Again, since I apparently wasn't clear before: I would expect this to happen in the event you find yourself in a situation where you are among a large number of realms that is or will be declaring war on one or a very small number of realms, such that if they do not have realms join in to help them, they will be massively, hopelessly, demoralizingly outnumbered.
Yes, you may have had many contingency plans, but you made an assumption that led to your "initial projections" that had the war not being one-sided.
Those assumptions, not to put too fine a point on it, were wrong.
And, again, our characters did not assume anything. We made plans based around multiple possibilities. And starting from the presumption that the most powerful realm on the continent, with a historical ally and a newly formed colony, would be fighting alone seems, to me, problematic on the face of it. That's not a sensible plan, and the characters making these plans are at least somewhat sensible.
That was one of the factors that led to where we are now. (Another of them was Zatirri rolling into rulership swinging, and yes, he deserved to get sucker-punched for his arrogance in this matter. That doesn't mean every player in his realm deserved to be put in a position where they were forced into a war they could not win, and had no way of knowing how they could end without destruction, for an indeterminate amount of time.)
They had several ways of knowing. Their Ruler could have, but didn't, tell them. They could have reached out, to literally anyone, and gotten the story, none of which ever involved destruction of the realm. The "indeterminate amount of time" is completely related to failures of communication, which would have been rectified in several ways. And had any of us known that any of the players in Thalmarkin were having issues, we would have happily talked OOC about it.
What I'm trying to do here—and I recognize that I'm flailing a bit at it, but please try to bear with me—is not to change everything to being pre-planned and risk-free, but to change the culture so that rulers, at the very least, start trying to take some responsibility for the fun of the whole continent rather than the every-realm-for-itself model we have operated under up to now. To stop and take stock every once in a while, question your assumptions, and check in with your fellow players, "Hey, how are things going? Are you having fun? If not, what can we as a continent do to make that better?" Never expecting to be turning relations and RPs around on a dime, but just starting to take into account the other people sitting at the table.
If John Read-Jones had had a relationship with Matthew Runyon, and the other players of BT rulers, such that they all not only already saw each other as players, but had corresponded OOC—not about what their realms were planning, but about the general mood and what they felt like they needed—then I think it extremely unlikely that the setup for this situation would ever have happened. And this is emphatically not me saying I think you're to blame for that lack—I think this is a lack in BattleMaster's culture that I myself have only started to really see within the last few months to a year.
I regularly talk with other players, both in game and on Discord. I have pretty good relationships with several players in Thalmarkin. Including a couple of people in the upper echelons. And I have, in point of fact, talked about Obia'Syela, general ideas about it, how the realm is faring, etc. Rea, Luitolf, and I have talked repeatedly about the Heralds religion. Rogos and I talk all the time about Perdan and the problems the EC has faced. You're right, I didn't have a particular relationship with John Read-Jones, but if your goal is to get everyone to have a relationship with everyone else, that's going to be a difficult task.
For me, the
number one problem here is not talking, absolutely. But putting that all on the Rulers is an issue, for the same reason that putting everything on the Devs and Titans is an issue. If no one says anything, I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to know this. I talked with all of these people, repeatedly, during the time when they were apparently feeling upset. I will admit that I'm often oblivious to things, as Kel can attest, but at no point did I get the sense that there was anything more than the usual "oh crap,
that didn't work" until Zat sent his message to the ruler/admin channel.
I
completely agree that if we were all playing as friends around the table, this would have been avoided. But I'm failing to see, in concrete terms, what we could have done differently. Yes, at the point when Vordul Sanguinius and Ar Agyr didn't join the war, should we have stopped and thought for a moment, of course. I've admitted that multiple times previously. But I'm still not sure what I would have done differently. And adding more burdens onto Ruler just makes me think, again, that settling down as a nice rich Duke is a better plan all around.
It's the same kind of disregard for other players' feelings as human beings that led Alexandros Stavrou to conduct his campaign of harassment and bullying. The same, frankly, that has led to every single major incident of OOC hostility and every single major controversial Titan case. I'm trying to attack that problem at its source and I do not claim to have a good idea of what I'm doing, but I'll be damned if I stop trying.
I hope you can see me in that light as you continue to bring critiques of my performance as I move through this effort.
I get that. I really do. And I'm trying to bring constructive criticism to this. I'm trying to point out that I
agree with the goal and idea, I just disagree with some points of the implementation of it. And I'm trying really, really,
really hard not to take this personally, but that's difficult when you and others are linking what I and others did with continued examples of some of the worst things that have happened in the game.
I
am guilty of something in this. I am guilty of sticking too much in character, and not stopping and thinking OOC when the war allies broke out differently. Absolutely. But the continued comparisons of negligence that could easily have been corrected with one conversation, with active, hostile, malignant, intentional behaviour makes it really difficult for me to remain calm about this.
