Gicker Shame is Lame if it Doesn't Stay In-Game

[Strongheart]

I've noticed over my time of playing here that there seems to be this stigma against those who enjoy playing with magick. I am curious as to why this is when they have just as much right as being a character as a mundane would. Now, it can't be that it isn't challenging because it certainly is. You're subjecting yourself to being ignored or given a certain attention in a negative way that you may not want normally by others along with the fact that you're damaging yourself with having to rely solely on your main guild around others (excluding touched). Is it because people consider this a "special snowflake" sort of dilemma? If that is the case, let's keep in mind that whether you agree to this statement or not, it won't make it any less true: you are the main character of your own story. Having abilities like these does not make you any more special than sponsored roles (contextually special snowflakes and yes I'm shaming them because it's an equally nonsensical example) or some Lamos Amos.

Thoughts?

[MeTekillot]

People have interpreted Arm's "low-fantasy"() setting as meaning "rare fantastical elements", instead of "fantastical elements in an otherwise ordinary world". Absolutely nothing about Arm's setting being ordinary doesn't seem to come into this. Tight-lipped culture (due to IC discovery of things apparently being part of the draw of Arm) around IC events and mechanics has discouraged discussion of magick whatsoever until a recent cultural shift in the GDB cracked open that nut a little more (probably helped by a bunch of grumpy players posting every single coded thing they knew on the shadowboard).

There's also just good old-fashioned being able to feel superior as a reason for people to be smug about never playing magickers, or never doing magick with their unmanifested magicker, and people have been rewarded karma for flagellating themselves by picking a class whose skills they never used, so the stigma is reinforced.

Staff have also steadily been busting magick access to shit in an effort to move the game toward a low-magick direction (as per their behavior with the breaking up of sorcerers and main guild Elementalists, as well as some of my correspondence with them during my 2(?) year stint as an Oashi noble.) Rude wake-up call for those of us that like magick and its place in the world, or rather, the place it used to have in the world.

[MeTekillot]

I'm of the opinion that your 60 day warrior being able to have his shit utterly ruined nearly on accident by most random gickers is good for the game. The game isn't supposed to be fair. Magick is supposed to be scary.

[Lizzie]

100% on board with Metikillot.

I didn't think it was a good idea to *dilute* magicks by splitting up the elements, though I sincerely don't have a problem with eliminating elkros, drov, and nilaz AS LONG AS their spells remain in the game, within the ability of the sorcerer subguilds at some point (which was confirmed by staff on a thread back when they were announcing/discussing this).

Rather than diluting, they should have allowed fewer characters of each element. Make them karma-restricted AND require a special app.

Allow just a couple of FULL-guild mages of each element: ruk, whira, krath, vivadu.

Allow a couple of subguild sorcs.

Allow a couple of full-guild sorcs.

Allow a couple or three mindbenders.

Allow up to one psi/sorc.

But here's the rub. I think transparency to the playerbase would be a BAD thing for this plan. We shouldn't know, oocly, that there are up to 2 mindworms and no more, around. Because if we kill two characters we think are mindworms, we start roleplaying as though they're all dead and we can relax our roleplaying suspicion and distrust. If we kill one, we will RP that we know there might be another one.

The lines between ooc knowledge and IC behavior are blurred, I've seen it, I've been the victim of it, I've done it, not even realizing I was doing it til it was pointed out to me.

So I don't think the number of mages of each element and mindbender and sorcerer roles should be announced. But I do think the staff should absolutely put strict limits on how many should be available to the playerbase, whether by karma or special app or both. And they should be full guilds.

[Akaramu]

100% on board with Metikillot.

Same here. 'Balancing' (even if it wasn't meant as such) hurts a game that is supposed to be unfair by design. That unfairness is the reason I fell in love with it in the first place.

So what if magickers were retardedly powerful and mundane PCs were outclassed? That's how the world works according to its documentation...

[The Lonely Hunter]

I dig Lizzie's ideas here. Especially with the transparent thing. Players don't need to know the details. I think Arm is more fun when things are shaded as opposed to when everything is right there in the open. Part of the appeal of the game, for me at least, is the unknown.

[number13]

((moderated)) death machines with the ability to ((mess with your day)), or send you to a random death by typing a couple words, for whom the optimal play is hiding alone in a cave and spamming meaningless spells until they have the ability to do all of the above.

"Fun".

[Eyeball]

((moderated)) death machines with the ability to ((mess with your day)), or send you to a random death by typing a couple words, for whom the optimal play is hiding alone in a cave and spamming meaningless spells until they have the ability to do all of the above.

