Quotations and disguises

[Quizmar]

I've noticed there are a few suggestions asking for the removal of the "disguise" naming convention. Once upon a time I wanted this as well, but after playing almost exclusively lying/disguise/espionage characters, I think its removal would be a terrible idea, and technically extremely difficult.
I think the first point is that someone suggesting this might feel as though the quotations are attracting more attention to them then they would otherwise, this depends on context but is largely untrue. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to wear a quotation name, there are plenty of players who without and intrigue are permanently in quotations. There might be character reasons for wearing a new name. Even if you are trying to be "Cordor Gaurd" and have the outfit right, and don't do anything besides walk around, the vast majority of players will go along with it.
Even if you did remove disguise quotations, you could still be seen as a player due to the lack of the talk option on click, and the P menu, or player lists, which yes, aren't IC info, but essentially removing the quotations is a meta-solution. If there were no quotations, and you wanted to send a wisp to your friend who is being impersonated, either the wisp wouldn't work, or it would go to the correct one. The game uses names as a tag for a lot of different things, and therefore make removing quotations necessary.
The truth is that the overwhelming majority of players will play along with your disguise, as long as you mind your P's and Q's.
The character display name is about more than there appearance, its their mannerisms, their subtle facial details, their smell, and anything else which could make a person identifiable, not just the name.
Those who are not going to play along with your disguise, without you giving a sufficient IC reason, are the problem players anyway, and no amount of mechanical changes will make a difference in their behavior.
It can be easy to forget 99% of arelith players want to have fun and have good character moments, and so there is a mutual good faith required from all parties. I know its frustrating to have your schemes foiled, but most arelith players are good players, and might have busted you from something besides your disguise, that has certainly been my situation

[Anomandaris]

Agree to disagree on this one. As someone who enjoys disguise based RP, I've found the amount of metagaming around disguise tags to be extremely pervasive and lead to very real impacts on RP outcomes. I wish nothing more than for the removal of disguise tags. To me the primary concern that I've heard is that people can then effectively impersonate other characters REAL identities, which IMO is actually a feature not an issue. We'd also probably have to address forgeries in terms of signing documents as that could get a bit out of hand.

A few examples that I see all the time:

• Gear swap on noticing disguise tag to put on spot gear and break disguises. This is standard behavior.
• "Special" interest or suspicion based on disguise tag leading to interrogation/questioning despite otherwise non suspicious behavior. This is often combined with the other as they "run" into detect range to ping the disguise.
• Deductions/grand leaps of logics by other PCs about who is under the disguise without having actually broken the disguise to even know a disguise is being used.

The existence of disguise tags outright prevents a LARGE number of RP avenues that rely on the suspension of belief that in my experience is the exception not the rule.

Removing the tag would require actual attention be paid to mannerisms, details of aesthetics and so on. To actually mimic someone would require careful planning and observation, or very oblivious marks. It would further necessitate actual spycraft like verification phrases and passkeys to authenticate how you're talking to.

Adding this real level of uncertainty would make things a lot more interesting and tricky to navigate IC, which I think would be helpful for the server rather than people knowing OOC it's someone in disguise.

I've yet to hear a compelling argument why we NEED disguise tags that effectively provide more OOC information that this person is in fact lying/hiding something. All it does is invite abuse via metagaming. And metagaming is an ongoing reality in conflict RP.

[perseid]

Seconding Anomandaris' arguments. I also disagree it's technically challenging when we've seen staff in the past discussing that it's feasible. Any argument around how "People can still metagame anyway" is just the same as people saying it wouldn't matter to remove player names from the server list prior to logging in "Because people will find other ways to meta". Doesn't matter, just because we can't make metagaming impossible doesn't mean we should make it easy.

[Anomandaris]

Run a trial like quackers? >:)

[Quizmar]

In my experience this kind of behavior is only common in a certain surface city and I believe that this kind of behavior reflects a larger pattern within that settlement. I go to Andunor and everyone is playing along, responding in step with the queues and information I am providing via my outfit and description, and playing into the discovery and RP. But in a certain surface city people start True Seeing, gear swaps, etc, but only once has it escalated to the point where someone has interrogated me for no reason, and this player broke my disguise via spot and started saying my full character name.

