[MAJOR] New 'appear' command
Change how your character is presenting themselves

We have been looking for ways to reduce meta around disguise, and also increase the ability for players to present their characters to others in our coded systems the same way they are presenting them in roleplay with other characters.

As such, we spent a fair amount of time scoping out and discussing a system for changing your physical appearance and presentation so that things like your gender or your short description were more fluid based on the roleplay you were taking part in, or how your character has been developing.

DISCLAIMER

This code is still very new and may have some bugs or issues. Please report these over xhelp and submit an @bug if you encounter any issues.

We are actively seeking feedback on this code (please feel free to reply to this thread). This code will EVOLVE over time as we identify places to better it, places where we may need to further gate appearance changes behind skill of item checks, or where we see people abusing or misusing the code. We will make improvements and changes based on feedback!

Syntax: appear / appear (option)

The 'appear' command is used to slightly alter your appearance and demeanor. It is an IC command that you can use when your character is affecting a physical change such as hunching, trying to appear taller, sucking in their tummy to appear skinnier, pushing out their belly to appear fatter, or appearing more feminine, masculine, or androgynous than they typically are.

Appear is available to everyone, but some of the abilities it offers are only available when the character has a high enough disguise skill. Appear is a powerful command that can enhance your roleplay in a variety of ways. It can be coupled with disguises to make you increasingly unrecognizable amongst the sea of people in Withmore City.

Appear physically changes how your character is presenting themselves to the world. If you appear taller, your short description will change. If you appear shorter, your short description will change. The same goes for your gender.

Below you will find a more detailed explanation of some of what you can do.

APPEAR

Simply typing the command with no options will show you a list of what you can do. This will change as you increase your disguise.

APPEARING

This will show you the appearances you are currently affecting.

APPEAR TALLER

You straighten your back, adjust your shoes (possibly putting in some lifts) and you appear taller. If you were previously short, you would now appear average. You must be wearing shoes for this to work.

APPEAR SHORTER

You adopt a hunch, and appear shorter. Your short description will go down a level (if possible).

APPEAR FATTER

You push out your belly and appear fatter than you are. You must be covering your abdomen with clothing for this to work.

APPEAR SKINNIER

You suck in your belly and appear skinnier. You must be covering your abdomen for this to work.

APPEAR

You can appear as a short description that is not your physical gender (if you want to change your physical gender short desc you still use @shortdesc change). For example if you are masculine, you can 'appear hag' to change your characters pronouns to the feminine, and appear as a 'hag' in your short description. Your characters ACTUAL pronouns will change.

STOP APPEARING

At any point you can choose to 'stop appearing ' to stop affecting that appearance. For example 'stop appearing hag' or 'stop appearing skinnier'.

WHAT BREAKS APPEARANCE?

Unlike disguise, the appearance your character is presenting will not 'break' over time based on things you say or do. The exception here is if you remove certain articles of clothing that are allowing your appearance to not be broken. For appearing taller, this is your shoes. For appearing masculine/feminine/etc it is your groin being covered.

HOW BIG ARE THESE APPEARANCE CHANGES

You can't go from a midget to tall or tall to a midget. You can't go from skinny to fat. You can only 'go up a level' or 'go down a level' so to speak.

CAVEATS

If you are already tall, your short description is not going to change. If you are already midget, it won't change. If you are already feminine, you can't be more feminine, or masculine more masculine. This applies across the board to the different options.

Another caveat is that your characters @voice will NOT change. You will have to change this manually as you see fit.

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO WHEN PRESENTING A DIFFERENT APPEARANCE

You must ROLEPLAY the appearance you are affecting. If you are affecting the appearance of a hag, you should roleplay as such. If you are affecting the appearance of a bro, when your character typically presents themselves as dainty and feminine, you should be roleplaying your character moving and talking like a bro.

SOMEONE IS PRESENTING AS TALLER OR MASCULINE BUT MY CHARACTER CAN TELL THEY AREN'T REALLY

Then your character believes they aren't tall or masculine. If you notice someone with their back straight attempting to appear taller than they are YOU NOTICE IT ICly. If you notice someone using masculine pronouns where they used to have feminine ones, that is your character noticing the person is presenting themselves as masculine where they previously presented as feminine or androgynous. This is the cyberpunk future, and gender is fluid here.

HOW WILL THIS AFFECT THE GAME?

As of now, with minimal effort you can change your / height / weight / gender as presented in short description and in pronouns used when other people look at your character. This means that there no longer has to be one 'puny man' or 'short hag' in the game walking around disguised making it easy to pick out who they are from a meta stand point.

