12-27-2019, 11:45 PM
Yeah but why? Why is fucking around with, say, gravity all the more powerful, impactful and in the need to be graded over the idea of suddenly making fire appear from your hand and on another person? That is by in large completely arbitrary and coupled with the assumption that ultimately these trees actually have an impact on someone's in character actions outside of flavor in a fight - which happens, sure, but by in large not really. (Outside of resident RP-but-ignored tree illusion, anyway.)
You're gating something that is intrinsically going to be solely mechanical beyond a mild bit of effort and an application that gets real awkward if you don't get it for whatever reason. If there is some lore reason to at least make sure the player is aware of what they're getting into - cosmic and occult, holy to a lesser degree - then sure. The current system is not IC, spells barely have an effect during actual scenes, it's all very much whatever.
As for mentorship, that's fine? I am a s s u m i n g that the advanced trees would still be applied for, but even barring that you have all the various exalted and etc etc special skills that exist, still. Oh no, potentially you have clipped the rich RP of someone running around trying to get a couple of moves for their verb to the tune of "hey, can you teach me kung-fu?" "uh, okay." a hour of back and forth later "god bless, now I know kung-fu. Maybe we'll talk at some point after." "Alright bye I didn't really get anything out of that myself here."
that's an extreme example but even in the case of it being far more nuanced it would be an instant approved application anyway for the whole tree
Does the application process do much for your character? Is your character defined solely by their moves? There's 100+~ people online at a time at the moment, that's a lot of potential applications team admin have to skim for for... not much actual benefit. And believe me, I have played a character who ended up as dev bait; it's a lot of rather repetitive, unfulfilling scenes of the mentor/knowledgeable person repeating footnotes and the other player writing how they follow along, nod, understand and then save that log for their application. Out of... eight? instances of this only one character even shared their name, or ever talked to mine again.
Bzzt.
You're gating something that is intrinsically going to be solely mechanical beyond a mild bit of effort and an application that gets real awkward if you don't get it for whatever reason. If there is some lore reason to at least make sure the player is aware of what they're getting into - cosmic and occult, holy to a lesser degree - then sure. The current system is not IC, spells barely have an effect during actual scenes, it's all very much whatever.
As for mentorship, that's fine? I am a s s u m i n g that the advanced trees would still be applied for, but even barring that you have all the various exalted and etc etc special skills that exist, still. Oh no, potentially you have clipped the rich RP of someone running around trying to get a couple of moves for their verb to the tune of "hey, can you teach me kung-fu?" "uh, okay." a hour of back and forth later "god bless, now I know kung-fu. Maybe we'll talk at some point after." "Alright bye I didn't really get anything out of that myself here."
that's an extreme example but even in the case of it being far more nuanced it would be an instant approved application anyway for the whole tree
Does the application process do much for your character? Is your character defined solely by their moves? There's 100+~ people online at a time at the moment, that's a lot of potential applications team admin have to skim for for... not much actual benefit. And believe me, I have played a character who ended up as dev bait; it's a lot of rather repetitive, unfulfilling scenes of the mentor/knowledgeable person repeating footnotes and the other player writing how they follow along, nod, understand and then save that log for their application. Out of... eight? instances of this only one character even shared their name, or ever talked to mine again.
Bzzt.