If you are changing mechanics to make their style of play either pointless or greatly reduced in efficiency, then yes you are punishing them through mechanics, simply because they aren't playing in the way you have deemed acceptable. There are player driven methods to resolve this, which not only allow for different play styles between realms and individual choice, but also the possibility of political and other conflict and interaction within the realm. I don't particularly want them punished at all, I was simply pointing out that for realms where this is a problem and the consensus exists that it is not acceptable within the realm, mechanics exist to correct it, which in my view is much better then a game wide system to stamp it out.
What is the "play style" of academy whores? I've been there. I trained infils back in the old days. There is nothing fun about it. It is boring. I felt like hammering my head onto the desk every time I trained. Is there seriously someone who *enjoys* training? Not the end result of having high skills, but the training itself?
People train because it's currently the only way to improve their skills. It shouldn't be so. Training is boring for them, boring for others. A game shouldn't focus any objective on boring processes.
Our characters are high nobles. It should be simply assumed that they train on their free time.
So don't train. What is the worst that can happen? Duels will actually be risky? You won't win that tournament that was so important to you having fun?
Hardly anybody duels because no matter how badass your character is, and how many battles he's led infantry in, odds are the brand new character has as much or higher swordfighting skill than you have. Often, this has led to ridiculous cases of brand-new characters challenging rulers and the like to duels within weeks of joining the game. IRL, if this happened, the war-hardened king could easily just say "bring it on" and slay him.
If he's a peace-lover, though, or never takes risks, then fine, that character shouldn't be a god at swordfighting. But that's what modulated risk-taking is all about. Having it so that characters who don't take any more risk than they do right now only increase skill very slowly and cap at, say, 40%, while characters who jump in head-first and end up with serious wounds most battles, for years, are the only true sword gods.
More wounds also means more turnover.
I'm not having less fun because my neighbor likes to watch baseball. I don't understand how that could happen to you.
I fail to see how this compares. IR, you have a ton of neighbors, and no obligation to frequent any of them. In BM, you are in a team of a select few. It's more akin to being in a family where a certain member of the family is always at the bar, using up grocery money to get drunk. Yes, maybe he's the one that made that income. Doesn't give him the right to disregard everyone else that's relying on it.
If you don't like academies in your realm, destroy the academies there. It'll save you maintenance money.
Believe it or not, I've actually done this when in positions of power. That's irrelevant, however.
It only takes one party to start a war.
If you've got a continent with five realms, three allies on one side and two on the other, and for various reasons four of these realms are led by peace-loving rulers that maintain the status quo against restless nobles that would like for something to happen. Now say that one other realm, with a single ally, is the only one ruled by a ruler that wants to shake things up. So that ruler tries to prepare his realm for war, he orders recruitment of troops and investments in recruitment centres. But, despite how wealthy his realm should be, none of that seems to be happening. His army remains small and the infrastructure remains poor, because those with gold have other priorities. He can't ban them, they'll just switch to one of the enemies, and he'll just be less able to go to war. And so, because he can't mount a reasonable army, he puts off the war again, and again, and again. Just because one or two douchebags wanted to use that gold to train their skills, the whole continent is at peace. Had he been able to divert all of these resources to a war effort, he could have launched a surprise attack on one of his enemies, their two allies would probably have come in to defend him, and then his own ally would probably have come in to even the odds. That single ruler could have brought the whole continent at war.
Academies are detrimental to the game as a whole, not just to the realms that use them.