I just don't think the implementation of removing quotations would go over well, paranoia would increase drastically, and the level of suspicion encountered would skyrocket. Do you want to interrogate your friends to find out if its really them? A secret password when ever you meet, every time? Because that's what the implementation would mean, in terms of IC. Paranoia and annoying security measures to account for this.

As I said, the Character name is more than the name, its their full likeness, and I don't like the idea that because arelith has like 30 heads per gender per race that suddenly you can look the exact same as someone, without magic. With magic, that seems more feasible and makes sense RP wise.

I do think that quote-less disguising should be added but limited, and requiring magic. as an epic cookie maybe Epic Spell: Alter Self, which would temporarily allow someone to disguise without quotations, and maybe change racial types, it would need hard limitations, though. maybe 1 min per caster level, or something like that, and be pretty expensive.

[perseid]

In my experience this kind of behavior is only common in a certain surface city and I believe that this kind of behavior reflects a larger pattern within that settlement. I go to Andunor and everyone is playing along, responding in step with the queues and information I am providing via my outfit and description, and playing into the discovery and RP. But in a certain surface city people start True Seeing, gear swaps, etc, but only once has it escalated to the point where someone has interrogated me for no reason, and this player broke my disguise via spot and started saying my full character name.

I just don't think the implementation of removing quotations would go over well, paranoia would increase drastically, and the level of suspicion encountered would skyrocket. Do you want to interrogate your friends to find out if its really them? A secret password when ever you meet, every time? Because that's what the implementation would mean, in terms of IC. Paranoia and annoying security measures to account for this.

I sort of would tbh. My character already has a few different systems for identifying themselves to uncertain peers as a point of rp even with the quotation marks. I think observable examples are only half of the picture though. When you have "" marks my experience has been that people will engage with you differently even if not in a hostile fashion just because they as a player aren't sure what to make of you even though within the context of the situation you shouldn't stand out at all.

[The GrumpyCat]

I've no strong feelings about this- save in cases of prominent pc/npc impersonation.

And I'd like to echo this point:

I just don't think the implementation of removing quotations would go over well, paranoia would increase drastically, and the level of suspicion encountered would skyrocket. Do you want to interrogate your friends to find out if its really them? A secret password when ever you meet, every time? Because that's what the implementation would mean, in terms of IC. Paranoia and annoying security measures to account for this.

As I said, the Character name is more than the name, its their full likeness, and I don't like the idea that because arelith has like 30 heads per gender per race that suddenly you can look the exact same as someone, without magic. With magic, that seems more feasible and makes sense RP wise.

And I'd like to add to it with the first part - keep in mind that this is presuming everyone is NOT metagaming. It's just as -if not far more likely, that people would just end up discording others and going 'Haya, is guy I'm talking to actually you?'
And frankly, as DMs, we've no way of easily telling when that's happening.

The second point (also very valid) also doesn't take account of the sort of impersonations I think would be most likely: Impersonations for PvP.
If Alis Dionadair-Grantz comes up, fully armoured, fully warded, and says 'Die evil scum' then begins PvP. then I'm honestly not going to have time to assess if it's them or not by their headset (even if not helmed they could be so warded up to the nines it's impossible to tell within a few seconds, for me anyway.)
Such encounters could ruin OOC reputation, as well as IC reputation, especially as we arn't generally transparent about our cases. In this case, Alis's player might become known as an awful PvPer, a murder hobo who goes around just killing low level pcs. And that kinda sucks for them.

Further more, this could be used to conceal rule breaks, or make it appear rulebreaks are happening. E.g. if in the above example whoever was disguises as 'Alis' didn't even bother with any pre rp PvP.

Now - I'm 99,9% sure that in such cases, we'd easily be able to tell the truth of the matter. Our logs do deliniate between disguised and none disguised as is. Still, there'd be a lot of reports sent in (of both rulebreaks and susspected rule breaks) - and I can see it adding significantly to our case load.

