monkeypoacher

Thank god that they're short, honestly. The war rules never needed to be anything more than simple hard-and-fast bullet points. Everything else gets settled in war chats anyways, and it's good to have as few rules as possible to lawyer.

Brandt Toadsdorfer, the leader of the Miner's Plot, began to sweat nervously at the news. Had the wool truly been pulled over his eyes? Had the Baroness and her children not been evaporated in arcane fire, as his co-conspirators insisted? He anxiously re-read his correspondence with the Orenian Government. His attempts to charter the Dobrov Motherlode had been stalled in the courts, placed under indefinite review due to the proceedings of the War. He needed proof of heir Fyodor Carrion's signature, but Fyodor infamously reclusive. Scouts sent to Dobrov found no trace of him, nor, unsettlingly, anyone at all. Now he had hundreds of pallets of pickaxes and equipment floating on a clipper in Providence Harbor, and several dozen miners milling about N.P.C. in increasing agitation at their lack of pay. But now that rumors of that infernal castle were swirling around Providence, even exponential issuances of promissory scrip could not buy their continued loyalty. Was his whole house of cards about to topple down? He looked in the silver mirror that sat beside his desk in the attic of Hope Annex. His face was the hue and sheen of melting tallow. The cloak and dagger sat on a nearby stool, its blade reflecting a rare beam of sunlight. It was taunting him, beckoning as he milled impotent circles, hunched over in the cramped garret, coy glimmer assuring - there was only one thing left to do now.

"Long may they splinter." Says Alderman Aubergine, dipping a cracker in whipped smoked trout and washing the salty snack down with a draught of fine Red Auvergnat.

"The Empire pledges its swords," said Herod Harrenid, who is in no way qualified to pledge the Empire's swords, "We must be ready to defend Canonism to the death - even if Canonism will be the death of us!"

This is an entirely separate issue!!! Also lying to the guard works like 70% of the time just tell them you're unarmed and watch as Elysium roleplayers are terrified of confrontation

Yeah, I know it doesn't make perfect sense in RP. But most things don't on this server. Yes, it breaks a footnote rule, but so do a lot of staff verdicts. It's just such an incredibly silly thing to tell players they can't do - I can't be nice to someone and not take their items when I disarm them? I could also keep track of people's weapons with chests and signs, it's just the inconvenience of both of us having to be on at the same time - which is not an issue of RP enforcement - that makes this untenable. I have no idea if I'm going to have to log off in 20 minutes when the guy wants to leave. But I could also just build a "weapons locker" adjacent to the gatehouse that players could publicly access, do /cprivate myname theirname, and then let them pick it up on the way out. It's a solvable issue, people just found the path of least resistance. When I tried to roleplay a corrupt city watchman and relieve magic roleplayers of their special enchanted contraband I was faced with players who would get so apoplectic about their special carbarum-lunarite-diamond alloy swords being taken off their person that I was basically forced to say "okay just don't RP having it buddy" to get them to stop chimping out OOCly. So there's that, too. What you're complaining about is just a convenient workaround that you do not have to participate in. You can always give your items away.

I have, I just don't see the issue? Any reasonably well-managed town on Almaris realistically would disarm you at the gates. Crossbow violence is an epidemic. If you want to toss someone your items instead of just RPly agreeing that some of them have been removed from your person and sent to hammerspace that's your prerogative. If you want to smuggle weapons into a town you should do it in RP instead of telling people that they can't guard their towns in a certain way. If anything, I think the /search command is really game-y and doesn't represent how a guy would be able to search me for weapons through 4 feet of iron bar reinforced concrete and voidal-proof glass, but that's apparently not the issue you have

Aubergine de la Baltas mounts the rostrum at City Hall, fitted in full regalia of the Captain of the Watch (a position to which he was honorarily appointed), to deliver a speech: "Southbridge. Southbridge will be the chestnut that cracks the tooth of the foraging hog. Fight bravely, dear citizens, for your very homes and homesteads, for every buxom peasant matron who weeps for her slain boy. By the grace of God, on this day, we will not yield a single inch of Imperial loam!"

i need an independent dukedom to roleplay my never-before-attempted culture and very special take on canonism that i literally cannot roleplay with anyone else, anywhere else. [culture] golden eagle ascendant: customs of the Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων

very nice post. well feedback'd, my friend! it would be banning "sexual roleplay" or "romance roleplay" not "ftb" though to be clear. "ftb" is the caveat we have created that allows people to do sexual roleplay (vanilla for the purposes of procreation) on the minecraft server, by saying it didn't really happen, you're just allowed to imagine it happened offscreen (wink wink). we should probably write guidelines for what you're allowed to roleplay and what's okay and not okay for people to roleplay aimed at encouraging kids to get help if something doesn't feel right. and there should be extreme caution taken when enforcing bans for ERP so that if someone is being groomed we do not drive them out of our community and into the arms of their abuser just to drive this point home, i'll tell the story of a friend i met on my first few months playing lotc. she began an RP relationship with an older teenager and subsequently got banned for ERPing with him on the server. since she was now no longer Lord of the Craft's responsibility this older person was free to keep talking to her on Skype, find out her contact information, blackmail her for more graphic sexual roleplay and send her rape threats. all of this was enabled by shitter reactionary admins who banned her on impulse. not to protect her well-being, but because her situation made them uncomfortable and they wanted to avoid liability for it. this may sound like an aside to the conversation of whether we should ban minecraft sex, but it's important to think about how we are going to handle these bans and how we are going to talk to potential victims. as uncomfortable of a situation as it may be, we have a duty of care to some several hundred children on this server and i think a duty to ourselves to make sure the sort of shit that started this conversation doesn't happen again. also, for the love of god raise the minimum age on this server to like 15 or something. if I see another 13 year old kid join this server just to be digitally crucified for being gay i will kill myself.

