Limited Anonymity to Encourage Sociopathy

[baerden]

We've discussed why there are limited bad players, and while I think there SHOULD consequences, I also think that we should be given a chance to avoid them, namely, being identified while doing them.

We've discussed introduction systems. Where players dont know your name and only your description gives you clues onto whom they are, unless they formally introdude themselevs to your character.

This is a great idea, unfortunately, requires a lot of work. What i'm about to suggest may make this less needed.

Like the title suggests, this would be a command, open to anyone or just the less savory guilds, this is up to the GMs.

Introduce a disguise mechanic that allows you to disguise as an npc for a limited time frame.

Options include:

Npc must exist, and you will need 'components' for the disguise in order to limit abuse and balance it. Player must disguise while hiding while in the presense of the npc so that people cant just disguise on the fly. Enforce a time limit for how long the disguise lasts, and a cool down to limit its use.

Npc doesnt need to exist, and disguising still needs 'disguise clothing components' to alter you look. Your short description will be made from a combination of your actual features, unless you hide them, and these components. Again, enforce a time limit for how long the disguise lasts, and a cool down to limit its use.

Introduce skill or ability to discover said disguises, based on a perception test.

Please make suggestions, ideas, and feed back.

[Elystole]

How difficult is it to make wearing a mask or pulling up a bandanna or scarf hide your name?

[baerden]

When I say components I mean consumable components that cannot be reused. A wig, face makeup, fake hair. Etc.

I would rather see these components open to all players, and mixed in within their respective shops instead of 'shar or thief' only items.

Another option could be that in order to use disguise, you would need to be on rp hardcore.

A totally different option could be that when a player is sufficiently covered another player would not see their name unless they were in their friends list.

Everyone else would see a description generated by 3 distinguishing outward characteristics. The only thing I can think of would be, their height, maybe sex and their outerwear, since their hair color, eyes and face will be hidden. For instance.

if a chars height is > x, set height desc, { very short, short, average height, tall, very tall, towering }
if a chars outwear consists of {fancy boots, cloak, jacket, shirt, shirtless}
sex, {male, female}
if char is holding weapons/shield {whatever, whatever}

depending on these variables (we can add more, or have synonyms to make it more random), we then populate our short description.

an average height man wearing a green wool cloak with a hood.

[Sevoi]

I don't mind elaborate disguises, but really - a greathelm, or a scarf, or a bandana/mask/etc. that hides your features should be plenty.

My thought would be if you're equipped with the items, you have the option (or maybe it's automatic) to switch your short description from your name to something else. Your body type+concealing item. So, Dude would become A (height category), lanky person with a steel greathelm covering their features.

This is basically the same as what Baerden's suggesting, but without the props so much.

[Elystole]

That's what I was getting at: Disguises are cool, but a scarf, bandanna, mask, etc. should be sufficient to just conceal your identity. It's suspicious as hell too, and I wouldn't be surprised if polite company tells you take it off.

Maybe disguises can be a way to walk around with your identity concealed without looking like that is what you are doing.

And I vaguely remember some chatter about making bandannas no longer guild-specific items as all they are is a square of cloth.

[jilliana]

How difficult is it to make wearing a mask or pulling up a bandanna or scarf hide your name?

Jirato posted something not too long ago about how difficult a task this will be to take on code-wise. If not difficult, time-consuming.

I honestly feel that implementing this would make a lot of us happy and could open up another avenue of roleplay for the bad guys that could turn into something we probably don't expect.

That's what I was getting at: Disguises are cool, but a scarf, bandanna, mask, etc. should be sufficient to just conceal your identity. It's suspicious as hell too, and I wouldn't be surprised if polite company tells you take it off.

Maybe disguises can be a way to walk around with your identity concealed without looking like that is what you are doing.

There are a few things a lot of us who do care if someone is concealed or not could be doing now. One of them is asking people to remove their mask when they enter a town and they start a conversation with us. One could assume, (whether safely or not is up to each individual) that when someone wears a mask and starts a conversation with a stranger, they don't care if their identity is known or not.

