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Mentor vacations
How to help the community and not screw yourself

So I believe this was mentioned in the ooc gathering and discussion we had most recently. Or something akin to having players with long-standing characters or positions in the community in general that perhaps they could have space to shift into a sort of temp character to help mentor others.

How I propose this could work is that the character this mentor might assume is brought in almost like an IC consultant.

They have an IC contracted time (that adheres to the length of this character ooc)

The character is given either matching, appropriate or max ue.

The character's purpose is outlined by the staff to push a direction and guide/mentor PC's that might be struggling with direction or knowledge.

The character is has a very clear directive that they are a consultant and mentor from both IC and OOC.

I think this could help new characters coming into factions without any sort of idea as to what they are really doing. It eliviates hand holding from the staff of those players/characters and allows over arching goals and desires to push in a much more organic way. Further more it allows those that have the knowledge and desire to mentor the freedom to do so in a way free from their own long term characters.

An example might be.

Mid-bie works their way into a faction that has no current PC's. But this faction previously had PC's that were exceptional in the role yet lack a character that can take up position to mentor and guide the mid-bie. So the faction 'hires a consultant' to come in and show this mid-bie the rope, maybe assist with some work but ultimately is there to pass on knowledge.

This same thing could be used to pass on skill sets to new characters, there are skills that are very OOC knowledge based and the actual UE investment is not all that much trouble but can take months or even years to build that knowledge. If there are no viable characters to funnel that knowledge through in an IC way, you get a situation where you have new players and characters moving into these skill sets with huge holes in their knowledge.

So why not have a short term character come, do a week of workshops for a corporatoration, hospital, garage?

I would also go as far to say this would help the staff re-learn things. Because it is apparent that there are things in the game that are lost dark arts that even the staff know nothing about.

In lieu of this sort of thing, IC literature detailing the ins and outs of archetypes and tactics can be super helpful to the community and something I think the recent e-note updates really support.
On the surface it violates some metagaming rules. Characters are not allowed to enter the city with advanced knowledge of in-city mechanics, associations with in-city factions, or just in general being able to impart information they learned on a previous character without having learned it again. Likewise characters are not supposed to be beneficiaries of metagaming know-how, learning through channels not available to other players, or having access to inside information outside the scope of their normal mentorships.

Mind you, this reset to zero has created a lot of problems. There is almost no cultural memory in the game, often significant knowledge gaps between one generation to the next, and not knowing how to get effectively mentored is a long-standing player complaint.

I think any situation where players are seeking adversarial know-how, bringing in an experienced player as a mentor NPC might be problematic in two ways: First it creates a somewhat reasonable expectation that the players following that guidance would see some kind of improvement in outcomes, which is not something that's always (or even often) going to be true. Second it may be providing subjective advantages to one faction over another, and their opponents might reasonably wonder why they had made the effort to self-teach if just being told how to do things was going to be an option.

Notwithstanding that though I agree that technical know-how being lost is a real problem, and one that really makes no sense at all in theme because there's always going to be lots of people who know how something works, but there might sometimes be zero players or staff who do. Discoverability is sometimes a big problem, and one that effects different parts of the game in different ways, and just getting lucky enough to be the player who was around when a system was implemented or being lucky enough to get taught by them is not always going to be possible.

Anyway that's a very long of way of saying that I think in certain situations where it wouldn't be conferring an unfair advantage to someone, and where the expectation was it was re-opening what should be a well-known system, and where staff are not able to mentor for whatever reason, and there is no active player characters who might provide that mentorship, then this might be a reasonable solution for difficult to learn parts of the game. And as Reefer says that expert players should as much as possible document their expertise somewhere before jumping to their next characters.

After further consideration, I would appreciate Backseat Driver cybernetics. A fully mnemonic cyberbrain that features the persona of whoever impacted in it. It would allow the 'ghost' to watch everything through the sleeves eyes and give them full control of the body whenever they @quit and allow them to see and send thinks. In addition, it would feature /takeover command that would give them full control of the body for 10-20 minutes.

The cyberbrain would feature a different @stats setup available to the 'ghost' vs the inhabitant. Lastly, it would, of course, be able to be ripped and transferred - when in transit the 'ghost' would be blind to its surroundings.

How's that for a slightly different take on the mentor/mentee relationship?