Why I won't play Vampire, and why you shouldn't either.

[restricted]

-snip-

Edited January 16, 2022 by Faris

[Colfer]

21 minutes ago, restricted said:

I personally do not find completely dominating another for purpose of a roleplay game to very conducive to servers that do not offer ERP

I'm sorry. What? What does ERP have to do with this? Vampires are known in alot of fiction for the ability to hypnotize people for the sake of controlling them and gaining an advantage over others. Cultists do the same thing albeit with many more players in a more team based setting. Cortical borers do this same thing. This doesnt mean that these acts are ERP related at all as your post might suggest. 

 

25 minutes ago, restricted said:

Furthermore the mechanics of Vampire encourage gaslighting. For those unfamiliar Gaslighting is attempting replace someone else's reality with another, and a classic hallmark of abusive relationships. I do not think we should be encouraging such a thing within the server

We should also remove gun sounds incase any of our players have PTSD, as well as knives just incase anybody was actually stabbed in real life. These things are also extremely horrible and are serious issues with people, but people can understand typically that this is a VIDEO GAME and that the person on the other end is not their love interest that has abused them for months or more time. They just met this person, and have barely any connection to them if I had to guess. This gaslighting argument sounds contrived at best.

 

27 minutes ago, restricted said:

I have no choice but to either continue playing without my agency as a player or go to cryo and make the vampire lose their blood points.

Just ahelp for the vampires to get back their blood points and head to cryo, Its as simple as that.

 

28 minutes ago, restricted said:

What I am getting at, if it was not obvious enough, is that Vampire is not healthy for the game. Its main appeal is to those who do not respect consent, do not respect other's agency, and encourage abusive tactics. If you abuse these things you are likely better off going to a place where you can ERP while you are at it, as they lean a lot more towards that type of environment.

I don't think I understand where you are getting this sexual and ERP side of vampire gameplay. If you have legitimately been uncomfortable with a vampire who is doing these sorts of things in a sexual manner, ahelp it.

Its main appeal is to those who want to be a vampire, a legendary monster told throughout the world in myths, and to gain the powers of one to a realistic degree. Its a power fantasy would be a better term to describe it. The vampire player is (hopefully) not joining as vampire in order to gaslight, abuse, and sexually harass people and its mechanics only encourage gaslighting to a moderate degree, because its an effective tactic when you have the ability to alter peoples memories substantially as an other worldly entity.

Overall I don't understand this point of view. Nobody is forcing you to participate when you get thralled, Just go play something else for an hour or two.
It just sounds like you don't like being thralled and are pulling out as many of the worst topics that you can to make it sound worse than it actually is.
I don't like thralling either, but I would just say its not very helpful to a roleplay environment. I feel that the roleplay is much better when I get turned into a vampire rather than become a thrall, because I have to cope with my new nature as an undead beast, rather than pretend im normal until the vampire says the magic word.

[Garnascus]

27 minutes ago, restricted said:

Vampire by its very mechanics encourages destroying player agency.

You are already not in charge of what happens to your character. We play on a server with antagonists enabled and various spooky things that can happen. You have absolutely no say in it if that meteor decides to tear your face off. You have no say in it if the mercs bomb the vault open and you happened to be exploring maint a few tiles away and die. You cannot join a round and pick and choose what you agree to (outside of what breaks the rules). 

34 minutes ago, restricted said:

It is not fun for me as the player, it may be fun for the vampire player however I personally do not find completely dominating another for purpose of a roleplay game to very conducive to servers that do not offer ERP

I think it is fine to prefer certain types of RP over others. I think the more willing our playerbase is to cryo/ghost out of situations they do not personally enjoy the worse our server quality is overall. There is nothing in a vampire dominate thats your entire personality disappears and you become a mindless zombie to click things horizontal. If a vampire tells you to kill joe schmoe you still have plenty of ways to go about that. You're restricted of course but you still have agency within that restriction. Ideally the vampire and player have a quick conversation in LOOC about how to ensure both people have fun. 

