I hate magickers, official thread.

[LiquidShell]

Yeah, was a bit trollish, guess I was getting carried away.

ANYWAY, Lizzie, this has nothing to do with me, so save your criticisms of me for someone else, I'm just expressing my feelings of magickers.  I honestly don't care that your character is unbuffed, not code using, and getting along fine with magickers, many players don't have that option, and many players by necessity are forced to be aggressive to them.

To me, the whole magicker thing seems to eat away at the grit of the story.  In this beautifully horrible place a person has to scrap for every meal they get, search around in particularly hostile places for water, or pay some extreme prices.  You throw three magickers together you can have all seven foodgroups, fifteen flavors of water, and mounts that never get tired.  Is that grit? I don't believe so. When I think of grit, I don't think of Merlin.  I think Grog Skullsplitter the axe swinging mul who's mother died in childbirth because he was so huge.  I just don't buy the magicker thing at all, too many even if there were two, I'd rather see them as npc's, and I don't think they bring much to the game other than over simplifying it.

[Tarx]

...and many players by necessity are forced to be aggressive to them [magickers].

Well, I sort of gathered from this thread, player experience, and staff opinion that this is not the case.  But tomato, tomato, right?

[Marauder Moe]

Magickers can't be gritty?  Yeesh.  You mention that copious food and free mounts are the antithesis of grit, while your hypothetical mul is the height of grit just because his mom is dead?  In Arm, very often Grog Skullsplitter is going to be very well pampered and fed by his Borsail handlers between arena matches.  Meanwhile, a magicker might get discovered and suddenly he has to flee the city and live in some dank cave.  In Allanak, they are sometimes forced to slog through the sewers and hunt nilazis as ordered by a templar.  Gemmed and ungemmed might sometimes be civil to eachother, but try having a love affair between a magicker and a mundane.  That will get very gritty.  Looking back, I can think of many dirty rotten awful disgusting things I've seen magickers have to do to get by.

Grit isn't just poverty and starvation.  Magickers don't all have it easy, even the kind that don't need food.

[Melody]

Not -once- has any magicker threatened or attempted to cause her harm. My character isn't a buff anything - I spend MUCH more time roleplaying than I do utilizing my coded skills. I don't know much about how the magick system works, I only skimmed very briefly over it in the web docs just so I would have a feel for what any mundane character might know.

If you have experienced THAT much trouble with magickers, you might consider that maybe you're the one causing it. Sure there are magickers pretty much everywhere these days, and even my PC might think everyone who walks by is probably one of those nasty vile things, heh. But 1) that doesn't make it true, and 2) even if it is true, none of them are trying to hurt my PC so I don't really give a flying fig.

I only ever play city bound characters. They are never buff and none of them can really tell one end of a sword from another. Even my shortest lived character goes way pass 10 days playing time (save the one character I had in Tuluk, but I retired her out of boredom), they often have sustained interaction with no less than 3 mages and sometimes a couple of psi.

It's definitely not because I go out of my way to look for them. As soon as my character uncover plots and gets involved... they would come looking for me. Occasionally, all I ever have to do sit solo rp with myself while crafting. It's really difficult to rp a mortal fear of a whiran when your character knew a sorcerer and a psi are just around the corner, oh, and a couple of drovians are stalking you at the same time.

I adore mages. I like that they are powerful. None of them are badly played, too. There are rarely any aggressive encounters even though we are oppositions. In fact, all of them are excellent roleplayers. But there are just so many of them. As someone already mentioned, they are all over the plots, so it's nigh on impossible to do anything without stumbling across them.

I don't think it's a matter of roleplay style, or maybe we should all stay away from plots, in which case nothing can really be done.

And I think Ghost is right. And LoD, too.

[moab]

Hey, I justed remembered an interesting moment in one of my character's lives that I think demonstrates a point made by other mage-friendly characters.

My gemmed dude was hanging outside.  Unknown to anyone an invisible POWERFUL mage was chatting with him.

An elf runs by and decides to attack (randomly, I guess, after checking me out).  Boom. Unconscious.

