My players have just arrived on Extropia, investigating the activities of Sybaris Security, a small but well respected mercenary outift based on the asteriod. Sybaris appear to be connected with a broader conspiracy that appears to be in conflict with their Firewall server (forknapping a proxy, crashing a remote hab which contained a Firewall sponsored research project experimenting on the Delta fork of a TITAN, attempting to acquire various WMDs).
The PCs know that Sybaris appears to have had an exclusive contract for the last 6 months with an unknown entity, and (thanks to a some very lucky networking rolls) that Sybaris have acquired a large warship (last seen lurking between the belt and Jupiter) that doesn't appear in the company's adverstiing (which is unusual, as a company warship is something PR would make a big deal of, and Sybaris doesn't appear to be well funded enough to purchase and maintain one).
Given Extropia's...chaotic legal system, I'm hoping to make that part of investigation.
Knowing my players, they will probably fall back on their standard "poke-the-hornets-nest-with-a-thermobaric-grenade" plan of investigation. Even if they are more subtle, I expect that eventually they will tip their hand, and piss somebody off.
When this happens, I have a nasty little ambush planned in which (unless they get really lucky) they will have some or all of their party decapitated and their stacks taken. When they are resleeved, what legal actions (lawsuits etd) would they have available to them through Nomic (their private court from Rimward) to find out who forknapped them, and where they were taken?
Obviously, I am truly looking forward to suing the hell out of them for every single bit of damages.
Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.
Help me bury my players in red tape.
Wed, 2012-08-22 00:50
#1
Kayne0X1
Help me bury my players in red tape.
Wed, 2012-08-22 01:03
#2
DivineWrath
Well, if you want to bury
Well, if you want to bury your players in red tape, I suggest you read the RPG Paranoia. It has many catch 22s, and "damned if you do damned if you don't" stuff. If you want something less humorous and more realistic, I could do some looking around.
Links (strange, they are not showing the full product lines at time of posting)
Classic Paranoia
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?cPath=213
New Paranoia
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?cPath=5352
Wed, 2012-08-22 02:12
#3
DivineWrath
I did some quick searching
I did some quick searching and some examples of troublesome red tape (as well as a few I added).
-Getting denied services and goods you should be getting.
-Promises to remove red tape without getting specific.
-Paperwork. Lots of it.
-Having bosses micromanage their company instead of letting employees do their jobs.
-Refusing to solve simple problems without paper work (not returning a lost purple crocodile to a child even though its on the counter, and its agreed by all parties that it belongs to the child).
-Avoiding answering your questions.
-Answering questions with long winded statements... long enough for you to forget the question(s) you asked (difficult with mesh inserts and muses as they can record things).
-Heavy use of jargon and buzz words (as people don't tend to ask for definitions and searching the mesh might be time consuming).
-Red Tape might be considered to be an art by some, something that should be crafted with care.
-A suggestion or complaint box filled to capacity, or a e-mail back saying that the server is full.
-Different definitions for words like "adequate", "approved", "voluntary". They should be much different from common usage.
-Use words such as "scientifically tested", but don't include what the results were. Also use words like, includes "trusted ingredients", etc. You'll be surprised what words a business can use that sounds good but doesn't require them to be good.
Wed, 2012-08-22 11:47
#4
Arenamontanus
Hmm, anarchocapitalist red
Hmm, anarchocapitalist red tape. That is such a fun topic.
Now, if you have been egonapped you can of course strike back. You can sue your security provider if they did not provide appropriate security according to best industry practice. You can demand recordings from spimes, sensors and people from the vicinity to track the egos down - and your insurance, security and law companies can likely help you put some pressure here (those sensors belonging to any of them will of course comply as per contract, and they have deals with many other companies). You can also start suing people you think harbor the fugitive criminals and so on. There is a tricky balance here between exploiting the general extropian dislike of initiation of force and the annoyance with coercion and bad manners.
Other things:
Tort spam: people who seem disoriented might get a large number of frivolous lightweight lawsuits delivered by fly-by-night legal constructs. If they react wrong they lose a few credits... and more spam shows up.
John Waynes: Some annoying people are their own law company and security company. Most of them are stupid or criminal tourists that get skinned before they have even left the bazaar. But a few are tough and rich enough to actually make it uneconomical to mess with them unless it is very serious.
Also, remember that some extreme people will not even tell you the time unless you pay them. Because doing something for free is disrespectful.
