I agree with Darthiel that there's no good unilateral reason why we can't choose to be social with one another, but it's not like every member of every guild acknowledges every other member of their guild... Granted they don't have our level of paranoia, but still, not everyone feels or chooses to feel a kinship to al of their guildmates. Or maybe they're just RPing whatever personality type that makes them that way... Aside from that, I think people probably have very different priorities in that some people are focused on the endgame, when/whatever they think it will be, while some are focused on surviving the here and now, which is basically just about catching up with the other guilds' skill levels and making themselves more formidable. Or they're focused on making musk hog zombies with which to bother people.

I guess my point is if I want to meet people, then I try to meet people, but I don't expect that everyone will want to meet me. If they don't, they must not be my people.



-- Unless you've never died in Elanthia, you are undead. --

I'm not sure how you RP that one...

So when he (it is a he right) talks to Book for advancement or whatever (magic or what not), you just pretend it never happened?
_____________________________________
Victory Over Lyras, on the 397th year and 156 days since the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

Sounds like he makes a much better, and more unique, Philosopher then I originally thought. Pity about the name though, heh.

Just a personal pet peeve of mine. Pay no attention. But I am serious about being a unique Philosopher. I look forward to us getting to RP sometime.

The difference is more semantic than anything else. He defines what a necromancer is along terms that don't happen to include him. Your character, the temple, and most (all?) of the rest of the game define it differently. That said, no one has offered a definition solid and respectable enough to change his mind. Most characters, when asked, can't really offer a good set of "properties" that define a necromancer, they merely tell him he is one.

Further, from a player perspective, you know that I need to do the same things in terms of circling and whatnot that you do. Your character, however, doesn't really know what any other character's interactions with Book( 's risen ) or other NPCs in the guild happens to be. You can only even see my character in the commons. As such, I really need to explain very little of the mechanics away. If, for instance, learning to use risen later requires a necromancer vent a poison gas into a crowded restaurant for the purposes of study (something that Shatter would find a distasteful waste of potential labor for the eternity to come), not only is there no reason my research would need to be the same as yours ICly, it wouldn't even make sense if every PC necromancer hit up the same restaurant and killed a large group of people. From the player standpoint, it might make sense for a necromancer to do and make a good quest, but ICly, people would recognize that it's the third time the establishment was gassed this week and stop going there.

Even beyond all that, using smile and act and such, I could feasibly make Shatter do things that don't have the backing of game mechanics (such as animating a large number of carving beads and having them kill one another). I imagine I could even claim Shatter knows some spells that don't rightly exist and display them, provided they don't need combat or show mechanics (i.e. animating a large number of carving beads or causing a sprouting flower to grow, then wilt and die as a result of the spell). The only difficult spot I think I might run into would involve learning rituals as they don't fall perfectly in line with his back story.

Lol of course.

>>I could be wrong about this, but I've been told that smile/act are not meant to do things your player cannot do IG.

This has always been my impression as well.

perhaps some of the problem here is that, being the "new" guild, we still haven't been given the fully developed picture. Some of the mysteries of the guild are still out there, and until there are IC means of finding out for ourselves, some of the RP is still going to end up being "out there", or eventually "wrong".

Just as, before people were given out racial information they were able to present s'kra and togs having human kids or only 7 races in existence, etc.

Now, as an example, we have had contradictory information out there as well as misleading information. Historical necromancers who have been out there before the advent of the philosophers have all been of the perverse variety. There were GM posts stating that after a certain point, redemption would be impossible. Yet, in-game, there were the Moon Mage visions of the old man confronting Lyras - who certainly under the scope of being a Lich - would not qualify for redemption. Yet the vision had her rejecting that option. <the one where he states "your descent was unusual", etc.

When the necromancer guild has been out for a bit longer, and we have more information <i.e. an in-game library> perhaps it will become clearer, although there will always be a certain amount of self-delusion evident among the philosophers as a whole. How can a mortal expect to stand up against a god? Like in ghostbusters. "If someone asks you if you are a god..." :-)

hey, skeletal wings actually exist :

<<You tap some skeletal wings of bone-white ironwood shrouded in tattered cobwebs that you are wearing.>>

bought em at a merchant that showed up in crossing after the fest.


just can't fly with 'em. claiming you can would be too seriously delustional, and like armifer posted someone that goes skywize nevada after their attunement would likely end up being used for spare parts.


as far as claiming to fashion constructs out of beads? not now possible. although possibly in the future we might be able to fashion, or carve? them out of more than one <or two> types of material. Being as we have a technique from the carving discipline, maybe?

