Update on Open question to team evil/morally questionable

[Aspect of Sorrow]

I'll point out that as an evil character if you are up to anything that resembles evil, victimless or otherwise, if you do not have an empire backing you, odds are that team good will shut your efforts down real fast. In the current environment as an evil character, it's very difficult to actually get the space and security to develop an evil character without having the backing of an empire.

It's a statistics game at some point, and typically the weight skews the more overt that evil is. Were the server and its core a Lolthite focus the inverse becomes true. It's an effect of the setting of the PW.

Perhaps it should be encouraged for players of evil characters to develop the infrastructure they need to be a tangible threat to team good, resolving in interactions between the good aligned factions and the evil aligned factions that equalizes the level of risk on both sides.

I don't foresee equilibrium ever being met in this setting, once something goes too far off the rails on the Sword Coast the more goodly natured tends to try and undo it, whilst the evil natured tend to become opportunistic. There are evil infrastructures that exist but a run of the mill character tends to be just a morally ambiguous adventurer than someone willing to hop in rank-and-file, independently free than under structured pretenses. If there's an appetite to be sated by the rank-and-file elements then it's not advertised well - examples being BR, EB, and some of the religious churches. The two primary pushers that I've seen in this PW's history for it are the Zhents followed by Bregan, and the third that doesn't want to be named dropped but knows who I'm talking about on S1.

Currently the evil characters carry most of the risk in player conflicts on the surface.

I'm unsure if that's true; social ostracization happens fast in this community especially on team good's fence; paladins that don't adhere to expected parameter fall. You could have something considerable in size, well worked on, and suddenly dismissed over a single fault whilst in the team good space and far reaching ramification, some unfortunately OOC. I suppose more generally you have more to lose in those risks by playing team good. I can list examples of paladins who had to ask evil worshippers to handle orc troubles when they themselves couldn't, priestesses of certain faiths that spoke a little too unkindly toward their kind, or even the simple act of being in a relationship with the wrongly perceived despite meeting all criteria of their faith task and purpose yet pushed away to reside at a stone tower in the distance by her previous friends. There have been numerous political disgraces within factions themselves, some outright expelled, and the impact of these can be far reaching due to the tribalism that occurs in character. Team evil has the ability to work in a kind of a mixed environment with team good, but some just position themselves into a space that becomes an uphill battle because of their choices that no one else forced upon them. Even a simple rumor becomes ruinous. In more extreme examples this lead to a loss to access of much of the active playerbase.

[Grimwald]

Report. Report. Report. Half of your post up to the Temple of Bhaal was just an unending stream of encounters mostly culminating in your attackers breaking one or more server rules.

yeah it got a bit whiny there didn't it? I had alot built up and I was just trying to offer some perspective.

I don't like reporting because I don't want to be perceived as one of those people that goes crying every time something goes wrong.
If it's just some random encounter with no actual in game consequences then I'm just gonna avoid the person and go somewhere else.

[Ghost]

I don't like reporting because I don't want to be perceived as one of those people that goes crying every time something goes wrong.

If you expect staff to deal with rule breakers, report the rulebreakers. Otherwise we can't, unless we are direct witnesses ourselves.

[DaloLorn]

Report. Report. Report. Half of your post up to the Temple of Bhaal was just an unending stream of encounters mostly culminating in your attackers breaking one or more server rules.

yeah it got a bit whiny there didn't it? I had alot built up and I was just trying to offer some perspective.

I don't like reporting because I don't want to be perceived as one of those people that goes crying every time something goes wrong.
If it's just some random encounter with no actual in game consequences then I'm just gonna avoid the person and go somewhere else.

It's a nice sentiment, but:

1. They will not learn how to play nice if nobody tells them.
2. If they don't care to learn, then they should be removed before they do something more consequential.

[Louvaine]

There's nothing wrong with feedback and you have to trust DM team capable of sifting through information provided by players to extract value and entertainment for everyone involved.

[Saharez]

I'll point out that as an evil character if you are up to anything that resembles evil, victimless or otherwise, if you do not have an empire backing you, odds are that team good will shut your efforts down real fast. In the current environment as an evil character, it's very difficult to actually get the space and security to develop an evil character without having the backing of an empire.

It's a statistics game at some point, and typically the weight skews the more overt that evil is. Were the server and its core a Lolthite focus the inverse becomes true. It's an effect of the setting of the PW.

