Subsistence level work for courtesans, whores and the like?

[Armaddict]

Now again, consider barmaids, fortune tellers, street performers, nursemaids, tattooists, whores, and so on - these are all "service" professions that we know exist in the world, are in theme, and are plenty common based on npcs, room echoes, descriptions etc -- definitely more than "a lot of nothing".

Well.  When I say a 'whole lot of nothing', what I'm saying isn't that things don't exist.  They do.  But the translation from the vNPC realm into the PC realm comes with a lot of assumptions about just how 'static' those people actually are, or whether they are as I said...a reference to the game setting that provides backdrop and atmosphere, but not necessarily the basis of 'the code should make this completely easy for you to do, as well'.

In the end, that -is- what I think is being talked about.  People can and have done some of the things from that list.  Sometimes, they were prominent enough to make money at it.  Other times, it was a side thing.

If people want to play those things, that's well and good.  But I don't consider it particularly contributory, either...unless it -is- truly a side thing, and they have things more involved going on the side.  In essence...a fortune teller who just sits and tells fortunes might very well be able to subsist purely off of telling fortunes.  But that doesn't...really bring much...to the game, for a player to be doing that; I'd -assume- that they are involved in other things on the side beyond just that and bar-banter, and those other things, I will also assume, bring meat to the game.  If it brings meat to the game, it probably brings meat to their table as well.

This is purely my own perspective on people playing purely-flavor roles.  No, I would not deny people the ability to do that, which is why I'm not -strongly- against it.  Just kinda really 'meh' on it.  Like I was trying to imply with my question...it's kind of a move towards people playing flavor roles in a bubble that they don't need to leave.  Grebbers, and your other examples, have the bonus of providing content to crafters and items for shops and that at least minimal contribution to the actions of others.  It's great that you want to play out what vNPC's do (kind of)...but generally speaking, I consider PC's to be the -potential- real stories amid a backdrop of things you really wouldn't want to read about for very long.

[Armaddict]

I'll go ahead and stop posting about it, because I'm not trying to shut the idea down as much as I'm a little stranged out by the desire to facilitate a means for characters to remain 'just there' characters, as opposed to 'just there' characters that over time are morphed into characters forced by hardship to engage in other things that help, hinder, or involve other players.

To me, the 'just there' characters were perfect as NPC and vNPC backdrops; PCs, generally, I assume we all want to be a little more involved in the goings-on of the world.  A dung sweeper that emotes (or in this case, a prostitute that mingles and contributes basically by saying they're a prostitute) might say 'mucho kudos!' to you, but to me, that's just player time that could be spent creating or contributing to content and things for players to do.

[M]

I think giving players more freedom to roleplay as they might like is plenty contribution enough. It brings interaction, which keeps players engaged; it brings the world to life, which keeps players immersed. A player doesn't contribute more or less to the game just by virtue of playing one role over another; they just contribute by playing in an engaging way period.

[Synthesis]

I'll go ahead and stop posting about it, because I'm not trying to shut the idea down as much as I'm a little stranged out by the desire to facilitate a means for characters to remain 'just there' characters, as opposed to 'just there' characters that over time are morphed into characters forced by hardship to engage in other things that help, hinder, or involve other players.

To me, the 'just there' characters were perfect as NPC and vNPC backdrops; PCs, generally, I assume we all want to be a little more involved in the goings-on of the world.  A dung sweeper that emotes (or in this case, a prostitute that mingles and contributes basically by saying they're a prostitute) might say 'mucho kudos!' to you, but to me, that's just player time that could be spent creating or contributing to content and things for players to do.

The idea that there will be some PC that routinely does nothing except idle in the resource-faucet whorehouse and collect crumbs is a total joke.  Presenting it as a counterargument is a straw man presented as reductio ad absurdum.  Nobody is going to sit there and "contribute nothing" over the long term.

The proper counterargument would be to question the necessity of grinding for basic shit in the first place.

[Armaddict]

The idea that there will be some PC that routinely does nothing except idle in the resource-faucet whorehouse and collect crumbs is a total joke.  Presenting it as a counterargument is a straw man presented as reductio ad absurdum.  Nobody is going to sit there and "contribute nothing" over the long term.

The proper counterargument would be to question the necessity of grinding for basic shit in the first place.

