Shattered Kingdoms

So, it has become some kind of habit for some people to pick Nerina NPC adjectives like gangly, portly, hook-nosed etc., especially when they roll characters fighting against the Talons. Some other people also like to use disguises with the same adjectives. This obviously creates a problem with the skirmish skill among a few others. I thought that picking adjectives that confuse targeting either permanently or with disguise was against the rules. What's the case? I'd like Dulrik to clear this up please.

Yeah this needs to be cleared up, if this is an issue then perhaps skirmish and other skills/spells can be changed to bypass adjectives and target by name rather than adjective.

For instance I know I'm fighting Tyto, but if I target lanky then sometimes I end up targeting myself. Even though I don't have Tyto greeted it'd still be nice to be able to target "Tyto"

My understanding is this:

Disguising as someone in your own group to avoid targeting = Cheating
Disguising as someone not in your group to avoid targeting = tictacs

Not tactics. You are abusing the targeting code to your advantage. If you have to fight the game instead of the player, not tactics. Abuse of code.

Using disguise to avoid being skirmish targeted seems perfectly ok to me, I mean isn't the purpose of it to avoid detection and or notice from others?

People purposely using adjectives to avoid skirmishing in opposing cities is a bit on the cheating side, like the people that used the same adjective as their pets.

Only a few possible ways to fix it code wise, is adding two more arguments with the skirmish command,
ie skirmish <adjective> <race> <sex>.
The other would be the command ignoring all NPC's and just fixated on PC's alone.

The latter of the two options would be the best work around this best where as the second would be more of a sure fire code fix, but then skirmish would become a PvP only skill. (Though honestly, who actually uses it for PvE?)

this, if you ask my opinion, tactics with disguise would be this, your fighting a caster, you start fighting disguised as "A masked male half-elf" not to many NPCs with the masked adjective and it's a legit disguise. you fight a few rounds caster starts to concentrate, you drop your disguise and go back to regular adjective to throw him off, that seems like the tactics that disguise should have been used for combat wise but then I guess that's still abuse of code huh?

That is one of the things that disguise was written for. It was not written so that if you target them by their adjective, due to the code you target a nearby NPC. That is using the system to make the player fight the system and not the player. Dropping your disguise is totally different, because that is how the code works and you are not targeting a nearby NPC.

I genuinely don't know the answer to this, so I hope an IMM comes and clarifies before people argue themselves into a frenzy when they don't even know for sure what the rules are.

Like I said, Dulrik already addressed this:

The rules in the past -have- been "It's frowned upon but not illegal" until recently where it was made certainly illegal to disguise the same as your pet.

However, there has been no crysal clear distinction on this at all concerning other NPCs or PCs. I personally don't mind disguises in general and like their existence, but I do not at all like the limitations of the code which prevent me from being able to skirmish or target the gangly halfling that is singing songs versus the gangly giant that is standing beside me in my own formation. To another extent, I'm always frustrated when players purposefully disguise themselves to look like someone in -my- party. It's frustrating enough when two people have the same permanent adjectives cross-party (Bash red!) because that's just unfortunate, but it adds an additional layer of frustration when there are similar adjectives because someone is trying to take advantage of it.

The problem here is that it's extremely difficult to create clear rules for the use of disguise without leaving it very heavily in the discretion of whatever IMM feels like judging things, and it's also very difficult if not impossible to regulate disguise through code to prevent this use without eliminating disguise altogether, or at least limiting it so heavily that it may as well never be used.

For example, It certainly seems IC for me to disguise like a gangly halfling if I'm a halfling running around solo in Nerina trying to blend in with the guards to avoid suspicion. Doing so wouldn't make a Talon act out of character in most circumstances. However, on the off chance that I get involved in a fight in a room with said gangly halflings, if people start running in and out of the room it's possible that the Talon might act out of character by bashing the wrong gangly halfling: And the same is true for all NPCs in the city.

Here's the crux of the matter. Disguise is used in one of two ways: To make you look like someone who has never existed, or to make you look like someone else. If disguise is -ever- used in the latter sense, it is bound to create targeting errors. If disguise is ever used in a city for someone to "blend in" with the NPCs or PCs there, it is absolutely impossible at the same time to avoid targeting errors based on those PCs or NPCs, and that's the main problem.


While it doesn't solve everything, my wish is that there was an "auto party" feature that would effectively bypass all adjectives and names in your party when targeting aggressive actions: With auto party on, if one of my groupmates has "red-eyed" as an adjective and I try to bash the "red-haired" human fighting me with "bash red" then auto party would never hit the "red-eyed" PC in my group even if he was first in the room. As well, with auto party, if I tried to target someone in my group with any aggressive action and there wasn't anyone else with that same adjective, I would get a message of "But they're in your party!" It doesn't solve the problem of targeting PCs and NPCs outside of your group, but some people will argue that it even fitting, depending on how convincing the disguise skill is supposed to be.