Assassination of player characters

[ConjurerDragon]

Ariadne wrote:

>This post was generated by the Birthright.net message forum.
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>Ariadne wrote:
> In the Cerilian History assasination is already practiced: The mage-King El-Arrasi (foundor of the modern Khinasi) was assaninated by the Serpent.
>IMO this can be a practice in evil lands, but not common in others. Assasinating PC`s might anger them, but they should lern early to fortify their private rooms. My priestess` bedroom for example is protected by serveral "glyph of warding"s, a "Symbol: Stun" and a scroll with a "page guardian" laying there. The complete room is warded by a "forbiddance" spell. So the chance, someone of the "Brotherhood of Khet" can enter (and survive) it to assassinate her, is very small (No one has tried it until now)!
>
Is your priestess paranoid? Sounds like pretty much magical defence ;-)
But a highlevel rogue could still disable them and sneak past those
glyphs of warding...
Hmm, now that I consider it - who cleans your bedroom up, and sweeps
dust and cleans the floor? You have to be very specific with those magic
(and allow some other people to enter) or you´ll waste much of your time
needed to rule with cleaning your private chamber :-)

However I concur in that assasination is EVIL - Machiavelli certainly
could not convince the good regents to use it as a tool.
Even less likely the Anuireans with their code of noble war, chivalry
and such - assasination is something anyone calling himself knight,
paladin or cavalier would despise. Evil rulers on the other hand :-)
bye
Michael

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[Onwen Agelmore]

Assassination always was an easy way to handle some problems...
It was on history. In braveheart the LongSwanks try to assassinate Willian Wallace to silence his word. An Assassination is the best way to end whith a Hero. What is Domain whitout his Leader?
Imagine if Avan sent someone to kill the Arch Duke, it was easy to him to defeat what remain of hes kingdon...

[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Romes" <Archmage@T-ONLINE.DE>
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2002 12:31 PM

> Even less likely the Anuireans with their code of noble war, chivalry
> and such - assasination is something anyone calling himself knight,
> paladin or cavalier would despise. Evil rulers on the other hand :-)

But there are rulers in Anuire other than the knightly landed rulers. Would
guilders object to assasination? We know somthing about many of the
Anuirean guilders, and as a group I don`t think these guys would scruple to
reject assasination. I`d even throw the templars of Sera in there too.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Ariadne]

Originally posted by ConjurerDragon

Is your priestess paranoid? Sounds like pretty much magical defence ;-) But a highlevel rogue could still disable them and sneak past those glyphs of warding...

Oh jes, a little (She has already got some attacks). A thief might get trough the wardings, but he must be REALY GOOD (and he will still do enough noise to wake her up, if he DETECTS those traps)...

Hmm, now that I consider it - who cleans your bedroom up, and sweeps dust and cleans the floor? You have to be very specific with those magic (and allow some other people to enter) or you´ll waste much of your time needed to rule with cleaning your private chamber :-)

That I already asked myself too. She gave one or two trustful peoples the password, I think (and a CG character with the password can always pass her wardings)...

[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ariadne" <brnetboard@TUARHIEVEL.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 1:37 AM

> That I already asked myself too. She gave one or two trustful
> peoples the password, I think (and a CG character with the
> password can always pass her wardings)...

Such a figure maintains a minimal court at best, and probabaly has a
reputation of paranoia. Even smallish noble houses were maintained by what
would look to us as an army of servants. Watch the opening sequence of
Dangerous Laisons some time, and notice that both the vicomte and the
marquis are dressed by a half dozen people. Throw in the food preperation
and you have another half dozen. Then you have the folks who clean. Other
staff have duties like moving your conveyance about, still others are likely
in a noble household. Even if you imagine Cerilian households as being
something less grand than Earth`s early modern period, that still adds up to
many servants.

Even so, contraversial nobles who lived in times of greatest risk of
assasination (Italian Renaissance, English & French Reformation) endured a
high ratio of attempted assasinations to successful ones. Further, they
tended to be in public places when a noble was moving between seccure
locations. A ruler who isolates themselves will not have day to day control
of their holdings and may become vulnerable to a great captain. If you want
to kill Caesar, you do it in the Senate and you make sure that the plot goes
as far as Brutus. You kill Lincoln at Ford`s Theater, Henry IV in the
streets of Paris. And this despite large households. In fact, in many
regards, the larger the household, the harder it is to get into the bedroom.
The hermit has a mere handful of servants to kill/ sleep/ hold while the
grand noble has an army of eyes and ears to sound the alarm. Even if you
send a ninja to kill a ruler in their sleep, its more likely that a crowded
palace will find a trail of dead/ sleeped/ held servants and thereby tip off
the ruler.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Onwen Agelmore]

just to know, how much GB has your cleric ariadne?
What is the incoming of your province?

