-The- Raiding post.

[Moofassa]

The following is based on an actual IC event, but in no way can be traced to an actual event.




                              Along the North Road


The big fat human has arrive from the south, riding a big yellow kank.

The big fat human dismounts, to skin a dead carru lying in the middle of the road.

Hiding elf, sneaks up behind human.

The hooded, freaky elf, walks up behind you with an arrow drawn, feet from your neck, shouting in poor sirihish' Give up, or i shoot'


big fat human mounts kank, spam flees away.



Ok, i know there have been many many posts about this. But i think we need to dicuss why this happens. And when it's twinking, and when it's RP.
In that scenario, it just isnt realistic, because the arrow would make big fat human into big fat corpse. I wanted to start a thread on how to react properly to a raid, and how to raid properly.
Im tired, of both, people spam walking away from death traps, and elven raiders not raiding fairly.

Please.

[Cenghiz]

Find paralyzing poison, poison your arrow, shoot after he escapes and go kill him, ending with OOC: Next time you want interaction, you start emoting.
But please please please, don't start a discussion.. It's been discussed a bazillion times before.

Note: Dead animal to skin? Heh, kudos. Perfect idea.

[Moofassa]

Thankyou. It's a favorite, now i've gone and given in away.


I really think this needs to be discussed seriously, not in a i hate you, you hate me sort of way. But a real discussion of why this happens, and how we can change it.

[facehugger]

You can also look at that from the other side.

Let's say you're on the road. Flat, empty road. Flat, barren wastes for a hundred cords in each direction.

Just because you think you're good at sneaking. Just because you happen to have made your hide roll... This does not mean that you'd be able to creep along the flat empty area to come within a close enough distance to hold the tip of your drawn arrow a cord from someone's neck. I would rank that in the same "forsive RP" catagory as saying that you managed to get close enough to someone in a tavern to hold your knife to their throat. Getting close enough, unseen, to make an offensive strike is already a coded feature of the game. It's called Backstab.

I'll also touch on the other matter near since, of people complaining about "We raided him and had all directions guarded, but he still fled! Even though we had all the directions guarded!" Well... one coded room in the environment, is a very large deal of space. Let's say its much smaller than it really is, call it a 100' x 100' block. Well, if you've got four people each attempting to block someone from getting past a 100' wide stretch of land... not very easy. Watch a football/soccer/basketball/hockey game some time, you'll quickly see what I mean.

[Moofassa]

I completely agree, this is the type of discussion i was hoping for.

Alright, so say they poweremote, how should one react?

[Gaare]

I would make hidden emotes while following the figure with "think." Same for stealing, hiding, etc...

[Cenghiz]

I simply disagree.. If he placed a dead animal ready for skinning for nice hide there, I'm sure he RPed hiding somewhere close.. His aim's to attack when the victim's involved in the corpse. Even a seven year old boy may understand the aim of the unskinned corpse and the incoming raider.

[facehugger]

I simply disagree.. If he placed a dead animal ready for skinning for nice hide there, I'm sure he RPed hiding somewhere close.. His aim's to attack when the victim's involved in the corpse. Even a seven year old boy may understand the aim of the unskinned corpse and the incoming raider.

It doesn't matter if he "RPed hiding somewhere close"... Assuming this person even bothered to read the room description to see if there could possibly be somewhere close to hide.

We're still talking about closing the distance between "somewhere close" and "right next to you". The closer you get to someone, the harder it is to continue to go unnoticed. If it is in the middle of a road, as the original scenario stated, that means that there is going to be at least 10 or so cords of open, empty area that said raider is going to have to "sneak" through to get that close.

Now... we'll add in more factors.

Alright. Say there happened to be this big boulder, large enough to hide behind. That this boulder was right on the edge of the road. That this wasn't one of the big roads (remember, the average "road" through the wastes is large enough to handle even an Argosy, so we're talking roads that are an easy 50 cords wide) and that this boulder was only 5 cords from the center of the road, where said corpse was placed....

Now, say we're assuming that the prey is a good enough a sport to take in the environment and go with the flow, to allow the arrow wielding fiend to sneak up close enough to place a drawn arrow tip a cord from their neck... Is this arrow wielding fiend going to be a good enough sport to take in the random chances of, say... what direction this person is facing, when they crouch down to skin the beast? Usually, emotes alone aren't enough to determine this, since most of the time the arrow wielding fiend isn't going to emote out which side of the road they're hiding on, and most of the time the victim won't emote which way they're facing when they crouch down to skin. So it's up to the fiend to use their judgement.. To roll a dice, flip a coin, to put in enough random chance to see if their carefully arranged planned would actually work, once the trap was sprung.

Would your average fiend do this?