My goal with disguise has always been to make it so that if you can guess who someone is, you know who they are. That way the GMs do not have to ever deal with complaints of people being meta about disguise because everyone has within their power the ability to increase their disguise skill, and then take the time to write a new description, change their @voice, change their mannerisms and clothes and weapons, and be unrecognizable in a city of 65+ million people. That is the goal. This is a step in that direction.

Another change to this is that gender can be more fluid and up to the person roleplaying. This does NOT mean that presenting yourself as female means you do not have male genitalia or vice versa. It means you are presenting yourself as feminine or masculine. Cyberpunk future. Gender fluid.

COMPLAINTS & CONFUSION

A change like this is sure to garner some complaints and confusion. I welcome the opportunity to hear other peoples points of view on this, and to potentially adjust the code to be more straight forward, or themely. However, please remember that we aren't trying to tackle real world issues of gender here. We are creating systems with which players can better represent to the game world how they are playing their character, and to allow people leeway in their characters short descriptions to reduce meta & means of identifying people that would not be present if we truly had 65 million people in the city.

Keep your comments on topic!

-- S

(Edited by Slither at 3:50 pm on 2/9/2020)

(Edited by Slither at 4:31 pm on 2/9/2020)

(Edited by Slither at 4:41 pm on 2/9/2020)

You can now 'stop appearing' or 'stop app' to stop all affected appearances.

Use @born-sex me to define your character's sex as it was designated when they were born. For many characters, this may be the same as the character's present day gender. You don't have to set this if it doesn't apply to you, but you are welcome to do so.

This will be expressed in blood work, though its not going to show up in old blood samples. If you'd like specific karyotypes as part of your character's back story to show up in your blood as part of your biological sex, we can support this via a custom BIOLOGICAL-SEX-CHROMASOMES rp info flag staff can set if you file a @service-request.

I've been wanting to be able to codedly stuff pillows in my shirt or wear lifts for disguising for so long, this is amazing. Big props to the team!

It is also broken in its current presentation. In the form of being incredibly overpowered.

Nothing breaks my immersion more than having a tiny dude randomly become a curvy gal in an instant when they walk into bars. People will begin using this in the most absurd ways just so that they NEVER get identified on the streets no matter what they do and to always get away with everything.

I am proposing a change where working towards a new appear combination takes a period of time. That forces you to plan your identities ahead of time and prevents abusive use of this system. It may be a few hours or days, a value determined by the difficulty of assuming your new identity (e.g. the delta of current vs desired).

Also there should be a hard cap on whether you can combine different attributes. Sure you may try to appear taller but not fatter or the opposite gender all at the same time! Maybe only one different adjective would be more balanced.

Otherwise I can become a puny dude, stroll in with a shroud, kill Johnny McGraw, change myself to average dyke, over and over, in a matter of a couple commands.

These are not only fantastic gameplay improvements, they're great expansions on character presentation and identity.

10/10, would appear again.

With this in mind, and in the interest of eliminating one of the only roles represented in the game which appears gender-limited, I have an @idea slash Theme topic about Deathball players.

It's not 100% mine, one person in the XOOC said "I think Chen changing IC for the term to work would be great." I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. But I'll put it in Theme and afterwards see if I come up with some specific @idea topic for making these things ICly clear.

When you die I don’t think you have a demeanor anymore - so your corpse should revert to whichever type of gender you are without use of appear. This would also stop the “ corpses”.

This is AMAZING!

Thank you to everyone who identified the need for this, conceptualized the solution, and the did the actual hard work with the implementation and coding.

I am not going to proclaim that this fully eliminates a lot of the small worlding around disguise meta. But it does make such things extremely less likely if people who are disguising themselves take the time to adjust their APPEARance as well.

Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.

So .watche the TV was:

A lithe chum watche the TV.

I turned it off and just had chum as my shortdesc and it started working. Not sure what I did or if it's a known issue but I figured I'd pop it in here in case staff weren't aware.

Still super pumped about the changes!

You shouldn't be using it as a guess if a disguise doesn't break to begin with, why does seeing true build/sex matter?

When using APPEAR options, the Pose command is not properly parsing verbs.

For example:

A character who has typed 'stop appearing' and does not have any options said, can type '.nod at Joe.' and people will see 'Jane nods at Joe.'

A character who is Appearing differently can type the same '.nod at Joe.' and people will see 'Character nod at Joe.' without the appended S (nodS).

This happens 100% of the time.

We have switched androg to using Ze/zir pronouns which you can read about here. This maintains the same language constructs as existing pronouns and means it works with our existing systems which we've built a lot of code upon.

