Gab of the Week: Human Tribals

[Kavrick]

Alright, next up is tribals! This one is pretty simple, we all know tribals, but I've got a few questions for this one in particular. These questions are just two, but I think the answers will require a bit of thought.

1. Do you personally prefer playing a virtual tribe, or playing in a coded one? And why?

2. If you prefer playing in a coded one, which tribes would you like to see open? And why?

Hope everyone is having a nice week, was originally going to make this thread about celves, but after the last thread... Please remain respectful to differing opinions and all that, but I'd like to think this topic wont be so heated, after all, everyone loves tribals!

[lostinspace]

Truthfully, if I want to play a tribal I almost always go for Desert Elf.
The few times I have played a human tribal, I've always gone for a virtual tribe.
I couldn't even name an existing human tribe.

[Kavrick]

Truthfully, if I want to play a tribal I almost always go for Desert Elf.

I'm not surprised about this, but I would like to ask, what makes you gravitate towards a desert elf tribal over a human one?

[Lotion]

Player run family rolecall tribes are some of the absolute best tribal experiences you can have in the game. However, there are a few things that staff could do to support them better (this is mostly policy changes)

• Allow more later PCs to spawn in as fresh toons in the event of a player flaking too early. Wasting one of four "slots" on someone who ends up not playing their character very much at all or immediately ghosts feels so sad. The Cernd Viir'i suffered from this.
• Similarly to the new policy for sponsored roles, allow players to temporarily store their characters in order to participate in a family rolecall. It's very sad when a player seeds a rolecall they would be able to absolutely rock and then not be able to because it would mean abandoning their current role. Even worse is if you bin a well established character to rock a fresh toon in a cool literally once in a lifetime tribe and get carru'd at 4 hours played.

[Tuannon]

They are almost universally overridden by any desert elf community that borders their lands. To the extent of being harassed by Sun Runners for being near their (your) sacred site.

[lostinspace]

I'm not surprised about this, but I would like to ask, what makes you gravitate towards a desert elf tribal over a human one?

I think 2 reasons.
1: Desert elves do tribal better. Better camps, better ability to travel, don't need mount, stealth archery, climbing to reach destinations, etc.

2: Non-tribal humans do hunting/wilderness just as good. What does a tribal human do that a raider/stalker/scout riding out of Luir's can't? They can spend just as much time outside city walls as the tribal, but also has no issue renting an apartment to store stuff or whatever.

Truthfully the ONLY reason I could think to play a human tribal, is because you want to play an Enforcer/Infiltrator, and I think those classes are restricted for D.Elves

[Kavrick]

1: Desert elves do tribal better. Better camps, better ability to travel, don't need mount, stealth archery, climbing to reach destinations, etc.

I'm not actually sure if I would agree with 'do better', more than just 'do differently'. Desert running is convenient, but mounts, especially when fed can travel further than desert running. I will say, I think humans should be able to walk a lot further than they currently can, letting delves keep their desert running but making wilderness stealth less clunky for humans.

[dunecrawler]

The coded human tribes just seem... incredibly boring, going by the help files, and I've never learned much that goes beyond the help files in game. They don't seem to have much going on RP-wise, other than trade and socializing. The only human tribal I've ever played was a Tan Muark back in the day, and I just got bored out of my mind. That one is one of the few PCs that I stored.

[papertiger]

The tribe I tried was really unique (coded), but I just didn't really dig how isolated I felt in it. If I had been more confident in how to train solo to get myself to and from Luir's more regularly to get more interaction, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more. I didn't really know how. I gave it a solid try, but it just wasn't for me (at least not yet?).

I might try it again when I feel more confident I won't just suicide to creatures. It feels like a more advanced role, though maybe it's just my personal inexperience with PvE. I think I need to play another Bynner before I'd consider it again. I also just didn't love my character concept. It was too shallow and development felt difficult without interaction.

[Kaathe]

All this is off memory and not corroborated with logs or data. 

When I started staffing Araseik was the only human tribe. We had a steady player and a few folks pass through. It was quaint. I think folks liked it, but generally didn't stick long term.

