Roleplay Discussion - The Desert Elf Question

It's been a lot of years since I played a d-elf and I don't even know what tribes are open currently, but the issue has always been that no matter how elaborate and fascinating a backstory you give a tribe, there are very few ways to apply that to gameplay if it doesn't involve rubbing your combat skills in people's faces. I mean, take the Soh Lana Kah--they venerate the anakore, treating it almost like a god. But what day-to-day roleplay can you really get out of that? Unless animated, an anakore is just an aggro idiot no different from any other animal. You can't go and roleplay with an anakore. You can go and emote watching it reverently from a distance or whatever, but after five such solo RP sessions, you just fucking lose interest because it isn't something anyone else is gonna give a shit about. So you default to "defend the homeland!" roleplay because that's a universal language.

Back when I played, d-elf roleplaying standards weren't particularly bad. Certainly nothing like the painfully terrible efforts of almost all players of HGs. Seriously, there's something about that race that just causes the player behind it to become as stupid as their character. D-elves are more varied, and there have been quite a few great ones throughout the years. Some shit ones as well, but since it's still an elf at the end of the day, it tends to deter those who are so useless at roleplaying that they need the crutch of broken stats to make their character relevant. Maybe d-elf standards have plummeted in recent times, I haven't been there to witness it.

Stealing is one thing that I can forgive d-elf players for neglecting. I mean, the race doesn't get steal as a racial skill, and it doesn't make a great deal of sense to play a d-elf miscreant. So you're left with the "other kinds of stealing," which is pretty futile in most cases. Unless it's the kind of stealing where you cut someone's head off and steal their shit, of course. The code doesn't allow for very many scams and capers, especially for d-elves who are generally stuck in the desert where it's difficult to find anyone to RP with at all, let alone an opportunity to carry out some kind of scam. I tried plenty of times back in my naive days of optimism, and it always went one of two ways: either the other player was totally unwilling to play along because they knew OOCly that the bridge you're trying to sell them doesn't exist, or they play along so willingly that it isn't fun. That thing where you actually fool both the player and their character is just too rare, due to the constraints of a MUD codebase, so people stop bothering.

Of course, I don't think there should be numerous different tribes in the first place. Armageddon has always shot itself in the foot by trying to run a game that needs 200 players online to not feel empty when it has nowhere near that amount. There should be one playable tribe, a major one that can live up to the glory days of Blackwing. Trying to make anything happen with sporadic bands of 2-5 characters is just an exercise in futility. It simply has never amounted to anything. When was the last time a d-elf tribe was persistently relevant? The Blackwing days, I'd say. Anything since has been fleeting and weak, leaving absolutely no lasting legacy. The same will be true of the latest tribe, and the next one after it, and so on. They'll fuck around for a few months, kill some dudes, make people go "grr, elves" and then they're gone and forgotten.

You can't select a city class on a desert elf, or a wilderness class on a city elf.

The only way for desert elves to have steal is if they take a subguild with it.

I know that. That's why I'm writing the post. I understand that in addition to being a staffer, you're also a player (or were a player) and overall you seem like pretty much a normal guy. But it's this very perception that I'm trying to change.

I think that the association of desert elves with player killing is an unfortunate one, and I think that if someone wanted to play a mugger or a raider, then desert elves are an illogical choice for them, with plenty of exceptions that I'm prepared to outline.

I should probably make a separate post about this, but I've always that, using the older karma scale as a model, players should have free writ to PK characters that are higher on the ladder than them. So if you're playing a desert elf, and you make the specific choice that you want to hunt witches, then it's all good. But when you're playing a desert elf, and you want to come shoot up a bunch of zero karma players, then I'll admit that I've already mentally written you off as cheesy player.

And that's 95% of current desert elves, and hitherto for about fifteen years.




Yes, and it's become clear that you and I have different standards for role play. For me, a dozen think commands and a half dozen emotes do nothing to ameliorate the negative impact of some desert elf killing three newbie commoner PCs because the player of the desert elf was bored. I'll make the additional point that when players make the unfortunate choice to do a territorial/raider desert elf, they usually make in game choices to enforce rather than ignore the urban social hierarchy. Groupthink if ever there were.




