Reactions to the Witch Subguilds

[BadSkeelz]

I'm getting a very "Trump is President, deal with it" vibe from this.

The game changed. The game has changed numerous times over the years. Some skillsets got reworked, some things got removed or tweaked. But we've had a closure of an entire sphere, a revamp of the entire Playerbase's selection of skillsets in the form of extending Subguilds and Magick subguilds, and a "promise" of a Main Guild revamp as well.


The game has changed. Deal with it. Its just changed a lot in five years without much rhyme, reason, or explanation other than "we said so", and for some people that's not enough.

Don't blame me. I didn't vote for him.

Full mage guilds won the popular vote but lost the electoral college.

Full mage guilds had too much shady shit in their history, too much baggage. I'm sorry they didn't win but I won't mind never seeing them again.

[Riev]

Full mage guilds had too much shady shit in their history, too much baggage. I'm sorry they didn't win but I won't mind never seeing them again.

Full mage guilds can't find their emails.

[wizturbo]

Oh dear...

Yes, there are multiple camps on this issue and it's even possible the majority of players are against the status quo when it comes to full mages.  That doesn't mean we need to act like it's some deeply dividing subject.  I'm not sitting around shaking my fist cursing the Rath administration, quite the contrary.  I like our staff.  I like all the new stuff they've done.  I just miss half of the game's playable guilds and would like to see them reintroduced.  People who want this aren't sore losers, and they don't need to suck it up and move on.  They can bring the topic up in the appropriate channel (such as a GDB topic titled 'Reactions to the Witch Subguilds') and try and make their case. 

Armageddon isn't, and shouldn't be a democracy.  That doesn't mean it should be full of people who do nothing to challenge the status quo either.  There's nothing unhealthy about a dissenting view, as long as it's not being given in a way that tries to damage the community or hurt anyone's feelings.

[BadSkeelz]

Just because I have pride in my mundane human playing history doesn't mean I'm prejudiced!

Heehee, okay, I'll stop now.

[Miradus]

I'd love to play a full mage, but I'd be happy if I could just see a list of the spells each mage subguild gets and what they do. Some of the really cool ones are special app for me and I'm reluctant to burn one of those and find out the spells aren't good (or die trying to use them).

Overall, I don't feel gimped by being a mundane like I do in some other muds. I think things are pretty well balanced that you don't NEED magic, but I enjoy mixing in a rogue gick every now and then to my character list.

[BadSkeelz]

I'd love to play a full mage, but I'd be happy if I could just see a list of the spells each mage subguild gets and what they do. Some of the really cool ones are special app for me and I'm reluctant to burn one of those and find out the spells aren't good (or die trying to use them).

I don't think you're ever going to get a spell list. One thing that the vast majority of respondents have been in agreement on is that Magick skills and progression should remain a "find-out IC" secret. For one thing this maintains the mystique of magick for other players- you never quite know what you're dealing with until it's affected you.

I haven't played a subguild yet, but I imagine their spell allocations are fairly "Common sense." So if you have a particular effect in mind, you should be able to suss it out from the Guild pages. And if all else fails put in a request. Staff would probably point you towards the right subguild if you're specific in what you're looking for.

[Riev]

Correct. If your entire build is based on this one krathi being able to launch fireballs from his nipples, and you NEED to know if you can cast fireballs, they may point you in the right direction.

Its akin, I think, to picking a subguild assuming it has skinning, but it doesn't, and it wasn't laid out to suggest otherwise.

[Akaramu]

I kind of agree with Miradus - for full mages, 'finding out IC' worked because the full elementalist guilds were quite versatile. But the subguilds are so specialized and so dependent on your main guild skills / concept for usefulness that you need to come up with a plan in advance. HOWEVER! From what I've seen, staff did a pretty good job with the subguild descriptions. From reading those, I think I have a pretty good idea of what spells each aspect gets.

HOWEVER#2! The same might not be true for someone who isn't already intimately familiar with elementalist spell lists (a.k.a. newbies).

[Miradus]

Yeah, that's the problem. I never played a full mage so saying a Krathi destructionanator doesn't really clue me in to nipple fireballs.

[BadSkeelz]

If the fireballs could cause damage to something, they'd probably be under Destructionator.

If they're more like "fire swallower floor show" potency maybe there would be something in simple Touched.

[Delirium]

Saying one krathi can do something, and another can't feels like this, to me:


"I know he can greb food, and I know he make knives, thus, he can't sew."
or
"You can't poison a weapon? I guess you'll never be able to, then."

I don't think either line should ever be used in armageddon. I haven't read an argument here yet that would convince me otherwise.

