Impressions

The current way that impressions are shown, with "Impression" and "Counter-Impression," seems to be somewhat random in how it determines which counter-impressions go with which impressions, and indeed REQUIRES you to make a new impression to even see the impressions others have made of you.

May I suggest that instead impressions just be shown in chronological order, regardless of who sent them, as a timeline rather than trying to match up "sets" of impressions and counter-impressions? In some cases people have done two or even three impressions of my character which I cannot see on the page (and there is no other record of these once they scroll off of your "notes" in game), and then when I do make a new impression, all three are grouped as one single clump of counter-impressions regardless of the timing and whether they have any relationship to my impression. Likewise I have sent multiple impressions without receiving one back and then when I do get one back the system decides it doesn't "match" with my latest impression even when they're within 24 hours of one another, and it ends up being grouped with the next one I submit even if that happens a week later.

I worry that, especially now that there are coded time limits for making impressions, someone might die or just stop logging in and I won't ever be able to make a new impression and thus will permanently lose access to the last impressions they made. Or perhaps that it will encourage meaningless impressions simply to get something on the page.

I just feel like it would make more sense to simply present a timeline sort of format, still roughly the same as it is currently just without the trying to match up impressions given with those received, since they often do not come in matched pairs.

If there's something I'm missing that makes matching them up important, I'm happy to be told I'm wrong. Just a small thing. :)

This is a great idea. 

I have however been vaguely wondering whether it's useful for impressions to always be obvious to others. While at this point, an impression might function to be something like... "What would you tell some rando, if they asked you about Bla-di-bla?" I believe that for the sake of being able to have deep character developments and dynamics, it might be more useful for the majority of players if they could put that kind of depth into impressions while keeping these reflections a secret, both IC and OOC. 


When me and Mistsparrow were first talking about this system, we loftily decided that all players would be able to separate IC/OOC and we should respect them to do so. But as alpha has progressed and I've gained some experience as a game runner, I've started to believe that while trust is great, we should perhaps take greater measures to protect people's immersion and defend them from bleed-feelings and suspicions of metagaming. An analogy might be a society where everyone walks in and just leaves their belongings laying about, because there's a tacit understanding that nobody is ever going to be stealing here. If a thief enters that society, it will be super hard for them to control themselves, and if a victim of theft enters that society, it will be super hard for them to feel at ease. And unfortunately, many of us are either thieves or victims of theft, and perhaps this society isn't truly that comfortable, you know?

To clarify this analogy, a thief is someone who will read an impression of an IC nemesis' plans to murder them ("God, I hate Bloo! Totally gonna murder him on Alharat's Day."), and then take that in-game and be like "Bla-di-bla plans to murder me, I can sense it." And a victim of theft is a player whose PC (Bla-di-bla) plans to murder her IC nemesis, but makes an impression like "Bloo is kind of a decent guy, I suppose." while seriously planning to IC-murder Bloo. Obviously I'm really overblowing these examples, but hopefully it's understandable.


So maybe it's not really good to be able to see counter-impressions at all?

Or maybe there should be some kind of way to distinguish between what is meant for public (and thus the other person will know/see) consumption... and what is not?

Sorry to kind of focus your post on this, but it seems like a really great opportunity to discuss impressions in general, if you don't mind.

I don't mind at all, go for your life!

So as a "victim of theft" myself, coming in to the game I was initially super suspicious and sceptical of the whole idea of impressions being visible, yeah. I even recall swearing I was never gonna use them.

But as I've played, I have to admit I have been absolutely charmed and moved by some I've received, and the idea now of taking them away totally is suddenly a tug on my heart.

However, that said, I entirely agree that there are some things that I haven't been able to reconcile as far as giving things away OOCly - because even the best players aren't immune to the IC/OOC bleed, and sometimes even unintentionally! (See a certain person's name which has never been spoken in game but is on the forum, resulting in at least one incidence of someone accidentally using that name in game. Stuff like that! Even the best-intentioned player might forget where they got a piece of information.)

And in thinking about it yes I have definitely tailored some impressions - hopefully not as badly as your example - in order to not give away major in character secrets (even just today I did that, I realise!). So perhaps a way to either mask some impressions or a way to add secret content, a la thinks/interior narration in cutscenes, would be a great addition to the system. How you would do this I don't know, but you're the coder so I'm leaving it as your problem to deal with sorry ;)

I'm glad to see impressions recorded of me/receive them, just because I tend to forget they exist otherwise. i'd drop off in using them if I didn't have those reminders.

Impressions inspire complex feelings, at least in me.