Yes, I can my friend. That's essentially what I here allege. The purpose of role-playing is to adhere to character motives within reason. I just think that you're helping my point that it would be better for the game if people who were primarily interested in turf wars and PKing chose zero karma characters as their vector for these missions. As of this writing there are three, count them three zero-karma characters that I know of who are combat effective raiders. Independent of each other. They built the roots and developed the methodology to do it, and they're racking up body counts. Unless you don't mind losing your character, it would be unwise to raid these guys. Given their stature they have a couple of small bands of people who assist these efforts. If you want to play a raider, then play a raider. Using a desert elf desert ninja to accomplish these aims is gauche.




I'm not convinced that you feel that way. But if you truly feel that way I would be happier if you didn't play desert elves. I think you're capable of more than that.

I think that you and I have different opinions on what the core role of a desert elf should be in the game, and I want to demarcate that I'm shifting tones in this post to make my next point. The above I meant in a friendly way to be various supportable points that I think any reasonable and informed person could agree with, or failing that to understand my perspective. My next point I'll qualify as being very strictly off in opinion land.

It is my opinion that the zero-karma characters - particularly the red-shirts, poor and various sorts of low-lifes are the meat and potatoes of the game. It is for the enjoyment of the people that play these types of roles, that the rest of us do or should put on the rest of the complicated ballet that we seem to enjoy. So if you're playing anything else, particularly a sponsored roll or something that requires karma, the standards are slightly higher. The staff seem to agree with me on that point.


So what do you get in the roll of the desert elf, that you're spending a karma point for? You certainly get jacked stats and combat/survival abilities. Any of the people that are currently playing desert elves get a really neat tree fort. If if the game were a bit more functional, you'd get in the form of your clanmates a set of easy friends, allies or co-conspirators in whatever fun and games you chose to involve your character in. It is also my opinion that desert elves represent a form of diversity that won't be common to most cityborn. If you're a commoner from Allanak and you're role playing as you should, you pretty much will always believe that Tektolnes is the one true God, that northerners are evil, that elves are dumb, the world is flat and that crime is bad. You believe these things because you're educated, and you've been educated under the hegemony of City State. Elven philosophies are more removed from this legally enforced hemogeny (not to be confused with a hegemony). You should have some freedom to play a much wackier character.

What price should you pay? In my opinion, you should be discouraged from PKing the zero-karma characters. If the game were more functional, you should be pariah because nobody wants to socialize with someone who is both tribal AND an elf. Staff have implied in the past that you're not really meant to use a desert elf as an avatar to explore the wasteland without limit.

And I think that desert elves can add a lot of benefit to the game in the potential for desert elf players to mediate between the more rural, city-born adventurer/gatherer types and the raw dangers of the wasteland. I'd make the suggestion that instead of hiring desert elves to procure things from the wasteland, to explore the wasteland, and to make hits in the wasteland that it should still be largely zero-karma characters doing these things, but then desert elves become the scouts and guides for these guys.

The problem with d-elves are twofold: precedence and documentation. Precedence is a problem that plagues the game in general, but in the case of delves it’s especially problematic. Documentation for d-elves don’t quite fit the game as it is, which is why I’m thinking they added this new tribe.

When you think about D-elves two or three things immediately jump out at you: 1) Blackwing 2) Redfangs 3) That gith plot from a couple years ago that turned into a pk-fest. A couple of these you can obviously see what the problem is. Let’s start with #1 though, why would Blackwing be a problem? Blackwing are a problem because they set the precedent of dominating the game. When Blackwing was playable, they could go anywhere, had a hand in just about a everything, could run across the map without stopping, the list goes on and on, but the point is there was a time where they broke the game. Might’ve been awesome to be a part of, but it set the precedent of everyone that followed to try to break the game. The problem here is the way the game is now, that will never happen again.
2) Redfangs- I think this is where the precedent of PK d-elf came from. There are different versions of what happened, but one thing is for sure it centers around pk. The game is past the point of pk clans and it should be. The problem is those players didn’t just disappear, they went to other clans with the same mentality. Notably SLK...because they tough. Then there was an attempt to turn them into the Redfangs. I’ll get into that when I talk about documentation.
3) The gith war- This is a culmination of 1 and 2. With the added fail of having it centered around a magical clan and a anti-magic clan. I mean...what could go wrong there? Not to mention that was a combat oriented plot and gith were made playable. Too many moving parts and it ended up exactly like you would think it would....AIDS. What could’ve been a good thing, turned to absolute shit.

