Arelith

Curve wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 3:01 pm I hear you when it comes to hard IC evidence. But, I don't buy it. You have to suspend disbelief (temporarily allow oneself to believe something that isn't true, especially in order to enjoy a work of fiction) with many things on Arelith or else you risk falling into a weird place where you are taking things far too literally and ruining the fun of the game for yourself.

The problem isn't myself. I try to RP around the consequences, I keep a healthy fear of death, and I try to inject the uncertainty that someone might not return whenever I RP.

The problem is *everyone else*. Specifically if you're in an RP.. I don't wanna use the word "event", but an RP happening where someone just got bashed and decapitated, there will inevitably be 5-6 people out of the crowd of 20 that will react exactly in that way. And time and time again they will be proven right, as next day the PC that had been mutilated and decapitated will show up seeking revenge. Kayfabe only works if everyone's doing it.

Heck, I witnessed the exact scenario just yesterday, outside of Cordor. Nearly everyone present were a who's who of Arelith's most famous PCs, and the obliteration of one of the longest standing PCs before their very eyes was met with "well, he's gonna be upset in the morning, we better get ready for when he comes back with his allies".

Ninjimmy wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 1:20 pm

-XXX- wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 12:18 pm Victim being able to implicate their killer not only renders the overwhelming majority of PvP encounters irrelevant, but also actively punishes the winner in many cases.

... Still slightly devil's advocate but, even with memory loss, if the victim ISN'T able to implicate their killer it's only because the killer or any witness don't talk about it any point, so the memory loss way ALSO renders the overwhelming majority of PvP irrelevant since the event is largely jettisoned from continuity.

Not explicitly stating that "the gods brought me back" might go a long way towards "fading to black" when it comes to matters of character death and resurrection.

The moment we get characters acknowlidging respawns IC is when all conflict devolves into:

A) team openly evil vs. team openly good group PvP action with minimal one-liner token RP
B) shy tenative "it's complicated" kind of maybe-conflict RP where everyone bends their characters just to avoid PvP at all costs (since it represents a losing proposition regardless of the actual encounter's outcome).

I've reacted ICly to killing a character by taking measures to stop them from returning. Giving them rites, trying to set their soul at "peace" and monitoring the body to see if it fades to dust. I've expressed IC frustration at the impermanence of death on the lands. I've put IC work into doing things to find ways to seal away things, or work with the players of characters to help give them a satisfying ending if they are considering rolling/shelving.

I've been ridiculed and attacked for these things ICly and OOCly.

It breaks verisimilitude to pretend like simply killing is a guaranteed solution to anything. There are mountains and mountains of of IC evidence to suggest otherwise. Death is extremely unpleasant and should be avoided and people are free to react to it in their own way. I don't think the issue is memory loss, I think it's that there's no enforced proper method of recognizing the impact of death.

If someone dies so much that them coming back all the time starts to make rp and consequences weird, report them. MoD's have been placed for this.

Act like death is permanent. Acting otherwise is much more detrimental.

If people give you crap IC, whatever. RP it. Culture changes by people being the change they want to see. If people give you crap OOC for it? Who cares, they're being dumb.

So many problems come from well-meaning people trying to please uncool people.

I've always rp'd it as depends on how quick the death was will determine how much I might remember. If I'm talking to someone and suddenly get 2 shot in the back and die, I usually rp it as I heard a noise behind me then nothing. If we have a long arguement and then a fight breaks out, I figure I would remember alot more. I was arguing with so and so we drew swords and fought.

But considering the horrors the average pc seems in Arelith, I can understand why someone dying isn't always a big deal. On average just doing writs think of how much slaughter someone is exposed to, so it's not right to say there is something wrong everytime they seem some one killed or beheaded if they don't freak out. My current PC hates to see the dead desecrated, and thinks there something very wrong with people who do it. My Garagos pc, loved it. Hack your opponent up and rejoice. So every pc will react differently. Also she thinks we are in some odd plane where the gods are playing with us, which explains why death doesn't mean death.

This is not a solution but it might help.

Make it so bashed corpses disappear normally after a while, or they can be cleaned up.

