Aelu / Rel (Combustionary)

This looks more like an attempt to make yourself into a special snowflake than something to actually enhance the server's RP. Plus, it doesn't explain what the mask actually is. Where it came from. Why it has these special powers. -1

A letter is sent in to the group, assuming it is still alive. IC:Name: Relgard Sintel Age: 467 Race: High Elf (Impure) Gender: Male Reason for joining: Looking for a new job. Favored skill: I've been just about everything at one point. Give me a task and I'll do it. OOC: Username: Darkdragon274 Age: 17 Reason: Looking for a new thing to do.

This sounds wonderful. Let's do it.

Given name(RP name): You will call me 'Shale' (Skype name if you have one): TheWafflian True name(MC name): Darkdragon274 Race: I am an elf. What sort of elf is irrelevant. Authentic magic user?: No. If so what form of magic ye use?: Do ye seek adventure, knowledge, and companionship?: Why apply if I do not? Mageshield, Vigils or Apprentice(if other detail)?: I apply as a Mageshadow, despite your regulations. This is my area of expertise and you will, assuming you accept this, find such expertise to be suitable. This is non-negotiable. For Mageshields only: Do ye swear solemnly to put your life upon the line to preserve that of your arcane brethren? What combat skills have ye? My tongue is my sword and my traps are my shield. Short Response for all Applicants, write how ye would respond: You come across a massive ruin of ancient design, strange sounds and lights emanate from within. I mark the location, and send the information to somebody more suited for arranging an exploration. Afterwards, I enter the outer rooms of the site, to decide whether or not it has been looted yet. While at a local bar you see two dark hooded figures in the corner discussing in a whispered conversation. You can't quite make out what they're saying but you clearly hear the word "artifact". Despite the common assumption, most men of shady repute do not discuss evil plans at populated taverns. The obvious solution is to buy the pair a few rounds of heavy liqueur and loosen their lips with alcohol. Walking down the Anthos Highway you come across a masked man with a sword threatening a hooded figure, claiming he is a necromancer. Assuming neither of these men are of the order, I allow the situation to go on as is. If I'm particularly bored, I may stand around and watch. Other men's fights are not my own.

Relgard lets out a sigh, seeing the poster. He takes one of the many down, folding it up and stowing it in his robe. "The more things change..."

As for strictness? I guess we'll have to just disagree, then. In my eyes, it's painfully eased. Though I've always been one for strict staff regulation and whatnot. I don't believe that playerbase is capable of regulating itself. I do what I can to help players who do magic incorrectly, and in many cases it works. But there are also many situations where it doesn't. Maybe my fears about the plugin are ill-placed, and if they are, that should fix the issue.

What I want to 'bring back' is nothing near the level of the old MAT. What I think would work, is quite simple. -MAT's job is to keep a list of mages, add new mages. -To get magic, you either -a) Post your name, magic type, and teacher. Teacher posts to confirm. Learn at whatever pace you desire. -b) Post your name, magic type, and briefly summarize how your character learned (Like, one paragraph tops) and learn at your own pace. -In extreme cases, MAT can remove repeat offenders from magic. My first MA took about three hours to write. This would take roughly three minutes. Maybe five if you're self-taught. Which I'm thankful for, but I suppose I'll be relieved when I see it. Or a post is made fully describing how it works. I saw too many of Vaq's promises of "It'll work" to trust anything plugin-relating thing without an actual explanation. That's just my thing, though. We'll see.