Moments later, his buddy runs into the room (who woulda guessed) and pulls his blade.  Boom. Dealt with.

The mage I was standing with had a years of experience and had planned his reactions over and over again.  He knew exactly what he needed to do and when.

On top of it all he emoted and talked.

Warriors: poor planning.
Mages: all planning.

[Bebop]

moabs post reminds me of something similiar I saw once.

I was talking to an invisible mage, ranger has scan on, walks in an immediately with no questions (or emotes) whips out his weapons and attacks said gicker.

Needless to say the mage did not hesitate to prompty BBQPK him.

The severe problem as I see it, is not with magickers but with how people choose to interact and RP their interaction with magickers.

[LoD]

moabs post reminds me of something similiar I saw once.

I was talking to an invisible mage, ranger has scan on, walks in an immediately with no questions (or emotes) whips out his weapons and attacks said gicker.

Needless to say the mage did not hesitate to prompty BBQPK him.

The severe problem as I see it, is not with magickers but with how people choose to interact and RP their interaction with magickers.

It's somewhat disturbing that this invisible magicker was in such an accessible location as to encounter not only you, but some random ranger waltzing through the area.  I don't know the details or geography of where you were, but if the magicker (and yourself) were being careful about meeting, I doubt that situation would've happened.

Perhaps the person walking in thought you were going to be attacked and thought they'd help.  Perhaps they'd been ganked by a magicker somewhere with their last character without an emotes.  I know that has certainly happened to me, despite the arguement that karma breeds responsbile play.  Or perhpas this guy was just a noob and thought, "Watch me wtfpwn this finger wiggler!".

I don't know the whole situation, but there is more "wrong" with that entire situation than the ranger's actions.  Just as there is more wrong with the roles of magick in the present game than simply how mundane characters react and treat them.

I'm glad that Apocolyptic Cow caught onto the general issue I have with magick in the world, and hope that it's something which can be built upon in the forthcoming game.  Magick is awesome.  Magick should be rare and mysterious.  And Magick should be woven into the framework of the game in such a way that its presence more often cooperates with mundane plots rather than trumps them.

It's also my hope that players exercise their own form of self restraint in special apping or consistently playing magicker characters, especially as a means of avoiding the time investment required to reach a modicum of survivability and/or power.  I don't believe the changes made to mages that allow them to quickly gain their spells is necessarily the best move, especially their more lethal abilities.

I'd be much more in favor of seeing mages granted a much greater degree of survivability without the teeth.  Give them ways to avoid, escape, or withstand mundane attacks without simultaneously granting them the aggressive tools to kill.  Let those powers develop more slowly, and I think you will see just as quick a rate of return on mundanes not hunting mages.

Make mages require group coordination to take down not because they can kill you so quickly, but because you can't actually take them down by yourself.  Then they wouldn't be worth attacking mindlessly because you nearly couldn't manage it alone.  I'm not advocating mages be stripped of every offensive capability, but it might keep the folks away if the system was tweaked a bit in this direction as well.

-LoD

[Hymwen]

I started a long, rambling post but decided that my opinion boils down to this:

They're not necessarily too powerful, but the power they can achieve is gained too easily. And there are too many of them.

[spawnloser]

Yeah, was a bit trollish, guess I was getting carried away.

Yes.  Yes, you were.

ANYWAY, Lizzie, this has nothing to do with me, so save your criticisms of me for someone else, I'm just expressing my feelings of magickers.

Do you realize how you contradicted yourself in this statement?  Honestly, it's not about you but about your feelings?  That means it's about you.

I honestly don't care that your character is unbuffed, not code using, and getting along fine with magickers, many players don't have that option, and many players by necessity are forced to be aggressive to them.

Yes they do have the option.  Most players of magickers will give you an option.  Deal with the magicker as your character probably should, which means plenty of being scared and cowering, or go head to head.  In a head to head match up, magickers often have the upper hand, as they should have...according to the documenation.  You're not being forced to be aggressive.  You are choosing to be aggressive instead of a scared twit running away, begging for your life or simply passing out.

