System RP Detractors

[Kinaed]

Greetings,

As you all know, TI is an RP game. Surprise!

As the main goal of TI is an excellent RP experience, it'd be good to get a sense for when our system (as opposed to people, please only respond regarding how TI is coded) fails to support the goal.

Are there times when commands are jarring or distract you from scenes? Places where the game isn't about taking on a role and becominga fantasy character for awhile? Let us know your thoughts on this thread!

Thanks!

[Percival]

The rumour system currently feels like a 4chan board for hurling anonymous insults. I like the rumour system as a concept, and it was once much better. Perhaps opening accountability for responses to rumours as well as the person who started the rumour itself would be a good, coded change.

Otherwise, I think that the game is well balanced for roleplay support.

[AlwaysShunny]

Agreed on the rumor system. It seems more like two or three people just constantly going at it in rough frontier talk rather than a barmaid actually saying something to a patron as she passes them by. I had a friend actually leave the game over it, and reforming the rumor system has always been discussed, although I don't think anything had ever come of the talks.

[Rothgar]

The rumour system currently feels like a 4chan board for hurling anonymous insults. I like the rumour system as a concept, and it was once much better. Perhaps opening accountability for responses to rumours as well as the person who started the rumour itself would be a good, coded change.

Otherwise, I think that the game is well balanced for roleplay support.

The rumor system is awful. I've never been an enormous fan of it, but for whatever reason in the last 6 months or so it's gotten to a point where I'd be on board with removing it all together. I'm amazed at some of the stuff that passes for 'good rumors,' and I'm not surprised at all that someone might've left because of it. It's brutal, it's untraceable (unless you have a particularly new or honest character), it's often WAY out of theme, it makes very little sense to hear NPC's talk about it, and it's just awful.

And yeah, INB4 people screaming, "If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen," or "Being an arse is thematic!" Yeah, no, I get that. You guys know the player that I play. But if an in-game system makes people leave, you might want to take a look at it.

[Taunya]

Movement causes me a bit of a headache. Everyone moves at different paces, so you often can't chat while walking between locations. Poses may get lost, sometimes you miss someone and travel to the next leg and they're left behind, if you arrive at at place with other players, while you're supposedly walking in with someone, it can take quite some time for them to arrive sometimes, etc

It would be nice if all players in a 'group' (not just following, to allow getaways and such) moved at the rate of the slowest character, and starting to move from a room was synchronized so they'll all stay bunched up in the same room while traveling. It currently seems to wait until one character has actually moved from the room before followers begin moving.

[Andruid]

Greetings,

As you all know, TI is an RP game. Surprise!

As the main goal of TI is an excellent RP experience, it'd be good to get a sense for when our system (as opposed to people, please only respond regarding how TI is coded) fails to support the goal.

Are there times when commands are jarring or distract you from scenes? Places where the game isn't about taking on a role and becominga fantasy character for awhile? Let us know your thoughts on this thread!

Thanks!

Great question! Off the top of my head:

1) Trying to convey ICly that I'd like a coded rumor tell. Saying something like, "Tell me about this rumor about X" often results in someone just discussing the rumor without sharing it codedly. I have to then break immersion by asking for it using osays or tells.

2) Trying to ICly talk about influence (IP), support (support mechanics), or the zero-sum game that is the city metrics system (city metrics, city support, city subvert actions) is immersion breaking to me, every time. I feel the need to either follow up OOCly to ensure that the coded implications of my character's actions/dialogue was understood or risk failure due to miscommunication. Saying something like, "I could use my influence to support class relations if you pay me two hundred silver" is the most direct way to get your idea across. It's also so obviously about coded mechanics as to be immersion breaking in and of itself. This is, ironically, sort of the opposite problem as #1 above.

3) Steal is a spammy, threaded nightmare that punches you repeatedly in the eyeballs with object keywords and short strings over and over and over.

4) Teaching is a distracting, spammy nightmare also. Right now, I think it's impossible to actually engage in many of the activities about which you would want to teach (i.e. teaching a skill to others while also engaging in that skill in order to teach by example), which seems like an awful disconnect and, for me at least, a cause of OOC frustration with the system.

5) The verify command. The idea of something like a birth certificate, in medieval times, strikes me as very out of place. Where do these papers come from? Who makes them? What is their purpose? We don't have public places on grid that actually give any IC background or support to this notion of regular people carrying around identifying documents, and those documents typically don't actually exist outside of the verify command. Maybe if there were an IC way to create or alter them (as through forgery), this would seem less immersion breaking to me, but right now, they're tied directly to a character's score with no way to alter them without RPA.

6) The manual "keys assign" system. It's immersion breaking to me to have to stop and remember to codedly assign a key, and it feels like a completely OOC mechanism for completely IC protections. If the assigning were controlled automatically by code in most instances, this system would feel less immersion breaking. The helpfile could also benefit from an explanation of what "assigning" means ICly -- i.e. giving your neighbors or shopkeep a head's up or informing the staff that so-and-so might be by. Right now, all the focus is on the OOC protection without any explanation of how it might translate into the IC results.

[Andruid]

Rumors, man. I know of people who have left the game because of it, too, and it sucks. It's a tough balance between giving people the teeth to say contentious things and making them so fearful of repercussions as to say nothing at all.