Now, there are other things like the closing of Tuluk, players who didn’t read the docs, etc. But those precedents really hurt D-elf play the most.

So let’s talk about the docs. When you think about d-elves the first thing that comes to mind is raiders. I don’t, but 90% of the playerbase does. That’s a problem. I also wouldn’t go down the rabbit hole of “they steal” it’s not that they steal; yes, they steal but it’s more so they steal because they’re opportunistic and they think they’re smarter and better than everybody else. So, you want someone’s boots? Literally stealing them is not your only option. Any other form of swindling is perfectly legit and even preferable because you want them to know you swindled them in the end. Very few players get that. It’s very hard to model that too because of precedent.

The docs needed to be rewritten as a part of the closing of Tuluk. First though, let’s look at the tablelands. There’s no real reason for a non elf to go there. Unless it’s for wezer poison or to skill up on the gith that spawn there and you’re going to do that off peak anyway, so the motive for going isn’t going to be to interact and role play anyway. There isn’t really a reason to go there, there’s no commodity that you would want that comes from there on a regular basis. That’s a problem, it wasn’t really connected to the world in any meaningful way.

If you looked at the two playable tribes, well I’d lump this problem in with the same problem human tribals have: they’re weak sauce. Because they’re weak sauce, people don’t stay in them very long to impact the game or even kick off a meaningful plot. Like with human tribals (trust me on this I’ve played a lot of both) the average retention rate is about two weeks for these clans. Part of that is the docs.

If you compared the Sunrunners’ docs to SLK it’s like reading a novel and reading a pamphlet. A quick glance at Sunrunner docs you have a pretty good idea of daily life, the structure of the clan, magic, etc. You read SLK’s docs? The matriarch of the clan magically fucks an anakore, has elven babies...but they hate magic? Not even earth magic? Really? Huh....you don’t make anything really, there isn’t much of a clan structure. You’re a child, you have a test, you’re an adult, you join a band, the band pretty much does what they want. It’s not hard to see why a clan like this ends up with a lot of people that want to pk. At best, what you can get from the docs are: you are a small, tough clan of survivors. You practice the ways of the anakore because he too uses stealth, cunning and is smart enough to pick his battles.
You’re a spartan of the desert that favors stealth. They’re basically the special forces of the desert. Are they ever played that way? No...they’re limited to the most boring part of the map.

Sunrunners suffer from the exact opposite. They can pretty much go anywhere, but nobody gives a shit about what they sell. Because they sell booze. So you mean to tell me... a tribe of merchants that worship the sun, they’re just known for booze? Not for making cloth that has fire resistant properties, not lightweight, yet breathable yet strong fabric that’s damned near bulletproof? Just booze...hm, ok. So they’re basically human tribals...selling shit nobody cares about and they fuck a lot, because why not? I always imagined them a humans that ran around with fake elf ears.

I can’t really talk about the new tribe. I hope it works out. I will share a couple of thoughts. I hope the docs for them gives them a reason to be a part of Allanak and I hope the docs for them explain what it is to be a d-elf. It’s time for a new precedent.

Combine the two races, make elves a karma-required race in general and retcon the city/elf- desert/elf separation nonsense. This would fix a lot of problems you find with elves in general. City elves are just as poorly played as their desert counterparts.

To me Two Moons represents the idea of combining city/desert elves into one race and letting them do whatever the fuck they wanna do. Which is what elves should be doing. Stealing/raiding/thieving/etc. all within a tribe period. There should be very few tribeless elves, in fact there should be none allowed from the PC side, it just makes things fucking difficult roleplay wise and it is also boring as hell.