Posted by Pico(IMM) on December 10, 1999 at 20:51:40:
In Reply to: EMPOWERMENT posted by widowson on December 10, 1999 at 12:48:47:
> In a recent presidential election, a reporter asked a candidate the simple question, “How much does a gallon of Milk cost?” The candidate was unable to respond and this was used by his opponent as an example of how this candidate had gotten "Ivory-tower” syndrome, basically how he had lost touch with the common person because he had been in a position of authority for so long. > This is an excellent RL analogy to use when debating empowerment. With all due respect, many Immortals have been Immortals for so long that they no longer understand how difficult, time consuming and uncertain empowerment is for normal players. > Naturally, empowerment is easy for Immortals because they can see WIZI invisible Imms and, through casual conversations, know what their fellow Immortals like in empowered characters. Simply put, they know when and what to pray when attempting empowerment. Immortals are essentially guaranteed empowerment where as mortals roll the dice every time. > Normal mortals don’t know if their god is even on when they pray and, since they have little or no feedback, don’t know if their ideology is correct. Since we don’t have this luxury, this access to OOC knowledge, we fumble around through trial and error wondering, in painful, unresponding ignorance. Wondering if our god is even on, if he's even watching, and weather or not we're wasting our time on a character concept that will never be empowered for some unknown reason. In short, the Imms, on the whole, are out of Well, I'll say the imms, on the whole, play > In my own experience, I’ve had characters empowered on the same day I rolled them. Others, a week later. Yet others 2 weeks despite putting near equal effort into each one. There are some who have waited 3 weeks to a month for empowerment which would suggest not that their RP was wrong, since they got it eventually, but the absence of their particular god. It’s not fair to keep players hanging for 3 weeks or more for empowerment. > In essence, empowerment seems to be based more on luck and happenstance than anything else. It would be advisable to either eliminate it altogether, automate it somehow, perhaps let tattooed priests empower, or anything to rectify this situation. > In all honesty, if empowerment was only RP based and had nothing to do on Immortal availability and individual preference than you could take 2 people, of equal skill, playing empowered characters for the following experiment. One should theoretically have as much success praying to Nepenthe at 8p.m. as the other praying to Vassagon at 8a.m. Empowerment, in its current form, refuses to take real life factors into consideration and is unfairly easier for Immortals or someone with inside information. In a perfect world.... We didn't set up the However, a flawed system shouldn't be Your stated spirit of these emails (posts)
touch with the reality of the empowerment
process because we don't play many mortals
anymore to find out ... and when we do play
clerical mortals, we use OOC knowledge to
know whom to pray for and what to tell them.
mortals (as much as conniving and conspiracy-
hungry players let us) enough to monitor the
game as well as to have fun in the game we've
all spent time creating and maintaining. Some
of those are clerics and we probably do have
a better idea of "what to say" -- but not as
BS to give in an interview, but because we
have a better understanding of the roles that
a cleric in a certain sphere should play. This
is 1) because we've had more of an opportunity
to talk with all of the imms (though usually
as a lower imm you're not that comfortable just
chatting with the higher imms), but 2) because
you had to be a good RPer to become an immortal
in the first place. So a good RPer who knows
what to RP, this leads to better players in
the game -- hardly a travesty to justice.
empowerment system to purposefully screw over
the player base nor favor our own characters.
We set it up to make the clerical classes mean
more than "mages with different spells." Is
the process perfect? Do players lose out because
a certain imm isn't around when they are? Do
we know about all this? Yes, and ideally anyone
deserving to be empowered would be and we'd
have enough time to monitor every empowered
person to make sure they're doing what they're
supposed to be doing.
scrapped because it's not perfect -- not many
things are. "This is wrong, we must do
something" is not a philosophy I, or
many of the other Immortals adhere to. We're
open to constructive suggestions that would
improve the process without throwing out the
baby (the reasons we instituted empowerment
in the first place) with the bathwater (the
flaws).
was to not just whine about problems, but to
discuss them seriously so they could be
solved. I haven't seen much here or in the
other messages along those lines. I can tell
you that I, as well as most of the other Imms,
have read numerous messages on all of the Web
forums, starting with ours through Dioxide's,
and have not found a satisfactory solution.
We'll still look.