[Dorganath]

Moved from the prior thread

Originally Posted by Pibemanden

Simply put, to be entertained...

To be more precise.. I want to be able to do something which keeps me entertained. Thankfully I have a character who can actually join in on most of the entertaining aspects of the server(At least seen from my perspective)..
I would say that choosing a diety in general will limit you no matter how you put it. However it wont stop you from creating a different character to have the kind of fun you want to have, so I wouldn't really put the diety system down as a bad thing, rather just one which adds flavor to your character and might put some restrictions on that character alone.

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Of course, we all want quests.. Again entertainment value and so forth...
What I could wish for though would be smaller in audience and bigger in character work for the individual character. Far too often the quest boils down to the same PC's taking the lead and the rest of the party just being there for the ride and the xp.
Sadly the amount of GM's and the time they can dedicate to nwn is too small for this and I believe that the situation we have now is a compromise between having quests open to a broader audience and having the quests themselves run by few characters.

Depends on which kind of GM involvement you are asking about.. I am choosing to view this from the deity discussion and the reply will not address my feelings about this subject in general.

I would actually like a lot more GM involvement in the deity system as we have it now. One of the biggest problem many faiths face are that their followers and especially their divinely inspired characters can't really do anything that their faith dictates them to do, there are some examples of faiths who can though;

1) Toranites, hey go out slay evil, sadly evil respawns but hey then you can just slay evil again another day

2) Doranites, craft-craft-craft, pretty easy

3) Lucindites, with the new inclusion of wild and no magic areas spawning around the world they can actually go out and help their lady. However some of the newer additions to the faith like the pit stalkers are clearly only intended for the MMO and have no real purpose unless a GM picks it up, same goes for dragonlinks really... However no one that I know of are part of those organizations save NPC's so I figure that is alright.

The faiths which has real problems with doing anything would be.

1) Az'attans, really it feels like beating a dead horse.. But what can these people to exactly besides RP? They can tell people not to kill and to try to redeem from now and till the world of Layonara is consumed by the dragon cult and still get nowhere because the only chance of doing an act of redeemption/pacifism are GM encounters. The can preach however I guess that counts...

2) Shindy people, protect the oceans? Uhh.. How, we can't even travel in the oceans so they are sort of limited to waging a neverending war on the Mist people, and besides the PC's they encounter that too is limited to GM interactions. I would judge this as sort of the situation the Lucindites faced before the wild/no magic area mechanics were introduced

3) Prunilla, again preaching sure just keep doing that... But farming? Since the farming system was dropped in favor of the MMO(Not complaining about this decision just stating the fact), they are pretty much limited to preaching as well.

While preaching priests aren't a bad thing, since that is part of being a priest in the first place, it certainly is a bad thing if it is what the priest is limited to do. Especially especially if they can't gain levels through normal means, and here I mean combat and purely combat the only reliable source of xp. There are those who will probably argue here that RP will mend all this and that levels doesn't matter.
Then... I would like to reply with one of my strongests standpoints, levels -should- matter, and that is matter more than RP... Sure I can accept that a level 5 could do what a level 10 could through good RP or to drive a quest forward, fair enough. But when you start justifying the level 5 cleric being as influential as the level 40 cleric then there is something clearly wrong in the logic.
Levels are the only clear way of measuring the magnitude of a character short of very, with the emphasis on VERY, strict guidelines for how this works. The guidelines and reasonings should either be obvious, ex. person of neutral or below deity relation goes into temple of deity X and asks for help being refused said help, or explained very carefully and made available to all who would like to know why.
Usually this is the norm but of course it is very tedious to keep track of all this and even more when your average clergy as defined by LORE doesn't really have any ranks besides some very high ones being occupied by NPC's.
I know that I probably wasn't the most prominent speaker for the ranking system the lucindite church used the have, and we shouldn't really dwell in the past because we have the new deity write-ups which are wonderful in their own right..
But the advantage this system could have had was that there was a clear defined place in the church, there could be a feeling of progression where the PC would slowly move towards a move influential post in the hierarchy. However the problem was that the GM focus on this field was too little and it ended up pretty much like the situation is now, PC's at the bottom, rock bottom of all churches and nothing else except the rare epic.

The problem I feel there is really boils down to two decisions which I as a player think has been made:

1) Focus the GM's on running quests for everyone since the GMs are busy people and we would like as much focus on the player base as a whole as opposed to fragments of the player base

2) The consequence of this is that focus is largely removed from the churches and deities, making them too preachy for my taste.

I might start being redundant here but again, this focus makes it so that the churches and deities are less alive compared to what I would like. I must admit here that I am a huge fan of rather interventionist deities who actually matter to their followers.
Surely the priest is expected to have the deity matter to him, but there is no signs from either church or deity towards the individual PC save CDQ's and I believe that this is indeed a poor way to handle those relationships.
But again this is a choice from the GM team and they have their reasons for this and I will not argue that there might be things speaking against this approach, but I will still say that I would like if things were more like this and less like they are today.

Sure, as long as there are a measure of usefulness for the individual player and not just for the benefit of saying that there is flavor but the flavor is only there for what you want to preach and not what you are part of.

Uhmmm... May I point out that it is actually what is happening now, except that certain domain/equipment combos are unavailable due to deity restrictions? This is very bluntly put but it is part of the reality that I see on the servers on a day to day basis. I mean no offence in this, I believe that the most important thing is that the players feel content with the experience offered and given that no one seems to complain about this I guess that people are.

My argument should pretty well state that I don't believe that the world is living and breathing, rather it is an arena now outside GM quests. Surely there are some RP-isles out there but they are far in-between and rather closed. This of course doesn't include the RP that people do while wacking monsters which is thankfully not absent on layonara...

I know that the general picture this post reflects of layonara is rather bad. However I keep coming back because I like the world and the people who play. But I do believe that there are some illusions among some people of how the day to day experience of layonara is these days, and hopefully this post will inspire some thought about the way the world works and how you would like it to work to enhancing your experience here