Re: Province ownership and other subjects

Carl Edman (cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu)
Mon, 27 Jul 92 13:32:46 PDT

Oleg the Loudmouth:
> Fine. You seem to have misinterpreted my remarks -- I was
> complaining that most of the people proposing systems
> seemed to be setting them up such that you either paid the
> taxes or had to go kill the ruler. Instead, I would like the
> default to be not pay taxes, and the ruler can either
> convince you to actively pay or attack you. The onus
> should lie on the purported ruler, not the alleged
> subject. Some rulers might even not tax everyone, in
> order to avoid confrontations with powerful subjects.
> That's the way many medieval societies worked.

Onus, Shomnus. Declaring yourself the ruler _means_ automatically
fighting anyone who doesn't pay taxes. Leaving a power unenforced
means giving it up in the long run.

If someone demands taxes and someone else refuses to pay taxes then
there is a conflict. Period. Who actually issues the ATTACK command
is in the end irelevant and should be done in the way which is the
most simple to implement. If this really disturbs you that much, I'll
write a command preprocessor for you which implements aliases like:

alias REFUSE_TO_PAY_TAXES="ATTACK <province owner>"

There is no difference. You can view it any way you want.

And while one certainly could add a whole lot of gunk about tax
exempt status and different tax rates for different people aso., I
think that that is easily enough handled through current game
mechanisms and really not worth the effort.

> Second, the "first occupant of a structure" rule people
> seem to be implying that if you have a bigger force but
> aren't the first occupant of the structure, you can't
> rule the province without killing the first occupant,
> even if you have a vastly bigger force. Well, that is a
> simple way to code it, but doesn't make that much sense.

It makes all the sense in the world. Just having a bigger force
doesn't mean that you suddenly become the ruler of a province. Maybe
you are a friend of the owner and are just passing through ?

The only way to become the ruler of a province is to declare yourself
to be one in an unowned one, or to depose the current one. And being
a ruler means fighting anyone else who claims to be the ruler - that
is the essence of ruling. So if there already is a much weaker ruler
tell him to get lost or else. Just don't expect to become province
ruler without having to do anything.

> However, I've yet to see a compelling argument for
> ownership in the first place, other than that some people
> think they own places and want free money for it. Well,
> I've got my patch of land too, but I don't see the need for a
> windfall.

Where are all the people who claimed that there have to different
ways of playing this game to suit different tastes now that we need
them ? You want to be a trader, an adventurer, an archmage aso. ?
Well, for some people the most interesting role is the one of leader
of a region. Why not add that interesting facet which will lead to so
many new ways of interacting and so many more stories being able to
be told ?

Carl Edman


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