Tarquinus

Aysun - sorry for misspelling your name. Sharazhad - I didn't want to spoil the surprise or the shock. I've been roleplaying for a very long time myself - over thirty years - so I am aware of the "consent" issue, and I find your words and tone patronizing. I think it is unfair to Mya's roleplaying skill to assume she can't handle what happened. As it turns out, I approached her almost immediately after the fact, and she was happy to play along. When she posts here saying that I am a thoughtless bastard and a poor roleplayer, I will give some credence to your position... but not before. There [u]is[/u] a very unfortunate aspect to Mya's murder, but it doesn't revolve around her specifically, and I have tried to apologize to the parties concerned.

Sure! I am hoping people other than just Lorerootians will be among the award recipients. So far, I am seeing strong participation from Kyphis, Virtuous Pride, Aysun, Hiebas, and Lightsage, so I am encouraged. [b]edited to include people I just remembered are participating but aren't in LR (to my knowledge, anyway)[/b]

First, lightsage - I like that. You are bringing something to the entertainment. Keep it up! Second, Darigan (and anyone else who cares): the "quest" is only partly about the mystery. I promised more than that in the first post on this thread, and I intend to deliver. The point is to have fun, and keep having fun, within the structure of a "real" event" in MD and the consequences of it. Third, to all others: If this quest seems like a dumb idea, I'm sorry. I've been waiting for something like it for a long time. I refuse to write a quest about "made-up stuff" - the murder of Mya Celestia by another Player Character (Ivorak) using game-mechanical means (the stone dagger) really happened in MD, and is not an event that is contingent upon observers to agree that it happened (as dst helpfully pointed out). No asterisks were involved in Mya's death, and there is nothing meta-gamed about her corpse. You don't have to post here if you don't like it, though your opinions are welcome if you absolutely must share.

What are you waiting for?

No. You got the why wrong... totally wrong. We are publicizing the who and how anyway, so thanks for the publicity! Would you like a pat on the head?

It has begun. Not all of it will be random. There will be some scripted events. Don't worry - I will post them as they occur. Edit: There is no time to 'start roleplaying' or stop - the quest is meant to flow seamlessly with the everyday life of MagicDuel. What I want to see is players getting involved, helping move the story along, bringing their own ideas and character (their characters, too, but I mean personal character) to the story. I do not intend to have the sorts of events where people are standing around watching something occur. I want as many people to be involved as possible: that's the entire point! Let's have fun.

Thanks for the post, Manda, but remember to keep all RP off the forum. This quest is meant to be entirely in-game.

Someone has murdered Mya Celestia! Who? How? And for the love of MagicDuel, [i][b]WHY?[/b][/i] There will be hints, clues, plots, and counterplots. There will be fights. There will be consequences. Wish Points and at least one drachorn will be given as rewards for sleuthing and good roleplay. Let this outrage not pass unanswered!

I don't offer to "teach" you poetry, Mur, though I have taught English before. What I offer is constructive criticism and some advice on from whom to steal. You are welcome, and perhaps well-advised, to ignore it. That said, Pamplemousse has a poem by Neruda in her papers, and it never fails to blow me away.

[list] [*]Aqune - my first mentor in MD. [*]Innocence - not merely the best roleplayer in MD: the best roleplayer I have ever known. [*]Khalazdad - superb roleplayer. The center of gravity for an entire sub-culture in MagicDuel. Intelligent, perceptive, and compassionate. A tremendous asset to the game. [/list]

Yes, I think you have the idea exactly. Welcome to the journey! I will help you to the best of my ability, and I think others will do the same. Perhaps you can help me with my atrociously bad coding sometime. (this is not to say your poetry is atrociously bad - it's quite good, especially considering you are writing in a second language. But my coding really is horridly bad.)

