Dissociative Gestalt Syndrome
Come on, get down with the SICkness

"These were too common. It's supposed to be dangerous, difficult, and expensive."

The idea here is similar to DCD. After enough rips, your brain slowly starts to have trouble comprehending what's SIC and what's internal dialogue, as the neural tissue is damaged over time. Each time you're ripped (with increasing chances from failures and crit failures), there's a cumulative chance to develop a neurological disorder that prevents you from discerning between SIC, internal dialogue, and your own speech centers.

The way this would manifest with overwritten attempts at speech the way that being drunk does. Someone trying to coordinate over the phone for a hit, suddenly shouting about ROBOT ONLY WANTS TOOTHBRUSH, Akalumpa gunna getcha, and other classics?

The remedy here would be time and expensive treatments, with severity increasing the more rips you have performed without medical assistance.

My main concern with an idea like this would be impeding RP, rather than attributing to it, and also people just repeating what they said before until it was understood.

However, I think having something similar would add flavor to rips, the maddening nature of SIC, and create some hilariously unfortunate incidents.

Thoughts?

Really though, this is my attempt at creating longterm issues for people "flippantly" getting rips. I know it's seen as a necessity, but other risk that made RP and kept the heat on people getting rips would be neat.

I mean, you get a whole new identity with a SIC rip, so if you had someone to PROGRAM it for you.. making the files that the WJF/corps/city from the start. Creating the foundation of your existance, basically giving you a new identity, would be really cool.

The previous round of changes don't seem to have hit the desired effect. I'm still seeing the same behaviors that were deemed problematic before the changes.

I'm not sure that some kind of SIC PDS is the solution here. To me, the problem lies in the relative ease of removing them (which has been addressed) and the relative ease of getting new ones (which has not been addressed.) I think that one way this could be mitigated would be if SIC chips just totally blanked out after being removed from a body. That way you can't just slap an old one in and go about your business and collect your paychecks and everything else.

Make it so that there needs to be a conversation between the people getting ripped and their NPC bosses about getting ripped after the fact. That way Staff will be 100% aware of who, what and when/why this is happening.

It's still just being used as a 'I do things and don't want any consequences' tool currently.

Unfortunately, that isn't how they work. I don't want to dive into IC information, but you're a little off about that.

*That discourages people from taking big risks.

*That is going to further incentivize people 'laying low' after jobs- which, while perfectly sensible, leads to extremely boring and frustrating RP if you're the one trying to react to said things.

*Isn't going to make for good RP in general.

'Weoooweooo, I'm suuuuuper crazy!' RP isn't great RP to begin with. People already try and explain away PDS "Sorry I cut your face off last week, it was PDS, l e l." Won't this just be more of the same?

I think this was a joke anyway (I hope) but I don't want or need a $cript being my nanny.

I'd suggest instead of the filler standbys something that causes physical speech, phone calls, thoughts, and SICs to randomly get interchanged (at a reasonable random interval). Saying "Yeah I killed him, so what?" into a phone could make you accidentally think it over pubSIC or you could get a random pubSIC message via the GM Thoughts system and think you're being guided towards some plot because of an idea 'you' had. You could say "cr Yeah the password is mashtastic." out loud. Or maybe the potential to accidentally ccom the wrong alias, change default keys, etc.

The idea of making constant rips have consequences beyond cost is super themely IMO, sure we'd need to rebalance a bit again, but that doesn't make the concept itself better or worse.

There will of course be people attempting to avoid the consequences of DGS, but I think they'll hurt themselves more than they'll hurt the flow of conflict by not following the nudging away from getting SIC rips more than you change your clothes or never leaving your cube.

>accidentally cm something you meant to say

>"I should probably get checked for DGS..."

I don't know the exact lore behind PDS, but I've been assuming it's mostly a psychological issue caused by too much of your body being not your body.

It makes a lot of sense to me that SIC would not work as well with frequent rips, that messages might garble (using the language code), or that keys or private SICs might be more expensive, or things of that nature.

I strongly disagree that it would be fun to force a player to send dialogue to SIC or, even worse, invent dialogue from another character going to the DGS player without that second character's input. That would be an extremely dangerous precedent to set in my opinion.

The number one way I've seen people deal with unexpected severe PDS symptoms is go to their pads and log off. Anything that's going to make the game actively unfun to play will probably result in similar.