"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter."
-Ernest Hemingway, "On the Blue Water: A Gulfstream Letter," Esquire, April, 1936
I am not going to step into the debate on which system is better - I haven't paid enough attention or been back long enough to have a good understanding. Instead, I am just going to make a post extolling the virtues of CvC and make some excuses for why otherwise good people sometimes devolve into a$$hats when CvC arises.
ALFAns, including myself, have said time and again that it is the people that make ALFA worth participating in. The people we play alongside with, the people we encounter, the people who DM for us and the people we DM for. And that is all true; ALFA, like so many human endeavors, is ultimately satisfying because it is about human interaction (even if some of us are pretending to be elves, tieflings, half-orcs, etc.). Hunting and killing spawned creatures can be fun, and certainly profitable, as can delivering the mail and other mundane tasks, but you can find much better versions of those quests in games like Skyrim. So why play in ALFA? Because ALFA is filled with hardcore role-players; people who strive for intense interpersonal interaction in-character. We ALFAns try mightily to step into the shoes of a Faerun-born adventurer, and then set off into the world we made looking to be that person.
Well, it stands to reason that if what we are after is completely immersive in-character interpersonal action, the threat of harm or death from the people we interact from has to be real. Otherwise, there are no consequences, or even the threat of consequences to our interpersonal relations. Why should there be a threat? Aside from the palpable excitement such a threat generates, its true to the world and the characters.
Think about this: the vast, vast majority of player-characters out there in ALFA are stone-cold killers, even the goodly aligned ones. They march off into the wilds, at the behest of this lord or that, search out the bad-guys (however you might define that term), then they draw steel and slaughter them if they are able. Generally speaking, adventurers are people who do not fit into normal society well, AND they are prone to solving their problems with violence. It is their modus operandi, be they armed with sword, bow, spell, pet or faith; violence is second nature to almost all of ALFAs PCs, good, neutral or evil. And if these people were all socially adjusted, they’d have regular jobs. Granted, an exception exists to that rule for knights; this is their regular job, but knights are like cops, and while cops (and soldiers) becomes cops (and soldiers) for a wide variety of reasons, they don’t do it because they abhor violence.
In short, violence is a part of these characters’ daily lives; thus it should be a part of their interactions with others. To me, nothing reeks more of metagaming than saying “you can go kill all those folks over there, because they are NPCs, but you can’t kill this person here because this is a PC.”
I know that having your PC killed sucks; my first drow PC in ALFA got killed by Burt’s human fighter. Fortunately it was on a one-off OAS game, so I “resurrected” her when NWN1 went live (used her death as background). The one thing I didn’t do was call Burt out and say “you suck for killing me!” I did call one of his group out in the forums for mutilating the body though – have some respect people!
In NWN1, my drow got chased out of Skullport and I ended up on the surface for awhile, and there were plenty of people who wanted to CvC me and my followers, and a couple even tried. I did not complain about that – I understood it, and honestly, it was one of the most exciting things about playing back then. I still remember our first surface excursion, with Intharra (Zak), Amenia and myself, and feeling just absolutely terrified that whoever we ran into was going to CvC us on the spot (if we didn’t get killed by NPCs with KOS scripts first!). It was thrilling. The first time Higgy walked into my dungeon cell, I thought he was just going to beat me to death. And honestly, over the next 3-4 years of play, every time I encountered Hignar in-game, I wondered, “is this the time?” And that is THRILLING! Feelings like that made ALFA worth playing in.
This is why I quote Hemingway at the start. Most ALFAns will never have to hunt armed people in their lives. A few of us have been soldiers (airborne infantry, hua!) and there have probably been cops, and we have some idea of what it is like, and I’m sure there have been combat vets from OIF and OEF who have done it. But most ALFAns have not, and will not ever hunt a real armed human being. But we can do it in ALFA … and that is one of things that makes it so thrilling. No spawn, no DM monster or NPC will ever provide the thrill of fighting another PC because behind the other PC is a real person fighting for their virtual life. I’ve played in a lot of campaigns, fought everything from rats in the streets of Skullport, to a Balor in the streets of Ched Nasad. No fight, with spawn or DM creature, generates the kind of thrill you get when you have to face off against another PC.