Repetition often seems weak in a poem (and in prose, too, but that's a different story). Repetition [u]can[/u] be an effective device in writing when it is done intentionally, but the intention should be obvious. You are exactly right when you say rhyming words are not enough for poetry, which is why I complimented your metrics (you do better with meter than many of the English-speaking would-be poets in MD). I backed away from my suggested alternative words for the very reason that a poem is first and foremost a personal thing, and rhyming is not enough. As an aside, poets of the old school wanted to see rhyme, meter, and metaphor in a poem. Contemporary poetry rarely uses rhyme or meter, but I think many would-be poets don't really grasp the rule "don't break the rules until you understand them". From my perspective, it is considerably more difficult to write an unstructured poem than a structured one, for failures in unstructured poetry are spectacularly bad. Somebody asked Housman what poetry is, and he replied that he did not know, but could tell a poem when he saw one. A true poem arrests the reader and evokes a strong emotional or even physical reaction (Campbell relates this phenomenon in Art to the sign stimulus of Biology). What you have written is a poem by that standard, which in my mind is the only criterion that matters.

Felicitations.

[quote name='Burns' date='29 May 2010 - 08:45 AM' timestamp='1275140759' post='60582']I mean, we could consider the existance of different races, like humans and cyborgs, in MD, but... where's the indication for that? [/quote] Who needs 'em? We have knators, aramors, and grasans.

When the muse speaks, who has open ears? Mur does. I would push you on two of the rhymes, were I your editor, but I'm just another guy in MagicDuel. Thanks for sharing this.

[quote]I personally said that, ideally, I think everyone should be kept to one character, but that's just me. I hold myself to my own ethics and no one else, but I don't see any harm in constructive criticism from time to time, and that's what this debate seems like to me. No one's been ranting, everyone's been presenting pretty good arguments for and against the practice of child alts and various philosophies behind alts to begin with.[/quote] Your constructive criticism is welcome, Aysun, and indeed you get a certain cachet with me and others for arguing your case lucidly and logically among veteran players. That said, and this is no criticism of you, you speak from a position of relative ignorance where alts are concerned. It is easy to say, in a vacuum, "things should be thus," but MagicDuel is not nor ever has been a vacuum. You ask how Yrthilian can have wound up with so many alts without necessarily wanting them, and the answer is simply that he inherited them, and that they serve meaningful roles, quasi-npc-like, in the realm. He would be remiss in his function as king of Golemus Golemicarum (to say nothing of his personal responsibility as a friend) to allow these accounts and roles to languish unused or simply disappear. You arrive after the era of the RPCs, so you do not know about certain roles and characters in the realm that are or have become somewhat institutional. In my case, I invented two alts for specific purposes, and one almost never gets used because the plans I made for it did not pan out. My "primary" alternate account, Keith Moon, sees so much use it is now honestly debatable which is the "main" - Tarquinus or Keith. It is important that you understand that my public acknowledgment of Keith as Tarquinus's "alt" is a relatively recent phenomenon. I don't mean to sound pompous, as it is a simple fact that as recently as a month ago some players were still reacting with surprise to learn that Keith and Tarquinus are played by the same guy. Why is that? Mainly, it is that Keith started out as sort of a joke, a spinoff of the Tarquinus character's belief in reincarnation, and grew into a fully developed character in his own right. I play Lucius and Keith as friends, which is easy enough to understand and explain, but they are different from each other and dwell in different societies in the world of MagicDuel. Is either of them one-dimensional? Judge for yourself. I can certainly corroborate the statement that playing multiple well-developed characters at once is challenging. Your words about the aspects of our personalities coming to the fore of these characters is accurate, but anyone who has ever game-mastered a tabletop RPG has experience borrowing different aspects of her personality and presenting them as completely different perspectives. Do I recommend it? I do not. But there are a few players, whom I will not name because I feel it is up to them to publicize (or try to keep secret) the identities of their alts, who manage them competently as separate entities. I reiterate that I did not intentionally choose this "double life" in MagicDuel so much as I fell into it, but I can certainly understand why some players might feel bored, curious, and/or skilled enough to want to try playing multiple characters with more or less equal attention. The objections you raise about the reality of the MagicDuel setting are well taken, but they really only present challenges to the players more than insurmountable obstacles. The easy answer for me to the question of the characters' role in this reality is that Tarquinus is somewhat delusional and insane, and I have always played him that way. Dissociative Identity Disorder is cliché and somewhat hackneyed, but I guarantee there are at least two players other than me in MagicDuel who carry it off elegantly and sometimes brilliantly. [b]Edited for clarity[/b]

