Bounty system

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reading.

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If syndicates are supposed to be evil only, then wouldn't that disallow goods from giving them business?  Wouldn't placing a bounty (i.e supporting an evil organization) be against good ethos?

The biggest complaint about neutrals in syndicate is that they can't be protected against, but who cares, they can't get protection either. 

Killing for gold is not evil however killing for the gold in someone's pocket IS... lol

Neutrals should be allowed in Syndicate BUT they should also be on the bribery wagon, if a bounty is 50k and the victim offered them 50k up front then the neutral has ZERO reason to kill. If the neutral continues with the murder attempt that's cabal > align and should be punished with the usual outcasting, align change and skill loss.

Goods bountying people has always been something that we take a very close look at.

A good bountying another good is an absolute no-go and will almost always lead to outcast and skill loss for the bounty placer.

A good bountying a neutral needs as much of a very very strong rp reason as the good attacking that same neutral. Only acceptable with a very strong rp support.

A good bountying an evil has two sides: on the one hand, you're supporting an evil organisation by giving it more work, on the other hand, you're getting the evils to kill each other. This is something the good needs to consider and then decide on, depending on their own rp. In the past, some KNIGHT cabal Imms have straight out forbidden their Knights to place bounties, while others have allowed it. It's a difficult balance. If Syndi is full of neutral hunters at the time, the good is sending neutrals out to die vs evil, in most cases this would be poor rp (unless a past with this neutrals has created enmity).

As for the killing for gold argument, this is not really valid for a well rped neutral Syndicate, as he will have OTHER reasons (else he's not well rped). See F0xx post. It might be a religious motivation, it may be the need to belong, etc.

On 3/21/2018 at 9:21 AM, f0xx said:

I can not understand how people complain about Syndicates but not about Watchers. As an Avatar you are not even allowed to kill them, and you get a hard-coded punishment for doing so.

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Same goes about goodies being hunted by good Tribunals. "They get a pass on behaviour that would get a a Non-Tribunal *good *Outcasted." Right?

What do you think about the people who do recognize the the Watcher/Good Tribunal issue as well? 😛

What I can't understand is how somebody can recognize the issue in Watcher/Tribunal, but can't see it in Syndicate. It is the same issue!

The reason we don't have a lot of "gray areas" in the rules regarding how we run cabals and RP is because those gray areas predictably lead to similarly inconsistent enforcement. Inconsistent interpretation of a rule is just another way to describe a gray area, btw.

If one IMM thinks that action/RP xx is a violation of the rules, but another believes it is just an interpretation, you'll have major issues. Especially when the rule is interpreted in different ways by the same imm for different contexts.

It is much better to have a consistent set of rules and allow variation in how you play WITHIN those clearly defined rules, not varying the rules themselves.

That just leads to confusion among the playerbase, evidence of which is proven by the confusion and frustration that has continually surrounded these issues for a decade.

A quote from a post I made last year that directly pointed out why align is important and why balancing/designing around it (instead of your individual, random RP) works in our system:

On 9/20/2017 at 5:08 PM, Celerity said:

It then begs the question..why religion? Why not race? How about guild? What about town? Political entity? Character dynasty? At which point do you draw the battle lines? You'll notice that in FL, most of the hard lines are drawn at the align level. The game's core story is about Nexus vs Knight and has been since the beginning. Even though the other cabals focus on non-align (ethos for Tribunal (many issues because of this), class for savant/warmaster, ethos/race/class for watcher (thus that cabal is a complete design failure), wealth for merchant/syndicate (another failure due to no real wealth system in game), and lore for herald (another fail, because lore development has been very weak in FL). So you have some successful cabal implementations and some failures.

Turns out that good vs evil (and to a lesser extent lawful vs chaotic) is a nice, easily understood and played tension.

If want to mix it up and make nation, religion, or something else more important, you start seeing the lack of depth in those systems. Since we don't really have playable concept of religion or nation-state in the game, it would be a bad idea to balance around them. You can already see it when you have contradictory goals:

Consider Avatars. How do they play in cabals? Avatar goals first (align), cabal goals second.

This is inverted sometimes in Tribunal --> Ethos over align. Goods can attack goods. This has been a huge source of problems for the game because the game is designed around align first, not ethos. This is a design failure that has never been rectified.

Warmaster/Savant tend to play out nicely EXCEPT when you have..shocker...align conflicts. This is because the cabal requirements contradict the main tension point designed into the game.

Good tribunals can only defend against good outlaws or war enemies, the latter of which has the exception of "if no other members of tribunal are on, that are neut/evil". @Zoichan can correct me if I'm wrong there, his cabal obviously, but I do seem to remember that to be what I was told on my one and only goodie trib.

@f0xx Didnt we talk about this a while back and you told me I was right that it IS evil..?

We’ve both had neutral Syndicate Leaders so we both know you can bend that interpretation with a few reasons like Anume mentioned. But, regardless of your reasons behind the deed, it is still an evil deed. Ekhurift took bounties to fit in and find a home for himself. Ekhurift rode that evil line pretty damn hard and a ton of his actions could and maybe SHOULD have led to an outcast of alignment.