Copyright and trademark protection (on Extropia? yeah, right) - some law companies do allow their clients to claim this, and this might of course be used to both make lawsuits about people investigating and prevent them from seeing things without signing powerful nondisclosure agreements. Sure, other law and security companies are not going to be going out of their way to enforce this, and might actually even delight in ignoring these spurious constructs, but they can slow things down. Especially when the lawbots have been asked to slow things down by demanding hopelessly messy arbitration methods. "I'm sorry, but my client insists for religious reasons to run this via OpenSharia. Or trial by combat as supervised by a duly notarized goðar." But conversely, maybe you are lucky and can claim your ego as a trade secret as per your law and security contracts.
You can sell yourself into indentured slavery to a corporation you own yourself. So when people try to get information from you you can refer them to their owning corporation, who unfortunately happens to be impossible to talk to. The board of directors consists of a straw person on a remote habitat.
Hiding things by not "having" them: "I'm sorry sir, I cannot recall that unless I get a properly authenticated command from my owner to remember it consciously."
—
Wed, 2012-08-22 18:51
#5
Friend Computer
Excellent choice Citizen!
IT IS A HAPPY GAME. TIME FOR SOME MANDATORY VOLUNTEER DUTY CITIZEN!
One fun method of creating red tape is to have the legal code they are playing against evolving in real time. Some shady judge-for-hire-(cheap) AI with a swarm of lawbots can run court cases in a x60 simulspace and offer legal judgements that change precident on the fly. They could probably even do it in combat time if you want to get silly with it. Basically this makes sure that any trick the party finds to get some piece of data isn't suddenly a skeleton key to getting all of the information they want from anyone.
—
[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/titan_userbar.jpg[/img]
[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/pro_userbar.jpg[/img]
The Computer wants you to be happy. Happiness is mandatory. Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by death.
Wed, 2012-08-22 20:29
#6
Kayne0X1
Thanks!
Thanks very much for all your help(and for tipping me off to Paranoia, which looks like a lot of fun)!
The suing for recordings of the event sound likes the way to go, which will reveal enough tidbits that they will be able to trace the assault to a shell company that appears to be the new owners of Sybaris.
I'm thinking that the shell company will be a John Wayne in indentured service to himself, who will be an absolute nightmare to deal with through both legal and military means - thanks Arenamontanus for those concepts!
Which brings me to another question - what is the status of the vairous criminal organisations on Extropia?
As well as Sybaris, the conspiracy the players are investigating also seems to involve Nine Lives, and I'll need to reinforce that link, so I'm thinking that their forknapped egos will end up on Legba (cue evil laugh). So, would there be a Nine Lives Inc. on Extropia, or would they still have to fly under the radar a bit? I'd imagine that more "legitimate" criminal organsiation would be able to operate openly, but given Nine Lives' focus on crimes against the ego, I'd imagine that they'd be illegal on Extropia, given the "sanctity" of the ego (as in to self-determiation, not sancitity in a bioconservatice sense)is the basic tenet of Extropian philosophy?
Thu, 2012-08-23 06:17
#7
Arenamontanus
Kayne0X1 wrote:Which brings
Things are slightly tricky, since there is *nothing* that is "illegal on Extropia" - remember, it is all private law! So Nine Lives might run their own judiciary meting out mob justice and claiming their activities are all legal. However, as Rimward pointed out (page 165):
So Nine Lives tame judiciary would almost certainly not be accepted as part of the Extropian Legal Guild, the Free Bar Association, or the Mutualist Code. And the activities of Nine Lives are not accepted by very many, if any, judiciaries. In fact, given that Nine Lives are extremely bad by Extropian standards, most likely *no* judiciary will do arbitration with them, since it would smear their reputation and hence cost them customers. Nine Lives might have a few fronts, but if they are exposed they fold. Conversely, normally shareholders dislike their companies getting involved in too much fighting (costs money!), but the rep boost of taking down hated groups like Nine Lives can be worth it.
Note that this doesn't mean crime syndicates don't have offices on Extropia (I envision them a bit like the yakuza offices, all about a nice corporate front). It is just that these offices don't do anything illegal.
The trick to extropian crime is either to use Extropia to do things that are criminal elsewhere (pirating blueprints, supporting various rebel groups, running privateer companies, converting Titanian kroner into credits...) or do sleazy business practices that will be stamped out eventually but will gain you money in the meantime (rep fraud, con schemes, bad indenture contracts, fraudulent contracts, etc.) Identity theft, forgery and other forms of hacking are likely the most common major crime and are taken rather seriously since they undermine the trustworthiness of contracts.
You can always make money where rules artificially reduce the supply of something compared to its demand. On a free place like Extropia there is less crime since the difference between supply and demand is smaller, but there is always *something* to exploit.
—