The Problem of Prestiges

[Zarquon]

Originally, I made a pretty damn long essay that I felt really held together all my thoughts and feelings. Then I read through the four pages. And I realized something.

tl;dr

So I am just going to put these right here, in terms that you don't need to use much more than an iota of your brain to understand, since I know most of you are too lazy to care anyway. I am going to pretty damn honest here:

Spoiler'd for BRUTAL HONESTY.

Spoiler:

One of the first thing I did when I saw this thread was to go to the IC forums and read through all the Prestige Threads. You know something? I loved them. I loved how Reigan and Krilari, even though they are such developed characters already, could use Prestige to further develop their characters. I loved what they said. I loved what they wrote. I loved their writing style. They don't tend to be too long, but not too short either, concise and still pretty rich in their contents. Lovely.

You gave this new system three weeks, bro. Chillax, k?

By Archimonde's teats, it had barely been three weeks!

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Har har, so funneh. I like how some people, naming no names, have no idea why we play a fantasy game. I like how some people, naming no names, play fantasy games to be the farmers and the peons. Har har, so funneh.

No.

That's not why I am playing a bloody fatnazi game for. I play a fatnazi game to slaughter the world, kill a dragon, butcher an abomination and kill that bloody necromancer! I play it to charge in on my golden steed, to raise the dead and terrorize that village, to make a Wish Spell and move my wizard tower to the isle I want it to be.

I play a fantasy world, because in the real world, you are nothing more than a slave to those rich bastards who have enough money to bury you in but can't bloody make a decision as to a fucking debt ceiling without ruining the economy AND making my dad lose his job. So the day the fantasy world ever makes me as insignificant as the real world, I might as well go back to LIFE.

By Kil'Jaeden's withered ballsacks, please start remembering why we are here!

Spoiler:

(SAM) It's like in the great stories Mr.Frodo, the ones that really matter.Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the ending, because after the end you'll be happy.Why can't the world go back to the way it was, when so much mattered than.But in the end it is only a passing thing, shadow , even darkness must pass.A new day will come when the sun comes and shines out the clearer , thoughts are the stories that stay with you that ment something even if you were to small to understand why. But i think Mr.Frodo I do understand, i know now folks, and thoughts , and stories, and people had lots of chances of turning back, but they didn't they kept going, because they were holding on to something.

(Frodo)What are we holding onto Sam?

(Sam) That there's some good in this world and its worth fighting for.

Not going to say more.

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Yo, bro. So I herd they liekz pissing yo off so y u coming to piss us off rather than pissing those pissers off, yo?

By an orc's withered dick, why you ban people who contributes to CoTH but not idiots that make us rage?

Spoiler:

So, you can't RP. So, the Dice God hates you too. Solution? ROLL A PRESTIGE!!! WOOT!!!

. . .seriously. I have almost never win a fight before. I enter a fight knowing full well that I can lose and accept that fact; the most fun, the MOST fun, I have ever had, is to lose a battle and actually getting more RP than when I win a battle.

But my point is simple. Why the f**k do we need to give Prestige roll bonuses again? Whose damn bloody great idea is this? What you have done is to demonize Prestige Classes into nothing more than a tool in a dick-waving competition; to demean the POINT behind Prestige Class as a tool for character development and progression into one of pragmatic roll bonuses.

Take those bonuses off.

Spoiler:

CoTH is a private server, and that is why I like it. I am one of those crazy people who can afford retail, but would rather play on a private RP server, because Blizzard are douchebags that start getting so corrupted by EMONIES they forget how to make a proper story. WC3 (ROC) was orgasmic, WC3 (TFT) was bleh, WoW Classic was k, the rest just fails. Personal opinion, maybe.

But this is why Private RP servers are kewl, yo?

We get to change things. We get to refine things. And we are NOT WoW. I think it is time we accept the fact that by trying to make ourselves into WoW, we are actually making ourselves worse than we can be. And we can be better.

We can actually, like, you know. . .RP.

And now, for my favorite. . .

