desum | murder mechanics

murder mechanics

Hey all!

There's been some discussion about the consequences for murder, etc. Right now, a character suffers the pain of the victim, loses their powers, and then post-counselor visit loses one memory. But since it came up, I though it was worth revisiting since I still realize this doesn't feel like much of a consolation and unfortunately we can't have a 10 body pile up in which we all just keep killing each other (probably.)

I've also had it suggested by a couple people that they'd like a scapegoat mechanic - i.e. if a person is "caught" that didn't commit the crime, they can be subjected to murder consequences. This would be opt in and players would have no obligation.

Finally, I'm also looking at incentive to actually solve the murders since right now it's just for the deed well done. I've seen merit points and small items suggested as rewards, but I'd love to hear thoughts on this one since I've been struggling with it a bit.

So, I was hoping I could get some thoughts, ideas, etc, on how people feel about it and what they might like to see! I've got my own idea that I'll drop in the comments.

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I came here to say that I had no idea that you lose memories post-counselor visit? Was this a recent change? Am I dumb...

If we haven't already it might be a good idea to remove incentives for killing like the merit points thing (unless that's already gone) as it seems like having None Incentive beyond maybe personal vendetta for certain characters (or just doing it to do it since we have murder hobos) is probably good! Previously we were encouraged to do a crime so maybe flat out discouraging it is better in the long run.

That's true, I don't know that it's really necessary anymore given that everyone here just murders anyway lmao... With the VP being dead it might be a good time to reevaluate that. I've also seen it suggested that if you're not caught, you get +100 points, but once you're outed as a murderer you lose -100 points or smth like that.

This was from the FAQ so it's been around for awhile! You just lose one memory, see below from the faq:

Characters who are caught fighting, whether with npcs or player characters, will be sent to the faculty office to write a reflection essay, which must be completed before the student is allowed to attend club or earn merit points. Characters who are caught killing will be sent to the counselor's office, and will lose a memory as a consequence. Please contact the mod before any npc death.

Edited 2022-02-16 16:03 (UTC)

LMAO I am dumb omg. I guess I haven't been keeping up with the changes to the system very well

I would say that losing merit points for getting caught or admitting to your crimes would be less incentive to kill for sure so I like that. Still tough on account of the fact that people are still gonna do it anyway, but that's kinda the name of the game at that point. If you really wanted to be firm about it you could say that the murderer loses ALL merit points if caught, but I'm not sure how hardass that is.

I'm also assuming this would only be the case for PC murders and not murders set up by the school like the practicum or the field trips? Esp wrt the other murder mechanics.

Perhaps for harsher punishment, something like detention or in school suspension could be implemented? It def would not have to follow the regular versions of those things. They could be way harsher since this is a hell school lmao. Whether that means going through a personalized trial, solitary confinement, or maybe something else, that might be something to balance out the act more!

Scapegoat mechanic def sounds fun! I think punishment might need be considered for it too though. Like maybe in addition for opt-in, maybe a choice for light punishments would be good too. Or at least a opt-out choice for one of them or something.

Reward wise, merit-points and small prizes would be great! I think reduced prices on bonus AC would also be great too! Doesn't have to be a ton, but I think that's good incentive and you can be selective on what would be reduced.

Anyway all just ideas; none need to be taken but they can be changed too as you best see fit! If you wanna run anything by me I'm all ears!

One thing I'm worried about with scapegoat mechanics is it may make characters reluctant to point fingers (even if everyone's fine with it ooc) which is already a little bit of a problem in meetings, because suddenly getting it wrong has consequences. This is not in and of itself bad but means that the consequence for just... not trying to catch anyone at all and letting the murder stand needs to be higher to push back against that inertia, which is why death games so often have 'everyone will die if you don't pick someone'.

Making it something more external and less of an ic choice could work... something like even if you didn't do it the accumulated karma of suspicion sort of 'sticks' to you until it's cleared, and if it goes on too long/gets strong enough it can start causing effects? Or something meted out by the school itself... Not sure.

EDIT: Also seconding reduced prices on Bonus AC... I'm crying bc I do think plot clues could stand to be a little cheaper, or have an option for a mini-version for things like 'tell me more about the cats' and 'i want to befriend the pool monster'.

Edited (another thought) 2022-02-17 03:37 (UTC)

takes a shot, i'm laying out all my thoughts so rip to the character limit sorry this is gonna be long, i ramble.