I was initially very skeptical of them, because they are almost designed to bleed from IC to OOC since they are explicitly taking IC information the other character does not have and communicating that information to the player. This is more or less exactly what it is hoped players will keep to a minimum among themselves, for reasons I think most people, if they are honest with themselves, agree with. Namely that, as Inaya says, even the most scrupulously compartmentalized players can forget where they learned a piece of information. Nevermind all the temptations to use ill gotten information to influence the outcome of a situation to one's liking that can get the better or even the most well-intentioned. I am generally in favor of trusting players to mean well, but I think this is a different sort of situation than that. It is genuinely impossible to unring a bell. No nefarious intent required. So, given all of that, I initially thought making impressions known to the target was a terrible idea.

But over the course of reading the Reddit episodes and thinking about my baggage and my tendency to project models and issues from past games onto new games, I ended up deciding that the only way a new game was going to have the opportunity to exist outside the old (bad) mold would be if the players were able to leave behind their expectations and projections and experience it as a wholly new thing. So I decided to radically science these unfamiliar and in some cases frightening deviations from the norms I had accepted. It was an interesting and useful experience. Once I got in game I started impressioning people and I didn't die. No one stabbed me or refused to play with me. 
 

Now, I DO edit my character's thoughts for the purposes of impressions. I spent a while feeling a bit frustrated, actually, because I didn't have the luxury of being open and straightforward (for, I think, fairly obvious reasons >.>) and finding ways of saying something worth saying without showing my hand was an extra hurdle. But receiving impressions back that allowed me to feel that my frantic flailing at the keyboard has communicated any part of the character I was trying to describe, however superficially, was hugely satisfying. Is hugely satisfying. So that made the work fairly worth it.

However, as I tend to play a fairly challenging character who tends to get into mischief, I have always had an unresolved feeling of tension around how honest to be in expressing his impressions of people with whom he is in active conflict in some way or another. It's a leap of faith each time. I know that if the player I'm engaging with is feeling too identified with their character at that moment, or is just having a rough day, they might feel upset or angry about the (extremely subjective) judgment they have just received about that character. This concern, and the resulting suspicion that some reactions may be fueled by OOC emotion of this kind has created a conflict with that commitment to radical openness and trust that I made earlier. I have started to wonder, again, what value impressions really serve.

Everyone wants to get positive feedback, and everyone's sense of what is positive varies. I am delighted to get impressions that say "what a scoundrel!" from people who seem to enjoy having that type of person to bounce off of. But sometimes I find myself feeling as if I have to choose between prodding someone who doesn't seem happy and refraining from utilizing a fundamental game mechanic. I say fundamental in part because it's one of the very limited number of ways there is to earn XP in SoA. I'm obviously not obsessed with number-go-up or I would be playing a different game, but I think everyone wants to be able to advance their character in ways that jibe with their personal journey, and there are only a very limited (which I VERY much approve of) ways of doing so. 
 

So I am fairly ambivalent about impressions currently. I suspect that personally I have perhaps had my fun with getting them and could do without the anxiety and drama at this point. While they remain an important mechanic I will continue to do them, but I will always find it stressful to have to make decisions about what to share and how often and with whom. 
 

One last comment more aligned with the original topic (soz Inaya >.>)... having impressions be "spent" by attaching them to story developments, and only making one impression available at a time per character seems unnecessarily restrictive. My story developments do not line up with my succession of impressions neatly enough for this to make sense at all, and they often apply to more than one development. If we are keeping them could we perhaps just store the whole list and make them available for all time?

Impressions are tricky, and probably my least favorite system in the game.

They can absolutely be a dopamine hit to read - There's a thrill to seeing a positive, nuanced response to a scene you were part of, that makes it feel a little less like typing away into the void.

But they're also incredibly immersion breaking. Especially when they come a day or a few hours after the fact. I find it really jarring to be in the middle of an intense scene, and suddenly get this psychic intrusion of "What a mysterious creature. I could get lost in his eyes. Sally." or, worse, "What a stupid little creature. I will enjoy plucking out his eyes. Bob." And while the positive ones feel good, the negative ones feel bad on an OOC level, for me, in the way that a PC treating my PC poorly doesn't.

By and large, I think the cons of their being broadcast to the recipient outweigh the positives. There's the obvious issue of not wanting to give away OOC info - If my PC is smiling to your face but secretly plotting to through you overboard, "I can't wait to push him off the railing when his guard is down" is a weird and scary impression to write, but "We laughed and had a great time" is disingenious. It also puts a lot of pressure on what I feel should be a relatively low-stakes system. Sometimes I have very detailed and meaningful impressions of PCs, but sometimes your character just told mine that they took a job in a woodcutter's shop, and that's a valid impression too, but sending Bob an impression of "Bob started working in the woodcutter's shop" feels like a letdown.

