Posted by Nepenthe(IMM) on April 5, 2000 at 13:56:54:
In Reply to: a reply to Shokai's post on the second page, putting it here so there is a small chance of getting an informed response... posted by Maubuisson on April 5, 2000 at 04:53:46:
You're going to have to bear with me because we're going back around two years here. I'm not going to comment on what Shokai meant , just Mau. I would have to say she was, at best, trying hard but not much more than a newbie. I'm highly prone to tattooing newbielike characters who put in effort. I'm sorry, but from what I can remember (no specific instances, it's going back a long time) you were about average for Knights of the day. Not horrible, but not good enough to save the cabal either.
Knights was definitely lacking in "elite" players at that period, in all respects. As far as PKs go, there were something like two Knights out of sixty or seventy that were even breaking even on kills/deaths (and I was playing one of them). As far as RP goes, there were some decent characters who got the "goodliness" half of Knighthood right, but I honestly don't think a single one of them would have made it through an interview for the unbreakable blade tattoo intact (no, not just because Cador could be mean).
You get a certain amount of "telephone game" with cabals, wherein one leader is a little off on the purpose of the cabal, and the players they induct end up a little off from that (and one of them ends up leader) and so on, and so on, and so on.
Traditionally, if Twist or I were to try to play a Master more than a year after the last time we'd sat a leader down and told him what the Five Magics were, we'd get sent away and told to find the right answers -- because in that short of an amount of RL time, just a few leaders worth, their version and the "right" version would manage to drift so far from each other as to be come irrecognizable. That happened in the Knight cabal with the ideal of Honor to an extreme degree. Here's an easy example: would you get thrown out of Knights if two Knights jumped on one Empire who was trying to raid? Well, no, you wouldn't. The happy Knight books said you could do it, because the Knight cabal also had this ideal of protecting the Light. Is that honorable, though? Well, no, it's not. If you aspired to Cador's tattoo or any other position of extreme honor you probably shouldn't be doing that. Knights being off on the honor ideal as held by the cabal got much worse if you went away from the (relatively) straightforward issue of parity in combat, something which is a long way from the whole of the honor issue.