While I initially really liked this command, I've since left several bits of feedback with staff regarding it's use, and there's been more than a few global OOC shouts about people not using the command correctly I.E. roleplaying disguising themselves.

I think appear really needs to have some serious coded restrictions placed upon it. There's been a lot of great suggestions in this thread about introducing items to the game to enable it's usage, making people use a mirror or doing it someplace that's private or off the beaten path, etc. I'm not sure where the distinction needs to be made, but it's literally a daily occurrence seeing people -not- roleplaying appearance changes, -not- taking into account their stats and skills, and -not- using any form of realism or common sense when it comes to restricting themselves on it's usage.

I think the workload of trying to enforce what's been deemed the 'correct' utilization of the command is an undue burden on staff, and that players also really shouldn't be responsible for reporting people cheesing appear when it's so pervasive and commonplace. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I think that people are intentionally cheating or not following the spirit of the game in using it- I think that many people simply don't realize that the command is supposed to come with a lot of OOC restrictions placed on it that aren't paired with coded restrictions.

I'd suggest the following changes:

1. Cap the number of 'attributes' you can change with the appear command on a sliding scale that scales with your disguise skill, with everyone being capable of one change at base (no investment of UE), two at a moderate level of skill investment, and three with a high level of skill investment. This still allows people to be gender fluid and use whatever gender appear they like, whenever they like, but prevents an average playa from walking into a phone booth and coming out a hulking lesbian with zero skills involved.

2. Remove some of the 'vague' gender neutral descriptors, or stick them behind a non-trivial disguise skill barrier. I've been seeing an increasing number of 'average humans' walking around and this information is quite literally, completely useless. You, me, Jane across the street or whoever else can't exactly act on information presented when 'average human' enters the room. "Help! I'm being chased and shot by a shrouded average human!" should be a comedy line, not examples of gritty RPI gameplay, in my mind.

3. Cap the number of appearance changes you can effect at some relatively low number per hour, and possibly put this timer on a sliding scale that scales with disguise skill. We, as players, should be making strategic decisions about when and how to try and disguise ourselves, and we're forced to do so with actual disguises, but not somewhat magical hand-wavey metamorphosis powers. It just isn't in line with the other disguise code in the game. Let anyone change their appearance once per hour, or per 30 minutes or whatever, and let them improve that with skills and training investment.

4. 'Average' people have a significant advantage using appear over anyone who isn't average, so line items #3 and #1 should really address this issue.

5. Height and weight appears should have a chance of slipping. I understand the gender fluid intentions of having unbreakable gender appears, but hunching over, sticking your gut in/out etc. are examples of acting- and I think realistically, should have a chance of failing based at how good you are at acting.

If someone is presenting as a certain gender, or agender, they don't want it to 'break' (and I think that it does through various ways runs very contrary gender presentation is, someone doesn't stop being a woman if they don't pass), but the initial 'start up' of the appear isn't an issue. It could take twenty minutes to initiate as long as it lasted forever.

Height and weight mods making it even harder to stay disguised makes a lot of sense to me.

So we're right back to where we were before the new disguise policy, only now it's about gender-presentation instead of about individial-recognition.

One comes with consequences, one does not. I think that that highlights the priority that the concerns about "cheesing" appearance should be given.

Average people already have a significant advantage: They can appear any heigh or weight. Tall people can appear average but not short, skinny people can appear average but not fat. Anyone who's already starting from average has 50% more options.

I've never engaged with staff about changes from one male/female gender into the opposite gender, but logically that would seem to be true too.

I think many of these problems arise from the appear system doing two completely different things. (1) it exists as a major advancement to the disguise system and (2) it exists as a way to handle characters being able to pick their presentation gender in the fashion they think is ICly appropriate.

I think staff really needs to separate these systems. I think appear should be completely for disguise, and gender identity should be set at character generation and can be subsequently changed either via a separate command with a long cooldown (like 24 hours) or via request or XHELP. I think a command would be better, but that's a question about relative staff time.

Indeed, staff have already set up some baseline for that with the @born-sex command, which seems to really set up people's @sex being the way they identify.

Almost all of the problems I see and hear about with appear come from the necessary compromises needed to serve both of appear's purposes. We should separate them and then use appear for disguise and a separate system to handle characters who wish to change their presented gender identity after CG (as opposed to merely disguising themselves.)

That has the second salutary advantage of making gender not linked to physical appearance at all -- someone who is a transgender woman with male parts is not suddenly "revealed" as someone with he/his pronouns when their trousers come off, which is something that happens if that person is using appear to change their gender presentation.

I'm honestly on the fence about it myself. I can see both sides of the argument. I think people could conceivably set up this way irl if they were all the same rough size. It causes confusion in an ic and ooc way though.