[Moofassa]

Average fiend, noobie fiend, experienced fiend. Even if he's facing the elf, would you get up and run, just because you saw where he came from, with his arrow drawn?

[amoeba]

Ok, i know there have been many many posts about this. But i think we need to dicuss why this happens. And when it's twinking, and when it's RP.

But please please please, don't start a discussion.. It's been discussed a bazillion times before.

It has been discussed many times, but it is importiant.

My opinions, ignore them as you wish:

- First I *expect* that many people will do this, fight or flight, kinda a natural reaction. So that being said. Plan for it. You know for those folks that say it's unrealistic, I've encountered similar in RL, you know what I did?  I ran. As simple as that.  There are things you can do to anticipate this reaction, and no I'm not telling any

- please don't ooc because you are unhappy with the situation and you want to get your digs in. Wish up, email, whatever.

- Don't get so ate up in the needing an emote gratification that that is all that matters. Chase the damn guy, you're an elf, you know he's keeping to the road, cut him off at the pass, have your buddies waiting, whatever. I enjoy the chase at least as much as catching him.

- If you are the initiator of the scene it is your responsablity to set the scene (i.e emote), the other person is reacting to you. How they are going to react will depend on a number of factors not in your control.  How experienced with RP they are, how powerfull they are, can they survive an attack, did they get ooc panicky about it and just start mashing keys., etc.  In short worry about how you react not how they "should" react.

- Deferentiate between "raiding" and assassinating. Sometimes the intent is to simply kill the target for whatever reason. In this case stealth is probably called for, so don't be shocked at the attack from nowhere. There are skills for sleathy behaviour, and there are tools for detection.  Still if possible, the inittator should try if possible to convey a scene, not always possible, but they should try.

- As a raider, I try to do at least a little setup, sometimes they run off before my poky fingers get it out, other times I get to complete the scene. When the people just off fast, both ICly and OOCly I think I just need to get faster and better at this, I shrug and I move on.  I Don't always succeed at setting the scene well, sometimes it's out of my control. Event's move to quickly. Sometimes it all goes nicely.

- As a victim, I have been guilty of bahamet fleeing behaviour. You know what I mean. A bahamet appears in the room, you stand and run hard.  I don't think many stop to a emote about being scared before booking it.  Just remember to some players, you, the raider are the bahamet.  Don't be so shocked when they just run.  As you get more powerful and/or more experianced you know how much time you have before you're in any serious danger, you have the luxury of a nicely drawn out RP scene.

-In short, Do the best that you can do. do whats appropriate ICly.  Enjoy it when it works well,  move on and learn from it when it doesn't.  There are always comments about trusting the other, well this isn't about them, you can't control them, just do whats correct for you. If the person is an obvious twink, give it to the IMMS and move on with the knowledge that you did what you could.

[facehugger]

Average fiend, noobie fiend, experienced fiend. Even if he's facing the elf, would you get up and run, just because you saw where he came from, with his arrow drawn?

The example was a situation where a fiend was able to sneak up to a point blank range where he likely would not miss.

Now, if you're coming around a boulder, ten feet away... yea, chances are I'd make a move in the few to several second time period it took for the fiend to get a bead on me. Be it getting a shield up, drawing my weapons and charging, or hopping on my kank and making a run for it...

In my mind, chances are, that if I let the fiend get within a point blank range of a possibly lethal shot, that I'm going to die. I'd much rather act when I stood a better chance of survival.

[Moofassa]

No one said he was going to kill you. You just reacted right away... would you actually charge a man with an arrow pointed at your face, the second you made any hostile movement, realistically, the arrow would be in your eye socket.


Edited to add: This is off topic, if you wanna dicuss this more with me, id be glad to send me a PM. back to more Amoeba like posts.

[Anonymous]

Did you email the staff?  That's more likely to get any desired change in play from that one PC than this post.

[facehugger]

No one said he was going to kill you. You just reacted right away... would you actually charge a man with an arrow pointed at your face, the second you made any hostile movement, realistically, the arrow would be in your eye socket.

No, I think this is on topic.

When someone draws a weapon and comes at me, I will assume that their intent is to kill me. I think most people would. This is Zalanthas.

And, if you will look at the example I was stating... When I said reacted right away, I am talking about reacting when I see someone coming around a corner of a boulder. When they are rounding a corner, they do not have an arrow pointed at my face. They have an arrow pointed off to the side, at some odd angle that might roughly be my torso level. When they round the corner enough so that their face is visible, that I can see their eyes, which means that they can see me, that is when they begin to angle their bow so that their arrow will be pointed at my face. This takes time. Minutes? No. But a couple/few seconds is plenty enough time for me to begin to react. It's enough time for me to raise my shield to cover my face. It's enough time for me to take a leaping dive behind my kank. It's enough time to make sure that they don't he sure shot that having an arrow aimed point blank at a still target would give them. It's far harder to hit a moving target at 10 cords than it is to hit a neck from a cord away.