Current Mechanics
yes i am giving these headers dwi

I feel like the main issue comes down to incentives to get away with murder VS incentives to committing murder. Let's be real here, no one really needs an IC incentive to murder, I made up an entire yogen OC just to make Clamor kill someone. Consequences to being caught as a murderer get brought up a lot, but personally I don't think this is the way to go, at least not as the primary solution. What I'd rather see focused on is a more risk vs reward based system for murderers, ie. if they just kill someone and everyone knows they did it then they either don't get a reward or get a much smaller one, BUT if they kill someone and avoid getting caught they get a much bigger reward for it.

Another thing I think could use addressing is committing murders that can't be solved (bodies/evidence destroyed via void is a good example, lookin' at you Childe). I don't think this is a problem per se, but if more focus is placed on rewards for killers who get away with it, it's far too easy right now to do that just by dumping corpses in the void. So there has to be some balance! Like a system where the highest rewards are given to characters who can successfully scapegoat another person into taking the blame for their kills, with far fewer rewards given to kills that go unnoticed or kills where they're immediately caught and blamed.

Looping back to consequences again, I talked about this a bit on discord but to give my thoughts again on the current (updated) murder consequences... at first I was excited for them, but after having some time to think about them and make use of them I found it a bit underwhelming. As an IC deterrent, there was no communication that this would be happening to characters so no one really knew about them at all until someone killed and then brought it up (holds up Add), which took quite awhile to happen. Even then, it's an IC stretch for one person to say they killed and X happened and conclude that this will always happen when murders occur now even though there's been nothing to suggest there would be a change to those mechanics... and I think this was also exacerbated by the updated murder consequences not being in an easy-to-find location for a long time, because it felt like a lot of people either forgot about certain parts of the new mechanics or didn't know they'd changed at all. And if killers aren't implementing the consequences to their murders, it's even harder to ICly learn those consequences exist for obvious reasons.

BASICALLY my main issue with the current consequences is that they're not known/understood very well ICly, so they can't be considered an effective deterrent to murder. So, how do they fair as a punishment to murder? I think the pain reflection part is good, very simple and effective, not a huge enough drawback to punish players OOC but a solid baseline punishment for characters to deal with IC. 1 week of powerloss... I have mixed feelings about tbh, because on one hand it creates both an opening for other characters to seek vengeance (no matter how OP a character's powers are, if they use them to kill then they'll be vulnerable for that week and have to rely on other methods or their CR for protection) and it creates a method to identify the killer if they have abilities that they now can't access (though this suffers from the lack of IC confirmation of the mechanics). On the other hand, it also creates an unfair disadvantage to superpowered characters, because even if they don't use those powers to kill, any time they commit a murder they'll lose access to all powers and thus be immediately suspect if a power check gets brought up. There are no other ICly-known effects that would disable abilities, so right now the only real explanation is "abilities are off = they killed someone".

There's also the memloss part, which. i also forgot about at the time, had Add kill like 18 people and then realized i had to come up with 18 memories to erase, so that was a hmm moment. like to be perfectly honest I kinda just put that whole issue in a "deal with this later" corner of my brain because I couldn't even think of 18 memories that would be a noticeable loss to Add without completely derailing my chardev plans for him, so I just kinda... ignored it, in the end...... to give my thoughts on it overall tho, I do LIKE the idea of memloss as a consequence, but it feels a little random and it is a pretty major drawback for some characters. The part that makes me hmmm about it tho is that, ICly, the school is encouraging characters to commit murder, so having the counsellor directly take memories away afterwards feels like a mixed signal... if it were more explained IC I could see it being spun as a "reward", but as far as I'm aware it's not directly addressed at all in an IC way, so it just kinda Happens and good luck figuring that out. Unless a character loses a really obvious/notable memory, chances are they're never gonna realize they've forgotten anything at all. Even if they do, how would they connect that to a murder they committed when memloss is already tied into other parts of the setting? Like how everyone's been in Yogen for years but they don't remember previous years. There's no strong reason for characters to associate memory loss with murder, and it would take a LOT of murders and observation to make that connection.