There is no reason a dead body would become a permanent fixture of the land either way forcing everyone to know this is the spot X got killed at like if it was a sign, except a sign could be destroyed.

It just encourages both bashing people in places on purpose to achieve this effect, maximum exposure to the fact that someone got killed and you will see them walking around probably in either ten minutes or 24hs at best, and/or the breaking of RP by having them inevitable walk around the same place because they got killed at a friendly place and their assailant went back to their own territory.

I keep walking about places where people have gotten clearly killed thinking what does everyone get out of it, other than my character being exposed to the corpses of people he'll see walking just fine in minutes or hours anyways.

maybe those people shouldn't be walking around like they're just fine if they died 10 minutes ago

Zavandar wrote: Wed Jul 07, 2021 12:16 am maybe those people shouldn't be walking around like they're just fine if they died 10 minutes ago

Watchful Glare wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 10:49 pm This is not a solution but it might help.

Make it so bashed corpses disappear normally after a while, or they can be cleaned up.

There is no reason a dead body would become a permanent fixture of the land either way forcing everyone to know this is the spot X got killed at like if it was a sign, except a sign could be destroyed.

It just encourages both bashing people in places on purpose to achieve this effect, maximum exposure to the fact that someone got killed and you will see them walking around probably in either ten minutes or 24hs at best, and/or the breaking of RP by having them inevitable walk around the same place because they got killed at a friendly place and their assailant went back to their own territory.

I keep walking about places where people have gotten clearly killed thinking what does everyone get out of it, other than my character being exposed to the corpses of people he'll see walking just fine in minutes or hours anyways.

People need to stop RPing that "death is temporary here"
Pretty sure that's against the rules. Pretty sure people get MoDs for that.

Why has it become the norm now? I'm seeing it non-stop in game, and I'm seeing it all through-out this thread.

Way more people than I'm comfortable making reports for.

Hazard wrote: Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:14 am People need to stop RPing that "death is temporary here"
Pretty sure that's against the rules. Pretty sure people get MoDs for that.

Why has it become the norm now? I'm seeing it non-stop in game, and I'm seeing it all through-out this thread.

Way more people than I'm comfortable making reports for.

Tell them it's blasphemy to take the gods intervention for granted like that, as if they know for sure someone will return after death. I've seen people get kicked out of factions for saying stuff like that. Even if they dress it in an immersive IC excuse, it's still cheap.

Hazard wrote: Wed Jul 07, 2021 2:14 am People need to stop RPing that "death is temporary here"
Pretty sure that's against the rules. Pretty sure people get MoDs for that.

Why has it become the norm now? I'm seeing it non-stop in game, and I'm seeing it all through-out this thread.

Way more people than I'm comfortable making reports for.

Yeah, it's been happening a lot and I've been watching people try to normalize it in discord, too.

I personally lend a lot of weight to death. To respond more directly to the OP, I'll often barely get on a character for like 3 days if they get killed (but I also try my hardest to NOT die). I also tend to not remember very much upon revival, but those memories may/may not come back with time depending on which I think would be more interesting. Immediately rezzing to fire off 5 speedies of "x killed me" is not on my list of "interesting".

Not respecting death has created some really cheap narratives. Fear of death is the impetus behind so many plots, and in a setting like this, is absolutely essential. I'm sad that what Hazard is saying there is becoming so true. When the protagonist (or even antagonist!) of a story starts to go, "Well they'll just respawn anyway," in only the most minimally IC way possible, it leads to stagnation.

I won't overstep by naming specific instances, but this is something I have witnessed in every settlement in only the past month or two, and I have also seen it supported in discord several times. While I don't think I'd advocate for giving everyone MoD's (too double-edged for me to be comfortable with), I do think that giving people MoD's would solve the problem (even if it may create new ones). That's something worth thinking about. Where is the happy medium between encouraging people to respect death IC and mechanically enforced perma-death?

Wherever it is, I think we're in a worse place on the spectrum now than we have been for a long time.

Seeing that it wasn’t “enforceable” as a rule kind of confuses me, as I’ve seen much bigger RP communities over the years have this rule in place for years and years. That being said, I don’t blame them either. Would probably add more of a headache and workload to the already busy admins/DM’s.