[Sneaky]

Bandanas that can be pulled up to make a mask are sold publicly. Also, I have always felt that just wearing a cloak or mask pulled up or even a helm should be enough to cover someone's identity. I feel that we're all grown ups and we can all agree that if someone hooded or cloaked and wearing a mask attacks you, but it still displays their name, that being able to discuss whether or not you recognized them in character should be possible without someone getting butt hurt because they failed to hide their identity or because they failed to recognize someone with a hidden identity.

[Jaster]

I love banana masks!

[baerden]

Bandanas that can be pulled up to make a mask are sold publicly. Also, I have always felt that just wearing a cloak or mask pulled up or even a helm should be enough to cover someone's identity. I feel that we're all grown ups and we can all agree that if someone hooded or cloaked and wearing a mask attacks you, but it still displays their name, that being able to discuss whether or not you recognized them in character should be possible without someone getting butt hurt because they failed to hide their identity or because they failed to recognize someone with a hidden identity.

Sadly, we all are sometimes guilty of not following the best practices of Role Play. You can trumpet on and on about how we 'should' do things, but the fact is that mechanics leaves no doubt, and its much more 'fair'.

I rushed this idea out, and did not give my reasoning or how it would work. It has derailed into soemthing that wasnt intended. I will be posting shortly to further elaborate on this.

[valmorian]

the main problem I see with this is that most npcs don't really walk around and are stationary

[baerden]

the main problem I see with this is that most npcs don't really walk around and are stationary

This is not a problem, this is a feature. Players will be limited on believability based on the NPC they choose, and their location. There are a handful of humanoid NPC creatures that wander the wilds. There are a handful of NPC's that also wander the cities. If a player sees something out of place, it will limit how and where a player can pull off a successful disguise.

I want to preface this next section with the fact that while I think this particular mechanics is needed, this mechanic should ONLY be considered to be implemented after we have addressed the underlying issue that would solves the problem of conflicts tendancy to devolve into simply killing each other or otherwise becoming simply "pissing contests" as discussed in the call on Saturday.

I will address this issue in up coming posts that introduce some ideas for game mechanics and scenarios with conflicting goals that come with measurable in game consequences for each party. This will shift the conflict's importance to the primary conflicting goal, with killing eachother as only ONE way to discourage the fullfillment or the opposing players conflicting goals.

Now to address some questions about the reasoning for this particular mechanic.

We have seen why it is important to use mechanics to limit players OOC knowledge instead of relying on proper Roleplay. We can pretend that we all follow the guidelines in not using OOC info in game. But that has been demonstratibly proven to be false. There is a reason why RP HARDCORE was introduced. I will use the example of Jaster. While some people championed the idea of keeping the WHO list separate from IC knowledge, many people would automatically accuse Jaster of stealing even if their only proof was that something was missing and that Jaster was logged in at the time.

Mechanics remove this human element, and create a more fair game for all of us.

The reason I suggested this limited model instead of the all encompassing model that Elystole suggested is to:

1. Reduce the amount of work to implement.

I originally stated in the call that an introduction system was not very many lines of code. This is true if this were a thought at the time of the games conception. However after a little bit of thinking, I realized that a full introduction system, and a full feature hiding system would require a large overhaul because of the amount of changes to the existing code that already exists. Please keep in mind that these concepts are based on assumption and a GM would need to disclose the actual feasibility of any of this.


2. Create an active ability to limit its use.

Fairly self explanitory. Its to limit the potential for abuse.

Personally, I would think it would be detrimental to allow everyone to hide their features, all the time, at any given time. The ability to make everyone have a unique short description would be limited due the limited description of features and clothes. We want to avoid everyone looking the same. There are ways to solve this, but, again, this requires more work. If everyone could hide their features and if the issue that limits the ways in which we were displayed with our short descrition was not solved then this would create a lot of confusion for new players joining our community.

We will denote variables with the @ symbol and we will denote player input as the {} brackets.

So, based on these assumptions, and my assumptions for how player variables are set/get, lets quickly prototype the one that I assume takes less programming and work.

1. -- Create a player variable to flag whether they are disguised. Initialize @disguised variable.

2. -- Create a player variable to set duration of disguise. Initialize @disguised_duration variable.