As for current murder incentives, we only have merit points, which I actually do wanna address briefly because it's also kinda hmm. Like ICly we've been getting the impression that merit points might have something to do with graduation perks, so having a huge amount of merit points at the end of the year may actually be a much larger benefit than we thought initially... but the issue with merit points is that they're very nebulous as a concept. We don't track them OOC (thank fuck) so it's easy to lose track of how much 500 points is really supposed to be "worth". Is it worth killing someone over? Maybe?? It only really mattered for that first month where we had the auction, which was a good setup, but nothing like that has really come up since. It's hard to use merit points as a justification for committing an IC murder when there's nothing we can really say they needed those merit points for, so in the end the points don't matter.

MURDERS ASIDE there is also the thing about incentives for actually solving murders, of which there are none, so my only comment on that is i think there should be cause that'd be rad.

Actual Suggestions
It's the end of the year and both the principal(?) and VP are dead, as well as the stuco pres, so firstly I think the changes to mechanics should be stated very upfront ICly because this is the PERFECT time to be doing that. The biggest part of making use of incentives/consequences is characters actually being able to know about them at all, and the previous attempts have suffered a lot because of that not being done IMO. So whatever ends up happening, I think it should at least be strongly alluded to at the start of the year during the opening assembly or w/e, if not outright stated. Depends on what's being done, who's telling the school, who decides to murder someone 1 week into the new year, etc...

Out of the current consequences, the only one I think should stay for sure is the "feel the pain of your victim the night after you kill" because it's 1) pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things, 2) very thematically fitting, and 3) fun to mess with. Basically there's not reason not to have it. The other two parts (powerloss, memloss) are a bit mixed, so they could either stay or go or have changes made to them.

I was gonna go into what I think some better consequences/rewards/whatever would be, but in the end my opinion is more like... whatever the specific mechanics are don't matter a whole ton. Rather, I think what's more important is that the mechanics make sense and are fully communicated IC. FOR EXAMPLE: the school has been encouraging murder, so why would they suddenly put in consequences for it? What does Yogen want from its students? This also ties into plot shit I obviously don't know about so like, why did it suddenly veer into pro-murder territory, maybe we can learn something about that through how the new faculty handles murders this year... does the school want students to solve murders? If we think of "getting away with murder" and "solving someone else's poorly executed murder" as life skills, then it's easy to explain why the school would be all for updating their procedures to encourage both. And if the school itself doing something wouldn't make sense, is there a way the NPC students could fill a similar role as rewards/consequence, ie. gaining favours from certain NPCs through committing or solving murders? There's a LOT of different ways we could go with this.

To briefly go over consequences/rewards themselves tho, my main takeaway is that I think these should be flexible to what the player wants, because what works for one person might not work for someone else. Like the current memloss aspect might not be a big deal for some characters, but to a character that has specific trauma related to memloss (looks directly at Noah tbh) it's a much worse drawback, especially if their murder was accidental or forced. For things like the mandatory finals murders, consequences (and also rewards!) should be reduced and specific to that event. If the school is forcing characters to do something, it doesn't make sense to treat that the same as a character willingly going out of their way to kill and hide evidence.

I do also wanna say I like the idea of scapegoating! I also just think it'd be funny/awful to have someone like the counsellor gaslight the shit out of a scapegoated character even tho they know that person is innocent... seems like something counsellorsan would do. In a way this could also be treated as a "reward" to the character who got away with murder ("see all these shitty consequences you avoided?? good job lol"), and if consequences are tailored to the character, it could also be a way to tell if someone didn't commit a murder... like if consequences fit the "true" killer, the scapegoated character could potentially learn something from the specific punishments given to them if they don't make any sense. THAT'S A LITTLE MORE VAGUE but just an idea i had just now and went damn wouldn't that be a way to start a counter-investigation arc where a character clears their name after being falsely accused.

On the note of murders where evidence is lost and unrecoverable... idk i can't think of an IC reason why the school would be against dumping bodies in the void or otherwise being Too Good at hiding a body, but maybe something like "Mizuki or whoever thinks its funnier when people freak out about a body so better rewards go to those who take the risk vs those who don't". That, or there could be a change to how the void functions to leave behind evidence if a body is dumped there. Maybe dumping corpses in the void is Bad, Actually. Maybe characters that keep doing it start drawing more attention from the shadow people... it's like how you're not supposed to feed seagulls cause they'll start swarming you for food once they realize you have more you're not giving up, y'know? That would both make it harder to (safely) dump corpses in the void in the future as well as make it obvious to other characters that someone has been doing it if they end up in the void and all the shadows start swarming that character.

