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- Ameliorative 3m
- Napoleon 6h
- Bruhlicious 4h Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
a Mench 9h Doing a bit of everything.
- notloose 3h
And 16 more hiding and/or disguised

Death in Sindome
You and your clone

I've seen this a lot lately but people are starting to act like death doesn't matter.

Hey I have a clone, the pain, suffering, shock, trauma, etc of death doesn't scare me I can just come right back and not remember it...

I don't see how this is a thing. Cloning is a terrible experience, you wake up in a vat of goo, you're fresh, confused, in shock, and feeling a wide array of emotions. Unless you've died 500 times and you're so used to the experience after ten years of being in Withmore, then why are you RPing this way?

Fear death, fear conflict, make plans to avoid death, get excited about consequences, don't become complacent about what happens to your character.

I introduce conflict into the game when there's a lack of it on the player generated side. You might notice when people start dying left and right, well. This is a plot, and these things happen based on who 'earns' them.

This is meant to cause and drive RP into darker places where the theme lives. It works a lot of the time, and sometimes people treat a plot like a nuisance and just ask the related NPCs to literally, "I'll meet you so you can kill me and get this over with so I can go back to MOOSEX."

It makes me sad as a GM, and it makes me angry at the same time.

People want me to be nicer, more understanding and be more respectful of their ideas and opinions whether they're right or wrong, then I get this. I get a lousy response from a player who's been here over a year, because they don't 'want to be bothered' with RP efforts by the staff.

Yes, I need to work on my general level of niceness when interactions with people with OOC issues. This however is not the way to improve the community.

I had to newt a player tonight who didn't appreciate the IC situation he found himself in, He decided to argue with me about how this even happened or why it happened and started to justify his RP response without it even being questioned.

I gave him a warning to stop, he didn't, then he accused me of power tripping because I was honest with him and I told him that his RP response was boring, and it felt like a waste of GM efforts on him at all. So after repeatedly ignoring my asking him to stop using xhelp, I newted him for two weeks.

Was I unfair? I don't think so, this person has a track record with arguing with admin on xhelp and two weeks is where the punishment is currently defaulted to.

Now, try to understand my perspective on both the OOC perspective and the IC perspective of this scenario and maybe we can talk some more about player concerns.

Not really going to comment on the rest because it's a minefield heh, but about why people are so cavalier about death... it would be very helpful if staff set a better example about it. Having NPCs die then jump back into things right after with no hesitation, or get beaten to near death then go heal at a clinic and run back out to start fighting again as if nothing happened. Well, if you don't want players to have that attitude about the pain and trauma, don't set that example with NPCs.

NPCs are to be treated like any other character, so if staff do something meta like that with them, then it's going to rub off on people and they'll start acting similarly. Myself I always have my character very disoriented and easily manipulated in the haze following cloning, and extended downtime when severely injured even beyond the coded healing process, but not everyone has been playing as long as I have and when their main experience is both PCs and NPCs treating combat/death a certain way, that's what they're likely to adopt. And you yourself have done the whole clinic visit is magic routine with NPCs, so it's not an isolated thing.

The mocking phrase "Do as I say, not as I do" comes to mind. Lead by example, not by words, and people will start following. Tell people to act a certain way, then go and do the opposite yourself, and people are less likely to believe in you.

If you make pain from combat or death from any reason seem meaningless to NPCs, you're giving permission for PCs to treat it the same way. It's either that or we stop treating NPCs like PCs.

That's my 2 chyen on that aspect.

Oh well then lets whip out the evidence. It's IC information too.

This player has been newted (suspended) from the game for sharing IC information via screen shots, don't follow this player's bad example.

And I quote:

Cerb, you obviously care much more about being right than you care about the players being able to enjoy and express themselves in the game, and it's clear that you'd rather use your dubious authority of "partially in charge of a role playing game on the Internet" to shut down anyone whose views don't line up with yours than acquiesce or engage even slightly, even on a matter that ultimately has very little consequence.

This isn't even about whether or not "lol" is a word; I've only been the target of this kind of behavior from you on one occasion that I can remember, but I've seen you do it to others enough that I can't stay silent about it anymore. A GM's job should be to foster a welcoming community for the game and help keep the game smooth-running and enjoyable, and your attitude is acting counter to both.

I do not expect you will change, as your fanatic belief in your own logic and reasoning skills does not seem to permit you ever admit you have anything to learn, but I could not in good conscience stay silent about it any longer. It's making the game less enjoyable for me and others. $void me or delete my character if you want, because there's nothing about your 'powers' or 'authority' as Sindome Head GM that intimidates me.

Sorry if this sounds unpleasant and dismissive, but you reap what you sew. I know GMing is challenging, demanding, and often thankless work, but this isn't even about the player-GM relationship so much as it is about baseline civility between two adults. I do want to keep playing and enjoying the game, but the fact that this kind of dynamic between the GMs and players seems to be considered not only normal but exemplary worries me greatly.

And if being able to say "lol" on SIC matters enough to someone that they can make a well-reasoned, researched, and even cited case for being able to, just fucking let them.

So where above was I complaining about what you did? I never said I wasn't playing it out. Did I say anything contrary? Because I don't see it in the screen shots.