That's not touching on the possiblity of more wierd and serious situations.

E.g. - The Chancellor of Cordor coming up to your pc and saying you are evicted from your home. That you however have time to release it, and to take your things out. You try a spot check, but get no where. Maybe you arn't even sure about the headset of the chancellor - you don't often look at it. Maybe they wear a helm. You release your home for them only to discover it was a ruse. How do you, as a player, feel about that?
I'm all for in game consequence stuff, but that seems really harsh to me.
(or again, more likely, I think it'd just encourage people to have a good network of ooc communication, so they can check via discord in important chats if someone was real or not.)

Getting rid of the " "? Maybe. I'm ok with the idea for it as a trial run. But I feel strongly that impersonations of named pcs/nps should be dissalowed if so.

[Nazmina]

Maybe remove quote from name tags, but put a IC this person has a disguise note in their char bio?

Something like a colored text saying "something seems off about this person", maybe make it only show up if you are somewhat close to that person.

That way you still can know someone is in disguise without them standing out as soon as you see them.

[Kythana]

I would love the quotes to go away. The impersonation aspect feels a little overblown to me, in the same way that quackers/typing indicators gets an overreaction about potential abuse.

Those are things that can be solved through combination of:

• A good implementation, and.
• Clearly defined rules that are enforced.

If someone is just low-effort taking your name and bashing lowbies on repeat until you get established as a mass murderer, that's poor form, and should be stomped out quickly.

But someone taking the time to examine your mannerisms, clothing, general personality and schedule, and pull off some cool impersonation?

That's amazing rp, in my mind. And the potential far outweighs the downsides, imho.

While I understand that there are plenty of people willing to suspend disbelief and pretend the quotes aren't there, I find difficulty doing so. When you're fooled ooc, you're fooled ic; The reaction is a lot more genuine and the rp comes across way more natural.

The Chancellor of Cordor coming up to your pc and saying you are evicted from your home. That you however have time to release it, and to take your things out. You try a spot check, but get no where. Maybe you arn't even sure about the headset of the chancellor - you don't often look at it. Maybe they wear a helm. You release your home for them only to discover it was a ruse. How do you, as a player, feel about that?

I would love that. It would allow for conflict oriented rp that isn't centered the actual mechanical part of pvp. Being able to slander and defame notable figures by taking their name and icly antagonizing other characters is a good thing.

It would force the chancellor and their government to take a hard stance to shutting down government official impersonation, and create rp for the guards, administration and citizens. It also creates a ton of cool rp for bad actors wanting to sabotage a settlement from within, without resorting to just-> Place a contract -> scrygank.

It additionally allows an advantage right back at the impersonated character. In the event where they actually did do something nasty as that character, the fallback excuse can just be, "Wasn't me, it was an imposter!"

Would some players abuse it?

Sure. In the same way that many other gameplay elements are abused. But does the potential for something having bad elements outweigh its implementation? I don't think so, given how Quakers turned out.

[Salasker]

The possibility of OOC problems is far more extensive than any benefit, in my opinion; Grumpy outlined only a few possibilities.

Messages, letters, PvP reports are just the start. For instance, you'd also have to say good-bye to character portraits, or find some way of changing them...

[Perplexia]

seeing as we've already mentioned the bogeyman that is potential OOC abuse; this change would have some pretty severe implications when it comes to obfuscated player names

essentially, there would be zero way of knowing if you're sending a tell to the player you think you are

the disguised player wouldn't necessarily need to be acting in bad faith either, they could simply receive a tell from somebody who saw the character's name on the player list and didn't think twice about it

[AstralUniverse]

We cant do without ooc disguise indicators aka quotation marks or previously (disguised) tag, for the same reason that we get a report of disguise breaking attempts (and an even bolder red colored report when the disguise is broken). It's impossible for the player to tell if they're being meta-gamed and file reports without it, and it's not really enforcible for the DM team without players being able to report potential meta-gaming. That's just the reality of the system as it's currently implemented.

