| Summary: | Fake religion |
| Violation: | Abuse of game mechanics |
| World: | Colonies |
| Complainer: | Aaron Champion (http://battlemaster.org/UserDetails.php?ID=31496) |
| About: | Cleatus (http://battlemaster.org/UserDetails.php?ID=7526) |
I fail to see which IR or paragraph of the social contract it violates.
Just a quick question.
Are nobles atheist until they pick a religion or are they pagan worshipers until they pic a specific one? Just popped up ::)
Just a quick question.
Are nobles atheist until they pick a religion or are they pagan worshipers until they pic a specific one? Just popped up ::)
It's humanistic tolerant postmodernism, with a good dash of "we founded this to keep out the influence of enemy priests" as the real reason. Definitely not medieval, or really anything other than a veneer over an abuse of game mechanics.
Be that as it may, the serious question here is whether this is within the Magistrates' jurisdiction. If it's not, we need to figure out whose jurisdiction it is.
I think Tom has already definitively answered this question. It is not.
Regarding who is responsible for this, I would argue that no one is. This kind of religion is not against any rule. Is it officially discouraged and detested? Yes. But it's not actually a violation of anything on a non-SMA island. If specific players in the community or the community at large find such religions to be distasteful, then they should take steps to discourage them by creating IC disincentives to their creation and maintenance. There are many perfectly justifiable IC reasons for religious characters to detest a 'religion' such as the Path of Chivalry and seek to oppose or destroy it.
I think there's a strong argument to be made that this is a circumvention of game mechanics.
Allow me to shed some light on Hvrek and why his name become infamous among the elder members of our realm, as he was known back then. Recently I able to get hold of some papers on his history from my library.
Hvrek previously hold the position of Duke of Alowca. He was a young blood, someone who made everyone felt charmed with his fire spewed campaign which charmed most of us. He has a younger brother who takeover Lord of Iglavik when it become vacant. Thus, he hold 2 high positions, something we should have discouraged from the start. Then his brother found a religion which is very similar to those former priests realms(Alebad and Alowca realms which have been destroyed by us Oritolon and Lukon alliance very long time ago). The religion spreads like fire, gathering quite a number of nobles to their cause. Very soon, the whole nobles in Alowca duchy (Alowca city, Warmanoras and Irdalni) and even including Iglavik (under his brother lordship) are devoted to the evil religion he founded.
We used to do a referendum to elect a region Lord and he abused it by able to command majority of the votes. At that time, the vote is done by all Lords and Ladies, if you have 2 knights serving your region, you have 2 votes. The more knights, the more votes you have. This is how Hvrek finally trained his eyes on the big prize, The Rulership of our Oritolon realm.
If you check our elder members of the realm family background, you will find we have something in common; We have been banned by a Judge Katherine who is the tool literally by Hvrek himself. She banned half the realm nobles(Most nobles of Duchy of Oritolon that Hvrek found suspicious). We started our own Rebellion and a campaign to free our beloved Oritolon from his cruel grasp. But he acted fast, by banning most of us by using the Judge, which he put in his puppet. He even exiled Sir Spearhead, our Royal previous Ruler of our realm.
Very soon, we started our Rebellion. With most of the experienced and battle-hardened knights are on our side, we had not much problem of succeeding.
(OOC: From a game perspective, player of Hvrek has multi accounts with all players of the knights/nobles in Alowca duchy are his accounts. The ending of our Rebellion concluded with bug I think, as Hvrek and his multi accounts got banned, but we have bug of Rulership election referendums where we unable to vote anyone because hey, we are still banned from Oritolon, thanks to that fast finger Judge who ban us all in a matter of second.)
It is quite an old letter from my library archive. Oritolon has undergo a few moment of instability when the former Alowca priest realm religion was founded yet again, although we have defeated them again in the Long War. Here is the library archive of Oritolon recent history for your perusal.
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Oritolon_(Realm)/Recent_History#The_Hvrek_Treachery
So, basically, it was founded as a way to keep out religions they don't like. And it explicitly states that it is not a religion.
I think that's a clear abuse of game mechanics.
Game Mechanic: enemy priests can influence your people and cause trouble, maybe even take over your regions
Circumvention: avoiding the game mechanic by creating a 'religion' that has no religious beliefs, for purely game mechanic reasons.
This is the same idea as joining all your realms regions into one duchy so that civil work is more efficient.
I suppose you could try to use the "If the only reason your doing something is game mechanics, you're probably doing it wrong" philosophy with this. If the only reason you're forming your "it's-not-a-religion" religion is to keep real religion from coming into your realm, then the only reason you're doing it is game mechanics.
Now this I find to be a far more compelling line of reasoning. But is this actually against the rules to do this?Probably. Game mechanics trump RP. What the game mechanics say is what happens. Period. If you use a game mechanic and then say something like "Ignore the game mechanics, that's not what we're doing", then you are doing something wrong.
