I recently was talking with another person ingame who has been in PAS a few years, and we talked about a number of things like tram being born, etc etc.
One of the things he asked me was why did I start PAS and why did I choose that name for the guild.
Since I have been asked these questions so often I wanted to post the reasons here.
When UO was new, I played UO with 4 RL friends nightly. We had a blast, but never felt the need to form a guild. I wasn't roleplaying, but I did have a char named KingDavid, because that was my RL nickname among pretty much all of my RL friends.
My friends and I played UO in beta (I was lucky to get chosen to be a beta tester, and they came to my house to play it along with me). We all started on Great Lakes, if I recalled, but as happened back then, most of the reds macrod overnight illegally, and we just played the game, so their skills were always ahead of ours.
We then jumped to Nappa Valley when that shard opened, figuring we now knew how to gain skills faster, and could keep up with the new reds on that shard (WRONG hehe).
So then when Sonoma opened, we all came here and played solo. After about 2 weeks, they all quit over the rampant red situation, so I was left on my own.
I was talking with them after they left, and I quit UO for a week, but then realized that I was giving in to the reds.
One of my friends recommended starting a guild, and trying to roleplay a character.
Well, I had KingDavid already, so I came back, and decided to form a guild to see if I could get others like me together to fight the reds.
I thought about the name for awhile, and I thought about what sort of guild I wanted to have, other than just getting blues together to help me fight reds.
I had noticed that in MOST guilds, there was an elitist formation. You had to know someone to get in the guild, and if they had ranks, the ones who brown-nosed the gm the most got the promotions.
So I decided that I wanted a guild where anyone could join, except for griefers. It hit me ... if I was the King of the shard, then I would have an army to lead. Plus, an army required all types of folks to make it function. Tailors, blacksmiths, mages, archers, melee folks, etc.
That really appealed to me, because I remember hearing folks try to get into guilds ingame, and they would talk about how many gm skills they had, how good a fighter they were, etc.
Then I sat down in about 20 minutes and wrote the fiction of the KD story.
I decided on the People's Army of Sonoma, because then we would seek out everyone except griefers to join us.
We would be a guild that would not be elitist. The first group of PAS helped me come up with the ranks (they did most of the work), and then I decided that the highest ranking PAS members (Elders) would be the ones that voted for promotions, not the gm.
Of course we had to start with Elders in order to get them the power to vote, so I chose Blackstaff and DeGuy as our first Elders, and they took it from there.
So what was unique about PAS:
We would do pvp and pvm events, not just one type of event.
We would protect the people by fighting criminals (reds).
Anyone except griefers could join PAS (craftsmen included, and we had several that only wanted to be craftsmen in UO).
Brown-nosing the gm got people nowhere as Elders voted on promotions.
We were a home for solo blues frustrated with fighting reds on their own.
And the rest is history. Our players made PAS what we were each year, and continue to this day to define what PAS is. We were the largest guild in Sonoma for all but the first 5 months or so of our existence.
And to this day, my RL daughters, the Princesses Katie and Kelli ingame, both are mad when I say "PAS" as one word (like "pass"). They always correct me, "Dad, its P-A-S!".
And I always reply that I can call it what I want, when I want, cause it was my baby
OK stopping another long post. My eternal thanks for every single person that has made us what we are (and that number tallies about 6,000 now).
All of you, past, present, and future PAS ROCK Sonoma!
KD