Uncooperative Prisoners

[Matias]

Any events in the past or recent are not the point of this post. This is simply drawing attention to a potential design issue.

Become Difficult Prisoner – excerpt from helpfile

If a victim chooses the stoic unresponsive option twice in a row, they
will pay some life force and be flagged as a difficult prisoner. Typing
become difficult prisoner will also flag you this way. Difficult
prisoners slowly drain the life force from anyone roleplaying with them
while they are helpless and this flag lasts for three days.

Now in prior versions you had Sanctuary and so after going stoic/difficult you normally survived.

However in the current iteration you can die for bad decisions. So from a design perspective does Become Difficult Prisoner still fulfill its goal? The goal being that people who do not enjoy RPing with each other or being antagonized by certain people can reduce and discourage continued interaction/RP? Sometimes actions which lead to capture can warrant harsh punishments. Especially from an uncooperative prisoner. Is the political cost of murder (which is little understood) supposed to discourage it? Should difficult prisoners have further penalties to executing?

Or is everything working as intended and charon coins / social pressure will win out in the end?

[Luka]

The purpose of difficult prisoner is more so to flag up, and provide resistance to, scenes which you aren’t comfortable writing out. Whether it’s for content reasons, because you don’t like the person you’re scening with, or you’re just done playing the game for the day and don’t have any energy left to expend on engaging creatively with a video game.

I don’t think it’s supposed to be a “get out of jail free card”, especially in H7 which has a larger focus on mechanically intensive PVP and managing to corner someone into a situation where you could kill someone isn’t something trivial. If going difficult prisoner made it harder to kill you, I think we’d just see everyone go difficult prisoner at the beginning of every scene, which would be kind of lame.

I’d say if someone goes difficult prisoner just don’t try to get any more RP out of them. If you were going to execute them, execute them. If you were gunna rough them up, rough them up. If you were gunna keep them in a cell for a while, take them off to the cell. As long as you’re not increasing the mechanical consequence you’re giving someone because you’re upset they didn’t want to RP with you, you’re probably fine, and I think difficult prisoner as it is is perfectly fit for purpose for flagging up when someone is feeling like that.

[Matias]

So the assumption is that the prisoners RP or lack there of shouldn’t have any impact on the outcome of a scene? If you are willing to beat them / throw them in prison after an interaction but would kill them if they didn’t give satisfactory responses. How does that play out?

[Luka]

I think in the instance of someone throwing up difficult prisoner in a good faith way it shouldn’t have any impact on the outcome of a scene, yeah.

If you suspect the person doing it is doing it tactically, and isn’t genuinely uncomfortable / too exhasuted for the scene, then yeah, that’s something you should take into account, but outside of that it’s the classic “My guy” dillema. What’s more important? That realism is kept perfect, and all characters act exactly as they would given their defined characteristics? Or that everyone at the table is having fun?

[Luka]

So, firstly, let’s try and keep things productive. You’re clearly upset about something, so please feel free to reach out to me about whatever it is sometime and we can see if we can iron it.

Secondly though, I don’t have any alts on H7, I’ve only been playing Luka, and I don’t ever play more than one character at once, or at least, haven’t in my time since I started playing Haven. If a character you thought was being played by me did something to upset you there’s not really much I can say towards that, you’d need to talk to whoever it was that was playing that character.

As for me going difficult prisoner a lot, I can also confirm I’ve not been doing that. I’ve gone difficult prisoner once since H7 started. That was today, and I did it 20 minutes into the scene since I couldn’t figure out what the command was and had to search helpfiles to find it.

To actually answer your question though, about what to do if you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t seem interested in writing a story with you in which they are receiving antagonism from you. I’d just recommend to not story tell with that person. Don’t take their plot hooks, don’t reach out to their character. If they insist on interacting with you despite that I’d even say to go so far as to reach out OOC and explain that the vibes aren’t there and you’d like to focus on stories that don’t involve their character.

[Luka]

Though to add to that, I’d also just check if that person wasn’t simply having a bad day. There are a lot of situations, especially in H7, you can catch someone right as they’re about to log off, or right after they’ve already had an exhausting scene, or in any number of situations where they’re just not interested in further RP at that time. If someone acts like that consistantly, like you seem to think I do, then yeah you should just try and avoid playing with them, but also keep in mind that there’s a person behind the computer, and that person has a life, and it’s probably a life complicated enough that there could be a lot more explanations beyond them simply being lame for why they’re trying to get out of a scene.

[Author]

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