Fake religion

[egamma]

It doesn't violate the Social Contract or IRs.

[Solari]

Then it's either not a problem, or we need guidance on how to handle it. I'm fine with whatever outcome.

[Geronus]

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.

[Anaris]

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.

[Geronus]

I think there's a strong argument to be made that this is a circumvention of game mechanics.

Can you explain your thinking on this? I'm not sure I agree, but I'd like to see how you reached this conclusion.

[Solari]

Some additional info which was provided when I asked for an explanation of the religion IC:

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

[Anaris]

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.

[Geronus]

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.

But is it? What advantage do they derive from doing this that another realm cannot also enjoy without doing things this way? How is it exploitative? What concerns me is that another realm could do the exact same thing without *saying* that's what they're doing and it would be fine. That means that the issue isn't *what* they're doing with the game mechanics so much as the *way* they are going about it. Therefore I would hesitate to classify this as an abuse of game mechanics.

[Indirik]

A thin veneer of RP hides many evils.

[egamma]

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.

[Indirik]

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."

[Geronus]

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.

How is that circumventing anything? You're doing exactly the same thing as anyone who has a religion does. The mechanic is used exactly the same way. It's not avoided - it's used. The sole difference is that you are not bothering to put any RP into it, which is not an issue of mechanics at all.

[Geronus]

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 it actually against the rules to do this?

[Indirik]

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.

* 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?

[feyeleanor]

Some additional info which was provided when I asked for an explanation of the religion IC:

The Path of Chivalry predates the incident described by a number of years. It was well-established when I started playing in Alowca at the start of 2008, and it was clear at that time that the main purpose of the religion was to prevent either of the neighbouring theocracies from using religious means to subvert Oritolon's lands. I never felt it was an abuse per se, but given that Oritolon spends an inordinate amount of time claiming not to be a theocracy it's pretty weird they have a State Religion and for that religion by its own admission to be solely concerned with policing religious beliefs whilst having no particular revelations of its own.