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CONFLICT AND WHY IT'S ESSENTIAL


Mickaelhz
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as a whole, players do not come on this server to tell stories or to engage in epic fantasy conflicts. they come on here to play an idealized fictive version of themselves, doing things they cannot do in real life. conflicts on this server are not enjoyed for how poetic they are or how good at evoking emotion and capturing the player’s imagination, for the most part. people engage in them for the thrill of being a genius strategist or a skilled warrior or a conqueror in the fantasy world, or people engage in them for fun pvp.

 

newbie dragonslayers/assassins, bandits, and other chaos agents are never going to fit in on this server. people who play an elfsona with >1000 hours of playtime are not going to accept the loss of that elfsona by random factors outside of their control. it’s a sad fact that this probably limits people’s ability to have fun on lotc, but there isn’t much that could be done about it if staff really wanted to. nothing you can say or do will convince someone to give up the character they spent months of their life to write, who represents a certain aspirational view of their identity, to be sacrificed at the altar of drungo dabber. people will literally sooner quit than do this. raid rules and defender default are the current compromise that keeps people logging in; they probably need (and will receive) a rewrite but they have been much, much worse, and this is nothing new.

 

also there’s nothing wrong with being a bandit, a villain, etc. but let’s drop the act that you’re blameless individuals being victimized by staff. This is a stupid charade and it’s totally unnecessary to get your point across. you aren’t providing anyone a public service by being a road bandit on a fantasy roleplay server, you’re trying to have fun. everyone else is trying to have fun, so this is infinitely more salient and relatable than “well conflict is the lifeblood of rp” (yes I know, wrong thread) and lotc will shrivel and die without your essential lifegiving conflict rp. it will not.

 

conflict is cool when you’re fighting a dragon or sealing an ancient lich king in the bowels of the earth. conflict isn’t cool when you want to impress a cute girl on minecraft so you play a 6’5 chiseled handsome archmage warrior prince, or when you get your kicks by making random rpers cry and being racist on discord. there is good conflict rp and there is bad conflict rp. good conflict is essential, we should make sure bad conflict doesn’t make this server uninhabitable for its target audience.

 

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A part of growing the player base in my settlement was guiding people there from ct. We would roleplay on our way and it was fun... for the first week. After some time the roleplay became more of a chore than a fun surprising experience. Even though the people and characters were different, the roleplay remained predictable and plain.

 

One day this all changed. As I was guiding a greedy goblin, an elf and a dwarf out of ct towards Sutica, the elf started to scream. Up the road a band of mounted orcs appeared and came charging towards us. We tried to get away but were inevitably caught up with and halted. They demanded our items and the dwarf as sacrifice. After minutes of civil conversation we ended up fighting and then scattered, barely making it out alive as we did (they got the dwarf though). Everyone was filled with excitement as we entered our settlement! The following days consisted of enjoyable cat and mouse games between my group of new players and the orc bandits attempting to catch us. Sometimes we would win and sometimes we would lose but having those bandits on the road was what made lotc enjoyable to me.

 

conflict roleplay makes lotc a better server and should not be killed off through even stricter rules. 

Edited by Mark2282
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Honestly, I’ve never really been one to partake in raid/conflict roleplay, nor have I ever enjoyed being raided on the road when travelling from one destination to the other, but even so I find a part of me misses those interactions. Road roleplay is at an all time low, and this is honestly something I miss greatly. I remember last summer when my character would have to find soldiers to guide them from Curon to Oren because there was almost a constant threat of being bandited on the roads. Bandit roleplay can actually create some really cool dynamics, and overall if we’re aiming for a medieval/fantasy style server then it’s pretty accurate to the setting. Like Michaelhz said it creates a purpose for the military, which in turn provides more roleplay for our nations. I think we should be trying to encourage higher quality banditing, while still giving them the space for creativity by having less limiting rules.