[Joe46]

I'm going to play devil's advocate and say Bluff/disguising is powerful enough as it is. I don't think making impersonation easier will make things better, in fact what you all suggest sounds like a comedy skit to me. Do any of you people realize how hard it is to steal someone's identity and looks? "Ah yes, trist me citizen, I am the chancellor you know we'll" says a squeaky voice from the helmet

On a more serious note, Bluff/perform vs spot is already in favour of the former. Spot is harder to gear for, has way less buffs enhancing you and in equal conditions you have a 25% chance to actually break someone's disguise (one to God roll them, one to break if they stick around).

Should you break it, then it's as easy as the person changing disguises again and you're back on relying on a 25% chance IF they stick around for half an hour or more

[Joe46]

As an aside, no, true sight does not help at all at popping disguises unless you as the would be disguiser are polymorph. Then the giant bonus to your disguise DC is negated but that's it. That +15 spot you get from TS does NOT help anyone pop disguises.

About gear swapping, while I agree it's meta... It's a consequence of the system. A disguiser will always walk around with their gear to get the best possible score when they disguise. A spotter only becomes "useful" when a disguiser isn't around but you never know when one isn't around. In these interactions it's always the disguiser that "decides" when the DC check happens and unless they have little knowledge they'll always decide to go for this confrontation when they are ready.

A spotter must either: always wear their gear on at all times while a disguiser only wears it when they need to, or never wear it at all because logically why would you switch it simply because you see quotation marks?

[The GrumpyCat]

Another issue to consider (and again, my issue with this is mostly about Impersonation not over all disguise, but this is something that nags at me a ittle) Is won't this make the 48 hour rule harder to enforce?

If as a Player you get killed by Tony one day, and then a few hours by Bob - and there's no sign of disguise usage (because you've a low spot) How do you know, or not know, if that was the same person in different disguises, killing you over and over again?

Or how would you know even if just the rp rule was broken - if Bob didn't murder you (or be murdered by you) and didn't just go back to you and start RPing with you?

Like, a lot of this stuff we depend on Players reporting honestly? So if the players don't know... quite often we don't?

[-XXX-]

If as a Player you get killed by Tony one day, and then a few hours by Bob - and there's no sign of disguise usage (because you've a low spot) How do you know, or not know, if that was the same person in different disguises, killing you over and over again?

Or how would you know even if just the rp rule was broken - if Bob didn't murder you (or be murdered by you) and didn't just go back to you and start RPing with you?

Isn't this kinda already the case? -disguise scrambles player names: all you can tell right now is that one disguised character did this and then another disguised character did that, but how do you verify that it was the same person behind both characters from a player client?

While I don't condone metagaming, IMO disguise enjoys too many safety measures - to a point where it makes reporting bad behavior more difficult.
Furthermore it's a feature that ought to be defeated eventually by design to progress RP narratives.
Unbeatable disguises do not advance storytelling - all they do at certain point is provide a perpetual shield from consequences.

---

People get mad whenever a character with "" around their name gets treated slightly differently, but I'd be surprised if the very same people did't walk around with open player list to get a "known spotbot logged in" alert in advance.

[perseid]

If as a Player you get killed by Tony one day, and then a few hours by Bob - and there's no sign of disguise usage (because you've a low spot) How do you know, or not know, if that was the same person in different disguises, killing you over and over again?

Or how would you know even if just the rp rule was broken - if Bob didn't murder you (or be murdered by you) and didn't just go back to you and start RPing with you?

Isn't this kinda already the case? -disguise scrambles player names: all you can tell right now is that one disguised character did this and then another disguised character did that, but how do you verify that it was the same person behind both characters from a player client?

While I don't condone metagaming, IMO disguise enjoys too many safety measures - to a point where it makes reporting bad behavior more difficult.
Furthermore it's a feature that ought to be defeated eventually by design to progress RP narratives.
Unbeatable disguises do not advance storytelling - all they do at certain point is provide a perpetual shield from consequences.

