque happening in the game.

I was wondering when a thread about that announcement would crop up here, and I just can't see fault in staff attempting to construct a plot that involves a great many, not just one clan or an enclave or uber-magickers-muls-undead-nilazi-psionicists.

i laughed hard when that plot leaked here and it was so railroaded that they didnt change a single ridiculous detail when it went down

Explicitly and publicly limiting a vague and highly hyped rolecall to a very few is one of the reasons people discuss staff pets, staff favourites, staff friends, staff cliques, whatever. The very concept of a public rolecall with no transparency doesn't really inspire much confidence. Now to be fair to staff even nowadays I constantly see very adequate RPers doubt themselves and rather believe staff have favourites than put themselves out there and try. Sometimes it's less truth and more protection mechanicism. Sometimes it's more truth.

I'm going to be frank, I skimmed this rolecall but as a rule of thumb if I were going to say I have special roles for X amount of people I might also emphasis strongly that this is part of a larger overarching plot on the game that all characters will be affected by and these roles are merely flashpoints from which staff will move out from and back to and out from again. The roles serve the game and all existing characters not this is for super special awesome characters. You know if that's how they're planning to do it.

Coffee.

congratulations to qwerty for winning the gold medal in mental gymnastics with this post.

The Gypsies sucked ass as a clan

If every clan was as dynamic as the Tan Muark once was, ArmageddonMUD would be a better game.  Part of the problem is that the Tan Muark was ahead of its time in many ways.  In a time where there weren't many items, they had lots of unique items.  Long since then, custom gear or custom craftable gear for specific groups, even now-defunct ones, is par for the course, when that really wasn't the case during the Tan Muark's prime.  Their base was more impregnable at the time, but many of its contemporary clans mirrored this:  The Blackwing, the Black Moon, the Conclave, and even Merchant Houses had their own expansive bases, like Kurac in Luir's and Kadius having Freil's Rest when it was an "enterable" village, autonomous to Kadius, mostly, with its own crimcode, like Luir's for Kurac, which also addresses another thing you said:


 Although, in the end. and they had an entire region that was completely out of theme with Zalanthas in terms of harshness.

Without going into specifics, basically all desert elves have somewhat of an equivalent to this.  Other clans, too. Tuluk and the grasslands was an equivalent.  Nak and chalton land are. You haven't read gypsy docs if you think they're out of lines in terms of harshness in terms of their story. One of the main differences were actual NPC guards at borders containing creature NPCs to hunt.  Quite frankly, I don't think very many people really hunted on lands exclusively much with gypsy characters.  When I played gypsies, I had no idea how the combat code worked.  I cannot ever remember a gypsy PC, for instance, hunting turaal to twink up because they knew they'd miss a lot.  It's the kinda that just didn't happen in that clan, by and large, because knowledge of how the code worked was not displayed in levels... there were only vague theories of how to get better, if people cared at all.  I never really did.  

The gypsy lands were not immune to people going on them, either.  I had a gypsy who was PK'd on gypsy lands, for instance.

Despite other clans having similar depth in terms of what was uniquely and codedly available to them at times, gypsies just became a symbol because so much, codedly, had been built around them.  It was sort've the same thing as the Kuraci Outriders or lots of other groups, but it was also during a time when not many clans at all had uniforms except for maybe one or two items, so it stood out more then that gypsies had, for instance, lots of custom items - that gypsies might even kill an outsider for having. Because someone went above and beyond in terms of effort to heavily supplement the clan with lots of gear and a base, to a degree that not many have ventured since, it seemed like heavy favoritism.  Since then, it is par for the course, typically, for clans to have tons of clan-specific items, bases, and other perks.  Because gypsies had these things at a time when many clans didn't coupled with that they were invite-only, it was viewed as a clan demonstrating favoritism.


So they rebuilt the area to make it 'very' harh and, let's admit, sort of cool. With Lava, fire ants, etc. The story arc of 'how' it happened was kind of weak, I'll admit. It could've happened differently if the whole tree of life thing worked out different, but the final result would've been the same. Is that truly such a horrible thing though? Tan Muark 'did' suck and mostly detracted from the game, instead of adding to it. Dashra was a safe haven, which is not really a Zalanthas theme. And the new area 'is' pretty cool.


Personally, I like that the Muark lost the NPC border guards.  Having said that, they could have been scaled back very easily, instead.  I don't have a problem with gypsies losing territory.  I just think it was kinda dumb to destroy Tyn Dashra by literally moving a volcano from one place to the other and serve sort've an OOC agenda.  

The problem is that it is really hard to build groups in Armageddon but incredibly easy for entire clans to be removed from play or, as in the case of the Conclave, outright retconned.  

Don't get me wrong.  I like the fact that certain clans have been restricted from play or, on I think what should be a situational (and unfortunately, ultimately, arbitrary) basis, but maybe sometimes it's easy for people to forget that it's easier to destroy or take something away than it is to create it.  Retconning clans or visible evidence of them as was the case with the Conclave should never happen again.  It discourages people from attempting to establish things of permanence in the game to a certain degree, I think. 

At the very least, I think a clan that has left its mark should allow that mark to remain, somehow, whether it be ruins or whatever, and never just written out of the history of the game.