3. -- Create a player variable to set a countdown timer to denote a cooldown function to limit time between the use of disguises.

4. -- Create a function to determine if the player is disguised or not.

5. -- Create a function to test the cooldown function. Initialize @diguised_cooldown variable.

6. -- Create a funcion to determine if the player has enough components to disguise themselves as an NPC thats in the room.

7. -- Create a function to initiate the setting of the player disguised flag, and to set a player short description, @npc_disguise, based on the arguments passed to disguised {disguise @npc}. ( We only change the short description, but we leave the long description so that players can look at them and still see what they are wearing. This will aid players in discovering whether a player is disguised or not)

8. -- Create a function to test if npc is in the room, and valid for using as a disguise target.

9. -- Create a function to add elements of @npc_disguise to replace the instances where their names are displayed in third person while performing player actions, (attacking, eating, sitting, standing, etc).

10. -- Create a function to add elements of @npc_disguise to the player flags to be able to reference the disguised player when we wish to perform actions against them. I.E. {kill long haired man}. Players can still be targeted as their actual player names.

11. -- Create a function to set the @disguised_duration. I propose a 30 minute duration for the disguise to last.

12. -- Create function to set @disuigse_cooldown variable when @disguised_duration reaches 0. I propose this cool down duration between disguise attempts to be 15 minutes.

[baerden]

Reserved for future post detailing how these mechanics would appear to the players and how they would be used.

[Elystole]

My question regarding "How difficult is it to make wearing a mask or pulling up a bandanna or scarf hide your name?" was an honest one. Unfortunately, tone is often loss in text-based mediums, but I really did mean, "How difficult is it to do that? Is it really difficult? If so, not worth the trouble. If it isn't difficult, would we find it valuable?"

I was thinking changing "Elystole" to "a man wearing a bandanna" wouldn't be too hard. Animates' names are changed when they are animated, but maybe that takes a lot of work. The one problem that did immediately spring to my mind was that it would make targeting people much more difficult when you have a half-dozen "a masked man" running around.

This is a question that is on my mind. I have had a couple of RPs now where I was hunting someone or someone was hunting me, but we didn't know each others' names. Fortunately, we were mature enough to refrain from attacking the other until introductions had been made, and the building tension and the delivery ("I'm a friend of Lae's." "I thought as much." *BOOM*) enhanced the experience. But I am wondering how I should handle the publishing of the blacklist in Shadgard, and there have been incidents in the past where I thought I have deferred to caution and not gone after someone that maybe I should have because I wanted to make sure I had a rock-solid case for the action as I wanted to eliminate the possibility that OOC knowledge was coloring my behavior. Things like "So and so is an assassin!" Okay... How do you know that? What do they look like? Describe them to me. Can I identify them myself?

I do think that a bandanna, mask, or the other quick-fix would be sufficient for "I want to assassinate someone without broadcasting my name to everyone." I don't know how difficult it would be to implement. As for limiting its use, it is limited by the populace. You know that person is up to no good: Why else would they cover their face? Covering your face in that way is basically waving a flag that says "I am up to trouble!" which will result in a lot of people being wary of that person or telling them to take off the mask. I can see guards and shopkeepers reacting negatively to such people. But you would have to actually look at them in order to identify them instead of just using their broadcasted name.

Though there is some difficulty from that because I would get a good look at the person who is trying to kill me even if I don't have the chance to hit 'look person' while we're fighting. Maybe we don't have anonymity because it creates other headaches.

[baerden]

I wasn't calling you out. I suggested it myself. I was only using it to differentiate between the two suggestions.

It would be useful to answer the question you posed. However, your last sentence regarding the headaches can be solved and there is a good reason for limited anonymity as I posted and as was discussed in the skype call.

[jilliana]

the main problem I see with this is that most npcs don't really walk around and are stationary

That's the thing that makes CLOK special and different compared to other MUDs.

I know a few other people as well as myself that go by the rule that if there is a crowd, there is an NPC even if the NPC isn't visible. The NPCs that we do see that you call stationary can start moving/talking at any point if a GM decides to do something about what's toing on around them.

I know this post is slightly off-topic but I wanted to take the time to clarify this a little bit.