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Old 01-16-2014, 02:23 PM   #9
Jherlen
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Join Date: Jul 2002
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Re: Cronyism and Cliques

Whether you have a deity system or not doesn't matter; what matters is when the staff members/admins ARE the deities in the IC world, rather than just being able to control them. For example, if Staff Member A is also the God of Evil, and Staff Member B is the God of Justice, and these two religions are in conflict in the game, you've put your staff members in a position where they are ICly in conflict, and the conflict might result in death of their followers, destruction of temples and what have you. This creates a competitive atmosphere among your staff members because of the warring nature of their IC personas. I saw it happen on a MUD once, years ago, and it indeed lead to corruption, cliques, cronyism, and false accusations of all of the above.

A better approach, I think, is to keep your IC deities as a totally separate concept from your staff, and give staff members the ability to animate the deities and their religions as makes sense for your world. Multiple staff members should be able to animate a deity, priests and so on, assigning quests and reacting to prayers and what have you according to your lore. This puts the game world under collective staff ownership and promotes fairness among staff, as they aren't in competition to make "their" religion win, and so have less motive to unfairly help/hinder players.
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