39 minutes ago, restricted said:

urthermore the mechanics of Vampire encourage gaslighting. For those unfamiliar Gaslighting is attempting replace someone else's reality with another, and a classic hallmark of abusive relationships. I do not think we should be encouraging such a thing within the server

I just dont think this is a fair argument to make. We have an enormous amount of extremely offensive topics present on server, and in our lore. We have discrimination against LGBT people in certain areas of our lore, we have rounds with an extreme amount of violence and gore and it is even possible for characters to commit suicide on station. It is totally ok if you're ok with things like this but this is what is allowed on our server.

 

[Marlon P.]

Vampire is my favorite mode and the only antagonist i have enabled these days. This OP is not convincing as to why my preference is wrong. You don't control your agency once you spawn.

Edit: garn said everything i do.

Vamps who make it horny should be ahelped and bonked.

Edited January 12, 2022 by Marlon P.

[Alberyk]

Removing vampire is feasible as long we have another gamemode to replace it.

[VeteranGary]

Most of these issues seem more fitting as player-specific issues about the gamemode, but the main complaints that I have are mostly just mechanic that encourages poor vampire RP. Namely the thralling gimmick, which is an extremely early ability vampires unlock that is way too overused. Even though the time has been nerfed to 10 seconds, I still find it extremely common to be combat-thralled, or even just flashed/hypnotized mid sentence and thralled as a security player, which most of these have occured in public places on the station which just shows there is very little consequences to using thralls. Depending on who you got on your side you basically have someone disposable to cover up your mistakes. 

Compared to other gamemodes, conversions actually require roleplay to occur. Cultists need to convince you or work together to get you on a convert rune, which even provides the player a choice whether they want to participate or not! Vampire does not provide this to thralls or newly created vampires. Even revolution asks you if you want to participate, and also requires the players to convince you to join other than just clicking a button on the abilities tab. Currently the only way to reverse vampire abilities is holy water and any religious tools the chaplain get, which are largely unknown and someone would have to be extremely superstitious and circumstantial to provide the 'cure', since it is pretty niche, something like using a dropper of holy water on the eyes.

So, as a nerf I think thralling should be made harder to get, or should have certain restrictions such as a time limit based on the amount of blood invested, or a cap to how many thralls can exist at one time. Or even a feature that allows the thralling to be lost if the victim loses a lot of blood/receives a bloodbag, which can happen naturally in a round. Personally for starters I think players should get a prompt to either resist or become a thrall, so that the vampires do not have to waste the blood in the first place, and can just kill the person instead if they do not choose to participate in the round. Another problem with thralling is how inconsequential it is. You spend a ton of blood to thrall someone, and you can just replenish it straight away just by feasting on your thrall. This should be removed, same how you can't draw blood from other vampires.

[Roostercat]

Very little about Vampire at face value makes it encourage ERP. Hypnosis and domination like abilities are not ERP-derived and are only taken there when someone too horny for their own good takes over. if that happens, you should ahelp, as is usual. As for the topic of other people not playing it either, everyone has different opinions. Just because you do not enjoy the gameplay of Vampire doesn't mean everyone else should hate it by default as well. 

[Captain Gecko]

I haven't been playing Vampire much these days, more because I haven't been playing much antags overall actually as of recently, but also because my gimmicks got a bit repetitive there... However, it's true that there are some problems about the gamemode, some things that should be tweaked...

But honestly, with all due respect... What?

 

Look, everything's been pretty much addressed, the weird reference to ERP that no one gets, the senseless thing about abusive gaslighting (like yes, sure, there is an abusive aspect to the vampire's gimmick thorought the medias... BUT VAMPIRES ARE EVIL! THAT'S THE POINT! IT'S AN ANTAGONIST IN THE GAME!), etc.

But I'm going to mostly focus on the gameplay aspect, namely the deprivation of agency... Look, firstly, Aurora, no matter how important the Roleplay aspect is, is not devoid of its gameplay aspect. Some servers do that, removing antags (IE: Vstation), but not here. This means that the moment you know there could be an antag, your character risks death, or well, some sort of death. but beside that, this is not limited to the Vampire. "Privation of Agency" in the way of mind/body control or role change happens with borers, anything psionic, cultists, and so on. Hell, just dying or even being crippled means a total or near-total loss of your agency, and this can happen at any time! Even without antags! Miners falling in holes, blobs, anomalies, being choked by vines, an officer being too trigger-happy, a vending machine throwing a knife in your back, asteroids, carps, Xenobiology, being teleported into wall because telescience, Xenobotany, taking the wrong drink as a Xeno, the local surgeon messing up, there is SO MUCH.

