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.
Well Tom, partially you´re right. To have people yell "Overlord´s a pussy" every time is frustrating and not very noble, if I saw that it would be something I would report it so the person would lose honor/prestige (heck, I was once punished with this for calling a noble a rabid dog).
But you need to understand that, you are putting us against a 6m creature from another plane. That alone is pretty epic.
And with the anti-hero worship thing going on pretty much every were now, every one will act like him. In the end, everyone wants to be Wolverine. So yes, people will role-play the hero-in-the-face-of-overwhelming-odds to make the enemy ridicule, because that´s what the anti-hero do. The noble one and the one that face the odds respecting the opponent and being noble is the more regular hero, most like Superman.
No one wants to be a "normal human" everyone wants to be great and leave the normality to the troops and captains.
Now on prison changes, the atmosphere of a prison would need to change a bit I think. Right now every prison just works as a way to keep you from playing for a week (and that´s one of the reasons that we usually have agreements with other realms to release prisoners after day three).
This is a system that could be remade, maybe add more things to it, like if there is 5 or more members of the same realm in one prison, you can start a rebellion, try a mass escape or anything like that.
Increase the activity and options to make prison a bad place so you can RP, more than a "wait for X days for you to play"
Bribe guards to help you and your fellow prisoners escape it is a good idea, add mortality to escape would be good too (after all you´re trying to escape, they can cut your hand or take your life depending on it).
Now I was one that voted for mortality on the invasion, I lost my oldest character to the last one and it was good. Because she died defending her land. And I see no problem with that. Overlord should accept duels and people should face the consequences of it.
