Posted by Oft-Arbiter on May 26, 2000 at 12:52:48:
In Reply to: Um...(I know I'm going to regret STARTING a thread, but here goes...) posted by Umguy on May 26, 2000 at 12:31:58:
> This is a quick (hopefully) and simple post about the rager/empire truce or whatever.
>
> It is pretty purely my opinion, but that just means every single one of you should agree with me because I'm always right :P
>
> Ok, seriously:
> Leader of Battle makes a truce with the non-magi of empire. People are bitching about this. I'm ecstatic (though it hurts my current char, who is anti-empire and wants that codex in the skull throne :P) about this. Why? Because, quite simply, ragers are about killing mages. Ragers are not about killing warriors who use potions, or rangers who call lightning, or thieves who recite a detect invis scroll. Mages bad. Now, you say, "but isn't all magic bad?" Sure. But, if nobody in the world could become invisible, that thief wouldn't need to rely on magical scrolls, would he? If nobody could fly, the world would build ladders, towers, etc for people to get to places like arial city. Ok, the latter isn't a great example, but the point is that in the mind of a (as I like to think, proper) rager, magicians are the real root of all evil. Yes, even elven magi are evil. They are the ones that make the magic that corrupts all the others. That warrior who quaffed a potion was influenced by a magician somewhere, and wanted to duplicate the magician's feat of (wording, flying, whatever). That ranger who called lightning learned from a guildmaster. The guildmaster was probably taught by someone else. Down the line it goes, until you find some little magician sitting in a laboratory somewhere thinking up "how can I get the clouds to make lightning come out of them, like that druid does?"
>
> So, I applaud Minalcar. You can make comparisons to sylvan and arbs, but battle really already does have this system with them. Battle doesn't take the sapling, doesn't kill druids/rangers/bards/warriors/shamen/healers in sylvan, and concentrates on the mages. They typically do this with arbs, until an arb pisses off a rager by stopping him from killing a mage (then all bets are off, it seems). Why does this work? Because sylvan/arbs/etc. don't take the head, either. So instead of taking each other's item, battle and these cabals are saying "maybe I don't like you, and maybe you harbor magi, but I'm going to just beat the crap out of those magi you harbor, rather than stop you from doing what your cabal is about (protecting nature/protecting the law).
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> This, of course, can't last, since empire's "goal" is world domination. That includes battle. Eventually, someone in empire will get kicked in the head and made to realize that it's tough to have world domination when a village of warriors with more numbers than you have is running around killing all the magic-guys, they'll take the head, and break the truce. Until then, though, it's perfectly within Minalcar's roleplay to ally himself with the blades and divines, trying to influence them to get rid of the black and arcane sect. Will it happen? No. Because OOC, that's not how Empire works. But IC, there's no reason Minalcar should care how Empire's OOC mechanism is.
>
> That's my $.02.