Breaking Bad

[Annalesa]

So, let me come at this there's not enough bad guys from the other angle:

Somebody who has played a "bad guy" before and loves to stir up trouble

Anna was a mage that eventually became a thief (briefly Sapiente), along with being and doing a ton of other things. After doing a lot of immoral things, she slowly cracked and eventually became the Skin Walker, a serial killer.

The problem is that I did a ton of bad things, and almost all of them were in the background and in secret. There is a lot of trouble going on all the time in this game.

Trust me. It finds me. Always.

No, it's not always readily obvious and on the surface, but it's there. It just take a while to actually build up a legitimate bad guy.

As for the kind of flash and flair bad guys that a lot of people are probably looking for...folks the bottom line is that those kinds of characters are expensive.

I'd love to make a level 5 mage and try to burn the town down, but that would require a lot of experience and a lot of quest points.

I mean, every little thing involves having to spend QP, and it's not exactly easy to get that stuff. And, furthermore, seeing as how I'd be spending a boatload of XP on a char that was only going to last a few weeks to a few months at the most, only getting back 30 or 40% of my spent XP is not going to cut it. Yes, I understand that there is a recommend system, but how am I going to guarantee that I get any significant amount of XP back? No matter how awesome my idea is, and no matter how well I roll things, there are no guarantees.

And then I can't just make a character I want. If it's anything special, I need to app for it. And there's like 5 immies I need to send an app to, and who knows when they'll have time to deal with that?

I can't speak for everybody else, but here's what I know for my own self:

There is an extremely strong disincentive to make bad guys.

[Puciek]

Problem with bad guys is the very broken risk vs reward ratio. When you do a bad thing of any notoriety, there are gabazilion tools to track you back down (and know that this is you) while there are not as many at concealing it. It's especially annoying to new players (look: me) who don't know how actions/spell look on the other end (and there is no way to learn it on your own).
And with all those risks, what is the reward?


REC_LEVEL:
Global Storytelling : 5 %
Events or Global Effect : 4 %
Major personal danger : 4 %
Minor personal danger : 3 %
Limited Storytelling : 3 %
Direct, major RP impact : 2 %
Direct, minor RP impact : 1 %
Character style : 1 %
Duplicate Submission : 0 %

So just to "break even" on XP with a bad character you need to get roughly 15 recs for different events. And people are very reluctant to hand those out actually which boggles my mind. If people want to see more baddies, they need to value bad actions more and reward those who stick out their neck by either casting spells that may give them out (as it is obvious who did it) or who start some sort of conflict, manipulation and other sort of deception.

I firmly believe that any action, that hurts your character, taken because of your IC integrity should be rewarded with recommend. That's my guideline.

[Annalesa]

Problem with bad guys is the very broken risk vs reward ratio. When you do a bad thing of any notoriety, there are gabazilion tools to track you back down (and know that this is you)

Hit the nail on the head. The second that you do anything even remotely direct, you're pretty much a dead man walking.

Honestly, I don't mind the risk vs. reward scenario so much. I don't mind going in and knowing that this char or that char is probably going to die horribly and very quickly.

What I do mind is bankrupting myself of XP and QP while I'm just trying to make cool characters or do neat stuff. I'm just not going to do it.

[Voxumo]

Yeah and plus most of the time the baddies remain hidden and how are yous suppose to recommend someone who you don't know who they are? I mean really how does that add up?

[Puciek]

Yeah and plus most of the time the baddies remain hidden and how are yous suppose to recommend someone who you don't know who they are? I mean really how does that add up?

I am pretty sure that if you will say on ooc "I want to recommend a person but I haven't seen him/her/it" staff will be happy to help you with that (while keeping the other person anonymous) as I am sure that most of skills like steal are logged anyway. I know that I've received a recommendation from staffer after managing a steal during mage burning.

[Dice]

I would just like to say I really agree with this.

Our starter thresholds are so low that you have to do an incredible amount to get your death XP up to a level where you don't actually lose out after creating a bad guy, especially since any given event can only net you one rec in terms of actual rec level %.

I'm not even sure it's possible to get your rec level to 100% before getting caught via doing bad guy things.

That said RPA definitely doesn't just hand you bad guys - if they're wearing cloaks, you get very little, and most of the bad-guy catching comes directly from RP rather than tools.

[Cellan]

As someone who generally plays lawful characters, I'd like it if it were easier for people to be antagonistic on both sides of the coin. In other words: making it easier for the bad guys to be bad is also going to make it more dangerous for the lawful types; I think that this will lower life expectancy in general, as a natural consequence of the RP atmosphere being more... well, antagonistic and contentious.

Given that, I think that maybe we need to focus on 'antagonism' rather than 'good' or 'bad'; in short, we need to level the playing field for both sides of the pitch. If 'lawful' types are going to go on a one-man crusade in an attempt to wipe out the Manus "once-and-for-all", then this surely means that they, too, will be sacrificing quite a bit of EXP if they die?

I'm in complete agreement with everyone here, but I do think we need to shift our focus slightly.

[Puciek]

As someone who generally plays lawful characters, I'd like it if it were easier for people to be antagonistic on both sides of the coin. In other words: making it easier for the bad guys to be bad is also going to make it more dangerous for the lawful types; I think that this will lower life expectancy in general, as a natural consequence of the RP atmosphere being more... well, antagonistic and contentious.

Given that, I think that maybe we need to focus on 'antagonism' rather than 'good' or 'bad'; in short, we need to level the playing field for both sides of the pitch. If 'lawful' types are going to go on a one-man crusade in an attempt to wipe out the Manus "once-and-for-all", then this surely means that they, too, will be sacrificing quite a bit of EXP if they die?

I'm in complete agreement with everyone here, but I do think we need to shift our focus slightly.

Difference is that people generally loathe the baddie and gang up on him, while everyone supports the "good hero" who goes against thieves/mages. The social stigma and hardships of normal functioning seem to balance it well.

[Geras]

Yah, I agree with Cellan here. Some of the best villains we've had have been lawful types. I wouldn't mind the XP recovery being boosted a bit across the board. It was too high before and now it's a bit too low and could use a tweak up again IMHO.

[Cellan]

Well, to be fair, no one plays a "bad guy" to escape social stigma and be generally well-liked. It sort of comes with the job description: we're always going to have battle lines drawn between difference IC factions. Figuring out the difference between good/bad, right/wrong is part of the draw of TI, and forms the basis of most of our day-to-day frictions.

As for gaining more support, I'm not sure that's strictly true. Our numbers in the Knights and Reeves aren't great at the moment, and there's nothing stopping a group of "baddies" from ganging up on a lawful character.

My point here isn't that we should make it harder for "bad" characters to succeed or build their skills at all: I'm in 100% agreement that they should be rewarded in some way for stirring up. My point is that it doesn't only take "bad" characters to stir trouble, and that the "good" types sacrifice their lives for the sake of good RP. I think that we should ultimately be giving people, good or bad, more death XP for cutting short their characters' lives.