Probably, some of the rampant commentary might be reined in, if, in order to reply to a rumor, you had to do it from your character's own circle and not from some random NPC "source" or according to some other person's station. I'm okay with the anonymity as it stands, but hiding behind an extra layer of NPC shield maybe takes things a little too far. (In recent months, I have largely stopped attributing my rumors to anyone other than my current character, tbh.) So instead of trying to match the circle of the rumor, people should be forced to match their own circles instead. You want to speak in a Freeman's voice about Freeman problems? Then do it on your Freeman character, in a likely place.

In real life, people are always speculating about the source of gossip, too, and if there were just a liiiittle more risk involved in speaking your mind (and there is, in real life, way more risk in speaking your mind), people would be more thoughtful and careful about how they go about it. I also think that speaking from your own character's circle/position is much easier and comes more naturally (it's part of your agenda, after all) than trying to speak honestly and legitimately from some other perspective. Maybe it's time to give a more "grounded" rumor system with more realistic consequences a shot.

A possible fix for some of the perception issues around appropriate race/class of gossipmongers:

Change then intro from this:

A smartly-dressed lithmorran gentryman replies to a bit of gossip, "Some angry hackneyed Freeman thing that it doesn't make sense for me to even be saying as a Lithmorran gentryman!"

To something like this:

A smartly-dressed lithmorran gentryman passes on something someone else said, "Some angry thing that could have been said by anyone regardless of race or class, and I'm just passing it on for shock value or whatever!"

It's not like circles are tied to specific locations, anyway.

[Andruid]

Movement causes me a bit of a headache. Everyone moves at different paces, so you often can't chat while walking between locations. Poses may get lost, sometimes you miss someone and travel to the next leg and they're left behind, if you arrive at at place with other players, while you're supposedly walking in with someone, it can take quite some time for them to arrive sometimes, etc

It would be nice if all players in a 'group' (not just following, to allow getaways and such) moved at the rate of the slowest character, and starting to move from a room was synchronized so they'll all stay bunched up in the same room while traveling. It currently seems to wait until one character has actually moved from the room before followers begin moving.

I wouldn't mind seeing some of the follow lag/gap reduced, myself.

I also can't tell you how many times I've stood around waiting for someone to codely follow or stop following, or how many times I've forgotten or seen other people forget. It happens CONSTANTLY. It's gotten to the point where I've started emoting extremely obvious things like, "So-and-so waits for /target to stop following before turning to depart." Maybe if there were a reminder in one's prompt as (following) status, this would be more obvious and easy to remember? At the very least, those of us with scripting/programming knowledge could potentially build a better warning system into our own clients... actually, I probably could now, but it would be less work with a flag in my prompt. >_>

(Or maybe a warning when a reboot breaks a follow?)

It's a relatively minor thing, but it's still immersion breaking to me and mildly disruptive every time someone accidentally walks out of a scene while following someone they forgot to unfollow.

[Puciek]

I love the rumour system, I hate the idiotic ctrl-c/ctrl+v OOC hatemill it is now. Really, we don't need to hear the same promote on the 19th rumour about the same person - we've read it the first time that person X is a murder/cheater/whorer/heretic. Get creative, and if you can't, well, maybe skip on posting a promote as you clearly have nothing ICLy interesting to add. Can't we just have rumours that discuss the subject, instead of using mention of person X to throw OOC jabs at them?
When that will get fixed, I am quite sure we can get rumours back as a fun way to convey "news" around town. But I have very much pulled out of it for the reasons above.

5) The verify command. The idea of something like a birth certificate, in medieval times, strikes me as very out of place. Where do these papers come from? Who makes them? What is their purpose? We don't have public places on grid that actually give any IC background or support to this notion of regular people carrying around identifying documents, and those documents typically don't actually exist outside of the verify command. Maybe if there were an IC way to create or alter them (as through forgery), this would seem less immersion breaking to me, but right now, they're tied directly to a character's score with no way to alter them without RPA.

It may surprise you but in medieval times towns especially kept pretty good records of their citizens and they did so for two simple reason - taxes and security. How exactly were the records kept will vary greatly from one region to another, from ones where the record keeping started and was done by churches ( a common thing in eastern/middle of Europe, also middle-east I think) and more western approach where the town ran census. Though even on a smaller scale each "lord" (loose term for any landowner with vassals) held an account of who they have under their rule, and those records were often shared with their Lord in summarised form etc. Carrying "papers" was also not an uncommon thing, and very important when you had to deal with for example run-away peasants. And a copy of those documents would almost always be stored back with the lord for any verification needs. It will also help to remember that societies were magnitude smaller back then than they are now, and with much more rigid hierarchy.

So as weird as the idea of papers may seem, it wasn't as uncommon. Granted that the way verify is implemented is a bit oocly, but then your PC can always refuse it. The problem is that without it, well, you have to fill in RPA to get the details on anyone, and that is just asking too much for simple details verification. Have to have that balance somewhere, and the fact that you can refuse it, with whatever IC consequences the Reeve sees fit, seems like a reasonable enough middle ground to me. And it's not like it's widely used on the grid either.

[Andruid]

It would be nice if all players in a 'group' (not just following, to allow getaways and such) moved at the rate of the slowest character, and starting to move from a room was synchronized so they'll all stay bunched up in the same room while traveling. It currently seems to wait until one character has actually moved from the room before followers begin moving.

I forgot to add that because follow is not a consensual command, code would probably need to be able to distinguish between a "friendly" follow and a "not-friendly" follow. Maybe commands to "invite" people to friendly-follow and then consensually remove them at will would help?