After some discussion, we have made changes to how Ragers interact with magic portals. They will become live NCR.

From the code changes forum - BattleRagers should now beware PORTAL SICKNESS (see Gameplay).

'PORTAL SICKNESS'
Having sworn off the use of magic and therefore being unaccustomed to its voluntary use, a BattleRager can in times of tactical necessity steel his nerves and dash through a magical portal at the expense of physical pain and a malady known as Portal Sickness. While affected by Portal Sickness, a BattleRager is susceptible to bouts of pain and vomiting, as well as difficulty calling upon his powers.

Note:
The immortals reserve the right to adjust which portals will cause this sickness at any time and make no guarantee that we have identified all instances we feel should be covered.

Nothing has changed with invoking magical objects of any form. This is purely for portals (any fixed way of magical transportation really).

A villager should have a good IC reason to use a portal. Examples of bad reasons would be to hide from an enemy or for the sole purpose of gathering items.

I would say these portals just became even more interesting mechanically throughout all of Thera. Just because a rager can follow you through one does not mean they will be effective after they have.

nt

Make it so that portal sickness doesn't apply when you have adrenaline? Like a thirsted rager chasing a mage through portal should not vomit after charging there.

The absolute worst time to request we change a change is before the change has gone live.

No, we're happy with what we've come up with (for now) and if we make any follow up changes down the road, it'll be after we've had the opportunity to observe how things play out, have had more internal discussions, read feedback based on actual game play, etc.

A good example would be a warrior rager chasing a mage into HTOS with the mage knowing full well of this 'portal sickness' change

mage then says Festlethrum, and simply waits for midrank warrior to follow. Mage walks east as soon as rager enters the room rager took damage and is now potentially sick..(because he had it in his buffer knowing the rager would show). Rager follows east, at which point the mage says Festlethrum (which he handily now has an alias for). Now, the rager is left with the choice of potentially taking more damage (and getting sick if he were not already) or letting the mage escape.


Can you consider making it so that the rager can't be damaged by portal sickness..repeatedly in a (somewhat) short amount of time?

If not, I think this change has horrible game balance implications that haven't been thoroughly thought through nor vetted.

A few thoughts:

1) I'm okay with the proposition that magic sometimes puts a mage outside of a Rager's grasp. Of all the ways players have found to taunt or "grief" each other, this doesn't even make the first page in my opinion. Nobody can force you to use a portal, let alone multiple times, and if a mage uses one escape then good on them, and if they use it to sit and hide then they're most likely making a trade-off to do so.

2) Most portals, like the one you used as an example, result in zero lag. This has a couple of implications that make the scenario you described a lot less problematic.

3) Trolling Ragers and/or being effectively safe from them has always been possible for a clever mage 99% of the time via pass door, fly, or other less widely known tricks. This has never been a real problem. Yes, there are things a Rager could do some of the time or against certain opponents, but that remains true in the case of portal sickness as well.

4) IF (if!) someone actually employed a trigger to abuse this mechanic, and there is only a small subset of places it would be advantageous to do so, I will happy dispense with them.

If you tried that Festlethrum tactic without triggers you would almost certainly get caught by the rager.

I hit up and I get the last command, I hit up again I get the command before that, no need to write an alias or use a trigger, just get the command ready and hover over the enter key

I doubt I could react before their trip goes in. Possibly in the mountains or forest but not on lag less terrain.

Seems like it won't.

...that I think this is a mostly cosmetic change that will weed out a few bad apples.

As someone who led the cabal for 200+ hrs, and has played nearly every variation of rager (except for a hiding scout), most of my ragers never used magic portals. Because, you know, they were magic. I would honestly never go to (old) Arboria because you were entering a clearly visible magic portal. Stuff like Vassagon's old shrine WAS used heavily, as there is no "visible" magic of any sort.

None of my ragers ever went to Trothon. None of my ragers ever went to Silent (it was closed for the two ragers who got "pinged" by the quest to get in though, sadly).

That being said, I can see a few rager roles that would allow for such use of portals. Of course, those roles would probably get the IMMs attention anyway, and thus, Portal Sickness would not be an issue.

The only person(s) I see this affecting are the people who don't really think all the times about the basic RP of the character.

And of course ranking parties in areas with magic portals

i'm all for anything that curbs power-gaming or gaming the system. this change lays it out cleanly and clearly.

kudos, chums

Another positive change, I think all too often the great powers villagers get are often used without considering the massive drawbacks a villager should be roleplaying and living out. This is a positive step.

