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Messages - Scarlett

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31
BM General Discussion / Re: Messages and Metagaming
« on: July 01, 2013, 10:50:44 PM »
This discrepancy is built into the game design and there is no getting around it - you pretty much have to do one of the two things described above.

The only way around it would be to integrate infiltrator actions to things that can happen for other reasons. You'd need some kind of crime/control system where your warehouses could get sabotaged by NPCs if they had reason. That's not a small undertaking, but until it happens, the only people who do sabotage warehouses or assassinate nobles are other nobles. That's just the way of the BM universe.

32
Helpline / Re: Priest must have 'reputation' before a personal sermon
« on: July 01, 2013, 12:18:27 AM »
I still do not ever have this option as the founder of a religion with speech in the high 70s/low 80s. I am unsure of how to spread the religion to other realms without making people come to the one temple that we have.

33
BM General Discussion / Re: Re: Best realms to join on June 2013
« on: June 30, 2013, 04:00:07 PM »
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No offence, but it doesn't exactly seem like the best idea to have ruler with no power, when only the people in your realm know he has no power. Its seems like its part of the reason Terran got

Of course. Terran got precisely what it asked for. Weak central ruler, a puppeteer whose agenda was only partially concerned with Terran and not at all concerned with Terran's magnates, election fatigue, and inertia sufficient that whenever anyone suggested changing anything it was met with skepticism.

Any organization in a place like that needs 2-3 major players to get together and completely change things. Phantaria and Saffalore were both mechanisms to do that.

34
BM General Discussion / Re: Re: Best realms to join on June 2013
« on: June 29, 2013, 05:09:03 PM »
To be fair, Terran's problem was also a paucity of candidates who weren't Kas.

35
BM General Discussion / Re: Re: Best realms to join on June 2013
« on: June 28, 2013, 05:46:20 AM »
I have found realms with lots of elected positions to be, ironically, more anti-social.

Appointed roles means you know right away who the power-brokers are: Dukes, the sovereign, and the council. That could be anywhere from 4-10 people. It gives you a reason to care about the feudal hierarchy.

In realms where you can get elected to lordships with 3 votes, nobody cares about those things because they don't have to. If you then try and insist on anything related to the feudal hierarchy (as even republics are still supposed to have them in BM) you get looked like you have a third eye.

If you tracked anything, I would just make it how often new lords or council roles change hands, regardless of how they change hands. '20% of characters in this realm are promoted every month.' That would be useful.

36
BM General Discussion / Re: Re: Best realms to join on June 2013
« on: June 27, 2013, 08:57:34 PM »
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A significant component of opportunity is the number of positions that are elected.

This has got very little to do with opportunity unless you can meaningfully compare it to the turnover in non-elected roles. Otherwise you're just rewarding Republics. I've seen monarchies with good turnover and republics with terrible turnover.

Realms with elected lordships have also been the worst realms I've ever played in. Zero out of three were any fun at all because it was just popularity contests nobody gave a !@#$ about because a knight or a lord in a region on one end of the realm doesn't have any stake in what happens in a region on the other end of the realm. You end up with election fatigue.

37
Development / Re: River travel
« on: June 25, 2013, 10:43:30 PM »
I wonder if we could get an answer on provisions and not hijack the thread to be about sea travel? I am looking forward to that, too, but not in this thread.

38
Far East Island / Re: Arcaean Empire
« on: June 25, 2013, 04:51:04 PM »
Jenred was a PR campaign.

Velax is ... a campaign.

39
BM General Discussion / Re: Language
« on: June 25, 2013, 03:00:22 PM »
I have used bits and pieces of relatively common Latin as 'the ancient tongue' but that's about it, and I make a point of putting it in a context where its meaning is clear. Latin is a little easier because it's pretty much equally alien to everyone and therefore easier to buy as some distant Battlemaster tongue.

I wouldn't use any languages still spoken today unless there was a particular word with a readily understood meaning - for instance, Chevalier or Duc. Even then I've just seen them used and not used them myself.

