Knights vs Mages - Game Design

[Zeita]

My issue with this argument is that there seems to be this common misconception that playing a mage is about being a mustache twirling villain and "awwing the masses" when in truth that isn't what playing one is supposed to be about. Magery is supposed to be this thing you keep secret and live in paranoia about because the Order will eventually come for you. It's about fearing for your loved ones and knowing you will likely eventually end up at the pyre.

Thematically, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to cast magic publicly in the RELIGIOUS CENTER OF THE KNOWN WORLD. You should be wary of casting publicly. You shouldn't expect to be able to be openly a mage and survive. You should be working in the shadows forming cabals or fostering underground communities.

Being a mage, thematically, isn't about being flashy. It's about surviving in a cruel world that inherently rejects you.

I want to quote this and say a big +1. Chronodbu is pretty much spot on with my own point of view on this.

[Geras]

Suggestion that I think would satisfy everyone:

Could the ash just be made to have a built in 15% failure chance (before considering defenses) and a cooldown/immunity for a brief period?

I think that would strike a balance between mages being too strong and Knights being able to act too much with impunity. Dealing with a mage should be scary, even if you're *probably* going to come out on top.

And maybe ashes should decay after a period of time? (Dunno about that one)

In terms of "catching" people though - I think it would be nice of both lawful and unlawful types had more tools to get each other under control.

[Tasker]

Suggestion that I think would satisfy everyone:

Could the ash just be made to have a built in 15% failure chance (before considering defenses) and a cooldown/immunity for a brief period?

I think that would strike a balance between mages being too strong and Knights being able to act too much with impunity. Dealing with a mage should be scary, even if you're *probably* going to come out on top.

And maybe ashes should decay after a period of time? (Dunno about that one)

In terms of "catching" people though - I think it would be nice of both lawful and unlawful types had more tools to get each other under control.

It's quite hard to use as it is, and seems to be prevented from use in certain dire situations due to unknown IC reasons of which the Order is not aware of. I don't think there is any issue of Knights acting with too much impunity, as that hasn't really been demonstrated in recent times considering the point of this thread.

Ashes do decay after a certain ammount of time also! So they can't really be stockpiled for rainy days, and the method in which you get them is very hard also. They are really not a common item, in my entire time on TI I've never heard or seen or their use prior to the last few weeks.

I'm not sure what you mean by get eachother under control? More restraints or something?

[Rabek]

I wouldn't be fond of a 15% fail rate simply because it doesn't quite make sense. I'd rather balancing be done to fit lore rather than lore changing to fit balancing.

That said, I always thought mage ashes had to coat a thing to block magic (which is why the river square is anti-magic, as are a few jail rooms), rather than just making any contact whatsoever. Having something that can block magic with a single command doesn't seem very thematic. Mages are meant to be feared. Having Knights coat themselves in ash before confronting a powerful mage would be a far more interesting and thematic use than dusting, I think. We already have several drugs for rendering mages useless after being caught.

My ideal balance point, in the end, is having mages need to be clever and/or outnumber their target to succeed, while fighting a Knight on even footing should always end in the mage losing. Any other state of affairs works against the very base theme of Inquisition. That is: rooting out hiding mages. If mages don't have to hide to succeed, then this concept falls apart.

I dislike a lot of the reworked Air spells for this reason; they're geared almost entirely to being very showy and public, which isn't what TI magic should be in my opinion. Other elements don't have the same problem, at least not to the same degree. Indeed, Fire was reworked in the opposite direction; it used to be very direct and combative, and it was reworked to work more subtly and require cleverness in application.

[Andruid]

Isn't it written right into the major help file on magic that it can be temperamental and unpredictable? So .. isn't there being a random/unpredictable nature to things on theme/point? Should things magically always go exactly as you want them to?

That help file was placed in to make changes on magic --for balance reasons-- easier to explain IC and not as part of theme: it has always been difficult to, one day know how to cast a spell then not know how to cast it the next day, players were uncertain on how to address that in the game so the help file was added. I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong.

Randomizing the timer is pretty much like saying that when someone swings a weapon there is a chance of it recoiling and smacking their face. 8/10, people won't bother trying to use those unless they want to compute things for whatever reasons.

