Should be made so it's easy for the carrier player to stop being carried (like stop escort).
As a stop gap, I have been told by staff in the past that you can just pose a nicer grab and use @lp to show your kinder hold. The pose and @lp will make it clear to others that you are not strangle-dragging someone about. Just don't abuse it by saying you are carrying someone unless you are reasonably confident you could lift their corpse.
And yes, corpses do weigh different amounts. This is because characters weigh different amounts. As far as I know, a character's weight is used to determine their corpses weight. So there is variation.
I think that it is important that if you can carry a person you must also be able to carry their corpse as this is one of the few ways a PC can show or and gauge each other's strength ICly.
"dead weight" is definitely a thing. It is much easier to lift a hundred pound person than it is to lift a hundred pound inanimate object.
As far as the game goes, it's much easier to drag someone than it is to lift them. I feel like the mechanical differences between grapple and lift do a good job of modeling that.
As far as game play goes, I'm not interested in modeling that tiny difference. If the devs are interested in doing so (assuming they want to implement something like this at all), that's fine. What I personally don't want to see is any mechanic that lets you carry do so based on the grapple code as that would result in people carrying others they really should have no chance to carry based on stats.
I'm also pretty happy with how lift and grapple/drag are modeled in Sindome. Fully agree there.
So if we could use a command to carry or lift, then it wouldn't trigger the idea of a crime or something socially inacceptable happening in a topside sector.
It would also help in those incidents where you see a player dragging someone else - you can't tell if they're just carrying them to a clinic or carrying them to a safe location because they fell asleep, or if it's a nefarious abduction and they are actually being dragged. You kind of have to assume the latter at the moment.
1. Hostile grapple/grapple for those untrusted.
2. Carry for trusted individuals, either through an @trust or through faction trust.
People no longer have to xhelp for certain kinds of crime topside. And this isn't only a topside thing where it's an issue, in my opinion. I don't think it's an overly large issue, but I do think it's a bit of a one. Grapple doesn't generate a hostile response from NPCs.
There's no automatic callouts when a grapple happens from NPCs who normally callout when they're under attack or respond to attacks. Grapples are not seen as naturally hostile even when someone is dragging a person by an NPC who would normally respond to hostile behavior. Grapples don't get the same kind of response as normal attacks do from NPCs or the ambient population as a whole.
And I believe this has led to and will continue to lead to people cheesing the system.
By readjusting/updating/modifying grapple to be seen as a hostile action and at the very least get a callout from NPCs who normally callout hostile behavior against themselves/against others, this means people or NPCs who are under attack by grapple alone will respond accordingly, ambient population will respond accordingly when staff aren't around to possibly throw a few responses out.
Implementing a carry system under @trust (or faction trusted behavior) will allow people to let others carry them when they're injured, unconscious, asleep, for other RP reasons, in a more natural way that also wouldn't require ambient response. It could be easily broken/ended by the carried party when wanted.
I think with the changes to the crime policy this would end up a positive change and I think overall it's just healthier for the game. I don't think it's productive to have a grapple only system where grapples can often end up a hostile action but don't receive the same type of response from NPCs/ambient population that other hostile acts do.
1) Having the appropriate NPCs were outfitted with an appropriate cybernetic to limit cheesing? The expectation being for automagic @trust to do its thing.
2) Update the appropriate scripts to call out grappling.
Porque no los dos??
I never thought of the angle mentioned by Crashdown though with regards to grappling not being considered hostile by ambient pop or NPCs it turns the issue above into something WAY more serious, especially if a character just grapples someone from an unpopulated area to a populated one with clear hostile intent as a way to avoid any ambient pop alerts. (I have seen this done IC and would consider it a meta-light thing to do)
A @trust carry (carry can only be used when trusted and functions just like trust grapple only the descriptions are much more friendly), remove @trust grapple (grapple is always a hostile action) call outs for hostile grapples in a similar way to combat.
As for someone who is unconscious or dead, I guess you can carry or grapple can be used.
This also gives potential avenues of more interesting work, get someone drunk, get them to @trust carry them home everyone happy till you take a wrong turn Ace them and move on. (I know you can do this already with Grapple, but issues above already highlight the problem with this)
Anything that encourages moves away from the sneak-shroud-grapple-kill meta I think is a positive thing.
I'm in total agreement with you Crashdown. If NPC's are codedly setup to where they call for help if you attack them, then they should also call for help the moment someone tackles them and tries to haul them off.
If the solution is to split it off into another verb, then that's one option. Another I could see is that it could be determined to be a hostile or non-hostile action based on how trusting of the PC the NPC is. So people who are well esteemed within their faction won't set off a panic for carrying their chum over their shoulder, but anyone else would.
Grapple is probably one of the more elegant and intuitive verbs, I think creating other verbs for niche purposes would make the game just harder to learn. Slightly different messaging while @trusted might be possible, though being able to just lift/carry unconscious characters makes sudden abductions way easier.
The reason that we don't have auto responses for this already that bring allies to your side when someone grapples is a bit complex. It's possible if the grappler stays in the same place but if they are moving we can't really dispatch NPCs easily. It would be somewhat complex and prone to issues. Not fully impossible though.
If anything grappling someone to drag them off quietly should only be the second choice because it was easier to kill them in situ. The popularity of grapple is because it's basically the only way available to players to kill targets without drawing in every Don Quixote in twenty blocks. If players cheat using it, that's on them, not the verb.
As far as carry vs. drag, carrying is far less taxing on stamina/strength than dragging. I won't go into details, but it has to do with scalar product of force and displacement vectors. If you've ever been in some kind of medical emergency or training (military for example) you train in both of these. From personal experience, I can say it's much much easier to carry than drag. Even getting the person off the ground is easy if you know how to lift properly and use the victim's body to your advantage for the task.