 

Once agang, I'm sure that we can improve, or at least tweak Vampire... But the reasons you give are just... Eh, they don't work.

[Triogenix]

2 hours ago, Garnascus said:

You are already not in charge of what happens to your character. We play on a server with antagonists enabled and various spooky things that can happen. You have absolutely no say in it if that meteor decides to tear your face off. You have no say in it if the mercs bomb the vault open and you happened to be exploring maint a few tiles away and die. You cannot join a round and pick and choose what you agree to (outside of what breaks the rules). 

 

Okay, I have an issue with this. While you are correct that you don't have control over many things that happen to your character, up to death, the difference with vamp in my eyes is that thrall, leaves players with no choice, instead of the more binary choice more common with other antagonist interactions. If another antagonist wants you to do something, the best way they have to force you to do it, is to threaten you with death, by whatever means. This still leaves characters and players a choice though, to die, or to do as they're told, and there are things a character will die over. Thrall removes this binary choice and forces your character, and you as a player, to be fully subservient to the vampire with threat of OOC consequence should you not.

It is possible that a merc team might take you hostage, and just leave you cuffed to a chair with no choice? Yes, but in that situation your character isn't making any decisions, decisions are made for them. They aren't actively doing anything, and in my opinion, if a character is actively doing something, the player should be able to determine that active thing. Getting forced to actively do something, with literally no choice, is horrible, and should be possible. Even CC orders offer more choice then being ordered around as a thrall.

 

Sorry if I rambled a bit, but I hope I made sense. A vampire thralling someone removes all choice that player and character get, and still forces the thrall to act actively, whereas everything you mentioned is just random passive happenstance. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by Triogenix

[CampinKiller]

Some people seem confused as to where the ERP-potential/aspect of it comes in, but there have been players in the recent past (who were mostly punished I believe?) who would do things like thrall characters and make them kiss or love each other or some variation thereof.

I do agree with a lot of the other points people are making though, at least in terms of player agency. Sometimes this stuff happens when you play secret, and that’s the risk you take when readying for secret

[TrainTN]

It's one thing to not like the game mode, as you very obviously don't, but it's absurd and childish to equate it to ERP and IRL abusive relationships. It's a magic space vampire in a game of 2D spacemens on a space station. You are also accusing people who do enjoy the mode of being abusers and sexual predators, and that's extremely insulting and unreasonable. In fact, I'd call it disgusting to throw labels like that at people over a video game because of magic vampires in space.

[SatinsPristOTD]

Ehhhhhh......... This is a rather odd thing to read on the forums. Vampire RP doesn't trigger my gaslighting PTSD (Something I had to deal with for a solid five years). It's also not that easy to get thrall on Aurora, given vampire's are probably one of the most "role play heavy" antags we have. It takes quite a BIT to get thrall on my end, and do it well enough to have a storyline established.

I also don't see how "Dominate" even equals ERP. Does some ERP include domination? Yeah, but the word "dominate" isn't specifically a sex word. In fact, it's about as sexual as a carrot with a top hat.
 

Honestly, I think you should look deeper into what's triggering these thoughts and not project them onto the server or it's players. It's a bit of an odd thing to do to those of us that actually antag Vampire, and NGL... I don't really appreciate being lumped in to "eRP/Dominate" logic.

It's a decent antag. There's a lot of story building elements involved. It's in the same catagory as cult when cult is done well.

Also, if we're going to talk about mind control, yikes on three bikes... cult's probably worse at it than Vampire will ever hope to be.

[SatinsPristOTD]

5 hours ago, restricted said:

Its main appeal is to those who do not respect consent, do not respect other's agency, and encourage abusive tactics. If you abuse these things you are likely better off going to a place where you can ERP while you are at it, as they lean a lot more towards that type of environment.

ALSO, Let me snip this: You didn't just insult me, you did it over a public form, AND it wasn't just me you insulted.

This thread is toxic to players, and honestly.... it's complaint worthy. You literally just accused me and all other vamp antaggers of not respecting consent and that we're better off on some sex roleplay server.