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11 hours ago, I'm an idiot said:

as a whole, players do not come on this server to tell stories or to engage in epic fantasy conflicts. they come on here to play an idealized fictive version of themselves, doing things they cannot do in real life. conflicts on this server are not enjoyed for how poetic they are or how good at evoking emotion and capturing the player’s imagination, for the most part. people engage in them for the thrill of being a genius strategist or a skilled warrior or a conqueror in the fantasy world, or people engage in them for fun pvp.

 

newbie dragonslayers/assassins, bandits, and other chaos agents are never going to fit in on this server. people who play an elfsona with >1000 hours of playtime are not going to accept the loss of that elfsona by random factors outside of their control. it’s a sad fact that this probably limits people’s ability to have fun on lotc, but there isn’t much that could be done about it if staff really wanted to. nothing you can say or do will convince someone to give up the character they spent months of their life to write, who represents a certain aspirational view of their identity, to be sacrificed at the altar of drungo dabber. people will literally sooner quit than do this. raid rules and defender default are the current compromise that keeps people logging in. they probably need (and will receive) a rewrite but they have been much, much worse, and this is nothing new.

 

also there’s nothing wrong with being a bandit, a villain, etc. but let’s drop the act that you’re blameless individuals being victimized by staff. This is a stupid charade and it’s totally unnecessary to get your point across. you aren’t providing anyone a public service by being a road bandit on a fantasy roleplay server, you’re trying to have fun. everyone else is trying to have fun, so this is infinitely more salient and relatable than “well conflict is the lifeblood of rp” (yes I know, wrong thread) and lotc will shrivel and die without your essential lifegiving conflict rp. it will not.

 

conflict is cool when you’re fighting a dragon or sealing an ancient lich king in the bowels of the earth. conflict isn’t cool when you want to impress a cute girl on minecraft so you play a 6’5 chiseled handsome archmage warrior prince, or when you get your kicks by making random rpers cry and being racist on discord. there is good conflict rp and there is bad conflict rp. good conflict is essential, we should make sure bad conflict doesn’t make this server uninhabitable for its target audience.

 

 

Your brain is unironically huge. 

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After reading everything, there are issues with player-driven conflict from both sides:

 

  1. Defenders are overly concerned, out of character, over conflict, particularly threatening conflict that may result in death, injury or loss of items.
  2. Attackers do not generate meaningful roleplay and instead hinder the roleplay of the inhabitants.  

 

These are both concerns, and it is disingenuous to discount either. Any relevant argument about fixing this problem should tackle both issues. The ultimate goal of any roleplay should be to generate a good experience. Roleplay can have bad ends, but the experience can still be good.

 

Issue One: To an extent, issue one can’t be solved in totality: some people will always be like that. However, I think it can be diminished and people can be better sports if the roleplay is meaningful or interesting. We should also consider why people roleplay. This differs from person to person. The guy who logs in for military affairs may only log in for that, and he may be want to do bandit roleplay for the purpose of armed conflict. That’s his thing. Someone else may want to do towny roleplay. There’s a wide range of people on the server with differing opinions on what good roleplay is. 

 

It think a step in the right direction would be organized, non-discriminatory banditry. One “bandit” group I know of in roleplay are the Ironguts. I wouldn’t really describe them as bandits in roleplay, but they kind of feel the same ooc role in that they run around looking for trouble. Ironguts Dwarves do conflict well because you know who they areThey’re not one-day alts, they’re real characters whose group have been around for years. It sucks as a defender to lose to one-day alts when you’re playing a character you’re trying to develop. It just feels bad, but it doesn’t feel as bad when you know the person attacking you has been around for a while and that it is a real character.

 

Issue Two: Players should always strive to make fun for both parties. The goal of banditry should never be to oocly attack or harass players, and it shouldn’t be to destroy people’s fun. If only one party is enjoying the roleplay, it isn’t worth doing. A lot of bandit roleplay feels lazy: it’s boring and overdone. One of the better “bandity” roleplayers I knew was Zarsies. He had like a necromancer who ran around kidnapping people along the road and experimenting on them in a laboratory. That’s cool. That’s different. 