See I was present for one of these instances and seem to remember staff being against multiple people using the exact same pronoun set. No official rule was set in place, but the cheese goes beyond just being disguised to something I consider an actual code abuse, I will explain why I think this in a moment.

From a disguise/IC point of view, having multiple people shrouded puny boy is not a problem if they have prepared accordingly to look identical. It is a smart way to make sure that those disguised are harder to identify or differentiate.

The problem comes in on a code level. Multiple shrouded puny boys in one place gives the disguised party a distinct advantage by adding additional out of character syntax obstacles the defending player must overcome. Firstly the defending player must now use the multiples system to target any of the disguised characters, wasting valuable time in a potentially high pressure situation. Secondly it becomes impossible to tell which of the disguised characters is doing what, as all their emotes or combat messages feature the same pronouns. This can get so extreme that in the heat of the moment a defending player may not notice that there is more than one disguised person present until it is too late, information that would be visibly available without effort in a real situation but now needs the player to type in look to identify there are multiple assailants. None of this is IC, it's an abusive OOC manipulation of the games syntax system for IC benefits.

TL:DR

Multiple identical disguised forces additional syntax barriers on players, garnering an IC benefit from weaknesses in the code.

I've yet to read a single justification or defense of it that doesn't feel really silly when imagined in pragmatic applications, like HolyChrome pointed out. It's clearly just an abuse of the text-based medium and the present implementation of disguise and appearance mechanics. Coordinating your poncho colors or whatever is one thing, saying 'hey let's all be lithe denizens hyuk hyuk' is really really stupid. I say this as a non-combat character with zero dog in the literal or metaphorical fight.

The discussion of 'multiple identical attackers' should probably be suggested for a TownHall topic.

I think it warrants discussion and probably a Policy to prohibit it.

As others have pointed out, it is extremely meta gamish.

It would also be great if there were a way for the game to default to '1st' when multiples are present. Given that it doesn't, I am assuming that there is a coded reason that makes that impossible.

A look command that only shows player/NPC bits, and does so on a new line for each instance. It would additionally check for exact matches in short desc, and prepend the sequence number to the string for client presentation. Color coding this portion of the string as suggested above might be a good idea. If people associate RED with "first", BLUE with "second", etc... it will allow for easier visual processing. Finally... append the objects they're holding to the end of the line.

I'd assume this would give everyone the information they're wanting in the situations where it matters.

i.e. something like...

(first) a shrouded lithe walker carrying a katana and a katana

(second) a shrouded lithe walker carrying an H&K MK23-S

(third) a shrouded lithe walker carrying a katana

In light of that argument, I make the following amendment to my suggestion above:

Gate the command behind a Perception+Weapon/Martial Skill check.

Experienced combatants with a good eye are going to be far more capable of digesting what's happening around them than your regular Joe who just tailors womens lingerie and sells them at the markets.

A shrouded lithe walker arrives from the north

A shrouded lithe walker to "Could I get a pint?"

The NPC bartender then flips out about there being a dip because they can't target either shrouded lithe walker.

This is true of NPC combat targeting as well.

To me, it feels as though intentionally aligning your shortdesc with one or more other people before entering combat (or doing something where combat is probable) is blatant metagaming since you're using OOC information (your character's shortdescs) to target/mess with the person behind the keyboard.

Maybe I'm wrong and there's a completely valid IC reason for doing this and it isn't metagaming and a bunch of coding work should be done to accommodate this. However I've yet to have someone tell me what a valid example of an IC reason to is.

I realize that

count walk

l first walk

l 2nd walk

etc.

Doesn't take all that long to type, and, for a sighted person that knows where on the screen to look to see what someone is holding, is trivial, though I can't speak to how this would be for people with screen readers.

But, if it's fine and not metagaming, then would the following examples also not be metagaming?

- Attacking a PC or NPC faction member in full view of NPCs of the same faction that can't target you.

- Going into a bar where you see a shrouded lithe walker, leaving and coming back disguised as a shrouded lithe walker and pickpocketing people knowing that if you get caught they won't be able to distinguish which shrouded lithe walker pickpocketed them.

- Pickpocketing NPCs while a friend is disguised the same as you so they can't target you if you get caught.

Say two people have katanas, your PC has high level in longblades, they should easily be able to tell the difference who is stronger simple through their PC's ability to hold their sword.

Someone however with a lower longblade weapon skill might not notice this and simple consider who ever was defaulted in the room 'count' as 1st combatant.

This might be code intensive or tick intensive, but I personally think could be a QOL update beyond just this specific issue.