Appear & Disguise make RP difficult.
Primarily a problem in the mix.

I'm purely talking about gameplay mechanics here. Disguise's job is to hide the identity of characters who wish do remain anonymous and/or do crimes around the game. Appear code was a significant force-multiplier to disguise, and has absolutely no counterplay, since it can't 'slip' or fail regardless of what you do ICly.

We're also discussing making it so that appear doesn't break on corpses, or when naked. So that will further muddy the waters in determining who did what, and linking them to that action.

We like to say that actions have consequences in SD, but right now, with a relatively low investment of UE into disguise and it's relevant stats, used in conjunction with appear, it's quite possible, if not downright easy to commit perfect crimes.

We allow people to change their height, weight and apparent sex with appear on the fly with no skill or stat investment. In addition, you can hide your @nakeds by using disguise items. But you can also hide the way your character looks by being clever with other game mechanics.

This has, in effect, made it so security gear, the chatter system, NPC reports (assuming you go about asking NPC's for intel with @Request_puppet in the first place) and eyewitness reports effectively useless.

If you're not in a position to physically intercept someone doing a crime or something that you wish to prevent, then it takes but a moment to swap a disguise item and use the appear command to walk into an alley a midget mano and walk out a amazonian walker. At which point... you've lost your ability to retaliate without simply smallworlding the person.

We were told when this code came out, in addition to the changes in rules whereby staff will no longer investigate smallworlding, that the game is now about linking activities with motives. This is a fine solution if you are in a position in the game with relatively few enemies. It is significantly less than fine when you have a position of power whereby your own friends and allies are want to cain on you.

I'll also say that the solution of attacking random disguised people on scene who you think might be involved isn't working. And truthfully, chasing down motives can, in and of itself, be extremely smallworldy. We're told to respect the ambient population of the game, but the ratio to puppeted characters doing crimes to players doing crimes is obviously, very skewed.

In the past, I've suggested blanket nerfs to the appear skill. Things such as requiring people to do it in their pads, requiring people to do it using items that take not-insignificant amounts of time to use, requiring disguise kits that are consumable, etc.

There's also the issue of appear effectively stripping the informational value of eyewitness, photographic or video evidence of events down to slim to zero value. This code disproportionately affects the mix more than anyplace else in the game. Gender neutral appearances make it extremely frustrating and gamey to even describe shrouded people. "He looked like a.. human wearing a poncho." "Get that average human being!" "Look out, an average walker is coming for you!" These are gamey/cheesy phrases to use, and convey extremely little actionable intel for players not willing to simply smallworld shrouds.

However, I see a conflation of sex and gender related issues with gameplay related issues here, and while I personally think a more progressive approach to allowing players to express their character's gender more freely is awesome, I don't think it should come at the cost of gameplay.

I want to solicit the community's feedback on this, because I feel that it's an issue that's significantly impacted my own gameplay, and I'm curious as to if it's been the same for others.

The TL;DR version: Appear when used in conjunction with disguise code makes it relatively easy to get away with near perfect crimes. Clearly, there's a lot of ambient pop in the game at all times to witness appearance changes, but the lack of reaction of the ambient pop, as well as the lack of mechanical constraints on the verb itself are allowing people to radically change their appearances in a very small amount of time, and so attempting to enforce consequences on actions as players seems at times, overtly difficult.

Disguise has been abused as a gamey mechanic for as long as I can remember. Also I don't feel its just for doing crimes, even if most people use it for that purpose.

There are ways this could be patched maybe, cool downs, rising up investment/difficulty, not allowing to use it in rooms with the [Crowded] tag, requiring a mirror, X-Ray cybereyes for counter, etc.

Even then, I don't think this is ever going to be perfect. There is always going to be a junction where disguises don't slip anymore and when that point is reached you are going to be facing the same problems which as mentioned have limited solutions.

I'm not simply referring to protecting a property or apartment. This also applies to being killed and trying to follow-up on that. Having an eyewitness, getting an autopsy or using the chatter system now just tells you that you were killed by some form of person using [popular weapon].

Whether or not you want to pursue trying to place blame on someone purely based on what kind of weapon they use is entirely on you at that point. In the case of especially rare weapons/combinations, this might be doable, but in most circumstances, that information isn't something that I feel you should be acting on.

But that's just my take. We have room ambients describing people sword fighting with katanas and people firing off pistols, so I don't feel like that weapon choice should be the sole determining factor when trying to ID people. To do otherwise would be just totally ignoring both NPC's as well as the ambpop.

Is this one of these situations where tuning the game for high UE expenditure ends up negatively impacting everyone else who hasn't dumped that much UE into something?

I understand your example. After a certain amount of UE, people can change their @disguise-name and @disguise-desc

My understanding is that is optional and not mandatory.

What your example glosses over is everyone who has put some UE into disguise and has ~50 'appear' descriptors to choose from.

I put some more thought into this last night and I think it might be useful to gate 'height' and 'weight' appears behind certain skill levels.

I also thought it might be useful / balancing to incur some sort of endurance penalty, like stealth. My reasoning is that especially for weight, attempting to keep your gut sucked in or pushed out for an extended period of time is going to be draining. The same logic applies to a lesser extent to being hunched over / appearing shorter.

I RPed with someone who had a super high disguise skill and I thought that they were a brand new immigrant. It was only after about a month or so that they admitted to me that they were someone else.

I think I understood what you originally meant and you just reiterated the same thing basically. What I am saying is that I disagree with your posture and then I tried to offer real ways in which it can and it has been remedied in the past.

But you seem pretty stuck with your posture, which I would argue puts the whole player base in a "bad apples" meta gamey bag and that is an unhealthy black and white fallacy that doesn't do you or anyone else any favors.

Sounds fun. Play it where it lies.