Thu Aug 22, 2013 4:32 am
Well, Seilena tried to make it look as though they were cleansing the mages in the guild. She even confessed to killing a Kirop for being a mage and publicly announced that she would have done Ehren and Cirian in had she been able to get hold of them and known that they were mages. Heretic? Maybe, but definitely anti-mage.
Personally, though, I think we're making too big of a deal about the mages-in-the-Brotherhood thing. I mean, following the whole idea of massive amounts of vNPCs, then, realistically, the consistency of the mage PCs that are found is small potatoes compared to the massive amount of total possible Brotherhood members that actually would be coming through the Reeves' hands on any given day. The overall amount when you think about it in terms of total people, including NPCs, vNPCs, and PCs, that are found to be mages are a small amount, really just to be expected given a simple law of averages. I could even go on to argue that perhaps the reason the really heinous ones seem to mostly be mages is that magery is the very reason that they are doing truly horrible stuff to being with. To me, the very idea of thief = mage, even though a good bit of thief PCs are indeed mages, is sort of twinkish on all our parts. I mean, realistically, why are we even having that conversation? It's completely and totally unreasonable to me when you look at the whole picture. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, though.
As for the main topic, though, I agree that there are a lot of problems with being a thief. I would love for more RP to take place down south, and I would love for there to be more use for our skills. I think that lockpick already has the kind of utility that one would expect. Sneak and hide are sigh-worthy, but I don't have any direct ideas for those. So:
I think that perhaps an idea of allowing steal to be performed on vNPCs with skill, time of day, and room (amongst other things I may be missing?) to determine success would be a good one. Now, this would be an option for a low risk/low reward type thing, so I think the max one could expect to earn would be, say, five or ten silver or a low-level item like a pipe or a fish or something, but the risk would be pretty low if you played your cards right. I think that there should be a chance of success, a chance of failure without detection, and a chance of failure with detection.
My main concern, of course, is how in the world this would be implemented and if it's even possible and if it's too much work for our poor staff that I love dearly and don't want to overburden. Also, is this too twinkish, too open to abuse?
Another thing that I would like to address is that I think people get into the thieves guild and expect to be doing giant plots all the time. I get that it's part of why people join the Brotherhood, the thrill of adventure of kidnapping people, killing, etc, but is that really a realistic expectation? Should we be expecting the thieves' guild to be constantly doing huge jobs and stuff all the time? Shouldn't that kind of thing be more the exception instead of the rule, and isn't that expectation part of the core of a lot of things, namely why we have Tenebrae changing almost as much as some people change their underpants?
I don't really know. I just know that the thing that's really gotten to me both times I rolled Tenebrae was that everybody constantly wanted to do something big and couldn't simply be patient enough for targets to present themselves. The thing that really bugged me personally was that, realistically, we needed a solid team of people that had varying positions in order to pull something like that off, and people just simply could not understand that. Don't get me wrong; I'm usually pretty good about pulling bouquets out of my butt, but good God. I mean, I was either directly or indirectly responsible for about half a dozen deaths all in all as Seilena and basically engaged in a giant conspiracy to have my husband killed on Annalesa, so I can do some crazy stuff given enough time, but that's just it: having the time to get everything together.
While I'm on the subject, I'm just going to go ahead and put it out there that the thieves are an organization that gets by on secrecy and covert operations from everything I've read, so I'm still trying to figure out why in God's name the thief guild is known for its giant blow ups that come once every OOC month or so.
Nonetheless, these last two paragraphs are merely my own personal frustrations with the whole thing, and they are more my own personal preferences than anything else. I'm merely left confused and bewildered about the general tide of things that don't really fit my style or my ways of being more slow, methodical, and engaging in long-term goals, but that's my problem. I merely highlight them because I wonder if I'm the only one that has abandoned the thief build because of wanting to take my time to make a truly horrendous bad guy instead of a pop-boom-fizzle one.
I will also go ahead and point out that the crossover between mages and thieves is probably due more to a necessity than anything else. I can't guarantee it, but I would say that its a distinct possibility (it certainly was with both Annalesa and Izzy for me) Some of the thief skills are nigh useless when it comes to actually being valuable to a criminal (not anybody's fault it's just how it plays out), but those mage skills? Oh yes.
Sorry for the novel and if I sound like a whiny little baby in some places. I don't mean to be; I'm just really peeved that the Brotherhood simply has so much going on that just doesn't allow my play style to fall in very well or me to make much use of skills that I would love to try out.
