I'm quoting Lae, but this is a general response. I'm only using his arguments as a springboard without meaning any personal attack.
Laewyloth wrote:
- There are "More people in Forostar who look like, behave like, smell like, and dress like person X" than you want to believe. This should mean that -any- observation you make has to be second-guessed without an *intimate* knowledge of who you're looking at. Yes, even people you know. Hell, gentleman-players, think about how different you look with or without a beard. Seeing "An elf, the same height as player X" when you don't have an introduce/remember string for that player is NOT a valid way to suspect anything about anybody.
This is absolute non-sense and awfully convenient for disguise users. You'd be hard pressed to find that in planet Earth. It's easy to be fooled into thinking someone you've never met is someone else, but it's incredibly hard (and a truly rare and difficult skill) to fool someone that already knows you. At the very least a
dramatic change in behavior would be needed. Disguise strategies work best when used to blend in and disappear in a crowd, not when trying to be flamboyant and outstandish. And worst of all, nobody is ever going to agree on what "an abundance of proof" means. This argument is a recipe for OOC conflict. Regardless, this attacks a core element of any RPG, and that is that PCs are remarkable. Nobody wants to play an average Joe (and in fact, in Geas, nobody does). I second Zehren's sentiments about this. Making PCs be just another regular Joe is a slippery slope to even worse, even more contrived anti-accountability arguments.
Laewyloth wrote:
- Skills, magical auras, etc. are again, not indicative or who someone is. Why? Because for every pasty halfling, or silver-haired elf out there that pulsates when you cast a spell at 'em, or backstabs you on the road, there's X number of -identical- figures out there in Forostar. So, you need to have "an abundance of proof" to say definitively *who* someone is. What defines 'an abundance of proof'? Something more than anything mentioned in this thread, obviously!
Skills that cannot be learned anywhere, that have historically been used by thieves and that are in fact an act of observable thievery should indeed be grounds to believe someone has gotten special training and/or belongs to some shady thievery-related group. We can argue forever about if backstab is shady or not, but mugging is just straight out theft even outside of any game-mechanical framework. The exclusivity of access to these skills ratifies this approach. Even if they are learnable by other means, the argument still holds because access to those means is tightly controlled by .. a shady organization. Or should we stop considering iron will a special thing you can only learn in certain guilds? Or chi? Or casting miracles? Why exactly do rogue skills need special treatment?
Why do rogues need special protection nobody else in the game is afforded?
Again, a lot of OOC metagaming effort required for people to blatantly
ignore these facts that even a 10 year old would put together. This "rogue" organization might be very large, or many small organizations, but it definitely exists and it's beyond the reach of the common folk, coz it if was within their reach, then we would
definitely know everything about them. See, if there are infinite eyes out there, there are also infinite spies. It's a slippery slope.
Magical auras only add more irrefutable proof. Are we really asked to assume that there is an infinite amount of darkelves out there with exactly the same jewelry (including the gem in the ring), the same magical items and so much more magic glow in their persona than any mage has ever seen? This is asking the players to play dumb in the face of evidence.
Laewyloth wrote:
- Nobody in Forostar is special and 100% identifiable except perhaps via context clues, and maybe -super notable individuals like a queen-. But even then, isn't there that parable or story about the prince and the pauper?
This is a repetition of point one and makes no sense in the context of the dynamics of the game. ANY remarkable adventurer will gain fame and be known quickly. In Geas, nobody becomes notorious at anything without a huge time investment and exposure. Someone
new showing up showcasing "heroic" levels of expertise at anything means they either just arrived from some other land or were training in secret in some sort of specific training school (e.g. The Elvandar Guard or The Assassins Guild). Not only would thousands of invisible NPCs have seen them before and able to recognize them, but also they would have made ripples for themselves in boards, scalp charts and social dynamics way before they'd have reached any serious level of expertise.
If a specific disguised rogue is posing as a newbie, that's a good and sensible cover and something every player of the game would be happy to interact with. If a disguised rogue is a fully equipped master of weapons, stealth and thievery, that's not a nobody.
All of these points as you described them only make sense in a world where the population at large has stopped caring and looking and are just straight out dumbly victimized. Mechanically, these are all shoehorned arguments to justify the existence of and protection afforded by the
disguise mechanic. Arguments that require the entire playerbase to walk on eggshells and second guess themselves. In real world terms, this is called gaslighting:
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person or group makes someone question their sanity, perception of reality, or memories. People experiencing gaslighting often feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust themselves.
Why are we talking about rogues in a thread about disguise? Because disguise is how rogues avoid accountability and bring these arguments to OOC
every single time. This ruling (or suggestion for a ruling) would not even have been necessary if it wasn't for disguise. Masks are way less troublesome and have rarely caused issues in 20 years of history of the game. The main difference between masks and disguise? personal accountability (you can immediately see that someone is in fact masked) and group accountability (masks belong to organizations).
There are two things that disguise protects:
- The ability to play an alter ego. (<- This is cool)
- The ability to act without consequences. (<- This is incredibly bad. No multiplayer environment should provide this)
I dig the alter-ego RP, I really do. I'd love to find a way for the game to support that without having this cyclic argument every few years. For 20 years, the game has struggled with the design of disguise because it is antisocial and an incredibly easy mechanic to argue pro and against. In a game like this, imho, there is no place for constant, failproof un-accountability.
As I've said many times in many forms: make rogues accountable for their actions, like
everybody else is.
Disguise is a band-aid to the real root issue here, and that is that rogues don't feel like they have any space to move in without 100% failproof cover.
Finally, there is a clear separation IMHO between the function of NPCs and PCs. I like the analogy to movies and theatre. While you're fighting the city guards, there might be a hundred people around you, but none of them matter functionally. They are atrezzo, dress-up, tools for roleplay and acting. What matters is what the main actors are doing. It's a huge disservice to a RPing game to expect players to constantly care about the backdrop nobodies in detriment of the main act. PCs should be heroes. A few NPCs should be and are important, e.g. Gwenalena, a few social structures should be defined, e.g. Elvandar is Taniel town, but the everyday events of the game should be written by, acted by and performed by players.