To reply to the most important part first: Of course it was an evil choice. When you say "put nobody else at risk other than yourself", that is a
lie. It is nothing more than an absolute lie. In
either possible outcome of the deal, you are risking bringing harm to others; in the case that you lose, by what you might later be forced to do because you are corrupted, and in the case that you win, because you are keeping a chaos artefact in close proximity to everyone else and you have no idea what other effects it might have besides the one you know about. You realize that TTRPGs are an open-ended form of game, right? It's entirely possible that in a future situation, Stirk could decide for any reason that the chaos artefact becomes a problem - it would be narratively natural. It's clear to me now that you really don't have any clue what you actually did.
Lenglon, though... you need to pull your head out, here.
Well that's hostile, guess we aren't going to get to have a polite conversation.
You have no idea how polite I'm being.
The only thing that I labeled as not being negotiable, in my conversation with another player, not the GM, was that she remain a playable character. I drew the red line so far back it's absurd, and the simple fact that I felt the need to draw it at all should tell you how extreme the situation has become, all about a choice that I made a point of staying public about from start to finish in case someone wanted to say, oh, "please don't do that?". I know it's hard for you to understand that asking someone to not do something might influence them into not doing it, but that's because I'm less of an asshole than you are, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm an asshole.
Let me be clear: I don't have any issue with you making the choice you made, I have an issue with you telling other people how to respond to it. "Remaining a playable character" is not something you get to demand - if you had stumbled into a trap and died, you would not remain a playable character. If other players don't make the decision to compromise their own ideas of what they should do in order to save you, that's their right. Well, you stumbled into an obvious trap and died.
But you also know that you have the freedom to react in character too, right? If Marco makes a choice you don't like, you can go down the Dark Indaria route, you can mutiny, you can pretend to leave and then stow away on board, you can even try to use the amulet to pray to the daemon to help you out again. I don't have any problem with PVP, so all of those are things I would be completely okay with, although some of the other players may reasonably dislike it. What you decide to do is up to you. What Marco decides to do is up to Caellath.
In what world have I demanded anything of the kind in the first place? Unlike you, I abide by a rule of not fucking over friendlies, which, of course, restricts my freedom of choice substantially. You had the freedom to choose for yourself as well. All I'm asking for is that Cael abide by the same, and I have clearly labeled that I'm fine with her getting punished to a reasonable extent and explicitly am fine with it within limits, even though that's not normally a thing a PC should do to another PC.
"Unlike me"? What did
I do? Unlike me, you
actually fucked over friendlies. It's become glaringly obvious that you didn't actually have a clue what you were doing, though, so, to be clear: It should have been obvious to you, yes, that other players and other characters would respond like this to your choice. Not explicitly telling you not to do it - and you
were told not to do it IC - doesn't mean you haven't fucked us over by putting us in this position. Given that, if you want to take it back based on that understanding which you clearly did not have, I would be in favor of your being allowed to do so. But that's up to you. You're not being punished for not understanding that - I genuinely thought it was completely impossible to miss, and I suspect the other players did as well. I assumed, as I think we all did, that you made your choice in full awareness of the ramifications. If you didn't, you now know those ramifications and maybe you would make a different decision knowing them.
ETA,A: I think that, if any of us had known that you
all of A) were actually going to take the deal, not merely 'consider it and then change your mind at the last second', B) intended to immediately tell the very strict and by-the-book Captain that you had done so, knowing, at least OOC, the obvious consequence, C) expected that you would not receive the obvious consequence and felt entitled to have the other players play along with that,
and D) were soliciting opinions on these facts and not just informing us of them, then we would have advised against doing the thing that would clearly lead to the game devolving into (real-world) chaos. Perhaps, in the future, if you want to offer people the chance to object to something, you should make that clear and not just make a statement and assume that, if nobody says anything, everyone else must be on board. That's a little narcissistic, to be honest.
Values dissonance problem:
So we've got two major aspects of values dissonance going on here. First, there's the simple fact that the 40k universe fosters extremely domineering, judgemental, prejudicial, and hateful behavior. It's all part of the grimdark flavor, which is fine. The problem comes from the fact that this shit is unhealthy as hell when applied to fellow real human beings. Just because the imperium would shoot Indaria on sight, doesn't mean Cael should shoot Lenglon on sight. I think nobody here disagrees with that. However there's some other aspects to it. For example, Macro is the RT is the lord and god of the ship. Cael is just another player the same as you and me. No better, no worse. Although Marco gets to make demands of Indaria, Cael doesn't get to make demands of Lenglon. Not hard, right?