Then you missed the argument.  The argument isn't so much 'If you do this, everyone will do nothing.'

It's 'why would you incentivize or facilitate doing nothing?'  When we're all in agreement that there are plenty of ways to go about making coin without a standard 'I have virtual customers' check, then questioning implementing it so that people don't have to do those other things is not...SYNTHESIS ABSURDUS.  Ha!  Take -that- argument language to the face.

Edit:  No, but seriously.  I already talked it to death with other posters in discord to the point of feeling pretty comfortable that we talked over the points.  If it goes in, it goes in, I'm not claiming this is a game breaker or something.  I just think it's kind of a weird direction to remove some of the built-in drive to be involved in other things, and in the case we don't think that's going to happen (i.e. That's absurd, they'll do things the same way as now), I don't see the reason for it in the first place.

[valeria]

I think trading off your subguild so that you can play a flavor role to the hilt of that flavor is the exact opposite of an incentive.

[Synthesis]

The idea that there will be some PC that routinely does nothing except idle in the resource-faucet whorehouse and collect crumbs is a total joke.  Presenting it as a counterargument is a straw man presented as reductio ad absurdum.  Nobody is going to sit there and "contribute nothing" over the long term.

The proper counterargument would be to question the necessity of grinding for basic shit in the first place.

Then you missed the argument.  The argument isn't so much 'If you do this, everyone will do nothing.'

It's 'why would you incentivize or facilitate doing nothing?'  When we're all in agreement that there are plenty of ways to go about making coin without a standard 'I have virtual customers' check, then questioning implementing it so that people don't have to do those other things is not...SYNTHESIS ABSURDUS.  Ha!  Take -that- argument language to the face.

Edit:  No, but seriously.  I already talked it to death with other posters in discord to the point of feeling pretty comfortable that we talked over the points.  If it goes in, it goes in, I'm not claiming this is a game breaker or something.  I just think it's kind of a weird direction to remove some of the built-in drive to be involved in other things, and in the case we don't think that's going to happen (i.e. That's absurd, they'll do things the same way as now), I don't see the reason for it in the first place.

No, I didn't miss the argument.  A properly-implemented resource faucet is not an incentive to do nothing except logging in qua logging in, which is the argument you repeatedly make.  I disagree strongly that "hardship" is what "forces" PCs to "engage."  To rephrase the terms of your reductio:  the idea that we'd all just log in and act like NPCs if we had infinite coins in our bank accounts is absurd.

I didn't say you said "everyone will do nothing."  I said it's hyperbolic to propose that even -some- people will do nothing.  I guarantee you that every* sex-work PC who utilizes a properly-implemented** sex-work subsistence-level automated resource faucet will only use it as a springboard to be involved in other things, because the ENTIRE POINT of the game is to be involved in other things.

Not that I feel particularly strongly about it being implemented, because I typically don't engage in sexual or even romantic roleplay.  It's just that, as a matter of fairness, I understand that even though I'd personally rather type "forage salt" 100x a day than sit in the Gaj and flirt, there are other folks who enjoy exactly the opposite, and the game is big enough for both.

*I leave open the remote possibility that there exists some player of this game with OCD or the like who purely gains enjoyment from watching the numbers in their bank account  increase.
**Where "properly-implemented" means "it allows the PC to subsist without resorting to activities that would be out of character."

[Inks]

I just wanted to say I love people who play flavor roles, and if you want to sacrifice subguild for a role that means you don't get hungry in the city, I am 100% fine with that. Literally nothing will be hurt by that.

[Barzalene]

I too love flavor roles, but I disagree that nothing would be hurt. I think the game needs more hunger and desperation, not less. This is especially true for roles whose nature is to be hungry and desperate. Unless it you mean that once your hunger or thirst became near fatal you'd get a half cup of dirty water and a stale piece of bread or a cockroach to eat in exchange for your subguilds. Of course one would lose hitpoints along the way. what with living in desperate poverty.

[nauta]

I too love flavor roles, but I disagree that nothing would be hurt. I think the game needs more hunger and desperation, not less. This is especially true for roles whose nature is to be hungry and desperate. Unless it you mean that once your hunger or thirst became near fatal you'd get a half cup of dirty water and a stale piece of bread or a cockroach to eat in exchange for your subguilds. Of course one would lose hitpoints along the way. what with living in desperate poverty.

