I think the key in a complex situation like this is communication. OOC communication.
Yes, you assumed that other realms would join in on Thalmarkin's side, which would have made it a more even conflict. Zatirri assumed that when he declared war on Irondale, he'd get Irondale and maybe one or two other realms involved in a war, and probably VS on his side.
Our characters didn't
assume anything. They planned for multiple possibilities, one of which included allies joining Thalmarkin. Zat's character did
not plan for any other eventualities, clearly. When a character rolls into Rulership swinging, they often get sucker punched, and I think that is generally a good thing, because I as a player am not terribly interested in dealing with yet another megalomaniacal Ruler, and having the ones that do show up get sucker punched lowers the incidences of that.
What I would like to ask of "you" (in quotes because it's not "you, Matt" or even "you, the realms arrayed against Thalmarkin now", but "any rulers who are in the situation in the future of preparing to be one of several realms declaring war on one realm") in the future is that you first talk to the realm about to get its butt kicked, preferably on the Ruler/Admin OOC channel so that we can be present to help mediate, and make sure there's a good enough understanding on both sides of what you're all getting into that the players involved aren't faced with nasty surprises.
My problem with this has been and continues to be that I don't know where the line is. Do we do that every time we think there's even a chance of a war becoming one-sided? Because, again, initial projections on this didn't anticipate it being that one-sided. Do we do that the moment we see it turning toward that path? Even if that isn't obvious to everyone involved?
Do we do that with
every war?
We're now talking about fundamentally changing the nature of the game, to something closer to some D&D games where all the character drama is discussed OOC first and arranged for fun, rather than the actual competitive nature that Battlemaster conflicts have frequently actually had.
I'm not necessarily opposed to that, to be clear. But that
is a change. That's a
big change. And I think that's a change that needs to be discussed, not one that we can pretend was always how the game was and we just collectively forgot about for a while.
Because right now, the players of
every single Ruler in the "Coalition" on Beluaterra have mentioned the possibility of abdicating or pausing or leaving, or have actually abdicated. I was the only exception, and I'm saying now that I've been considering it. Now it's possible Eugenica abdicating didn't have anything specifically to do with this, there was some other stuff going on there, but clearly a decision was made that playing a Duke was going to be better than playing a Ruler. And that says a lot right there, because I, Matthew, thought Eugenica was doing some good stuff.
I won't speak for anyone else, but for me, I'm considering it because what I'm hearing now is concerning, and draining, and I don't know if I want to deal with it anymore. I don't think I'm going to, but my reasons for that are a lot more of various obligations than they are anything to do with "fun".
So, let's see how this plays out. But let's also be clear about what we're trying collectively to do here, and talk about it before we jump into major new changes, if at all possible.
