From rbarrett@dept.english.upenn.edu Wed May 31 12:45:23 1995
Regarding the IC/OOC status of "seasons" with respect to the service issue:
Lydia, as a medievalist and someone who's studied peasant labor, I'm going to have to agree with Paul that using the Season as the standard of service at the Concilium is an IC intrusion of a OOC mechanical structure. Why? B/c no one in the Middle Ages cared about time spent--it was product that mattered. The work-week, the time-clock, the wage per hour--those are bourgeois, capitalist ideas that only emerge in the 18th century (in any large degree; they're brewing throughout the early modern period). A peasant didn't have to work on his lord's fields, say, thirty hours a week--he was merely required to work on his lord's fields and provide the lord with some of the produce of his own humble plot. His time was not his service--his actions were. Feeding his family (i.e., his own personal interest) was just something that had to be worked in alongside his feudal obligations.
Since our Magi are all medieval people, they'd probably think in like terms. Not "you owe a Season of service" but "once a year each Magus must provide a Service to the entire covenant, a Service to be approved by the full council of Elder Magi [or some such]". So basically any sort of house-keeping type action would be satisfactory--and it wouldn't matter how long it took. After all, rendering the Dragon's corpse into Vis only took Alanus a month (which was lucky b/c it took him only two months to finish his Doolittle spell)--under a charter that uses time as a basis even that wouldn't count. The point should be that each Magus should do something for the good of all--and Asid certainly has been volunteering to blow a season here or there. Cain's political reasons for not wanting Asid on the Budapest trip shouldn't cancel out the fact of Asid's willingness to lose a season of study to help out with the Deadfire mission.
Rob
I just want to know, what decides if a season is enough? Council meetings. Does Alanus trust the Council to vote consistently appropriately? How would you like it if we had a vote right now as to whether the Dragon extraction counted as a service? (You'd get it, but that's not the point). What if the Council overtuned it, for some stupid political gain (Cain?)? I'd bet we've have doors blown off their hinges again.
I like the seasonal activity plan, even if it is harsh to magi, because it's equally harsh to all, and thus clear. No one gets off with easy service-- you have to scrap a planned season. Vasha, who has the least workable seasons of any mage, is willing to go along with this-- mostly because he doesn't want to see people getting off easy if he has to sacrifice a precious season for his tasks. You ask Vasha to lose a season, and he could be a year behind schedule. If the Council then ruled Asid's day trip to Ragusa was his entire service for the year, Vasha would blow his top-- why then, isn't his entire season at the shop a service to the covenant? And, boy, if you let Vasha have his service be the Winter seasons in Ragusa, someone else is going to blow their top as Vasha never does another thing for the covenant again, having gotten out of the service. I don't want to have a political battle every time we try to get the covenant improved-- I'd rather have Tariq have the "what have you done for us lately opinion?" and have that "what you have done" fairly defined as a season lost. It will kill a lot of nasty fighting, and make us work together better, I swear. It is a solution well tested.
Again, I repeat, game mechanics are often what makes the player characters fairly even. So sometimes you have to turn to them to ejudicate a fight between how players see something. It's what they are there for.
Bill