Lord of The Rings has elves. It also has giant trees. And dragons. It doesn't have common magic, though. I don't see what you're trying to prove. Show me where I once said magic was for the 'elite'. Show me where I once said it should take months to learn. Please, show me. I beg you. Not once have I said people shouldn't be able to get magic. My opinion is that there should be regulated means of getting it, as a way to improve the quality of magic as a whole. Because, right now? Aside from the locked subtypes, the usual quality of magic rp is abysmal. I don't want to make people unable to be mages. I want to make sure those people are able to properly roleplay magic. If they are self-taught and can demonstrate an understanding of how it works? Of how to RP it? Let them have it. Say what you will about Villain apps, but villainy back then was never nearly as bad as it is now. I miss those 'awful' days dearly. But I guess it's elitist to think people should put in effort now. Oh well. Staff approved powergaming? I'll agree, on this. T4/T5 mages were a bit too strong, in my opinion, but LoTC shouldn't begin and end with mechanics. Here's an example. Back in Anthos, Knox's warclaim on the North. Towards the end we'd gotten all of the Antags holed up in a gated cave in the back of their fort. So, for the next five minutes, my Geomancer begins prepping a spell, something to attempt to damage the gate enough to shoot through. It was great, soldiers came around and killed withers while I typed, and five minutes later, I emoted flinging the stone. What happened? I was PMed by an ET that I wasn't able to do that. Fairness? Making sure I wasn't special? Sure. Except for the fact that the ET's alternative was for me to rip a pillar out of the ground and use it as a ram. That's just as much 'staff endorsed powergaming' as the spell. The skills may fix them, but they may not. We're going a direction of homogenizing literally everything on this server so that nobody feels left out. If the skill plugin works well? We'll have tons of different types of characters. I don't want to be above everyone else, I simply don't want to see something with so much potential get dumbed down because people don't want to work for it. My worry? I'm worried it won't. Introducing the 'gold staff' wand tool didn't create a new type of mage-combatant in battle, it just suddenly turned every soldier into some novice mage who could cast a magic missile. What I'm worried about is that the system is going to turn be one of min/maxing to get the best possible stats. That magic's going to be little more than something with almost no purpose but to complement each player's sword in pvp. And you can't say that will 'stimulate creativity'.

Why should magic be common? How does it being a fantasy world justify that? Magic is rare in Lord of the Rings books. Magic is rare in some Final Fantasy game universes. For every fantasy universe where it's commonplace, there's another where it's rare and coveted. Just being a 'fantasy universe' does not justify it being one way or another. People certainly batted their eyelids at Gandalf, no? Sure, right now a player can pick up a book, and became a mage, but why should we encourage that? Please, give me an example about how unlocking magic has done anything but increase quantity at the expense of quality. What good have we done by turning a previously useful and interesting skill into a different way of saying "Draws his sword (PVP)"? And why can't the other magic types be locked by IC reasons? I don't want another lengthy OOC process like MAs, I want magic to require you actually learn it IC. Look at the Alchemy plugin - Threads with the recipies were removed, so obviously the staff wanted players to have to work to become better with it. The same applies for the emerald-enchanting system. If we can't just wake up and be masters at what is described as magic in a bottle, why should we be able to wake up as masters of magic?

We used to have a sort of lock on those, Villain Apps. As much as I would love to see VAs again, that's an argument for a different thread. I'm not interested in keeping myself special, I'd be more than willing to give mine up for a better system. Creativity with swords and shields and crossbows end with slashing, stabbing, blocking, and shooting. The creativity with magic ends with what the staff decide is the limit. The way to allow more creativity in magic is to get the staff to trust the magic players more. The way to do that, is to improve the overall quality of magic RP, and in my eyes, the way to do that is to create some form of gating for magic. Certainly not as extensive as prior magic apps, but something that prohibits a character from becoming a master wizard over night. It would be nigh-impossible to fully contain the magics that have been released. Anybody who managed to, say, get every evocationist into his guild would be doing something extremely impressive. And as a side note, is it possible for you to say something without trying to attack the high elves?

I'm afraid I don't believe that. Magic's staleness isn't because of that, it's because it's been rendered useless. Proof of that? Look at really the only magics that people care about anymore. Nobody bats an eye when they see a pyromancer. A shade or a necromancer? They're unusual. They're interesting. They can do more because they have standards. A sword is a swung piece of metal. It's straightforward, though even in the past, we regarded day one master swordsmen as powergamers. But does it make sense for an illiterate child to pick up a book, look at the first page, and suddenly be able to read? Does it make sense for a man to look at a farm, and suddenly understand everything about farming? The game doesn't begin and end with mechanics. The reason magic is dull now is because, for the open subtypes, there's no point in adding 'flair'. What can a pyromancer do that can't be accomplished with pvp, these days? When magic was locked, a high-tiered one could burn something, (don't confuse this with griefing, I mean slight damage) and create rp. These days? We can't allow that, else every raider would suddenly learn it in order to harass people. A magic that can do something interesting? Necromancy can create liches, for one. They can have places corrupted (Just a month or two ago I saw a large bit of the druid grove corrupted as so, it was pretty interesting). Would the staff allow this, if the magic was open? Would the LMs want five new liches popping up every day? Or every town getting it's fields drained of life?

