Prince of Nothing
In the law, we often talk about the term "reasonable." On its face, it sounds nice. An easy criterion to use for judging cases. Right?
Wrong.
Reasonableness is a meaningless word. What is reasonable to one person is completely unreasonable to another. It is great for attorneys who think they can use it to sway a jury. It is not great outside of a trial setting when you have to predict whether or not X course of action is actually ok for a client.
Currently, the judging criteria for invasions are as follows:
Personally, I think the OOC Drama, teamwork, and effort criteria are all great, but the one that comes up most often is "story."
My proposition is that this is a poor mechanism for judging invasions and here are two reasons why.
[*]Moving Goal Post: There is no way to know how an invasion is going to turn out ahead of time. It could look like one side is completely crushing the other, but the ruling could come out that the "story" of a rag-tag band of heroes fighting through adversity and having to escape from overwhelming odds proved more "compelling" and thus the side that by all appearances actually loses the planet by having their armies decimated, fleet destroyed, etc., instead actually wins. Not only is there no way to predict how an invasion is going to turn out, but the results of one invasion might come out entirely the other way depending on who the judge is because that judge found a particular storyline more compelling than the other side.
Writing an invasion where you actually win the IC battles, but then end up losing the overall invasion because your story was not compelling does not make sense.
Writing a story where your character or platoon or whatever suffers heavy losses/loses a battle/goes to the darkside and then not knowing whether or not that story actually contributes toward your side or the other side does not make sense.
To be honest, I am not entirely sure what the new criterion should be, but I know that the current one is non-sensical without further guidelines.
I just think we can do better than "story telling."
Wrong.
Reasonableness is a meaningless word. What is reasonable to one person is completely unreasonable to another. It is great for attorneys who think they can use it to sway a jury. It is not great outside of a trial setting when you have to predict whether or not X course of action is actually ok for a client.
Currently, the judging criteria for invasions are as follows:
- Teamwork. The amount of teamwork each faction exhibits over the course of the Invasion will contribute to victory, including its organization, cooperation with the faction's members, and how it executes its vision for the Invasion. This also includes members from opposing factions working with each other, rather than against each other, to provide entertaining role-play.
- Story. Does it make sense? How exciting is it? Are the factions trying to weave a purposeful story or put up points on a scoreboard? This should not include the reason for the Invasion, but rather the story that proceeds once the Invasion has begun.
- OOC Drama. Negative drama instigated by either side, publicly, can negatively impact a Faction’s chances for victory in an Invasion. Entertainment. The value of entertainment provided by Factions in an Invasion can positively impact a Faction’s chances for victory in an Invasion.
- Effort. The amount of effort put into the Invasion by each faction participating will positively impact that faction's chances for victory. This includes, but is not limited to - active writers participating, quality of writing, and responding to your writing partners in a reasonable time.
Personally, I think the OOC Drama, teamwork, and effort criteria are all great, but the one that comes up most often is "story."
My proposition is that this is a poor mechanism for judging invasions and here are two reasons why.
- Arbitrary: "story" is an arbitrary judging criteria. What makes something exciting to one person could be entirely boring to another person. Consequently, when an RPJ judges an invasion it is impossible to tell how it is going to come out if both sides have put in a lot of effort, there is teamwork, and there has been no OOC drama, because the storylines of one or two characters on one side might simply color the lenses. Furthermore, let us say that I write a story about how Ryan Korr turns to the dark side over the course of invasion and for whatever reason instead of being atrocious people actually love it. Let us also say that in turning to the dark side he proceeds to eviscerate his entire army. Ok, wow. Interesting story. Who gets those points? Does that mean I get story points that go to the Alliance? Or does that mean those story points go to whoever our opponent is? Right now, I don't have the first idea.
This means that the rule's inherent arbitrariness acts as a disincentive to the very sort of thing it is supposed to encourage: storytelling. - Even if it does not disincentivize storytelling, it leads to my second point -
[*]Moving Goal Post: There is no way to know how an invasion is going to turn out ahead of time. It could look like one side is completely crushing the other, but the ruling could come out that the "story" of a rag-tag band of heroes fighting through adversity and having to escape from overwhelming odds proved more "compelling" and thus the side that by all appearances actually loses the planet by having their armies decimated, fleet destroyed, etc., instead actually wins. Not only is there no way to predict how an invasion is going to turn out, but the results of one invasion might come out entirely the other way depending on who the judge is because that judge found a particular storyline more compelling than the other side.
Writing an invasion where you actually win the IC battles, but then end up losing the overall invasion because your story was not compelling does not make sense.
Writing a story where your character or platoon or whatever suffers heavy losses/loses a battle/goes to the darkside and then not knowing whether or not that story actually contributes toward your side or the other side does not make sense.
To be honest, I am not entirely sure what the new criterion should be, but I know that the current one is non-sensical without further guidelines.
I just think we can do better than "story telling."