[quote name='Windy' date='27 May 2010 - 08:32 AM' timestamp='1274967153' post='60448']If a player chooses to role-play mundane things not related to the game, who cares? As long as it is not vulgar or against the rules set for us, no harm done.[/quote] I could not disagree more. Someone is plotting to assassinate a king: that is interesting. Someone is pretending to have magic powers that are not supported by the system: that is all too often uninteresting, and it undercuts the magic powers that [u]are[/u] part of the system. I have seen someone get indignant that her magic "powers" failed to heal someone else's roleplayed injury. That is why we have a system. It establishes what can be done, and by whom. Without the system, all roleplay occurs with the consent of the other players. It is not impolite, it is damned rude to impose your personal roleplaying vision on everyone around you by dictating the terms of the shared reality. [quote]My point is this. Why set boundaries for other players? Why set boundaries for yourselves?[/quote] That is precisely what distinguishes a strong roleplayer from a weak one: boundaries. I have heard someone say of roleplaying, "anything is possible!" For a weak roleplayer, perhaps. A strong roleplayer sets limitations for her character and uses them to define the character. Sherlock Holmes is addicted to cocaine. Achilles is vulnerable at the heel. Even Superman, a godlike character if ever there was one, is vulnerable to kryptonite. A character's weaknesses -- limitations -- are intriguing, and for the purpose of a strong story, necessary.

Allow me to agree. As a fan of both the combat system and the Fight Club, I would love to see the problem of the orders-of-magnitude difference in damage redressed. Well said, Burns, and well thought.

[quote]The tradition of starting "children alternates,"...yet this is just more ammunition to be used by those who believe that role playing has no place in this game. If this is what role playing is turning into, and it pains me to say this, then they are correct.[/quote] Allow me to say that firstly, I agree, and secondly, that not every person who "roleplays" in MagicDuel agrees that role-played children are a good thing or role-plays in the same way. I will go further: I am very annoyed that some people seem bound and determined to remove the "fantasy" from what is advertised as a fantasy role-playing game. I do not refer to those who famously oppose role-playing, but to that same camp of those who think "child alternates" are good for the game, for they undermine, whether they mean to or not (and I think, on balance, that they are unaware of the effect they are having), the consensual fantasy and the magic of the MagicDuel game setting, and they undermine it with the basest of humdrum, everyday details. As my "alt" Keith Moon observed, no one cares whether there is toilet tissue in the invisible WC of the Defensive Quarters. That is a detail we can all live without. Until that second camp agrees to study the setting, analyze it, and attempt to understand the impact the setting has on their characters, I, like you, have only the feeblest of answers to the first camp: "It ain't me done it." Among the second camp, I must include, with no pleasure at all, those who smile and nod with approval at "events" such as are the subject of this thread. As a proud citizen of Loreroot, I, as the character Tarquinus, sometimes find it hard to be proud; and indeed some might say the pride I exhibit is only for the sake of role-playing the Latin [i]cognomen[/i] of that character.

Happy Birthday.

[center][b]Delight of the razor[/b][/center] This is fine, an edge of wit advanced in whispers on your skin, and only you have all of it: my hopes, my laughter, and my sin. In sunlight’s peaceful lassitude I chart your body’s golden map, my dark devotion soft renewed, crepuscular, without collapse. So in this twilight I divine the path to your unmarked reprieve, and softly shall my razor shine, silent, too, my love to live. [right]--written, of course, for Pamplemousse, by Keith Moon[/right]

Fröhliche Geburtstag!

"Stochastic Serenade" A twice-inflected turmoil trills its binary unease As shadowy negations slip from solipsistic shade; The proud, porphyric promenade of eschaton's disease Propels in syncopation my stochastic serenade. From sorry, soggy verse unwinds a myriad of pleas, Perturbs the surly stillness with an anarchist's brigade And stoops to strain the troubadour's poetic, vinous lees: Tyrannical in metrics is choleric cavalcade. I'll send my trembling trysts of rhyme to tweak the tops of trees, And sharpen all my shyness on a beatific blade, Though heard before shall ring no more or bound upon the breeze, Staccato taps of love's synapse as heresy portrayed. My cardiac collapse invites a knocking of the knees And fundamental parody of discipline displayed, Too fulsome for my fright to fill, your avalanche to freeze - And lost to my delight, declaim stochastic serenade.

Happy b-b-b-birthday, you thing from another world, you.

Tough choice between Indyra's and Allyce's. I voted for Indyra's in the end.