Injuries/treatments

P! Are you telling me I learned all these healing commands while people were constantly bleeding out just for you to give me a triage command?! That's a fantastic idea, and I love it. It gets really stressful when your character is Someone Who Knows What to Do, but panic bleeding is happening. Cycling through Press -> Stitch -> Treat -> Bandage would be top, and it would also be great if you could just go to the next worst injury without spamming diagnose or scrolling through the chaos of mass injuries.

Regarding Pof Esfandiar's points - I feel like we are now in a place (see: no longer on a ship without doors) where it makes more sense to consider the benefits and risks of allowing a little mischief with sleeping avatars. I love Ighlaf's idea of having the option for light sleep, deep sleep, and dreams about things occurring. Custom reactions to 'catching' someone, maybe? I also appreciate how it could become an OOC issue with general boundaries in RP and not being able to XCARD. If SoA ever decides to implement some sort of Yes/Maybe/No list, this could help mitigate crossing lines while allowing the chaos of like... passing out drunk in a fountain. A config would be a good option too!

My personal reaction is that I'd not appreciate it OOCly if a character I was playing woke up with no pants on, but stolen coins would be a fun thing to explore so... mixed feelings! 

[edit] this is largelya reply to pilgrim, lol, I was too slow and there were other posts after so the second person seems weird but...

I understand wanting people to be able to log out without having to worry about the fate of their character in the meantime. But they already can do that, by logging out without leaving a sleep avatar.

That makes the presence of a sleep avatar a choice the player has made, and one they can choose not to make - thus it is not necessarily a solution to the above issues, such as logging in and not knowing if your buddy is gone or not. The ambiguity you mention still exists; the fact that some people may leave sleep avatars doesn't alleviate it. It would, if we all always left sleep avatars when we logged out... but that's not currently how things work. (And there are some reasons I wouldn't want them to work that way - but I assume you have your own reservations about universal sleep avatars because you didn't set it up that way.)

As far as I can tell, sleep avatars are used primarly for healing ticks and perhaps secondarily for the possibility of getting treated while one is unable to log in, thus ensuring less "downtime" on healing interventions, thus speeding healing ultimately.

So, I'm not necessarily arguing in favor of allowing more manipulation of sleep avatars, but I do sort of feel like it's worth being talking about why we assume the abuse will outweigh the benefit. If the answer is "unbeknownst to you, people consistently do insane stuff whenever they have the opportunity to manipulate each other's stuff, even here, and it's just easier from an admin perspective to not have to chase that down" that's cool, lol. I'm just curious.

I agree with Ighlaf that stealing pants is a bit silly - surely a person would wake up.

But that implies a whole minigame almost, about trying to steal from sleeping people using sleight of hand, and if they wake up they summon guards or remember your appearance (or both!), but if they don't you may get away with something. That all seems fun to me, and it seems like possibly if you code in mechanisms to note the commission of these acts, and the identity of the perpetrator, then it's not a matter of admins having to come through later and investigate logs to figure out where Amira's Special Stone went. The perp is already Wanted or what have you.

This has gone a little farther in the direction of stealing than was intended, alas. I didn't start asking these questions with the intent to propose adding a pickpocket minigame, honest. ;B But either way it's all good. :)

[edited to add]

I also love the idea of deep/shallow sleep that Ighlaf suggested and the Yes/No/Maybe list Firouzeh mentioned.

I'm not sure if it's happening as much now, but one thing I saw on the ship and genuinely loved was actually how many people did seem to be using sleep avatars purely for the sake of leaving an imprint in the room. 

And without a reloading interrupting the delayed function or being in a prison room (which will make you a sleep avatar whether or not you elect to leave one, just like quitting while asleep or unconscious), sleep avatars fade after 8 hours, because ideally when you're online your character is not just sleeping... they might be going about all sorts of personal off-screen business. That's also why we don't have quit rooms. You can quit while wandering away on the street and say that you have some errands at the bazaar, or whatever. Some people on the ship actually panicked to the degree of multiple bugs/petitions reported the first time this happened and some sleep avatars of people that they cared about disappeared.

Leaving the imprint is genuinely the main reason for sleep avatars (I coded them in at the same time as I coded in imprisonment, actually) -- so I definitely don't want to associate greater insecurity with the simple act of leaving a sleep avatar. I want people to feel free to leave those and still feel relatively-secure. And there are definitely situations where leaving the sleep avatar isn't really optional. In addition to hopefully letting logged-out players feel somewhat-secure, I'd prefer higher-scale conflict to be on-screen so that players could have agency to respond if they wanted -- even if it wasn't to issue an XCard, but just to write emotes.