In general, players are going to know a lot about what guilds can and can't do, but characters should never make assumptions. And for all you know as a player, you could be interacting with a special app that can do things out of the norm.

Think outside the box more when you represent your PC to the world and things will generally feel a lot more seamless.

I must not have been very clear. I lament when players have their chars make those assumptions.

It was me that wasn't clear. I was agreeing with you

[Raptor_Dan]

It was me that wasn't clear. I was agreeing with you

OMG, Delirium, quit being agreeable! How can I be overdramatic if you keep being rational! I feel like my heart is going to explode like a volcano and my head will fly away like a bird.

Oh, hmm. I guess I managed after all.

[ghanima]

Oh dear...

Yes, there are multiple camps on this issue and it's even possible the majority of players are against the status quo when it comes to full mages.  That doesn't mean we need to act like it's some deeply dividing subject.  I'm not sitting around shaking my fist cursing the Rath administration, quite the contrary.  I like our staff.  I like all the new stuff they've done.  I just miss half of the game's playable guilds and would like to see them reintroduced.  People who want this aren't sore losers, and they don't need to suck it up and move on.  They can bring the topic up in the appropriate channel (such as a GDB topic titled 'Reactions to the Witch Subguilds') and try and make their case. 

Armageddon isn't, and shouldn't be a democracy.  That doesn't mean it should be full of people who do nothing to challenge the status quo either.  There's nothing unhealthy about a dissenting view, as long as it's not being given in a way that tries to damage the community or hurt anyone's feelings.

This is great!

I feel like this needs to be added as a preface before any discussion about the game. If someone's badmouthing the game, its players, and the staff who run it, it's understandable to want to silence them. They're being rude. But polite disagreement is the very heart of discussion and we are in fact a discussion board. It's not necessary to always be so trigger happy every time someone disagrees with the status quo or the current state of the game. Their opinions should be no more and no less welcome than anyone else's.

I'm kind of steering in the direction of wizturbo's and a few other posters views here. I miss the idea of playing a full fledged mage whose life centers around his element. I don't know if I agree with the idea that such a person is not a "person first" and that by making it a subguild now they suddenly are. But there's also been years worth of criticism against high magick plots and things like that so maybe putting full scale magick on the back burner for a while isn't such a bad thing. The code for full mages still exists and by not having an official IC explanation about any changes to the laws of magick, it allows some wiggle room for updates in the future. Maybe we'll see a return of full mages some time down the road or maybe we'll look back and realize we appreciate the weakening of magick as it is now.

[Harmless]

For the record, as a former player of a full mainguild elementalist or two, and having seen what they can do and absolutely falling in love with the magick system, the subguild mage changes DID disappoint me so much that I didn't even want to touch them initially. For the first nearly 1 RL year after the changes, I didn't have any desire to play one.

Now I'm finally coming around, and as I stated in a previous post, am wondering how these new subguilds may lead to POSITIVE changes about mage culture for playability and intrigue/plot stimulation sake.

Now I'm starting to build a slight amount of excitement over what magick will look like in the future, and just recently became interested enough to start thinking of concepts for them.

But it did take me a whole 1RL year of hating that so many options were removed so much that I didn't want to even touch magick, for fear of heartbreaking disappointment, before I finally got around to it. I don't consider it self-sabotage, it's more like a normal human response to suddenly losing something you like.

[Lizzie]

And for my part (to add to Harmless's thoughts), it's not just the loathing of removing the main guilds that bothers me. It is that, combined with the splitting of the elements so that any fully-branchable ranger, warrior, merchant, can now also be a mage. This, also combined with the elimination of full-on sorcs. And it's not the code alone that bothers me, it's the code combined with the loss of roleplay hooks.

The staff talks about players playing a mage first, person second, and that was one of the main reasons for changing things up.

Well how about all those people who want to play a warrior first, a person second. All those folks who pick dwarf/warrior because they want to get the most bang for their coded buck, and pick their dwarven focus to make sure it matches their coded focus. Or those rangers - the jack of all trades. People who want to play a character who can do a bit of everything - and then they make up a "person" whose background supports their desire to max the code.

Why is it that only magicks got the nerf? and yes - it's a nerf. When option A no longer exists, then option A was nerfed.

I would've been 100% for the staff requiring both the karma AND special apps for ALL magick options. But was that even on the table at all?

I still have zero interest in playing a quarter-mage, and I still want to play a full mage. Nothing I've seen in the game, or on the GDB, has changed my opinion and actually in-game from the POV characters who interact with quarter-mages, it's just supported my opinion and strengthened it.

