Allanak vs. Tuluk [Let's get it on!]

[dwiniel]

Need conflict? Bardic competitions between the bards of Tuluk and Allanak!

[jstorrie]

I disagree with the whole 'we need more conflict' frame of mind.  There does not always need to be overt conflict to drive this game, and any conflict will arise naturally through player- and imm-run plots, without any need of this sort of prodding.

[Anonymous]

Vox,

Although I would scarcely want to be the victim of inter-city prejudice, it seems to me that your ideas hold merit.

I shall make the attempt to mistreat persons from foreign cities, with the understanding that it will increase your enjoyment of the game.

-sjanimal

[Anonymous]

Raiding.
It sounds easy. Don't kill in a city, it doesn't matter.

(How it really is, from what I've seen pcs do)
Raid in the north, Tuluk hunts you down as a whole.
Raid near Luir's Outpost, Kurac hunts you down as a whole.
Raid in the southlands, few high enough give a damn.


When you make each city care about only protecting what is in that city, it gets VASTLY more dangerous in the wilderness.

The only way to be a succsessful raider, is to kill each and every pc you raid.
If you leave any alive, you create only enough RP fun until Tuluk or Luir's or Allanak's pcs find out, then you die. End of story.

Just raid in the damn cities, kill 10 people, noone will care.
Attack and let one live out of a city, you had better disappear until every living pc dies.

Smart raiding doesn't work, because you can't live off of raiding.
Try as you may. One botch in your target lands, you had better disappear for a very loong time. It doesn't even matter what you are wearing anymore. Because if you have 1 tattoo, which if you are a raider, you probably have a few. If any of them are in your description, you die.

Rage venting aside.

I'm all for telling those barbarian Tulukians to go back and skrew there mother... era... kank. or Telling those Skinnies to run for cover. Nothing worse then a longneck from the opposite city.

[Angela Christine]

Smart raiding doesn't work, because you can't live off of raiding.  

Like I said, in the context of this thread it is about making a statement, not making money.  These raiders are not desperate criminals trying to make a living, they are patriots fighting the good fight.  Think privateers, not pirates.

The description thing gets plenty of hype, but in this case it is almost irrelivent.  Your description only matters if people capable of hurting you get to see you in a place where they are stronger than you are.  Suppose you are a Naki raiding party working near Tuluk.  You rob and humiliate a lumberjack, who runs back home with your description, and tells it to everyone he sees.  So what?  You will NEVER be in Tuluk, so it doesn't matter if everyone there knows what you look like.  When there start to be patrols around the city and things get too hot to handle, you go back home to Allanak for a couple weeks.  If you aren't seen for a week or two most PCs will assume you have died.

So how do you make your living?  Be creative.  If you don't want to be creative, just try hunting.  While you are wanding around the wilderness looking for victims you can bag a few critters, the hides will cover your expenses.  When you can't go up north (or south) because people are looking for you, then hunt animals near your hometown.  If you want to be wily, have your merry band pretend to be simple grebbers and craftsmen, who know a little about fighting just so they can defend themselves.  Stone carvers are big burly fellows, so are miners.  A group that includes a stone carver, a jewelery maker, a fletcher and a tool maker will collectively be able to use almost every single stone they find, which is a effcient way to get middle-class quick.  That gives you things to do between raids, so that you can space your raids far enough apart to make rousing the entire city to hunt you pretty much useless.  (If you are working out of the north, you can add a woodworker or replace the stoneworker with a woodworker, if you want).


Raiding does work, just ask the Black Moon raiders.  Oh, wait, you can't ask them because they were so damned effective that they were removed, they had more power than their IC numbers and position warented.  Or ask the terrorists/freedom fighters of the Liberation, whose raiding activities were so effective that they had to sacrifice a camp to prevent the Allanaki hoards from scouring the forest looking for them before they were ready for the final push.  Oh yeah, baby, raiding works.  

1. Don't work alone, or with just one other guy.  Raiding alone is for suckers.  Dead suckers.

2. Don't piss in your own back yard, because you'll need a safe place to fall back on.


AC

[Edited to fix typo: "blackwing" where it should have been "blackmoon."  Thanks Callisto.]

[Callisto]

Raiding does work, just as the Blackwing.

I think you mean the Black Moon raiders.