I get the the idea behind making things IC as possible and holding people to roleplay, but this does seem excessively punitive. Fortress slaughter neutrals for bling all the time, Outlanders hunt sentients for fun and sport, and Nexus will aid the "underdog" so they make a team of six to gank the crap out of the two squires who can't hide from them. There is room for suspension of disbelief if it makes the game more fun, which is why we do not have commands for evacuating our bowels regularly and rituals like creating circles of protection do not take hours of painstaking intricate labor.

It seems like you are going very hardline about this use of portals, particularly since the most popular ranking areas are in or off Organia. Is the goal to make Eil Sharei invul_rager? Is it to kill off the cabal?

As an immortal of Battle, I do hope you also advocate for the cabal and its members rather than just look for opportunities to police them.

Like I've said elsewhere in this thread, Battle gets incredible powers which are meant to be a tradeoff for the extreme handicaps required by their roleplay. If you can't handle the restrictions of roleplaying a Villager properly - to the extent you can seriously suggest that it will kill off the cabal - perhaps it's not the Cabal for you. This is hands down the greatest change I've ever seen in CF because it holds people accountable to RP that they were otherwise just ignoring.

I also want to point out that what you said is, at least in my case, the opposite of true. This change has made me want to play a rager. I've avoided Battle for years because it seemed like the people in it just didn't take their roles seriously. Now that automated accountability is being added, it makes me more interested.

Frankly, the response to this sort of thing SHOULD be punitive. IMO they're getting off light that they can use the portals at all without getting inducted into none.

I personally believe you're making a mistake in thinking that Verathi should be an "advocate" for Battle. He, like the other imms, should be an advocate for good roleplay and balanced mechanics across the board without favoring any particular Cabal. In this case, enough people were ignoring Battle roleplay in favor of perks that something was done, and I cannot possibly applaud this change any harder than I already have.

FWIW, of the "bad roleplay" things you've provided above seem like particularly bad roleplay to me (especially if the Outlander is evil, and the Fortress is killing a neutral that is threatening innocents.) But there already are hardcoded mechanics in other venues - consider that, for every good aligned creature that a good aligned character kills, their align gets auto-dinged. As it should.

I think there is going to be a certain class of people that are mad about this change because they've gotten away with piss-poor RP for so long that they mistook that for the imms being okay with it, when instead it was more a matter of the imms having extremely limited manpower to police this sort of thing effectively. Automation is often the perfect solution to these sorts of problems, and at least in this case, it seems to be ideal.

Oh believe me, Team Battle is advocating for Battle. When we first discussed this, my solution to Ragers using portals was "induct idiotguy none and have a nice day". But alas, we compromised.

For what it's worth, the usual method of getting into Organia is not via a portal. Ragers never have and still don't have any impediment to going there.

All we've done is taken something that was generally agreed upon to be crappy RP and applied a real consequence to it, and a consistent one to boot. Now instead of one guy getting away with it because of luck and another guy getting yelled at on the first offense and subsequent getting mad because aforementioned guy was treated differently, a reasonable mechanic is just baked into the game.

If you really think there being a consequence to using magical portals as a BattleRager is even in the same ball park as making players pinch a loaf every 24 hours then .. well, if I don't have anything nice to say I won't say anything at all.

Regardless of whether people agree or not, it removes ambiguity and allows every rager to be treated equally.

+1 to "Pinch a loaf" too!

At least now the power gamers who threw rp out the window now have a framework that permits them to do what they want, and those who never did it because it was using magic can also do it, but it isn't cost free.

Thanks for what you do, Umiron.

I think this is a good idea, but I would be wary of many of the suggestions in this thread which seem to be snowballing into "let's just hardcode battle RP."

All cabals have RP restrictions and powers. Despite the occasional roar of the crowd, I don't think villagers are any more or less corrupt then any other cabal when it comes to following dogma. I say this because the same people who play a rager and accept communes from paladins (which I have never seen nor heard of IC) will roll an Imperial next month and attack people in town. It's the player, not the character/cabal that is the culprit. In fact, someone who plays serial villagers is probably the last person that will ignore the tablet in this way.

