Frill's Feedback || NL Death Appeals

[frill]

IGN Frill

Suggestion, feedback or idea!

What’s the appeal of death appeals?
A solution to the NL permakilling problem.​

Nation-leaders are forced to permakill on first death, but may submit an application that may be reviewed by administration or moderation (i personally think administration because NL death should be rare, but w/e) to rescind this, should they have a good enough justification or mitigating circumstance.

There is no clear-cut via media for nation-leader permakilling; it is a binary of forcing perma-kills and not forcing them upon the character, so the middle ground between the two options will always fall to one side or the other. However, there have been recent roleplay circumstances that demonstrate the lack of ‘death consequence’ for threats of execution, capture, loss of war et al. With most nation-leaders relying on an implicit honour-code where permakilling follows appropriate roleplay justification, there have been times where nation-leaders do not follow suit and ignore any aspect of fear roleplay or intimidation due to the tacit ooc knowledge that they can respawn back at their home nation and only lose a few pieces of gear and shreds of dignity in the process.

There must either be consequences for death as a nation-leader or a roleplay acknowledgement that death is no longer a placable threat. With nation-leaders not fearing execution, or being executed and respawning to continue to harass their captors, the opt-in status of death has given rise to action without the ultimate consequence.

Although people fear the lack of nation stability or the removal of control of the player-character into the hands of staff-members, these are both necessary evils; the former due to the fact that placing a leader in a position where they may die will lead to instability, and the latter due to the fact that good faith is being drawn thin.

Why a reviewal process? It allows dubious reasons such as throwaway banditry or participation in an ET-lead event to be handwaved on review, allowing the NL to partake in events as a ‘normal’ player would while facing consequences for recklessness elsewhere.

here's a sample
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Uh-oh! You died!​

Character Name: Your character's name.
Cause of Death: Tell us how they died, including as much detail as you can recall.
# of Previous Revives: Tell us how many times this character has been revived before.
Member Vouch: Have a separate player confirm these details. Vouches are expected to only be made by witnesses to the death.
(Optional) Character Sheet: Link your character sheet with your character's information, if you have one.

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People will not like this system as they believe it will lead to nation instability. However, the instability does not remain in the permanence of death but for placing your nation-leader character in situations where they will die. Most nation-leaders that agree with this system will either play their character with enough of a fear of death that they will not throw them head-first into deadly circumstances, or they will accept the mortal consequences for the large risks.

The fear of shadow-leading arises when players surrender the decision making process to another player; instead of leading their nation as themselves, they are a puppet for another party. This can never be truly combatted but the administration have proven themselves capable enough to intervene when there are malignant out-of-character factors at play and should be able to combat this sufficiently. People who fear shadow-leading and other out-of-character eminence gris underestimate the capability of the moderation and administration in routing out metagaming and malicious players from the server.

It will remove control of the character from the player, but only enough to combat unfeasible recklessness and the ignoring of consequences. It mitigates the necessity of direct staff intervention when a nation-leader ignores the reality of death due to ooc-protection but not without the ability for the nation-leader to justify it. If there is a reason beyond “I simply don’t want to die :[“ there is an avenue to argue this.

Throwaway personas must be treated the same by staff-members to mitigate the use of alternate personas to do ‘active roleplay’, such as incubating the nation-leader persona to not use it outside of basic stewardry. This would require some moderation and monitoring of player activity; if an alternate persona has far more on-time than a nation persona, or if this secondary persona only appears when conflict arises, staff-members must consider the factors of metagaming and question the player.

 

[Rumpo]

I do not think this is a good idea at all.
For one, I strictly believe that a nation leader PKing at /any/ death is a detriment to the server. If a nation leader was to be forcefully perma-killed, it should be in a situation where a lot of roleplay is created from the death and therefore content for the server is produced based off of this.