Perhaps it should be encouraged for players of evil characters to develop the infrastructure they need to be a tangible threat to team good, resolving in interactions between the good aligned factions and the evil aligned factions that equalizes the level of risk on both sides.

I don't foresee equilibrium ever being met in this setting, once something goes too far off the rails on the Sword Coast the more goodly natured tends to try and undo it, whilst the evil natured tend to become opportunistic. There are evil infrastructures that exist but a run of the mill character tends to be just a morally ambiguous adventurer than someone willing to hop in rank-and-file, independently free than under structured pretenses. If there's an appetite to be sated by the rank-and-file elements then it's not advertised well - examples being BR, EB, and some of the religious churches. The two primary pushers that I've seen in this PW's history for it are the Zhents followed by Bregan, and the third that doesn't want to be named dropped but knows who I'm talking about on S1.

It had be cool if you had addressed my post as a whole instead of separating it into tidbits where the context wasn't as readily apparent, full post here for clarity:

I'll point out that as an evil character if you are up to anything that resembles evil, victimless or otherwise, if you do not have an empire backing you, odds are that team good will shut your efforts down real fast.

In the current environment as an evil character, it's very difficult to actually get the space and security to develop an evil character without having the backing of an empire.

Perhaps that's why most of the players playing evil characters are into empire building.

Perhaps it should be encouraged for players of evil characters to develop the infrastructure they need to be a tangible threat to team good, resolving in interactions between the good aligned factions and the evil aligned factions that equalizes the level of risk on both sides.

Currently the evil characters carry most of the risk in player conflicts on the surface.

Currently the evil characters carry most of the risk in player conflicts on the surface.

I'm unsure if that's true; social ostracization happens fast in this community especially on team good's fence; paladins that don't adhere to expected parameter fall. You could have something considerable in size, well worked on, and suddenly dismissed over a single fault whilst in the team good space and far reaching ramification, some unfortunately OOC. I suppose more generally you have more to lose in those risks by playing team good. I can list examples of paladins who had to ask evil worshippers to handle orc troubles when they themselves couldn't, priestesses of certain faiths that spoke a little too unkindly toward their kind, or even the simple act of being in a relationship with the wrongly perceived despite meeting all criteria of their faith task and purpose yet pushed away to reside at a stone tower in the distance by her previous friends. There have been numerous political disgraces within factions themselves, some outright expelled, and the impact of these can be far reaching due to the tribalism that occurs in character. Team evil has the ability to work in a kind of a mixed environment with team good, but some just position themselves into a space that becomes an uphill battle because of their choices that no one else forced upon them. Even a simple rumor becomes ruinous. In more extreme examples this lead to a loss to access of much of the active playerbase.

Most of your point here seems to be about cultural problems within team good and should probably get it's own post.



Under the premise of this thread I thought it was obvious that it was about team evil vs team good and the risks involved here.

To ensure no further miscommunication, here is my intended meaning in point form.

• Team good got infrastructure and organisation to efficiently shut down evil doers.

• Team evil does not have the infrastructure or organisation to defend the pursuit of their own goals

• The above point play a part in encouraging team evil to attempt establishing infrastructure and organisation

• Team evil appears from earlier posts to be discouraged from trying to build infrastructure and organisations by admin.

• Perhaps a way to address the sentiment that playing evil is a fruitless endeavour could be by encouraging "empire building" instead of discouraging it among team evil

I hope that clears up the meaning of my post.

[Steve]

How’s the Evil RP going?

Lol. 2016. I was asking the same questions as now, seeing the same—more or less—responses.

So now that one can say a certain “thread in feeling” exists over all these years, what are concrete solutions, both IC and OOC?

Again, we can all agree there are problems, real and perceived as real. So I’d argue one doesn’t need to list them, but instead, make direct requests as possible solutions.

So I’ll put out one request: a DM-led Campaign for only PCs of Evil Alignment. Use this OOC constructed opportunity to create good relations and FUN between players and Staff. Just as a added suggestion: an “adventure” in the Upperdark, where both Surfacers and/or Underdarkers could join in the campaign.

I’m sure there are others here in the community that could make other/better requests. Cheers.

[Saharez]

I had request a different kind of communication, so for example when admin and DMs have concerns, instead of going straight to:
"You can't do that because of x, y and z."
They could go:
"That's an interesting idea, how do you plan to handle x, y and z?"

It's a tiny change but if consistently applied it'll do wonders for the faith team evil has in admin and DMs.