40
Development / Provisions on Stable
« on: June 24, 2013, 05:40:29 PM »
I may be missing something, but it appears to me that provisions have been implemented on Stable for a while in everything except the ability to buy them.

- The unit status screen shows your provisions %
- Your unit depletes its provisions in a starving region and then starves
- Your provisions are restocked automatically when you travel to a region with food...sometimes

However, there is no link to 'buy provisions.'

Can this be added to stable?

41
Yeah, I've never seen anybody get upset about calling Caglians or Arcaeans Imperial scum before.

42
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women were considered inferior,

Not in BM, obviously. This convention just does not exist in Battlemaster.

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Well I am racist with my friends,

Probably the 'play as if you were with your friends' comment was meant generally, not as a literal direction to behave in BM however it is you behave around your friends.

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, and racism was an open reason to go to war.

Not so much. Religious differences were a far bigger reason. Not to say there was no racism, but you did not have lots of races all in the same place very often. You did have neighbors who were heretics or heathens, and if it so happened they were a slightly different color, that would help - but the Vikings did not invade Saxony or England because Saxons weren't vikings. They wanted loot. The reconquista did not happen because white people didn't like brown people; it happened because Catholics couldn't stand losing the whole of Iberia to the moors.

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If we all start playing as if everything was all fair and equal back then

I don't think that any serious argument has been made in favor of applying 21st century egalitarianism to Battlemaster. The only real change in the rules is the consideration for women in combat, which is big but fairly easy to make.

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Other races were often feared and hated, just because they were different. Gays could be stoned in the streets, bastards were often left to die or killed, underage girls were often married and were having sex around the ages of 10-12, and women were often seen as second class citizens.

This is all true but to hand this kind of ammunition to amateur writers and RPers is to ask for an internet clusterf*ck. To address these topics requires a certain degree of sensitivity and also extensive knowledge of how and why they occurred in the Middle Ages. In the right hands, it could be insightful or revealing; employed as a bludgeon against another character you don't like it's just the lazy way out in the same way that graphic sex and violence on television are often the lazy way out. You have to know the rules before you can break them and while I would applaud a serious attempt to play a character as openly gay, it'd be a very difficult exercise and with so many pitfalls for players rather than characters to go from 'hey fun battlemaster escape' to 'augh modern day bigotry' that I'd just as soon go without.

Frankly, I'm impressed when people bother to spend a few minutes learning about medieval politics or society. That you're aware of a generalized medieval bigotry does not arm you sufficiently to write it into your character in a meaningful way. Maybe you can (I don't know you) but it's hard for me and I've been at it for a while.

On a more historical note, I would also point out that much of what you describe did not go without complaint in the middle ages. The church was tremendously corrupt but your average, everyday person was no more comfortable with the idea of a ten year old getting married than we are today. In a noble family where heirs could mean war or peace you might jump the gun as soon as the girl was capable of producing offspring, but I would be careful about overgeneralizing how bad things were. The whole reason that people put up with the corrupt Catholic church is that they did not want a return to the Dark ages when there was really no authority at all to stop this sort of thing.




43
Background / Re: War Reparations in Medieval Times
« on: June 12, 2013, 10:55:50 PM »
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So, given that the Count of Toulouse could be wealthier and, potentially, more influential due to his wealth than the King of Whales

A better example would be the King of France and the Count of Toulouse. The Count of Toulouse (notably Raymond of Toulouse during the first Crusade) was one of the most powerful and wealthy lords around. He was a vassal of the King of France but during a time when vassals were highly autonomous (as opposed to vassals of England post-William the Conquerer).

Socially, the Count of Toulouse would treat the King of France as a higher authority even though the Count of Toulouse had in most every respect more power at his individual disposal - but he was not a King and he would rapidly lose that power if he went around pissing all over medieval hierarchy. Typically lords in Toulouse's position would expect greater influence and courtesy, and they'd get it. They wouldn't go around pissing off Kings because they'd attract too much attention and it'd be possible if not easy for the King to roust up a dozen or so lesser lords who wanted a piece of Toulouse and humble the Count in the King's name.