Then they soft closed and Vru'Rihali opened. VR had that early excitement and it lasted awhile. Then a lull and then few weeks of vru rihali being full again. It was awesome. It's got a unique rank up system that needs work, but has good potential that other tribes lack. Regardless VR is on the wane again. 

I got 5 people for the mystery tribe role call across both peak time zones. There is excitement. But between my mistakes and an early carru death the project was dead in a month. 

I've only been at this a year.  Human tribes have been open in the game for decades.  So I won't despair. But I do think the role call to get a group going is probably the way to go.  Have one tribe open. Role call.  Enjoy it. When it peters out, pick a new tribe, spruce it up, open it with a role call, rinse and repeat. 

[Kaathe]

Player run family rolecall tribes are some of the absolute best tribal experiences you can have in the game. However, there are a few things that staff could do to support them better (this is mostly policy changes)

• Allow more later PCs to spawn in as fresh toons in the event of a player flaking too early. Wasting one of four "slots" on someone who ends up not playing their character very much at all or immediately ghosts feels so sad. The Cernd Viir'i suffered from this.
• Similarly to the new policy for sponsored roles, allow players to temporarily store their characters in order to participate in a family rolecall. It's very sad when a player seeds a rolecall they would be able to absolutely rock and then not be able to because it would mean abandoning their current role. Even worse is if you bin a well established character to rock a fresh toon in a cool literally once in a lifetime tribe and get carru'd at 4 hours played.

Sometimes I kick this idea around in my head too. Close official human tribes.  Make these changes.  Let players handle that role call rotation i suggested themselves. Approve their docs, let them refill dead and inactive up to 4 cap, don't build stuff they can't CC. Maybe add a generic tiny player tribal camp that has a sleep and storage tent and rotates if they dedicate CC to it.  Let them live and die where they want.  If someone wants to role call for an official tribe, open it up for them.

Would that be too awesome? Would we get too many at once making support a challenge and cities empty? Would we just allow one at a time? What if one blocks it for years? Would ensuring sensible lore be a strain and point of contention? This gets complex real fast and then I stop thinking about it.

[Lotion]

I think a lot of kaathe's problems are mostly self solving or could easily be addressed once we get to them and they rear their little kitty fangs

[dumbstruck]

I love playing human tribals.

I really dislike that the advantages that desert elves have claim to be sourced from living in the desert for generations when human tribals have done this and lack the same. (To be clear, I don't mean wild running, though i definitely think having normal human stamina ranges but a 2 stamina movement per wilderness room while walking would make sense, especially if it was balanced by taking a similar movement penalty in cities, but I'm mostly talking about stuff like being able to climb and sneak to a one last I recall, when in the wilds, and things like that. I would think growing up out there, you would learn it).

If you want to have 2 different elven races, that's fine, but don't do it in a way that makes it look so stupid and terrible on the humans living in the same situation.

It is not surprising to me that with the mechanical advantages that desert elves have over desert humans (aka human tribals) people repeatedly opt to play desert elves. Just the same way in a city they do with humans because the city elves are disadvantaged.

I don't play human tribals because I am looking to socialize or spend a great deal of tribe mates, because in my experience of play, this is not a realistic expectation. Additionally, it is difficult to find a happy medium between too little documentation to establish a distinct culture and presence and too much documentation feeling like a straitjacket that narrows everyone into something unappealingly narrow/specific.

I also like Kaathe's idea but at the same time I worry about how viable it would be if done, and, honestly, how many people would succeed at doing anything where if you pulled back the veil on it it wouldn't look dubious or like favortism in some fashion and that complicating things down the road.

I ultimately wish this game had more automatic approval of things that added to roleplay and the world so it felt like fewer parts were subject to the personal opinion and feelings of someone overseeing you because even if you like them that doesn't account the stories that always creep up of people who were pursuing something and working well with their team and then staff rotations happened and nothing worked or made sense and then six months of their rl life went up in smoke, etc.

[Windstorm]

I ultimately wish this game had more automatic approval of things that added to roleplay and the world so it felt like fewer parts were subject to the personal opinion and feelings of someone overseeing you because even if you like them that doesn't account the stories that always creep up of people who were pursuing something and working well with their team and then staff rotations happened and nothing worked or made sense and then six months of their rl life went up in smoke, etc.