Brandon Steel wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2021 10:47 pm Seeing that it wasn’t “enforceable” as a rule kind of confuses me, as I’ve seen much bigger RP communities over the years have this rule in place for years and years. That being said, I don’t blame them either. Would probably add more of a headache and workload to the already busy admins/DM’s.

Arelith is a much bigger community with a much larger playerbase than other servers. That's why the enforcement part is problematic here, because in such a large scale you'll get tons of workload to understand what a PC should or shouldnt know in every individual case and very often the result of this type of DM supervision ends with protests about favorism. So it's really not as simple as in smaller communities.

Haroshia wrote: Tue Jul 06, 2021 5:16 pmI don't think the issue is memory loss, I think it's that there's no enforced proper method of recognizing the impact of death.

Before enforcement comes into play, there needs to be an official statement of how impactful death is, but there isn't, and there never has been. All that we know about the staffs opinions on death's meaning has been culled from random, disorganized forum posts which have often been inconsistent. There's no rule about the RP impact of death on the main page, or the wiki, or in the module as far as I've see. The only consistent "guidance" I've seen has been "RP death in a way that doesn't break immersion", but that's too nebulous a statement to be useful. Allowing each player to set the boundaries of a rule based on their personal preferences and beliefs creates an incongruency of metrics which wreaks havoc when differing ideologies interact within the game world. It's hard to create a level playing field when most of the participants aren't even playing the same sport.

Welcome to my decade long crusade. Try to manage your expectations.

I kinda think there needs to be a sweet spot.

RPing that death is the final end when every damn one of us gets, at minimum, 9 respawns after a fatal confrontation is silly and immersion breaking because it's adding a false weight to the confrontation elements. It IS temporary, pretending it isn't is far more immersion damaging because it adds a false melodrama every other week scratch that, DAY, where someone dies and then they turn up alive again. It's like a bad soap opera, whether that's after a couple days or couple weeks. If we took it seriously there'd be non-stop funerals.

Equally, RPing that death is a 3 minute teleport that gives you a hangover is also silly because dying is a traumatic experience and the enforced death sickness is a part of that, like you ought to be a wreck. Death is not a nice experience and there should be some element of concern that this is the one they can't come back from, that this time they've reached too far and this is going to be the one they won't make it back from even if, odds are they will.

There HAS to be a sweet spot between these two points where death is something to be avoided and feared while also acknowledging that, yes, maybe it isn't so permanent here but don't take it for granted because Kelemvor has a limit.

I mean, hell, we could spin a Tomb of Annihilation-esque story out of it.

I agree with that. It's hard to tell people to treat death like Shakespearean drama when we play like we're in Marvel comic books in every other respect. Especially when PVP is so much more casual and rampant than it ever was before. I think one reason a lot of players don't take death seriously is because their killer didn't take killing them seriously. If the fight is just some random squabble over a property sign or who gets to grind where, who's going to treat that loss with the weight death supposedly deserves?

I would much rather PVP and PVP losses on Arelith be modified to be "beaten within an inch of your life" myself to justify why you come back so quickly and true death be saved for big story moments that matter. It wouldn't solve all of the problems but it would at least be better to RP around day to day.

The problem isn't so much the acknowledgement that sometimes people come back from death. It is the passive nonchalant acceptance that you can't kill people that seems to be a super widespread sentiment among PCs. Before I could quietly avoid engaging in grand plots with PCs that declared that sentiment, but nowadays it is too widespread to avoid and still have RP.

There is a difference between acknowledging a possibility and accepting it as a near certainty.

It gets particularly immersion breaking when it is done in settlements. Slavers/hexers/cursers/evil scientists/people who speak in the theater get leniently exiled/pariahd rather than punished because "You know as well as I that death isn't permanent here".
In fact I think people are relaying too much on the coded toys at their disposal (exile, etc), where they are meant to support roleplaying efforts, not be the extent of it.

I know that people who have Law Enforcement or Crusading characters get exposed to a lot of respawning and recurring villainry/goodguyry because they get all the reports of everyone's shenanigans, but that is one of the challenges of playing a conflict oriented, well informed character imo it is not an excuse to be disrespectful to the other players attempt to create a story- Which i think treating them as a respawning annoyance, is.

