I didn't mean to give the impression that any one thing could fix this problem. Personally I think the problem may take as long to fix as it did to metasticize to where it is now; part of why I tried to give emphasis to a light touch.
Example: What if, instead of outright removing the Outcast tag, the Outcast Tag only appeared when the outcast was in a large Settlement like Cordor (this seems like it would play nicely on the often-said 'NPCs whispering and shunning you', etc). This way when an outcast is climbing a mountainpeak in a blizzard at 2am on a FR-Thursday it might not be so obvious they're mega-evil-purge-bad because an outcast being so far from civilization is... kind of the point isn't it?
Things like that. Changes that don't really change the
core of its purpose, because we have to acknowledge the reason it is there in the first pace, but allow for more breathing room that tacitly says 'Hey, chill the heck out', similar to how "Disguise" didn't change how disguises worked but still felt so much better. These changes aren't airtight but I think they have a slow-burning positive impact.
To try and stay to the OP and not become a Tag Thread I'll shotgun a quick list of ideas to contribute towards ambiguity that I genuinely feel could introduce more nuance into RP but not be directly impactful on the original concept or break any 'build-meta':
[*] Players can choose their weapon VFX. There was a huge update like over a year ago with tons of awesome looking VFX and nobody seems to be able to use them. If people can't be responsible then it can be removed, but I have faith.
[*] All casters can infinicast scaling cantrips. Never able to outperform real magic, and maybe hardly ever used, but the possibility itself casts less certainty to determining a mage's source of power.
[*] Warlock eye effects only become active in epic levels similar to hexblade weapon/monk.
[*] Recap: Character tags are only displayed in relevant settings where that character is likely not supposed to comfortably be. IE: Polite Society. Bonus points if actual NPCs grumble and emote towards outcast/pirate characters. Double bonus points if that's the actual 'tell', "No funny business, pirate."
[*] Experimental: All casters (warlocks included - specialist wizard excluded) get basic vanilla summons that either aren't affected by conjuration feats or actually summon one power level downward. So instead of only being able to summon Lord Kitten-killer of the 876th layer you can still summon a basic dire-puppers at middling efficiency.
That's all I can spitball for now, but I hope it at least spells out what I'm trying to get at.
magistrasa wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 1:44 pm
If a member of civilized society is able to read a description, or look at VFX, and see plainly that a person is Evil with a capital E as if they have a glowing neon sign over their head, the only sensible thing for that member of civilized society to do is ostracize the evil individual and meet them with hostility and revulsion. The utter lack of ambiguity is ruinous to nuanced storytelling.
This establishes my thoughts better than myself. While I haven't personally witnessed much of what is going on - it's hard to believe all of it is explicitly bad RP or meta gaming - it could very well be that people are working with the tools we're given and maybe the tools are more at fault than the player in some cases.
I had a chance encounter a few weeks ago on the surface far from any city that I know of, and was asked to leave. It went something like: "Hey we both know you're not supposed to be here, so get lost or bad things might happen." (Paraphrased).
This was pretty shocking for me because I'd just come back from a break for a few months and was very surprised
anyone could recognize the character. It wasn't until about half an hour later that it suddenly dawned on me that they were reacting to my Outcast tag; until this revelation I was utterly confused and trusting the other players were being faithful - which they absolutely were.
I use this example because
nobody did anything wrong. These are the tools we're given. Visual indicators, tags, weapons, vfx, are going to be number one when it comes to interaction - so we should focus on adjusting the tools (possible) rather than the players (probably not possible).