PB seriously. Logic just isn't going to work here. You know this.

personally, I see considerable differences between causing animating beads (when necromancers can animate dirt anyhow) and "transforming yourself into a lich dragon that can eat book's face". Animating beads which subsequently "die" at the end of the verb command I don't personally see an egregious breach of personal ability, certainly no more than some of the feats of athletics I've seen done with the commands. There is precedent for necromancers (though not the PC selection as of the present, dirt constructs aside) animating that nature of object. It really wouldn't do anything but lend credence to the way I play the character. If it's a breach of policy, that's all that really needs to be said, but it's a far cry from some of the hyperbole and/or slippery slope arguments made in earlier posts.

Lol, my character is a necromancer. I RP him as believing otherwise. There's a difference here.

>>personally, I see considerable differences between causing animating beads (when necromancers can animate dirt anyhow) and "transforming yourself into a lich dragon that can eat book's face". Animating beads which subsequently "die" at the end of the verb command I don't personally see an egregious breach of personal ability, certainly no more than some of the feats of athletics I've seen done with the commands.

There really isn't. They're both fantastical things that can't be accomplished under any conditions.

>>There is precedent for necromancers (though not the PC selection as of the present, dirt constructs aside) animating that nature of object.

You're right. But your character still doesn't know how to do that.

>>It really wouldn't do anything but lend credence to the way I play the character.

That's part of the problem. You're using actions your character can't logically do to show your character is acting a certain way.

It would be one thing if you used the ACT and SMILE verbs so your character could quickly animate dirt using blood magic, but it's another thing entirely to animate wood, since there is nothing that implies a Philosopher/Necromancer trained under Book would be able to do so.

>>Lol, my character is a necromancer. I RP him as believing otherwise. There's a difference here.

While there's nothing wrong with having a character in gross denial, you're doing "more" than just having him in denial, especially if he's animating things that he was never taught to animate.

Part of that is the fact that you're mixing player knowledge and mechanics with IC knowledge. Shatter would tell you that he has never "circled" (combat maneuver excluded), that he has never spoken with Book in person (which happens to be true even from a player perspective based upon the information we've received), that he holds no rank within the guild beyond "barely (and not always) tolerated visitor", and that all his knowledge of the dark arts comes from elsewhere.

Is it different? Yes. Strange? Probably. Out of bound? Eh, I don't think.

And for the characters that leap tall togs in bound, sprint from the Segolthia to the Faldesu and back in a fraction of second, throw hot coal without burning their unarmored hands, shoot bows 3 rooms away with pinpoint accuracy despite having no bow skill whatsoever, perform brawling attacks on other characters they couldn't hope to make contact with (that one probably is a violation, as you're causing another character to "do" something), hand out thousands and thousands of plats (funny, but probably also against policy), punch holes in trees/stone walls, stab themselves in the foot by accident (without a wound), swim unswimmable waters (specifically diving off a ship on it's way to ratha, keeping up with the ship itself for a while, then climbing back on board), climb unclimbable objects, throw boulders and other such things that are well beyond the realm of a character's physical ability, these items get the same advice?

Whoa, I'm not sure what you're talking about with 99% of that run on sentence.

Are you suggesting that because there are examples of weird mechanics in the game, that any mechanics manipulation are justified? Because that's pretty silly.

E.g., yes, I find it silly that I can throw a hammer at something at missile range, and then pick up the hammer and do it again. Does that mean I should be allowed to use mechanics to make things happen that aren't really happening in an effort to explain my characters unconventional RP stance? No. It doesn't.

Not sure a list is technically a run-on but I could be wrong. Not all long sentences are run-ons. The contents of your backpack, for instance, is a single, grammatically correct sentence. The following:

"I shot an arrow and it hit its target and the target died and then I searched it and it had a gold nugget and I took it."

is a run-on. The number of words in a sentence has little to do with whether or not it's a run-on.

Yes, you can make up a story for how something came to be surrounding the creation of said altered ring, but the point remains you are making a story ABOUT THE RING. In order to circle, you go speak with Book. I'm not sure how you can pretend that doesn't happen unless you're selectively delusional.

But still, your argument hinges on the notion that 'some odd mechanics exist in game' ergo, 'I can use whatever mechanics manipulation I want to make my belief system occur', which is sort of odd.

>>But still, your argument hinges on the notion that 'some odd mechanics exist in game' ergo, 'I can use whatever mechanics manipulation I want to make my belief system occur', which is sort of odd.

I believe the technical term for this is hyperbole or a misunderstanding of concept. Making a story about the ring is not that much different than making a story about the character's knowledge-base. Making the ring required a level of mechanics, all of which can be utterly ignored. Circle mechanics can be equally ignored, particularly when no one can say blunt your RP by tossing out a log quote showing you gaining a circle.

For the record, my character never HAS met Book and yours likely hasn't either. As I recall the "Zamidren Book" in the guild is a "carefully constructed risen" and "sufficient information exists around the guild for a character to figure that out".

As for toying with open-ended commands, my opinion is very much in line with Caraamon's player, but that is really a distant aside. The main portion of the argument does not hinge on it whatsoever.