[path]

i thought a slowly implimented variation in the nothern/southern spoken sirishish would be cool.

that is to say, if you were in the north and from the south, you understanding of the language would be brought down a notch. progressively, over the next year or two, until the languages were quite different, though not completely - ever.

take for example as a long term goal the difference between Portuguese and Spanish.

just an idea i had.

also, it could be cool if - when crashing in a tavern not of your hometown you had to pay, a very marginal fee, but one none-the-less. this idea has been hashed around a lot, but i'm not sure if it's ever been brought up in this way. i think it would make traveling to other cities and outposts more realistically an expensive venture.

[da mitey warrior]

Angela Christine's idea is simply brilliant.  It's the perfect way to add tension and stir up conflict in the game.  Bravo.

Privateers all the way.

[Anonymous]

Playing a raider seems to go two basic ways on Arm.

1) You miss. Magickally some nobody that you missed becomes important enough to spread a rumor of exactly what you look throughout the nearest city (ic board). Regardless of how many times you change cloaks, clothes, facewraps, masks, etc., people magickally figure out exactly who you are (using tricks of the code), and you get killed.

2) Your group gets too powerful and is killed off, blocked, or thwarted by the imms. Why? Because the group's IC power surpassed their position OOC, or in the big picture, so to speak.

Find me a way around these problems and I'm all ears.

Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Let's not forget whining about RP. That goes like this...

1) The raider came in and didn't emote once and attacked me.

2) Raider says I'm tired of fucking people running the second someone enters their room. Or, I was using secret RP that the victim didn't see, and it was RP'd plenty.

Tips around how to RP raiding and conflict so it's fun/fair for both attacker and victim is another issue. I don't have the answers but maybe you do.

[wizturbo]

Playing a raider seems to go two basic ways on Arm.

1) You miss. Magickally some nobody that you missed becomes important enough to spread a rumor of exactly what you look throughout the nearest city (ic board). Regardless of how many times you change cloaks, clothes, facewraps, masks, etc., people magickally figure out exactly who you are (using tricks of the code), and you get killed.

2) Your group gets too powerful and is killed off, blocked, or thwarted by the imms. Why? Because the group's IC power surpassed their position OOC, or in the big picture, so to speak.

Find me a way around these problems and I'm all ears.

Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Let's not forget whining about RP. That goes like this...

1) The raider came in and didn't emote once and attacked me.

2) Raider says I'm tired of fucking people running the second someone enters their room. Or, I was using secret RP that the victim didn't see, and it was RP'd plenty.

Tips around how to RP raiding and conflict so it's fun/fair for both attacker and victim is another issue. I don't have the answers but maybe you do.

About raiding :  

This is a very difficult role to play properly.  The reasons for it are pretty simple, your -going- to be accused of being a twink.  You have to roleplay SOOOO well, to be able to ward off the attacks that your a PKing twink that most players aren't skilled enough to handle it.  

Also, raiders are hated.  Your going to be hunted down.  Yes, virtually there are lots of raiders and the law can't handle all of them nor does it care to, but your not virtual.  And the powers that be are going to look towards you to be their 'crack down on raiders' effort.

About the "running" part:

I'm sorry, but out in the lawless desert the first thing anyone intelligent who see's someone approach is going to run, or draw a weapon and prepare to defend themselves.  Have you seen the movie Lord of the Rings 2 at the very beginning?  How Aragorn and his party were approached with spears circling them immediately?  Thats how it works.  People who are smart take no risks out in the lawless wastelands.  If your not approaching via stealth, EXPECT to have people flee immediately.  I know, choosing a guild with stealth might mean... *gasp* .... you might not win in a straight up fight against a tough warrior "nobody".  But raiding isn't supposed to be safe.  Its probably one of the most dangerous professions.

[Armaddict]

I'll always remember the raiding scene where I was playing a half-giant, with a dwarf leader.

We raided someone, I got to subdue them, and was told to scare him.  I reacted to this by shaking the living shit out of the dwarf I was holding, and then raising him to my eye level to ask, "Hey, you scared?"

It resulted in the raidee joining the raider band.

Raiding can be plenty of fun to role-play, but -both- parties have to be willing to play along with things that happen, and not whine about things -not going their way-.  That is the -only- reason people whine after a raiding scene.

