Discussion How would you buff Bounty Hunting?

[Aeshi Tillian]

Convince people to let themselves be bountied. You can incentivize bounty postings, you can add a prize or point system, but it isn’t going to matter if all I have to do is click a toggle and bounty hunters can only go after me in public threads. Easy solution is avoid public threads.

Or even with the toggle on, can just nope out of the situation, or stop posting, and that’s it. The bounty posting is pointless.

Bounty board doesn’t get much use probably because bounty hunters can’t actually do anything without a writer’s permission, and in most cases, they say no.

Provide a narrative more compelling and rewarding than what people already have planned, and you’ll probably get more people willing to be bountied. More people willing, more likely bounties are to be placed.

However, it also needs a system to prevent OOC griefing, which has happened in the past. So essential, it’s the same question as invasions and rebellions.

How do we create a system of PVP that is enjoyable, narratively driven, drama-free, respectful of everyone involved, and not a game of chance?

 

[Tefka]

How do we create a system of PVP that is enjoyable, narratively driven, drama-free, respectful of everyone involved, and not a game of chance?

This is the only question that matters in this thread, imo. I would remove the focus on the word “narrative” since it’s just a buzzword adopted by the community to mean “story without OOC elements”, whereas all stories are started OOC. But that’s just semantics and personal preference.

The problem isn’t the current system or lack thereof. The problem is always motivation. Factions are easy, because the system dictates writers get together that motivate each other. Private threads are easy, because the system dictates individual writers are already motivated to motivate each other.

Bounties are more difficult because the system dictates organization, that Staff has opted not to provide due to manpower shortage, with no plans of expansion to support a niche element of roleplay.

My suggestion would be the same for any other area of Chaos that lacks motivation. Less emphasis on Discord, less emphasis on organizing, more emphasis on writing and forum posting. Basically, more site activity creates more organic room for these smaller niche forms of rp.

We won’t get that until people stop treating Discord as a necessity, and start looking at how much time they put into microcommunity building versus how much time they actually post.

 

[Tefka]

Also when someone finds a way to dramaproof literally anything on Chaos, please DM me immediately. Again, my best answer for this is to reduce the amount of OOC posting you do versus IC posting. The longer you’re focused on IC, the less OOC impacts you.

But people love their OOC drama, so this will never happen.

 

[Vrun Ryssic]

Ironically made a Discord channel for the guild recently

Coughs

Very good points being made, too.

I was just thinking earlier that it would be nice if there were some form of "Bounty Completed" tag for listed Bounties so that the authors could show willing hunters that the job is no longer valid. Of course, it would be just as easy for the authors to post that they've been completed too.

My Character's currently looking for jobs so he can make a name for himself around Chaos. I'm also very open to criticism regarding the Guild and would invite others to help with building it up if they have any suggestions to help encourage activity for Hunters across the Board.

We could even get some competition going between Guild Hunters and Independent Hunters. Making a number of NPC Bounty Targets, and then thread with both types of Bounty Hunters in a competition to claim the bounties and their prize first!

 

[Fatty]

As a former owner of a Bounty Hunters Guild, I can tell you right now that the issue is almost never getting a hunter to hunt. The real issue is motivating bounties to be hunted and captured.

They don't have any incentive to cooperate. You would think that using their toggle to opt in to be Bounty hunted would be enough, but in my experience even with the toggle on a mark is rarely willing to interrupt what they are doing to acknowledge the hunter. It takes a phenomenal level of coordination and ooc communication to run successfull hunt. At least, that has been my experience actually writing successful hunts.

My definition of successful being that the mark actively participates, had a decent chance of being captured, and helped to complete the storyline. Which means the over the past year and half I can count three hunts being successfully for me, and each one took massive amounts of OOC coordination.

Cute rewards and incentives to hunt don't make them successful. Talking and coordinating with the hunted does. Work that most hunters don't typically engage with in my past experience, and sometimes doesn't even pay off in the end. Some people like the idea of being hunted, but practically speaking don't want to engage with it unless it directly benefits something they were already thinking about doing.

In very short words, Bounty Hunting is a very hard niche to get into, and requires way more than just writing to accomplish.

 

[Vrun Ryssic]

As a former owner of a Bounty Hunters Guild, I can tell you right now that the issue is almost never getting a hunter to hunt. The real issue is motivating bounties to be hunted and captured.