More welcoming communication leads to better outcome and better experiences even when it doesn't.

[Zar'shalee]

So with "team evil" and "team Good" we now have a whole new term for branding fellow players: "Empire building".

Going through this topic just reminded me that nothing has changed so I will be brief:

If someone feels ambitious and have time to build their own small "empire" (whatever that could be) which do not disturbs main storyline campaign of the server. Person should be allowed to do so. Some people simply prefer to just log into the game and then just wait till something happens so they can get involved. Some are simply more ambitious and setup longterm ultimate goals for their characters which gives them motivation to log in every day and follow the path towards that goal.

That being said...

This is community of 30-40 active players, who are playing pretty much a dead game on ancient PW server. There is no "team evil" or "team good", there is only us. The moment you start thinking and splitting this community to: "we" and "they", it is over. So I hope everyone including DMs understands that. There is only us - the community.

[zhazz]

So I’ll put out one request: a DM-led Campaign for only PCs of Evil Alignment. Use this OOC constructed opportunity to create good relations and FUN between players and Staff. Just as a added suggestion: an “adventure” in the Upperdark, where both Surfacers and/or Underdarkers could join in the campaign.

I’m sure there are others here in the community that could make other/better requests. Cheers.

I like this request/proposal. Would very much like to see what it might affect in the end.

Though I will advice a bit of caution, and say that for it to have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding, the campaigners cannot seek to establish a foothold/stronghold/haven in civilized lands. Goodly people would be wary and unhappy about them establishing a presence in unclaimed lands, but there'd be a much bigger incentive to oppose if they started displacing, harming, or subjugating civilized societies in the process.

Other than that worry, I'd say: rock on!

[DaloLorn]

So with "team evil" and "team Good" we now have a whole new term for branding fellow players: "Empire building".

Empire building is a term I coined to describe my own activities, first and foremost. If you have a different way to succinctly describe what Lin and the rest of Selmiyeritar have been doing (when they've been doing anything), I'm all ears, but she is literally trying to carve out a powerbase for herself in the Upperdark.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

It had be cool if you had addressed my post as a whole instead of separating it into tidbits where the context wasn't as readily apparent, full post here for clarity:

The purpose for the snip isn't out of context, and the forum supports full context inspection by the click of the arrow from the quote block and your edits on display, minimizing the need of full block duplication.

This is community of 30-40 active players, who are playing pretty much a dead game on ancient PW server. There is no "team evil" or "team good", there is only us. The moment you start thinking and splitting this community to: "we" and "they", it is over. So I hope everyone including DMs understands that. There is only us - the community.

The community is understood; the discussion is wanted more in the vein of a subset's improvement of their experience.

Most of your point here seems to be about cultural problems within team good and should probably get it's own post.

It's a reinforcement of the reason for the response by example.

[AsuraKing]

Hidden: show

I'll preface my thoughts by saying I play on Team Neutral, while admitting that many of Team Neutral leans heavily in favor of Team Good.

I'll start though, with talking about "who is the antagonist". The antagonist in a PW is the one who is actively engaged in stopping or slowing another's plans, or to stir up trouble for them. If Team Good goes out of their way to foil the plans of Team Evil, then they become the antagonists; think of the recent incident at the Boarskyre Bridge. In my opinion, the paladins who showed up to put a stop to things were the antagonists in this scenario.

To follow this up, the role of antagonist usually falls to Team Evil on this server, as they are usually the ones who are plotting and scheming, and thus are the "aggressors" in plots (which I think is a better descriptor rather than antagonist, anyway.) On a PW, the people who are doing the aggressing (or trying to change the status quo) should be at the disadvantage. At the bridge incident, the Paladins paid a heavy cost; they were the aggressors and had an uphill climb to accomplish what they wanted. In contrast, at the battle between Nashkel/Auril, the Aurilites were the clear aggressors, and should face a much harder time to win (and thus change the status quo).

Now, as to the state of playing evil on the server, what I have personally seen (and this is only my opinion based upon my experience) is that we have a few long term Team Evil players who deserve to be rewarded for their long term efforts. However, I would estimate that roughly 2/3 people on team evil that I run across are "moustache twirling villains" who deserve to lose, all the time. I know of a handful of people who have been around for a bit now who keep making evil toons, and they want to upset the status quo, but are trying to do such in trollish ways that only serve to annoy team good, team neutral, and likely team evil. (Emmanuel once ICly said about one such toon, "They are such an idiot and making the Cyricists look so bad that I'm surprised they haven't killed him themselves yet.") These types of efforts shouldn't be rewarded or encouraged. In fact, some of the things these toons have claimed to have done recently I have ICly brushed off with my toon saying, "It's not possible", and me OOCly explaining to people that it was indeed impossible for them to have done what they said.