This is how you get permanently banned from Sindome.
I know. And I said I resigned from this game. I'm done. Kill my character. Perma ban me. I'm not coming back to it ever. Do what you want. You singled me out as arguing over something that was not true. I never once stated I was frustrated or bitching about the whole stranded. I thought it was cool.

Problem is you took offense with my playstyle. When I have set in stone that my characters all inherit two things from me. They are cold and they are fearless. You took offense to that.

To make clear what Cerberus is talking about when he says "this" is what gets you permanently banned:

It isn't the OOC argument between an intoxicated player and an unpopular admin. No. Players can and have come back from that.

It isn't even the complaining to admin about IC events. Not even close.

It isn't even the insistence to stick to a play style which is contrary to the theme of the game and would admins leave me the fuck alone I don't like this fucking plot.

It's the "fuckyou" to everybody in the entire game. Posting IC logs to the public BGBB is just about the worst rulebreak conceivable. It ruins the game for everybody.

I am going to weigh in very specifically on how some players approach death ICly. I'm not touching on the other stuff mentioned here, just the perception of death in Sindome, because it's something I've thought about a lot, and considered making a post about myself a few times.

Death is not a pleasant experience. It is often painful, and just the idea of it bothers people. In Sindome, the presence of Sense/NET and Genetek have cheapened life a tad, but let's not forget that dying is still dying. Your character might wake up with some of the memories they had, but they're a product of science. The 'old them' is -dead-. Shouldn't that bother them? Maybe they begin to question their existence a little? Are they the same person just because they have a few of the same memories, or does the fact that they just crawled out of a vat force the revelation that they're physically someone else on them. There certainly should not be many people just shrugging it off like it's not a big deal and going about their business, or offering themselves up as a sacrifice because they feel something is a nuisance. I invite some of you to consider that your viewpoint might very well be a product of the fact that you, the player, do not have to personally experience what you're putting your character through, and that disconnect allows you to do these things.

There are a lot of ways you can handle death and clones in Sindome. Ultimately I think most people, GMs and players alike will agree that it's up to you... but your character disregarding it because you (the player) recognize cloning as a mechanical buffer between your character and perma-death is a very easy way to lose the respect of the characters and the players behind them that take these punches and roll with them.

Thank you for your response, this is exactly what I was talking about.
I have edited IssacF's post to remove the screenshots sharing IC information. This player has been suspended from the game for violating our rules. Please don't accept their behavior as appropriate. Thank you and apologies for not removing this information sooner.
Thank you for removing the images. I kinda laid into him IRL for doing it. :P
I am sad my response has kinda gotten buried from all this, though. :<
Thought I'd pop in to add a little something else to my previous post. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me before, because I've definitely considered it. Anyway, here it is:

From a different perspective (the one doing the dying)... Imagine someone who looks like you, acts like you, has your memories and capabilities, but ***is not you*** taking over your life. Imagine that person getting involved with your wife or love interest in your place, drinking with your friends and chatting amiably over things you did. Imagine some fraud sitting at your father's bedside as he passes away. Your life is not continuing. Someone else is taking over it.

Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me. There are lots of reasons death can be unpleasant, even if your character is not afraid of pain or dying itself.

I find that characters who are supposed to be able to suppress emotions like fear, uncertainty and doubt end up displaying them prominently, sometimes as the main motivators of their actions. IMHO it's one thing if this is a conscious element of the character concept - still annoying, but at least I can assume that's me channeling my character's reaction if I know that's why people do it - and another if the player is just expressing wish fulfillment by making their character ~totally detached and badass~. I won't pretend there isn't a little wish fulfillment in the game for all of us, but telling a convincing and mutually enjoyable story together with our friends should come first. It just ends up manifesting in other fears besides pain and death in and of themselves, like loneliness, isolation, not having one's achievements or intelligence recognized, and even disability. (Ever notice almost every character can walk a whole district and hardly break a sweat, addicts downplay their addictions, nobody needs to drain their account on pain meds until they've been shot, etc.?)
"Your life is not continuing. Someone else is taking over it. Does that bother you?"

Well, there are two separate complaints here. One is about what your character's attitude should be before you send them to die, which this thought relates to.

The other is about what happens after your character's clone comes out. That person wouldn't give a shit about the above, though they still should RP like they're literally being born, which isn't easy for a womb-incubated infant and shouldn't be easy for a tank-recombined fullgrown person either.

That's FAR from the primary thing which should deter people from getting dead. The human self preservation/pain avoidance instinct is probably 3d6 orders of magnitude more motivating.

That's in my previous post, Linekin. :)
I'll say this. I don't know how people can not be affected by their character dying, or even the potential of it. Everytime my character gets into a life or death situation in this game, my fight or flight response kicks in hard. Even in situations where I know my character is going to come out on top, I still get the shakes. It's one of my favorite things about this game. I've played plenty of rpgs, text based, table top, MMO, etc, but there's just something about Sindome that gets me. It's almost like a high. You're in combat, you land a hit, they land a hit, then suddenly, BAM, the red scrawl. When it happens, I'm not sure if I want to throw my computer across the room or shout at the top of my lungs or what. Not matter how many times I've experienced, no matter how many times I've been on the giving end, it's still one of the greatest rushes I've ever felt, even as it's disappointing.