Community agreement on the treatment of "monstrous" races

[MJZ]

The problem is two fold. People not Rp to the drow properly.

I have to agree with this. I see dark elves who don't make the slightest effort to conceal their heritage. And when you react in shock? Everyone around you stones you for doing it!

But I have another question - people toss the term "drow" around so often, I thought the name was officially changed to "dark elf"?

In any case, it's just plain foolish more often than not, in my experience. Does anyone agree with me that it's severely unrealistic and conflicting to defend PC orcs, half-ogres, etc if you routinely engage in killing them as NPCs for natural resources? Think about this - that clan hiding in a complex of caves, that's their home. Those resources are theirs. Is it then alright to invade their home, slaughter them, and take what's theirs, if you shout out "thou shalt not judge" when you see a PC of the same race in town?

Back to dark elves, it's been especially bad for me so far. People don't seem to read the race's description in the handbook or on LORE. The second line of their description reads,

"they are feared and hated by all races of Layonara."

Ca'duz and Pyrtechon are their Gods. And yet, a character who has no prior experience with the dark elves, only heard and absorbed the cross-societal revulsion to them, for some strange reason thinks they should be treated the same as anyone else. It's terrible!

[Acacea]

Ca'duz and V, rather... but yes, not to disagree (if you search for "drow" you will see that it is not a matter of disagreement so please don't take offense), but this has come up so many times that by now everyone is fully aware of how they are supposed to be and just flat out fight the fact that they aren't supposed to be trusted.

The player etiquette towards the monster races has been rehashed so many times that it really feels pointless to try and force-feed it anymore when it continues to be consistently misinterpreted or compared to more 'enlightened' (hehe) periods of time. I generally see the problem as the fact that everyone wants to play the PC that 'rises above the masses' and 'sees beyond the flesh' and all that, and never has to actually play amidst the view that as seen as fact in the world, nor face the many, MANY raids, killings, kidnappings, and all in all sinister plots to conquer the world and so forth, that is the justification. Also goes for the large number of good drow before the alignment restrictions. So many people rebel that there's not actually anything to rebel against, hehe. I'm just waiting to see how they evolve with the new alignment restrictions, because I think that helps.

The thread seemed to be about how they should be accepted based on location though, referring as much to the unseen populace as PCs which is perfectly valid to me- some places are more murderously vengeful than others, while yet others are so apathetic and beaten that they wouldn't care if it was Bloodstone they were buying cabbage from.

[Pen N Popper]

How about this:  Put the monstrous races into a faction that automatically sets them to dislike for all players in non-monstrous race factions?  This way players would have to manually change them to like on their player list ingame.  Would certainly clue people in that one's first impression of a drow should be hostile.  Would also force the drow to approach travelling parties with a bit more caution lest they get smoked.

[Interia_Discordius]

Well, is there a way to change them to Hostile without encouraging PvP so much? My PC has a tendency to randomly attack when I'm around a hostile and they're at a certain distance away (i.e. VERY close or passing). So, maybe at a Dislike setting where it's coded so you can't attack without the PvP widget or arena?

Just suggestions...I know nothing about scripting, so I'm just throwing stuff out

[Dorganath]

Um....I don't think that putting a system in place to bypass the system on PvP is very productive or in keeping with the spirit of this server. We don't want any group of characters engaging in open PvP against another regardless of the circumstances.

When we were getting ready to go to V3 and the the plans for a PvP Widget that everyone would have were announced, about half of the people who responded were quite clear in that they did not like the prospect of relaxing PvP, going so far as to assume that it would spiral out of control and ultimately harm the server.  With the restrictions we have in-place, the logging and such, that's very unlikely.  

Setting a group of players to be hostile to another group automatically will make them targetable.  Targetable means accidental and "accidental" PvP incidents will rise. With that, hurt feelings will rise, OOC anger will increase, etc.

As Acacea pointed out, this comes up so regularly as to have lost its impact.

So....what to do about it?

The information about monstrous races are out there.  The documentation of hostilities between one race and the other is out there.

This is not just a matter of players of dark elves not RPing properly  but of a lot of people not RPing the cultural friction.

I know that our RL times are one of general "enlightenment" and acceptance of people who may look different but are all basically the same if you look past things like skin color, ethnicity and other such outward physical traits, because looking or being "different" is not really a bad thing.  

But Layonara is not Earth....it's not the 21st century and yes, there truly are reasons to hate, or at least distrust, a person based on their appearance.

Dark Elves for instance have a long history of brutality, treachery, attacks on the surface (both historical and in-game events) and a long list of other infractions both against the other races as well as against themselves.   Dark Elf society is one of back-stabbing, constant struggles for power and the like.

Dark elves don't even trust each other.

Of all the player races available, Elves especially should not, ever, ever have their initial reaction to Dark Elves be one of tolerance, enlightenment or acceptance.  Someone might say, "Oh, but my Elf character was raised to be tolerant of everyone, including Dark Elves."  Fact of the matter is, this is extremely unlikely if raised in an Elven society.  Equally unlikely is the idea that a Dark Elf child who showed a leaning toward being compassionate in any way would be allowed to live long enough to escape the Deep.

So I know this is going to sound a lot like a "You should do it this way" kind of post, but it's not.

Having said everything above, calls for a unified community standard on how to treat monstrous races just cannot and should not be established.

In my own opinion, certain things should be RPed with respect to racial relationships.  But that doesn't mean I am going to tell you how you should RP them....or if you should RP them at all.  The key thing is to keep these things in mind when RPing.

And that goes for the players of monstrous races as well.  Act according to your character's race, alignment and background.

A couple final notes:

It's important not to meta-game racial information.  The two biggest infractions in this area are:
1) Reading the floating name of the character and meta-gaming their race from either recognition or the Server Status page and screaming out "DARK ELF!!!!!"  There are many Dark Elves who remain in disguise while in the open. Keep that in mind.