I mean, if you want unexpected results from magic why bother with trying to balance the moons to get what you want in the first place?

As for the output of ashes, I'll take the heat and say I was the one who put forth the idea. One first and foremost for realism to the role play that no human produces just a single handful of ashes - a search reveals it's something usually more like 4 to 6 lbs.

You're not wrong. I wrote the helpfile in question. Before retirement, my last mage, at one point, knew every spell in the game, and as staff began to do more spell balancing, I would come back from the occasional hiatus and find myself in a situation (sometimes a risky one, even!) trying to use a spell that my character mysteriously no longer knew. It was frustrating, and I had no guidance on how to explain the sudden loss of spells ICly. After chatting with a couple of long-time staffers, I wrote that helpfile to help explain the changes IC and to make sure that myself and others could transfer OOC/RL feelings of frustration into legitimate IC emotions. In other words, I'd rather roleplay a stymied mage than be an irritated player. :)

The change to the exploding orbs is for the best, IMO. They were crazy overpowered. Being able to drop two watermelons into a crowd and put everyone in the room in negative HP was far too easy with a set timer. The risk-to-reward ratio was not balanced. The changes seem entirely appropriate for the item in question and with respect to magic lore. Mages already have a lot of annoying things they can do to people from afar without getting caught -- I don't think easily blowing everyone to smithereens needs to be one of them.

I like Rabek's comments about theme/lore and balance.

I can't really comment on the topic of ashes, but having played both sides of the Knight/Order-Mage fence (sometimes at once), I do think that playing a mage can be just as huge of an investment in time and energy as playing a Knight or Orderite. They're both time-consuming and risky roles, and I think we all need to respect that on an OOC level, no matter what sort of character we're currently playing. Additionally, playing a character in a leadership or in-demand position is doubly exhausting and can often be thankless, despite being so crucial to the game. So please recommend your fellow players often, especially when they respond to your hooks and mail and messengers and help further your own stories.

[Klapman]

In my opinion, the wrong questions are being asked here. This isn't a question of game design so much as it is a question of what kind of game The Inquisition is meant to be. Is it a game where we're meant to tell stories together, or a game that is possible to win? It can't be the latter, because there is no scenario in which a Mage win will actually be declared. The Grand Inquisitor has been killed before. The Earl Marshall has been killed before. The Vault has been robbed before. There is nothing left that can be done to destroy the Order that hasn't already been done. Even the Cardinal has been ousted from their position by the acts of Mages, if only obliquely.

I think the reason so many people in the Order are having trouble with the Mages in the past few months is simple - the Mages can't win thematically, but within the game itself they're kicking absolute ass. That is an enormous disconnect, and not one that can be easily swept under the rug. It is not a question of whether Knights are strong or weak, or if Mages are the same - the question is why can't the Mages win? And if they can't win, why should they be strong? If it's the strength of magic that makes people want to play Mages, then those are exactly the types of people who really shouldn't be filling villain roles anyways.

Villains in stories are allowed to do everything they can to win because it is a story told by one person. Every action they take is considered by the author to further the theme of the story, to bring the hero to some resolution, or to add flavor to the world. Villains that exist only as a negative force do not work in RP games. Villains in this scenario need to have a deep understanding, not only of their own characters, but of the characters of others as well. As it is now, the Mages just keep decapitating the heads of the Order, and there is no point in doing so.

If you look at it solely from an IC perspective, they might have done nothing wrong. After all, the characters in this story would obviously think that killing the Earl Marshall would have an effect, yes? But that explanation is flimsy after a while. When Benicio was killed back in August or whatever, it was an amazing moment. The Archbishop of Lithmore, dead. It was huge character development for a lot of people, and it was great. I have absolutely zero problems with how that turned out. But that's because, at the end of the day, Archbishop just isn't that important of an OOC role. You can lose that level of leadership and only really have an IC effect.