Spoiler:

I am just going to put this out straight. I think all the whinings are completely pointless and detracts us from the WHOLE BLOODY POINT OF A RP SERVER.

CoTH is reaching a stage where we are building castles on empty air and tunneling through the clouds for an imaginary war that we just feel like raging. Nothing more, for no other reasons, than to rattle our sabres and shake our massive edicks. Stop being so bloody cynical, and please remember why you are here; to have FUN.

So, yeah. . .SHUT UP AND GO BACK TO ROLEPLAY, YER PEON!

Blood and bloody ashes, solving things that ain't mathematical, compounding formulaes that ain't chemical, and engineering things that ain't mechanical. b***h, whine, b***h somemore, over pointless things like. . .prestige?

Seriously, I love the Prestige System for THIS VERY SIMPLE REASON. Have you guys ever read the Prestige posts? Checked their quality, maybe? Some of them, most of them, are pretty damn good read, and I actually loved quite a few. I like how Reigan and Krilari, pretty damn developed characters already, could still develop further with Prestige. I love that dragon, it made me giggle. I loved how Grakor managed to tie in the Kidnapped event with his own Prestige. I loved the fact that -the Prestige System made people who might previously not want to write write under the scrutiny of an entire community-. Do you do that for your English teacher? Do you do that for that school assignment you hate?

I loved the Prestige System because it encouraged an atmosphere of creative writing and a desire to write more, write better, and write characterfully.

And that, my darlings, is why I love the Prestige System.

Oh, and to qualify? I do not have a single Prestige Character nor a Character training to be a Prestige, but I have RPed with almost a dozen Prestige Characters. And I have not a single problem with them, which I attribute to this:

Some people just can't understand the idea of losing to win.
And some people just can't accept the fact that others actually spent months to get what they got.

And hence what do they do? They b***h and whine until they get their way, because I can totally imagine those same people who b***h about the Prestige actually writing more than those pursuing Prestige does and being motivated to do more for their character developments than those pursuing Prestige does [sarcasm alert].

So. . .I will finish off with this:

Spoiler:

[Xigo]

(Strictly for the record, it's not that I want people to be insignificant, I'm just annoyed by the characters who are crazy over the top and wearing tier X glowy shoulderpad armor.)

[Roxas65]

*Massive rant with pwetty pictures.*

I think I'm in love with you.

[Wuvvums]

Someone's learned about memegenerator I see...

On the plus side I think there's still a lot of rp opportunities without prestiges. And with Cataclysm coming we're getting new races and a slew of new race/class combinations, and a newly changed world that should provide for a lot of variation without a special system.

I must also note that someone in this thread was suggesting Brutal's system, though it has the exact same problem the other system has; the fact that you can just have your character be "certified powerful" because they went through a system for a certain amount of time. No one is asking us to be insignificant. In fact, even while working inside the 8 classes we end up doing much more in the fantasy world than what we could ever do in real life. If you want a free-for-all, no limit to what you can do fantasy then might I suggest some forum rp boards? I'm not saying this in a patronizing way, I just mean that some of us don't mind being grounded and rping under a certain limit of powers.

[Zarquon]

Go google Image.

Search, 'Warcraft'.

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Damn this is SEXY.

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Go google Image.

Search, 'Insignificant'.

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. . .I am just trying to make a point, yeah? Most of my characters aren't amazing, neither golden boys nor impressive fighters, though I like to give tiny quirks here and there to them to make them interesting. None of my characters are super powerful, and anybody who RPs with them will know that they are almost the exact opposite. They are people who tries to avoid battles. But yer see. . .

Maybe we forgot what Warcraft means.

Maybe. . .maybe we should rethink a bit. Maybe we should start killing the drakes, yeah? Maybe that one month epic campaign to kill a Deep-Sea Kraken shouldn't be shot down, but encouraged, yeah? Maybe. . .just maybe, and I know this is an alien concept to you. . .