2) If you see an "ogre" in town, chances are really good this is a half-giant, and would, in fact, look much different to your character.  In the earlier days, we were limited by the lack of availability of a suitable model for half-giant characters, and this still has some effect today. In this case, visuals are not as helpful as one would hope.

Anyway, in my opinion, both the players of monstrous races and the players of "normal" races both have some share of guilt in how our characters portray the inter-character relations between such racial types.  However, establishing and enforcing some kind of "community standard" just isn't practical.

[Kindo]

Well put, and thank you. I do not think we were after a community standard, more to point out that there are many, many players out there who do not role-play their race or their reaction towards another race properly. When 90% of the players are all cuddly-loving to monsters and Dark Elves, it just becomes silly. In any case, I feel your post cleared up matters, and I can only hope some people read this and will, hopefully, make appropriate changes to how they play. Not everyone can be in love with everyone and tolerate every single living thing.

[allneal]

AS a very new layo player i'm coing too chime in here.

i'm on my second pc and chose a Dark elf female, orginall she hid her identy very well and everyone just asumed by her accent she was elven. after avout 2-3 RL weeks or in game terms 2 years or so. she meet both a dark elf who opening showed his herritage and seemed well accepted. then shortly later she reveled her true herritage too 2 PC's she was travleing with for game time 5-7 months. the accepted her very openlysince

1) they already knew her
2) had derk elves as friends already
3) possesed shady past them selves

now she walks openly as a dark elf. she's still very ingorant of teh world of men haveing isolated her self soo much ont eh surface out of fear. i have had a few PC react almost hositle towards her. with some people having 15-30+ years of gaem life there pc have meet a few dark elves that proved themselves too be good. so i can see teh PC's haveing a resonable amoutof tollarance towards a monster race PC.

the PC's are suposed too be teh hero's and villans of teh world. now teh general populace i would suspect will act hostile or at least un frieldly towards a monster race pc. It's just very hard too tell some how to RP there character to react towards other PC. are you going too tell Dwarves to be openly hostile towards Elves? I think you have too let people descide for them selves how to RP THERE pc's. so far i have seen both acceptance and hostility. It problaly helps that Xune is a female and seems rather ignorante of teh world so she always ask questions much like a child does. she just seems innocent with her ingorance. she simply does not know.

for wxample when she first meet a paladain she had no idea what that was. ( not all of of paladains in drow socity). It took him quite awhile too get her too understand what that ment. she keep calling him a cleric or a warrior. the concept of a paladain simply eluded her.

[Drizzlin]

I don't think that's necessarily true.  A CN character, all other things being equal (that is, if s/he is unlikely to get arrested for murder for doing so), would be just as likely to kill someone for an insult as to ignore it.  If they decide to take it out on the person, a beating may suffice, or they may simply want them dead.  It would take a pretty severe insult, but even so, I think it's a reasonable approach.

LN, not so much, nor TN - both lean more towards good than evil, and it's usually not lawful to kill someone for words, or even for threats, if they're not backed up.  If a Lawful Neutral character saw an opponent as a threat to the law or to his life and it was within his jurisdiction, however... *slice*.

It kind of scares me seeing this from a character approver. Neutral is neutral, whether TN, CN, or LN. None of those three alignments "lean more towards good than evil". In fact before evil was allowed to be played without long amounts of RP and a CDT, TN was as close to evil as you could get from an alignment. Keep in mind TN is NOT evil and needs to be played as TN, but a TN person has a lot of room to do evil acts as well as good acts, as long as their actions are not backed by evil or good intent.

For people who think good people, especially lawful aligned (this goes for LN & LG) do only good or neutral acts (that means their actions are not backed by good or evil intentions) are crazy. Church members, like the pope are as LG as you can get. They follow a strict law/code, and do kind and good acts, as long as they fit within thier law/code. More people have died in the name of god or some religion than anything other thing in the world. Cancer can not touch these people.

We are talking about lawful biding, good citizens, that because of their lawful beliefs, did things to other human beings that can not be fathomed. Just look at the Salem Witch Trials, the Crusades, and the inquistions. These were led by what the times defined as good people, who raised families, saved lives, and did their best to better thier communities. Just along the way they burnt little girls, tortured people, and killed every woman, child and adult who didn't praise Jesus.

[darkstorme]

My apologies to Drizzlin, and any others who found my post (quoted in Drizzlin's post above) unclear or inaccurate. I clearly wasn't particularly erudite that day, and I'll freely admit my word choice was far from ideal.  The use of the word "lean" has grown, at least on Layonara, to mean an intention of shifting alignments, and it was misplaced in my statement.  More to the point, you're correct in saying that Neutral is Neutral as far as actions are concerned, which is how we generally define alignments here. My original statement was actually meant to refer to the intentions of a character, rather than his actions, per se.

Before I proceed any further, let me say that there are many types of neutral characters, just as there are many different ways to play any given alignment. Therefore, there will undoubtedly be characters that completely and totally contradict what I am about to say. That said, a large proportion of neutral characters probably believe they are good characters. Their neutrality is a result of their actions -- or inaction -- and not their intentions.

To quote from LORE, "Characters who are of true neutral alignment may well be simply characters who have the inclinations of Neutral Good, but not the commitment to them." Likewise, roughly the same can be said of lawful neutral characters. Chaotic neutral characters, on the other hand, are less likely to view themselves as either good or evil because they often see both of these extremes as somewhat structured.

However, this thread is about the treatment of the monstrous races, so lest I hijack it further, I'll end here and leave all further discussion of the subtleties of alignments for a more appropriate thread. Again, apologies if my original post was unclear, and thanks to Drizzlin for pointing this out.