Welcome to Gaia! ::

Well, what I'm about to tell you is based more or less solely on my experiences in Barton Town mainstream back in the day, and my experiences Commerce hopping now. The FFA, the O/M forum might as well be different worlds for all that I'm considering them here.

What also should be noted is that this is just my view of Gaia as a whole, and other people may or may not agree with it.

There are pretty much two areas of Gaia...there's the nice, normal area where law enforcers actually do their job and vampires and demons and angels and what not don't go all that often. People from around here are relatively normal human beings, and the most that will happen to them is that a strange creature will suddenly come into their lives (as a result of a Breedables RP)

Then there's the other side of the tracks, where Owle lives and the half-angel half-vampire half-ducks roam. It's pretty much lawless; people walk around with weapons openly, and you can more or less pitch a grenade inside a populated bar without fear of the police or government acting against you. What you would fear, are the people inside that bar, some of whom might be immune to fire, some of whom might be immortal or the avatars of gods, some of whom might have very powerful, very nasty friends...

It's a society of adventurers, mercenaries, and outcasts, people who would be considered extraordinarily unusual in the normal side of Gaia but pretty much are the norm on this side of the tracks. Not a day goes by without people trying to kill one another, people embarking on unusual quests to save the world/their friends/innocent NPCs/themselves, and vampires making out in the upstairs room of some bar.

I'm just going to call these two sides uptown and downtown, with uptown being the normal side. It makes it easier for me to type, even though this division refers to all of Gaia and not just one city...an entire lawless city could be "downtown", while an entire sleepy little village could be "uptown."

Occasionally the two sides do interact; a demon will wander into an unassuming uptown cafe and order a croissant, a single uptown mom will be visited by an angel and dragged into a game of chaos, an uptown boy will find his home beseiged by robots. There's even a few corporations that sell goods to both sides: innocuous items like house plants and cars and such to the uptowners, weapons and firearms to the downtowners. However, for the most part, they tend to avoid each other: the uptowners out of fear for their own safety, and the downtowners cause they can't cause random havoc without the police getting called on them.

The uptown residents probably largely ignore the O/M and FFA guilds, except when they need protection from organizations like the GPD and the GNG, which would more than likely seem more respectable in their eyes. They might be a bit suspicious of it, and fearful of its power, especially since several of its members exhibit the unusual qualities of the residents of downtown areas.

The downtown residents also largely ignore these guilds, unless they are members of them or are looking for a place to create random havoc in and want a challenge. But if, say, the GNG were to try and bring law and order to their home and playground, they would probably go apeshit. Hell, my character Owle would go apeshit, and she's generally peaceful and quiet. Some of the more innocent downtowners would probably be thankful for it, but I think the vast majority would protest. Violently. We're talking about people who's main methods of problem solving are things like "Kill it with fire" or "beat the living daylights out of them till they agree." I predict a few terrorist attacks, and a lot of resistance.

*points at the corner of Ian's shop* gonk

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This sounds like an interesting leadup to a total GNG effort, actually. We just need a good motivation to enforce our presence in downtown Gaia. At the risk of seeming indelicate, what we may need is a World Trade Center catastrophe to alert us to the threat of downtown Gaia.

If nothing else, we need something that can't be solved within ten posts by:

• Orbital bombardment;
  
• Superiority by numbers;
  
• Variable mecha;
  
• Application of engineered herpes virus to delicious salads.

I've got a couple ideas, but I think we might want to keep things on the down-low for the moment, maybe make yet another PM-ring development group. (I love those things. whee ) After all, what fun is it if the whole guild sees the plot coming from a mile away?

That was my assumption from the beginning, barring any countermanding sentiment on your part. heart

I think the only options there are a lack of a visable target, or sufficient civilian presence that can't be moved - such as a plainclothes force that hides among them.

The problem is that those are hard to RP against; you spend a lot of time doing nothing, and then you're cleaning up a mess. If any progress is made, it's either unbearably slow or the result of bad RPing.

Against an equal force you can fight for a long time without getting anything done, but you'll have been doing something.

So we're going to need normal forces to tie up the major branches and provide an RP outlet to prevent stagnation.



You REALLY got a kick out of that, didn't you? xd

I like mages. 3nodding

What I was musing about when Nida first mentioned to me the need for someone to play the bad guy, was some kind of massive takeover of a city...in that kind of scenario, you've got a big old visible target, but you can't bomb the hell out of it because of the large number of civilians still trapped inside. And it would still leave plenty of flexibility for the GNG to be doing something at least minorly effective all the time.

I've thought about it, and the uptown/downtown thing seems to work fine.

When whales fight, shrimp die. It makes sense to keep the people who can't take care of themselves away from the people who can, and grouped together so that a specialized police force can easily put the kebash on any trouble before things go south.
This segregation was probably established soon after Gaia found itself becoming a transdimentional nexus, with the uptown folk being almost exclusively naitive to Gaia, and the downtown folk almost exclusively not. Since it's so recent an occurance, people are just starting to figure out how they feel about it as a collective, and there's quite a bit of prejudice emerging. The uptown, of course, would have to have enough people in it to form a large enough voting block to keep the sides seperated - perhaps talk of making uptown and downtown litteral, until they realized that any workable designs would be smart enough to put the people with high yeild explosives away from the structural supports.

The downtowners dislike paying taxes for the millitary because they feel they can take anything on without a government agency, while the uptowners mostly object to letting the downtowners have access to weapons which could scorch the planet to a baren rock.


Does that Sound about right?