Quote:Making people paranoid that assassins are on every streetcorner and rooftop - good RP. Making it such that they really are - seems a little shoddy, possibly hedging on deus ex machina, depending on how such a thing is used.I agree with you that assassins on every street corner is over the top. Even though one may create a server-wide organization, based on thieves for example, and create imaginary NPCs doesn't mean that there should be hundreds of them. Let's keep it real folks.
LS based Factions are cool, but their scope is very small. For example an LS has 40 members in it, 15 of those are Knights. Now, what power would these Knights have outside the LS itself? (I am assuming that characters aren't solely interested in just their group but the world around them). 15 is more of a street gang with no real power, thus making the idea of this Knighthood slightly invalid. Perhaps they can patrol the streets of some shady district, or guard one caravan... but even those would literally take the whole force of the hypothetical 15 person Knighthood to do. In my experience it was hard to keep these factions stable in XI. Only at the very begging of RP on Sylph, when there was one RPLS, were player-based factions really a force to reckon with. This was because there were a lot of RP'ers under one LS, and the leader literally played the head of almost every faction himself xD, so even the success of that is somewhat artificial. Since then I've seen problems with membership decline which led to Factions having no real power, or absence of leadership in which case the faction likely fall apart.
However I do love the idea of factions/organizations and what they can potentially accomplish in terms of RP when they are actually working. This idea of external factions/organizations/agencies does potentially remove many flaws I mentioned above. FFXI had a divided RP'ing community which made this idea very limited. Now however I am very excited to see as all under one roof, and perhaps it can work.
I'm planning to start one based on assassins/killers/mercs who are willing to do anything for the coin. The leader and the organization itself will be heavily tied to both my character's history and main plot line. By opening it up for the public (after all it will be rather public once some killings begin) I figure might as well make it accessible to whoever wants to RP as part of it, or against it, or somehow effected by it, etc. It'd definitely be a small band of 15 or so NPCs at first, so... no assassin on every corner hehe. I'll stop here before I get ahead of myself. Your thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
I’m the bullies you hate, that you became.
