No RP Killing

[Maina]

1. They are Guests. Not main characters. Their longevity is not assumed or assured. It’s in the name.
2. Nova has been on record as saying they exist to make the threat of Legion-controlled territories real. They exist to be a threat.
3. They have a host of powers that can no-contest, without any oversight, ruin any number of PCs, so they are indeed an extreme threat.
4. They are the only ‘antagonist’ faction. They are not just evil, they are anathema to all life on Earth and interested in turning it into a literal extension of Hell. They are omnicidal. They are an existential threat. Thinking they should all die is not psychopathic, it’s the only reasonable position. Characters are free to have unreasonable positions, but let’s be real and understand that their goal is to build a bridge between Hell and Earth for conquest by an army of demons with godlike powers.
5. They get yoinked out of any borough that doesn’t belong to them, making extended roleplay impossible and extremely dangerous to the person who decides to give them the chance. There’s no point in taking them back to base for an interrogation if they’ll just get teleported back to their own base. If this gets suppressed when bound (dunno if it does), then it still only lasts until they bargain escape out of it. Then, oops, you can never travel through a Legion-controlled borough again without threat of retaliation.

Their design simply makes them impossible to leave unaddressed as a threat, unfortunately. It relies entirely on trusting the behavior of someone you do not know, cannot vet, and cannot opt out of unlike every other antagonistic system in H7. All while giving even more power to the antagonist than other systems do. To my knowledge, there’s nothing stopping them from electric fencing you into a room and then detaining everyone that tries to save you.

So the role of these Guests is explicitly stated to be a threat and mechanically supported as a nearly unsurmountable one. Lore supports them as the one faction that everyone agrees is a problem and has to be stopped. The entire game is built around limiting their influence and power.

You should make one planning on being a threat, causing trouble, and eventually dying. Not having an extended character arc, because they simply aren’t built for one. They do not have the mechanical support for it. They have huge barriers in place, both in code and lore, to keep it from happening.

Do I think this is how an antagonist guest should be designed? No. But it’s the reality.

Do I think no-RP murder is ideal behavior? No, but the current code and lore punishes anything else. There’s no way to draw it out without risking far worse happening to your PC.

It’s a Guest with an instant auto-win button they can deploy any time they like in certain areas and get teleported out of any area where they can’t do it. They can hurt anyone they like worse than any real PC and are largely immune to the consequences. It’s the natural consequence of the design.

So I mostly do everything in my power to avoid them, because extended roleplay is actively coded against as it stands.

[Matthew]

I want to step in here since I was the one who ultimately made the call.

This wasn’t a case where someone set out to hunt down a Lieutenant. It was a wrong place, wrong time moment. While actively out in the mist people got pulled into combat. One was a Lieutenant who attacked the other person, and from there they lost. I wasn’t in a position to be fully involved when it was happening, so I delegated and gave a remote call. That decision, made at a distance, is what cut the story short.

At the time, my thinking was fairly binary: either a prolonged interrogation with little chance of survival that I didn’t have time to oversee or participate in, or an execution to move on. On that basis, I advised killing. What I didn’t realize then was that this ended up being zero RP. That’s where I see the real mistake. Not being more present to make sure the story had space to play out, even briefly. By defaulting to the “clean” solution, I halted someone else’s story, and that’s not what I want to promote.

I think we should talk more as a group about what to do with captured Lieutenants. Execution is the quick answer, but it risks shutting things down. Long-term imprisonment doesn’t seem sustainable. I struggle finding reasons where it makes sense to release, but want to find those kinds of solutions.

I’ll own my part in how this one played out, and I’ll handle it differently in the future. Sometimes these situations do come down to bad timing and imperfect information, but that doesn’t change the fact that better RP could have happened here. I appreciate everyone raising their perspectives, and I’d like to help work toward clearer expectations so we can balance danger with story in moments like this.

[Author]

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