Observations on surface "Good" vs Evil "roleplaying" (Moved to "squashing the OOC beef" leave the salt here)

[Paint]

A prison island would be funny as hell and I endorse it in whatever form it takes. Unless it's Skal. Please don't send criminals to Skal.

[Ad Astra]

A prison island would be funny as hell and I endorse it in whatever form it takes. Unless it's Skal. Please don't send criminals to Skal.

but it's where they belong..

[DM Monkey]

Just RP it. It doesn’t need a mechanical supported setup when you’ve already got all the tools you need. Giving people the benefit of the doubt every now and then goes a long way to instil confidence in good faith RP both ways.

[Choofed]

Just RP it. It doesn’t need a mechanical supported setup when you’ve already got all the tools you need. Giving people the benefit of the doubt every now and then goes a long way to instil confidence in good faith RP both ways.

Right, lovely to say Monkey but most of the jails on the servers don't have escape routes or even baseline mechanical support. They in fact, do not have the tools they need.

Likewise, we've had really mixed messaging from the team on doing it. We had some DM's come out and tell us that this was breaking the Jailing and Capture rules despite us giving them a clear means of escape. Others were completely fine with it, and we were simply left in limbo.

[The GrumpyCat]

So a genuine recommendation here, give the goodguys a means to send someone off to a labour camp or 'prison' from their respective jails. Gives us an out to send them to a prison camp or something, without having to kill them so we don't memory scrub them with the death rules.

Sometimes sentencing someone to ten years in jail, but 'they escaped!!!' is a good option, it would be nice if it could have some mechanical support.

As it stands, I've just been putting people in the Cordor jail cells with escape routes, sentencing them for 10 years and then very explicitly telling them precisely how to escape on an OOC so they can leave whenever they want when the RP's over.

Yeah, this would be really cool. It's up to the dev/area dev team when/if it happens, but I'm absolutly pro the 'prison isle' concept or something like it. To be honest, just more (mild) mechanical options might be quite nice.

Likewise, we've had really mixed messaging from the team on doing it. We had some DM's come out and tell us that this was breaking the Jailing and Capture rules despite us giving them a clear means of escape. Others were completely fine with it, and we were simply left in limbo.

Sorry can you clarify? What's breaking the jailing and capture rules?

[Beary Nice]

Reading the names of at least one of the posters in this thread, I had to laugh at the disconnect between what they posted, and how they actually act ingame. Disingenuous doesn't quite cover it.

Whether players would like to admit it to themselves or the community or not, there's a wholly pervasive play to win aspect to Surface anti-evil. It has nothing to do with "Team Good", and everything to do with "Team I Want to Win".

It just so happens that it's very easy to win, on this server.

Makes you think.

[ASqueakyPitFiend]

So I have not made a forum post in what feels like ages. I try to stay away from these sort of threads and keep to myself and enjoy the game for what I want to make of it regardless of how many people tell me that "Arelith sucks." "The DMs are corrupt." "X player is the worst person in the world." etc etc etc. Now granted, I am also not innocent of having my gripes, my complaints, and my fair share of toxicity towards certain people and I have taken the consequences of those actions in stride and come to terms with my biased opinions and have learn to just let bygones be bygones.

Lets face it, you're not going to get a long with everyone. This is a D&D game filled with D&D nerds who all want to tell their D&D story. But what we forget is that this is a D&D game on the Internet. For the longest time I have let that discourage me from trying to engage in anything meaningful on multiple characters because I felt the same way that a lot of people are feeling right now judging by some of these posts I'm reading. You start to wonder, "What even is the point if [redacted] faction just inserts themselves and kill bashes me on sight?" There really is not easy answer to it I am afraid beyond the tired expression of "Report it to the DMs if you feel you are being unfairly treated." And your response might be they do nothing about it because X DM is in Y's pocket. Report it to a higher authority then? If you feel a DM is biased, take it to the Head DM. If you feel the Head DM is biased, take it to admins. Talk to other DMs in private and get their opinion on the matter, you have resources to vent your frustrations and just remember that not everyone is a bad person. If you have multiple sources kinda giving you similar answers then that may be a clue to do some self reflecting. But if you're getting extremely frustrated about it, then take some time away and play a different game. I've been enjoying Chivalry 2 and We Who Are About To Die because it gives me an outlet to take out my frustrations in a different setting, distract myself, and then come back refreshed. Current character I'm playing now is a great example of this technique and I've been having more fun on this character than any recent character I've played because I've been taking advise from Witch, Starfish, Herald, Avalon Soul, and a few others about self-moderating and it's helped me a lot.

With that being said, I've spent the better half of this year exploring various factions, interacting with people whom in the past I would've never even considered interacting with in my entire life to get a good look at their side of the stories. See things from their perspective and try to put myself in their shoes while also scouting to see who I think would be the best person to tell a story with outside of my friend groups. I won't sugarcoat anything, I was pleasantly shocked by quite a few groups, some whom I had concerns with confirmed, and others whom I was disgusted by their actions and try to avoid now for my own mental health and enjoyment of the game. I've used all this to build my current story and lay it out for some of these select groups whom I have confidence will be able to latch on to it without knowing who I am and tell an engaging, fun, scary, and brutal story of true evil vs good (though I'm sure this post might out who I am now, oh well).

In days long ago, conflict was not this huge bitter OOC hate. Don't get me wrong, there was definitely still beef back then before EE, but now you have entire groups going at each other like it's some big Twitter (or I guess its now X) war. Regardless, conflicts told a story. Nowadays you have people who just want to collect ears and then never talk on their discord about X player is trash and how they crushed them or you have people who completely disregard a PCs contributions (one that they had very fond respect for) just because they didn't get a certain amount of money on the bounty placed for them. I see this from both sides and it saddens me to see it to the point that I just question if I ever want any sort of interactions with that player because those sorts of actions make me wonder if I'll ever get anything meaningful out of them?

To those that I am interacting with right now in current conflicts, and if you know who you are then great, understand I am looking forward to everything coming our way. All I want from us is for both sides to have fun, to get to tell their story. If you defeat me, awesome! A loss is a loss and I do like seeing good triumph over evil. I have no clue what might come with my defeats but I cannot wait to see what you all come up with because I have a lot planned for all of you if evil triumphs

To the other anonymous groups. I really try to hold out hope for everyone these days rather than be cynical and convinced that people cannot change (not something I've had 100% success with and I am still working on it, no one is perfect). That being said, I really do hope that some day we can see eye to eye on certain things and maybe get to a level where we can also exchange stories and conflict and build something on Arelith together.

[Hazard]

Players should not feel they are being targetted because they really arnt.