Shattered Kingdoms

Along those lines, you're a mage who is looking straight at a masked male human and concentrating on a spell. You see him. He's right there. -----> masked male human

So, as you are looking right at him, he takes his right hand, and removes his mask. Now, all of a sudden, you have no idea where the masked male human is? He's right there standing right in front of you! -----> ugly male human

You may call it tictacs. I call it a double standard, and making disguises non-removable while in combat would be a good change, imo.

That pretty much sums it up. Disguising ones self as an enemy in attempt to make their allies target them is a blatantly OOC action. Think of it this way, if you were in Afghanistan fighting for the American military would you dress up in native Afghani garb while fighting a battle in hopes the get them to shoot each other? No, no you wouldn't. End of discussion.

You're missing the point. While it is certainly true that disguising yourself only to misdirect is blatantly OOC, it's also completely legitimate to do the same just to blend in with the environment for scouting or spying purposes. Sadly, there's not much of a way to limit one through code without limiting the other.

I find it completely fitting that the use of disguise completely negates the ability to skirmish because you aren't exactly sure what the guy is going to look like at any given point in time.

Let's take the same hypothetical scenario e.g. Talon skirmisher vs random enemy in the streets. Enemy either has gangly as adjective or as a disguise. I think disguise is borderline acceptable, permanent adjective is far worse. Talon skirmisher looks for gangly to shoot but instead he ends up shooting the priestess down the street, his fellow Talon that spells him up all the time.

This isn't realistic game-wise, it's realistic on some strange meta-gaming level. Yeah, gangly and gangly are the same word but inside the game, said Talon would know the priestess, her face, what her name is and he would never try to shoot her in the face just because he's looking for someone that only appears to look like her. This is disguise, not mimic. Most times, the enemies don't even have the same race or gender.

Very simple solution would be to make skirmish more encompassing and have it accept the entire 'adjective gender race' combo instead of just the adjective or the race. But that still leaves a problem with spells and other skills and we do need a rule on what is acceptable and what is not.

That real life example by Terrus is perfect for group fights. Completely unrealistic to start hitting your people just because someone looks like them. The whole issue isn't on avoiding ranged combat by making yourself unrecognisable, it's to avoid the obvious abuse of negating ranged combat because it will result in unrealistic friendly fire.

Maybe we should

Actually, it can be realistic. Lets look at police comparisons for line ups. They take people that look similar and line them up to pick out a witness. This is done at close range.

Skirmish now, is done at long range. You have to think that down the street or one "room" or so away in SK isn't particularly defined length wise. It can be a short distance, or in the case of wilderness, a long distance. It's not unfeasible that, at long range, a person mistakes someone for someone else and shoots the wrong person. You can't notice their gear at those distances, so, at best it's probably just a somewhat vague outline of details, aka the adjective. In that case, it's possible for two gangly halflings to look identical and mistakenly shoot the guard, mistaking it for your disguised enemy. After all, a true master of disguise causes confusion among his enemies and turns them against each other. It only comes to light later after the damage has been done that things clear up and they realized the impostor (disguised individual.)

This is a poor example. Actually, it is against the Geneva convention to do this. Since it was made international law, I think it is safe to say that there is a precedent set for it. If we looked hard enough, I'm sure we could find some examples of this being done in the past (one side disguising as the enemy to confuse/distract the enemy).

In short, perhaps one reason America doesn't do this is because we tend to follow the Geneva convention. Real world examples do not always equate to Shattered Kingdoms scenarios.

I am not talking about the non-combat uses of disguise. If you are running around as 'gangly' in Nerina to scout or be a gate target. Props to you. Perfect use of disguise. The OP isn't talking about that use of disguise. The OP is talking about using 'gangly' so that if someone decides to skirmish them, they target a NPC or another member of their party with a similar adjective.

This shouldn't even be a discussion.

"Disguise gangly" is smart. "Disguise tree" "disguise patrisaurus" and "disguise cityguard" are all curse worthy.

PS, order your cityguards and pets to hit disguised people using their character's names instead of adjectives. Not that hard.

Except it doesn't work?