Making Commoner RP

[flurry]

Maybe I'm being thick.  Tavern-clans?

It was an idea that someone (I forget who) started a thread on in the Clans forum, maybe about a year ago(?).

Basically, instead of just NPC employees, the tavern would function as a kind of working-class PC clan.   Bartenders, servers, entertainment, cooks, etc.  It would be neat to see a clan like this, or even two in competition.  (My comment about the Sanctuary was just that I thought a tavern like this might be an incentive to draw people away from the Sanc).

Maybe someone with a better memory than me can add to what I've said, but I think that's the basic idea.  Maybe it's a step above what Rindan was getting at in the original post, but it would be a notch below the noble and great merchant houses.

[amoeba]

First I apologize the length of the post, hopefully you'll stick through it.

I'll still stick to my argument that conflict more easily moves down the ladder than up. In the extreme example, nobody else at all is going to care about two sidless rinthers fighting over pieces of bread. Lots of people will likely be paid or coerced or otherwise encouraged to care about struggles between two wealthy and influential people. The higher up you go, the farther the seeds can scatter down to.

I think what you are describing is more of a symptom rather than a cause.  I think that both sides of this argument are a bit oversimplified. Hopefully I can clarify my points. For this argument I want to talk about substained and meaningful conflict, not as ale six stated "two sidless rinthers fighting over pieces of bread".  Interpersonal conflict does not nesessarily lead to anything larger than two people arguing.  For the sake of this discussion, that is not what I am refering to.

First lets look at what the common commodity required for conflict to thrive. I would argue that this is information.  If a noble pays an assassin to whack a different noble what is really of value here is not sid, but rather information.  Certainly the money is the IC motivator, but in terms of what makes the game enjoyable it is the information that the noble passed on to the assassin that is truly of value.  With the act of passing this information down, another person has been involved in the plot, another set of variables has been introduced.  

As with any commodity, it is the rarity of the commodity from which it derives it's value.  I think everyone will agree if the fact that assassin x was contracted by noble x to kill noble y was posted on the tavern boards, then that commodity becomes worthless.  On the flip side, if that information is horded, it is not as valuble as it could be.  It needs to be invested, used to it's maximun potential.  Taking our example, if a spy overheard the conversation betwen the nobel and the assassin, then our information has payed off a dividend, namely more information to be used.  

So, we have determined that information has to get out to further conflict, but not too much so as to degrade it's value.  If you think about it, one of the major qualites of this mud is the importaince that is placed on keeping secrets, secret.  Now that I have bored you with this, let me go on as to why this matters in terms of this discussion.

Why is it that conflict seems to trickle from the top down? In simple terms, they have more information than Joe Blow hunter on the street.  They are weathly with information.  They have far more access.

If you look conflict in this way you will notice that this can be very easily driven bottom up.  A very knowledged rinthi scum could be a powerhouse of secrets.  If he spends that information wisely, a nothing could easily drive many interesting plots.  The diference here is that if this indivudual dies, his information dies with him.  In the top down organizations, the information is more often passed down, inherited if you will.  This is what I mean by the collective memories, it is really accumulated information.

Now leadership (in an ooc sense)  plays into this as well.  A good leader knows how to spend this information wisely, he also knows more importiantly how to make new information to be used.  Take the assassin example, in this, the noble *creates* this information.   I have seen cases where information was mishandled, often ignored, left unused until it died of atrophy.  I have also seen the type who were greedy with information. They saw a cool new plot, and didn't want to tell anyone else, so it could belong to just them.  They horded it and it never gained in value. A great leader knows how to manage secrets well.

There is also the issue of access.  Face it, an anti-social hunter living mostly in the wilds has considerably less information to spend than a house aide.  However a hunter could create information. If a hunter goes to raid someone along the road, and the person survives. Inforamtion, a potential plot was created.  If the hunter just kills the party outright, it's a zero sum gain.  Once aagin an active, agressive raider that makes mistakes will generate far more plots than a passive loner hunter.

I know this all sounds rather acedemic, but I think it is importiant to understand that in terms of game dynamics, information is what matters, not economics so much.  An assassin could be hired by a noble for 20 large for a hit, but a starving rhithi could offer 3 slices of bread to a low end assassin to kill an enemy. The sid is irrelevant, the passed on plot line is what is importaint.  Thinking about things this way sometimes helps figure out a different angle to approaching conflict.