Then Toroni was killed. This death I think was spurred almost entirely by the feeling of "It was awesome last time, man!", but it had an extremely damaging effect on the game. Toroni was extremely good at all the paperwork and such, and at that point the Inquisitors were already severely undermanned. At that point it was, quite literally, just Renton and Toroni as Inquisitors. With Toroni's death, it all fell to Renton. I was Renton's player, and I applied for the role of Inquisitor maybe an OOC month before all of the Magebane business went down. I was still learning how to do the job, both ICly and OOCly. My concept for Renton was to be an evil bastard of an Inquisitor, to be absolutely in love with the torture, and to basically have barely hidden his taint all these years until he was finally in a position to inflict some real harm upon people. He was a straight up villain. Suddenly I was forced to abandon that concept.

"Why?" I hear you ask. "That just means your character finally has all the power they desire, and they can finally do their evil bits, right?" On the surface, yes. But that is if you are forcing yourself to only look at things from an IC angle. That is normally laudable, but the more important your character becomes in the game, the more you have to consider the effects you have upon the game itself. As a low level Inquisitor, Renton would have been an example of how even evil people can become powerful figures in the Church, given a vicious and capable enough mind. As the Grand Inquisitor of Lithmore, if he'd acted that way, nobody would have been able to supersede his orders except for an NPC Cardinal. He would have had absolutely no checks, save that for a Staff controlled character.

In that case, we would have had an Order that is even less palatable to the general playerbase. As it is now it can be spooky to play with Orderites, but if Renton had remained that evil conniving son of a witch, it would have been far, far worse. And the thing is, I wouldn't have minded that - except that the Mages cannot win the damned game. If they could have spurred the people against Renton and taken over the Church by demonizing him, by showing the absolute folly of the Church in accepting his evil ways and promoting him to such a lofty position, I would have found that absolutely enthralling. But that couldn't happen.

Now what could have happened is that the Mages could have simply killed Renton after he proved himself to be a seriously bad egg. The only reason I had a problem with that outcome is that Renton was it. If Renton died, there would be literally zero Inquisitors on grid. A full half of the Order would be effectively broken, but ICly we wouldn't be able to acknowledge it as such. And that's the biggest problem right now - the ideal strength of the Order, versus the reality.

So now we come to the most recent death, Gothan. In the void left behind by both myself and the previous Earl Marshall, one guy was able to stand up and properly fill a strong role both ICly and OOCly as the leader of the Order. He was not only willing to play a good guy, he actually loved doing it. He was able to present an ideal version of the Order, one that people found interesting to play with. He was able to create a bedrock of RP where I failed, and while I thought Gothan's character was fairly archetypal, I couldn't deny that it was absolutely fantastic for the game. Then he just kinda got murdered. Why? I dunno, to create some shock value? "Oh no, what do we do now the Earl Marshall's gone?"

It's such a half-assed sort of villainy, and one that I find absolutely dull. Nothing has been added - it's just been taken away. Gothan could have been kidnapped, twisted, tortured into something other than he was. He could have been possessed, forced to give contradictory orders that left the Order in constant disarray, all the easier to pick off some of the younger members of the Order. He could have at least been captured and prepared for sacrifice to summon a Greater Demon, something that would be interesting.

Whenever I play a villain, I always see myself as Indiana Jones trying to steal the treasure from the pressure plate. If I take the prize, I need to quickly replace it with something else. It doesn't have to have equal value, but it does need to have equal weight. If I am ending one storyline, I need to be creating another at the same time. The Magebane in which Benicio died was a perfect example of this - yes, Benicio died, and that was sad. But it actually created some positive character development for Renton and, indeed, many others in the Order. In fact, despite the fact that Benicio was an awesome character, you could make a fairly compelling argument that more RP hooks were had as a result of his death than if he'd continued to live on through Magebane.

But when Toroni died, nothing was added. We just lost someone who was willing and able to do the extremely difficult job of Grand Inquisitor. And in Gothan's death, it's happened yet again. Conflict is necessary, yes - but only thoughtful conflict is going to have a positive effect on the game. If you want to be one of the major players in the game, and you really want what's best for it, you need to stop thinking in terms of "My guy would do this." and start thinking "What would be the most interesting result of this scenario that works within my character's motivations?"