As many have said, interaction with magickers tends to be a problem only when the problem is caused by the mundane.  Magicker characters are played by players that the staff has given some trust to.  Mundanes are played by those same players...and the players that haven't gained enough trust with the staff for interacting as they should with the world (which means other PCs too) around them.

[Forest Junkie]

They're not necessarily too powerful, but the power they can achieve is gained too easily.

Read Halaster's post regarding this. I think it might help you understand why certain things are this way.

And there are too many of them.

Just like there were too many d.elves in the game at one time? Half-elves? Pickpockets? Muls? Burglars spam stealing everything from rooms and taverns, including the couches. The list goes on and on.

Mages and their numbers will dwindle, just as the numbers of every other guild/race has in the past. Things are cyclic.

Can't we all just stop whining and play the game? Sheesh, there's only a few months of it left. Does it really fuckin' matter?

[Malken]

It's nothing surprising.. I've met an invisible magicker having a friendly chat with another character right in the middle of the road not too long ago. The visible guy even looked surprised to see me.

I didn't walked in and attacked the guy but I knew better than to stick around. Unfortunately, the guy saw my description and what followed was a series of , "You've seen me with the magicker-now you must die" events..

What I would like to see is something like this.. If there's 300 active characters in the game at the moment, only 10% or so of them should be allowed to play magickers at any given time. That means that no more than 30 magickers in total should be allowed in the game.

Once one of the magicker dies, if someone is currently creating a character and there's a spot left and he has the karma, then that option will be open, if not, it just won't be open and they'll have to play a mundane or another sort of special class..

Is it a bit unfair? Sure, but at least it keeps the numbers in check. You say, "Well, what if that person just stops playing, won't he or she keep a slot to herself?" Well, no, because that person won't be part of the 'active users' anymore, so that percentage will go up or down depending on the number of players currently playing during that week or month..

[LoD]

Can't we all just stop whining and play the game? Sheesh, there's only a few months of it left. Does it really fuckin' matter?

People aren't whining, they're discussing a pertinent topic regarding their perception of issues with magick in the current world and how it will translate over to the new game.  They've expressed opinions and suggestions for how magick could be offered a better role within the framework of the game, along with a model change to allow some of the rarity and mystery back into the world.

If you don't have any constructive to add, you should really take your own advice.

-LoD

[Forest Junkie]

If you don't have any constructive to add...

I believe I did add something constructive. It was something to the effect of "stop whining and just play the game, enjoy what little time we have left".

I'm done, bye bye.

[Dakkon Black]

I friggen love magickers, and this comes from somebody who had an absolute destroyer of a giant killed by one without any noticeable reason or emote.

Pretty much just out of the blue, cast, cast, cast die.

That's the danger of stepping out of the gates, every time you do it. I still think that mage was a useless turkey, and think considering the amount of control he had over the situation he could have at least emoted. But I don't want to quash things that are powerful.

This is like saying we need Mek's to hit for less damage. It does seem at times though that every single plot going on is happening because of an uber defiler or mage. I'd definately like to see the new arm focus more on the mundane. Perhaps we should have a limit to active powerhouses?

[Fathi]

This is like saying we need Mek's to hit for less damage. It does seem at times though that every single plot going on is happening because of an uber defiler or mage. I'd definately like to see the new arm focus more on the mundane. Perhaps we should have a limit to active powerhouses?

The only thing is, meks are less common than scrabs and beetles.

I definitely agree with you on the point that it seems like you have to fight to get RPTs and plots that aren't even just magick-heavy, but magick-dominated-and-driven. Of course, the events related to the end of the world are probably going to be magick out the ass. I don't like that, but it's realistic for the setting and I trust the staff will at least try to make it fun for those of us who don't want to play magicker characters.

As someone who joined Arm over other games because I don't like high fantasy and I didn't want to run into mages around every corner, this has killed a large chunk of my interest in the game.

And this is coming from someone with a tendency to actively avoid magickal plots to begin with. It's one thing to say, "Well if you don't like mages, don't play in X location," but when mages are ridiculously prevalent in every corner of the map and they make up a large portion of the playerbase and eclipse or negate the role of mundanes in almost every plot you get involved in, it's far easier said than done.

