Antag Rules, Guard Rules, Slum Structure, Gang System & More

[MonMarty]

This is going to be a bit of a "page of everything" as I am preparing to leave the country, to leave behind some words of insight and rule changes that should hopefully improve the functioning of the Slums while I am away.

Roleplay Right, when can I refuse and can I not refuse Roleplay
MassiveCraft is notoriously not-strict when it comes to roleplay enforcement. While on some other servers you are not permitted to run around OOC and have to always be IC, Massive allows a great deal of freedom allowing the players to choose what Roleplay to commit to and what roleplay not to commit to. We consider this the Roleplay Right, the ability to say "I don't like this roleplay so I'm not going to continue it", and at the core of that sentiment stands the idea that if roleplay makes someone uncomfortable, they should be allowed to walk away from it. That being said, this concept has come under fire as of recent, because it covers a number of gray zones where this policy is actually counter intuitive, or straight up makes the experience for those involved troublesome. Assume that in most scenario's, if you are not the starter of a roleplay scene, you have the right to deny roleplay with an individual or situation for any reason. There are however exceptions:

• You may never deny roleplay at the hands of a Charter organization. This usually pertains to guard charters attacking/arresting criminals, but also forced medical examination and more. These organizations are often QA'd by Staff members, thus it is assumed that they do not give players poor experiences, and often work under the narrative of the story progressions.
• You may never deny roleplay when you are "Antagging". Antagging is a term not often used substracted from the word "Antag", meaning Antagonist. When you are Antagging, you are actively creating a conflict situation with your character towards another character. You may then not deny roleplay to the response reaction of the opposite party. This is including but not limited to you attacking or working against someone, or being part of a group that is in a conflict with another group.
• Non Dice or Dice performed Combat RP rolls cannot be enforced one way or another. If one player refuses not to use dices, and if another player refuses to use dices, it is recommended that the combat roleplay simply does not take place. It is the Lore Staff's opinion that while dices leave too much to RNG and kill the fluidity of roleplay, they are far preferential to the more prevalent "Logic" CRP, because the latter is often unfair and invites spending 70% of the engagement in OOC arguing about whether someone's muscle density is enough to strike a weapon at XYZ Miles per hour at a 43 degree angle, the height of absurdity. As a general safety rule: Lore Staff will never come down on someone for powergaming if equal rolls are used. For the preferential rolling system: See below.
• You may never deny roleplay when you are subject to a story progression or a plot character, like currently a Dragon or Arken roaming Regalia. These are always portrayed by Lore Staff and thus become part of the story narrative, and never give off bad experiences as long as the narrative is respected.
  • That also requires me to add: If you needlessly get in the way of a narrative, expect to have absurd plot armor thrown in your face if you are disrupting a scene. For example: An Arken attempting to set a scene and make a speech that should allow other roleplayers to continue their personal narratives is being disrupted by a Combat Roleplayer who is desperately trying to kill the Arken mid-speech to claim the glory kill. Such a roleplayer can expect to have absurd and bullshit magical powers used to instant Knock-Out their character to get rid of their obstruction of the narrative. It always pays off to fire a quick PM to someone in an ongoing roleplay scene to ask if it's okay that you are jumping in as an outsider, because chances are that you are disrupting a plotted storyline between characters and are trying to make it all about yourself.

Kill Perms & Item Perms
MassiveCraft's Kill perms are a holy right, and in many ways, they are well explained. They do however deserve an additional expansion on the concept of peripheral perms like items, pets, npc characters and businesses.

• Items your character possesses on them or in an estate when they are being robbed/when your character is knocked-out cannot be protected. You may under no circumstance tell a player "You cannot steal XYZ", when your character is the Antag. It falls a bit in the grayzone if your character was the one attacked by a group of people, usually best left for the disgression of Lore Staff, but when it concerns your character attacking others and being knocked out (thus Antagging), you lose all rights to dictate how the roleplay ends, as your Kill Perms are essentially given. You are permitted to bargain with the players involved to create a compromise if you really don't want an item to be stolen, and you may also identify an item as plot crucial (for example a wedding ring, or a breathing mask your character needs to survive), but other items are always free game.
• NPC characters like pets and babies and infants who have no player attached to them are not protected by kill perms in any way. Domestic animals played by players also don't have any kill perm protection if they do not behave in a way that we consider "normal and reasonable" domestic animals, as per Lore Staff judgement.
• Businesses all around the city do not have an anti arson or destruction protection, with the exception of businesses on the Regalian Main street, since they serve a service to the server. This means that if another character wants to burn down your business in the slums, you should roleplay out this scenario. That's to say, nobody is allowed to "attack" a business when there is no one there (or say it was a night raid) since this is considered 0% risk attack RP, which is unreasonable. A roleplay scenario that involves attacking a business should always have a risk associated with it either when the business is being operated normally, or when you have agreed to a specific event time with the business owners. Main street properties may not be attacked without the permission of the business owner at all, period. This is because they deliver a crucial service to new players that is considered more important than whatever story you can drive out of burning down their business.

Slum Structure and the Dark Lady Emporium
We've listened to some feedback and decided to knock down a large section of unused housing and squares in the Slum district to place a large burnt out husk of a church, in which the new Lady Emporium will be positioned. The amount of regions will double, and the general manueverability around the Emporium will increase to facilitate the need for fluid slum RP, as the old cave-like emporium was quickly becoming too congesting and trapping for conflict RP. The building is already present and still being worked on, and should be done by the 30th of January before I leave to allow other Lore Staff to manage it.

