@Pandora said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Same will hold true for any kind of social combat, where, 'tell me ur sekrits so u die' is pretty much the social equivalent of some dude standing outside of the newbie gardens spam killing people in a MUD.
Except isn't this exactly how the interrogation social combat worked on Firan? Not that anyone is holding Firan up as some paragon of coded system excellence by any means, but you can't quite claim that any social combat system will punish people for that kind of fuckery, because it was pretty much the status quo on the last L&L game we all knew and loved(to bitch about).
There's two distinctly different kind of social systems that people are really talking about, that have very different goals. The macro ones we took very light nudges towards (reputation, renown, prestige) and those will all be massively revamped- basically anything dealing with any NPCs at all have to come through a social lens, and how well someone will rule will largely depend either on their social skills, or the political and social characters helping them with that. That kind of, 'I want to sell the nameless NPCs on something' is something not many people have problems with, since even if characters are both trying to convince NPCs to do different things so it's effectively PvP, it still is at one divide.
The really fucked up, 'tell me a secret that is suicidal' is the kind of social combat that a lot of people justifiably have huge gut rejections of, because they've seen the gigantic abuse cases there which just completely remove autonomy. Simply put, no social combat system should ever allow any kind of absurd situations that is wildly out of character and self-destructive for them- it just doesn't make sense. I vastly prefer buy in and carrot approaches to things like that, and though yeah I need to make sure social characters have teeth and have plenty of ideas about that, no charming stranger at a bar is going to talk a calm, rational person into cutting their own throat because it seemed like a good idea at the time. One reason so many people had such a problem with Custodius oocly is because he tended to try to sell other players oocly into a direction for their own characters that was wantonly self-destructive by taking advantage of ooc thematic ignorance combined with staff indifference or active collaboration in other games. That's actually a design flaw that isn't really addressed so much- characters should always be representative of actual people, they shouldn't really be permitted to take actions that are so self-destructive they make absolutely no sense in the context of the story, and are a result of ooc collusion or ignorance. And I carry that same philosophy on social combat or anything else in the game- if some rational, calm character has no good reason their happy guy wants to self-destruct, and it is purely ooc motivated, it can't be permitted.
Virtually every game will let player characters walk off that bridge, because they don't want to impede player agency over their characters, -even if- it makes no sense whatsoever. I say that's bullshit, and bad for collaborative games. It makes a shared story worse when you allow the absurd, even if it is purely self-destruction that can't be explained or rationalized.