[Krath]

This is like saying we need Mek's to hit for less damage. It does seem at times though that every single plot going on is happening because of an uber defiler or mage. I'd definately like to see the new arm focus more on the mundane. Perhaps we should have a limit to active powerhouses?

The only thing is, meks are less common than scrabs and beetles.

I definitely agree with you on the point that it seems like you have to fight to get RPTs and plots that aren't even just magick-heavy, but magick-dominated-and-driven. Of course, the events related to the end of the world are probably going to be magick out the ass. I don't like that, but it's realistic for the setting and I trust the staff will at least try to make it fun for those of us who don't want to play magicker characters.

As someone who joined Arm over other games because I don't like high fantasy and I didn't want to run into mages around every corner, this has killed a large chunk of my interest in the game.

And this is coming from someone with a tendency to actively avoid magickal plots to begin with. It's one thing to say, "Well if you don't like mages, don't play in X location," but when mages are ridiculously prevalent in every corner of the map and they make up a large portion of the playerbase and eclipse or negate the role of mundanes in almost every plot you get involved in, it's far easier said than done.

Ditto

[bloodfromstone]

Fathi's post is a good one.

The presence of mages in every plot and every location pretty much makes mundanes useless. Who needs an assassin when we have a mage? Scout? Mage. Transportation? Mage. I understand they should be better than mundanes and more powerful and all that, but there has to be some place for mundanes in the world, other than standing around and gossiping about the latest magick attack and waiting to be ganked by a magicker.

Less magickers, please. I had a character not long ago that, literally, more of his close circle of interaction turned out to be magickers than not.
"Hey, how's Aide X?" "Oh, she was a magicker, we got rid of her." "Oh, no. At least you have Aide Y." "Magicker." "Crap. I'll tell Lord Templar Z's aide to keep a look out for a new aide." "Oh, he was a magicker, too." "Private A?" "Magicker." (actual titles and such altered a bit)
I know this is partially just bad luck, but to slog through that while trying to protect friend #2 from getting whipped away by the second or third Whiran before getting killed by a magicker himself.... Good lord. Enough. Magick is neat and all, but I think I might wretch if I see another spell cast for the next little while.

[Nao]

I think you guys a little spoiled.

Are magickers really invading all plots, or would at least some of the plots not be happening at all without the magickers? Would you rather sit about and twiddle your thumbs than have those plots that wouldn't exist at all without the magickers?

I'm usually happy about anything happening at all, this might be connected to off-peak play times. Until I played a magicker myself and went actively looking for other 'gickers, my encounters with magick were marginal.

And if they weren't... Where is the problem of having to do with them in one way or another? Your best friend turns out to be a gicker...? Kill them, help them hide, sell them out to a templar or anyone that will pay, threaten them, scare the hell out of them with little hints, share a secret. Run and never talk to them again, but don't tell anyone else, either.

Catch someone casting in a cave out there? Basically the same options as above.

Getting bullied by some invisible mage? Have a nervous breakdown. Try to find out who this could have been and pay people for any information whatsoever about magickers that are around or magick in general. Do a well-organized mage hunt. Suspect random people and stalk them or have someone stalk them, whatever is appropriate for your character.

Make a character that fanatically hates everything even vaguely related to magick and see where that leads to.

There are so many possibilities for roleplay and interaction. I can't believe that some of you apparently would rather keep encounters with mages to a minimum and miss out on all this.

[bloodfromstone]

A major part of the problem, in my opinion, Nao, is that those responses you give are great. They're perfect for magickers in the documented setting. They are not really even realistic responses to magickers in the game as is, however. If we had nervous breakdowns every time an invisible mage harassed us, I think more of the population would be insane than not.

I'd love for freaking out, paranoia, etc to be the logical response to a magicker encounter. But I don't think anyone can really expect anyone to react this way when they're all over to place.

[X-D]

I'm with Fathi and others. Current mage numbers, Silly.

Also, I'd like to say, I have seen some well played...currently, and some I think are less well played...but maybe because the apparent objectives for many of them are just so OLD and TIRED.

