Soul stuff
Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2015 12:14 am
We should probably hash some of this stuff out because we've seen a couple of people doing stuff with it.
Basically, I'd prefer if the "lore" for souls and other spiritual stuff be loose at best in order to leave things as open as possible. Basically, it's something that people generally don't know anything about, and arguably can't know everything about.
There are soulstones in the game (generally not outright public knowledge to most people in the setting, especially when it comes to anything about how they work) and there's debate over whether souls interact with cloning, on account of the way clones will spit out a mental interface failure if you try to clone someone who's still alive, but the mechanism by which it works is by no means understood. Many people have their own theories, with varying levels of plausibility, but the waters are muddied by other philosophical (and naturally religious) debate on the entire subject.
The reason I prefer it to be loose, wibbly, unknown and unknowable?
Because it allows people to come up with their own little ideas and twists on the subject. It allows science to come up with bizarre experiments and roleplay things out, whether they get results or not. It allows strange things to happen and develop from this. If it's bizarre and unpredictable and people are generally unfamiliar with the entire topic, it makes it interesting.
That, and it's somewhat jarring thematically for a science-fiction game to be openly supernatural. If nothing else, for people to be talking about soul manipulation in public like it's no big deal means that it cannot be a big deal. It pulls the teeth out of it, so to speak. When we had Snag as the only tame Xeno, for instance, Snag was interesting to interact with. When people started getting staffs of change, or bringing facehuggers back from the xenostation so they could all play friendly xenos and we had three or four at a time on the station some shifts, that basically meant Snag was no longer an interesting thing - by making "friendly xeno" a commonplace concept, the idea ceased to be any good as a story hook. Some things are only interesting when they're rare. when they're flooded and everyone's suddenly familiar with them, it kills any possibility for interesting RP to come out of it.
Now, personally, as an admin I don't particularly care about what people wanna RP out in private. If you wanna be a succubus or whatever and go soulsucking or play scenes out with other consenting players in a dorm or whatever, go nuts - However, try not to go announcing your headcanon over the public comms or openly discussing it in the bar like it's gospel truth. That's the point where it gets jarring, and essentially comes across as forcing your canon over everyone else's.
Basically, I'd prefer if the "lore" for souls and other spiritual stuff be loose at best in order to leave things as open as possible. Basically, it's something that people generally don't know anything about, and arguably can't know everything about.
There are soulstones in the game (generally not outright public knowledge to most people in the setting, especially when it comes to anything about how they work) and there's debate over whether souls interact with cloning, on account of the way clones will spit out a mental interface failure if you try to clone someone who's still alive, but the mechanism by which it works is by no means understood. Many people have their own theories, with varying levels of plausibility, but the waters are muddied by other philosophical (and naturally religious) debate on the entire subject.
The reason I prefer it to be loose, wibbly, unknown and unknowable?
Because it allows people to come up with their own little ideas and twists on the subject. It allows science to come up with bizarre experiments and roleplay things out, whether they get results or not. It allows strange things to happen and develop from this. If it's bizarre and unpredictable and people are generally unfamiliar with the entire topic, it makes it interesting.
That, and it's somewhat jarring thematically for a science-fiction game to be openly supernatural. If nothing else, for people to be talking about soul manipulation in public like it's no big deal means that it cannot be a big deal. It pulls the teeth out of it, so to speak. When we had Snag as the only tame Xeno, for instance, Snag was interesting to interact with. When people started getting staffs of change, or bringing facehuggers back from the xenostation so they could all play friendly xenos and we had three or four at a time on the station some shifts, that basically meant Snag was no longer an interesting thing - by making "friendly xeno" a commonplace concept, the idea ceased to be any good as a story hook. Some things are only interesting when they're rare. when they're flooded and everyone's suddenly familiar with them, it kills any possibility for interesting RP to come out of it.
Now, personally, as an admin I don't particularly care about what people wanna RP out in private. If you wanna be a succubus or whatever and go soulsucking or play scenes out with other consenting players in a dorm or whatever, go nuts - However, try not to go announcing your headcanon over the public comms or openly discussing it in the bar like it's gospel truth. That's the point where it gets jarring, and essentially comes across as forcing your canon over everyone else's.