Personally I think that all of this might be a bit of an overreaction, Tom.
Personally, I think it is an
underreaction. I've set infiltrators free who had tried to assassinate Overlord - twice. Most human judges would have executed them. I have not accepted death duels because I didn't want to kill any characters, but a common reaction was to call Overlord a pussy. I have people who were seriously wounded in combat trash-talk me in a way that no matter how hard I try I can not imagine a real human being facing a creature three times his size who already struck you down once would.
These are outliers, certainly. I totally dig most of the roleplaying, including the attempts to provoke me, or to display courage and strength. But most of you don't see what I see and some of that is just out of line, and would not happen if there were actual consequences. Real people would fear for their lives. Why not have the players fear for their characters? Contrary to real humans, you get several and can continue playing even if one of them bites the dust.
Seriously. I have a guy in the Netherworld prison right now, who
after I tortured almost 10 prisoners composed and posted via "yell to everyone" a song to ridicule Overlord - the guy who just made everyone in the other cells wish they were dead instead. You would have to be insane to do something like that in real life, and even a human judge would probably have you tortured to death slowly over the next three days.
And those extremes are what I'm pissed about, because it turns everything into a comic. And I'm sick and tired of sitting there and having to take it. Because the invasion is a bit of fun for me as well, but mostly work. Frankly, if you the players don't like it, then we can do away with the whole invasion thing. It really isn't worth all the effort if all it brings is crap like that.
So either you respect me - and that includes knocking some sense into your fellow players when they don't - or this is the last invasion because neither am I willing to do so much work for negative feedback again, nor am I willing to submit any volunteers to that treatment.
This is not about dictating roleplays. I don't care how you do it. But damn you, I have a 6 m (that's 20 feet for you americans) creature from another plane, wearing armour made out of the pure suffering of hundreds of humans, whose souls are still somewhat alive and you can hear and feel their agony. I don't think that it's too much to ask when I say that a roleplay of jumping up and down yelling "Overlord's a pussy, Overlord's a pussy" is inadequate. That's not even brave hero stuff, that's just stilly and stupid and ruins the atmosphere. There are many ways to roleplay a hero-in-the-face-of-overwhelming-odds in such a way that your opponent doesn't feel ridiculed.
End Rant.
