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- SmokePotion 1m
- AdamBlue9000 3m Rolling 526d6 damage against both of us.
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- Vulkan 1h
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- Napoleon 7h
- Bruhlicious 6h Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
a Mench 14s Doing a bit of everything.
- notloose 5h
And 16 more hiding and/or disguised

Glance and Disguise

I've seen some calls about meta play with regard to using "glance me" while disguised. I've been mulling this over, and came up with an idea that might satisfy some engaged in this discussion.

To me, the act itself makes sense ICly. There are windows, puddles in the storm, ambient mirrors in places, even a whiskey glass can reflect your image back at you in the right light. I personally don't think it should require a mirror to check my disguise. Yet, I do feel there should be some risk to using glance this way.

So for starters, why not just make it a potentially compromising action when used to glance at yourself? Make glance a deleterious action to your disguise (if it isn't already). Seems like a simple fix.

But it could be taken even further. All those ambient objects that could be used to glance at yourself offer imperfect reflections. Imperfect reflections should sometimes yield imperfect results.

Ex. Joe Baka is slipping off of some gang turf after mugging someone, and he hasn't paid his dues. Shroud on, he is well disguised at the moment. Then he glances at himself. It's storming hard and he sees his reflection at his feet, checking his disguise in a well lit pool of water on the ground. All good, nothing to see here, he says to himself - just another shroud looking back at me. Except the image is blurred, and what he thinks he sees is a trick of the light, or maybe he's just so overconfident he doesn't see what might be obvious in a more perfect reflection. His disguise is compromised and he doesn't even realize it. He strides along confidently, only to be drug from his feet from behind, machete hovering over his face. The Art looks down at him, sneering. "You were warned about dodging tolls."

So yeah, look at yourself with glance all you want, but it's going to be a risk every time, either working against the integrity of your disguise and/or convincing you that you're better than you are...until it comes back to bite you in the ass.

I've seen some calls about meta play with regard to using "glance me" while disguised.

For those of us who have not, can you spell it out?

I totally fail to see how glancing at the hood you're presumably wearing around.. you know, your entire head to see if it's still in place is meta in any way. I also don't think that literally moving your eyes should pop you out of a disguise.

Disguise has a lot of issues right now, especially with some of the growing pains going on with Appear, but I don't see how making it so that glance me having a chance to break you out of your hood would fix any of the issues at hand.

The removal of glance while disguised will be more of an IG hindrance than aid because of the general facts that you can't check disguise grade, it has no help to your disguise being better because if it falls it falls, but most of all, I don't even need to use gl me other than to give me OOC info on how to rp.

If we take it that gl me IS meta (which of remember, gl-ance does not show disguise quality.) and make it either blocked or degrade disguises.. Can I no longer 'Look me'? Can I no longer 'Glance people'? Can I no longer use glance to ensure my character is still codely permitted with @disguise-name thus letting me rp it as such? Will mirrors now also degrade disguise?

This isn't a solution, its a very weird road block for meta behavior I'm hearing for the first time here..

I completely fail to see the issue here. Is there some feeling that players should not be able to tell if their own disguise has slipped? Because there's a hell of a lot of ways of checking you're still disguised that don't involve glance.
I can't seem to find the thread that got me thinking about this, but I've been told OOCly by a couple of players in the last year that it's frowned upon to use glance like this. As I said before, I never understood where the issue with it was myself - I was just brainstorming in response to some mystery thread I can't track down in BGBB now. Either way, it's beginning to look like this might be a confirmation bias on my part.

It seems the response I'm getting here is it isn't frowned upon or meta. If it isn't a problem, I'm going to stop trying to fix it.

No worries, it's a reasonable question to raise -- just one I hadn't considered.

Spamming glance after every action is pretty gamey but realistically when your @stats or pose echoes or 'look me' will tell you the same thing, it's probably more a sign you need to spend more UE.

Disguises breaking being an IC-only feedback is an interesting idea but opening that Pandora's box I think would involve talking about the mind-bending horror that is 'look me'.

If there really are people using 'glance' after or before every emote, say or action, good on them.

It seems extremely try hard to me, but people take this game pretty seriously. Let them be hyper paranoid.

That being said, I can see the other side of it. I would draw an analogy between constantly checking if a disguise is intact with carrying a concealed handgun and constantly checking on it. For people who are trained to notice those tells, it will be pretty obvious.

A middle of the road approach might be a fatigue timer on the glance command. Or maybe specifically 'glance me' if it is possible to get that granular with it.

I shudder to think about the increased CPU load of having to keep track of yet another timer for 50-100 players in any given cycle.

/character thinks to self, "Mona sure is adjusting her bra a lot."

"There she goes again." "And again, three times in two and a half minutes."

"Wait... is that, toilet paper!"

"Hey, everyone look. Mona stuffs her bra!!!"

/character2 "Dumb ass, didn't you realize mona's a mano? Come on, that's the weakest disguise I've seen this week."

What problem is this idea trying to solve?
I don't think 'glance me' often is gamey, I think it's being self-conscious and paranoid, particularly if you're not confident in your disguise abilities.
As someone who uses disguises a lot, glance isn't giving you a ton of information other than "are you or aren't you". You're not getting any hints as to how close to dropping you are, and if it's down, it's down. There are IC ways of figuring out how close to dropping you are anyhow. Most of the stress isn't in the glancing, but in wondering how close you are to a drop.

At that point if your disguise falls, you're pretty exposed to whoever may be watching, and you're punished in a coded way (which I won't get into). If glance gave you more information like how close you are to dropping then maybe I could see balance issues there, but it doesn't. I'm generally for ideas but I think this should be left alone since the skill requires stats and skill dedication.

I agree with floored. There are IC ways to get better results than Glance and ways to not have to Glance every action. 😉
Disguise meta aside, I'd like to see 'glance' give some indicator that it is being used.

"Character A gives themselves a quick once over."

"Character A gives Character B a quick once over."

Those indicators should be tied to Perception such that they will likely go unnoticed in CROWDED rooms, or when other characters are not WATCHing them.

Why?

If you don't get ESP alerts when people are actually looking at you, why would you get them when using glance, a significantly weaker and less useful command?