Official standing about IC population portrayal - Thoughts?

[Triple Seven]

It all boils down to one thing and one thing only: Does the player think about the roleplay they're doing and keep the portrayal of their character in mind?

 

- Someone from Davis using their hard earned/stolen money on gas to a place they don't live close to on the off-chance they'll get to rob someone for a few bucks doesn't make sense. 

- Going to a place like the pier, purely to rob someone? Doesn't make sense, it's never going to be a place where a police patrol doesn't pass every few minutes and you'll need to take into account that a robbery on a roleplay server takes longer than real life because you need to give people a chance to RP. Kidnapping instead? Way too heavy a crime to risk doing instead.

 

Robbery should be a crime of opportunity; an old lady walking in a shopping street after closing hours, a person trying to buy weed from someone in a shady place like an alley. What do we see on the server instead? People going out of their way to find people to rob, all through the city, no regard for anything. Go stand on a street and you can count the dirt bikes with 2 people on them, completely blacked out. What does the server do? Nerf the bike, not punish the people clearly failing to portray a realistic image of their chosen character.

 

Discussions like these are always about robberies for one reason alone: Low-life criminals have nothing better to do than insult each other over a street name, punch each other on the nose, sell some drugs and rob people. Those people will usually be armed, which already shows it makes no sense to try in the first place (fear rp). You might "win" by being the first to shoot them down (yes, fear rp is a factor for the robbery victim too, of course, but forcing people to freeze up when they get robbed every single time will not work, that's powergaming by definition), but your character will still get injured most likely by the other party, that injury is something you don't want and just because the player can't feel it, doesn't mean the character doesn't and it won't get infected. You can take it to a hospital, but the police will be called because it's a gunshot wound and you'll have a hard time explaining how you got that. Dealing with it yourself? Yes, gangster medics and doctors are amazing aren't they? How often does a criminal that is in a situation like this take the risk to roll a die and see if the bullet is lodged and needs to be surgically removed? I bet next to never.

 

TL;DR: Portrayal, portrayal, portrayal. Location, time, fear. These are all factors that need to be taken into account.

 

Is it hard to get weapons/money as a criminal from the hood? I bet, I have no experience with it, but I believe it. Is that realistic? Yes, to an extent. Does that mean your portrayal has to become unrealistic? No. There's a suggestion forum. Think long and hard and help fix the problem, don't create new ones or fight symptoms of a broken system.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Triple Seven

[Storm]

As promised I did bring this up in the staff meeting, and for now the current stance is going to say but it is subject to change some time soon. Continuity are working on a policy surrounding it, and hopefully implement it in a way that satisfies everyone.

 

I'd encourage the discussion to resume as all input is valuable in the creation of a rule like this.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Dawn

[DLimit]

26 minutes ago, paym4n said:

Personally like the idea of the city being populated and the whole broad daylight thing. If LS' population was based on the player count itself it'd be nothing but a small town, which it's not.

100%. I understand the timezone issue, but it SHOULD be acknowledged that certain areas are heavily populated, rather than simply disregarded.

Edited May 16, 2021 by DLimit

[liq]

It's always been that you've got to have an accurate & realistic portrayal of what it is you're role-playing. It's always been that you can't force NPC role-play on others for your advantage. The same way you can't role-play picking up a rock and throwing it at someone & expect to be taken seriously, you can't expect to be taken seriously when you use the excuse of how it's populated somewhere or something happens in broad daylight just because that argument happens to be in your favor.

 

In that same sense, you need to suspend your disbelief a little. It wouldn't make sense to rob people in front of a police station, for example, no matter how many players are or aren't there at the time of the actual robbery. There's a realistic argument that people (not necessarily cops, yet mostly cops) work out of that place 24/7. It's the same with most safezones currently listed.

 

The bigger problem you've got is that robberies have never been pivotal nor conducive to good role-play. It's because those who do them & those who're on the other end of them can't (or it isn't in their mindset to) role-play around them. It's all centered on loot. It has little to do with role-playing that your character is about to hit a lick/role-playing that your character got robbed, yet all to do with the items you gain/lose.

 

 

Edited May 16, 2021 by liq

[DasFroggy]

2 minutes ago, liq said:

The bigger problem you've got is that robberies have never been pivotal nor conducive to good role-play. It's because those who do them & those who're on the other end of them can't (or it isn't in their mindset to) role-play around them. It's all centered on loot. It has little to do with role-playing that your character is about to hit a lick/role-playing that your character got robbed, yet all to do with the items you gain/lose.