Would enforced memory loss help this? I don't know. But I do think some enforcement is needed to shift the culture.

AstralUniverse wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 6:24 am

Brandon Steel wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2021 10:47 pm Seeing that it wasn’t “enforceable” as a rule kind of confuses me, as I’ve seen much bigger RP communities over the years have this rule in place for years and years. That being said, I don’t blame them either. Would probably add more of a headache and workload to the already busy admins/DM’s.

Arelith is a much bigger community with a much larger playerbase than other servers. That's why the enforcement part is problematic here, because in such a large scale you'll get tons of workload to understand what a PC should or shouldnt know in every individual case and very often the result of this type of DM supervision ends with protests about favorism. So it's really not as simple as in smaller communities.

There is much bigger communities on different games that have this rule in place.

On NWN? No. Let’s say GTA as the first example that comes to my mind? Yes.

Brandon Steel wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 2:29 pm

AstralUniverse wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 6:24 am

Brandon Steel wrote: Thu Jul 08, 2021 10:47 pm Seeing that it wasn’t “enforceable” as a rule kind of confuses me, as I’ve seen much bigger RP communities over the years have this rule in place for years and years. That being said, I don’t blame them either. Would probably add more of a headache and workload to the already busy admins/DM’s.

Arelith is a much bigger community with a much larger playerbase than other servers. That's why the enforcement part is problematic here, because in such a large scale you'll get tons of workload to understand what a PC should or shouldnt know in every individual case and very often the result of this type of DM supervision ends with protests about favorism. So it's really not as simple as in smaller communities.

There is much bigger communities on different games that have this rule in place.

On NWN? No. Let’s say GTA as the first example that comes to my mind? Yes.

HOLD THE PHONE, there are RP servers for GTA V with more players than Arelith?
Please tell me that's real

Ninjimmy wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 2:49 pm HOLD THE PHONE, there are RP servers for GTA V with more players than Arelith?
Please tell me that's real

There is, yep.

I'm not going to retread the reason that I explicitly made the 'Memory of Death' thing a choice, that's already been more than discussed above, but I can see this conversation has expanded into the 'Consequences of Death' discussion, and how that plays into PvP. I can't give any firm policy answers, or any kind of magic solution that will make this work, but I can give my own analysis, and in doing so hopefully explain why I find it such a tricky issue to approach from a development standpoint.

So, basically when we talk about the 'consequences of death' we are basically asking the question, 'Are they taken too lightly?' but there are very much two perspectives here, that of the killer, and that of the victim.

The victim, is empowered by death as a minor inconveneince, and something they can choose to remember, and thus respond to, even in defeat. They will repeatedly poke the bear, knowing that they have little to lose, save for having their pride damaged in defeat.

The killer, is empowered by a harsher policy. They get to truly 'punish' the other character, either by forcing on them the mechanical consequences of death, or by never facing consequences for their actions, because the wounded party isn't allowed to respond in RP.

The former, can give rise to an atmosphere of pointless PvP - life is cheap, and whether one is throwing it away, or taking it from someone, there is little incentive to take it seriously.

The latter can encourage PvP as the ultimate tool, allowing powerbuilt charactes of a higher level to decide who does or does not get to play unhindered. This would frequently become OOC when we had harsher death penalties, with players literally trying to use it to drive others from the server.

I've played long enough to hear all kinds of possible solutions, a reputation system that punishes the attacker, a permanent subdual setting, restricting PvP itself. THey all have significant drawbacks, and all come at a cost.

Here are a few of the conculusions I have reached, though none of them is the 'answer' players may be seeking.

- Permanent subdual (never-death) would likely make PvP be treated even more lightly.

- Forgotten Realms is not the real world, death is painful, but not often final, and the afterlife is a confirmed fact, as such, we shouldn't expect (or desire) it to be treated with the finality as we might.

- Conflict between characters is far more interesting when not settled by PvP

- As a developer, if we encourage PvP resolutions, with systems such as the old settlement 'war' mechanic, or the current assassination function, or simply by having the loser pay a significant price in XP, we will see more of it.

