Enabling Conflict

[BattleJenkins]

Something I do want to make clear - Dice, I certainly don't mean to imply that you did anything wrong in the Ariel / Arioso conflict! In fact, I would say that your response was absolutely perfect. It was 100% what I was going for. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that, codewise, I blew most if not all of Arioso's resources on sustaining that whole fiasco as far as I could, so perhaps he only seemed 'utterly destroyed' from my perspective and I read too much into it. I'm perfectly willing to accept that perhaps there really is no problem, and it wouldn't have been so dire as it seemed for him if I had the opportunity to have him build himself up again, but other things ended up taking precedent. I do hope I can get another try with him someday! It was a lot of fun.

[Mika]

From a gameplay perspective, the game seems to be having a difficult time with lawfuls playing hardball, hence the new recommend category. I don't want to lose our players who enjoy playing coverts or antagonists.

While we could certainly allow only resourceful people who are good at lying and being sneaky OOC to succeed, I like the idea of our players being allowed to play characters that can thrive in areas unfamiliar to the player too. This requires a lot of cooperation and flexibility from the rest of the playerbase. I like Dice's ideas a lot.

I come from rebel stock so I already perceive TI's crown as the "bad guy" - from my point of view, the theme/world already ensures that any kind of rebel character will be ultimately fruitless (we can't overthrow the crown as it would require an entire rewrite). Players who make "antagonists," like mages, know that they're gonna die from chargen. Why not give them a good run?

I'm all for encouraging more reactive and less proactive enforcers - there's already policy restrictions around "guessing" who might be behind something you don't have hard evidence for because it's so often a sort of accidental metagaming (in a city of 50,000 it would be much harder to guess, you'd have a lot more on your plate if we required you to work your character's day job, there just isn't the time and resources to focus on each individual).

[Pixie]

I don't think playing a covert character skillfully requires being good at lying or a sneaky person OOC. That feels a little (accidentally!) hurtful to folks who have played these types of characters to great effect. They aren't sneaky lying bastards OOC, right? They're just writing one into fiction.

At the end of the day, it will probably always require -some- level of artful maneuvering to write an antagonist into the game. The theme and setting are all about one group having all the power and hunting the other side down. When one group has all the power the other must be craftier to survive. This applies mostly to mages, but could be switched up and applied to most other things as well. Crown vs. dissidents, Brotherhood vs. Reeves, etc.

This does not mean that player leeway shouldn't be a thing. Everybody's delved into that already, though -- making reasonable allowances for story's sake, etc.

On reactive Reeves/Knights/etc: I do think it's a little stinky that one type of person is told to be reactive or not be considered a "team player", when the rest of the game is urged to do the opposite. Not just urged to do the opposite, but celebrated and rewarded for it. I do get that it's difficult to separate accidental-metagaming-style investigations from legitimate investigations. It's just strikes me as an odd polarity -- how we judge the way people "should" play, based upon which label their character has.

I really do understand Gerolf's frustration. When his character creates conflict for an antagonist he's railed against for stifling peoples' fun. When the antagonist creates conflict for him they're automatically considered to be engineering fun. This is a strange dichotomy. Going after the "bad guy" creates conflict for the bad guy. So long as it doesn't end in the antagonist's immediate death, they just had somebody do for them what they're celebrated for doing for others.

[Tremere]

I get really frustrated because I overlook things or don't actively pursue things when people are actively working against my characters and do it repeatedly so as to not shut them down, but I'm called weak for it. When I finally respond and go after someone because it's one step too far and I can't ignore it anymore or I feel like I'm trying to keep with theme and theme will be broken if I don't respond, I'm hurting other peoples fun. I think it's great to reward people for generating conflict, but I think that while the theme may be geared towards the establishment, the actual game and players are much more the other way and it's much more geared towards enabling/rewarding the antagonists than those who play the 'good guys'. The good guys get a lot of work with no reward and often aren't recommended for doing those things either. The 'bad guys' are much more likely to get recommends because people just find that more interesting.

I also find it rather insulting the attitudes that it's the good guys causing the problems for the bad guys all the time. Sometimes the bad guys just do something stupid like doing something bad in a room -full- of people with strong combat abilities. And frankly i wouldn't doubt it if most of the bad guys who get taken down aren't being taken down ultimately by the good guys, but by other bad guys who are undermining their rivals. Mages? I swear more mages are being sold out by other mages than Knights capturing them out in the wild.

I also have a concern that this attitude is going to encourage people who like to make chaos/conflict for its own sake but with no story benefit/development. The kind who will come out and just do something completely random that has no story follow up just to cause shit. I love drama, but I dislike the pointless stuff that doesn't further/develop story.

[Dice]

One thing that I think gets lost often, though, is the sheer discrepancy in power between sides. Lawfuls/protagonists (just using that term for the people on the 'good guy' side for ease/to parallel antagonist) almost always have access to backup and resources that antagonists can't possibly manage to pull together. Moreover, protagonists CAN act in broad daylight, whereas the slightest loss of secrecy is damaging or deadly to antagonists.

And last of all, the stakes. An antagonist 'winning' usually means they cause some trouble and get away alive with a small prize; a protagonist 'winning' usually means an antagonist suffers serious harm up to and including death. One response prolongs the conflict. One ends it.

