New Command Idea: Reveal: Removal of hoods, facewraps & masks upon arrest.

[Brokkr]

Mdesc hiding masks were problematic because of the behavior they engendered.

So it is unlikely you will be able to have a drink at the Gaj with the guy you mugged the week before, unknown, anytime soon.

[X-D]

Behavior fostered by having them be very rare....not the masks themselves. So, staff fostered behavior.

[Greve]

Mdesc hiding masks were problematic because of the behavior they engendered.

So it is unlikely you will be able to have a drink at the Gaj with the guy you mugged the week before, unknown, anytime soon.

I think this may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. In other words, any problematic behavior caused by masks is dwarfed by what we have now: everyone always knows who everybody is, and it's effectively impossible to do anything anonymously because the game is essentially a village with a hundred inhabitants. If you're not a brand new character, people can glance at your mdesc and immediately tell who you are. It's human nature to remember an mdesc and it's human nature to connect the dots when we see it again. That's just how it is. We no longer have two cities and a slew of playable areas.

There's been a whole generation of RPIs where simply raising your hood hid your description. Shadows of Isildur 1-2, Harshlands, Atonement and Parallel all had this feature. It didn't lead to any significant problems that I know of. In those games, it was possible to do something without being instantaneously identified and your actions known to the whole world. It alleviated the need to do everything while hidden and thus creating no roleplay, and it alleviated the need to look for instant kill gimmicks. There's a lot of things that should be doable on Arm but aren't really because anonymity is impossible and everyone knows everyone. You might give your fellow man the benefit of the doubt, but will that courtesy be extended to you when you're doing some dirt? My experience says no.

One would be hard pressed to claim that the game has a rash of muggers and raiders. We're living in a Zalanthas where not much ever happens. Would it be so perilous to experiment with things that might let players do something mean and not get rounded up and lynched the next time they set foot in civilized areas? I can't help but get the feeling that much of what ought to be the lifeblood of this game is kept at bay by the big, scary "what if." I'm of the mind that Arm has grown so tedious that anything which might encourage some shake-up is worth trying.

Masks were removed fifteen years ago. If there was a reason to remove something fifteen years ago, can we really say that the same reasons still apply? While I'm not specifically campaign for masks, I think we can afford to try things that were deemed problematic back when we had things like wars and full-scale psionicists and sorcerers. If we can't have one, can we have the other back? Can we try things and see if it brings some life back into a game that has ground to such a halt, instead of always just saying that it's "problematic?"

[azuriolinist]

The twiggy, but barrel-chested man. (assess -v shows he is about the same size as you, because his weight is the same as yours and so is his height. But his shape is remarkable because he wears most of his bulk in his upper torso).
The green-skinned peg-legged woman
The guy with purple hair that runs down his back - that a mask would only cover the top part of, leaving MOST of it exposed for anyone to see.

This could possibly be worked around by also checking whether the masked PC has something worn about their body, which should be closed, and also has a hood up.

The single biggest problem I had with mdesc-hiding objects in other MUDs was that the roleplay around it could stretch the definition of realism.  There was often also no way to reveal the other person's identity short of knocking them out. This led towards a number of otherwise absurd stunts being pulled on both sides. So, to go back to this topic's main idea, I agree with the idea of 'reveal', so long as the masked PC is first subdued.

What if being able to completely hide your mdesc was also tied to a skill? Like hide, per se. If they know how to properly blend into crowds or camouflage themselves in the wild, they ought to  know how to properly cover themselves to actually stay hidden.

[Lizzie]

I had originally suggested a way to re-implement masks, because I actually liked the idea, in general. I just hated how it worked, at the time.

Disclaimer: One of my very first characters, and one of my favorites, was murdered by someone (or maybe two people) wearing one of those famous mdesc-obscuring yellow masks. It was a heart-poundingly amazing death and I honestly had no idea who was behind those masks until a couple of years later. The person who did it, told me in AIM, and said they felt horrible about it. It was my character's boyfriend. But I was totally cool with the death (after I had a cry and rolled up my next character) and learning the hows and whys of it years later was pretty neat.

My idea, was to reconfigure mdescs. You'd have two of them. One when your face is obscured, and one when it isn't. Perhaps we might just have to use templates, adjusted for the RPI setting. So the face/hair/ears/eyes are all described first. And the rest of the body, from the collarbone down, is described second. When the mask or hood or facewrap is raised, that entire first part is hidden by the code. When the mask/hood/facewrap is lowered, that entire first part is revealed.

It would still show the normal sdesc over the Way and there would still be that risk that someone in the room will "out" you by trying to "contact mask" if you're in the same room they're in. But there has to be some risk of discovery, otherwise it would just become as twinky as it became before the masks were removed from the game.

[ShaLeah]

The topic was a reveal command, its derailed into a discussion about masks.  While masks would be removable should this command ever be implemented can we focus on forcibly revealing hooded and masked people?


Should we start a discussion about the possible reintroduction of masks that actually hide wtf you are?

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

... until you can figure out how to prevent the brown-haired woman turn into the purple-eyed elf, you will have that problem. And that problem is incredibly jarring, immersion breaking, and crosses the line by a few miles over that magick division line called "suspension of disbelief."

Actually, masks existed that simply made the mdesc nul...so....

This is what I'm talking about. Wearing a mask would just remove the mdesc completely. If you want the mask's main desc, you just 'look figure's mask', but other than that, you obtain information about them via access and whatnot and that's about it.

Now, I'm hearing concerns about twinking with a mask on, but can anybody actually explain to me what the hell that means? What's the twinking thing about?