Some additional info which was provided when I asked for an explanation of the religion IC:
Probably. Game mechanics trump RP. What the game mechanics say is what happens. Period. If you use a game mechanic and then say something like "Ignore the game mechanics, that's not what we're doing", then you are doing something wrong.
* Declaring war and then saying "It's not really a war, we just have to do this because we need to be at War status to do something"
* Sending a message tagged as Orders, and then saying "This isn't an order"
* Sending a message not tagged as Orders, and then saying "This is an order"
Does starting a religion, then saying it is not a religion count as well? Do you need to specifically declare that you're not a religion for it to count? Or can you just create a religion that is completely devoid of content, has no gods, etc., and have that count?
Thing is, if this is even stated anywhere at all (and I do not see it on the Rules and Policies Wiki page), it seems like more of a policy. The Magistrates are for adjudicating violations of the the IRs and the Social Contract. As Tom said, I don't believe that this falls into either category unless you want to argue that it's either a bug exploit or a Fair Play issue. IMO either one would be a stretch.
If Tom feels that this kind of thing should be officially proscribed, it is up to him to make or clarify the rule and determine who would enforce it. Otherwise, I think this is something that needs to be handled by the community, IG.
I suppose you could try to use the "If the only reason your doing something is game mechanics, you're probably doing it wrong" philosophy with this. If the only reason you're forming your "it's-not-a-religion" religion is to keep real religion from coming into your realm, then the only reason you're doing it is game mechanics.
Perhaps some parallel could be drawn to declaring war on another realm, and then sending message saying "We're not really at war with them, we just needed to declare war to take this region. But really, we're still friends."
That's a nice sentiment, but based on what feyeleanor has been saying, people have been trying to do exactly that for years without success.
The problem with "you have to handle that sort of thing IG" is that the type of people who are willing to bend the rules like this tend to be the type of people who are also willing to min/max and, well, bend the rules in other ways, just to get ahead.
And when a realm that's already more powerful than the others around it takes a measure like this to "protect" itself from foreign religions, you have a recipe for a middle finger to the notion of RP and in-game common sense that just gets to sit there and show how useless those ideas are when they are left to the players to enforce for everything short of a blatant violation of the IR or Social Contract.
Although personally, I think it falls squarely under the "fair play" clause of the Social Contract, like many similar "well, nothing says I can't do it, so screw you" issues.
That's a nice sentiment, but based on what feyeleanor has been saying, people have been trying to do exactly that for years without success.
The problem with "you have to handle that sort of thing IG" is that the type of people who are willing to bend the rules like this tend to be the type of people who are also willing to min/max and, well, bend the rules in other ways, just to get ahead.
And when a realm that's already more powerful than the others around it takes a measure like this to "protect" itself from foreign religions, you have a recipe for a middle finger to the notion of RP and in-game common sense that just gets to sit there and show how useless those ideas are when they are left to the players to enforce for everything short of a blatant violation of the IR or Social Contract.
Although personally, I think it falls squarely under the "fair play" clause of the Social Contract, like many similar "well, nothing says I can't do it, so screw you" issues.
I like the thinking behind this and we could even make a new rule out of this.
Basically, I think it is time for a rule that says "if you do things in-game, mean them the way you do them.". Which means if you duel then it's a duel and not a training match. If you challenge someone for a death duel, you really want one party to die. If you create a religion, it must be a religion, and if you declare war you really want to bash in some heads.
I think the "do what you mean" rule would be easier to understand than a "don't do things purely for game-mechanics" one, while meaning pretty much the same thing.
I like the thinking behind this and we could even make a new rule out of this.
Basically, I think it is time for a rule that says "if you do things in-game, mean them the way you do them.". Which means if you duel then it's a duel and not a training match. If you challenge someone for a death duel, you really want one party to die. If you create a religion, it must be a religion, and if you declare war you really want to bash in some heads.
I think the "do what you mean" rule would be easier to understand than a "don't do things purely for game-mechanics" one, while meaning pretty much the same thing.
I brought up the original complaint, and even I don't think that applying a rule retroactively is fair. Perhaps the player of Cleatus Maggot could be persuaded to move the offensive phrase.Good one, my character May may want to join in too. She is too tired of waiting for Cleatus to die of old age IC :P
Solari created a new religion, which I intend to join. If it's good, then we can maybe just get rid of the bad one through IC means.
Good one, my character May may want to join in too. She is too tired of waiting for Cleatus to die of old age IC :P
I realize how it might look that I was in the process of starting a new religion as this case came up, but all I can do is give me complete assurances that there were no ulterior motives. I had to do some research into the Path of Chivalry, obviously, during work on my own religion (with a shout out to Indirik for the inspiration and material), when it was also suggested that I bring this case forward for clarification.
This is precisely the kind of rule BattleMaster needs. It will definitely need more judgement than many of the rules, and probably cause some complaining and flamewars (but then, what rule doesn't?), but I think it's absolutely the right way to go.