So I don't think we -can- really treat the two sides the same, and I think it is fair to ask for some restraint on the lawful side - whenever restraint is logical/reasonable, anyway. It isn't meant to be an attack on anyone to suggest that! Just that I think there's some real room for accommodation to be had.

[Tremere]

I don't think it is wrong to accommodate that at all dice, but it feels like lately anyone who is on the 'lawful' side is getting hammered for not being more accommodating while getting hammered for not being more proactive about dealing with these threats. It's a really damned annoying catch 22 to be a part of. And people are talking about there being no incentive to play a bad guy (that's what this threat implies and what recent discussions have made) but I think there is less reason to play a lawful. You get no thanks for doing so or trying to stick with theme. Instead you get a lot of hate/work. It leads to a lot of burnout and struggles to keep lawful guilds staffed.

[Pixie]

One thing that I think gets lost often, though, is the sheer discrepancy in power between sides. Lawfuls/protagonists (just using that term for the people on the 'good guy' side for ease/to parallel antagonist) almost always have access to backup and resources that antagonists can't possibly manage to pull together. Moreover, protagonists CAN act in broad daylight, whereas the slightest loss of secrecy is damaging or deadly to antagonists.

And last of all, the stakes. An antagonist 'winning' usually means they cause some trouble and get away alive with a small prize; a protagonist 'winning' usually means an antagonist suffers serious harm up to and including death. One response prolongs the conflict. One ends it.

So I don't think we -can- really treat the two sides the same, and I think it is fair to ask for some restraint on the lawful side - whenever restraint is logical/reasonable, anyway. It isn't meant to be an attack on anyone to suggest that! Just that I think there's some real room for accommodation to be had.

As tends to be the case... everything Dice said makes perfect sense to me. As also tends to be the case, I have a response!

The two sides of conflict: Both responses -can- prolong conflict, so long as reasonable restraint comes into play (on both sides, even; it would be equally crappy to see it done from villain to hero, that just almost never happens). I think we all agree wholeheartedly that exercising reasonable restraint is the way to go, and that that restraint does apply primarily to the characters with all the theme-granted power. I just wince when every little thing a "lawful" character does is considered some stifling act of fun-squashing. If they aren't executing or seeking to execute the "bad guy", they're generating valuable conflict for the conflict-maker (and that's not to say seeking an execution is bad by any means; sometimes it's the way it goes), opening up an avenue for the antagonist to respond. I suppose that's the point I'm trying to make, here. Not that the stakes aren't different or that the people in power should wield that power without a care, but that when character death isn't necessarily part of the equation it's hard to see lawfuls deemed fun-ruiners for throwing conflict back at the antagonists.

Edit: Incidentally, I played a criminal character once. I was HORRIBLE at it. I couldn't even keep my policies straight long enough to commit a crime. But what burned me out wasn't my inability to keep track of policy or lawfuls being over the top hardasses -- it was the lack of a response from lawfuls at all. Nothing generates a want to rebel against the status quo like the status quo fighting against you, and we can't be so concerned with "winning" (whatever "winning" means for an antagonist role -- small prize or big prize) that we take someone acting against us as a reason to abandon ship. We need to encourage those in power to play their roles, too. It's boring without them!

[Mika]

I don't think playing a covert character skillfully requires being good at lying or a sneaky person OOC. That feels a little (accidentally!) hurtful to folks who have played these types of characters to great effect. They aren't sneaky lying bastards OOC, right? They're just writing one into fiction.

"clever enough to play a villain" is maybe a better way to put it =)

[Rabek]

* Don't proactively hunt down 'suspicious people' who might be criminals or heretics based off small things - focus on actual obvious cases of wrongdoing or major evidence;

* Avoid exaggerating the importance of crimes. I've often seen people stretch to construe something as treason, murder, or heresy to justify a serious punishment, and it's usually just when "so-and-so has annoyed me for too long!" While this is IC, it's just not a good idea.

These two are, I think, the biggest issues for me.

For the first, I'd tie it in also to metaknowledge. For example, if a magecrafted item doesn't allow retooling, I won't use it. I assume someone will recognize the item string and point it out and I'll be dead.

The second I think has gotten a little better, but for a while we had a spat of people getting branded as heretics for things that aren't heresy and were indeed far lesser crimes. Heresy isn't something that you build up to. Like "sin twenty times and now you're a heretic!" It's got its own definition as a sin. Upgrading crimes like that isn't super helpful for anyone on either side of the conflict line.

More quickly burns through the villains that the good guys can track down and makes the bad guys less willing to do even minor things.

That said, I think there's a difference between 'upgrading crimes just to remove threats' and 'playing to theme, which is somewhat brutal and harsh'. I'm okay with the latter. You catch a mage, you burn them. You catch a real heretic, you brand them. Murderer, hang them. And so on. It's when the minor crimes are punished the same as the major that we start having serious problems. Because then why ever do the minor crimes? Antagonism becomes basically a way to go out with a bang when you're bored of a character, nothing more. But pulling back from the theme and doing less than it demands is also doing a disservice to everyone.

[Tremere]

Heresy isn't something that you build up to. Like "sin twenty times and now you're a heretic!" It's got its own definition as a sin. Upgrading crimes like that isn't super helpful for anyone on either side of the conflict line.

I would argue the exact opposite here. Repeatedly committing higher level sins over and over again, refusing to repent/change your actions at all could be argued to be heresy. Not only that, but it's a fairly standard thing that if you keep repeating the same crimes your punishment goes up.