---

People get mad whenever a character with "" around their name gets treated slightly differently, but I'd be surprised if the very same people did't walk around with open player list to get a "known spotbot logged in" alert in advance.

I think this would have the opposite of the intended consequences even if I agree disguise is a bit safe (though I'd also argue disguise is safe because so few people want to buiild spotters). Right now disguise at least creates interactions where they wouldn't otherwise exist between certain classes of characters. Introducing any kind of guaranteed outing mechanic is just going to create a dynamic where organizations structure in a way that drags its feet long enough at the early stages to ensure that by the time a person can become relevant they're a legal outing target which kills things like infiltration rp in favor of things like shallow scouting runs to scan the town boards into the chatlog and leave.

[Cthuletta]

So I've played characters who were perma-disguised or used them often for sure, and I kinda see both sides of the fence here.
The first being any disguised character who goes into... any place, you are examined almost right away by EVERYONE. Those quotations are presenting a challenge and you get examined repeatedly. People want very much to know who exactly they're talking to and if they're even supposed to be in where-ever place they walk into. While as when you're not disguised, you could have completely changed your bio to 'This person looks like a chicken' and nobody will notice for a couple days. I know this because I've done this with a temporary disguise bio completely different from my character's true identity accidentally remaining for several days because I forgot to change it back until I got a tell several days after that event asking about it. Oops!

That said, I want to use GrumpyCat's example of impersonation of a Chancellor telling your character that they're evicted. If there was no way to tell they were disguised, I'd be rather upset when I inevitably find out that wasn't the real Chancellor and I just lost my quarter and probably a LOT of stuff because I can't carry all those fixtures. Finding a quarter in settlements can be extremely difficult, especially when you like the one you currently have. Given the existence of bookshelves and storage, that's also a mechanical loss I'm taking. I'll put my hands up and admit I'd probably ask the actual player of the real Chancellor 'Is this for real?' before taking that loss. That's not even touching on the variety of ways this could be used with abuse and rule breaking in PvP or otherwise. Would hopefully be a minority of players who'd do that, but still a factor to consider.

I think there's a happy medium to be found here. The quotation marks are a big blaring red arrow sign of deceit occurring. Could be nefarious, could be innocent but the sign is still there and hard to ignore. When you examine a character with those quotations, you get a notice that you either failed to break the disguise, or 'This person is actually so-and-so'. My personal ideal would be get rid of those quotations marks, but keep the bio/combat log notice of failing/succeeding a disguise check. ICly, this means you'd have to REALLY take a look at that person to know if you succeed anyway. If you aren't looking that closely (examining the bio) that must mean they're RPing well enough that your character hasn't noticed anything odd so you don't think to do so. On the same token, it still provides feedback on the OOC front in the case of a rule break.
That's how I'd handle it, in any case.

[Anomandaris]

Some good counterpoints and very valid considerations relative to the idea of removing the quotations. In some way I kind of see them as potential "design requirements" rather than show stoppers. As someone else said, a good implementation and clear rules could solve (in theory) most of these issues related to messaging mechanics, letters etc. If we could implement a system that reduced meta of disguise tags, while addressing these issues, that might be a great outcome.

When we talk about impersonation for PvP or other purposes, it bears reminding that this is possible today. One of two dynamics may occur.

1) Only a disguised person can be impersonated effectively, given their disguise persona already has quotations, making them more vulnerable to impersonation. FWIW while I do see this occasionally, it's not that common. It takes a lot of effort and motivation, and is also extremely risky depending on what you're doing through this impersonation. But it does beg the question why this double standard should exist making disguised personas more vulnerable for impersonation.

2) An impersonation is attempted for a non-disguised persona, and due to the existence of quotation marks, there is zero suspension of belief. Intuitively many people know this will "never work" so they don't even bother, except for the few newer, perhaps naively optimistic RPers on the server. This is telling.

I can see the value of not permitting the impersonation of named NPCs, or heck NPCs in general.