[Akaramu]

The Armageddon MUD of my dreams has no guilds / subguilds at all, but only starting templates with the ability to eventually learn most skills (though being a witch or not would still be a permanent yes/no choice at creation). Kind of like the Elder Scrolls skill system - you learn by using. If you character does a lot of haggling, you get the haggle skill added to your character, and are able to improve it. If you do a lot of sneaking, you get that. There would be a 'point maximum' system to make sure no one can master everything. If you already had a bunch of master skills, you'd have to decrease some (or remove something that was added at novice level) to pick up something new.

Same thing with spells. You'd be able to learn / master X amount of spells, and the choice would be up to you.

It would be the end of guild sniffing, too! 

[Miradus]

I'd love that sort of open-system too, and the reality is that the current way it grinds out would mean that your character isn't going to have enough lifespan to become good at EVERYTHING anyway. Plus in a permadeath system you're almost never going to see anyone become that highly skilled at a wide variety of things. It will take focus to achieve anything.

[Bahliker]

Kept in check by skill decay and a maximum gain pool per skill type based on your four ability scores, that would be a sweet system. Build it on templates that are more like picking two half-guilds than our current guild-and-subguild chargen and you've got yourself a stew.

I've thought that we would be better off with two half-guilds at chargen for a long time. Or three. Each one could be a set of 5 to 20% skills that boost each other on overlap. That way you could still build full elementalists and come up with your own unique skill sets to reflect the way you see your character. It would be so much work, but probably less than it would be to rein in a skill system that isn't class based.

[Feco]

I would be really, really unhappy with skill decay.

[Riev]

The inherent problem with that kind of freedom, is eventually those of us who crave "efficiency" in building, will have max-hide, max-backstab, max-parry warrior/assassins that brutalize you. And that's not even the "trifecta" of brutal-ness.

I'd like a skill-less system similar to that, if only so that when someone says "I need a person who can poison this blade", you can at least ATTEMPT it. Which is why I've always agreed with suggests to put "all" skills to 5, and no-gain the ones not in your skillsheet. So you CAN attempt to hide, or poison, or climb, or whatever. You'll be successful like 5% of the time, plus bonuses from gear and stats.

Let everyone be Joe the Plumber if they work at it and want to RP it. Let those who apply for it specifically, be Mario.

[Bahliker]

Call it temporary penalties for long-term disuse then? Or just stick with a point pool limitation? Because once you say every character can learn any skill in a system that rewards skill use with skill gain, you'll quadruple the grind. Skyrim is a bad example to follow because the game is level-based. If you take out the levels you need another way to either balance or restrict.

Sorry for the derail. I know nobody is seriously looking at revamping the very core of the game's skill mechanic but I LOVE TALKING CRUNCHY BITS SO MUCH. Also the game is almost 25 years old. If we don't acknowledge the potential for deeper long-term change then we're not taking seriously the possibility of at least 10 more.

[titansfan]

People just want too much.  This is a role playing game,  much like D&D. Your character can't have everything. You have a role to play,  so pick that role and go. I believe the Imms have done a great job giving variation to character building more so now than we've ever had. Magick classes, although not as magickally powerful, are more varied and diverse than they have ever been. I don't want to see point buy, skill selection,  or skill decay.  The system now is very well balanced as far as skill dispersal to guilds and sub guilds. Positivity goes a long ways in the brain, think positive people!

[Akaramu]

People just want too much.  This is a role playing game,  much like D&D. Your character can't have everything. You have a role to play,  so pick that role and go. I believe the Imms have done a great job giving variation to character building more so now than we've ever had. Magick classes, although not as magickally powerful, are more varied and diverse than they have ever been.

No, mundane guilds are more varied and diverse than ever. Magick guilds are far less diverse. More mundane skills does not equal magick diversity.

Call it temporary penalties for long-term disuse then? Or just stick with a point pool limitation?

Point pool limitation is what I suggested. I suspect such a massive overhaul would be far too difficult to code, though. 

[Molten Heart]

.

[titansfan]

I didn't specify whether magical or mundane on purpose. The roles themselves are more diverse. It's a low magick setting but there's still plenty of magick. I love magick but I'm not up in arms about this because I think it does good for the game. Mages have specialties now.  That's good,  no two have the same spells on a regular basis like before.  Mages have actual usable skills outside of just magick now. That's awesome, full mages are something that would never be common in the setting as most manifested mages rarely even use their magick virtually save the rare few.

More mundane plots is a good thing. Less fire bombs of death and destruction is a good thing. The world is balanced, imo.