I do like the idea of electing to sleep more deeply, though, and thus leaving your story open to more crazy shenanigans This would honestly also be very helpful to me when playing SPCs that I want to be left vulnerable to sabotage for story reasons. The pickpocketing minigame sounds fun too. Sending dreams relevant to certain sorts of events (being carried, or having something taken) seems like a good idea! I also like the idea of reactions, maybe an optionally customizable thing.

Last point before I go to sleep: Everyone's been super awesome, my reasons for not wanting to blanket-insecurify sleep avatars is not at all because I'm suspecting our playerbase of wanting to abuse each other! I just want the feature to continue feeling safe to be used for the main purpose I intended. And, I do think that form follows function. Like, when you go to stand next to someone who doesn't trust you, you lose roundtime. That's not because I suspect all of our players would do DRAW DAGGER;STAND BY TAR;STAB TAR in quick succession if given the chance, but... I want someone to feel secure about DRAW DAGGER, STAND BY TAR... wait for roundtime... STAB TAR -- just as much as I want pof Tar to feel secure about knowing that if someone does approach his character with a dagger, he'll have a moment to DISTANCE before they can stab. The mechanics are like guardrails. I don't want Stabber to feel as if they have to: OOC Tar hey ya mind if I stab ya there? That gonna be okay? Yeah I'm going to do it now... 

Thank you!

Pickpocket minigame sounds fun, admittedly. And depending on what is stolen/steps for recovery. My character losing their charm would probably suck, but it also be an item they would be very alert about from thieves. Maybe a character can set one item as no steal/high alert So thieves might need to observe people to find out.

The way I view stealing is, if there are chances to catch people alongside risk and reward it can be fun. As a thief being able to yoink everything not nailed down, where is the risk/fun. But sneaking through high risk spots and succeding, heck yeah.

Being stolen from could be fun if there is opportunity to investigate, recover the item, or notice off the bat to go hey.

Lifestyle: Light sleeper, deep sleeper, night owl, insomianac, paranoid, sleep like the dead. >.>

Edit:I got a chuckle out of that example, and it was interesting to read the reasons behind the coding

Further edit, clarified some ideas

Late to this thread, but wanted to comment similar to pof Esfandiar that I loooooooooooove sleep avatars as a choice for RP. To echo what pilgrim wrote, seeing those sleep avatars throughout the ship was not only fun but added to the immersion as well as story-telling aspects of the characters. "Oh, so and so moved from the forecastle to the hold? Huh..." etc. Obviously, this is less of a thing now that all of our PCs aren't crammed into a ship, but that actually only makes it all the more interesting when you happen across a sleeping character in an unexpected place.

I think messing with sleep avatars is a mechanic that could be a lot of fun. I like both the lifestyle ideas (light sleep / deep sleep) that pof Ighlaf suggested, and also the minigame aspect from pof Esfandiar. I'll take it in a slightly different direction just for a thought exercise. Back on the ship, I recall PCs already trying to 'manage' this by hand; e.g. for folks that were sleeping in close proximity/cohabitating, plot notes were sometimes used to indicate being aware of other movements (you may notice this person got up in the middle of the night and came back upset, you might have heard a sound of an argument while you slept, etc). There's an opportunity for any interactions/emotes with a sleep avatar to be recorded based on, say, an acuity roll of the sleeping PC. This could of course apply to pickpocketing (the pickpocket succeeds, but based on the acuity roll vs. sleight of hand they get either a detailed or muddled description of what happened as a plot note), but you could expand this to other concepts too. Oh, so-and-so broke into your room while you were sleeping to steal your favorite pickaxe of +4 ore gathering? (I have a one-cart mind, don't I) That isn't interacting with the sleep avatar at all, because presumably said pickaxe is in a corner of the room somewhere. But, maybe the sleeping PC has an opportunity to detect nearby interactions based on a roll (acuity, probably?) and that'd again be recorded as a plot note or otherwise delivered to the PC. This would also encourage PCs to maybe want to whisper or speak more quietly near sleep avatars if they're trying to not be overheard.

Of course, while sleep avatars are a conscious choice, it is unclear with today's implementation if the player intended for the avatar to actually remain there that long (e.g. I logged out at night and put my character to 'bed', but really I'd want them up and working by the morning). I didn't realize they fade after 8 hours! I could have sworn I'd logged on 12-16 hours later and had my character still be "asleep", but maybe the avatar was gone. This is getting too wonky probably, but it MIGHT be nice if we could make this a player choice. (I choose to have my sleep avatar remain here until the hour of the ox, etc, at which point they disappear. Orrrrr, the character is super-injured or hella out of it, so actually they're just a perma-sleep-avatar, a permanent fixture while they're in recovery -- like the med bay that the forecastle had become).

Anyway thanks for going on that thought exercise with me. I like all of these ideas!

Also +1 to the triage command XD