Unattunement is Flawed

[PanicZealot 648]

Now, I have played LoTC for going on four years. I have played around with a lot of magic and love most of the Deity-based magic. But one thing has always struck me as Majorly Flawed.

Why in any version of the lore should Druidic unattunement be able to be done WITHOUT OOC consent, let alone without Mod/Story supervision? If you look at just about any other deity-based magic, there are quite a few steps that need to be taken in order for some form of disconnection to occur. Shamanism, for example, REQUIRES actual screenshots proving that there have been actions committed that are grounds for disconnection; even then, a shaman is given THREE strikes. Templarism requires OOC agreement between BOTH parties to duel in some way and the loser CAN be disconnected. Paladins were similar in this way that they had strict tenets to uphold. Heck, even Seers have to abide by strict tenets. 

While yes, Druids and their magic have tenets to follow, this DOES NOT, and CANNOT stop Druids from going around and disconnecting other Druids willy-nilly as they see fit. So explain to me HOW THAT MAKES SENSE?

I have heard many stories and even seen people go through what they consider to be wrongful disconnection many times. And there is nothing they can do to argue against this. And sure, they can go back and RE-Connect, but this means starting again from the beginning. 

Is this fair? Is this right? What say you?

[Tav 4336]

i’m gonna go out on a whim here and say this is a post you made on the part of your friend who got disconnected last night.

 

anyway, druids don’t have any tenets that enforce stuff, they’re purely cultural, i feel like you should know that if you’re making a post regarding the magic. if druids really wanted to they could disconnect someone just because of pure (roleplay) hatred, because still that is considered valid roleplay, if the circumstances were correct. that's not to say i don't agree that the process with unattunement is a very tricky one; obviously nobody is going to be happy that they got disconnected from their magic, i think it's the lack of any supervision on druidic unattunement that leaves more room for people to say it was bad faith or metagaming because it's an interaction relying on the honesty of players.

[Spoopy_Duck 3217]

I personally like chaos DC over any sort of staff protection or handholding of the process (the argument would then be that said staff member is simply biased towards the person being dc'd thats why it happened!) but I do want to say your view of the other "holy" magics DC systems is rather skewed to make druidism sound worse than it is.

Paladin as far as I remember did allow chaos DC as the arbiter of whether a tenant was broken or not was the DCing paladin and there was no redlines saying it needed staff verification if that were true. Notably also paladin DC was a PERMANENT sever from the magic.

Templar is also not an "ooc consent" DC. What is OOC about it is that the "victim" in the case of the duel is allowed to choose the gear and weapons that will be used with the option for both sides to agree to use alternatives outside of LOTC if they wish. Control of the DC is still firmly in the challengers hands and the lore actually says that OOCly dodging or refusing the duel will result in automatic defeat. Plus with templar there is also the ability to be permanently DC'd as a consequence.

Now druid is the unique one (i won't touch shaman completely unfamiliar with that lore and that lore is a mess anyways) in which there is nothing preventing the reconnection of a druid (unless you have hit the 2 deity dc button which is just a server lore rule not druid specific). Plus I do believe unless I am mistaken that the rewrite still allows the old rules where if you get reattuned within a month you get to come back at whatever tier and spell knowledge you previously held. 

Dark magics are also I believe basically all chaos DC with the exception of seer but this seemed to solely address holy magics and their systems so I will keep it with the holy magics.
 

[squakhawk 14038]

 

[lemonke 6014]

I hate Chaos DC. I don't have many reasons, but literally, I can use as a reason "you look at me wrong" to ruin your whole character, and lotcers can't be trusted with it.

 

I have just seen it happening so many times, and reporting it doesn't matter. The people who such things are smart enough to cover it well as an IC thing, another example is an entire empire asking someone to get dced. It's just extremely bad faith.