Lastly, and I'm not sure where I fall on this - but in addition to the obvious conflict between forthright impressions and deceitful impressions, there's the issue that text is actually a terrible communication medium. At their best, I think a good impression helps give context to a recent interaction - if Sally sat with my PC for an hour just quietly drinking her tea while he talked, getting an impression like "I enjoyed listening to him" helps clear up whether the PC is just shy, or the player was bored to tears. That said, it gets tricky when people send me impressions that my PC isn't supposed to know. I'm okay about separating OOC from IC, but when the impression deviates wildly from how I took the scene, it introduces a certain level of doubt in my mind. Am I supposed to take what I just got as OOC info that my PC wouldn't have known, or did I misread the scene somehow and the impression is what my PC should have taken away from the interaction? This seems to open up a lot of doors to accidentally getting it wrong, and then leaving others with weird suspicions of metagaming, that we might all be better off without.

I personally love impressions, especially the negative ones!

I usually have an idea of the story I want to tell although obviously in-game events determine how that story is told. Impressions for me have been such a great way to signal to people what kind of an IC relationship I'm trying to establish as part of that story, especially as they develop, usually from something very superficial to something deeper. I play a long game and enjoy (hopefully meaningful) conflict. Impressions have definitely added to that for me, especially recently when a few of my longer relationship exchanges have...blossomed.

I don't think there's any pressure to be too revealing in impressions. I don't usually provide reasons, just a snapshot of my character's feelings which might reasonably be assumed from the interaction OR might give a hint as to the reason. I wouldn't especially mind if impressions were private but if that was the case, I'd like a (vaguely World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness inspired) 'mask/mien' where the mask is what other people see and the mien is your true feelings so that the option was still there.

A mask/mien dynamic would at least resolve some of the tension around whether this thing one is communicating to the other player is information their character can/does know - as well as helping to make decisions about how forthcoming to be about private thoughts that would, if known, have a major impact on the other character's understanding of your PC. 
 

For characters whose opinions are fairly transparent there may not be a lot of conflict there, but for rogue/spy archetypes or someone with high composure, there is often (if not always) a lot of space between what the character wants to be showing and what they are thinking privately, and, as Yeshev said, trying to avoid the conflict by being superficial ("well that was fun") has the potential to be disingenuous, bordering on willfully misleading. 
 

Perhaps making it very explicit that this is what my character is intending for your character to know, not his private feelings, necessarily, would help to address that problem somewhat.

Howeve at that point I'm not sure, again, what it's accomplishing since surely your character is already expressing what they want the other to know of their opinion about them, through dialogue/body language, etc?

For my part, obviously I enjoy the impressions system or else I wouldn't have wanted to include it as a feature! While it's definitely not a normal MUD feature and there is some potential for metagaming in it, I suppose I've always felt that what you could OOCly learn from an impression was small and trivial enough for this not to feel like a very serious concern, especially given that people clearly have ample capacity for metagaming in much bigger ways without using coded systems. And I do enjoy the little bit of feedback about a character or a scene that impressions give. Sometimes they're wildly entertaining, sometimes they're moving, sometimes they help me to understand another player/character in ways that feel helpful to me as a player, and give me ideas for future roleplay with them. But I guess mostly, to me, they just feel like a fun way to chart my character's interactions and relationships with others as they develop over time.

I definitely do understand that act of self-censorship that might go on in creating an impression that you know the other player is going to read -- I've had to consider this myself a couple of times, and adjusted what I actually did write accordingly. In my own circumstances this didn't feel all that problematic; I just put a slightly different spin on the impression which was still certainly the major part of what my character was thinking and feeling. But it is possible that sometimes your character's impression really is tied in very strongly to something more secret or otherwise sensitive that you don't want conveyed to the other player.

My suggested solution to this would just be able to choose whether you want to share a particular impression with the target person or not. If the content of your character's impression doesn't feel sensitive or concerning in any way, you can choose to share it. If it does contain something very private or something you want kept secret, you can choose to not share it. Or if you just prefer every impression to be secret no matter what, don't share any at all! This gives everyone the power to control their impressions the way they want -- the sharers can share, the private people can stay private, and others can do things in between.

I wouldn't want to dispense with impressions entirely because they do serve as a way to track your own relationships with and feelings towards people. If people do prefer to have all impressions private all the time, I would be a little sad to not get to see them anymore. But ultimately their main purpose is for you to be able to record your own character's feelings, not to see someone else's. The sharing of them is very OOCy, so maybe that part isn't fitting for the environment of Avaria (I don't have a history of playing RPIs, so my feelings around features like this are potentially very different and a lot more lenient than other people's). If they feel more problematic than fun to everyone else, then they probably do need a change.