Hall of Shame

[moderation]

vfb said:No nation necessarily considers itself evil. The people of Sauromatia may eat the flesh of their enemies to show respect or gain their powers. In the nations conducting blood sacrifice, it may be a great honor to be chosen as a sacrifice. The righteous flames of the Marignon inquisition save the souls of those who are burned by the fires of justice. The Ashen Empire removes the pain of life from the world, and when all is reduced to ash and dust, nirvana is achieved.

Okay I'm mostly repeating myself, but I think this is clearer and more concise. Hanging an arbitrary "evilness" hat on certain nations and deciding that they are the ones most likely to break treaties is not useful because everyone has a different definition of what "evilness" means and which nations it applies to. Without any common understanding of the "evilness" and or "goodness" the nations, it's hard to have a consensus that EA Abysia is likely to break treaties because they are evil and EA Mictlan is not. Because of this lack of consensus on "evilness" (and the fact that the designers made the majority of the nations morally ambiguous), it's not generally meaningful to blame a broken treaty or similar strategic decisions on a nation's "evilness" or "goodness". Ultimately, these decisions are still up to the player.

In addition, what kind of models do we have for how an ancient Aztec god with a entire nation under his control may have negotiated a trade or alliance with a Greek goddess like Athena who also happened to be also have an entire army and nation under her control? Keep in mind this is happening as numerous Egyptian, Indian, Nordic and Chinese gods all happen to be sharing the stage and in various stages of war or alliance with each other. If you were dealing with a WWI or WWII scenario, then yes, it might make some reasonably logical roleplaying, but roleplaying this kind of scenario in Dominions is just too weird because we really have no practical ideas about how gods are supposed to act in the realm of international relations. As a result, attempts at this sort of roleplaying just seems like a way to dress up strategic game decisions as a story. But there is no real compelling story there for me to see, just some people trying to win at a game. I'm happy to roleplay flavor elements, but attempting to roleplay diplomacy just opens up too big of a can of worms for me.

[moderation]

Twan said:
This only shows that "artificial laws" may have to be precised for some cases.

Personnally I usually assume that :
- all undercover (stealthy scouting/anonymous spells) operations are always allowed
- finding a simple scout in your realm has no consequence
- being attacked by an assassin or finding a spy in a province where unrest is growing allows immediate NAP breaking against the owner

Don't know if all players have exactly the same view. So it's the kind of things that need to be cleared if a strict ruleset is to be made for some games.

I also think it would be useful to have some kind of common ruleset so everyone has a common understanding of what agreements mean. For starters maybe, maybe in the future there will be a clearly written out NAP form letter to make things clearer. Similar to how the GPL has multiple versions, there could be multiple NAP versions. Therefore you could just request a NAP version 3 with you neighbor and they would understand exactly what the terms are. Ideally, this will help prevent great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments down the line.

[Dedas]

I agree Twan.

My view:

The rights of players

- It is the right of every player by natural law to break any artificial law.

- It is the right of every players to punish the violation of any artificial law to any extent unless breaking natural law and/or meta-gaming (unless made natural law by common consent).

- It is the right of players to, within the same game, transform any artificial law to natural law. But only within that same game and only if every player within that game agrees.


The duties of players

- To not break natural law (cheating).

- To not meta-game unless that is made natural law within a game.




The definitions of natural law and artificial law can be found in my above posts.

[gowb]

Hm, no I respectfully disagree Moderation, I don't think it'd be a good idea to codify a set of laws for all players to obey. The solution is simply to make the terms of the NAP clear to whoever you are making it with, and make sure they understand and agree.

The real definition of a non-aggression pact is that you simply won't attack, not that you'll give warning before you attack. So in my definition a 3 turn NAP means I won't attack for three turns, and then anything goes. And there's nothing wrong with spies and scouts and such, long as they don't get caught, heh heh heh.

[Twan]

gowb said:The real definition of a non-aggression pact is that you simply won't attack, not that you'll give warning before you attack. So in my definition a 3 turn NAP means I won't attack for three turns, and then anything goes.

It's why there is a need to clarify common definitions. If you don't know what is a "3t NAP" for the community, and rather use your own idea of what it should mean, you may transform some game threads into flame wars the day you break one.