I MAY OR MAY NOT COME BACK TO THIS LATER but those are my thoughts rn wheezes... sorry its long, thank u for reading

i'll write my own comment later maybe but for now i want to piggyback off yours just to say i especially love the idea of npc students filling the role of rewards and consequences through favours for committing/solving murders... i think that is so cute... like a little worldbuild, or in videogames where you have npc dealers and sidequests, but it's not like, a sidequest-arc the way our named npcs have. they're human mechanics. seagull void students is also really funny. and counselorsan gaslighting scapegoats too. that'd make a scapegoat plot sooooo fun ngl...

Agreed, I particularly really like the idea of rewards for solving a murder being less merit points or items you get, but things that follow more naturally on from the murder itself; like how if we found out Maya's killer early Hiro might not have died, that sort of thing, but also like. NPCs getting closure, or even everyone getting a piece of lore, plot clue style, because right now the murders are pretty thematically separated from the rest of the goings on at the school.

I also do want to say if there's rewards to figuring out the murder we need to figure out in advance and be clear on who gets them and what for and in what amount; is it everyone that participated? How is that measured? Is it all the transfers? Right now there does seem to be an accidental reward for participating even if the murder isn't solved, which is that you get to loot the bodies rip.

I also want to kind of like. Put down that it should be okay if the murder isn't solved. Sometimes everyone will die like in July, or have brains full of bees, or there'll be people on hiatus, so I'd prefer reward over consequence if possible, or at least consequences that are opt out-able. Incentive to participate and incentive to solve are also separate things to be considered.

Right now there does seem to be an accidental reward for participating even if the murder isn't solved, which is that you get to loot the bodies rip.

i fucking spit out my drink i hate how right this is

also yeah tbh re: it's okay if murders go unsolved, i think what's more important is that there's a satisfying conclusion to either ending... something something "if you get away with it for at least x months then you get your murder reward" so the murderer doesn't have to keep it a secret forever and can eventually share with everyone what the solution was, i think that part's fun too even if the mystery goes unsolved IC. gestures at Komaeda.

When this was brought up in Discord, I had an idea that I still think can work in regards for changing the mechanics - by now it's commonly known that everyone's in the afterlife, why can't we lean into a karmic aspect in regards to all of this, and have consequences that don't just affect you, but affect your world? Good karma, bad karma, that sort of thing. The setting itself can become the "why" in regards to how things are shifting - souls being here for long enough, there could be an element of stagnation that needs to be countered. Speaking as someone who plays a character who'd need her hand forced to even consider murder, there could be grander incentives at play than just merits, though that is dipping more into the classic murdergame elements. Trials and temptations, that kind of thing.

My thought is this - there could be some murder incentives that affect one's world back home (or at the least, this is believed to be so). Killing and getting away with it gets you something that you really need or need to preserve, but getting caught comes with dire consequences - not only do you lose it, but your world suffers for it. Conversely, the student body is also held accountable - if they do nothing and let the murderer slip away without a solid effort, that counts as bad karma for them, and then they have to suffer something for it. Curses, bad dreams, setting status effects, etc.

Beyond that, a thought about murders as a whole: though I just talked about punishment on both sides, I think we should be able to have balance between the desire to solve and the desire to just get mileage out of the plot in any kind of way when it comes to a murder - but it's important that we know which type is the organizer's goal, so that it isn't stressful for people who want to solve it vs. people who are happy with however things unfold naturally.

Being told we were playing by Knox commandments was a huge help for the current murders, since that gives us a framework to solve in. It doesn't tip too much information, but it lets us OOCly understand that while ICly power check might happen, it's ultimately not factoring into the case at hand. As it is, I don't think we need to "win" or solve everything, but to stave off timecube the idea of multiple shorter meetings to reconvene might be better than having to backdate and constantly have people's CR in limbo.

I'll be going over what we currently have at the moment regarding the murder mechanics as well as potentially echoing (giving a +1) to the above statements as necessary and inputting my own thoughts, so please bear with me here.

Current murder mechanics:

memory loss can't be entirely pinned down to murder ICly

right now

Scapegoat and general "getting away with it" mechanics:

a set amount of time that the case needs to be solved ICly

can

Other general murder-related things:

now

tuition is tied to karma

also

having no murder at all on certain months can also tie back to karma

not doing a murder at all

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murder mechanics

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