Anyway, that's my million words on the subject. I hope this helps to add a new discussion. The balance of the game is not the issue here, it's the intent of the game. If the intent is to be able to win the game, then TI is failing. If it is to tell a compelling story, then the players are failing. It's up to us to decide which one is more important.

P.S. It might come across in this post that I consider the RP aspect to be most important. That's true. But that doesn't mean I'm against TI becoming more of a game! I just hate the limbo state we're in now, where the Mages really ought to be winning but can't under any circumstances seal the deal. If there were resets every time one side won, with varying victory conditions each time, I'd find that extremely interesting. The problem is, then those people who don't find the Order v Mage theme to be interesting fall by the wayside. But I don't think there's any solution to this problem that's not going to alienate someone. As it is now, it seems everyone is equally unsatisfied. That's more damaging to the game in the long term than a definitive stance one way or the other.

[Voxumo]

I have to agree with this in the most basic form of the message it is trying to deliver. Don't kill just for the sake of killing, for more rp can generally be gained from a lack of death than a death can offer. Generally, not always, but generally.

However I don't agree with how you are making it out to be only the mages at fault here. There have been many mages who try to bring rp to others, and who are swiftly shut down, on the basis of "It's our job to kill them." Yes mages may not be such an important role as EM or GI, but I'm looking beyond the roles here, and going "Hmm, this person provides solid rp for others, and not just people in their circle." No matter the role or person, people should really take a second and think "Will this death really benefit the game?"

Also just for the people in general who believe mages should stick to the shadows and throw their magic at people from a distance. Sure yeah, that sounds good in theory. But guess what, when a mage casts magic from afar, it generally creates immediate rp, and thus xp, for the victim. Typically it doesn't create rp for the mage, at least not in such an immediate way. But then again I don't know what I'm expecting. People complained when mages didn't have a presence, and people are complaining when mages do.

[Klapman]

I can only speak from my personal experience on this one, I'm afraid - I'm not a longtime player, and in the time I've been playing it's been largely Mages on offense. I'm sure that which side is at fault changes depending on which side has more power. I promise you, if I was seeing this in the Order I'd be railing against them. The onus to control the game is on whichever side happens to be on top. If the Order were superior, I'd be talking about how they don't need to go after every single clue in order to snuff out a meager Mage presence, and that it would make a lot more sense for their characters to be a bit laxer than normal due to their obvious superiority.

And honestly, I do consider Mages to be of relatively the same importance to the EM and GI, if they're highly ranking enough. In fact, I'd consider them even more important. If they've managed to gather a bunch of people under their rule as Mages, they've managed to create a system of government that is entirely independent of the game's "rules". When an Earl Marshal or Grand Inquisitor dies, it's a given that they'll be replaced eventually. Not so with the Mages - at least I think so, with the advent of the Manus that might've changed. In that sense, it is doubly important for the Order to be cognizant of how important that character is to the Mages. They should read the situation as best they can OOCly, and decide whether or not it might be more interesting to slip up and let the Mage go.

The problem is, as of right now the Mages are on top - and they're not going easy. This might sound callous to the effort of others, but it would have been far healthier for the game to go after a Page or a Squire, maybe even a Knight. But Gothan as Earl Marshall was the bedrock of the Order. The Order itself provides some general context, be good and knightly and kill mages and whatnot, but Gothan spent a lot of time and effort OOCly trying to bring people together and get the Order to work. In many ways he was succeeding, but he simply wasn't given enough time.

All in all, I am not on the side of the Order, and I'm not on the side of the Mages. Ideally, I'd have both sides be extremely powerful and working as hard as they can to absolutely fucking wreck the other. I'm on the side of RP, as I'd imagine everyone is. What I'm trying to say is that we can't pretend this system doesn't have limitations. We can work within them, but it has to be understood that any Mage victory is going to be temporary unless the game is completely rethemed. The theme of this game allows for a lot, but it doesn't have any silver bullets for a resistance to strike. There are no Death Stars to destroy or Emperors to defeat, no single codifier of opposition on either side that will mean the death of the faction, and that must be recognized in order for this RP to continue being interesting.

