GrumpyCat, thank you for posting.
While I'd like to engage with all of your comments soon, time's a little limited right now, so I'll engage with what I think is probably the most important.
The GrumpyCat wrote: ↑Fri Oct 16, 2020 8:17 pm
4) It's generally not IC to activly leave clues ect to reveal who your character is, in the vast majority of thefts. In fact often it really /isn't/ IC to leave any 'clues' at all, especialy when linked to 3. Your jolly thief of Brandaboras might want to say, leave a riddle to reveal where he put Billy's golden statue of Sharess, but why would your Maskarran ever be interested in being caught? There's been a bit of critisism about this - people stealing items and not leaving any rp for it , and I do get it, but on the other hand - can you blame them?
I absolutely can blame them.
We
routinely require people who engage in PvP activities to do things that do not make any IC sense at all/surrender an IC advantage, because it's just not fun for the other party otherwise.
1) Combat PvP - It makes no sense for any character who has already determined that they wish to engage in pvp to first interact with their target. The chance of losing goes way, way down if you just attack from stealth or invis without warning, and I'm pretty sure that every single character in existence knows that hostile interaction before the PvP is likely to put the opponent on guard and turn an effortless murder into a challenging fight. We've even decided that allowing guild assassins to attack their targets without first interactively roleplaying with them was a mistake, and have since implemented a requirement for hostile roleplay sometime in the 24h period before the attack takes place.
For example, imagine that you are playing a Banite who has just been ordered by his superiors to walk into a settlement and kill someone who has been blaspheming the faith. You know that the target is likely to flee or fight back if they are warned, but should be a pretty easy kill if you just go in hasted and attack from invis. You know further that escape of the target or defeat at their hands will be a failure, and your faith does not treat failure well. The fully IC thing for you to do is to attack without warning and with as little chance given to the other party to respond as possible. There is, furthermore, plenty of RP surrounding the attack (you've been ordered to go deal with a religious blasphemer, and have probably RPed a lot with your faction buddies on the topic); it's just not RP with the victim.
Yet, we do not allow this character to proceed with a wordless sneak attack, and for good reason. Instead, we require that they do something which makes no IC sense, but which we have determined is more likely to be fun/feel fair to all involved. They must interact first with their target. They must roleplay a little with them (and per recent DM team statements, the roleplay cannot be a banal "Hi how are you, nice weather today", but must instead convey some level of hostility) prior to the PvP. And if the character decides to "just do what is IC", we punish the player for breaking the rules. We do this because, over the long life of this server, we've decided that simply "be IC about your PvP" is not enough. It carries too much risk of PvP that, while it might make sense from a narrative standpoint, does not offer the target any roleplay beyond a quick trip to the fugue.
2) Exile - Similarly, it often does not make sense to deliver IC notice of exile to characters in a face-to-face fashion. Many times, exile is used to kick people with a violent history out of settlements, because it no longer makes sense for those settlements to allow those characters to remain. Like property eviction, however, delivering an exile in person both a) requires the sometimes-challenging task of personally tracking down an exile target, who may for reasons of timezone mismatch, intentional evasion, or simply the fact that they often roleplay in different places than those seeking to exile them, be difficult to reach; and b) carries a risk
that the character to be exiled will respond with violence.
From a purely IC standpoint, it makes little sense for a character to put themselves through the trouble or risk of finding a person they intend to exile to tell them to their face. The much safer and more ICly prudent response is simply to go to whichever settlement NPC handles exiles and implement the exile. We have determined, however, that this is a PvP action which requires interactive roleplay first, and that the interactive roleplay must be conducted by the person issuing the exile, must be in person, and must unambiguously mention the exile.
Why?
Because we've seen the following behavior from people delivering exiles:
a) Exile completely without roleplay.
b) Exile notification delivered through a powerful pvp intermediary who nonetheless is not the one administering the exile.
c) Exile notification delivered by speedy messenger/illusion messenger/goblin messenger
And we have determined that, no matter how much IC sense any of these approaches might make in any given exile situation, and no matter how much roleplay supports it on the part of the parties delivering the exile, it is unfair to and unfun for the target of the exile to be treated this way. And so we require people imposing an exile to do something that sometimes makes no IC sense
Example: Varith Fletcher was exiled
multiple times from multiple settlements, often either with no interaction, or an interaction that did not mention exile even a bit. These settlements often had very good reason to do so, and very good reasons to avoid personally confronting him about it. It was fully IC for them simply to implement the exile without ever going near someone who very well might kill them over it. The DM team overturned multiple exiles imposed in this fashion,
entirely regardless of the very good amount of IC sense that it made to impose them. Why? Because it deprived the exile target of roleplay.
3) Property Eviction - It likewise makes no IC sense for people to hold off on property eviction until face to face contact has been had. Once the decision has been reached to evict someone from city property, it makes full IC sense for the evicting party simply to proceed: the process of tracking down someone who may suspect that they are about to be evicted can be a challenging task, since they may do their best to make themselves hard to approach. Furthermore, since losing one's home/shop can be a serious blow to players for much the same reason as losing a prized item that they worked hard to obtain, property evictions sometimes lead to pvp and the death of the evictor. And sometimes the purpose of the eviction, IC, is to secure property for your friends and supporters; ICly, your character has no interest in being "fair" or "sportsmanlike" about the eviction.
Given the amount of effort that tracking down an evictee can sometimes take, and the danger that delivering notice in person can sometimes require, often the most sensible IC option is simply to release the property without any interaction at all. We don't allow this. Instead, we require that eviction notices be: a) accompanied by interactive roleplay; b) conducted in person; and c) made by the person actually making the eviction.
Why? Because at some point, people have decided that it was fully IC to:
a) Evict completely without roleplay.
b) Deliver eviction notice by speedy messenger/illusion messenger/goblin messenger
c) Have a subordinate without eviction powers, who may not be known to the eviction target "ambush" the target with notice.
So, no matter how much IC sense it makes for a character simply to evict without first providing some interactive roleplay to the target, we require a modicum of interactive roleplay in the first place.
The only exception to this requirement is when the DM team decides that a player is purposefully avoiding contact to make eviction as difficult as possible, and in this case the DM team handles the property release themselves.
You may ask why your Maskarran would risk getting caught. I would ask in turn why a Banite would risk failure or a Cyricist would risk defeat by letting their opponent know what is coming for them, or why the mayor who has been killed before by Varith Fletcher would risk dying again to exile him when he could just safely do so without interaction. It's generally not IC to interactively roleplay with the victim in those case either. The answer in all cases is: because we have decided that it is desirable to require such characters to surrender part of their advantage to facilitate more satisfying RP for their victims.
Why do we not have any such requirement for the burglar?
tl;dr summary: We have long since come to the determination that PvP action without interactive roleplay is not good because it is grossly unfair to and unfun for the victim, no matter how IC it is. Adequate guarantees that the victim gets
something in the way of RP out of the interaction has been built into every pvp system we have.
Except quarter theft and pickpocketing.