I AM THE SELF APPOINTED PROTECTER OF (Insert proper noun here) AND THOUGH I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT YOU...UM, Your here, SO ,um  I NOW HAVE REASON TO KILL YOU Ya! WITHOUT ANY OTHER INTERACTION, EMOTE, ANYTHING!!! Cept they don't even say that.
One word LAME!

I mean really, I swear I have seen that exact deal on more then 200 pc mages and maybe nearly that many npc mages in the last 4 years.
Its OLD, makes me gag IRL

And the sad thing about it is that its the karma 4+ PCs that do it the most.

Not too horribly long ago I ran a magicker who's only purpose was to make people fear and respect his kind, and even he killed less then half the PC's he dealt with, and even then the ones he did was dependant on thier actions. He knew he was pretty safe weather he was visible or not. And so, "I" Took the time to interact with victems and such as much as possible. EVEN with the PCs who attacked him without emote or warning, yes, even they got as nice a death as I could craft, sometimes quick sometimes slow.

Sorry, I ramble. My points are this.

Powerful high karma mages, if they are going to interact with other pcs, even just to raid, PLEASE, do so with more then coded spells.

There are way too many mages.

There are way too many mage plots.

Stop with the old tired cliche objective/focus/reason to PK..stop protecting shit that does not need protecting from the people who are not hurting it. Hell, compared to that a mage who was simply a homicidal maniac would be refreshing.

As to Nao post, There are so many of them that none of your suggestions are even fun anymore, with a single PC, I've done them ALL so many times its boring...which is what Fathi and others are saying as well...even LoD.

Lets go bag us a scrab...four rooms out the gates "magickal stuff" Oh, great, ANOTHER magicker...fuck it, turn around head to nearest quit safe room.........

[Fathi]

I can't believe that some of you apparently would rather keep encounters with mages to a minimum and miss out on all this.

It isn't wanting to keep magickal encounters "to a minimum." It's just wanting to keep them to anything but "to a maximum."

All of the suggestions you have are good ones, but my point is that I didn't think the game's setting was designed so that my character's everyday life should include running from, attacking, 'hunting', being suspicious of, or panicking over mages. Because mages aren't supposed to be so prominent in every mundane character's daily routine.

To me, my PC's near-constant exposure to magick and the overall repetitive nature of many of my magickal encounters have cheapened what is supposed to be a rare, frightening, and interesting event.

[Armaddict]

I can't believe that some of you apparently would rather keep encounters with mages to a minimum and miss out on all this.

That's like me saying, "I can't believe that some of you think magickal role-play is cool."

Which I'm not, by the way.

[jhunter]

I believe that the staff has stated in the past that the magicker populations were at intended proportions on average. I believe it is -fact- that alot of you are overexaggerating the amount of magickers you encounter with a single pc bigtime.
I may not have ever been one of the "trouble" mages people are talking about but I do not wish to see my opportunity to continue playing the ones that I do decimated by other's hatred of magickers and everything magickal in the game.

[Armaddict]

I believe it is -fact- that alot of you are overexaggerating the amount of magickers you encounter with a single pc bigtime.

I'm not overexaggerating.  However, it is a statement that is based on -our- 'green area' of where the magicker population should be.  The staff is in charge, I'm not refuting that.

But some people like to see it less, some people are fine with more.  To those who like to see it less, it will probably always seem like too much until a change comes around.

Isn't that kind of the whole point of why this discussion always goes on so long?  People want it at different measures of prominence.  I don't think it will change, since I've seen this thread come up countless times in eight years.

That doesn't mean I have no reason to share my personal viewpoint and share with people what my 'green area' consists of, though, does it?

[jhunter]

No, of course it doesn't mean that. I'm finding it really hard to believe that it's as bad as -any- of you guys are saying.  My experience has never been -remotely- close to the amounts of magick that people are stating they encounter on a consistent basis. I've played pcs in all ranges of types and locations and the only ones I encountered alot of magick with were either magickers themselves or a templar. (To be expected for either considering the type of templar I was playing.)