If he met a different King to which he didn't owe fealty, like Wales, he's treating with a foreigner so the amount of respect he shows is dependent upon what he's after. There weren't that many international parties. The Welsh, like the Bretons in Brittany, were (and remain) a proud and fierce people, but not a wealthy people. The Welsh were not, for the most part, going to get on boats and go to Toulouse. The Bretons were fantastic at defending Brittany (the only Roman province never to fall to barbarians, hence the name Romano-British) but considerably less fantastic at leaving Brittany and subjugating much of anything. Doesn't help that Brittany is kind of crap as far as money and economic strength were concerned.

That's a roundabout answer to your question and also contingent upon which part of the Middle Ages you looked at. In the 11th and 12th century, any King with half a brain is going to tread carefully around his magnates whether their title is 'Baron' or 'Duke.' By the late 14th and 15th centuries, Kings had centralized power to a much higher degree - a necessary step in the transition toward the Renaissance - so anybody even breathing incorrectly in the presence of royalty could expect to be ostracized.

BM can't model this very well because you can't have a vassal of the same rank. The Counts of Toulouse and Flanders had Count-level vassals (or what we'd approximate as Count-level vassals) and while this was technically awkward, it suited everyone involved just fine: the vassal counts got protection from a powerful lord to whom they did not have grovel too much while the superior count got to fly under the radar because hey, he's just a Count!

44
Background / Re: War Reparations in Medieval Times
« on: June 12, 2013, 07:43:57 PM »
The idea of someone trying to absolutely obliterate a medieval kingdom seems like it would be near impossible to do unless it was so small that something close to genocide could wipe it out

Not so much genocide but cultural assimilation. Wales is a pretty good example, as are Burgundy and Flanders. But with the exception of Burgundy in the Dark Ages, these were never really big sovereign Kingdoms even though they'd definitely count as BM-style realms. A map of medieval Western Europe  transferred to BM would probably have:

- The County of Toulouse, allied to
- The Kingdom of France, at peace with
- The Duchy of Brittany
- The Kingdom of England, federated with
- The Duchy of Normandy, federated with
- The Duchy of the Aquitaine
- The Kingdom of Scotland
- The Kingdom of Wales
- Ireland (rogue or largely unmanageable)
- The Duchy of Burgundy
- The County of Flanders

The Counts of Toulouse or Flanders were likely to be far more wealthy than the Duke of Brittany or the King of Wales, even if they might technically be vassals of someone else. But the whole idea of a 'realm' is tough to impose on some of these entities because a realm was pretty much whomever happened to get along with whomever else and could claim some cultural or spiritual bond.

45
Background / Re: War Reparations in Medieval Times
« on: June 12, 2013, 07:36:43 PM »
Treaties were really between people rather than realms up until the idea of 'country' took hold in the early Renaissance. You see some of the same things in BM when rulers change and the new ruler doesn't care about previous agreements. Some people go 'well yeah duh why should the ruler care' while others insist that the treaty was on behalf of the realm (which it was) but so much of medieval politics was personal that both sides are right. FEI is a perfect example of this. 'Relations' between Zonasa and their neighbors haven't changed all that much: it's not like some huge group in Zonasa always hated Kindara and Cathay just as there's certainly no group in Cathay that hates Zonasa any more than there ever was. But you change the guy in charge and all of a sudden you have a completely opposite picture of what you had days before that.

Or imagine what would happen if Morgan or Jenred unpaused right now. Entropy. It would be glorious. Not necessarily beneficial to any of my characters, but glorious all the same.

One other element you did have in medieval politics that we don't really have in BM is the role of the Pope. If you really wanted justification for your war, you got the Pope behind it (as William the Conquerer did when he invaded England). Or if you were losing, you got the Pope in your corner to sue for peace. Pissing on a treaty with the Papal seal was a lot harder, at least depending on which Pope you had in office at the time. BM religion is still in its awkward adolescent stage as BM doesn't have the population to support both a First and Second Estate even when it does have big religions like SA - it has to marry the two and it's pretty tough to be a priest in a realm with multiple religions where the ruler ain't on your side.

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