- PvP, in moderation can be great fun, but can absolutely become stale and tired when repeated every second day.

- Many players level to 30 as fast as possible, so as to join the merry-go-round of relentless PvP

- For most, winning is far more fun than losing.

- PvP continues to cause sore OOC feelings.

- Level 30s start fighting because they've got nothing better to do with that investment.

Overall, I guess? I'd just rather players didn't desire to shut others down quite as frequently as they do, and to concentrate on story and atmosphere, to allow other space to play and realise their concepts without quickly trying to grind them into so much paste. I have no answers here, beyond a hope that players and DMs work together to do so something more interesting with this world.

I definitely feel like PvP has rocketed up in prevalence in the last year or so. It wasn’t uncommon before, but there seemed to be more seriousness around it, leading to less quick-draw violence.

Unfortunately, a lot of the ooc reasoning I see in discords for this, are that people get tired with seeing the same antagonists (good or evil, depending on your PC), rarely changing their attitude towards their own mortality when they are defeated (note defeated, not killed ). This results in the attitude of ‘well there’s not much point capturing or warning this person, so let’s just kill them fast’ - kind of behaviour. I’ve seen this IC and OOC.

We are free as IG said, to some extent, to decide what the deaths of our PCs means to them. However, if your PC is dying in the same circumstances repeatedly, and your PC isn’t taking away any new fears/lessons from it, then you could probably stand to change that. It could be that your career as a highwayman ends, or a priest questions their faith or a knight goes through an arc of feeling afraid of combat for some time.

If my character is either subdued or killed in PvP, I will often add a visible injury to their description or make a drastic change to their outlook and reactions to things around them. You could do this from non-PvP deaths, but that might be a little too often in the levelling process.

The choice is yours, but it’s definitely true that the more death-fearing characters seem more deep.

Poor winners can be a problem too though. People get tired of the same maxed out characters dominating every conflict and doing things like going to PVP shotgun style ASAP instead of building something interesting, for example. Like I said before if your death means nothing to your killer or anyone else that doesn't inspire you to RP a long recuperation and lingering after effects.

I am not saying this is the +only+ problem but it is a problem that there is rarely any weight given to the act of killing as well as being killed. I don't think I've ever seem anyone show guilt or remorse or questioning whether they're doing the right thing when their body count piles up regardless of alignment. Shouldn't a paladin or good cleric at least be wondering if everyone they kill is truly evil and beyond redemption and stories like that? Rarely seen discussions after the fact if a kill was justified or not. Etc. We put so much on the killed to RP like it matters, and they absolutely should don't get me wrong, but this is a much bigger culture problem than that.

I think it is easy to overestimate humanity's capacity to regret or question their own actions. At the same time it is easy to underestimate our capacity to rationalize any action. So, to expect characters to do these things you'll often be disappointed. I don't say this to dissuade anyone from playing these emotions themselves, but don't get upset when others don't.

It is also a common thing to blame the characters you are in conflict with for the nature of the conflict. I think player's taking some personal responsibility and shifting their gameplay accordingly would prove very healthy. We may not be able to control what other players do, but we can control what we do.

I don't have a lot of hope for things to change, sadly. I think it would really take some 40rpr mentality to take hold of the server. It would take some changing the way we see the game and shifting our expectations. I have racked my brain about these things, as TRM said above, for a decade. I have not really gotten anywhere substantial in that time, either. With that said, I do think that the specific blasé attitude around death is a toxic thing on the server and should be handled by the DMs. Be that in the form of RPR drops, chats, or XP drops.

I'm not upset about anything or blaming anyone and I don't really have any expectations at all TBH. Those were just examples but there's other ways this could be presented (like for example, a frequent killer in evil Anundor might take pleasure in it themselves and might also need to be put down because they're bad for business.)

The heart of what I am saying is: if a killing doesn't matter to the player doing the killing (and I am not just talking about guilt it could be any reaction, I just mean it has to have some effect somewhere) and doesn't matter to others in the periphery then it won't matter to the one killed. It's on everyone. It's fair to complain the dead don't RP death correctly but if you want to try and change things that's one way to set an example, don't just kill and immediately move or or let some other PC's death go unnoticed but make something of it.