Guard Rules
Guards have been ebbing and flowing, especially since the charter system essentially started breaking off their members into different charters. There is however a clarification required both in terms of the Guard Kill Perms, and Guard Rights:

• Kill Perm immunity only exists for the Violet Order. Kill Perm immunity is not present for any other charter regardless of whether they engage in guard duty or not. This is because the City Guard is a staple organization that is permanent, while charters are fluid and temporary. Kill Perm immunity means that while someone is on-guard duty and engaging in proper (non corrupt) Guard business, their character can never be killed without their express permission. This protection is not in place for Charters, meaning Charters are always subject to the Kill Perms as described on the Character Death Rules page on the Wiki.
• The OOC/City bar on Guard entering the slums is nullified. This means that any and all Charter/Guard organizations are now permitted to patrol the Slums. They are still not permitted to go underground into the tunnels, but they may patrol the streets of the slums freely. More information about this below.
• Guard outfits of Charters may be stolen. Guard outfits of Imperial Guards and Violet Guards may never be stolen.

Gang System
A while back, a preliminary Gang system was implemented, but it suffered one crucial flaw: It encouraged direct player versus player conflict in an all-out kill or nothing war. This meant that gangs were constantly trying to exterminate each other, or more specifically each other's leaders, resulting in some serious batman roleplay on the part of the leaders. This was including but not limited to just not logging on when X rival gang was roaming the streets, to flatout ignoring a dangerous situation and being a badass and walking away from being captured. This stagnated conflict as no one was ever able to kill anyone, but everyone constantly wanted to kill everyone, and at the end of the day it just left a lot of people unsatisfied.

• The first change to this effect is the above mentioned Guards being permitted back into the slums. This achieves 2 things, firstly it allows the gangs to take the "lawful" side of Regalia into consideration. It makes them no longer untouchable to the surface people of Regalia, but also gives them someone else to compete with instead of the other city gangs. Secondly, it helps reinforce the "no kills" policy we'd like to enforce. In line with how we want to turn great gang rp into something different than a constant murder boner spree, the city guard will start enforcing a "You don't murder anyone, and we won't bother your ransacking, racketeering and beating in the streets". While individual guards might choose to stop violence in the slums at their own peril, the general atmosphere that we hope this creates is that the gangs become accutely aware IC'ly that if they start murdering each other in broad daylight, that the City Guard will move out in force and completely crush and burn the slums. It creates the environment that there is a state of DEFCON in the slums that the city will come and burn everything down if the slum gangs stop behaving, and that there is an uneasy truce between the city and slums as long as there is no excessive murdering. This gives both an IC and OOC explanation as to why Gangs shouldn't constantly try to eradicate each other, thus lowering the stakes and risks of crime-rp and making it more accessible to player who want to invest in crime, but don't feel like losing their character on the first combatrp session.
• The seconds change, is an inherent change in the system itself. Currently the system is very much aimed at the crushing of other gangs through the disabling or killing of their members. Not only will this murder sentiment no longer be a thing because of the aforementioned matter, we are changing the scope of gang as a whole in a way that is more cooperative instead of competitive with other systems like the nobility. Currently, gangs only represent "another way" for nobility to have to deal with obstacles and problems in a never ending pile of responsibilities. This sort of kicks the nobility down to the bottom as the ones carrying the community on their backs while they get little in terms of satisfying input or interaction with the gangs. Instead, we want the gangs to be about artefacts. How these artefacts reach the gangs is not entirely known yet, but the general gist is that some or most of these artefacts are not useful to the gangs (immediately anyway) and that the news of these artifacts won't reach the other systems until half a month or a month into being, though the gangs will be informed before hand what the item is and what it could mean to other groups in the system (yet they may not hand it off or act on it until a certain time has expired). This item will be in-game and will be put into a chest at a base and from that point onwards, all gangs are informed where the item is and what its value is, and the gangs start fighting over posession of the item. This should hopefully make the system more object oriented instead of murder oriented, thus making battles worth fighting and losing, but meaning that a lost battle won't be the end of a gang, but just mean they lose that specific item. How the system of gang base assaults will work has not yet been worked out, but the general gist of the syste is explained now.

Staff Preferential Dice System
The Staff Preferential Dice System is the "First to Three" system. Is essentially goes as the following:

1. Player A wins an attack roll against Player B, knocking their character down.
2. Player A rolls another attack roll, but loses to Player B, thus Player B escapes the KO
3. Player B may now roll their first attack roll, trying to knock down the opponent, and succeeds.
4. Player B now rolls again for the KO roll, and succeeds, thus winning the combat role play.
5. All rolls are performed at /dice 20 and whoever is highest wins the roll.

This essentially means that a player must win 3 rolls in a row (or immediately win the first 2 rolls at the start of the CRP, though this barely happens) to win an engagement. Practice has shown this can last anywhere between 10 minutes to half an hour if the rolls are bad, and gives for great turnaround potential and general non-power gaming and non-intrusive fun. If the First of Three system is used, Staff will never intervene and investigate power gaming, since it is essentially impossible to power game a dice roll system. There is room for uneven rolls for example giving someone /dice 25 and /dice 15, but there is no static rules to this, it's entirely up to the players involved to agree on uneven rolls to facilitate race/character design etc.

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