Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 3.7K All Categories
- 3K The Midnight Age
- 757 Announce posts
- 125 Newbies
- 6 Class Guides
- 804 Harpy's Head Tavern
- 57 Echo Canyon
- 310 Self-Affirmations
- 163 Town Crier
- 135 The Exchange
- 167 Sparring Grounds
- Combat Guides
- 30 Combat Logs
- 188 Idea Box
- 9 Classleads
- 578 Roleplay Logs
- 107 Aetolia Development
- 5 The Void
- 744 Miscellaneous
- 9 Announcements
- 417 OOC Chat
- 217 Tech Talk
- 47 Scripts
Looking for more active discussion? Join our Discord at https://discord.gg/x2s7fY6
Comments
@Galadriel said it best if all your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you follow?
@Vyxsis, you were the leader of the Indorani and had the ultimate decision to move forward with your plan or not. You could and should have stopped it when told to do so. That is it. You ignored the warnings and now have to pay the consequences.
Also, keep this in mind.. During an RP event it does not matter who is behind the godshell you are right. But while the admin are busy in the middle of the RP event they might not have the moment to stop everything to stop you. TWO DIVINE SAID STOP.
End of story.
Edited: I hate to sound mean or rude. But this is just how I see it.
When putting myself in your position as a very visible leader having to handle a sudden change (and having been in the situation before) I think most on the inevitable reckoning to come as you acknowledge the direction you thought was best for the guild and accept it did not have a place in Aetolia's long-term story. I also understand that it can feel jarring or unfair. My own closure to this has been to reestablish sound the boundaries that keep this game fun for me. In this case, it's remembering the producer's job isn't to be fair in story telling, but to tell and create a story that engages a conflicting player base and is built upon 20+ years of lore. My biggest mistake as a player has been to think I ever have a right to dictate the long-term outcome of Aetolia's story. It's hard to remember we're not the DM but it's part of what keeps the story line pure and is the best way to respect the story told by the players through their actions. Thie alternative would likely have been Vyxsis triedto talk to Chaos court, but never got their attention, thus ending that story line. But instead, you got a big "YES, AND..."! That's rare, and also is the administrations way of acknowledging and weaving in your microfiber of player story; it's rare to make the blanket.
After the Carnifex had their major shift, I was left feeling very much like I didn't know what direction to go. The only way I could think on how to stay true to Xenia was to take on the task of trying to make a player-run org that had the presence of any other game-supported one. It's something I'm still working towards, but I also think it's something that would be refreshing and unique to the game. Take some time to sit back and watch things develop. Think about who Vyxsis is and look for the windows and doors opening up for her.
as for the rest... i mean, sure, it's ICly reasonable to believe gods can follow through on threats. it's also ICly reasonable to think the Court of Chaos might actually win, given the situation, but OOCly it would've been super dumb to think that was a serious possibility. furthermore, severn's threat to "obliterate" us could've looked like a lot of things, practically speaking. it doesn't necessarily mean "you're actually completely seriously going to get deleted with no options to reform" - which is, frankly, an OOC convention. ICly, unless he actually destroyed all the people involved, it doesn't make a lick of sense to say "haha, i nuked your guild hall, now you don't exist!" as long as the people - and the guild is the people - are still around, there's nothing to stop them reforming except an imposed, OOC constraint (i.e. the org mechanic).
the bit about OOC assumptions... idek what to say. Chak's interaction with Vyxsis yesterday was so full of "i know you know who i am and that i also play Tanix" overtones that people who didn't know commented on how weird the argument about messaging and bloviating about how Tanix was betrayed were. at the end of the day, while i don't base IC actions on OOC assumptions, those OOC assumptions absolutely will impact the range of IC actions i'll consider taking. i'm not gonna blatantly break PK rules, which are largely OOC, and get shrubbed because i think it makes IC sense. i'm also not gonna do something i see as a complete waste of time and energy, like... messaging an absent god.
But that's a different situation. I don't think what you did was dumb or bad rp, just that, if it mattered to Vyxsis, sending a message to Chak would have let you say afterwards, "Well, I tried my best, but she didn't answer." If it didn't matter to Vyxsis (IE, that you were determined to speak to the chaos court either way) - then, don't worry it. Own your villain status, as @Xenia said. Or interpret your IC actions in another way, and own that. I agree that the situation with the indorani was unique, as far as I can recall- but so too was Vyxsis role in bringing it about. From my perspective, as a player, that's actually pretty cool.
i think this is where i have to point out this isn't, contrary to popular belief, just about me. if vyx took the indorani to some left-field extreme (which i don't think is true, but this is hypothetical), punish vyx. fine. remove me as gm. start a reformed guild where someone else is in charge, they've all learned their lesson, and there's some direction for developing away from the lore that led us to take this route. don't destroy the experience for everyone. i loved the indorani, it's true, and i had ideas, ambitions, goals. the point of all that was never just me, tho - it was to make a fun-as-unicorns guild with RP depth and world-wide engagement. i've been arguing here as a sort of representative - i was the org leader after all - on behalf of a group of people. the way this has been handled, both ICly and OOCly, by admin and players, has ruined a lot of the experience. hate me, think i'm a whiny jerk or an idiot or both, but for the love of unicorns, have some compassion for and mercy on all the others.
ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, GOOD OR BAD. Trager has lost citizenship, guild membership, allies and deities based off of decisions he made in-game. (@Jensen and his damn catapult fetish) This is no different, Vyxsis just had a God there to enforce the consequences. THE CONSEQUENCES THAT WERE CLEARLY AND CONCISELY IMPARTED.
Edit: Target to Trager. Damn phone. Also, if peeling back all the veiled BS and laying it out is abuse, I’m the most abusive MF you’ll ever see.
nonetheless, i don't think i've really just said "you just don't understand" - i have appealed to reasoning internal to indorani lore as a kind of shorthand rather than doing a huge info dump. i've also said, more than once, that this isn't just about me. i'm less worried, much much less worried, about my personal loss than that of all the others. i'm not even *really* complaining about there being consequences so much as that the consequences have been unnecessarily harsh to an entire group of people.
admin did make and are making decisions that changed the course of player responses, even. an example: yesterday, vyxsis and some other guildies were meeting with bloodloch leadership to explain ourselves. nobody was really happy with us, as is to be expected, but after a bit of talking, my sense was that some were coming to understand why we did what we did. it was probably going to result in punishment, still, but maybe tempered. but then, basically right before the meeting would've ended and the overlords would've adjourned to discuss, chakrasul appears and delivers a strong, strong tongue-lashing in which she doesn't really address my arguments but simply says "No. Wrong." then she disappears. immediately, what seemed like a process that was going relatively smoothly and would involve deliberation, Zenobia changes course and orders Vyxsis banished. it was a direct response to chakrasul's intervention. consequences? yes, fine. jumping in to interfere in the players' processes of doling out those consequences? ehhhhhhh... when you consider how many other ways and times chak could've chewed me the unicorns out - including in ways that would've better allowed other indorani to save face, rather than making their circumstances worse because of the Divine Stamp Of No-No - i think it's pretty reasonable to say "hey, this is a bit much."
again, the objection isn't to there being consequences. the objection is to the level and harshness of consequences that's causing a whole group of players to feel ostracized and immiserated.
Hi.
Are Indorani players going to be ostracized at some level and potentially find themselves in difficult positions? Absolutely, but they had to have known the consequences of supporting such an action. Regardless, they are not in an unwinnable situation, there are plenty of orgs in the game, and they have RP routes open to them for either redemption or doubling down on their cult. Relatively speaking, everyone is getting off almost scot-free.
I say 'detrimental' in the sense that the repercussions have far-reaching consequences that aren't easily forgiven or undone. In Duiran? The city's been nudged a lot recently by its gods to act else risk ostracizing its allies or being put in a needlessly difficult position. In the case of the Indorani, again, a sizeable portion of the guild supported a decision that pretty much came across as throwing every other org under the bus. I'm not saying Indorani players deserve the treatment, but at the same time they made the decision that put themselves there. And you can't really say, 'Oh, I had no idea that everyone would hate us ICly'. You kind of have to be aware of that possibility. It's kind of like how with the Gray Accords that's going on in-game: Duiran and Enorian KNOW there's the possibility that Bloodloch or Spinesreach won't share all the information they have, or that Severn might pull a 'LOL ARTIFICE' trick, but it's a CALCULATED RISK. You go in knowing something bad might happen, but you accept it anyway, and know full well what the consequences are going to be. And that's part of being part of any org leadership: weighing actions with consequences on multiple levels, and which consequences are 'acceptable' enough that isn't going to cause undue misery to players in your org.
You use the example that "The Chaos Lords imprisoned at the seals could have been rogues that Golgotha handed over." When a storyteller sets up a situation in which a player character finds him or herself in a dilemma and the player (or in this case group of players) makes a decision, a response like the one you list above is a perfect example of lazy storytelling. If something like that had happened, it would have done nothing more than proved to the player base that their decisions truly do not matter and the show will go on its intended path no matter what.
As for the dilemma itself, that's a wonderful opportunity for character and organization development. The Indorani were caught between loyalty to the Pantheon and loyalty to the Court. With the stakes as high as they were and the Pantheon warning of dire consequences, there could have been any number of ways to respond to the situation that wouldn't have been lazy like the admins shifting things around after the fact.
I could also argue that the fact such a dilemma exists at all brings credibility to @Razmael 's argument that the Indorani don't make sense as a player run organization. An org whose mission statement antagonizes the entire world isn't something that attracts allies, it's more of a "big bad" like the Dreikathi or Nazedha.
It happens. I won't really bother commenting on whether it was deserved or earned or horrible or what have you. All I see is that the Indorani can now infiltrate other guilds and attempt to influence them from the inside while being part of a hidden clan cult or something dedicated to the spread of Chaos... or something.
