[Discuss] Re: Proposed Marshal changes

[Samuel Knowlton]

>> Excellent. Then the change has accomplished what was intended. If you
treat everyone as one giant blob, if you ignore that marshals are unlike
everyone else, then you will lose against a better organized enemy. Say,
one where the marshal understands that his job is to stay with his army,
come hell or high water.

So traveling home to repair and refit makes you disorganized?

Here is what will happen (and what I am already seeing happen in some 
realms):

The marshal will change twice a week.

I think you are focusing a little much on an impractical ideal of how the 
game should be played at the expense of how everyone is actually doing it. 
'Stay with the army, come hell or high water' never happens, and there is no 
incentive for it to happen, even with these settings. And even if you make 
it so you can't change the marshal as often as you like, it will just create 
frustration and people won't use marshal settings.

Your entire argument here is founded on the notion that a realm which treats 
its army like a giant blob should be penalized. My argument has nothing to 
do with this. It is that, sometimes, conditions will dictate that a realm's 
whole argument will indeed be a blob, and that other times, it won't. You've 
got big realms and small realms, and realms with multiple armies (and thus 
multiple marshals) will sometimes have one mission per army and sometimes 
they won't. You're going to see liege lords re-assigning nobles willy-nilly 
from one army to the other (or just to one giant army) or replacing Marshals 
ad hoc.

If your goal is to make things more local and decentralized, than let's get 
the new tax system up and running. That is the biggest achievement in this 
department since I've been on BM. This recent business with marshal settings 
achieves far less and has a much greater cost, which, in my opinion, cancels 
out whatever progress it also introcuces because it forces people to 'game' 
their way around it.

The tax system has incentive and rewards; in one blow, you make it in 
everyone's interest to use local taxes and oaths, and realms which still try 
to do the realm-wide distribution of taxes will have unhappy nobles and less 
efficiency.

Arbitrarily tacking on punitive measures with little basis in either 
gameplay or history will result on similar arbitrary measures to get around 
them. What possible IC reason is there for half an army (or, in BM terms, 
one of two armies) to sit around in a disorganized fashion because there 
marshal isn't there? Nobles would beg their rulers for the privilege of 
leading the van or commanding a battle because it brought them glory. The 
idea that nobody would be around to take charge just because the guy who 
usually does it is out of town is absurd, and easily circumvented in-game. 




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