"Fun".

Wouldn't it be so much fun if more of those spells could actually create something lasting, instead of nearly all either being used to destroy or produce something that disappears a few moments later?

[Eyeball]

Here is my difficulty with the position that any encounter between a mage and an experienced warrior should basically be a 50/50 split on who wins:

If the mage wins, he's probably totally spent and won't be ready for another encounter for quite a while.

If the warrior wins, he just goes on and fights the next thing.

Why should anyone want to be a mage in this context?

Also, people will still complain even if this is the arrangement, because two mages combining their powers is multiplicative, not additive like it is for warriors.

How gimped do you want mages to be?

Seems to me that mages (but not sorcerers) need to be repurposed away from combat and toward some other role in the game.

[Delirium]

Be careful with this thread guys. Already having to edit out references to specific magic spells.

[sleepyhead]

This thread seems to be veering away from its original purpose. Yes, the old mages were OP. Some people abused that. Some people abuse the power of the ranger guild, too. And yes, while it takes a lot longer and is riskier to become a maxxed ranger than it ever was to become a maxxed mage, it's not really all that more "respectable" to me to type "kill stilt" a thousand times than it is to spam "cast 'kral nil elkros oogety boogety'" in a cave. Neither one of those things is "hard"--combat is automatic in this game, after all--and both are tedious and can be very unfun. Nothing about either of those paths to greatness is particularly OOCly awe-inspiring to me. Being a savvy political player was always more impressive as far as I'm concerned. You actually have to be OOCly smart (can't be ICly smart if you aren't OOCly smart) and outmaneuver/outplay people, not just log in for hours a day and get your dodges/concentration losses in. But social/political players get almost as much flak as magicker players. Sometimes I think it's just the OOC perception of the "manliness" factor. Gickers and social/political roles are seen as more feminine roles, so they get accused of being unfairly handed everything they have, whereas powerful combat characters are seen as masculine and thus "earned" the respect they have, ICly and OOCly. It's just a theory, and it's probably not going to win me any friends, but that's what it looks like sometimes.

Now, even as someone who plays a hell of a lot of gickers, I gicker-shame too. When I find out ICly that someone's a magicker, my immediate kneejerk OOC response is to groan and go, "Not another one." I do think there are often too many running around. When karma spending is fully operational, I hope this goes a little way towards fixing it, because I for one have only seen more magickers since the changes. But it really isn't the gicker players' faults. Nobody knows how many other freaks there are in the world at a given time. Like everyone else, they just had a concept they were excited about playing. And they have to branch parry like everyone else now, too, so enough with the OOC hate.

As for the IC hate, bring it on.

EDIT: To briefly address the main guild/subguild issue: I don't believe main guilds are ever coming back, just like full sorcs are probably never coming back. Psis are probably going to get subguilded eventually, too. I do feel encouraged by the fact that subguild sorcs were expanded not once, but twice. I would like to see something like that happen to sub elementalists. Magick might actually be scary again.

[AdamBlue]

Totally aside here, all of these 'moderated posts' are pretty dumb imho. Maybe the rules should be changed in regards to magic or something.

[tapas]

Way to ruin an awesome thread title by using it to title a GDB thread. kidding

Huffing about full guild magickers is kinda getting old now. They aren't coming back and doesn't belong in this thread.

As far as the op, it's just hard for a number of reasons.

#1 Probably being that if want to treat magickers as threatening, scary monsters, the best option is to avoid them. But that means that you're never interacting with them and so those negative interactions are never seen.

#2 You could easily have your character taken away from you. I've seen it. You've seen. People have been arrowed at the bar for it. Aggressively interacting with other players will frequently get you killed "Just because."

#3 Being buddy-buddy is low-effort and comes with the benefit of having this scary awful monster as an ally.

[Molten Heart]

.

[Hicksville Hoochie]

If people know you're playing a gicker oocly, you're doing it wrong. 

[Armaddict]

Gicker shaming has less to do with people liking magick and more to do with them turning it into their main enjoyment of the game, then turning around and insisting the game should expand or change to make it a larger focus of the game.

If you're just playing snickers in the setting, you should assume the generalities are not including you, hard as that may be at times.

[tapas]

Baha. I actually thought this was just ANOTHER thread about characters being nice to magickers.

My bad for skimming.

---

As far as the actual topic goes, I don't think I've actually been shamed for playing a magicker role. But I have been shamed for a taking a karma class and never manifesting it. And then playing another karma class and then never using it... sooo.

