We have ways of making you talk... (Interrogation/Torture)

[MeTekillot]

TORTURE

Give facilities to each clan of an appropriate type (Criminals/Powerful Merchant and Noble Houses/Templarate). Allow clan members of sufficient rank to enlist the assistance of a torturer NPC. Being tortured would have effects outline in my crippling idea after some discussion. I will summarize here:

The torturer chooses a part of your body to cripple. The first episode will cause a long-term but temporary debuff to a stat. The second episode will cause a permanent lowering of that stat.

Each stat would be able to incur a temporary debuff once before the penalties would become permanent.

If you would rather choose that your character dies, you are given a prompt after being tortured informing you that QUIT DIE is freely usable for the next 10 minutes.

This gives incentive for people to crack under torture (besides the current incentive of avoiding death, cumbersome maiming that requires the intervention of staff in each case to codedly reflect, or can be forgotten about in the heat of the moment).

This also opens avenues of victimizing one's enemies that keep character plotlines open that would otherwise be closed due to PKing your enemies, for lack of many other impactful options.

OPTIONAL IDEA: Spend karma
An optional idea, but by no means a facet of the main idea in its broad possible implementation, is to have players be given the ability to spend one karma point to turn a permanent torture stat penalty into a temporary one. For players without karma, allow them to use this ability once per character.
I propose this optional addendum to the idea to increase the following: player agency in suffering of the penalties, rarity of karma roles, weight of the decision making whether or not to break under torture

[Lotion]

spending a karma CGP on an ingame effect sounds like something that is absolutely terrible

[HazelHomewrecker]

The unfortunate reality is that the quality/integrity of any sort of torture/interrogation scene is inherently linked to the writer's ability or interest in portraying the character realistically. When faced with getting a finger chopped off, a nail forcibly pried away, or being whipped and lacerated with razors, you--as the character's writer--feel nothing, and will most likely never experience something like it in your lifetime. So, you have nothing to base an appropriate response off of, and as such you are less inclined to 'break' or 'crack' under the torture or interrogation.

It's those truly devoted roleplayers that are going to give you exactly what you're looking for, or maybe not. Maybe their character is just that one person who is for some reason basically immune to immeasurable pain and would never give up any information...even if that would be extremely weird and out-of-place in my opinion.

All-in-all, I don't think this thread is particularly useful, and these ideas would do more harm than good. Instead, let's think about how we--as players--can better portray our characters when we're doing these scenes, how to think and react appropriately, rather than forcibly cripple someone codedly on a whim.

[EDITED TO ADD:]

If you think that players need to be threatened with coded stat deductions for not doing exactly what you want them to do, you should probably take a nice long look at what you're actually trying to achieve. Are you trying to enhance the roleplaying scene, or dominate it through coded force? You can't have both with this suggestion.

[MeTekillot]

I don't know that I have the energy to detail to you that having a scene be impactful codedly and roleplay wise is not mutually exclusive. I believe the two should synergize. But you seemingly don't. Okay.

[MeTekillot]

Are you trying to enhance the roleplaying scene, or dominate it through coded force? You can't have both with this suggestion.

You say we can't have both. And I ask "what's the fucking difference". What is the difference between the coded reality of the game world and the roleplayed scene. The thing that makes a half-giant a half-giant is their coded strength and coded size. If we don't have code in the game, what we're left with is masturbating flowery paragraphs of prose.

If I wanted to play a game where the only thing that mattered was some nebulous concept of roleplaying, I'd waste my time on fanfiction.net, MUSHes, and IRC channels.

Dominating through coded force is one of the few means we have of actually having ANY impact in roleplaying scenes.

Your entire argument seems to be predicated on presuming the quality of a roleplayer's scene or character diametrically opposed to the coded functions of the game. They're not adversarial systems. They're not fire and water. They're not hot and cold.