In fact, battle has a leadership position (drillmaster) whose sole responsibility, as far as I know, is to police and enforce village dogma. If people see ragers getting worded by a paladin and don't do something IC about it, they are part of the problem. If it is consistently reported and nothing happens, the drillmaster is the problem. If the drillmaster is consistently a problem, then the problem is actually the commander for not replacing him. And the wheel goes round and round.

This is how a character based world should function. The people are in charge (imms and players) and it becomes a product of their efforts or lack thereof. I think it's lazy for players to expect the immortals to control all the behaviors we don't like through intense policing and/or hard coding. Things work themselves out, just like cabal bandwagons. Ragers or any other caballed char that consistently thwarts their responsibilities is not going to be successful.

Players need to start taking some responsibility for the world. Ask yourself what you have done IC to change any of the things we constantly complain about on the forum and/or to the imms.

Now that the rant's over, I'd say that some portals affect the physical world (joining two distant lands by folding space for example) and not the user who merely walks across a threshold. Others clearly act on the user and I think in those cases that if a rager used it with his spellbane up, he would be scattered about thera like a bird that dies in the sky. But the sickness is cool too.

Saagkri

I wouldn't be averse to imperials that attack in town without having been attacked beforehand (well, the whole more complex set of rules for imperial town attacking) having a chance of automatic demotion with no promotion for 50 hours or so. Maybe increase the chances if there are witnesses.

Basically make it doable but with downsides.

We've tried the whole "let players enforce cabal dogma" thing, and it just doesn't work. All it takes is one leader (and we seem to have had many of them) who lets piss-poor RP slide, and then you've got a problem that can only be solved by direct imm intervention.

Economics teaches us to always look at the motivations of people in these situations. Thinking about this, we can surmise that:

1) The leader is motivated not to punish his underlings, especially if he's a powergamer, because that means less power for him and his allies.

2) The imms are motivated to take a hands off approach and not punish this sort of thing if it's not totally egregious, because they don't want to ruin someone's time unless it's warranted, and they don't want to be the bad guy.

I hear you with regards to enforcing it more for Battle than other cabals, but consider the fact that Battle gets the best Cabal powers in the game. This is supposed to be a tradeoff for the many things that they give up for the sake of RP - unfortunately, too many people are trying to get away with too much for the sake of convenience or powergaming. For you to suggest that Villagers who do this won't be successful is, no offense, very naive -- I can think of at least two heavily, HEAVILY imm-rewarded current villagers who were openly in favor of using magic portals as though it's no big deal.

You say it's lazy for players to expect this sort of thing to be enforced, but the problem is that it only takes one (or a small group) of bad apples to spoil the bunch. There are just too many people who don't take the RP seriously -- hell, the other day on the newbie channel I saw someone asking about using a healer to remove a curse. Instead of talking about the RP of the situation, the overall response was more along the lines of "oh, don't worry about it, that's not tracked by the code so you can still join Battle without anyone finding out or it stopping you."

To make a long story short, there are just too many players who set the bar as low as possible for themselves. There has to be something (code-enforced, apparently) to make them behave appropriately - there's literally nothing other players can do except roll up Villagers and take people to the circle over piss-poor RP (which I've considered, but the end result of it would be that, even if I did something, it would be temporary - the kind of player who, as a villager, accepts word of recalls and goes through portals willy-nilly will just roll up a new character and participate in the exact same powergaming behavior again, maybe a little more discreetly.)

As an aside, I think these sorts of mechanical hard-blocks are the only way to truly control powergamers who will happily sacrifice (or go lax on) their RP when they think an imm isn't looking (and there's a big enough benefit to them). I understand there's not a lot in terms of immstaff right now, and the last thing I want is to create more of a policing job for them.

Besides: the more imms have to personally intervene in situations like this, the more likely it is you'll eventually make some sort of mistake, and then you've got an uproar on your hands. People are fallible. The best thing you can possibly do is put an almighty computer in charge of judging the situation, so there's no possible way it can be subjective. You really want to use that portal? Fine, enjoy being emetic'd.

I don't think anyone is willing to say that Battle doesn't get incredibly good powers, even if it's in question whether they're overpowered or not (I personally lean towards overpowered.) What's not in question is that their RP restrictions are meant to counterbalance how good it is to be able to walk around with constant dam redux, deathblow, borderline immunity to spells, and so on.