I'm not sure I can possibly echo this harder.

There's not a thing I dislike more in Armageddon than things being restricted/having rules placed over them when no one was harmed, the rules in place just restricted roleplay and interaction, and the results were then punitive and reductive. Sometimes out of nowhere.

Much's I'm an advocate of players trusting staff, if no harm's being done, I think honestly that the same kind of trust that the staff is asking of players needs to be extended TO players, in return.

Coming together does mean extending some trust both ways!

[CirclelessBard]

Player run family rolecall tribes are some of the absolute best tribal experiences you can have in the game. However, there are a few things that staff could do to support them better (this is mostly policy changes)

• Allow more later PCs to spawn in as fresh toons in the event of a player flaking too early. Wasting one of four "slots" on someone who ends up not playing their character very much at all or immediately ghosts feels so sad. The Cernd Viir'i suffered from this.
• Similarly to the new policy for sponsored roles, allow players to temporarily store their characters in order to participate in a family rolecall. It's very sad when a player seeds a rolecall they would be able to absolutely rock and then not be able to because it would mean abandoning their current role. Even worse is if you bin a well established character to rock a fresh toon in a cool literally once in a lifetime tribe and get carru'd at 4 hours played.

Sometimes I kick this idea around in my head too. Close official human tribes.  Make these changes.  Let players handle that role call rotation i suggested themselves. Approve their docs, let them refill dead and inactive up to 4 cap, don't build stuff they can't CC. Maybe add a generic tiny player tribal camp that has a sleep and storage tent and rotates if they dedicate CC to it.  Let them live and die where they want.  If someone wants to role call for an official tribe, open it up for them.

Would that be too awesome? Would we get too many at once making support a challenge and cities empty? Would we just allow one at a time? What if one blocks it for years? Would ensuring sensible lore be a strain and point of contention? This gets complex real fast and then I stop thinking about it.

For what it's worth, I think there is no such thing as "too awesome" when we're talking about making a game more fun and adding new opportunities that fit into the game's theme.

Yes, you would probably get a lot at the start, but in my experience with a variety of games, that always happens whenever there is a new option for play. There is a swell, then things will eventually even out once the most interested people have tried it out. There can also be slots for tribes, so staff can decide to support no more than X amount of player-created tribes at a time, and adjust X as needed.

[whengravityfails]

I ultimately wish this game had more automatic approval of things that added to roleplay and the world so it felt like fewer parts were subject to the personal opinion and feelings of someone overseeing you because even if you like them that doesn't account the stories that always creep up of people who were pursuing something and working well with their team and then staff rotations happened and nothing worked or made sense and then six months of their rl life went up in smoke, etc.

I'm not sure I can possibly echo this harder.

There's not a thing I dislike more in Armageddon than things being restricted/having rules placed over them when no one was harmed, the rules in place just restricted roleplay and interaction, and the results were then punitive and reductive. Sometimes out of nowhere.

Much's I'm an advocate of players trusting staff, if no harm's being done, I think honestly that the same kind of trust that the staff is asking of players needs to be extended TO players, in return.

Coming together does mean extending some trust both ways!

I ultimately wish this game had more automatic approval of things that added to roleplay and the world so it felt like fewer parts were subject to the personal opinion and feelings of someone overseeing you because even if you like them that doesn't account the stories that always creep up of people who were pursuing something and working well with their team and then staff rotations happened and nothing worked or made sense and then six months of their rl life went up in smoke, etc.

I'm not sure I can possibly echo this harder.

There's not a thing I dislike more in Armageddon than things being restricted/having rules placed over them when no one was harmed, the rules in place just restricted roleplay and interaction, and the results were then punitive and reductive. Sometimes out of nowhere.

Much's I'm an advocate of players trusting staff, if no harm's being done, I think honestly that the same kind of trust that the staff is asking of players needs to be extended TO players, in return.

Coming together does mean extending some trust both ways!
[/quote]

I'm going to echo this as well! Also, mechanically, I've always found it weird that human tribals can't at least walk a longer distance in the outdoors, like delves can run. They just kind of get the shaft there, making any kind of desert stealthiness of limited use.