Maybe we can realize that some of the most fun video games ever is that Pokemon game where you start off with a Pikachu in a small town with your paternalistic professor and ends off with a Lugia in the world tournament, yeah?

Honestly, I just want you to imagine a scenario. A simple scenario. Ten of us gather together on a mission to kill a dragon terrorizing Lakeshire, a month's long journey of many, many events and challenges and obstacles, before finally engaging in an epic battle and taking it down; maybe a player even jumps onto a boulder, leaps up against the dragon's back, letting out a warcry as he brings his axe down. . .and impales the blade into the dragon's skull, straight into its brain, sending it collapsing onto the ground. Decapitate it and take its head back to Lakeshire, where throngs of the fair town's inhabitants gather to cheer at the ten heroes. The mayor himself then steps forward and congratulates them, promising them a free flow of drinks in a party that lasts for a week.

You know what? I think that party, unlike most others I have seen, would actually be MEANINGFUL.

. . .maybe significant events don't need to involve you killing Archimonde, Arthas, Ali Baba or Illidan, yeah? Maybe significant events to you can be something as simple as a very cliched adventure for a small town in a place that I don't think anybody in CoTH actually goes to. Ever.

Maybe significant events CAN happen? Just use that little iota of creativity in your head, and realize that significant and epic things. . .are sometimes quite easy to envision and accept.

Consider this a plea, but sometimes, it's NOT that I feel that we are being forced to be insignificant, it is this:

We are reaching a point where Rules > RP.

It happened in Prologue, and it gave me a massive headache, because
it more or less tore that server apart.

Also, you might want to know this fun fact. I did those pictures using photoshop, filling in with the bucket tool, getting a picture of a nice orc and cutting the outlines out before pasting it on. I actually still have the template! HERE:

Spoiler:

Also, the one who suggested Brutal's idea. . .was also me. >.>

[LostStranger]

While I will concede that this isn't World of Pillowfightcraft, I must protest...

That official artwork of Kael'thas at the Sunwell has three verdant spheres instead of two.

[Wuvvums]

This is really jumping to conclusions. We can't do conquest, therefore we can never do anything significant ever. We can't have rps, we'll never be anything good on the server. We can't kill a dragon, therefore what we do is meaningless. Have you ever asked the GM team if you could run a one-month story line about a dragon terrorizing Lakeshire and progressing towards killing it? Or even tried to bounce some of your ideas off of certain story lines that can be done? Why is it that basing players off of the 8 playable classes suddenly means that what we do means nothing?

Even without prestiges and dragonslaying we've had some really good event chains and events like Stonetalon. Even in Kidnapped and in Skin Thieves, the role you played really depended on how you rped yourself and how you interacted with other characters. Here it was really nothing about power, but being together and working together, or working against one another, that really brought out the fun in big group rps, and we didn't need to change the world or slay something epic to feel like we've had a good time.

I just don't like this idea that because we can't have X or Y we can't have -anything- on the server.

[Uthaniel]

Just as many people want to RP an archmage as people want to RP student magi.

...But nobody ever wants to play student magi. That's why Aula Arcanum keeps failing.

[Zarquon]

My apologies, Wuvvums, for I believe that you had either misread my words or misunderstood my intentions. Nonetheless, it seems that it had become a matter of some import that I explicate upon and expound this point.

It is my belief that to a large extent, we have become assertive in enforcing the ideology of the fabled 'realism' to the point of becoming overtly restrictive in what we deem possible or impossible.