As far as reward, I'm all for Team Evil being given a chance to win, if they would indeed have a chance to win. There's many factors to be taken into account to make this happen, though. Firstly, is that I still hold that the person/guild/team who wishes to change the status quo should have the success rate stacked against them. Secondly, invested players (player count as well as RP done) and RP should be taken into account. Then we must consider the actual possibility per lore/situation, weighed against the tactics of the aggressor.

In short, fights aren't even. If my toon decided to march on Darkhold and destroy it because I figured only Tarina was there, it shouldn't be a one-on-one. I should absolutely lose. The same goes for so much more. Neither team good nor team evil defends in a vacuum. But it's very likely that they attack in a vacuum. In other words, if one guild in team good marches upon Darkhold, Darkhold likely has lots of Zhentarim allies to help them defend. But it's not likely that Baldur's Gate and the entire Lord's Alliance would step in to help the assault. There should be a high likelihood of the aggressors losing.

I wanted to chime in on this, as I do think this very much highlights the reason playing evil here may feel rough/unrewarding at times. Years ago when I played on Dalelands, there was very much a constant and similar discussion/issue but reversed. For a long time Evil was the status quo of Dalelands and the good folks constantly were upset that they couldnt make any real impact on that. It was a topic that, much like here, sparked some large exoduses of players at times and was a huge issue. My point is, the issue isnt "Team Evil vs Team Good" (hate those terms...), it's that having a status quo that's set in stone is not a good thing.

The status quo, while resilient should still be flexible. If an organization works their butts off over an extended period of time to establish something that breaks the status quo, those efforts should be rewarded. It just happens that our status quo on the surface tends to heavily lean towards Good here which makes it feel like most decisions are weighted towards a Good outcome.

Getting away from the Good/Evil sides of things, I personally think there's a greater issue, and that's a general fear of letting players have true agency and authority. Let player characters become Mayors of towns, captains of the Fist, that sort of thing. Our status quo is ultimately controlled by NPCs (which in turn gets obviously pinned on DMs) who set the rules/laws, etc. When NPCs control all real authority it becomes stagnant, if someone wants to become Mayor of Beregost and go full blown corrupt? Let them. If a group plots the assassination of Mags to take control, let them do it (even if it may be a poor decision on their part). Letting players have more agency/authority on how the setting functions would certainly breed more interesting RP opportunities out there.

Diversity makes things interesting, stagnation makes things boring.
(Barry just took 10d6 psychic damage from me saying that...)

[Planehopper]

This is community of 30-40 active players, who are playing pretty much a dead game on ancient PW server. There is no "team evil" or "team good", there is only us. The moment you start thinking and splitting this community to: "we" and "they", it is over. So I hope everyone including DMs understands that. There is only us - the community.

As a long time player who has "built empires" for both good and evil, established factions, etc. This resonates with me. Sure, there is work to be done at many levels to keep this place successful, but those needs are universal. When we start labeling others, or self-labeling ourselves as other, things will be much harder to fix.


That said, let me speak as a moderator here briefly. This thread has been reported several times by various parties and is being pushed to be locked. We do not want to do that. Please be mindful that 1) any specific example that includes a rule violation or insinuates a rule has been broken should be reported through PMs and not discussed here openly to cause further rifts. Failure to adhere to this one will result in individual action/bans. 2) if you want to offer constructive feedback or vent or share your perspective, do it respectful of other players/staff time and intention. There isnt a lot of 'the benefit of the doubt' happening in this thread, and it just makes for sniping and hostile interactions. You'll be asked to stay out of this thread or have moderation escalate if this continues. 3) try to find root causes of issues and offer/suggest potential solutions rather than point fingers at other player or staff groups if you want action taken. Creating 'teams' and pointing blame is causing the most grief here.

This thread will end up locked if you can't speak kindly, offer solutions, and remain civil. Don't provide more reasons to do so, please.

[Louvaine]

Hey, so, I didn't mean to cause any drama, but seeing that we're so heated I think it was a good idea. Clearly, we have a lot to say. Maybe if we hosted some regular talks with Staff to hear us out, that would help? Just throwing it out there.