[Nectorist 12869]

The world is ugly and chaotic and unfair… the only guarantor of security is strength…

[Wand 1220]

Tenet based disconnection was definitely not a better system, if anything there were way more disconnection wars back then before things largely switched to chaos dc, as folks like @Zindran bore witness to.

 

What we have now is a system where if you have an irp reason, doesn't matter if its technically rply true or not, you can be dcd once someone wants to pull the trigger and come find you to do it. The less staff oversight the better as far as rp reasoning goes, and they should really only be there in the event of meta or power gaming, unless theres a lore interaction that needs an st to do an emote or something (it makes no sense to have to go to an st only to be told 'they did nothing wrong, your irp reason isnt good enough', because then that stops differing kinds of role play within the community)

 

If we get left with tenet based only, you get systems where people active loophole and cant be technically dcd because 'staff said they did nothing wrong' but a role play perspective still exists to want to dc that person (something i was definitely witness to in Axios and Atlas before lore games arrived, see Squak's post for that)

 

The only other thing enforcing role-playing disconnections to be done a certain way is the community itself enforcing that in roleplay as a whole. Obviously you cant control people from doing what they want but thats the trade off behind the chaos DC concept

 

Right now the only limit is whats in the magic and in the connection/disconnection rules, which everyone agrees to abide when they get a magic that falls under a system like this

 

If for druids its three strikes, then theres the limit for them, unless that was changed in the past few months. I recall there is/was an upper limit of three disconnections from any deific source before you can no longer sustain *any* kind of deific connection

[PanicZealot 648]

1 hour ago, Tav said:

i’m gonna go out on a whim here and say this is a post you made on the part of your friend who got disconnected last night.

 

anyway, druids don’t have any tenets that enforce stuff, they’re purely cultural, i feel like you should know that if you’re making a post regarding the magic. if druids really wanted to they could disconnect someone just because of pure (roleplay) hatred, because still that is considered valid roleplay, if the circumstances were correct. that's not to say i don't agree that the process with unattunement is a very tricky one; obviously nobody is going to be happy that they got disconnected from their magic, i think it's the lack of any supervision on druidic unattunement that leaves more room for people to say it was bad faith or metagaming because it's an interaction relying on the honesty of players.

The lack of supervision is exactly what’s wrong with it. And unfortunately players often cannot be trusted.

 

Not to mention that often in the stories I’ve heard there is room for just pure OOC hate towards a character or player and this is why leaded to the decision.

[Unwillingly 18096]

16 minutes ago, PanicZealot said:

The lack of supervision is exactly what’s wrong with it. And unfortunately players often cannot be trusted.

 

Not to mention that often in the stories I’ve heard there is room for just pure OOC hate towards a character or player and this is why leaded to the decision.

it sounds like you have a pretty good reason to believe the RP you or your friend suffered was bad faith and OOCly motivated. why not make a report? 

[Songwitch 1832]

before chaos DC became the norm, tenet-based DC was all we had - at least when it comes to deific magics like druidism or paladinism. this type of DC implied that in order to DC someone who had broken their lore's tenets, that same someone had to be reported, and what this implied for the ST at large was ample searches including but not limited to flipping through dozens or hundreds of omni logs, back-and-forth between the reportee and the reported player, debates about tenet interpretation among players and members of the team both, and finally reaching a verdict.

 

chaos DC helps skip this whole 'ample searches' bit, because by letting go of tenets, you let go of the necessity to look into anyone's RP logs and deliberate on whether whatever has happened incurs actually breaking any tenet ... at least in most cases. it definitely isn't perfect but it is better than what we had before in the sense that it just simplifies things, speeds them up, and helps provide autonomy to actual playerbases. 

 

i personally still like the foundation of tenet-based DC because i think it's not irrefutably bad, or wrong, but chaos DC is a much easier choice - and arguably better. 

[Samson Option 9652]

4 minutes ago, Unwillingly said:

it sounds like you have a pretty good reason to believe the RP you or your friend suffered was bad faith and OOCly motivated. why not make a report? 

