I'd even want to bring it down even further, but that's too radical for the moment. The spirit should be: You have a problem with anyone, bring it up, talk about it, a solution will be found.
And we need a lot more of the "talk about it" spirit and a lot less of the "snitch" / "rat someone out" spirit that the current Titan system unfortunately conveys.
Unfortunately, BM is just too big and diverse for consensus-based enforcement of the rules. There are inherent adversarial qualities to the game (political and military conflict), and relatively few of its players know each other in real life. Not everyone will willingly adhere to the spirit of the game as conceived of by Tom. Some people just want to win, and are perfectly willing to abuse game mechanics and use OOC methods (like multi-accounting) to do so. Others want to role-play elves, pirates, ninjas or stranger things. Some people cannot escape their modern mindsets and conceptions of peasants (especially adventurers) as some sort of noble proletariat. Or shake the conviction that democracy is the best form of government.
Consensus will *never* be had in a community of this size. Every decision made will *always* make some people unhappy. This is inevitable. In SA that has all of 75 full members, that's exactly what happens. No matter what the Elders do, someone finds fault with it. And that's only 75 people! The only realistic way to mitigate this is to build a system that is both transparent and impartial, so that players can at least respect the process. Anything less will retain an arbitrary quality that is at the heart of complaints about the current Titan system, or so I believe. People get upset about the Titans because the process is so opaque. No one knows who might be under investigation and when. No one knows exactly what might get you lightning bolted. The whole process reeks of arbitrariness.
Personally, I feel that the current system is better than the originally proposed changes. I cannot imagine arguments over the rules being hashed out in this forum. One need only look at the 'Averoth OOC conflicts with GM' thread to see what the likely result of such a policy would be:
http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,394.0.htmlSomeone has to enforce the rules. If that makes them unpopular, so be it. However, I feel that a non-transparent and arbitrary system that is authoritarian in nature would still be better than hashing these things out via forum discussion. At least under the current method, the punishment comes down hard and fast and is then over. People's feathers may be ruffled for a time, but they will get over it (usually). If these things get debated in an open forum, everyone will get all kinds of worked up. Ugly things will be said, accusations will fly, and bad blood will abound. People will get much more entrenched in their positions, and feel that much more aggrieved when the ruling goes against them.