After reading everything in this and other posts like it, around cabal warfare, cabal balance, and character responsibilities to alignment/ethos/cabal, a couple of things seem to line up. To start, there have been complaints that Syndicate and Nexus usually line up together. For a majority of my time playing FL, Syndicate and Nexus have had an Alliance. We've also come to (maybe not completely unanimous) a popular opinion that Syndicate activity is usually evil, and neutral Syndicates should be played carefully. We've also established the same drawbacks to goods fighting neutral Watchers, specifically avatars, and how it is difficult to balance, or justify with RP. 

One solution, I think, would be to permanently align Knight and Watcher, and permanently align Syndicate and Nexus. I am not a codemaster, but perhaps a means of merging these cabals would create a system that is easier for the characters within to follow their RP more closely and accurately. Before you think this is immediately stupid, consider the results.

Knight and Watcher frequently fight the same enemies. Yes it is possible for them to be at odds due to Avatars being unnatural. But that is the single outlier as to why Knight and Watcher would ever need to fight each other. Knight is the side that will fight anyone that is evil, specifically Nexus. (And often Syndicate anyway based on the obvious complaint that Nexus and Merchant place bounties for Syndicate to collect) Watcher fights anyone unnatural, so besides Avatars this means Undead, Demons, Vampires, and Liches. (Who often though not always find themselves in Nexus or Syndicate.) Perhaps in the spirit of overhaul for a greater good, Avatars could potentially not be considered unnatural or at least find themselves a lesser enemy to Watcher.

Conversely, Nexus and Syndicate often fight the same enemies and are often in Alliance anyway. Even if just because it is easy to align with other evils or evil slanting neutrals. Nexus would be the side that breeds Chaos and unjustified evil, whereas Syndicate would be the side of a more organized evil for profit and business. Some may think I just want Nexus to side with Syndicate, but in fact I am of the belief that their near-permanent Alliance is detrimental in a system that supports changing Alliances, NA-Pacts, etc. Because of this, I think Knight/Tribunal/Watcher are often lopsiided with multiple Vendettas while Nexus/Syndicate often have one, or even none (in the case of my past Syndicate characters). Embracing this pairing of cabals, but also pairing Watcher with Knight would make for a more frequently even playing field.

I think, then, that Tribunal should not be able to align themselves with either side. But in doing so, may deserve a strength boost *and/or *a broader means of labeling criminals. (Think: giving Council more freedom to make laws, or far easier means to create lawful areas).  I am aware Tribunal is already a rather strong cabal, but in this case and in my opinion, they should not be political. I even see the irony in this, but war itself is not an ideal way of life for the Empire as it damages the atmosphere of peace, or servitude depending on the align of the current leadership. 

There may be many holes in my logic, and I've read through it a few times to address things that may come up. Please, tear it apart, I think there are some good ideas in there that could fix a lot of things and maybe even open the game up for more RP opportunities. Ideally, this could incorporate two pairs of cabals (Knight/Watcher - Syndicate/Nexus) and make way for new cabals ideas with broader scopes of RP that are less affected by these RP inconsistencies that have been exposed over the last few weeks. I haven't written a long post in a long time, so let me have it.

@Twinblades713 Short thought: Yes, I think you are on the right track. Although you didn't mean it directly as being less cabals, perma-alliances are effectively the same cabal. That is a good thing with a small playerbase.

I think the lore could be adjusted to fit a Knight/Watcher alliance (or any other alliance, actually), so I think that is a minor point.

The real issue with your idea is that you are taking four cabals and making them into two alliances. What about the cabals outside of these alliances? Unless they have a similar grouping (or other adjustment, as you recommend with Tribunal), there will be problems. I think you need to take the last step and combine the remaining cabals as well.

I have suggested multiple times (originally almost ten years ago) to condense the cabals into three 'cabals', combining two current subcabals into one new subcabal. This results in 8 final subcabal choices. Since these new subcabals have the ideology/history of two old ones, they are more diverse and have a firmer lore. More depth and less breadth is good for our size.

Right now, you are lucky to see a cabal mate, much less have meaningful group interactions on the cabal level. This is a big problem.

To contrast your selection of which cabals to combine, I think we can simplify all the ideologies into three broad categories:

Those who wish government (Knight, Tribunal, Herald, Syndicate). I put Syndicate here because without a government to corrupt, there is no organized crime or wealth for that matter.

Those who wish domination (Nexus, Savant).

Those who wish freedom (Watcher, Warmaster).

For more depth, just check out the idea thread. There are a lot of reasons to take a more directed approach to cabals and few reasons not to.

The trouble with threes.

As a parent I learned many years ago, and as a math enthusiast, that three is the beginning of inequality.

If you have 1 child (cabal) it gets an equal percentage of the love and attention 100%.

If you have 2 children, these things are divided, but each gets an equal percentage still 50% of your time devoted for each.

While a parent of three children can still divide their love and attention among them fairly evenly at 33.33%, there remains one constant truth.

Where there are three, two will play nice, and the other gets left out. 

While I like @Celerity's Idea, I can see that one of the cabals will always suffer the allegiance between the other two.

Ultimately this means the "unpopular" cabal will always be fighting those top tier PKers, have even less people to RP with, get fed up and quit. We come full circle.

As it stands now, I may not have any fellow Cabal members on line. However, I can RP with members of other cabals to create personal alliances that may protect me from those top tier Pkers.

Why 3 I ask?

5 is still less than eight. 5 would allow for some alliances by each coalition, creating more opportunities for RP. 5 would not pigeon hole the sub cabals so tightly.

Just thinking out loud.

Testing