And then hearing the "You really like your high karma roles don't you?" Even though two out of three are effectively mundanes.

Here's a question: Should you accept magicker shame if you never actually cast any of the magick?

[frankjacoby]

I'm of the opinion that your 60 day warrior being able to have his shit utterly ruined nearly on accident by most random gickers is good for the game. The game isn't supposed to be fair. Magick is supposed to be scary.

By accident

[CodeMaster]

I think playing a gemmed mage is/was one of the hardest roles to play in this game.  If you play it impeccably (imo) it's a lonely role of solo RP and complete hermitude.  If you want to see other players, you have to hang out in taverns, and then you're saddled with depicting the virtual world's negative reactions to you.

Players still argue about what those "negative reactions" should be because it's a creative writing game, and magick is basically the most important cornerstone of fear and hatred in Zalanthas.  For example, the tyranny of the dragon force-united bands of elven tribes before they even shared a language -- imagine how powerful a force would have to be to do that.

The importance of this interpretation to every one of us is, in my opinion, the main reason mage players get a lot of flak (I don't know if I buy the power argument -- yes, they can pkill, but 95% of them are relatively easy for another powerful player to pkill too... and you don't need any other excuse than what they are).

My last random thought on this is that I wouldn't want magick to become easy to ignore in this game.  It would be interesting, for example, if there were a creature or a force that could be aligned with/against, especially by mage characters, that was impossible to ignore.  We have Allanak and Tektolnes (and I'm hearing the gith stuff was awesome for a while, but I completely missed that boat), but what about cults?  What about powerful creatures from beyond the known who wish to pillage the knowledge of the cities' libraries (or destroy said knowledge)?  A dormant Suk-Krathian manifestation trapped underneath the sea of silt, only able to speak and direct action through 'touched' characters?

[MeTekillot]

I'm of the opinion that your 60 day warrior being able to have his shit utterly ruined nearly on accident by most random gickers is good for the game. The game isn't supposed to be fair. Magick is supposed to be scary.

By accident

Language drifts, shifts, and takes on new meaning in new or old contexts. I communicated my point, and is that not the point of posting or speaking?

[Harmless]

OOC discriminating against the opinions of players who play a lot of magickers is pretty stupid. I mean, I played several magickers, both mainguilded and subguilded. I also played like 40 other characters who were mundane. Are you going to call me less of a player, or a "questionable" RPer over this? If so, then you're playing the wrong game. They have these guilds/subguilds as options for a reason. Magick ruined Zalanthas. It exists.

As for the concerns I see posted over magick, let me tell you from experiences with multiple subguilds by now, they were MASSIVELY rebalanced, not just from the spell selection standpoint (which is detailed in the helpfiles), but from the ability to branch standpoint. MASSIVELY. Your concerns of a 60 day warrior ever dying to a magicker who only played for a few weeks are long gone, folks.

[James de Monet]

This one goes both ways, I think.  Magick should be scary and OP, it's literally what defines the setting (world destroyed by magick).  At the same time, you don't want it to be such realized OP or so prevalent that it constantly eclipses the mundane world, which is where most characters should be playing.

If you're pissed off about your mundanes getting owned by magick...I think you might be playing the wrong game.  The whole WORLD has already been owned by magick, and is still enslaved by its users.  That being said, magick definitely has the propensity to be abused by griefers, but the idea is that this is why it's karma-gated, and more closely monitored, so that the atrocities committed with it are not prevented, but done in keeping with the theme and documentation.

[Cind]

They are hard roles, that's honestly why I don't go for them much anymore after it started costing karma to get them. But they're fun, in their own ways.

I've seen abuse of magick power, I think we all have. But, honestly? If they want to spend all that time spamcasting to get that power, they've done a lot of the punishment themselves. Man, I don't see how people put up with that particular grind.

I wanted to say that I miss the walking monthly plotlines that nilazis were. They would stay hidden for a while, spreading the occasional rumor about their plans and rise to power, and then they'd wreck house on Allanak, dying magnificently, and then a month later you'd hear about the same thing beginning to happen again. I've never played one, but I don't really understand why they were culled, and think they should be open for sponsored roles.

[MeTekillot]

A hard or soft cap on magickers in-game would have been a better solution than busting magick access, features, and guilds to pieces, in my opinion.

[Riev]

You don't know people are shaming you OOCly for playing a magicker if you don't talk to people OOCly.