I'm going to reply to you from my own journal (hi it's Jenn lol) because I do the bulk of the NPCing. I am also going to talk a little generally in spots so other people can understand where I'm coming from with my approach to them. (So it's gonna get long.)
I really want to make it clear that the intended purpose of the Navarch and Archimedes are not to be full characters in their own rights (esp in Archie's case) or a kind of "CR" (esp in the Navarch's case.) They both serve different functions in play, which is intended to be:
- Archimedes is generally meant to handle quick concerns and questions, access to specific items (ie, "Hi, Archimedes, I'd like a repair kit for x item" or "Hi, my communicator got smashed" or "Hi, I need [item that is specifically for doing my job as a warden]") Some deviation from this is fine but I can't use him to soothe the vast majority of inmate concerns because that is literally the wardens' jobs, and it's more rewarding for inmates to go over those things with someone they can actually have longterm CR with.
- The Navarch is meant to assist wardens in their work, which is more esoteric things like facilitating inmate punishment, giving wardens access to crucial information (with inmate player permission), answering questions wardens may have about how they're doing in their job, or dealing with troubled wardens (Ie one who is on the cusp of demotion.)
I want to make it clear that characters can (and should) question themselves, wardens and what fairness/equity/etc are. I think it even makes sense as a deflection for them to temporarily fixate on the ship's system as the real problem rather than acknowledging any flaw in themselves.
However, I do think it's a pretty unrewarding path to take long-term, both because I am not interested in NPCing for frequent and persistent challenges to the core premise of the game to no benefit, and also because it is going to hit a wall, a very very hard wall. It may also be very hard to convince other players to engage on fighting the wall with you. To match your eye slide: we designed some things in this game to be more transparent because the total ambiguity of a nameless, faceless Admiral who has no rhyme or reason for why he picks certain people and has no accountability to any other body felt very hard to handle sometimes. That said, I cannot possibly answer 41 questions, the first two of which are made up of over a dozen sub questions. This is not a functional use of my time, and may or may not glean anything useful to Volk. If you'd like, we can handwave a variety of things, but I simply cannot NPC them all, and Volk will eventually have to accept the situation he's in so that you can get into the meat of the problems that made him an inmate, rather than the problems with the system he's temporarily in. Especially because none of this seems rewarding to Volk; he just seems more and more frustrated, and I worry about frustrating you in turn.
The problem with trying to make the Navarch's life difficult is also that:
a) The Navarch is not going to talk to inmates, the same way any prison warden isn't going to meet at random with prisoners, so it's just creating work for the wardens as a go-between. Some warden players may like this and like investigating the system, but everyone has to understand that I am not going to NPC out dozens of answers to challenges to the system that largely won't get changes, because we are not going to overhaul the game to address all those things. The game will change and evolve over time, yes, but two months in we're not going to gut it like that to make it more realistic to any specific character.
b) This is a setting meant to give characters challenges, new experiences and tastes of other lives. I like to think of it as a redemption isekai. We are not building a meticulously crafted open world beyond the Peregrine's boundaries, nor trying to tell a story about an idealized version of earth prison in space that follows the Geneva Convention and whatnot. Writing about the nitty gritty of the system is a lot of hours, discussions and labour for us to write a ton of stuff about how the system works in huge detail when we could be writing plots where characters get to see new things, blow things up, go on adventures, live other lives, etc.
c) As I said to you in conversation the other day, some of Volk's questions are technically answerable, and I could write out a full answer using alien jargon or excuses to answer "why don't we have a psychiatrist", but the real answer is just "because then we have to have NPC psychiatrists on board so mods can do more NPCing, people can handwave psychiatry, or someone has to play a competent psychiatrist and also be interested in playing it with you specifically." I am doubtful as to how satisfying this is for most players OOC and it is also not going to create much (if any) value IC. I understand that it may be frustrating to curve a character around legitimately good questions, but we are writing stories set in a cool spaceship, not writing a 1:1 observation on the reality of the situation.
Ultimately, I don't want to treat the setting like an escape room where the objective is to figure out how to get out, whether it's by unlocking clues talking to the NPCs or brute force. I want the setting to be a vehicle for telling stories about characters, and that means interactions between PCs who have ongoing CR and conflict and resolutions and all those things.
no subject
I really want to make it clear that the intended purpose of the Navarch and Archimedes are not to be full characters in their own rights (esp in Archie's case) or a kind of "CR" (esp in the Navarch's case.) They both serve different functions in play, which is intended to be:
I want to make it clear that characters can (and should) question themselves, wardens and what fairness/equity/etc are. I think it even makes sense as a deflection for them to temporarily fixate on the ship's system as the real problem rather than acknowledging any flaw in themselves.
However, I do think it's a pretty unrewarding path to take long-term, both because I am not interested in NPCing for frequent and persistent challenges to the core premise of the game to no benefit, and also because it is going to hit a wall, a very very hard wall. It may also be very hard to convince other players to engage on fighting the wall with you. To match your eye slide: we designed some things in this game to be more transparent because the total ambiguity of a nameless, faceless Admiral who has no rhyme or reason for why he picks certain people and has no accountability to any other body felt very hard to handle sometimes. That said, I cannot possibly answer 41 questions, the first two of which are made up of over a dozen sub questions. This is not a functional use of my time, and may or may not glean anything useful to Volk. If you'd like, we can handwave a variety of things, but I simply cannot NPC them all, and Volk will eventually have to accept the situation he's in so that you can get into the meat of the problems that made him an inmate, rather than the problems with the system he's temporarily in. Especially because none of this seems rewarding to Volk; he just seems more and more frustrated, and I worry about frustrating you in turn.
The problem with trying to make the Navarch's life difficult is also that:
a) The Navarch is not going to talk to inmates, the same way any prison warden isn't going to meet at random with prisoners, so it's just creating work for the wardens as a go-between. Some warden players may like this and like investigating the system, but everyone has to understand that I am not going to NPC out dozens of answers to challenges to the system that largely won't get changes, because we are not going to overhaul the game to address all those things. The game will change and evolve over time, yes, but two months in we're not going to gut it like that to make it more realistic to any specific character.
b) This is a setting meant to give characters challenges, new experiences and tastes of other lives. I like to think of it as a redemption isekai. We are not building a meticulously crafted open world beyond the Peregrine's boundaries, nor trying to tell a story about an idealized version of earth prison in space that follows the Geneva Convention and whatnot. Writing about the nitty gritty of the system is a lot of hours, discussions and labour for us to write a ton of stuff about how the system works in huge detail when we could be writing plots where characters get to see new things, blow things up, go on adventures, live other lives, etc.
c) As I said to you in conversation the other day, some of Volk's questions are technically answerable, and I could write out a full answer using alien jargon or excuses to answer "why don't we have a psychiatrist", but the real answer is just "because then we have to have NPC psychiatrists on board so mods can do more NPCing, people can handwave psychiatry, or someone has to play a competent psychiatrist and also be interested in playing it with you specifically." I am doubtful as to how satisfying this is for most players OOC and it is also not going to create much (if any) value IC. I understand that it may be frustrating to curve a character around legitimately good questions, but we are writing stories set in a cool spaceship, not writing a 1:1 observation on the reality of the situation.
Ultimately, I don't want to treat the setting like an escape room where the objective is to figure out how to get out, whether it's by unlocking clues talking to the NPCs or brute force. I want the setting to be a vehicle for telling stories about characters, and that means interactions between PCs who have ongoing CR and conflict and resolutions and all those things.