e: I came up with a flowery metaphor. Let's say that TI is one big wrestling match, with one side being led by Babyface McAmericanHero, and the other led by Killhell Satan. The lesser forces of these two titans fight eachother in match after match, building up a momentum that threatens to shake the wrestling heavens. And then these two get in the ring. Babyface McAmericanHero starts working the crowd, pumping them up, getting them hyped, ready for the championship match of the century, and then Killhell Satan breaks script and uses a secret move he'd spent hundreds of hours practicing to pin Babyface in about three seconds flat. The match is over, the announcers try to play it off as best they can, but at the end of the day everyone's leaving disappointed. Killhell then shrugs and goes "Well I'm supposed to be the bad guy man, what can ya do". Now nobody watches wrestling anymore - even though in that moment, it was more real than it had ever been, because despite it being real... It was also completely boring.

I'm not here to be real and try to win, I'm here to tell interesting and funny stories with cool people that have roughly the same interests. When I'm interested in winning, I play Rocket League.

[vaxin]

I'm typing this on my phone, so please excuse me if my response isn't as cogent or eloquent as your posts, Klapman. I think you raise interesting and valid points, but you're missing information.

Both of your examples were directly as a result of my and a couple of others' roleplay, so let me see if I can shed some light onto why we took the admittedly drastic step of Pkill. First off, I kidnapped Toroni, tortured and branded him, and gave him to a court demon to possess. I don't know if there is much more RP evil that I can subject someone too. I wasn't consulted on the decision to finish him, and I probably would have agreed that it was a silly thing to do for the health of the game, but I can see why the player who did it, did. I won't speak for them.

Gothan I did kill, and it was not because of his role. It didn't matter that he was Earl Marshall. Rather, there was personal roleplay that demanded his death in no uncertain terms. It was vindictive but justified and totally in character, with Gothan receiving plenty of IC warning that he was a target of my character. Perhaps it was bad for the balance of power between Knights and mages, but frankly I'm not responsible for that balance. Staff is, and that's why I support their efforts to bring things back into order, though I disagree with the way it's being done.

I've played Hotae, Vaxin, Caen, and Nalien over a span of almost two years now. All have been powerful mages that could have killed most anyone. I've killed three people and assisted in the killing of maybe three more. Just because it looks like mages are killing with no reason doesn't mean they are.

[Geras]

So given how out of touch I am with developments in magic since magecraft came in, and given my notorious pacifism/caution on my mage take this all with a grain of salt, but...

Klapman's post is a troubling and worthwhile one (maybe worthwhile of its own thread). I think there's an issue in general with these sorts of games that no matter what the exact balance is, very long lived characters can get much more powerful than any newcomer can hope to. In my day with Manus it was people like Ariel and Jei who I knew could probably wreck me in a second. They're gone. If the pendulum has swung the other way, then that should be addressed, and ash or other countermeasures made to be more reliable (though not a sure thing). I think in general having more variance/randomness to combat outcomes too can help make sure established toons aren't able to act with impunity on either side.

I would say this too - I don't think there's a problem with successful Orderite/lawful type rerolling another Orderite. It's been done. I've done it with mages. Just because one toon dies doesn't meant you can't make another that fills a similar role. I'd encourage people to do that.

My philosophy as Rubeus was that of a gardener - pruning troublesome parts of the Order, but not attacking the organism as a whole. I took that to too much of an extreme - my guildhall was secure, so there weren't many ways for the Order to cause real problems for me, and therefor relatively little reason for me to act. I think there's a worthwhile distinction to be made here though, which is to not target the OOC functioning of the Order. Icly the organization is huge. Killing 1-2 Inquisitors does sweet crap all to the Order ICly. OOCly though, when the Order only has 2 active members... yah, the game takes a blow. Sure there's vNPCs doing whatever in the background, but there's no actual players making sure cases get dealt with. I think that's something people should consider in their decisions - attacking a couple Orderites doesn't do real IC damage but it does do real OOC damage.

I also think there's nothing wrong with saying to someone during a scene "how would you feel about a PK here?" It's fine to leave someone badly wounded instead of killing them. It's ok for attacks to fail.