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NWNThayPW / ThayPublicSuggestions

Public suggestion repo for the NWN:EE server Thay and the Underdark
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Non-Mulan Red Wizard Apprentices, breaking the law #58

Open Ed1nSm opened 1 year ago

Ed1nSm commented 1 year ago

According to the "Laws of Thay" that are prominently displayed in all(?) legion barracks, it is in fact illegal on pain of death for someone to take a non-Mulan as a Red Wizard Apprentice.

There's currently no way for the module to check if a character is Mulan or not. As such, this law has been flagrantly broken quite a few times. Which is fine and all, but also a ludonarrative dissonance. I'll be making another suggestion ("Human ethnicities on character creation") which will be much more in-depth, and in case that one happens to be picked up, you might use the system introduced there to check for whether the character is Mulan or not.

If that system isn't picked up, perhaps a short and sweet way to make sure the player at least knows enough about the setting to know what Mulan are (and to introduce some sort of upper-class standardization over the plebs) is to make knowledge of the Mulhorandi language at 100% fluency an additional requirement for becoming an Apprentice.

flightlessavian commented 1 year ago

I somewhat disagree - this shouldn't in fact be dealt with mechanically this crassly. Why? Because it's in my opinion one of the exemplars of Thayan law-operation in practice. Sure, taking on non-Mulan apprentices isn't technically legal. and sure, if someone falls from grace, it will be used against them, but for a Red Wizard in good standing? I somehow don't think the complainant would suffer from good health and prosperity. Unless of course it's something super egregious, like taking on a non-human. That said, it might be that non-Mulan apprentices will face rather more assassin attacks etc.

Ed1nSm commented 1 year ago

That's just an example of selective mechanical enforcement of laws or social conventions, though. See: Orcs not being able to move past Sergeant and such. Either do the mechanical enforcement for all cases, or do it for none of them, I say.