Murderhobo'ing

It might be tough to tell with one of the current plots (the psychopathic murders happening in town) -- but murderhobo'ing is actually not something we want to see in Song of Avaria. In fact, there are a lot of expectations for fair play around being an antagonist.

If you're going to kill an established NPC (rather than one you fished or found at the end of a game trail or bred on a farm)  then you should have ample reason for doing so. You should have story lead-up, involving developments in your story arc, thoughts, and feelings about what you're doing. You should query that NPC so that there can be an adequate response. 

If you do kill an established NPC, you should definitely not take the corpse immediately to another NPC and challenge that other NPC with the corpse under the pretense that this is a legitimate story when the other NPC is not even being animated to react properly. 

For the purpose of story, any NPC is just as important as a PC. Any VNPC is just as important as a PC. Animals are people too, even if human laws don't always see it that way. When you pursue story actions, you can expect story consequences, and hopefully it will be fun for everyone. What is not fun for everyone... is random destruction. So, obviously don't do that.

TLDR: have some respect for the story. It's fine to be a murderer. Not fine to be a murderhobo.

I voted for three of the options (the ones I played and enjoyed, either briefly or lengthily!) -- feel free to comment if there's another that you like, but I'm not going to edit the poll because I'm lazy.

On this same note, and going back a while now but... it still bothers me that during the mist, the NPC was somehow seen as "fair game" to attack with live deadly weapons when no such similarly severe incidents happened to PCs. :/

(Being deliberately vague here to protect both the innocent, the guilty, and the players who don't know about it. TL;DR: Violence broke out in many different ways for story reasons aboard the ship, but the only time deadly weapons were actually used was on an NPC which feels super crappy and unfair and OOC-knowledge-influenced to me. NPCs are not target dummies 😡)

I have played only one of those games, Arm, for about a week some mumblemumble years ago. I wasn't super thrilled with it, so no votes from me >.>

On the ship at least, there was some confusion at times about who was an NPC and who wasn't (we didn't have a coded representation of that in LOOK, back then) -- I can remember at least two instances of deadly weapons being used against PCs, too! And the main times I remember deadly force being used on NPCs, it was something that was queried and/or discussed in OOCmails with me... and it happened while those NPCs were being animated, so that was perfectly okay.

I might be forgetting the instance that you're talking about though, there was so much that happened there. :D Anyway, just wanted to clarify...

It is perfectly fine to kill established NPCs as part of considered stories, and perfectly fine to kill PCs in stories too! But in general, these stories should be carefully considered. When considering killing someone as a story resolution, it'd generally be kinder (but not absolutely required, depending on your character's personality and the CvC interaction at hand) to give a PC more excuses where killing might be more of a later resort. I don't mind if someone, in a story, goes for killing as more of a sooner resort against an NPC -- but, importantly, it should be part of a well considered story, and/or come with a heads-up of some kind to admin for any necessary animation you're hoping for, and not just some random murderhobo'ing. As an example, if you want to kill a witch's familiar and then toss the corpse to said witch, you should notify staff in advance so they can at the very least animate the witch to realistically react to having her familiar's corpse tossed over. And there should be a reason that you want to do that, more than "I'm a psychopath, whee!"...

And yeah, I agree regarding not being super thrilled... honestly if I'd been super thrilled with any of those other games I'd be playing them instead of working on Song of Avaria. But then again, playing with a lack of consideration is not necessarily *bad*... some people just want to zone out and murderhobo in their game time, and it's totally a legit way to play some games. Just not a legit way to play this game, which is what I wanted to make clear. 

Sorry. Too vague >.> I was referring specifically to the mist-madness-induced violence, where lots of "random" violence popped up over a short period, most of it between PCs - and most of those were given a bit of "soft paws" treatment by the players, from what I saw, where they found excuses not to codedly absolutely demolish each other with their highest-power combat skills and weapons. But the single exception that I know of in the midst of all that was from a PC directed at an NPC (who I'm 99% sure knew it was an NPC). It just smacked to me of an unfair double standard, personally, though I could be wrong. I wasn't there for the actual incident, but given how things proceeded, I'm also 99% sure the NPC in question was animated at the time, and the whole thing supervised. It wasn't necessarily "wrong," at all, given what was going on; the incitements to violence were very real and very extreme, ICly, and if I'm honest more "true" violence should probably have happened to PCs as a result. It just felt uncomfortable and weird to me that everyone had been careful with each other... until it was an NPC, and then someone felt free to go nuts and codedly murder (or almost-murder).

I'm absolutely going to get defensive here and say that the reason Kinsa didn't pull a weapon on anyone was because of the specific circumstances surrounding that; but I definitely get where you're coming from. As for the propensity for violence towards NPCs and PCs, I don't know if we've actually had enough conflict so far to really make a measure of anything. 

Anyway, murderhobo games are only good when death is cheap and easily fixed. It can be a lot of fun to kill people and be killed when it's just a slap on the wrist.

Aw, yeah now I know what you mean, and I see where you're coming from.  It's a little on the shady side as far as story integrity goes but it's definitely not bannable behavior. I think people don't want to hurt PCs right away because they're valuing the potential feeling of the player behind the character -- and that's a good instinct, IMO -- whereas with NPCs, many of them exist for the advancement of PC stories. Questionable stuff happens when NPCs are treated as meaningless fodder, though -- because they can have depth and backstory, admin-run plots might hinge on them, and they can also be important to other PCs, and in terms of the virtual reality their lives are equally valuable. So, killing them should definitely be a storied occurrence and not some random impulse. Most of the violence that occurred on the ship was ideal, or at least as close-to-ideal as I might expect. Sometimes dramatic, intense, and terrifying things happened... but at least they happened with a lot of actual roleplay around them. 

Edit: To Kinsa -- yeah, exactly. Death is not cheap nor easily fixed here. It's largely permanent and meaningful in impact, to the degree that only the players of PCs who have died so far truly know. :')

The player who was warned in OOCMails prior to my posting this announcement has quit the game, saying a variety of things including that NPCs shouldn't be available in-game if they're not to be interacted-with, etc.

So, I kind of want to clarify some more in case anyone else didn't understand, since the whole point of this announcement is to make things clear. It's fine to interact with NPCs -- they have some automatic responses, sometimes they give you errands, they can be loyal to you and take orders, etc.

However, if you want to kill an established story NPC, you should:

• have a good reason for doing so that is supported in your story arcs, thinks, feels, etc

OR 

• be interacting with the NPC while it is being animated for whatever story reason already

OR

• query the NPC in order to instigate an animated interaction

OR

• discuss the situation with an admin and the admin might say (as has been said in the past) that it's fine for you to kill that NPC anytime without oversight

If you want to have a high-stakes story-based interaction with an NPC (like showing them the corpse of a friend and bragging about having killed said friend to their face), then:

• query that NPC

OR

• at the very least inquire in a petition as to how they would react so that maybe if it's a quiet sort of reaction, you can include that in your scene