Mob Follower Rewrite?

[Kinaed]

From a policy point of view, it is not okay to warp your mobs in to save your hide and pretend they were hanging around waiting for a call under any circumstances.

A player's mobs must be in the scene at the start of the scene for them to be allowed to participate unless their owners have explicit permission to summon them from their RP partners (ie, it is consensual and clearly not amidst a conflict). In that instance, players are not supposed to assume the code is causing a magic warp just because it CAN summon mobs in a snap. Rather, players are supposed to emote whatever is required to realistically depict ICly summoning their retainers and only do a code warp-in when it is ICly appropriate for them to arrive given the circumstances.

IE, hail does not ICly represent a magic summoning ability, so please don't use it that way just because you code-wise can.

[Leech]

I'm aware that it's not okay to do that, and the point of starting this topic was to supply a change that would make code a little more diverse, and allow for calling mobs into a scene without having to ask in a non-consensual game.

[Lei]

Ideally, I don't want to ever ask a player for permission to do something. Ideally!

Agree with this, so hard.

[Kinaed]

I find the reluctance ask people for things a bit strange, honestly. I rarely have problems asking people for things, especially if I'm asking for something I view as legitimate. If it's not legitimate, though, then the question shouldn't be asked at all, and I suspect that in that case most of us wouldn't ask.

RP is, by its very nature, a mostly cooperative exercise. We need to accept, for example, that Casimir and Lei are characters rather than the players behind them. That in itself is an act of separation, trust, and cooperation. We can code things to the cows come home, but it's not going to alleviate the need for players to play well together and with a sense of decency, fairness, and community.

I can see that it might be better of the existing system could not be gamed code-wise, but given that it's such a minor thing for people to behave well that alleviates a lot of code work that'd need to be done by one person who is already overstretched, I am more inclined to ask players to take the burden of using code to support their RP onto themselves. That burden will always exist, it's just a question of how extreme it is.

[Kinaed]

After discussing this with Temi, this is the solution we've posted to Az:

Hi Az,

Please do the following re: hail:

1. Reskin the command 'hail <name>' to require the argument summon, so now
summoning mobs from the broom closet actually uses 'hail summon <name>'
syntax.

2. Make 'hail' typed alone and 'hail <name>' error to the help file syntax
displayed in Help Hail. (Probably should make a rule to do this
dynamically rather than copy/paste the syntax so that updates are
captured.)

3. Add a new hail subcommand, 'hail call <name | all> <rpyell>'.
This command will have your character send out an RPyell that
looks like this, for example:

hail call amelia shouts, "For For goodness sake, Amelia! Stop dawdling! I said teaaaa!"
Kinaed shouts, "For For goodness sake, Amelia! Stop dawdling! I said teaaaa!" [Hail]

If the retainer mob is 1 room away, they will have a 100% chance of
attempting to travel to the room name their hailing owner is located
in. For each additional 1 room, they are 25% less likely to answer.
Using hail in this manner during combat takes up a combat round.
Additionally, being in combat will reduce their response chance
by an additional 25% to the usual penalties.

Retainers can only be summoned this way up to a maximum of 3 rooms
distance from their owner.

This request is the result of a player request on the forums.

Warm regards,
Kinky

Mobs without keys to a locked door will be blocked, etc.

[Leech]

I love it! And by no means am I trying to push for this in now, Kin. The simple fact that you're here considering it makes me all sorts of happy - and if it's on a to-do list, somewhere, that's all I could wish for as a player. However, if it's something you don't like, toss it! The great things about ideas is that they can be trashed, and then new ideas get rolled up.

----

Working cooperatively is good, I can dig that. I tend to work with a lot of people to try and make plots for everyone else. However, when it's something like calling in mobs for defense (or maybe, down the road, combat), it might be best to think "What code could we place here so that we don't have player policy concerns down the road?"

Nobody likes dealing with drama, I'm sure you least of all Kin, and if a piece of code can alleviate some of that flak I think it's worth considering. Sometimes I find myself just wanting to play instead of having to ask people. "tell lei Hey, can I throw you over that chair?" becomes "cemote attempts to grab #Lei and throw her over the chair." instead of "tell leech Well, I don't really want to be thrown over the chair, but..."

[Kinaed]

I get where you're coming from. The last part of my post was about programming resources.

This was added up as a 'to do when you can' priority, so I think it's unlikely to be seen for awhile, but the spec is there for Az to pick up whenever he likes.

[Leech]

Bumping this to get a judge of how viable mobs participating in offensive combat is. I think I posted about this some time ago, but I can't find the thread now!

So what do people think about mobs being able to bash faces in? Especially if mob upkeep is added (you have to pay weekly, monthly, etc for mobs), and maybe an IP charge for putting them in combat, or something.

I know that some people run around with four guards and can very well autokill a person. But honestly, don't we have enough systems in play that that wouldn't become a problem? If somebody is trying to kill you, we have policy in place to make sure they have a damn good reason to kill you, and RPed with you before had. The fact that they can do it in one hit, or a dozen, makes no difference to me - except in reflecting the hard work they put into their character.

Protip: Don't piss off people who can kill you. And if you do, hide.

[Inertia]

I hope this doesn't derail the conversation too much but I wanted to raise a question/objection about NPC loyalty.

Because you're puppeting the NPCs you've purchased, you can depend on their obedience. Is social class and/or how much money you can pay out in a given time frame the best way to represent social clout with regards to loyal followers? What does that mean for the support system - and what about those charismatic low-born characters who have more PC allies than they can substitute through NPCs (because of class restrictions on number of pets owned)?

I can only speak for myself but I don't think I'm the only one who's come across this problem: I've been reluctant to act on a plan because I don't trust another PC to be as on board with it as I need them to be. It would be great to have NPC minions to do my bidding in such cases but that takes a lot of the risk out of things.

Loyalty and trust can be extremely difficult to earn IC. The litmus test for supporting someone with code is whether or not you would kill for the person you're supporting. I have yet to be in a position where I was buying someone's support so maybe it isn't as far-fetched as it seems to me, but - accepting that NPCs are still real people - I think it's a fairer balance to assume you can buy someone's willingness to earn a paycheck as a meat shield but not as a death-dealer, when you're running both sides of the negotiations.

[Onyxsoulle]

The best equivalent I can think of for this is the SSA. These guys are highly trained and can kill. However, when the president is endangered, they don't usually go after the source first. Their priority is to get their guy out of harms way, putting themselves between the danger and the President.

I see this as a similar thing, at least for an ic reason, to npc mobs in game. They protect, they don't get their hands dirty.