Now, people are people, even ALFA’s best players. ALFA requires us to be hard-core role-players, and to do that, most of us have to get pretty deep in-character and identify with our toons. Once we do that, a threat to our toon can seem like a threat to us, personally. Not a physical threat of course, but a threat to our identity, to our ego. So, upon occasion, when the threat of CvC begins to loom larger and larger, folks can turn into unreasonable a$$hats. While I am using a pejorative term here, I actually sympathize a great deal. I know how attached I was to my characters, and I know how attached some of the players whose toons I killed were attached to their characters (Zak and Burt for example). And yet, we were able to overcome the personal feelings and get on with the game.
So, I urge folks to take CvC for what it is; a serious thrill ride, win, lose or draw. And while I also urge folks NOT to use CvC as an extension of OOC bullying, I strongly suggest that when the threat of CvC begins to arise, take a deep look at the relationship between the involved characters, setting aside your ego for a moment, and see if the other character is doing what that character would do. For example, I had no problem understanding why folks would show up at the ‘gates’ of Lonelywood looking to CvC my drow. But, some of the people who showed up at the gates of Lonelywood could not understand why, after being asked to leave and then refusing, the elves of Lonelywood decided to try to kill them. Often, this came about for one of two reasons: first, incorrect assumption – folks believed the elves of Lonelywood were goodly aligned, hippy-dippy tree huggers. Bad assumption. Second, there seemed to be a sense of entitlement on the part of some players playing goodly aligned characters – they seemed to think they had a right to go anywhere they pleased, and to attack “evil” PCs without facing any consequences (I am using Lonelywood as an example, but that is not necessarily where these observations come from).
Now, it would be meta-gaming if the elves of Lonelywood went onto the boards and explained their backgrounds, their philosophy, their outlook and such, and so they didn’t do that. As a result, when goodly types were turned away, or even chased away, they sometimes went OOC and cried foul, based on their incorrect assumptions or sense of entitlement or both. There are only two way I know to prevent such outcries: 1) fully explain everything, which is totally metagaming; or 2) trust the other players and DMs. I vote for trust, even when those people are trying to kill you in game. Don’t assume that the other player is metagaming, bullying or whatever, try to start with the assumption that the other player has legitimate reasons for wanting to CvC you. In other words, presume innocence until guilt is proven.
As a former Player-Admin, I know people cheat. I know people grief. I also know that people presume or assume cheating and griefing far, far more often than it actually occurs. And I know that those assumptions are often propped up by personal biases, against alignment, race, server, the OOC persona of the player, etc. So, where people actually do something ‘bad’ – fine, take action – but CvC is not inherently “bad” in ALFA. ALFA is a social game about human interaction, but violence is a part of human interaction, especially when the crowd you are running in is composed of stone-cold killers, be they good, evil or indifferent.
Anyway, no matter what rule ALFA adopts, I urge the powers-that-be not to water down CvC too much, and certainly do not eliminate it. I can live with the 2-PC per player rule. I can even live with other changes to the Pillars and the Charter and rules, but … eliminate CvC and/or permadeath, and even the high-caliber of ALFAs role-players will not be enough to keep me here. Now, my absence certainly won’t kill ALFA, or even slow it down (point proven by my 4-year hiatus) but … do you really want to turn the ALFA-roller-coaster into a kiddie ride? Put pads and bumbers on all the edges, flatten out all the drops, and straighten out all the corners? It will get kind of boring if you do that.
Oh, and one last note: people have talked about this person or that person leaving because of CvC. I CvC'd or help CvC over half-a-dozen PCs over the years, maybe more, and no one left. However, in my first week here, I got into a flame-war with Coby/Drakeswind/Treowe and he DID leave. Later, I got into debates on religion and LGBT issues with some rather intolerant ALFAns, and they left. Then we had the ALFAquake, and lost a 1/3 of our DMs and staff. This list goes on and on - point being, the number of ALFAns lost to CvC complaints PALES, absolutely PALES in comparsion to the number of ALFAns lost to politics, rule-changes, boredome, real-life, lack of DMing, lack of other players, OOC squabbles with DMs, age of the game, etc. etc.
As always, this is just my view and, true to my word, I am staying out of the vote - just voicing my 2-cents for keeping CvC alive and well in ALFA. For those that made it this far, thanks for reading.
M.
That's always been my rule.
J/K of course ... sort of.