You are incorrect and making an assessment based on mere pedantic if you read my words as, 'All or nothing', which I feel is an attempt to impose an absolute into my statements. That is a fallacy in an argumentative context. My point in my posts is that we are capable of being significant, of affecting the world, of progressing our characters to obtain achievements that are previously impossible to achieve through the Prestige System; my posts were targeted at those who feel that we absolutely do not need anything significant or 'epic'. Please, remember that while the quintessential act of heroism, the slaying of a dragon, is most definitely not a necessity for RP, it is also not a mutually exclusive concept from RP. The problem is that we are making it so, and tossing around words like;

". . .beyond the bounds and scopes of the players." [Slight paraphrasing]

The problem at this moment is that I feel that we are too trapped in a situation where we -cannot- do anything save for. . .honestly, save for playing the victims. Let us compare these statements; "It is always either we get stranded, shipwrecked, kidnapped or thrown into some hellish place by the legendary, forces beyond mortal comprehension or resolution" "It is always either we slaughter dragons, go through an undead army to kill the necromancer, or hunt down an assassin cartel operating in the Old Town"

Look at the two statements. We are not -absolute- in the sense that we are forever dancing to the tune of 'forces beyond our comprehension', but neither are we as free as we hope to be to assert maybe an iota of 'heroism' in a world of heroes.

Just my two CoTH tokens, I hope you understand, and do calm down, Wuvvum.

[Wuvvums]

Just my two CoTH tokens, I hope you understand, and do calm down, Wuvvum.

The same can be said for you. You were the one that started with the angry rants. You were the one making a rage post. Why is it I argue and I am the one that has to calm down? Don't insult me.

My points are quite valid. We can implement some level of limitation and realism and still have good rp. I don't think the situation has been as restrictive as we believe it has been. I think the prestige system has been -more- restricted because it feels like to do some certain things you had to get certified and go through a process. Do we really need a system to specialize? Or to have good villains? I remember the day when the Heretic Circus was quite a big and ominous group and it had no prestiges to back it up. I think that Marianna, Mistal, and the posse of villains can manage without being demons. Maybe we can make something better without having to go through a system.


Things were rather good before, and I believe from the experiences of our old veterans we don't need bells and whistles for our characters to have a good progression and for something significant to happen in the world.

[Uthaniel]

Oh hey.
Looks like this thread is starting to gather drama.

Who could have seen this coming?

But really. Time and place, guys. Time and place.

[Rigley]

Know what I like about that post up there?

Spoiler:

That's a footman. For those of you unaware, that's a standard rank and file soldier. His skill varies but is clearly between that of either a peasant or a lore figure; He has seen and fought magic and monsters from a place amongst a group, and has overcome them with great effort. He's fought scourge and orcs in full out war and survived, again not by his skill alone but due to his allies accompanying him. In the end this footman has no amazing and unique powers, but instead has only his personal resolve and courage and a sword and shield.

What's wrong with this? Why can't this be the ideal? I have no problem with strong characters, and indeed have a few of my own. Why must these strong characters be anything past that, though?

I don't know if I'm making my point clearly here, but I hope I am. I don't want to come into a fantasy world and see that everyone is playing the king, or the invincible champion; I want to see footmen, a character that has had adversity and uncertainty pitted against him. I don't get why we need to be anything more than that. You act like great things can't happen from the standard characters, but wars are won by the soldiers, not the prestigious commanders from the back.


...Eh. I tried, and probably failed. Maybe I made some sense in there.

And indeed, please keep the hostility low.

[BountyHunter]

I know an idea being bounced around on the GM boards was a system that would allow people to play variations of existing classes, essentially a more customizable, but neutered in that it won't alter character power, system.

"First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover." ~ Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[Binkleheimer]

As a side note, that footman? He's cannon fodder.
His sole job is to go in and take the brunt of the damage while my more specialized and/or power units proceed to wreck everything. He's cheap and expendable.
He only exists so that my knights, steam tanks, mortar crews, etc. don't get eaten alive first.

Same deal with this guy

Spoiler:

But in space.

[Rigley]

As a side note, that footman? He's cannon fodder.
His sole job is to go in and take the brunt of the damage while my more specialized and/or power units proceed to wreck everything. He's cheap and expendable.
He only exists so that my knights, steam tanks, mortar crews, etc. don't get eaten alive first.

Same deal with this guy

Spoiler:

But in space.

And yet we can bring up tons of pictures of those marines standing around looking awesome, and nearly none of the higher end units.

Also I was speaking more from the aspect of in-character than WCIII or otherwise, of course.