[Discuss] Re: The state of the game

[Bob]

Some thoughts re: "getting more people to properly play the role of a noble"

Well...

You have to get more of the "roleplay" side emphasized, incouraged
and, possibly, enforced. It's that simple. Good roleplayers will be as
proper as they can. Powergamers will only be as proper as they need to
be. Good roleplayers will just 'seem' more like a noble with their own
agenda. So I'd say somehow we just emphasize good roleplaying
techniques (and hey, the basic roleplaying techniques too), knowing
that many players come to the game with absolutely no prior RPing
experience, and others have DM'd for years and know all about it.

To have the players get involved moreso, expand the Mentor class to be
a requisite to new players, not just an option. Make "passing" the
Mentor's tasks also a requisite, since as-it-is, the only thing
necessary for a new player with a mentor is to wait out the period of
time. This way a mentor can control whether a new player 'graduates'
to fully being a noble in BM. (The rest, "without proper direction,
spend their days in taverns drinking away their youth and thinking
about what a career they might have had...?")
And hey, make mentors optional to old players as well as new ones - I
know that I could have learned more during my mentor period, except I
was so busy also trying to play the game that I hardly noticed the
mentor-lessons. To do this you'd have to take away 'mentor points' so
that mentorship isn't abused by folks just looking for free goodies.
It would then be a selfless, game-helpling kind of class. Ideally,
this class would be patrolled more and held to a higher standard by
Titans or whomever, so that the new power comes with new
responsibility (and punishment if abused).

Apart from the above, what could really help is the new Duchy/Hiearchy
systems. Battlemaster used to have "battle groups" and acted much more
like a strategy rather than roleplaying game. With those new systems
(at least from what I can tell) the immersiveness of being a noble in
a medieval-esque setting would be higher. But it won't, alone, be an
answer to the problems posed by people who ignore the "roleplaying"
aspect totally.

-- 
~b


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