I believe adding in occasional alarms going off on SIC would help to normalize it, and reduce the meta.
I don't think false alarms (no pun intended) would be creating any more RP.
A lot of people react to alarms. Perhaps if there were a way to get a location in Red with no PCs or NPCs, or a place that isn't anyone's specific turf, or heck, even just broadcast a street in West Red, then there might be cause for ambient ones.
Furthermore, when a murder is committed, the assailant can just leave and escape with very little in the way of physical evidence of their crime. On the other hand, there is no way to 'chop' a stolen car. You either have to ditch it for the owner to easily recover, or hope that they don't just happen to 'find' the one of four (made this number up) Grasshoppers in the mix and ignore that it's been repainted and they have no reason to ICly look at it.
It's a good thing that a bunch of people come to gawk at a car alarm going off. It's RP.
Or if they did exist, there'd be an onus to RP with them. A ganger stopping a memento from carjacking and then not being able to do anything with them sounds horribly janky.
Or worse, if it was just pure ambient, no mementos, happening right in front of someone at a location? Then you'd just have to shrug or even say it wasn't happening on SIC.
There's a lot of logistics to this that, while in an ideal world would make sense, sort of prevent this level of implementation.
The ambient car-alarms could broadcast from locations that don't actually "exist" in game, like Blitz Laundry for example maybe?
Little bit of flash, greasing some palms, a few phonecalls and you too can have a band of roving car alarms popping off as you like. Sounds like a great plot to get some fresh characters involved in petty crime to me.
I don't believe so. I think like with 'irl' car alarms, if they go off regularly, people will become 'numb' to them, and simply see 'Oh, an alarm with plates I don't recognize', whereas currently, every single one is 'hmmm, where have I seen those plates? Better go check on the one character I know that can do this!'
If people just got away with everything all the time, it'd leave no room for RP.
Characters are impressed to act with only what they know, and the GMs will lean heavily on people who aren't. That doesn't mean people still can't follow up leads.
I'd like to reiterate in the general support of this idea (that it's too easy to meta car crime, or just automotives in general) that we need to have some form of sensible middle ground between 'all cars that get stolen are gone with no RP' and 'All license plates can never be changed.'
I'd really like to see a system in place where tags are obfuscated, and people with the appropriate scanning equipment such as the hall, or resourceful P.I.'s, etc. can read them with something other than the look command.
Yours is a better solution for sure, if plates were only visible with special scanners -or- in the vehicle while it's on (like fuel levels) that would go a -LONG- way toward solving these problems.
That said, I felt like the ambient SIC was the more likely and easier solution to implement.
I think I'd still have car alarms broadcast the license plate, to create some plate swapping RP maybe? But I don't know.
