Magic in the Realms

[Incarnate]

As a longtime wizard player (and the head of the mage's guild IC) I am all for educating people in order to ensure better RP. However, I am completely against any mechanical enforcement of the RP. (Side note: For those of you who know my character and/or have seen my posts in the past, he's a pure caster now, not an arcane gish anymore.)

For myself, I have two modes while online. My default mode, which is geared towards RP, and my dungeon running mode. In my dungeon running mode, when I get to the map of the dungeon I'm going to run I fully ward. I summon two summons, and I ward them to the nines. I then run the dungeon. Once I get back to a "safe" place, I rest and reapply my "RP mode wards" and I go back into my default mode.

I RP that it takes eight hours of rest, followed by an hour of spell preparation to prepare my spellbook. After that hour of spell preparation, he casts a resistance spell, immunities to the five damage types we can be immune to, and premonition. These all last 24 hours or longer. So after a reset or crash, I cast them again, as he would have already had them on.

And I've had people complain IC/OOC about that, even. But, logically, my character would do that and likely more. He hangs around the FAI fire a lot. And he's seen random demons attack there, adventurers bring up mimics that attacked, witnessed assassination attempts, and saw a giant fire breathing rabbit illusion attack. Not to mention he's had threats to his life. So, realistically, he'd be much more warded around the FAI fire. But I limit it to wards that no one sees, and that last an entire reset.

When I'm dungeon running, I have no issues with the "blast away and rest" style of play (although my character isn't a blaster). Because in PnP, there's no way we'd be done with an entire dungeon in 20-30 minutes. It would take several gaming sessions, and hours of IG time, possibly days. So instead of dealing with a casting imbalance in my mind, I deal with a time distortion.

Those that run with my wizard (even when he was an arcane gish bad-a) know that I ward up at the beginning of a dungeon, and then usually don't cast a single spell in the dungeon unless needed to kill a boss.

So, if we want to educate people on proper RP of magic, again I am all for that. But placing a mechanical limitation on it to force it to become more valuable is a horrible idea in my opinion. Be that a gold cost, components, or a "spell pouch".

I completely get what you're saying, but that doesn't solve the problem, because you can only teach the people people that are willing to learn. As Reckeo pointed out earlier, the reason why a mechanical enforcement is necessary, simply due to the fact that the problem comes from the people who are less interested in RP, and more interested in just 'playing a game'. They enjoy it for what it is, and might 'RP-lite', without fully embracing, having the time investment, or interest, in learning or engaging in 'RP-medium', or 'RP-lore' play style. The solution you're offering most like will not appeal to RP-lite who wouldn't enjoy that RP, and it won't solve the issue of characters that litterally glitters with magic running around with full buffs nuking everything they can and throwing buffs on strangers as they move around around. Raising cultural expressions of lore-wise RP regarding magic casters simply WILL NOT CIRCUMVENT or PREVENT this.

Also, it requires integrity and a desire to actually rp this, and if one has neither and/or is only really interested in "playing a videogame", that no amount teaching will fix that, and it won't fix the issue.

[Reckeo]

It's all well and good. I for one am all about promoting RP cultural awareness and expanse of lore knowledge and seeing it practiced by players in game.

I'm also certainly not a fan of the gold cost idea, so I was only trying to come up with alternative suggestions to try and possibly implement mechanical alterations that would coincide with cultural change without killing fun or pissing off the server as a whole.

Like I said before, in UO, reg's sucked. A simple mechanical pouch, well, its a better idea than just Gold or regs.

So whats an even better idea, rather than simply just leaving it 'as is'?

These are the types of responses I'm trying to promote, of course we can also leave it as is and plug on, it's not so bad. I'm just trying to think outside the box to develop constructive ideas that might actually be awesome if done right.

Hard to do with so much flat out opposition. I'm looking for constructive criticism of the ideas and proposals, while also being afforded a respectful and thoughtful approach on how to improve the RP community of the server as a whole.

For the most part it has been respectful, but there is a lot of attitude saturating some of these replies that aren't really contributing to positive solutions as much as just disrespectfully slamming ideas from people who are trying to constructively offer ways to improve problems that exist.

Being realistic, these are ideas that will never come to fruition as it would just disrupt the server on too many levels since it's such a huge change, unfortunately. But the idea process, and attempting to brainstorm productively to come up with solutions to enriching RP is a positive process that brings the community together, OOCly, and of course ICly. That is part of what I think the OP was trying to do, I'd just like to see this ball kept rolling and not full of so much needless dismissive negativity.

Any a-hole with an attitude and a forum account can interject time and time again with "no", "lolz", "you'ze iz stoopud", and "never change it", but this does not contribute in any way, shape, or form, to progressing and moving forward in a matter that cultivates RP enrichment, or solutions to the problems that are not addressed through cultural lore awareness and implementation that myself, Incarnate, and many others have pointed out.

We are working on solutions and brainstorming mechanical ways to implement this. What are half you others doing other than just simply jumping in with a smug attitude and poor assumptions and telling us how 'wrong' we are?

CONTRIBUTE TO THE SOLUTION PROCESS; I challenge you.

Let me ask one more time:

So whats an even better idea, rather than simply just leaving it 'as is'?