ti-legacy.com

So, I was talking with Takta about a particularly outdated helpfile that painted Davism in a overtly negative light, and I've been noticing that we tend to have those hanging about quite a bit. Things that state 'Well, it happened this way, and some people believe this and some people believe that.' Or things that state outright the violent and subversive tactics of Davism.

As players, what we should know is that Davism is right. The knowledge that Dav could have been motivated by revenge shouldn't even be given, IMO. Everything else should be on the fringe - something we find out eventually and enjoy finding out. Personally, I always enjoy finding new ways of thinking about something, and I know that most of us know the Inquisition theme through and through, but new players don't. What they see is that Davism is inherently bad. Dav did it for revenge, the Order coerced the world by force, and what little good came from it was a sometimes charity group who enjoys barbecued mage on the weekend. And then they are told 'But that's the side the majority of people play on'. But, sometimes (oftentimes) it's not.

To me, (and this might be a whole nother discussion) Davism could be legit, y'know? Dav lost his family to mages, and the Lord chose to harness his anger into a positive force for good. That's how I like to think about it, when I'm in character.

This has gotten to be a really long winded rant by me, so I'll cut it short here. What I'm getting at is, does anybody else feel that Davism is painted in too much negativity to allow for a successful suspension of disbelief? By suspension of disbelief, I mean: do people's IC interactions suffer because they know, as players, that Davism is bad and it's just sometimes hard to back?

I don't mean to poke any buttons - and I definitely don't mean to be negative about our theme. This is something I've been wondering for as long as I've known about the Inquisition theme, because all of them give you the two sides upfront. None of them have ever been like 'Okay, here's Dav, he was perfect and there is no way that you can prove he did anything wrong unless you dig a whole hell of a lot.' I'm curious to know what people's thoughts are on the subject, especially staffers and veteran players who have been playing the theme a lot longer than my sorry ass.

This kind of comes from the idea that we, the players, do enough to discredit theme on our own - we don't exactly need help from helpfiles. So yeah, thoughts? Opinions? Hatred? Lay it on me, folks.

(The above is just opinion. I am no way saying this is how it should be and I am completely going to throw a tantrum that it's not this way. I always look at every game with, "Well, what would make it funner for me" in mind. Just food for thought!)

I think this is a fair point and would love to see some updates or rewrites to counter this. Looking to be a help file staffer, Leech? :P

Staffer? Hell no! Then I couldn't get QP =P

But I'm actually really wondering if anyone else feels the way I do, and whether or not this is actually a problem with others (and how they would handle it), before seeing about a solution.

Leech wrote:But I'm actually really wondering if anyone else feels the way I do, and whether or not this is actually a problem with others (and how they would handle it), before seeing about a solution.

I erased some specific examples here but IC accounts of RP are very often modified to paint the Order in a true/correct/positive light, as are discussions of religious "facts" and rituals. History's written by the winners, that's nothing new.

The hardest part about suspending disbelief, of course, is we all know as players that the RL Inquisitions were 100% wrong. You have to suspend disbelief just to even consider the Order has the tiniest hint of honesty or goodness, because the RL Inquisitions were among the cruelest times in recorded history. So even though magic clearly exists in the game, many people begin playing with that OOC bias even if they don't intentionally apply it to their RP.

As for helpfiles, that's a constant struggle that players of Orderites and non-Orderites alike have helped change to be more thematically consistent. One problem is that there seem to be limited tools available to have "gradually revealing" information in helpfiles. The Order gets some files the general public doesn't, but I don't think you can get more granular like "Everyone knows W, Priests know X, Inquisitors know Y, and the Cardinal knows Z." Unless you literally explain as much in the file and just trust people to separate the knowledge, which is how it goes currently.

Maybe helpfiles within guild categories could somehow be tied to the reader's actual promote rank in that guild? Sort of like higher level city lore - help religion files (accessible to everyone) might be all the pro-Davite info, help order files in general provide more details but generally still positive info, and as you raise in ranks you can either see longer versions of the same files, or maybe whole new files that other Orderites can't see. Then we just move all the two-sided depictions of history in there.

Dunno if that's feasible, but long story short I'm all for making it easier to play to theme.