At the end of the day, increasing team ADMIN load via investigation/reports is not ideal and should be carefully considered. I'm not sure this will actually have that effect however, given many of the potential abuses are already possible or present in one form or another. Not to mention how many reports are probably already made around disguise meta that is driven from tag adjacent outcomes. Someone made the point that mechanics and tools always present opportunities for abuse, we can take the "that's why we can't have nice things" approach or trust the community (with oversight) to use the tools in a generally compliant manner, rule breakers excepted.

There are also some dubious assertions here.

1) Disguise gear, at its highest efficacy level, is not combat viable. You may sacrifice Parry AC to have an offhand, you may sacrifice AC for (FOIG special costume gear), or simply not be able to dweomer to parity for saves, ability score, skills and so on. So the idea that disguise gear is somehow "always on" and only spot gear needs to be swapped out is just not true. They both require tradeoffs and management.

2) The idea that disguise and detection are misaligned in terms of balance to begin with or "disguise is already too powerful." Getting your disguise broken can be a character defining moment that forever changes the RP and everything about your character's day to day. The risk factors related to infiltration are tremendous. ICly you're facing death, torture, abject failure of character goals, imprisonment and a number of grisly ends.

There are also sure fire ways to deliver consequences without breaking the disguise check with spot. Having high bluff/perform does not make you magically immune to consequences. You still have to not get caught, not die, not slip up and tell people who you are, not slip up and get scried talking about certain things, not get caught changing, rotating through different outfits and personas if one gets burned, and so on. It requires a LOT of behind the scenes effort/RP to keep up, it's not an "instant win social/conflict RP button."

I'm not sure how it would play out to be honest. I'm clearly of the mind it could be a positive change, but so much is based on speculation of how the community may or may not respond to the new dynamic. IMO this is a great example of where a limited test deployment could serve to validate or better inform these hypothesis.

[Quizmar]

So I've played characters who were perma-disguised or used them often for sure, and I kinda see both sides of the fence here.
The first being any disguised character who goes into... any place, you are examined almost right away by EVERYONE. Those quotations are presenting a challenge and you get examined repeatedly. People want very much to know who exactly they're talking to and if they're even supposed to be in where-ever place they walk into.

The quotation marks are a big blaring red arrow sign of deceit occurring. Could be nefarious, could be innocent but the sign is still there and hard to ignore.

I'm not a fan of how much attention can be drawn to the presence of the quotes, but in my experience as a perma-disguise player, this is only really an issue in a certain surface city and as I stated earlier has to do with other issues there. Still, I don't really have that many problems if I'm dressed appropriately for the area.

The quotes are not necessarily indicative of deceit, there are many players who are perma disguised but prominent. A smart wizard will hide their real names so they can't be scryed. Maybe someone has people after them? Maybe they have backstory reasons why. There are legitimate reasons to use them

[Agog_fr]

I'm also in favor of removing the quotation marks. The fewer OOC means there are to detect a disguise, the greater the immersion of players will be, and the more RP means will be required to guard against infiltration.

If such a change were made, the Team would need to resolve the following issues:

• How do we manage the sending of magic messengers if two PCs can have the same name? The same goes for bank transfers. A radical solution would be to make it impossible to take the name of another PC, but that would be a pity as it would remove any impersonation RP.

• How do we deal with the fact that today's super-specialist Disguise PCs are impossible to recognize unless you're lucky on a roll?

• Wouldn't it be better if the Disguise detection roll were no longer manual, when inspecting a PC, but automatic? Today, we only inspect people with quotation marks. Tomorrow, we'd potentially have to inspect everyone, which would be tedious.

[ArelithMarketCrash]

Removing them is not worth it. If they are gone, it will increase OOC suspicion and efforts to confirm someone is who they think they are, like some have mentioned that people will be messaged over discord, player login checks will be more common, making annoying unreadable descriptions to make it hard to impersonate them might become a thing (and there are plenty huge unreadable descriptions already).

Then you have reporting problems, if Johnny Lobster is impersonated and the impersonator breaks rules, people will report the real John Lobster if they can't pierce the disguise, making more work for DMs who shouldn't have to spend hours upon hours investigating multiple people some of which may not even be involved at all.