 

Yea, I don't know where this culture of "can't ban report" has crept in but you need to make a ban report in order to enforce consequences, but also to bring this out of "vague-posting" into "Player X is in fact in the wrong post-investigation".

[PanicZealot 648]

1 minute ago, Samson Option said:

 

Yea, I don't know where this culture of "can't ban report" has crept in but you need to make a ban report in order to enforce consequences, but also to bring this out of "vague-posting" into "Player X is in fact in the wrong post-investigation".

I just wanted some player insight bro.

[Tav 4336]

25 minutes ago, PanicZealot said:

The lack of supervision is exactly what’s wrong with it. And unfortunately players often cannot be trusted.

 

Not to mention that often in the stories I’ve heard there is room for just pure OOC hate towards a character or player and this is why leaded to the decision.

Well, I can't really speak for any other stories you've heard, but I can assure you that the interaction with VaporWaveParrot wasn't some petty OOC plot or heavy metagaming interaction. Throughout the roleplay, members involved sent many screenshots of why their characters believed she was affiliating herself with darkspawn. We gave them a good 10 or more(?) mins too to take a breather, because we're not assholes, we understand the roleplay is stressful. 

If something were found out to be metagaming, the roleplay would be reversed and their character would go back to being a druid, we also told this to them. It's way easier to do the roleplay and then investigate instead of investigating throughout the roleplay, it just makes for a messier interaction. 

[PanicZealot 648]

6 minutes ago, Songwitch said:

before chaos DC became the norm, tenet-based DC was all we had - at least when it comes to deific magics like druidism or paladinism. this type of DC implied that in order to DC someone who had broken their lore's tenets, that same someone had to be reported, and what this implied for the ST at large was ample searches including but not limited to flipping through dozens or hundreds of omni logs, back-and-forth between the reportee and the reported player, debates about tenet interpretation among players and members of the team both, and finally reaching a verdict.

 

chaos DC helps skip this whole 'ample searches' bit, because by letting go of tenets, you let go of the necessity to look into anyone's RP logs and deliberate on whether whatever has happened incurs actually breaking any tenet ... at least in most cases. it definitely isn't perfect but it is better than what we had before in the sense that it just simplifies things, speeds them up, and helps provide autonomy to actual playerbases. 

 

i personally still like the foundation of tenet-based DC because i think it's not irrefutably bad, or wrong, but chaos DC is a much easier choice - and arguably better. 

If anything there should still be tenets that need to be broken to qualify a DC irp, whether it be chaos or not. 
 

these are DEITY based magics. Look at any other medium of magic given by gods and you can see that almost everyone of them have tenets that need to be followed.

[blackhand7 368]

To give my three cents as someone who has never played a druid or anything for that matter that can be disconnected forcibly: I do think that chaos systems are fine. I'm genuinely in favor of greater irp consequences and I think lotc as a whole often suffers from rp consequences being totally meaningless (cough, soul binds and monk revival, cough) but that's a conversation for another time and I know that my thoughts on those things are not shared by the playerbase as a whole. However, I do feel as though, in principle with the give and take rule, there should be some redlines around not killing someone after they are disconnected unless it is a PK. 

 

Getting forcibly disconnected, even for a frivolous reason, can be great character development; your persona loses the thing they've likely structured their entire identity around, and must redefine themselves in the void of its absence. That is the "give" to the take of losing an MA. Jamie Lannister has tremendous character development after losing his swordfighting feat (hand). But this development doesn't work if you are killed directly after, as the player loses all memory of the events and actions they chose that led them to being disconnected. They just wake up one day and their connection to the thing they have structured their entire character around is gone, and they rply will never be able to figure out what they did to deserve such a fate. Imagine if a chapter of Game of Thrones opened with Jamie Lannister just waking up with his hand gone, with no idea how it was taken from him, and no way of ever finding out. It's just way less interesting, for all parties involved. 

Edited December 24, 2025 by blackhand7