I'd be down with that.

Subguild: Profession
Trade-off: no coded skills (unlike other subguilds).
Reward: Every X days you receive a stale piece of bread, a cockroach, and a half cup of dirty water, and 10-20 sid.

After all, a butcher's assistant, a petty baker, or a fortuneteller in Allanak isn't making that much; whatever they get as the 'reward' should be roughly half (if that) of what a clanned employee gets.

One point that has come up worth emphasizing is that those of us who like playing flavor roles and who know the 'tricks' can survive just fine, but we have to do things against our character to do so.  So for instance, if I wanted to just be a poor southsider Allanaki human who works as a butcher's assistant, who never leaves the gates, and never goes in the rinth, my options to survive as a butcher's assistant are nothing.  Sure I could beg.  Sure I could go to crime.  Sure I could scrape dung.  (And maybe I would to supplement my income or on those really bad days when the boss ain't paying.)  But I couldn't survive while remaining in character as a butcher's assistant.  (Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

The profession sub-guild would allow new players who wanted to play flavor roles but don't know the 'tricks' to make mad coin to do so more easily (they'd still struggle to survive and be poor), and it would allow more experienced players to focus on playing a flavor role and remain in character while doing so.

[sleepyhead]

I do not think you get to retcon things that happen IG. What if someone hidden saw you, for example? If you were stripping bodies in the rinth then you were ICly stripping bodies in the rinth.

[Hauwke]

I do not think you get to retcon things that happen IG. What if someone hidden saw you, for example? If you were stripping bodies in the rinth then you were ICly stripping bodies in the rinth.

Thats exactly the point, why would a guy whose entire job is cutting critters, be in the 'rinth stripping guys and selling clothes?

[nauta]

I do not think you get to retcon things that happen IG. What if someone hidden saw you, for example? If you were stripping bodies in the rinth then you were ICly stripping bodies in the rinth.

I agree... but, what? 

The point is that at present in order to play a southside Allanaki butcher's assistant, you have to do things that a butcher's assistant wouldn't do.  The sub-guild profession would allow us to not do things that butcher's assistants qua butcher's assistants wouldn't do, things that are out of character for a butcher's assistant to do.  (We can still do those if we like, but we wouldn't have to.)

[Kankfly]

(Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

No. A veteran player will know better than retconning something you do ig because it's meta and twinking.

What happened ig, happened ig. There's no retconning.

If you're poor and starving, you're poor and starving. Why do you need sids to "fall back" on?

[nauta]

(Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

No. A veteran player will know better than retconning something you do ig because it's meta and twinking.

What happened ig, happened ig. There's no retconning.

If you're poor and starving, you're poor and starving. Why do you need sids to "fall back" on?

You need sids so that your character does not die, and at present there's no way to get sids just performing the day-to-day tasks that a butcher's assistant would perform, so you would have to resort to non-butcher-assistant tasks, such as salting, body grebbing, dung scraping, joining a clan, and so on.  I'm sort of confused where this talk of 'retcon' is coming from... when I say the actions are 'out of character', I mean they are out of character for a butcher's assistant: dung scraping is not what a butcher's assistant does.

[The Lonely Hunter]

(Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

Um...no. Really? A veteran player should not be doing anything outside of character. That is is very meta and inappropriate. Maybe I need to make that quote in my signature bold.

[Kankfly]

(Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

No. A veteran player will know better than retconning something you do ig because it's meta and twinking.

What happened ig, happened ig. There's no retconning.

If you're poor and starving, you're poor and starving. Why do you need sids to "fall back" on?

You need sids so that your character does not die, and at present there's no way to get sids just performing the day-to-day tasks that a butcher's assistant would perform, so you would have to resort to non-butcher-assistant tasks, such as salting, body grebbing, dung scraping, joining a clan, and so on.  I'm sort of confused where this talk of 'retcon' is coming from... when I say the actions are 'out of character', I mean they are out of character for a butcher's assistant: dung scraping is not what a butcher's assistant does.

Because if you have 2000 in your bank, you have 2000 in your bank, you're not poor and starving.