It's really not okay........

[Marlon P.]

31 minutes ago, SatinsPristOTD said:

ALSO, Let me snip this: You didn't just insult me, you did it over a public form, AND it wasn't just me you insulted.

This thread is toxic to players, and honestly.... it's complaint worthy. You literally just accused me and all other vamp antaggers of not respecting consent and that we're better off on some sex roleplay server.

It's really not okay........

Oh i didnt see that part of the op.

OP, knock that off. Im not a sex creep for playing a vampire antagonist.

[WaterPumpJohnny]

Wow! Everyone who plays Vampire is an ERP player because you don't like having to play antag. Nice  take. Wow!

[DickFreedomJohnson]

+Support to everything Garn and Satin have said, this thread seems absolutely out of line and in my time of playing a vamp and being vampire gamed I have never actually seen anybody do horny things. The worst thing I believe I have seen done was (ironically by me) falsifying a relationship ICly to bloodbag somebody however it NEVER went into creepy horny territory. Are some of the crew reactions borderline horny? Absolutely I have seen Security COUNTLESS times tell the same "Stop being horny at work and biting people" response time and time again to the point that it's basically just a regular response to being bit but I digress. I feel like this thread also is a massive spit in the eye to one of the most important thing about antagging, that being that sometimes you absolutely will have to lie and bullshit your way out of situations to get away with whatever wacky gimmick you are doing. I won't even cover the topic of how wrong it is to equate virtual vampires in a game from 2004 lying and being deceitful (which again IS PART OF THE GAME) is equaled up to an irl horrific experience that can, has, and will warp people's sense of trust and reality as I don't want to get banned.
 

Edited January 13, 2022 by DickFreedomJohnson
Redacted some of my foul language as it came off in a way I do not want.

[Butterrobber202]

I don't know what mental gymnastics you have to do to assume people playing Vampires are ERPers/Rapists. 

Yes, we've had undesirable players abuse the mechanics for that reason, but they are handled with a banning. That is a problem with players, not the gamemode itself. People could just as well force people to smooch via gunpoint rather than mind control. I think its an absolutely ridiculous take to say getting gaslight in a 2-hour pixel game is gonna trigger some trauma. 

 

Furthermore, Antagonists do not have to respect player agency. In fact, no one has to respect player agency. We are a collaborative story telling server, with gameplay mechanics and rules. The mechanics decide what happens when people come into conflict, one way or another. If you want to cause trouble in the bar, you have the agency to do so, yes. But, I also have the agency to walk over and beat the shit out of you for doing so. (viva la security) The mechanics will decide who comes out on top, if anyone does. If someone abuses those mechanics to violate the rules, the admins will take care of it.
Additionally, if we avoided everything that could cause people IRL grief, we'd have to retcon half our lore. (Wars, terrorism, death in general, etc.) 

[Faris]

Locking this temporarily until I can address a few things brought up.

[Arrow768]

19 hours ago, CampinKiller said:

who would do things like thrall characters and make them kiss or love each other or some variation thereof.

I do not remember things like that in the recent history.

That said, if something like that happens it is a very quick way to a perma ban

Edited January 13, 2022 by Arrow768
Spelling

[Faris]

Sorry for the delay, been sick for the last few days.

To start off, the opening post was inappropriate. Normally we'd hide but since it is the OP post, I've just deleted it. If the OP would like to keep this discussion going, they'll need to rewrite it in a more appropriate format.

Second of all, in regards to creepy behavior. It's not an everyday thing, but it does happen. It is not exclusive to game modes, and the best way to deal with it is to report it and we'll handle it.

Third of all, when joining the round, especially in secret, there is a list of all potential game modes, so by joining it, you are doing so with the understanding that you may get involved into the antics of game modes you do not particularly enjoy. Though in saying this, we understand that we cannot force you to play something you do not enjoy and try to accommodate the players as best we can, within reason.

Lastly, Aurora has many themes to gameplay that are things we wouldn't particularly like, the line between appropriate and inappropriate portrayal falls on the community member bringing it. Though there are a few things that do receive more scrutiny, with erotic things receiving a complete ban.

Unlocking now.