Rival System

Eyy, it's ya boi Serilda. Just pitching an idea that I was discussing with Iris the other day that I totally forgot about until just now. Wanted to throw it out for discussion to see what staff and members thought about it.

I don't remember how the conversation came up, but we were discussing a Rival system that would encourage and reward players for working collaboratively with characters that they view as enemies. In my mind it would work basically just like the Mentor system, but geared toward establishing a rival ICly.

Some of the ideas I had for this were:

1. In order to sign up for being official rivals, you have to prove through IC threads that you've done enough plot together to be considered rivals. This could be over the course of a couple threads, or through one heavily impactful one, but the idea is that you can't just say two characters are rivals without actually getting to that point ICly first.

2. You can change rivals at any point if needed/wanted, but you can only have one rival at a time.

3. Possible exp and/or jewel bonuses similar to Mentor system?

4. The idea I actually like the most: Doing a thread with a rival gives you access to jobs you might not otherwise have access to. For instance, a legal mage could go on a dark mission or a dark mage can go on a legal mission with their rival if they are playing the force of good/evil in their rival's thread. So for instance, a legal mage could join their rival on a dark mission but only if they are spending their RP actively trying to stop them from completing their dark mission. Likewise, a dark mage could try to sabotage their rival's efforts in a legal job.

Anyway, thought I'd throw this out there to see what people think. Endorse or reject as you will!

MarkusEldridge wrote:How will this effect completing jobs, for instance, if they both go on a dark job with the result being an assassination, and the 'good' force succeeds, meaning that the assassination is in fact stopped, the job is not actually considered complete at that point. How would they handle completions?

I would imagine that's up to them to determine either ahead of time or to see where the thread goes during the course of it. Perhaps in instances where a person manages to successfully usurp their rivals goals, then the person "failing" the job would only get EXP and bonus EXP rewards and just miss out on the monetary gain and any special gains listed that one would only get for completing the objectives.

Obviously, this would take a willingness to work together and come to an agreed outcome in some fashion by both parties. After all, this is meant to encourage IC plots between opposing characters and foster cooperation, not disagreements. (Though with any perceived PVP type of situation, I am sure there is bound to be disagreements eventually. We're all human, after all).

Either way my general thought it that no matter what, EXP should be rewarded for the thread whether or not IC objectives are met, but jewel/items could be lost if a character is thwarted from completing their mission. And to make things easier on staff, when turning in a job to be completed the person turning it in should list which of the rivals came out victorious with the turn in template.