[nauta]

(Now, a veteran player will do something outside of character to make the role of a butcher's assistant possible: the first week out of chargen you go to the rinth and strip bodies and fill your bank account, or you dungscrape and fill the bank account, or you greb or whatever, and then once you have enough to subsist on you just 'pretend' that you are poor and starving and so on and focus on being a butcher's assistant.)

Um...no. Really? A veteran player should not be doing anything outside of character. That is is very meta and inappropriate. Maybe I need to make that quote in my signature bold.

That's precisely the point: the profession sub-guild would allow us to play butcher's assistants without having to do things against our characters.

[valeria]

You know, if instead of some set amount, there was subguild that let you forage food from midden heaps (and some of those items helped thirst), and maybe sometimes you'd find more than a single obsidian coin, I think that would suffice just as well.  Then, if you're starving as a butcher's assistant, you probably do what the rest of the starving butcher's assistants do.

But this has been suggested AT LEAST two other times and nothing has come of it.  If anyone is capable of foraging scrape-by amounts of sustenance from heaps in the City to live on as a beggar/street sweep/flavor role, it's in a system so arcane that I don't know about it, and I've played characters who have tried.

But absent that, I wouldn't mind having it represented some other way.  Including getting a minimal (and I think we're all talking minimal, here, nobody's saying hundreds of sids or I think even 100 sid) among of coin every RL week.

[Jherlen]

I too love flavor roles, but I disagree that nothing would be hurt. I think the game needs more hunger and desperation, not less. This is especially true for roles whose nature is to be hungry and desperate. Unless it you mean that once your hunger or thirst became near fatal you'd get a half cup of dirty water and a stale piece of bread or a cockroach to eat in exchange for your subguilds. Of course one would lose hitpoints along the way. what with living in desperate poverty.

I definitely think the game needs more hunger and desperation too. But I see this proposal as actually enabling more common, verge-of-poverty sorts of characters that today aren't very often played.

I think erasing your hunger/thirst while in the city entirely goes too far, but providing either a small amount of coin and/or a very minimal meal every X days will allow PCs to just barely scrape by. As further restriction, cut off the benefit if a PC joins a clan (since as a member of a clan, you're assumed to be virtually working for your clan and not a side job), and cap the reward to 7X coins an RL week, so that somebody who takes a two month break from the game doesn't log back in as rich as a Borsail noble.

Nobody needs to be able to get rich or live the easy life off this proposal. In fact if that's your goal, you'd be better off taking a crafting subguild, where in no time flat you'll be making more per day than the amounts we've been talking about here.

The end result is that you have characters who can roleplay a number of professions that aren't currently coded, yet do exist in the game world, and you'll be able to just barely get by on the verge of poverty by doing so. To me, that's what Allanak should be full of - a bunch of commoners just barely getting by day to day. The whole city is not (with some exceptions in the past) full of actually starving people, just people who are right on the edge.

You can play flavor PCs like chalton herders or butchers assistant's today, it's true, but you usually have to resort to means to support them that aren't quite what those people would actually do. Many of those means encourage no more player interaction than having a virtual income would. I don't think that if we introduced a Profession subguild that PCs would resort to spying or thieving or interacting any less; they'd just end up doing less things that are strange for a character in their role to do in order to get by.

[Delirium]

You know, if instead of some set amount, there was subguild that let you forage food from midden heaps (and some of those items helped thirst), and maybe sometimes you'd find more than a single obsidian coin, I think that would suffice just as well.  Then, if you're starving as a butcher's assistant, you probably do what the rest of the starving butcher's assistants do.

But this has been suggested AT LEAST two other times and nothing has come of it.  If anyone is capable of foraging scrape-by amounts of sustenance from heaps in the City to live on as a beggar/street sweep/flavor role, it's in a system so arcane that I don't know about it, and I've played characters who have tried.

But absent that, I wouldn't mind having it represented some other way.  Including getting a minimal (and I think we're all talking minimal, here, nobody's saying hundreds of sids or I think even 100 sid) among of coin every RL week.

Honestly, I like the forage option better, because IC circumstances change and characters grow. I'd rather be the butcher's assistant who foraged for stale crusts for years until finally getting that big break... or growing desperate enough to turn to criminal enterprises... etc, etc, etc. Once that flavor character develops further, the subguild becomes irrelevant. Foraging for scraps, etc within the city, however, allows you to move on from that when the time comes.