To use examples for this point, if a nation leader dies in some random goblin-event I do not believe there would be much RP created (outside of their nation), in comparison to if a nation leader leading a war would be to die. I feel as if the first scenario would merely negatively impact the nation and not really impact anything else, while the second would have a greater effect elsewhere.

As a second point, I do not like a process of applications- especially for roleplayed related things. If you have noticed, there is only one "to play" application on the forums, and that is the whitelist application. There is no applications to gain special races, magic, etc. It is all gained in roleplay and kept strictly in-game. More applications means more bureaucratic work for staff to sift through.

The third point would be that this system is entirely subjective. It is based on an opinion, and that is something I wish to move away from. With a lot of systems we are trying to remove the aspect of subjectiveness to play a part, influence & nation plugin has helped a great deal in this regard and we plan to continue to work in this direction.

As a fourth point, there is no saying that a nation leader would even fill in this application. I am not aware of every time a nation leader dies and they could easily die in some situations, no one reports it and they do not even fill in one of these applications.

I think there are ways to go about nation leader PK's, if thats the direction we opt for as a community. However, I do not think this is at all a good implementation of that. I think a more likely route to go would revolve around a large influence cost while two nations are at war; this would mean that if a nation was prepared to pay a very hefty influence cost, then you would assume it was for a good and/or important reason which by extension would mean that an important death creates a lot of roleplay as a result of it.

 

[frill]

I strictly believe that a nation leader PKing at /any/ death is a detriment to the server. If a nation leader was to be forcefully perma-killed, it should be in a situation where a lot of roleplay is created from the death and therefore content for the server is produced based off of this.

*inhales cigar like tony soprano and smudges it out on ash tray*

This is absolutely the case and isn't being debated here. The issue at hand is that there is at least a minor polity within the server that ignore the roleplay created from consequences for any action due to the lack of permanence of death. Even capture roleplay is negligible when the only consequence is a character being locked to a cell for a week; there is no lasting damage nor any detriment to the nation, especially as any nation stewardry or leadership duties can be delegated through Discord or handed to other members of the nation in the meantime. The threat of execution or death is an impotent one, and these situations where roleplay can be created from death are entirely on the onus of the player. Captor demands of "Do X or I will lop your head off" becomes a moot demand when you know it'll regrow in the thirty seconds it takes to warp back to your home nation. The issue at hand is that the possibility of negative roleplay towards their nation is often enough of a rebuff from them to forego PKing and to continue playing as the character post-death.

The process of the applications is a slog but the only way possible for a moderated approach to permakilling to take place. It is an inconvenience but a rare one by design; if the complaint is about unneeded deluges of bureaucracy, consider telling the nation-leader to stop placing their character in situations where they continue to die. If you can think of some other process where there is a far less bureaucratic approach to mediating how nation-leaders approach death, I'd encourage it, but in the meantime situations have proved that consequence will be shirked for OOC nation-play expedience. if you fear bureaucracy at least have administration have greater input in whether nation-leaders PK at a casual and informal level.

The system is subjective by design. I understand that the subjective nature of any process becomes far more dangerous the further it moves away from the people who initially implement it, especially as designing something to adhere to one's own best interest and intentions means that it'll have to adhere to the succeeding administrative party's, but it would allow nation-leaders to explain away flippant environmental deaths or other shitposty reasons to negate needing a PK. These random goblin events can easily be handwaved by an ET commenting on the deathpost or some pre-event rubberstamp message, such as the returning-to-camp proviso of Harri's recent events.

That's not to say I don't like the idea of an influence cost, but that relegates PKing as a nation-leader to being a war-time enterprise. Surreptitious assassinations or intrigue such as kidnapping or internal government coups don't weigh into the influence system, but would surely be grounds to permakill a leader.