The OOC reputation is also a thing as mentioned by GrumpyCat, if the impersonator is a borderline griefer while staying just within the rules enough that they get away with ruining the fun of others for long enough before a DM takes notice, Johnny Lobster's player may get a reputation of being a griefer.

Even funnier, Johnny Lobster could pretend to be an impersonator and grief other people, then pretend he had been impersonated. This can technically happen already but with the removal of quotation marks there would be no easy way to verify.

There's also the funny fact people don't typically re-examine characters they are familiar, the quotation marks are a small incentive to check that. Without them, it is very much possible that people get away impersonating others that don't bother re-examining often with a mighty score of 0 bluff. If not, it will create a culture of suspicion where everyone is constantly examining someone else in the slight off chance they are disguised, not a good stress to have.

[ThisIsNotADrill]

Get rid of them. Most of the time, when I see a disguised character enter any place, people start casting spells to improve their perception or start treating this character with undue suspicion. Players see quotations, players optimize to counter, and disguised characters get targeted. And why wouldn't they? Games have conditioned players to be reactive to this kind of presented information.

There are multiple instances now that I've heard someone proclaim that someone is disguised with zero justification for it. Often from characters in a position of authority (such as law enforcement).

When asked for an explanation, it typically goes like so:

'how do you know they were disguised?'

'well they avoided me so they must be in a disguise'

or

'how do you know they were disguised?'

'well they were acting (read: standing around doing nothing) suspiciously so they must be in a disguise'

I'd like to communicate my respect to anyone who has the grit to engage with the disguise system, because a few interactions like this have entirely put me off my feed.

Better to prioritize the very real metagaming that does take place around the disguise system over the hypothetical potential for abuse that may happen.

Edit: This should of course also coincide with removing 'you failed to break a disguise' console messages.

[ReverentBlade]

I would not feel safe on an OOC level playing on a server where anyone could be everyone without a way for me to tell short of a specialized spotter built. Immersion and conflict and espionage are great and lovely RP tools, but the atmosphere such a change would create would demand a level of paranoia and "always on" I'm not prepared to give this game.

I humor the vast majority of disguise attempts I run into, but there are a lot of Jokers that just want to watch RP circles burn "because alignment" (or whatever contrived background reason to otherwise validate IC but troll-y behavior the PLAYER is gonna do anyway) and being able to spot that OOCly on some level and adapt is a necessary sanity buffer.

Not all metagaming is strictly negative, and the best community members bend character -quite often- to facilitate the growth of, or share room with, budding characters, or otherwise advance narrative. Some "self defense" metagaming is absolutely required to protect factions and playgroups from the dangers of simply being on the internet. No matter how much immersion we try to generate, the truth of the matter is that we are still a video game on the web.

My own experiences have left me feeling like the DM team is unequipped to handle the task of protecting the community from bullying behavior completely on their own, and I hope that observation isn't taken as insult to competence or intention, but rather acknowledging the reality of limited time and tools.

[MissEvelyn]

Removing quotation marks is what I'm for as well, but not entirely on its own. There have been some really valid and good reasons listed here by my fellow players to not get rid of those quotation marks; some very good concerns have been raised.

With that in mind, here's some ideas that potentially could solve those issues:
• Remove quotation marks.
• Force -notells on with -disguise, without a way to disable it while disguised.
• Due to avoidance of public services, disguised creatures cannot recieive speedy messengers, cannot interact with quarter/shop signs, and cannot vote or change citizenship statuses. Effectively, they're taking pains to not be recognized.
• Examining a disguised PC no longer prompts that you failed to recognize them. Successful recognitions still show up
• God-saves no longer turn a failure into a save. Instead, upon a failure and upon triggering the disguise god-save, a false identity will be 'revealed' to the successful spotter (using NWNs own random name generator).
...
• Bonus: When disguising as another player character's name, there is a 5% chance that a speedy sent to the real PC is instead sent to the disguised PC, if they're both online.