Powergaming and Physical Altercations

[BigWizardDick]

I want to preface this post with the acknowledgement that this is pretty long-winded and a bit of a read. I'd encourage all readers to read all of what's being said before coming to a conclusion/critique, and to make sure whatever critique they may have isn't already addressed in what's been detailed below. There's a lot to take in, and while I wish I could write it shorter I believe there's a lot of necessary idea/theory required to be expounded upon and explained for what could be a big change to the server in some aspects.

 

Currently on the server there is a severe lack of in-depth roleplay involving physical confrontations between characters. I've spent the majority of my time on my main character in the role of a security guard, whether through a firm like G6 or independently contracted by an establishment and thus have been exposed to countless physical altercations. I have never been able to roleplay further than attempting to grab someone, as generally people will begin punching right away through in-game mechanics or simply just run away. Furthermore, the amount of powergaming on this server is on levels I've never seen in other roleplay communities. Someone will do one /me to begin hitting you right off the bat and then they may very well just run away without ever giving you time to respond. Additionally, players never begin their /me's with attempting to do an action and waiting for the other person to respond, or they'll pack multiple different actions into one /me, and still not preface it with attempting to do the action and allowing the opposing party to respond. This blatant powergaming is generally never punished as it can be very time consuming to get an admin involved, so if the action being done to your char isn't very severe, you're better off letting it slide. This also empowers trolls by making the risk of physical confrontations very low and very easy to engage in as they won't be forced to properly roleplay out all of their actions, and physical confrontations take little to no effort to partake in from start to finish. This low-effort, minimal time requirement promotes trolling behavior.

 

I come from roleplay communities where every melee (not use of firearms) action done is roleplayed out, each action is attempted and not forced onto the player, and the opposing party must be given time to respond and must respond to whatever force is being attempted on to them in detail. Physical confrontations are fully roleplayed out and detailed, and this provides far more avenues of roleplay to be explored. There's also zero tolerance for powergaming. You need to roleplay according to both P2L rules (play 2 lose) and the capabilities of your characters within reason as well as give players time to react to your attempts at escaping, etc.

 

For those of you who are unaware of the theory behind P2L and why it is important when roleplaying out physical confrontations, I'll explain below.

 

Play 2 Lose on the surface level is in the name, you play to lose. This seems counterintuitive, especially if you don't want to lose in physical confrontations. However when both parties are adhering to this rule, powergaming is kept to a minimum; the rule doesn't imply you force your character to fail all of their attempted actions or to roleplay as being weak and easily damaged, but instead ensures that parties involved are properly adhering to the mental and physical capabilities of their characters and are properly roleplaying the injuries sustained during and after confrontations. On the flip side, for example, if you break out of handcuffs by sheer force, you're P2W, or playing to win. If someone stabs you and you sustain heavy bleeds yet continue roleplaying as if you haven't, you're playing 2 win. If you roleplay outside of what is obviously your character's capabilities, you're playing to win (such as dodging every attempt to injure your character).

 

The lack of enforcement of powergaming and allowing players to immediately devolve to using in-game mechanics to fight other parties leads to extremely low-effort behavior from most parties involved in fights, leaves little to no room for interesting avenues of RP to be explored in physical confrontations, and promotes powergaming as players can immediately run away without any roleplay involved. Players never being forced to attempt their actions and wait for a response also empowers trolls and people with malicious OOC intent by making the risk of physical confrontations very low and very easy to engage in as they won't be forced to properly roleplay out all of their actions, and physical confrontations take little to no effort to partake in from start to finish. This low-effort, minimal time requirement promotes troll behavior that is generally extremely superficial, uninteresting and unrewarding.

 

Okay, nice rant. TL;DR, what do you want to see changed/what are you suggesting we do?

What I want to see changed on the server is forcing players to roleplay out any physical altercation and all actions that involve melee, and forcing players to preface their actions with the fact that their action is an attempt and thus allowing the other party to respond before continuing. Additionally, players need to stick to one action at a time and the theory of P2L. This means punches, kicks, trying to get up from the floor when someone is on top of you, trying to smash a bottle on someone's head, all of it must be roleplayed out, and the opposing party given chance to respond. If more than two parties are involved, each player takes their turn in interacting with the given situation.

 

Additionally, the idea of timescale will need to be better enforced and integrated. If a fight breaks out, it can take some time to properly roleplay out. A phone call can be made in 10 seconds and the cops show up the next minute. This would be a breach of timescale, as generally fights only last for a few moments on an in-character scale and the cops wouldn't be able to show up that quickly in a realistic timeframe.