[JollyGreenGiant]

I'd go with a stepped process.

1. If you've got time to emote with the guy, you've got time to create a quick alias - alias x shoot bigfathuman.  If he mounts up with no rp, reward him by shooting him.  Hopefully you've got some poisoned arrows on hand to make it a more pleasant experience (for you).  Since in theory that's what you were threatening to do if the guy moved, it certainly seems a logical conclusion to his actions.

2. Log the event, email the mud.

3. If you see the same guy again, turn mercy on, shoot first and ask questions later, but don't let it affect your future interactions with other people.

[EvilRoeSlade]

Just because you think you're good at sneaking. Just because you happen to have made your hide roll... This does not mean that you'd be able to creep along the flat empty area to come within a close enough distance to hold the tip of your drawn arrow a cord from someone's neck. I would rank that in the same "forsive RP" catagory as saying that you managed to get close enough to someone in a tavern to hold your knife to their throat. Getting close enough, unseen, to make an offensive strike is already a coded feature of the game. It's called Backstab.

I'm not prepared to concede that RPing sneaking up behind someone and putting a knife to their throat is bad RP.  Neither the backstab command or the subdue command can portray that situation properly, and so it seems to me that it's unhappily left in the field of emotes.  But that isn't really what the topic at hand is, and I don't want to talk about it.

But getting to within say... 30 feet of someone?  Close enough to nock an arrow and aim it?  That falls solely under the domain of the hide and sneak skills.  Yes, solely.  If you succeed at remaining undetected, then you've done it.  If you don't succeed, then you haven't.  It is now the job of the target of your emotes to role-play accordingly, with the understanding that they didn't notice you until you made your presence known.

What it appears you're suggesting is that you aren't really hidden unless your target agrees with you that you are.  Since this is not a MUSH, that idea is ridiculous beyond reconciliation.  Your victim doesn't decide on your ability to hide and sneak, and you don't decide on your ability to hide and sneak, or even in what places it's not possible to hide and sneak.  The code does.  There is nothing more to be said.

I'll also touch on the other matter near since, of people complaining about "We raided him and had all directions guarded, but he still fled! Even though we had all the directions guarded!" Well... one coded room in the environment, is a very large deal of space. Let's say its much smaller than it really is, call it a 100' x 100' block. Well, if you've got four people each attempting to block someone from getting past a 100' wide stretch of land... not very easy. Watch a football/soccer/basketball/hockey game some time, you'll quickly see what I mean.

Here's another thing that's ridiculous.  The idea that there are things which exist called "rooms" which are three leagues in length and width, and to keep someone from exiting this "room" you must cover these entire three leagues.

I don't know when or where it was said that a room was three leagues in length, but that's only to give you a sense of perspective as to how big the world is.  If you maintain that this tidbit means that it's impossible to use the guard command in the wilderness, then you should also have to accept that it's impossible to use the archery command in the wilderness on any target that isn't in the same room as you are.  In gameplay terms, the idea of rooms doesn't work at all.

When someone guards an exit and prevents you from leaving, it means that they're close enough to you to prevent you from escaping.  If they try to prevent you from leaving but fail, then they weren't close enough.  That's all you need to know.

[wizturbo]

Adding a "threaten" ability which has been suggested would allievate many of these problems.  But in all actuality, don't sweat it.  I'd wish up before "raiding" anyone anyway, so the imm's would see their poor reaction and no doubt toss a negative comment on their account because of it.  

Then, when they want to app for a special role and get denied, they might reconsider the way they play.

[Dracul]

Threaten Threaten, all the way baby. Would be an awesome command to allow for a lot of rp. Adding emotes into play more too without such a need for all trust.

Code/RP I'm fully behind ERS's post.

What wizturbo said...yeah. Thats a good idea. I'm pretty shy about wishing, asking the imms for things. A lot of times I feel its too trivial to wish up. But notification wishes.  Its -only- one echo. Completely openended.

I would reiterate what ERS said about sneaking up on someone with hide/and or sneak. But, well, he and others said it already.

As for alias.  I normally use the clipboard...type out the command. Highlight it.   Ctrl-c to copy. Ctrl-v, Enter.  Bam!

[facehugger]

But getting to within say... 30 feet of someone?  Close enough to nock an arrow and aim it?  That falls solely under the domain of the hide and sneak skills.  Yes, solely.  If you succeed at remaining undetected, then you've done it.  If you don't succeed, then you haven't.  It is now the job of the target of your emotes to role-play accordingly, with the understanding that they didn't notice you until you made your presence known.

