I'm tired of typing and I don't really care to continue this on for much longer. I have seen the way these types of back and forth things can go (again I'm reminded of the Last Night Troll) but real quick, I'd just like to respectfully leave my parting opinions.
I was busy trying to split my time between Bay12 and homework. Yes, it was dumb.
I wasn't calling it dumb, I was calling it suicidal. For all I know that was your objective, in which case it would be quite an intelligent way of going about it. Seriously though, I'm not trying to insult your ideas, I just saw that most of the suggestions offered had a high chance of resulting in a game over and thus I wished to present my own in the hope of averting that.
We didn't have a chance to suffer for skimping on Alice's Gift, or from antagonizing the elves, or anything like that.
What led you to assume we would have? I recall no indicative signs that we were in for any serious karmic retribution. It wasn't about morality, it was about intelligence and being clever. From my perspective you seem moderately biased towards the idea that "bad guys" suffer because being "evil" is "wrong" and "just retribution" is unavoidable. I also take it that you view me the opposite; referencing the "unrealistically cold and pragmatic" comment. Perhaps there's a bit of truth to both. Honestly I do try and look at things from both sides of the coin. I suppose it doesn't matter, it looks like I'm just tired of seeing one type of behavior a lot on certain forum games and you tired of seeing the other type of behavior. Again probably based off where we respectively frequent. It just made me sad to see the spiritual successor to one of my favorite suggestion games dying and I admittedly got a little annoyed at the immediate and vehement opposition to my suggestion on the mere grounds of it being "evil".
Alright, let me rephrase that.
Fallacy.
There. I didn't try to be amusing.
I appreciated the amusing comment, hence the smiley. It saddens me greatly that my attempt at reciprocating what I saw as a friendly gesture has resulted in you snapping at me. If anything I said seemed like a personal attack, you again have my apologies. I suppose my humor can be a bit off but usually I'm just trying to get people to crack a smile while simultaneously arguing my view.
If we have, quote, "already lost the battle," by definition we cannot salvage it...
Besides, I find the kinds of "salvaging" you suggest to either fall into the category of "winning" ("impossible," by your suggestion) or that of "will soon lead to guerrilla warfare without any equipment or much training in anything useful against a god with a wide variety of troops who can bust guerrilla warfare".
Try and carry that logic over to real life military practice. If a battle is lost and there are survivors on the field, would a general shrug it off and say, "Hey, we already lost and can't salvage it. No point in trying to evacuate those troops stuck over there." I'd say there's a marked difference between "winning" and "not losing
completely". The former seems currently out of reach. I'm aiming for the latter.
Also what makes you assume the enemy god has troops well suited for rooting out stealthy guerrilla warfare troops? It's clearly not the greatest solution but it was no less suicidal than the suicidal charge idea proposed before.
Trying to breathe life into a game by making the protagonist act out of character is not good. (GreatWyrmGold is not eloquent this late.)
And do you really think that this will come back to life if we somehow got a few people out?
I've heard this argument before and it's a personal pet peeve of mine. Who gets to choose the character of the main character? The players. Am I not at the moment a participatory player in this suggestion game? Is the opinion of other players somehow more valuable than mine simply because they found out about this suggestion game before me?
The "character" of the character is based on either the GM's writing and rules or barring that, on the players. To my knowledge, the GM has made no specifications on what type of personality the god must have. Therefore it falls to the majority vote of the players, not some weird personality sheet set up early in the game by the first 4 players to be lucky enough to find out about the game.
It might not come back to life. I have no way of telling anyone that it will for a fact all work out if people follow my suggestion. I can tell you that
if everyone dies it definitely will end though. What right do you have to deprive me of the enjoyment of trying to keep this alive? I'm pretty sure only the GM and the forum admins have that right.
...Which supports the idea of "This game is dying because we were too nice!", how?
It doesn't. That was in reply to your comment that the game died due to lack of GM updates. The argument that the game is dying because we were too nice was lightly touched upon elsewhere. Actually, it was never my intention to argue that we're losing because we were nice. My argument was more centered around us losing because we refused to be "mean" when the situation called for it. There's nothing wrong with being nice if it doesn't have negative effects on the character or game. I did say "And look where that got us. Everyone's dead or about to die." but that was just out of frustration at being shot down for being evil. Niceness isn't a bad thing, it's just not helping in the current situation. My whole "take over the world, MWAHAHA!" comment was mainly a joke. Perhaps a bad joke but a joke none the less. I mean technically that is sort of one of the potential goals anyway. It doesn't have to be by crushing people with armies, it can be the nice way. Personally I just lean a bit towards the more effective way. It doesn't always have to go the most effective way but I definitely don't want to go the way that leads to game over.
No one is doubting that. We are merely doubting that they are the best solution.
The best solution is relative. In this case, I'd say the best solution (relatively) is not dying. My suggestion may potentially have resulted in survival while the others seemed less likely to do so. Of course that is somewhat opinionated but I think the logic behind the thinking is somewhat apparent. They do have a much more powerful army than us and they have already killed just about all our followers.
Considering that turning all of our followers into monsters unwillingly will leave us with no followers...
Sorry, do monsters not count as followers? Seriously, because I may have missed that mechanic. I suppose that would invalidate my plan somewhat. As long as they give off mana and can reproduce and are intelligent, I personally would consider them viable followers.
Other possibilities: We are a god of force, life, and darkness, are we not? We could create a force field to shield our people, or shroud the town in darkness to let them escape, or summon short-lived but flesh-eating bacteria to enter the enemy's troops, or whatever as easily as make a bunch of monsters.
Didn't want to neglect responding to your suggestions. Forcefield is great if we can afford it and if we have reason to believe the enemy god is incapable of breaking it down. I honestly don't know the answer to either of those questions and we also would have to maintain it for an unknown amount of time. Darkness shroud is a viable solution assuming the enemy's followers can't see in the dark. I think thematically undead usually can but if not than great. Creating a new species like flesh eating bacteria is likely to be too time consuming. It seems like all our species creation acts thus far have taken a good amount of time. Actually, I guess the same could be said about turning the humans into shades.
Fair enough, we don't have to transform anyone into monsters but can we all agree retreat is a good idea? Also do we even have enough mana to do anything besides order our followers to retreat?
Edit:
Actually I revoke my comment above "if everyone dies it definitely will end." As I said before, there is the possibility that we might be able to start completely from scratch with a new village if they all die. I guess that's the GM's decision.