 

To be abundantly clear, shootouts and any time a gun is involved should be entirely kept to in-game mechanics and free range like it is now.

 

Lastly, this would slightly change the rules on scrolling weapons. Players would need to roleplay attempting to take out their firearms if they are already in the midst/middle of a physical altercation to allow the opposing party to attempt to stop them if they are within physical range. If a player is clearly in a position where they'd have zero difficulty/resistance pulling out their firearm, they should be allowed to freely scroll to it without any /me needing to be done. Once a gun is involved/actively being used, the altercation should entirely shift from roleplay to in-game mechanics.

 

I think this can be enforced easily through two key ways: 

- Any and all grievances/reports involving physical fights should be taken to the forums to avoid a large influx of additional overhead for admins on the server in-game.

- Situations/scenes in reports should be voided or solved in favor of the party who didn't break rules if rules were broken during the confrontation and something of value was attained, the discretion being up to whoever is handling the report. This will promote players to be more discretionary with what altercations they decide to get involved in, and disenfranchise those with malicious OOC intent who only wish to troll and provoke escalation.

 

This change is certainly nothing small, however it's a critical step in better cultivating a more serious roleplay environment on the server and will vastly expand the actions and avenues of roleplay that can be taken by players and their characters. At the end of the day this is a heavy roleplay server, and the current environment involving fights is incredibly death-matchlike and low effort/superficial which promotes and empowers people on the server who have no intention of actually roleplaying on the server apart from trolling and provoking confrontations.

[Moonsong]

I'm in complete agreement with the majority of this except with the firearms part. If a scene escalates to a life or death situation, nobody is going to wait for everyone else to type out a /me to draw their sidearm. It's simply not practical, if they see you typing and a shootout is underway you're gonna get instantly downed and they're not gonna reciprocate with roleplay. It's just an opportunity for them to get a free kill.

 

As for the rest of the post, I support it. I hate scripted fighting and roleplay around it is always at bare minimum as you said, or on the opposite end of the scale over the top aggression is used for even the slightest altercation against another character making sure you can't do anything but play ragdoll. Something definitely needs to be done to improve the roleplay around physical altercations because it's mind numbingly dull and repetitive most of the time, ending up as "who has the fastest internet". I just don't see many wanting to go along with this without very vocal pushback, because well most players are lazy and can't be bothered;

 

 - reading descriptive roleplay because too long and would rather ridicule those who use descriptive /me's as elitists and try hards

 - typing anything more than is necessary because they want the path of least resistance to their goal

 - roleplaying actions in detail because it requires careful thought, imagination and more than 30 seconds of their time.

[violeNt]

The melee script is pretty bad, and I think roleplay quality would be better if people didn't immediately jump to it as it's hugely dependent on ping, and you are right that trolls tend to abuse the system and powergame their way through script fights. Howver, most people in my experience already roleplay out their first swing if they're the one to initiate a fight, and expecting people to stop and roleplay it out after that isn't very realistic, because you're just expecting the other person to honor it while you stop and type.

 

Considering how things have been on this server for a long time, I think that's far too much of a drastic change to force people to adapt to. I understand that it's how it works in other communities, but this server has always had a policy of if the script can handle it, let it, especially in situations where stopping to type would be detrimental to you (like fighting). It'd just flood the forums with reports on trolls or be ignored as a rule completely by the majority of the server. Not saying that's how it should be, just suddenly forcing very heavy, detailed roleplay on people for a system that has been mostly scripted in the past isn't something most people are going to advocate for.

 

I'm also not a huge fan of using forum reports as a solution. We already get a huge abundance of them over robberies, DM and the like, and I think it's a pretty universal feeling that people don't enjoy things being taken OOC in that way, and that it's a last resort. I think giving people the reach to police the rulebook over melee fights will only exasperate that problem, you'd have reports over every melee fight that broke out. Bearing in mind, that the P2W mentality can be both IC and OOC, while trolls can use it to powergame IC, there's just as many people on this server who will attempt to rule-lawyer people's RP and take every tiny escalation to the forums to attempt to get a void or punishment in their favor.

 

I think things can be improved, for certain. Trolls can already be punished for repeated offenses by RPQM and such if it's something they do regularly. I've been just as frustrated by people who do nothing but escalate script fights, then powergame their way out of them by running in circles or fighting again the moment they're picked up. I just don't see us ever transitioning to a system where every action needs to be roleplayed considering what people are used to with the current rules. I think a more lightweight solution like only the first swing needing to be responded to first, before switching to script, could be implemented.

[marbella mondays]

Idk how i feel ab this, Just gonna say nah for now