So, in keeping with that, let me offer up another idea that I think you should implement in the spirit of this:

COMMUNE SICKNESS
Given that Battleragers are, by their roleplay, not supposed to accept communes outside the shrine of Gods, give them the exact same vomiting/bad effects as portal sickness if they accept beneficial communes (i.e. anything requiring TRUST) but are not currently in a shrine. This shouldn't be hard to implement, since, AFAIK, areas are already flagged as shrines or not shrines.

It's far, far, FAR too common for certain powergaming Villagers to let Paladins and whatnot word of recall them when they're in trouble. This is terrible roleplay and it should come with consequences. I see it on basically every character I play, and I've never seen it punished.

Could do something similar for cabal powers like 'windwalk', but I'm not sure if this qualifies in the eyes of the immortals.

I'm afraid I see that commune sickness being abused by those who don't like you, but I'll think about it.

Windwalk is fine.

I thought of that too, hence the reason it would be limited to things that require TRUST. The last thing I want is for Villagers to get emetic'd for some jackass level 1 mage casting "invis" on them. However, can you think of a reason why a Villager would need to walk around with TRUSTALL up all the time? I can't.

EDIT: Also, just so you know (although I'm sure you probably already do), TRUSTALL is off by default. So you'd have to specifically turn it on for people to abuse this to ruin your day, and as a Villager, it seems like a damn rare situation (how often is your dude really visiting a shrine of the gods to let someone commune on them?) Rare enough, at least, that you'd probably remember to shut it off.

Would be to have villager trust permanently off, but allow priests in their gods shrine to commune without regard to trust. So priests can still bless villagers in their own shrine. They can also fight enemies more effectively there, which doesn't feel unreasonable.

But it seems less likely to get implemented based on how the portal thing was handled. Personally, if I was in charge, I would have also just made it impossible for Villagers to use portals at all rather than apply a penalty, since, imo, it's piss-poor Battle RP. So, I offered a similar compromise/solution that I think most people can agree is fair.

I just like the idea of priests being much more dangerous in their gods shrine too. Or that healer could just expel intruders by wording them.

n/t

1. I was talking with some friends, and the question came up about going to the past. I thought it wasn't a portal, but there was some disagreement. So, is the past void-walky-place a portal?

2. Eil Sharia?

3. I am assuming Khardrath's, but just to clarify, are the elemental plane portals + the exit to Hamsah covered?

4. Ktengs?



I'm not interested in asking about ALL of them, but I was curious if you'd shed some light on maybe the most commonly used portals that are now no-go's for Ragers (absent 'tactics' obviously).


Thanks for any information!

I hesitate to specifically say location a, b, c, and d are all blocked for the sheer fact that I am not perfect and will likely request ones to be added as what was missed is caught. Even then, it is possible I say one thing and have someone with better knowledge correct me.

So, instead I will introduce my methodologies. I thought of every portal or place of odd movement that I could and looked for signs of magic. When I saw them, I marked it as magical.

This is probably a recipe for bad RP, so take it with a grain of salt, but:

If I were to play a Villager and use some of these portals, and I find one that seems to be magical but isn't giving me naughty effects, should I pray about it or otherwise let you guys know? This is probably my favorite change on CF to date and I'd like to help you guys out in making sure it's implemented fully. CF is incredibly huge so it seems likely that you probably missed some, no?

Further idea: could you maybe flag those rooms so that "ATTUNE" lets you know a Villager would have trouble passing through the portal in it? Just a thought.

Give it a week or two then email me if you have found anything you think should be and isn't.

The Void (between past and present) is natural part of Thera and non-magical.

Generally speaking, any fixed object or door called a "portal" is probably going to result in portal sickness, particularly if it's extra-planar or part of a magical structure (e.g., Planar Sanctum). The exception I'd make here is anything found in a shrine, though the exact repercussions of that are up to Team Battle and of course meddling with anything in a shrine is a risk in and of itself. Ideally, common sense will prevail on this stuff.

It should also go without saying that whatever a Battle god says in-character goes.

Trothon pillars portals? They feel like they should be. Also the Festlethrum thingy.

I thought the past wasn't magical, and at least walking there surely wasn't.

I was arguing the logic likely used was based on magic-specific things that require a "use" or invokish type deal, or are just BLATANTLY magical, ie: look east - A BIG MAGIC PORTAL OF MAGIC IS HERE

So I'm glad my logic was on the same page, makes understanding it substantially easier.

Thanks again,




Overall I think it's a fine change and even gives some chances for fun RP.