Forbidden Magic: Darkness and Light!

[thejeff]

The only problem with my suggestion is it'll be difficult to keep Good death mages from spamming undead once the scripts run out.

(As I argue against myself...)

[CUnknown]

Yes, but these are the reanimated bones of only the "good" warriors. They are "good" skeletons. There is a world of difference.

As long as Good isn't using any death gems to summon tartarians or whatever, that is all I care about.

Let's say Good is forbidden from having Death or Blood on their pretenders as well.

[Tuidjy]

Why would the good races forsake death magic? Blood magic MOST definitely,
but death magic is not evil per se.

As a matter of fact, this game will be ruined if it is played unfairly. Nothing
can stop the Evil players from coordinating, and if they do that, it will be a
walk in the park for them. So we have to assume that all Evil guys are honest.
Can't we assume that all Good guys are honest as well, and let them script
only non-evil spells?

What is an evil spell? Anything that hurts population. Unrest and discent is
fine, killin is not. Anything that uses mind control and has 'evil' fluff.
Anything described as killing innocents. Thus summoning ghouls is an abomination
but rasing longdead would be fine.

Evil elemental spells: Hurricane, Tidal Wave, Volcanic Eruption
Evil astral spells: Enslave Mind, Imprint Souls, Master enslave
Evil death spells: Black Plague, Burden of Time, etc..

If a spell can be rationalized, it's fine:
Charm - oh, yes, you convert an unit, but you do it by a mind melt that lets
them see that your side is right.
Raging Hearts - the good people of the province are rising against the oppression
and are killing the tools of the evil regime.
Bane Lord - a great hero from the past arises to help defeat the enemies of
all that is good and pure.

I wonder whether any non-blood items should be forbidden to the good races. I
cannot think of any items that are clearly evil, and do not require blood. Does
the horror harmonica? The Wraith Sword I'm not quite sure about. There's
plenty of soulstealers in fantasy that are not evil... but still.

[moderation]

Hmm, well that's the tricky thing, you can justify all sorts of extraordinary and awful practices in the name of achieving a "good" cause (many news headlines come to mind). It's kind of disturbing, but also interesting to think about in Dominions terms since you would be the one responsible for said acts.

As for what good and evil mean, I think we're stuck with using the commonsense ideas we've inherited today to a certain extent. Of course if we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of a civilization from 3000 years ago, it would probably be different, but I'm not sure I'd want to be a barbarian.

Hey this gives me a new idea: Civilized people vs the barbarians. However this is also a rather big can of worms. Both Mel Gibson's Braveheart and Ghengis Khan come to mind. Maybe EA nations could fight LA ones or something.

[otthegreat]

That could work. Just EA vs LA is too general though. EA Ermor is a civilized nation while LA Tien Chi would probably be barbaric.

Maybe the civilized nations should be at the center of the map and a larger number of barbaric nations scattered arround the edges.

Civilized nations should be forced to take order while barbarians take turmoil.

The one thing that makes this less interesting than the good vs. evil vs. neutral idea is that there is no real need for cooporation among or between the groups. This game would quickly become almost exactly the same as any other dominions game. If someone can come up with a way to make cooporation on both/one of the teams beneficial this could be a very interesting idea.