 

I've seen people bandit and raid communities until they killed the community. This isn’t Crusader Kings. Arkantos ran a town back in the day that got raided to death. No amount of roleplay decisions fixes that. It’s OOCly fueled tension. Bandits get creative and attack at odd hours when no one is online, or they bait people to engage the conflict so they’re not technically attacking. It happens all of the time: it feels OOCly motivated, it feels like an OOC attack on the player, and it leads to a ban report (justified or not). 

 

 

 

 

 

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I’ve played for some time now, during every big war since Thorin and Godfrey and well and I’ve seen a lot of these posts and its great but as you might imagine my faith in anything substantially changing for the better has long been worn out.

 

LotC has trended towards increased regulation as time goes on, the obvious reason is because its more time for problems to come up and be solved. All the salt and OOC conflicts that often accompanied big world wars have been a big source of this. Nobody really wants the hateful conflicts in both RP and OOC, but they are inseparable as unfortunate as that is, and in the moment, its always salt and hate and its then when people want change. Our conflict rules have lacked self-awareness for some time, as the ability for bad things to happen outside a poorly written script get increasingly difficult. 

 

Yeah the Fringe and the 18 year’s war and a lot of the saltier and more hateful conflicts have damaged the server, but not because players haven’t moved on (relatively because that hate doesn’t just boil over everyday), but because of the rules and regulations they’ve made LotC adopt. Nobody really wants to lose sleep over conflict in LotC, but the answer to those problems have never been the response LotC has had which is increased number and complication of rules.

 

Conflict on LotC has been neutered for a while, its not to say that the good ol’ days were always better, the good times have always come in waves. I mean, I definitely had plenty of times were I was worried about Urguan just not existing after a conflict. as frightful as it is, the days where we had everything on the line are the ones where the actions meant the most, almost like what we did on LotC meant more than what it did.

 

2 years ago I started on my quest to unite the dwarves, it came from a place in my heart where I cared about the dwarves and what we did on LotC. And I knew the entire time I couldn’t provide the dwarves what I wanted, not simply because of my own limited abilities and time but also because LotC does not allow the creativity it used to. Instead of being down about that I focused on what we /could/ do, and that’s what we did.

 

I can’t name specifics for **** but all of this is part of a big picture trend LotC has been headed down for years, and its lame, so very very lame. Regulations seem to only ever increase over time, even in real life but it’d be nice if something that isn’t real life could gain the self-awareness to have a future that learns from and acknowledges the past instead of just reacting to it.

 

 

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I entirely agree that conflict in this server is essential. Specifically for the struggle as to which side is truly in the right. It enables an entirely new aspect to rp that is otherwise chalked up to one's affiliations and social stature. It brings the action to their doorstep and gives a constant sense of tension.

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On 10/7/2020 at 10:57 PM, Cjmate8 said:

 

A lot of the good conflict you’re pointing out is national conflict. The Hanseti Civil War was awesome. The PvP Flay goon squads that ran around doing “minas or die” roleplay was not. Also, people who get attacked don’t do all of these “rp opportunities” you point out. They just ping Discord and get the boys online. 

 

This may be an unpopular opinion, but here’s my two cents: raid cooldowns should be removed completely, increase the cap on how many people can attack, and all bandit roleplay should be organized oocly beforehand with the owner of the tile. It doesn’t have to be concise, just a simple, “Hey, we’re going to attack sometime on Saturday, and there’s going to be about 10 people” will suffice. If a tile owner knows there’s a lot of people attacking, he can ask them to attack next week so it isn’t overwhelming. 

 

I find server rules tedious. Players can solve a lot of these issues themselves; if they can’t, just have a GM step in to moderate and strike a balance. 

 

There’s the potential for meta-gaming, but people already meta-game with Discord. At least this way, they can roleplay sending out patrols and do military stuff the day they know there’s going the be conflict. 

The Flays doing “minas or die” broke players out of their rp safe shell.  RP was a major part of that type of banditry and a single rp encounter would sometimes last hours upon hours.  As this was and is an RP server, there always needs that stand alone group, otherwise it would just be another screw and nail rp server.

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