There's been a lot of talk lately about Fort's strict "no goodie kills" requirement.

RP-wise, it makes perfect sense. Of course Maran shouldn't kill goodies. The problem is that the CF's hardcoded NPC behavior has never been consistent with the imms' interpretation of what being "good" means.

Past imms have made it very clear that a good rager who regularly slaughters good mages will not remain good for long. Ditto for a Sunwarden who hunts paladins. Even good Tribs are expected to give good criminals a chance to turn themselves in before hunting them.

This is how the immstaff have ALWAYS interpreted the good alignment (all goodies, not just Maran). Good guys don't kill other good guys - at least not without a LOT of forethought and a LOT of remorse - or they get turned neutral eventually.

The problem is that's not how CF mobs behave.

- Good cityguards attack good criminals, basically without hesitation. (A behavior more consistent with CF's interpretation of "good" would be for them to say something like "Criminals are not welcome here" and bar goodie criminals from going further into the city, but not attack them; or to give them a ten second warning before attacking.)

- As noted elsewhere, angels and archons attack good conjies. This makes no sense; in CF/DND lore, these are literal embodiments of good, they should NEVER try to kill a good person. The obvious rebuttal is "well, it was justified because you tried to bind them!" - which is tantamount to saying "Outlander/Entropy are right, conjuring = enslavement which is an inherently evil act." In which case it shouldn't be possible to roll good conjurers at all.

- Blades can shove people into fights with goodie mobs. RP-wise it makes no sense that good NPCs would mindlessly attack another goodie who was literally pushed into them.

I could come up with other examples, these are just some of the more prominent ones. (Historically, of course, the biggest one was the whitecloak encampment, but I understand that's changed now.)

We all know why NPCs function this way. It's partly game balance (with no threat from servitors, goodie conjies would be OP) and partly practicality (coding a separate behavior for good cityguards would take time and resources). But the upshot is still that CF holds its own game world to a different standard than players.

Bluntly, good NPCs do not act good. They act neutral, which makes accidental goodie kills more likely than they should be.

That's always mildly annoyed me, but only turns into a real issue when you set a zero-tolerance "no goodie kills" rule on the largest good cabal. The truth is that while that rule makes perfect sense, it is at odds with how CF was designed.

I think that the rule should be scrapped until and unless NPCs act in a way that's consistent with the standards applied to good chars across the board.