A flavor concept only lasts so long before you need some form of story arc to keep them interesting to play; that's true for any character, if there's no movement, no progress, no change, life will inevitably grow stale and their story dull.

[Is Friday]

You know, if instead of some set amount, there was subguild that let you forage food from midden heaps (and some of those items helped thirst), and maybe sometimes you'd find more than a single obsidian coin, I think that would suffice just as well.  Then, if you're starving as a butcher's assistant, you probably do what the rest of the starving butcher's assistants do.

But this has been suggested AT LEAST two other times and nothing has come of it.  If anyone is capable of foraging scrape-by amounts of sustenance from heaps in the City to live on as a beggar/street sweep/flavor role, it's in a system so arcane that I don't know about it, and I've played characters who have tried.

But absent that, I wouldn't mind having it represented some other way.  Including getting a minimal (and I think we're all talking minimal, here, nobody's saying hundreds of sids or I think even 100 sid) among of coin every RL week.

Honestly, I like the forage option better, because IC circumstances change and characters grow. I'd rather be the butcher's assistant who foraged for stale crusts for years until finally getting that big break... or growing desperate enough to turn to criminal enterprises... etc, etc, etc. Once that flavor character develops further, the subguild becomes irrelevant. Foraging for scraps, etc within the city, however, allows you to move on from that when the time comes.

A flavor concept only lasts so long before you need some form of story arc to keep them interesting to play; that's true for any character, if there's no movement, no progress, no change, life will inevitably grow stale and their story dull.

Bolded the part I wanted to +1.

All of my flavor PCs lost their spark for me once I'd played them for a bit. There's no ability to transition from flavor to "serious" meta PC in a lot of professions in Arm. I think it's one of the biggest weaknesses of this MUD.

I've played plenty of MUDs that do a much better job, but they're primarily RPIs. I think we can find a middle ground to rewarding any type of play and rewarding more than just the standard "guild" options.

[In Dreams]

I've played a career whore and a career lumberjack in Allanak myself.

Maybe it's just me, but the struggle was part of the fun! I wouldn't have really wanted it to be any easier.

That said, I've never considered my PC to be 'just flavor'. What they do for coins doesn't necessarily define them.

[James de Monet]

cap the reward to 7X coins an RL week, so that somebody who takes a two month break from the game doesn't log back in as rich as a Borsail noble.

Isn't this not a thing anymore?  I think if you log back in after being away for a while, you just get your last payment, not all the ones since you left.  I guess if you wanted to introduce some danger to this arrangement (again, without any code changes) you could just put the pay NPC in the labyrinth.  Want to get paid?  Okay, but you gotta walk by stabby mcstabberson.

[Kankfly]

I think there's a certain misunderstanding between 'flavor roles' and 'regular characters'. Flavor roles are characters too, and just because you want them to veer toward a more 'flavorful' role, doesn't mean they aren't full-fledged characters. As a character, you need to consider that every character has 'personal growth'. A whore might be more at ease whoring because that is all he knows how to do best, but it doesn't mean that just because there's an easy opportunity to make a great deal of 'sids that doesn't involve sex, he would turn it down simply because he is a whore, much less if he is desperate because he has no clientele and therefore, no income.

There are certainly ways to keep a whore as a whore. Maybe your whore only knows how to whore and doesn't know how to do anything else well. Maybe your whore gets recruited into the Atrium and screws up all the lessons because he can't see the point of playing the political game and prefers the more straightforward business of trading sex for coins. Maybe he doesn't like having to get hit by wooden sparring sticks and the life of a mercenary so he doesn't join the Byn. Maybe he doesn't like the soldiering life, period. Now you have a whore that only feel comfortable whoring, and because he has no clientele, he is desperate, and takes up the side-job of shit digging (or grebbing). It doesn't mean this interferes with his role as a whore, or is in any way out of character for him, it just means he is just a shitty (pun intended) whore trying to survive. But once he's started to get a decent amount of regular customers that he can survive off, I doubt he would continue shit grebbing.

So there you have it, a character that's a 'flavor' role but also a character at the same time. This character doesn't need a subguild to get periodic coins. It's also a character that allows potential of character growth.