Bad Lore

[squakhawk 7303]

Bad Lore

This thread covers the explanation on what “Bad Lore” is, it’s concepts, and why certain archetypes or submissions are closed off entirely.

 

 

Bad Lore is a harsh term, particularly when describing older lores of the server which people put a lot of effort into, some 10+ years ago. However, people evolve and things age, and often, some concepts do so poorly over time. Not only this, but their utilization or place on the server is questionable. They can offer nothing, and just exist as a piece of lore to read. While not a bad idea, this gets into bad territory somewhat quickly. Let’s explain.

 

There’s a lot of different types of bad lore, but it mostly boils down to why it’s bad rather than the specifics itself. Some lores can never work, no matter how much finagling, spite, or effort one puts in because fundamentally their concept doesn’t mesh well with the server in some aspect. Some lores aren’t even open for submission, which is questionable given they have been in the past.

 

An example of fundamentally-flawed concepts of the server could be Telekinesis. While formerly a very important magic to mali’aheral, Telekinesis is a concept which has dulled greatly and seen over a dozen writes, each lacking in some aspect no matter how many times patches get applied to correct the last mistakes. Fundamentally, size, scale, and weight are impossible to work with in minecraft. Practically, any magic which tries to utilize some form of hard-measurement other than temperature or distance is going to run into this problem. Minecraft is not a good representation for size. It’s an extremely poor representation for weight. Even then, most roleplayers are extremely unfamiliar with both of these things, given it’s hard to picture yourself in armour. With swords, with shields, how that feels and how you can move. People can speculate and watch all their youtube videos on people performing incredible movement in armour or with weaponry, but it often delves into people arguing over semantics and specifics. Even if you wrote some form of equation, equality, or measurement, you are forcing people who have never read, nor maybe even want to read, your lore to get an idea of what has been arbitrarily decided for them. It’s written-in powergaming. Relativity is the best measurement here, and relativity is extremely poor for minecraft and magics; hence why it’s used sparingly.

 

Another fundamentally flawed concept has been Mentalism. While formerly a very well-kept magic and somewhat niche, it explored a lot of issues regarding metagaming and good-taste roleplay. These issues often revolved around death roleplay and how to get around memory blocks, metagaming names, places, people, and taking control of other people’s characters in a manner which can be abused incredibly easily. Simply put, writing in clauses or redlines that state “Don’t do this, or you’ll be in trouble” are extremely poor. A lore should not enable or allow those behaviors within their writing, and should not rely on Story Team to constantly validate roleplay and handhold people through utilizing their day to day magic. 

 

Another fundamentally flawed concept is Bladedancing. While never really having a formal magic submission, this is the idea of using a form of telekinesis which allows the user to manipulate floating blades around them, or weapons of some other kind. While again, a super cool and thematic idea, all the submissions we’ve ever received for so have been shot down for time and time again the same issues which exist on a conceptual basis. A person with a lore like this will always be fundamentally stronger than someone without it. While that seems a no-brainer that someone with a magic should be stronger than one without, it becomes unfair when every situation is an unwinnable one against a lore like this. What stops the user from not only manipulating blades, but having one of their own? Can they move just fine? Are they still strong? What cost is there to their lore? How long can they keep it up? What stops them from just stabbing people in the back with undodgeable strikes constantly?

 

And lastly, going over just two more of a similar archetype, Izkuuthi and Contract Magic. An issue with both of these is often players just felt at the mercy of both these types of magics and that they couldn’t do anything. That an Izkuuthi was impossible to kill, could constantly use illusion or manipulate the senses to borderline powergaming, that the Izkuuthi was practically an unskippable cutscene when interacting with them. Contract was similar, where it pinned players and made them feel trapped, and almost lore-enforced to be entirely at the mercy of a contract mage. People used them for anything, to be able to rip apart somebodies character if they didn’t do what they say. Both of these make players feel like a passenger of their own character rather than players master of their own destiny. Being trapped in these types of unskippable cutscene interactions may be fun for the lore, but it’s just wasted time and frustration for those interacting with it. That isn’t fun, good faith, or roleplay- it’s power tripping.

 

 

Overall, the list of conceptually flawed lorepieces goes something like this.

-Telekinesis

-Mentalism

-”Blade Dancing”

-Ruibrium

-Shade

-Arcanism

-Izkuuthi

-Contract Magic

-Soul Puppetry

-Cognatism

-Non-voidal Voidal Magic (Taking away Voidal Weakness)

-Fi’hiraan’tanya/Direct antimagic (A magic/ability which completely shuts down another magic)

 

 

While some of  these lore submissions aren’t wholly auto-denied, they just can’t be written without changing the core concept of the lorepiece. When rewrites were submitted for many of these pieces, the lore was so wholly disconnected from the original that it was just it’s own idea, with the same name. Even then, they shared the same conceptual issues which ended up having them denied. While spite is a great fuel and naivety is a blessing, we strongly, strongly suggest not writing these pieces else you wish for a swift denial. 

 

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Plagiarism

Another thing to consider is plagiarism. While this server is built as a hobby and is defined by artistic expression in a shared narrative, we do value keeping a core integrity to our lore. While many concepts on the server and in future submissions may be heavily inspired by other sources, the ST will accept nothing short of a piece which values it’s place on the server, more than another piece of lore coming in just as a port-over from the original source material. No matter what you’re writing, please keep in mind you should adapt your ideas to the LOTC universe, and stray from taking concepts and ideas from other sources. Invent and adapt those ideas further, but please refrain from copying other sources of lore and worldbuilding.

 

 

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The other hand of bad lore is in submissions. With this final rewrite of Lore Criteria, we’re throwing in some submissions which are on an auto-denial list of nonacceptance. We’ll go into the reasons for that below.

 

Open Race Submissions are no longer being accepted. Given this was never used, we want to move to a direction where CAs can be more of a direction for open races, given our lore is practically hard-coded to only have our core five and their subraces. Additional subraces, simply, don’t really have the legitimacy or playerbase to warrant becoming an open race, given none have ever sustained themselves for any degree of time outside of a couple months. With this update, Open Race Submissions are no longer accepted. If you wish to write something like a subrace or something along the lines of an open race, consider writing a Group-A Creature Submission more revolving around your subrace or open race. See General Criteria: CA Race Groupings for more details.

 

Aengudaemonic/Patron Submissions are no longer being accepted. In the past, accepted deities have always been really awkward and serve mostly as “OCs” which don’t fit in with the rest of the deities. This is lore written for people just to look at, and never quite interact with. While the ST over the years has been shifting towards having Aengudaemons and Pantheon being far more interactive and represented, these submissions dump someone’s writing and ideas for them to use. This makes it awkward, and in the past, just includes deities which are disconnected entirely from the pantheon and don’t quite fit in with the rest of the world.

 

The final submission type we’re removing is Non-Aengudaemonic Deity-Class Submissions. These are a mixed bag, and to be frank, were written by a previous admin with no real clue on what they would service or what they would do. Given we want to remove any mention of something like Primordials (another bad lore), and keep our lore simple at face and complex at back with Aengudaemons at the top of the chain. While Voidal Behemoths have their purpose, these are always used in large events in which they never show; since a voidal behemoth is effectively so powerful it’s outside of any ST’s perspective to play rightly outside of very distance proxy. With so, this submission type will close.