Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-71.61.178.23-20130722105712/@comment-71.61.177.24-20131023003335

Hmm, I think the super-vague purpouses are a little...off. I don't like them. I mean, portrayed as simple as they are, and all alone as variables, the way you implied they would be. I was thinking more of an actions focus, rather than goals. Some factions aren't interested in ultimate goals, really, but in consistently doing something. Like killing vampires, or helping people, or converting people. And maybe not making the goals so simple, but instead including full-sentence variations of them. ( I do think they should be included, though.) I'm rather afraid I'm not making sense. I'll try to organize here:

I think that guild creation should involve setting a set of skills, an action or set of actions that the guild is intended to do regularly as part of its purpouse, and, if applicable, an ultimate goal. The skills we appear to agree on. The action(s) would be more or less long-term goals, not of acheivement, but simply of action - to help beggars, to kill vampires, to serve one or another of the Daedra or Divines, etc, etc, etc. You could create a guild that purely relies on those and has no ultimate goal of accomplishment - witness the College of Winterhold, which is simply a guild for ongoing study and learning, or the Dark Brotherhood, which has no ultimate goals either and simply exists to carry out assassinations/serve the Night Mother. It could also be termed a guild that exists to help others, because the assassinations are only carried out because somebody requests them. It's a little like a library - somebody requests a thing, the librarians try to supply the thing, for free. Except the Dark Brotherhood is anonymous and works with considerably more serious stuff than checking out a book, lol. Actually, a large number of guilds in TES don't have ultimate goals. I mean, I don't even think the Companions really have a purpouse, or if they do, I haven't been able to find it. They're just sort of there, doing their thing. And of course the Thieves' Guild isn't working towards anything in particular either - it's just a batch of theives, generally following the same Daedric Prince and the same rules, helping each other out in an organization. There's no endgame - just a continuous "this is what we are here to do". I think that's closer to the real world, too. So I think we should have options to choose the things you want your guild to do, in general, not what you want them to be trying to get - because that doesn't seem to be terribly universal or realistic-seeming. But there are guilds about that have endgames - Harkon and those who help him, certainly, although I doubt that encompasses all the Volkihar, and Alduin and his dragons come to mind. Also, the Mythic Dawn in Oblivion. So you should have the option to pick one of those endgame goals, although in a more complex-looking format, because distilling it like that makes it seem like all the factions with an endgame are the same, plain, ordinary, mundane, unoriginal. It's a little bothersome. I apologize in advance if anything in this is wrong or confusing or offending. :)

- WorshipsMeridia