Nation leaders are elevated members of the community and really must be placed to a higher roleplay standard. Treating capture, assassination, or threats of death like a stubbed toe because you know you'll respawn does a mischief to the substance of political RP. There are burgeoning despots and autocrats specifically because they know they can only be ousted by their own choice, or international war.

edit to clarify for u;

The point of this system is to catalogue and decide whether or not a nation-leader should PK to a death, not to enforce deaths of all nation-leaders at whatever instance and catalogue them like a funeral rolodex.

You misunderstand the point of the application. The nation-leader is put in a position where they *must* explain why they are refusing to PK to a death. It is substantially harder to justify surviving a public execution or an assassination attempt when you have to admit on a public forum that you simply "don't wanna die :P".

 

[frill]

clerk's update;
rumpo and i have reached an out-of-court settlement about it being a good idea to spend influence to force enemy nation leader pks. it is a good idea actually and i thank rumpo for putting it on the table

 

[Ryanark]

clerk's update;
rumpo and i have reached an out-of-court settlement about it being a good idea to spend influence to force enemy nation leader pks. it is a good idea actually and i thank rumpo for putting it on the table

I think that the administration/Rumpo should expand on this a bit more in a different post. I endorse the idea but I would like to see under what conditions the influence can be spent on PK clauses and how long they last etc.

 

[A_Good_Fellow]

There is also the issue of alting or the use of consistent alt souls which depending on how the system is implanted IE nation leader is out for a herb run and gets jumped by 10 people (exaggerating bad circumstances) why take the risk? Especially when your alt soul farmer McGee can do it for you. Especially in the case of raids or PVP fights to either avoid it in the face of overwhelmingly odds or have McGee hold the line or die trying. Influence cost and specific rules are certainly a step in the right direction. Especially if we want to avoid people making mega impregnable PVP forts reaching hight limit

 

[FlemishSupremacy]

I don't entirely like the idea of subjecting anyone, even an NL to force pking. While it can certainly be disheartening to see an NL not PK after impactful roleplay, the flip side of this is that this will be an abuseable system where NLs will have to watch their every step and constantly have to be fearful of being slain where everyone else just doesn't.

While I absolutely agree that if the circumstances call for it, an NL should PK, I also believe that this goes for everyone. And if you require NLs to PK but not would-be assassins, that creates a grave imbalance. People would be able to go after their enemies' NL to try and assassinate them without having to fear of being PKed themselves in the attempt. The assassins in that case only have to get lucky once, whereas the NL has to be lucky every single attempt.
I know of the situation that has most likely promted you to write this post, and I agree that in that situation, the person involved should have PKed, I'm afraid this will just be abused and lead to more problems than it adds value.

While the application is a good idea, I don't think there is an objective way of deciding whether or not something is worthy of a PK, and if there objective metrics installed, then would-be assassins will OOCly go out of their way to ensure their assassination attempt ticks every minimally required box, whilst NLs would probably go out of their way OOCly to ensure that they don't appear in situations that would fall within those metrics.

In the end, while I'm fully in favour of NLs honouring good roleplay and PKing when the time has come, I don't think that there's a way to objectively enforce it without creating a system that can be abused.
((Sidenote: I'm also worried that the forced death of a good NL while there is an absence of a good successor can absolutely cause a community to die, which is something we also ought to avoid))

 

[Callum]

I’m just gonna come out and say it. This is retarded in every form and I’m open to arguing it out over discord but not here

 

[Haseroth]

I’m just gonna come out and say it. This is retarded in every form and I’m open to arguing it out over discord but not here

nay thee

 

[Dog]

I think all nation leaders should PK even if it’s a random death! Just don’t die lol!

 

[A_Good_Fellow]

I think all nation leaders should PK even if it’s a random death! Just don’t die lol!

Tldr
I think all should PK, Just don't die lol

Hahahaha hahaha ahHahaha hah hah hah ha... Ha. No but for real it should all come down to rules IE no one breaking into NL leaders rooms at 2am and waiting to gank them with full enchanted Mithril. As well as having building limits so no mega pvp forts so if y'all wanna address gate strats now may be a good time as well