The situation that is under discussion was as follows:

The hooded, freaky elf, walks up behind you with an arrow drawn, feet from your neck, shouting in poor sirihish' Give up, or i shoot'

If you are talking 30 feet, and not point blank, then I certainly agree with you. That falls under sneak and hide.

When someone guards an exit and prevents you from leaving, it means that they're close enough to you to prevent you from escaping.  If they try to prevent you from leaving but fail, then they weren't close enough.  That's all you need to know.

While I'll say that yes, one person can easily situate to hide in a location to be able to pop up within, say, 20 feet of the person, and block them from going that way. But the difficulty involved in four people placing themselves in an, as you say, three league area, that -also- happen to be the same exact area that the victim ends up walking through, is very slim.

[jhunter]

Just because you think you're good at sneaking. Just because you happen to have made your hide roll... This does not mean that you'd be able to creep along the flat empty area to come within a close enough distance to hold the tip of your drawn arrow a cord from someone's neck.

I completely disagree. He snuck up on the character, even dished out an emote. The victim should've rp'd it out. The code is there to decide whether or not he was able to sneak up on you...end of story.

[Maybe42or54]

I agree, unless the guy -assumed- he suceeded in his hide and your scan picked it up.
Open-ended emotes.

[Dracul]

Just a quick note...although it's leaning toward derailment...but wait...the topic is vauge...-the raiding- thread. ooh...know I want to derail.
Ahem.

Guarding. Lets take the example of sports VS guarding E exit in a wilderness room.

Consider the players of proffesional sports as players with a Very High guard skill. Right? They train that, all the time.

Now guard works both ways, having a high guard skill helps you guard, but it also helps you get through guard.             A pro player would have a pretty easy time againt a schmuck. You put any NBA in front of me...unless I get violent I'm not gonna get a basketball past them.

My allusion.

[EvilRoeSlade]

The hooded, freaky elf, walks up behind you with an arrow drawn, feet from your neck, shouting in poor sirihish' Give up, or i shoot'

If you are talking 30 feet, and not point blank, then I certainly agree with you. That falls under sneak and hide.

Okay, I see what you're saying.  I don't think being a cord away from someone is exactly ideal ambush range for a bow-wielding raider, unless that raider's aim is so horrible that it's necessary, and in that case he's probably screwed anyway.

I percieved that you were trying to justify spam-fleeing in a situation that favors the victim code-wise and the raider RP-wise.  If that's not the case, then I don't have much more to say.

While I'll say that yes, one person can easily situate to hide in a location to be able to pop up within, say, 20 feet of the person, and block them from going that way. But the difficulty involved in four people placing themselves in an, as you say, three league area, that -also- happen to be the same exact area that the victim ends up walking through, is very slim.

But see here, you still haven't gotten out of the room mentality.  The action of any given scene does NOT always take place in a three league area.  If four people are surrounding a victim and trying to prevent his escape, they can do it if they're close enough to that person.  If they didn't do it, they weren't close enough.

But I agree that it's fine for someone to attempt to flee in that situation.  If his escape works, then they didn't corner him skillfully enough.  If his escape doesn't, then they did.

Now, if twenty people were all emoting surrounding someone and he just spam-fled away, then that would bother me a hell of a lot.

[SewerRat_inTheOpen]

I still say when people spam flee away when they get threatened by a bowmen close by, they are putting a lot of faith in their raider or their steel chainmail. Not to mention the code.

[Rhyden]

Find paralyzing poison, poison your arrow, shoot after he escapes and go kill him, ending with OOC: Next time you want interaction, you start emoting.
But please please please, don't start a discussion.. It's been discussed a bazillion times before.

Note: Dead animal to skin? Heh, kudos. Perfect idea.

The skill poisoning is a very hard skill to aquire. Even more so is the correct poisons. IRL, if somebody has an arrow pulled back aiming anywhere near my head, sure I might roll out of the way if I was courageous/amazing agile man, but I wouldn't even try jumping back onto my mount. That could equal an arrow to the back of the head.

But, one has to consider the composants of arrows...flint, agate, obsidian, quartz, wood...some arrows aren't that tough, bows aren't that strong and most people know this.

This instance has happened to me before as well, Moofassa but an even worse scenario. Shot one arrow into X's body, X stood up, shot another arrow into X's body, X mounts X's Y, shot another arrow into X's body then X rides away. Chase after X and shot another arrow this time in X's helmless head. What should have happened? Recoil from first arrow, probably resulting in X clutching the pain-filled arrow stuck in X's bloodied chest. What did happen? Shot 4 arrows into X, X rides away with no emotes or role-playing at all. End of story, world is full of twinks...I mean, riding away with 3 arrows in your chest then being shot in the head while riding? Pulleaze!