[Lawgiver]

These assumptions are all well and good assuming that the assassin isn't willing to be a martyr. It is not overly difficult to get near a regent and then make a blazing attack leading to one's own death in the process. Heck its not even that hard to get within crossbow range and pluck an unsuspecting sap. Assassination by someone with little heed to self-preservation is easy... of course you have to find a suicidal maniac willing to die for the name of the cause, but that's just details. :P

[geeman]

I think one should role play out all the domain actions whenever
possible. The domain level should _interact_ with the adventure level, but
not sublimate it. If there are any of the domain actions that cry to be
role-played out at the adventure level, assassination is one of them. It`s
such a classic basis for an adventure (killing the leader of a opposing
group or preventing the murder of your own leader) that I really think it`s
best played out. The Rulebook suggests that such events are "most exciting
if the actual attack is played as a one-scene adventure" (p40) but I`d take
that as a minimum at best. An assassination could be extended to become
the basis of campaign, let alone a domain action, so turning it into a
little one or two die roll event strikes me as being a horrible waste.

If I were to run a PBeM (since that was the original question) I wouldn`t
allow assassination of PCs for a couple of reasons.

1. I think it might take over the game, especially if someone used the
rules based on the Espionage action from the Rulebook in which performing
an assassination on the majority of the PC regents isn`t all that
tough. Unless I was trying to emphasize that for some reason, I think that
might be a problem.

2. If I were DMing a PBeM I would do as much as I could to keep the amount
of miscellaneous stuff I needed to do at a minimum, and one of those things
would be that I`d try to avoid going through the character generation
process more than once with each player. If PC regents start getting
assassinated then you have to do the character generation stuff again and
I`d just find that annoying. That`s assuming, of course, the player still
wants to participate, and that`s something of a question mark. Getting a
PC assassinated is something that might turn off a lot of players and not
without some good reason. "By the way, on the second action round of
domain turn 2 an assassin`s arrow pierces your eye. You
die." Huh? What? I was going to establish a trade route.... "Nope,
you`re dead. Come up with another character." Ah, man, this
sucks.... OK, here`s my new character. "Good. Oh, wait.... Someone
slipped some hemlock into your tea. You`re dead. Give me another
character." ::sigh::

There should, however, be some sort of access to assassination. Like so
many aspects of the domain rules, I`d like to see some additional
descriptions of effects on such actions. Things like what happens if you
don`t assassinate a regent, but his lieutenant? His advisor? His wife or
heir? A military advisor or just the commander of a unit of soldiers? His
ambassador to a nearby domain? Not only should such targets have different
a DC, but they`d have different effects at the domain level. An
assassination of a NPC in a PC`s domain is quite different from
assassinating the PC. Depending on how close that NPC was to the PC I may
or may not want to role-play it as an adventure. I`d certainly want to
role-play an assassination attempt on a PC`s wife or heir, and probably on
his LT, but I`m less interested in role-playing the assassination of the
captain of a particular company of a PC regent`s soldiers. We should,
however, still have numbers and effects for the assassination of regents,
heirs, LTs and family members, because the DM might want to use them to
determine events in an NPC domain, or if he really wants to he could use
them to determine a PC`s fate.

The base success number for an Espionage action is 20 - province population
level of the target province - levels of guild holdings the acting regent
controls in the target province + levels of law holdings in the target
province controlled by the assassination target. So two questions:

1. What additional modifiers might be applied to that success number for
attempting to assassinate different kinds of people at the domain
level? The aforementioned heirs, LTs, family members, advisors, etc.

2. How might a successful assassination of one of those characters effect
the domain? That is, if one assassinated the captain of a unit of elite
infantry for some regent might that unit take "a hit" for a domain
turn? If one assassinated a regent`s heir might that have an effect on
loyalty in addition to the obvious loss of his heir? What kinds of
characters might be assassinated that would have an effect at the domain
level and what might those effects be?

Gary

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[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary" <geeman@SOFTHOME.NET>
Sent: Thursday, December 19, 2002 7:38 PM


> How might a successful assassination of one of those characters
> effect the domain?

Nearly always I think the effect of killing anyone is that the action they
were leading doesn`t take place. That`s really all that happens even for
rulers unless they have some problem with their succession. If the captain
of a unit is killed, there are still two to four lieutenants as well as an
ensign still there. But I could certainly see that the order to move from
Seasedge to Monsedge is delayed. In some cases the costs are lost, in other
cases they may be preserved, in some cases a GB may have to be paid to
sustain the action another turn. But these are more circumstantial than
anything.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Ariadne]

Originally posted by Onwen Agelmore

just to know, how much GB has your cleric ariadne?
What is the incoming of your province?

My priestess is ruler of the "Chosen of Khirdai" (I rule no province, only temples and law). I have an income of about 10 to 15 GB every turn (substract maitenant costs), I think. But if you think, I pay a wizard, I must disappoint you. My priestess is 15th level and makes her wardings herself...