I've had robberies where the criminal participants were not interested in what they received, so much as interested in the encounter. Those were (past tense, thanks to robbery rule changes) people I paid fifty thousand to instead of just five, because those parties tended to provide genuinely fun and engaging roleplay that I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in.

 

...then there's the crimegrinders, who prioritize profits and personal script-wins over roleplay...

[Gryphboi]

Crime's not only a matter of time, it's also a matter of location. LA's (yeah I know this is Los Santos and we're not roleplaying California, just take this as reference and if you quote me with the sole purpose of correcting this point I'll ignore you based on your inability to read) population density is 8449, taken from a 2019 census that also shows nearly four million people living in LA alone. If we're expected to believe that crime can happen in some areas that should realistically have surveillance and witnesses, then we might as well get rid of the concept of the safe zones altogether.

You CAN commit crimes in certain areas, but not in broad daylight. There are thousands of ex-cons in the real world that all say the same thing: avoid the public eye and unwanted attention. It's why burglars avoid houses that show signs of being occupied at the time or if they see security company signs. Some of you might argue against it, saying that your characters are dumb or lack experience, or they're desperate enough to commit these acts in public (which is completely fine, you're allowed to RP your character in any way you want them), but it's common sense that needs to be applied in these scenarios. "Am I really going to pull a gun out in public? Do I really need this stranger's phone and his wallet and am I ready to shoot them in the middle of a busy metropolitan area for it?" Opportunity's the number one motivator for crime, and risking a bullet in the lungs or years in prison for something that could be planned a little bit better seems like a waste of everybody's time.

In my opinion, we should stop taking certain things at face value and start roleplaying accordingly. We're not here for assets, we're not here to play cops and robbers. We're here to roleplay, and a big ass chunk of roleplay comes not from what the server/system has to offer us, but from our ability to write. If an area's empty, just stop for a second and think how many people would be realistically going through that area on a daily basis.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Gryphboi

[Smilesville]

50 minutes ago, Dawn said:

Continuity are working on a policy surrounding it, and hopefully implement it in a way that satisfies everyone.

Personally, I'm less concerned with how we do it as simply taking the effort to apply a consistent standard.

 

If the setting isn't something that we demand a criminal take into account, I'd like that to apply to truckers running lights and for staff to destigmatize vigilantism - that's the precise thing you see in lawless areas of the US, a la Chaz/Chop and Portland when it's on fire. The idea that anyone averse to desperate self defense would remain in LS with its murder rate is ridiculous.

 

If we're to claim our setting is a more stable locale, there need to be steps taken to bring the reality of the in-game experience closer to this. Remodel the safe zone map to include yellow zones where approval and/or supervision are required to engage in flagrant armed robbery.

 

The disconnect comes in when a character is surrounded by cold, dead reminders of the city's violence every day - only for a staff member to dictate that responding to robberies in a jaded manner isn't up to our standards. I've been warned for driving away when my engine was on because someone ten yards from me was pointing a gun in my direction - and that's utter nonsense. 

[bricksbricksbricks]

I think it's silly willy to get robbed with with guns pointed at you at the beach during day time.

[HeyMambo]

1 hour ago, liq said:

The bigger problem you've got is that robberies have never been pivotal nor conducive to good role-play. It's because those who do them & those who're on the other end of them can't (or it isn't in their mindset to) role-play around them. It's all centered on loot. It has little to do with role-playing that your character is about to hit a lick/role-playing that your character got robbed, yet all to do with the items you gain/lose.

ABSOLUTELY 👏👏👏 So what steps can be suggested to move towards fixing this? Is there even a way or is it just something we have to deal with? 

[Koko]

6 minutes ago, Numelo said:

ABSOLUTELY 👏👏👏 So what steps can be suggested to move towards fixing this? Is there even a way or is it just something we have to deal with? 

I think a lot of the time it just boils down to how you walk away from the robbery. I've experienced very good robberies where I had to take the L because I was caught at a perfect place to be robbed, and that's easy to RP with: you got robbed like real people in the real world get robbed, and you can react as if you had been robbed in real life and display real human reactions towards it.

 

Now today I was RPing in K-Town and someone came into the business we were at shivering and explaining that some masked men in a car right outside (in Little Seoul, a pretty busy, bustling area full of active businesses and actual players walking around doing civilian RP) had kidnapped him (a 17 year old young man) and taken him in a car to steal his wallet (the wallet of a 17 year old working at a gas station's store) and phone. This was a lot harder to RP around because we were all trying to take it IC and offer some comfort but you can tell that everyone was awkwardly standing around thinking how ridiculous the thought of it was.