I, personally, would like to see -more- raiding.  Seems to me it would be a common occupation for those living rarely in the cities, who spend a lot of time out in the wilderness.

People are just too damn friendly, heh.

[kelviksson]

TO whoever said that raiding, you can't live off of, What the heck do you think teh vikings lived on? They raided. Raiding does work I have tried it. And if you want some conflict, why don't you just have a radical group start lynching people in allanak from the north and killing everyone not foreign to there home eh'? It can all be player driven to feud events and battles, just depends what way ya go about it.

[Larrath]

The Vikings do not raid Allanak or Tuluk.  Yes, the giant multitudes of VNPC raiders exist everywhere, but they don't really terrorize anyone with their non-attacks.

Raiding *can* work, but it is many times more difficult than what it realistically should be.  Let's say that there are about four hundred raiders that live around Allanak.  These people can probably walk back and forth into the streets, and if they left someone alive that's fine.  Nobody is going to care about some two-bit farmer and his trouble.


Now let's talk on a PC level, because this is the situation described here.
You are a raider who operates with, let's say for the heck of it, two others.  You find someone sitting around in the desert, and you approach them.  Your character is wearing a hooded duster, a mask and a face-wrap on top of that mask, as well as camoflauge gear that you only use when raiding.  You also have a red dot tattooed on your left shoulder.

You approach Amos hunter, and he immediately looks at you and spams his way back to the city.  You return the following day, after changing all of your clothes, riding in on different mounts and from the opposite gate.  You enter a tavern and suddenly find that the entire city (the rumor board) is yelling and screaming about a blue-eyed, spiky haired half-elf raider with a red dot tattooed on his shoulder who is terrorizing the city-state.
Wait a minute.  Weren't you wearing a mask and a face-wrap, and had a hood?  And how can he see your shoulders from that far away and through all your gear?  It doesn't matter, because Templar Joe just decided that he had enough of these raiders, and that he is going to make an example to them all by taking *your* PC and killing them.
And there goes your character before you had a chance to raid anyone.  Your partners wouldn't matter because catching someone running through, assuming you do not have a command typed in already, is very difficult.

Assuming that you do manage to find this character and kill him before he contacts someone or reaches the city, you will probably find a GDB post about twink raiders.


A radical group is possible and a good thing, but it is not a a regular raider.  In fact, as AC stated before, someone from Allanak who killed ten Tulukis would not a criminal, but possibly a hero.  Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the Templarate would give him a medal for doing something like that.

[Gesht]

- - I think the best way to increase conflict can be summed up in two sentences.

1.  Gear a couple noble clans in each city towards actively committing acts of violence, espionage, and sabotage on the other city.

2. Increase trade.

- - The first is simple for increasing conflict. Require that all of these actions utilize PC agents, and mostly target other PCs.  These clan PCs then enforce the anti-other city sentiment when around other PCs.  The rumors of what is going on would also give the environment a less friendly field.  Sadly, this does require a lot of thinking out behind the scenes, to avoid imbalances in the game.

- - Trade is good.  More trade is more gooder.  In an ideal playerbase, I think automated tariffs would be a great idea.  However, independent PCs with money tend to spread it around, which keeps more small-timers alive.  The longer a character is around, the more nuances a player can perfect. Things like talking pleasently to a foreign trader whose 'sid is keepin you fed, but whom you imagine getting ravaged by a confused kank.  Besides, it's more fun to simply give templars the nod to squeeze a little more blood from yon silk-clad foreigner than have NPCs hitting you up for cash.

- - I think trade could be improved by limiting availabilty of materials, and introducing more trade items. I introduced seasonnings and severely limited their availability. Sadly, the small number of cheap seasonnings and the lack of knowledge of them by players has caused them to have a small impact on in-game trade.

- - While I don't think your (Vox) original suggestions would increase conflict, I do believe they'd give travelers a much better foreign feel.  Number 1, unfortunately, cannot be done, but would make things interesting.  I'd say Nenyuk should be all right with giving you your money's worth if it's sitting in their foreign bank, but give you a crummy exchange rate if you bring foreign cash to one of their banks for a simple exchange.  Number 2 would be better if local merchants simply ripped off people with foreign accents by upping their prices.