But Lenglon gets to make demands of Cael?
So take a moment and actually fucking look at what you're saying. You're saying that this choice, made publicly, with zero objection and straight up implied consent of the other players, is a reason to remove another player from the game entirely. You're declaring me a problem player for... taking a risk to my own character, and requesting that I don't be unilaterally executed for it. Yeah, if You and I were in the 40k universe this kind of treatment of other people would be nothing, normal, mild and friendly. This isn't the 40k universe, and people actually do have value here in reality.
First of all, let's not call "not overtly telling you what to do" "implied consent". Second, I'm declaring you a problem player for making a choice that puts other players in a difficult situation, and telling them how they are or are not allowed to respond to it.
Third, your framing is also ridiculous. Even if the decision is made to continue playing without you, that is not the same as you being executed in real life. Whining that "people actually do have value" ignores the fact that,
in the context of the game, your value
as a player of the game is the enjoyment you are giving to other players. If people don't enjoy playing with you, your value
as a player is negative and other people are not required to play with you. As of this last post, I feel that I have officially moved firmly into that camp, but I think this is something you can understand if you try to empathize with the other players. Please reconsider your attitude. This is just a game and the point is for us all to have fun.
Second aspect of values dissonance is the simple question of was Indaria's choice an evil choice? Apparently you say yes it was. The Imperium of Hate would agree with you, 100%, no question. But was it ACTUALLY an evil choice? I think not. It was a risky choice, yes. It was unwise, yes. However, did she put anyone at risk other than herself? No. She did not. She has harmed nobody, she's put nobody at risk other than herself, and I want you to seriously sit down and think for a moment about if it actually was evil at all.
I did, as I said above. I think you don't actually understand the full
narrative meaning of your choice. You put everyone's lives at risk and are continuing to do so.
Let me make my bad decision. I, the player (Lenglon), think having Indaria's story being one where she treads on the edge of falling to Chaos but resists actually doing so, will make her have a fun and engaging story. That's my choice. It's my risk to take.
As I said, you have every right to make your decision as a player. So do all the other players. Us reacting to your choices is not refusing to let you make a choice.
And I'm still waiting for Cael to bring literally anything to the table here. So far he's stated that his hard line is remove Indaria from play permanantly at a minimum, which completely unreasonable and unacceptable, so he's going to have to give, since I've already given quite a lot and don't have a lot more room to work with. I would like to talk this out like functional adults, but a negotiation requires more than one participant, and Cael isn't posting.
I don't think you understand how much of an asshole you are being here. Cael is almost certainly
deeply uncomfortable with the position you have put him in because he doesn't want to make a choice that will hurt your feelings, but doesn't see any other way out for his character that preserves his
own desire to play the game.
So let me be clear. He doesn't "
have to give". Nobody owes anyone the continuation of this game. If it's going to be like this, we could end it here. I don't want that to happen, but if you really are going to be this obtuse about it, I think it ultimately has to. Making demands that other people compromise to accommodate a choice you voluntarily made in the way you're happy with is not "talking this out like functional adults", it's you being a petulant child. You do not get to decide whether other people's decisions are "unreasonable and unacceptable". This game is for all of us, not just you. That's why, as someone who's willing to be blunt and not uncomfortable with making the statement, I stepped in to clarify matters and give a couple suggestions for how the game could continue with all players using their current characters.
But by the way, using the power of chaos to lie to people about your nature is not "treading on the edge of falling into Chaos but resisting actually doing so". It's swimming in it. I think this is the real values dissonance here... the WH40K lore makes clear that
chaos is an intrinsically destructive power that
will turn anyone who uses it for its own ends, somehow, eventually. Making deals with it is risking harm to the people around you
automatically, no matter how much you think you're coming out on top in the deal. The house always wins. You already let the wolf in, the question now is just how much makeup you want to put on it before seating it at the dinner table.
ETA: You know how, in old fairy tales, if you make a wager with the devil, even if you win, the thing you win ends up turning against you and delivering some kind of poetic justice, because the real moral is "don't make deals with the devil", not "don't lose"? It's
exactly like that.
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Topic: Rogue Trader: Laughing Gold (OOC) (Read 36232 times)