It basically comes down to a fine line between player and character. In a perfect world we'd all be able to ignore OOC knowledge and just play as characters, but in reality I know that can't happen. Keep in mind as you read the rest of this post I'm not asking for the impossible, just a little better understanding of the IC OOC divide.

Because if they notice a positive effect then it seems reasonable, in character, that they would ask their goodie mage friend to do it on purpose.

Imagine this line:

"Hey Bob, I just bought a new kevlar vest...supposed to be bulletproof, why don't you take this magnum and fire a round or two at me to test it"

Now, has this happened in real life? Sadly, I'm sure somewhere it has...and once the guy got out of the hospital, I'm pretty sure he went on to do more acts of stupidity. The point is CF mages do not cast practice spells and cantrips...they cast spells intended to do severe damage and ultimately death. Hell, for all I know I could be bulletproof...but I'm not going to let someone shoot me to find out. Another example, if a necromancer who was something of an ally of yours handed you a potion and said 'it'll make you impervious to the effects of power word kill'...would you let them attempt a pwk on you after you had downed the potion? Chances are, you wouldn't.


So the answer to "why in the hell would a good mage set a maran on fire" is "because he thinks it will help the Maran, because he's been asked to by that Maran"

Which in a very interesting way, violates one of the tennants of being a Maran, or at least the Maran philosophy. Just as none of us are going to let our buddies test our new kevlar vest with a 44 slug, as far as I can rationalize..no Maran is going to let anyone set them on fire to see if it burns or not. There's a lot of very finely detailed reasons I could go into, but as it was pointed out, I'm really not in the habit of spoonfeeding Maran philosophy.

The rame reason a goodie might attack another goodie who is slept/blackjacked. Or do you think this shouldn't happen either?

I have to admit, tehre's a lot of IC vs mechanics issues that my opinion and popular opinion differ on. The one you mentioned above is one of those.

Obviously it's a game balance thing, and that's fine. But from the character's point of view, it seems reasonable to take that action. I feel the same way about bouncing geysers off shielded guardians, incidentally.

To use game mechanics against you on this one, if we wanted there to be practice spells and (pardon the pun) friendly fire on CF...there would be a way to toggle autoattack. In this case, I garuntee you Aemelius attacked the invoker in question. So to put an IC spin on the mechanics that happened: hostile action begets hostile action. Invoker set Aemelius on fire, Aemelius lashed back out at the invoker. I could say a lot more about this, but I've got to run....if there are more questions feel free to ask.