Alternatively, you could just start chanting "Oonagh-a Oonagh-a" like I am.
So it's said that the Indorani "don't make sense as a player run organization" because of their antagonistic stance which, I'm uh... honestly kinda lost on. Every time I try to come back to Aetolia I feel like I see a lot of people bemoaning the lack of conflict, but this seems like a push in the opposite direction. And also, from an outsider's perspective, it does seem a bit to me that Indorani players were forced to choose between an IC lore-appropriate decision that would get them nuked or an OOC against-lore decision that lets them stay.
I dunno, I could be totally off with all of this. And I assure you all I'm not trying to stir up any more drama. I'm just trying to figure out what's going on, not just with this, but with the state of the game in general because like, I think there's some really, incredibly appealing aspects to this game. I just don't want to invest large amount of times in getting back into Ikruut if it's going to feel like hardcore railroading storywise. I made this character with a clear idea of what the Teradrim stood for then and they turned into something very different, which I rolled with, but this feels to me that it discourages conflict in general and I don't want to invest more time into roleplaying and character development if that's what I should expect.
When it comes to large scale events in Aetolia, I feel like it has to be approached as players like you're players in a D&D game, and the admins and Celani running the event are your DMs, and the event itself is a plot arc. The event runners will have a general idea of the end goal of what the plot arc is, and leave hooks to latch onto. The gods and NPCs nudging players in certain directions are like a DM doing the same to keep players going in a certain direction to keep the story moving. It's railroading, yes, but it's a necessary kind of railroading. You want to be able to do whatever you want? Well, you can; there's just going to be consequences. I can say from my own personal experiences with Duiran and the amount of nudging it's had to have from its gods that if it hadn't been done, Duiran probably wouldn't have gotten involved in the Liruma War ("It doesn't directly threaten us or Dendara, it's not our problem") or the Gray Accords ("Why would we cooperate with Shadow? They'll just stab us in the back, so let's go it alone") for reasons that were perfectly valid IC. But decisions were made to 'play ball' because as I've mentioned before, when you run an org, you do have to balance RP with what the story is currently demanding.
I was recently directed to here on what admin said about the guild. So I decided to read up. Now for my 2 cents.
Ishmar has a history from long ago with Severn. She doesn't trust anything that he says. She had asked if Chakrasul had a seal and the answer was no, they were created before her time. So she had thought "why bother?" Then the chaos seal popped up and she had an idea. Ask the chaos lords for help. After the threat was made, she left it in the Indorani hands. Although, if she were an Indorani, she would have told.
My mind and Ish's was running with possibilities of "what if"scenarios. Ish didn't know what was going on with the Indorani and it was maddening until I was given a small heads up ooc.
When Golgotha came into play, I'll admit that I was looking forward to seeing Severn and him fighting. I had no idea that all the other Gods were going to get involved. At one point, I actually thought that the good ole spider lady would be in Golgotha's harem. Wouldn't that had been a hoot?
I had planned on Ish never being in another guild again. After she was branded an enemy to Spinesreach and killed, she joined. Real emotions do come into factor on things.
Now she has her own punishments to take if she likes them or not. In the way that I've always played her, she accepts them for her small part in what happened.
With that said, she's already had a few ideas that could bring the Indorani back together again since there isn't a guild. If people in the guild accept her ideas, it's their choice just as it was in contacting the Chaos Lords.
Just remember this folks, Golgotha's blood on Severn's dagger did strengthen it some, but it won't hold forever. Who's to say that when Golgotha returns, Jox will break free and then the armies of chaos will turn to fight in that battle?
One last thought.... Any of the Gods that are aligned with Bloodloch never appeared at the seals. Only when Golgotha showed up. So how were the Indorani were know which way to go? Being a follower of Chakrasul, I loved seeing Severn in fear. We didn't know what her thoughts were on that matter until it came for the Indorani punishment in Bloodloch. A bit of a disappointment on that end.
A company of twenty mounted knights lets out a blood-curdling scream.
Yes there was a clear outline of acceptable behavior. ICLY Severn warned. It was ignored, he followed through. You are justifying, but you are failing to see yourself your actions as a leader represent your whole guild.
Why would they -want- to revive the indorani after you essentially gave the middle finger to everyone regardless of the intent, which stopped them from focusing on their event to handle what you did. In an Ic perspective.
Now no, I haven't been here but I can deduce what happened there, when it's all out there. Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects. The size of the forces on the first object equals the size of the force on the second object.
You chose the wrong action, you have the equal response of said reaction, plainly put it sucks yes, but essentially suck it up accept that the guild as a whole was punished because a majority agreed. You failed to stop them or even try to seek council. Then you and Leana tend to vastly go on the firestorm when you all don't get your way to claim how you're oppressed. Come off it already. It was stated clearly VERY CLEARLY.
If you don't like the response the admin gave you, you should have picked up on that not so subtle queue from the admin.
Do you hear that?
It feels good, it feels good because I am both the slave and the ruler of my own body and I wish to do with it exactly as I please