With the upcoming magic plugin, fully open magic will literally turn all combat magic into little more than a pvp commodity. We all saw what happened when golden staves started shooting fireballs. It took about five minutes for a non-mage to use it in pvp, and five more for them to write it off as a 'hand cannon'. Making magic fully open means every army will be comprised of a hundred soldiers who 'dabble in pyromancy' in order to justify having a fire spell to use in PvP. And as fun as it would be to see the Fire Nation rise on LoTC, we can all agree that the rp would begin and end at the line "Player casts fireball!". I don't want to 'block' players from becoming a mage. I don't want to say "You're too new a player for this". I want to see magic stay as magic. I want it to be something that takes a bit of effort to get, but not a prohibitive amount. You don't need to follow everything to the letter to be a good magic RPer, but you can't say a player who was properly taught isn't more likely to be better at Roleplaying the skill.

I don't see an issue with allowing self-teaching (In cases where a subtype isn't overflowing as is. In Mid-Anthos, we had a time where fire-evocation had about 5 times as many users as any other magic - If that's the case, find a teacher) if the player provides a valid reason. I want to have a proper list kept of magic roleplayers, not to make it difficult to access, but in order to allow punishment for those who often fail to rp it. A list of users so we can revoke and blacklist.

I'm a bit wary of the plugin, but if it's done right, it certainly could. I just hope it doesn't stomp all over the server's lore, and we end up in a situation where some random orenian soldier finds a shade spell, but the actual shades don't, and what not. If the magic plugin stays based around the current system, I'd want existing mages to be given spells when we first arrive, and some form of restriction kept in place. Otherwise, every soldier will have a cleric healing spell, a druid web spell, and some magic missile. I'd rather the magic plugin be a way to express magical power, rather than another version of the gold staves we had.

You say that as if 'recruiting all the teachers' is something than can just be easily done. Look at evocation, one of the biggest magic types. Fully locking that down to a clique would require every single teacher (Of which there are many) to join it. Just one single teacher refusing would weaken that clique, and every student of that teacher would weaken it. He teaches one, then they both teach one each. After a while, you end up with just as many teachers outside it as inside. And if it does, in fact, get cliqued? The Magic Team could easily fix that by working with the ET to have a tome hidden somewhere (They did this with earth evo in Anthos). Even looking at the subtypes locked for non-rp reasons (Like enchanting), even the original list of users had members not part of the Mage's guild. The only magics that are fully group-held are the ones that make sense to be, like the Shades or Necromancers.

I'd be fine with that. I'd take a fresh start over what we have now any day.

The MA system didn't work, but that's not what many of us want. I, personally, simply want to see some regulation. Minimal gating so that a character can't just wake up one morning as a master mage and say he learned in a dream.

So, you're saying we shouldn't try to maintain quality? Sure, some players who just 'picked up' magic are good at it - But many are not. The opposite was true for the days of MAs - Some were bad, but most were good. Naturally, a full-lock would have to make a list of current magic uses, and I see no issues with allowing mages who acquired magic during the free period keeping it after a lock. As long as there are magic-revokes once more, for mages (both new and old) who consistently fail to rp magic correctly. The 'time' needed is minimal - I don't advocate a return of the timed 'x screenshots every week for 2 months' system. I was a basic check before getting magic. The student posts in a magic section with his character name, magic type, and teacher. The teacher posts to confirm the student is being taught. Nothing more. It would not be nearly the same level of time needed as before. Self taught? If a magic is getting low on players, I'd see no issue with allowing self-teaching where it'd make sense. Explain to me. How would a faction be able to 'hoard power' if you yourself say magic has no power? Even if it did have power, how would a faction be able to hoard it all when (as I've stated repeatedly) none of the magics that would be locked are in any form a clique? The work that would be needed to turn evocation into something guild-based would be astounding, and somebody who actually managed it would certainly deserve what limited perks came with it.

Why should we cheapen magic as a whole in order to cater to you? By your logic, I should be able to make a dwarf and be the king on day one. Skipping the journey, after all. Or maybe found a new noble house? The process of getting followers is ever so tedious, you know. And once again - It's not about taking 1-6 months. It's about finding a teacher, and having them claim they taught you. That's it. If a player is unwilling to put in even that much effort, they simply don't deserve to have the magic.

I agree. It might be a bit complicated to implement, but I think it'd be worth it.