The leader of the Miners' Plot cheers. The Dobrov Motherlode is blasted wide open.

IMO peak times for nations should be integrated into a plugin that occasionally announces: "The Kingdom of Urguan - 17, The Holy Orenian Empire - 24, Elysium - 19, Haelun'or - 11 ..." and so on for every nation/settlement. Our competitor last year had this and it took the guesswork out of finding RP and directing new players to settlements. You always knew where other players were and you never had to wander around in search of RP. I also like the idea (from someone else I forgot) of giving each new player a number of "soulstone charges" - a charged soulstone can warp to any capital pillar on the map - so no one is stranded at the cloud temple and has to navigate the roads to find RP. You get multiple to start out because it's hard to tell where is where.

another casualty of the epic (cringe) "jaded boomer" mentality to lore & player creativity where some guy you never see or roleplay with shits on your lore instead of working with you and expects you to rewrite it to suit his narrow and perpetually fluctuating tastes. you will be missed

this entire map in a nutshell: player: i would like to [x] staff: we can't let you [x] for free, but you can just buy an [x] node! player: i would like to buy an [x] node staff: no

You know you can already make bank as a traveling salesman/RP shopkeeper. Last map I made way more by taking custom orders than I made from a well-placed shop or an auctionhouse transaction. As much as I would love for staff to get rid of my competition, so many people complain about shops and I meet so few shopkeepers that I am almost sure the complaint is "I wish other people would do this for me" If every town had a decent general store proprietor to talk to people would stop using the vending machine plugin entirely. People naturally want fun, interesting interactions and it's usually way better to order something at a fair price from the merchant's guild than buy it at a markup from a carpetshop. The only reason the whole carpet economy hasn't been totally supplanted by a more efficiently-managed merchant company is because nobody has tried to make one yet. I don't see what this has to do with fast travels though. The AH (which will be nuked soon inshallah) and shops exist mostly for player convenience, fast travels solve a problem with the design of the map. Almaris has lots of obnoxious downtime between settlements and I'm almost certain that it's a factor in our low player retention. It also limits the kind of RP you can actually do. I have no sway over who Haense gives a castle to. Why must I, a hypothetical newly-joined Haense player, bear the burden of searching aimlessly in the frozen tundra for players? Because my overlords wanted neither to stop giving each other new minecraft castles, nor to connect their castles to some sort of transit system?

This is already the case. Most people have a castle/grove/village/city they roleplay in and rarely leave. The current system just makes it obnoxious for someone new or unconnected to find opportunities to roleplay. I don't meet anyone on the roads anyway. "Just get a horse" people ride past me at 45 miles per hour before I have a chance to say hail. Most people are looking for a setting where they won't get ambushed by inbred C.H.U.D.s if they stay put for too long, road RP is effectively nonexistent.

Seriously. I am tired of riding around aimlessly looking for players. It already sucks all of the fun out of the server knowing that most people are roleplaying in their little private gardens, but at the very least it would be nice to be able to bounce between hubs instantaneously until I find a mildly active city square or tavern You could fix like 70% of the server's issues just by having fast travels with a floating text blurb that says "4 people are roleplaying here ..." That way I don't have to guess where people are roleplaying or ask the funniest people in the world in global OOC

Mor'shu frets as his potential customers die in droves.

I don't know, I've been having fun. Not sure what you mean when you say there's a lack of road banditry - we've had skirms on the roads almost daily for the past week. GMs have intentionally removed the cooldowns on roads to encourage banditry. The Grand King of Urguan and the AC of Oren were both kidnapped by the enemy in huge knockout pvp battles. I think you're speaking way too prematurely about a "lack of consequences" with this current war, which has barely even started. A tile is up for grabs, attackers can continue to drive towards Providence or take more land if they win (and cough up the money to maintain their conquering armies.) I think it's super revealing when you complain about things you haven't tried, like playing a "conquering horselord" ( @DeepDarkSamuraiis already RPing a pastoral nomadic culture - why don't you hit him up?) If the server seems stagnant, if the only thing you and your 30 guys can seem to do is join a nation and listen to someone else tell you what to think, that's because it's what players choose. Players choose to join a nation, choose to roleplay nobility and intrigue their way into comfortable positions as the ruling cliques. This is all a self-perpetuating system that, as you said, can't be fixed from the top down. You have to choose to break out of it, choose to do something else. If you really wanted you could forge out and try to create your own new niche. The staff have made it difficult, but not impossible; Yong Ping and Elysium are examples. This war has generally been pretty sportsmanlike and open. I have high hopes for it moving the story of LoTC, which has been utterly stagnant for the past 4 years, slowly forward. I really don't get the concern besides a vague sense that "things aren't as fun as they used to be" but I mean of course. W2emps happened. A lot of players quit because of it. The people who were in power after the war happened are the people who are in power now, they've just traded hats. Players have chosen to make the server stagnant and repetitive, because they want to sit on thrones in fancy castles with their own special titles and heraldry ripped from old dead nations, and they don't like giving any of that up.

"So many words, and each one of them meaningless in the face of a wanton, bloody war of conquest - brought on by dwarves murdering Canonists, and culminating inevitably in the murder of Canonists." Ponders Aubergine aloud!

An Orenian soldier looks up at his pinup of Vexalia Lothryne (an antique from the War of Two Emperors) and sighs, smiling longingly.

A Providence City burgher decides to travel down south and enjoy a beer at the tavern in the Destiny's Crossroads Autonomous Zone (DCAZ)