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
no subject
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