Presence, and actions requiring it

Hihi.

Most of the Presence helpfile is pretty self explanatory (and fun!), but I was unsure what was meant by "actions that require Presence" as below:

"Invest into one of your characters. This will increase that character's Presence attribute, and they will receive better outcomes when performing actions that require Presence."

 This is intriguing! What actions are we talking about here?

We should actually change that line, probably, because we ended up just flatly gating certain abilities behind Presence invested into characters. But, it's possible that in the future we will still implement a sort of "Presence RNG" for some things. I'm not completely sure about it at this point. It's not implemented at all and I don't really see any future situation where it'd be useful.

However, I'll explain a bit about our thoughts and give an example here. Currently there are only two abilities implemented that are gated behind Presence level and they are related to the lockpicking skill. 

In most cases, when you do an action like picking a lock and sneaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff, you are risking IC consequences. If a guard or an NPC who'd call the guards, see you -- you could be arrested and thrown in jail, and if you resist you could be killed, and so on. There's also other risks when potentially trying to sell what you stole, because even if you sell it to a VNPC merchant, it'd be theoretically possible for someone to track you down -- especially if they were peeved enough -- and get revenge in some fashion or another. So, it's certainly not possible to do these acts without in-character consequences, and because of that, we'd assume that thieves and such would have in-character reasons for playing this way.

Many games operate in this fashion, but as someone who's played some of those games, the primary issue I've come across is that sometimes there are other players who are actually not invested in their character at all. And then maybe there's you (general you) who is invested not just mechanically in terms of trying to gain xp and move through mechanical progression, but invested into the story of the game, the emotional development of your character, and so on. We hope that people would put care into their characters' stories and we want to handle that care with empathy and responsibility. Some players, though, are just not going to care much about the consequences to their character, regardless of how well otherwise they're writing the story. It can be tedious to constantly interact with these people who seem to be doing the most antagonistic things possible without seemingly any good reason; it stretches the boundaries of believability and makes the game environment full of fringe OOC animosity.

So, that's why we will use Presence level to gate any ability that could be considered "griefy" (beyond just the normal combat code). This forces people to put some time and investment into their characters before potentially doing something very criminal that could possibly victimize other PCs. It both prevents people from making a series of thief characters as one after the other dies, and it creates an IC situation where a new player would need to spend some time understanding how the world works before immediately jumping to doing criminal acts, and it increases the player's sense that they have invested some metric into the thief character and they don't want to commit IC acts that will provoke IC consequences without having a decent IC reason for it.

Clever!