Acacea +1
Excellent Post!On Mechanical Limitations:Just to chip in on one minor issue of the guard's weapons, there is a huge difference between bludgeoning and nonlethal. The guards weild warhammers that do 1d8 x3 dmg, which while less bloody than a sword, is still physical damage. When players asked if they could do subdual damage with a bludgeroning weapon, they were told no. And now when we ask why the guards killed Balthazar, we're told, no he didn't die, he was just knocked out. Warhammers are lethal. Please somebody tell Bjorn that they aren't lethal should we want to see a demonstration.
When we were told after the fact that we were retconning the whole death of Balthazar, that made me think... if he didnt die, hop the bindstone, walk back to get his grave, lost his gold in his pockets, etc... then would Muhk have killed the guards? Did he get an option to beat them to unconsciousness with the bluntside or handle of his axe? If we retcon one little quasi-factoid in the chain of events, then as skabot said, we must then retcon every event happening thereafter. If you retcon one thing, you need to retcon every other related thing down the line, cause and effect, action and reaction. If a butterly's wings flapping on the other side of the world causes a tornado, and there is no butterfly, then there is no tornado.
In practice, the Silverguard aims to subdue, not kill.
As for Hempstead's alignment, any city which has a death penalty for tresspassing and sent all the dockworkers out of their rightful homes on a trail of bloody tears is NOT Good in any sense. I could certainly see such things flying in LE Prantz, where praying in the streets or casting spells gets you locked away for life, or CE Arnax infested with bloodthirsty Demons, or even corruptable Kartharian, but a goodly city with a CG sponsor god Deliar acting like the Spanish Inquisition? I think not. Now maybe the city has been corrupted by forces within, maybe the Sisters changed over the years. But please let's stop pretending that the city is still good. It's not.
In other words, we know, without the guards having to emote...
you should let people know beforehand what is going on
The game is wysiwyg
The game is wysiwyg, that's the whole point of computer games. What is being depicted in the computer screen is the base line; that is what people see; that is what people experience. If you are doing something at variance to that, you should let people know beforehand what is going on.
The "beforehand" is the visible OOC stuff to be read about places/people/ via handbooks and LORE. The "we know" is not necessarily a "we know at this moment" either, but instead a "this information already exists and is persistent, and therefore overrides the action/info of the moment."
Indeed. Hence why this game encompasses much, much more than what is represented IG. So IG is the baseline, yes (though I could even argue against that), but you imply that IG is the only experience and "sight." I disagree. My imagination is most of my game experience. The IG portion only fascilitates pieces of that experience. Such is the case for me, though; perhaps the same is not true of you and others.
It is, but as has been said countless times before, we are simply unable to represent absolutely everything in-game that would exist if our characters were "real". Port Hempstead has more than two gate guards and one captain...by a significant number. It does not take only 5 minutes to run from one end of the continent to the other. Boat travel is not instantaneous. There are halfling tribes in the Spirit Dunes, but I've actually heard someone say "Well I don't see them, so they must not exist" despite being told otherwise. The very long list goes on.Baseline: YesThe End of the Line: No
I think one point of the original post that's being missed here is...there's a lot of assuming, and those assumptions lead people to fly off at light speed down a path of thought and action that gets out of step with what can/does/should happen. People seize on the immediately visual and don't bother to find out the rest.
If the assumption has been valid in previous cases, then only the person who knows it is not actually valid in this particular instance can rectify the situation.