[Pariah]

I think it's reasonable to give human tribals a lower stamina per room walk rate.

I get they aren't desert elves used to running long distances, but these guys live with the desert literally out their tent flap.  They shouldn't drain 5 mv per room (or whatever it is) that a regular city bound human does who's used to walking on paved roads.

I'm all for them having their MV per room lowered, that would give them some believability in the world that they grew up in the wastes.

[Riev]

Even dropping it to 3 stamina for an outdoors room would give them an extra ~60 rooms of movement, or around 30 rooms worth of radius.

I don't think tribals are walking the Red Route (unless they're taking the road) but I do think they'd be able to move more than 10 leagues.

[Brytta Léofa]

I'm afraid this would cause almost every human combat PC to pick a tribal origin?

(don't get me wrong, I like the idea)

[Pariah]

I'm afraid this would cause almost every human combat PC to pick a tribal origin?

So? Everyone who wants to play a real hunter type, using stealth skills in the wilds picks a d-elf.  Because Humans and their reliance on mounts just is playing wilderness ninja on nightmare mode.

I don't think it's really a bad thing is certain races/origins be used for certain types of play.  I'm not sure why everyone has a bad taste about that.  It's like Muls, sure you could play a complicated, emotional lovey dovey mul if you want.  But at the end of the day, they are murderhobo inclined at the very least.

Having human tribals be the goto for human combat isn't a horrible thing.

[betweenford]

Why did this thread about human tribals turn into talk about desert elves.

[dumbstruck]

Why did this thread about human tribals turn into talk about desert elves.

Because people sleep on tribal humans in large part to coded boosts to desert elves allegedly borne of 'evolution due to living in the wastes' when human tribals have been doing that for ages as well in the case of many of the tribes, Araseik for example. And yet they don't evolve? I get them not evolving /running/ but they should surely be more efficient at /walking/ desert wastes than humans who have lived in cities all their lives, no? And as such it is a very valid measure of comparison given the given reason for why one can and one cannot. And it's well known that there was a period of /years/ where a large majority of the playerbase was driven from playing human tribals due to them being Araseik in the Pah /literally living alongside those very elves all those years/ while the players of and the desert elf characters themselves harried the shit out of them and made the role literally unplayable. Was that recent? No. But there is a stupid incongruity there, and it's a joke that people take all too much to their head all these jokes about desert elves being the templars of the sands.

[Tuannon]

The elves are better at being a tribe than any human, and as stated before they believe the territory belongs to them and they outnumber the humans. So it's roughly the same principle as who is the one who gets to run the plots in the city, the one who can kill you first.

[dumbstruck]

I honestly don't give a rats ass about your plots or how good your tribe is. I care about how stupid and nonsensical it is that two groups are subject to the same condition for ages and ages and one supposedly has evolved /so much/ they literally cannot be in a city and the other literally cannot walk better in the sands that they spent those same hundreds or thousands of years in better than some asshole who wandered out of Allanak yesterday. Sure, only one race can evolve, Jan.

[betweenford]

Why did this thread about human tribals turn into talk about desert elves.

Because people sleep on tribal humans in large part to coded boosts to desert elves allegedly borne of 'evolution due to living in the wastes' when human tribals have been doing that for ages as well in the case of many of the tribes, Araseik for example. And yet they don't evolve? I get them not evolving /running/ but they should surely be more efficient at /walking/ desert wastes than humans who have lived in cities all their lives, no? And as such it is a very valid measure of comparison given the given reason for why one can and one cannot. And it's well known that there was a period of /years/ where a large majority of the playerbase was driven from playing human tribals due to them being Araseik in the Pah /literally living alongside those very elves all those years/ while the players of and the desert elf characters themselves harried the shit out of them and made the role literally unplayable. Was that recent? No. But there is a stupid incongruity there, and it's a joke that people take all too much to their head all these jokes about desert elves being the templars of the sands.

They already are desert adapted. The animals that each tribe breeds, roams with, and seeks sustenance from virtually are also desert adapted animals that in some circumstances, are better at roaming than elves.

Escru provide milk, erdlu provide eggs (which are supposed to have as much water as a waterskin, in the inspirational material), sunbacks and beetle and inixes provide travel.