They don't have any incentive to cooperate. You would think that using their toggle to opt in to be Bounty hunted would be enough, but in my experience even with the toggle on a mark is rarely willing to interrupt what they are doing to acknowledge the hunter. It takes a phenomenal level of coordination and ooc communication to run successfull hunt. At least, that has been my experience actually writing successful hunts.

My definition of successful being that the mark actively participates, had a decent chance of being captured, and helped to complete the storyline. Which means the over the past year and half I can count three hunts being successfully for me, and each one took massive amounts of OOC coordination.

Cute rewards and incentives to hunt don't make them successful. Talking and coordinating with the hunted does. Work that most hunters don't typically engage with in my past experience, and sometimes doesn't even pay off in the end. Some people like the idea of being hunted, but practically speaking don't want to engage with it unless it directly benefits something they were already thinking about doing.

In very short words, Bounty Hunting is a very hard niche to get into, and requires way more than just writing to accomplish.

I'm just really getting started so as far as experience on the Bounty Hunting scene goes, I cannot say much.

What I can say from reading your post however is that I seem to be on the right track in doing what I have been: PM'ing the targets I intend to start hunting in order to ensure the thread is fair and there are no misunderstandings whether IC or OOC.

Not everyone likes being hunted, especially if they have no incentive or motivation to follow through with the consequences/reasons as to why they have the price on their head, but I figure that before anything happens, I need to actually have their consent to begin the thread/hunt before I can actively try to pursue the objective/target.

Whether or not my efforts will amount to anything, however, is yet to be proven.

 

[Vesta]

After some thought, and reading through some of these comments (and revisiting my old posts on another discussion about this from like 3 years ago):

• Arrange threads/thread types where people involved that have their bounty toggle on are aware that they are likely to be interacted with for any bounty they might have on them. This wouldn't be a special prefix like [DOMINION] or [FACTION] or [PUBLIC] and so on, rather a secondary tag or prefix (or something in the title?) to make sure people involved can be prepared to incorporate a bounty subplot or storyline into anything they get wrapped up in during the course of their thread. Ideally a bounty toggle should have solved this in the first place, but it's pretty easy to get so invested in a story that you forget someone might want to go after you until you're already knee-deep and now you want to see it through rather than accept interference from some bounty hunter that you weren't previously RPing with.
  
  This could be as simple as putting something like (Hunters Welcome) in the title or a prefix made for bounties, like, idk, [BOUNTY] to let everyone know that having the bounty toggle on and participating in the thread is open season. Obviously making this clear to the people participating is important, but I think you'll see at least some engagement go up this way. However, I don't think that people not wanting to be hunted is so much an issue as having it fit some sort of storyline or something that isn't just a sudden, arbitrary, appearance of a bounty hunter that you've never interacted with sent by someone who hasn't interacted with them either - creates a kind of disconnect that causes it to lose the appeal for some people, so, with that in mind:
• Encourage bounty hunters and people posting bounties and their targets to try (key word being try, I don't think this will always be necessary) to work up to the actual hunt itself, or carry it out over various threads, with interactions, direct and indirect, across the three parties. This'll create, or help to create, a level of investment for everyone involved and achieve that hard-to-define "narrative" checkbox that everyone wants but can't seem to explain. This'll also help make this feel more story-based and temper or maybe even remove the feeling of "ooc" that people tend to associate with targeted PVP.
• Try to normalize using bounties to resolve IC conflicts over direct confrontations between characters. This is obviously easier said than done, and is mostly empty words without community backing. Basically, start with arranging bounties and threads and such between people who want to get bounties off the ground and then slowly involve more and more people who might be willing to take part but aren't quite as invested in bounties as a niche to supplement their existing storylines, until it becomes more or less the norm - or at least more of a norm than it is right now.

Communication, as always, is key, but it's more than just Hey, you've got a bounty and I'm a hunter, I'm gonna try to go after it in X thread, or Can I jump into a thread you're in to hunt you or anything like that. Like Fatty mentioned, there's a lot of coordination involved - think of how much work goes into master-apprentice stuff, because that's sort of how you should be looking at bounty hunts. Maybe not exactly the same way, but with similar levels of forethought and how it could help both writers enjoy their characters more and how both people could get their characters to grow from these sorts of confrontations. They don't even have to succeed, though it might be desirable that they do, people will want that to happen to their characters as they come to a conclusion that it'll enhance their storylines - if they do come to that conclusion.

tl;dr:

1. Make thread title/prefix to let people know they will (or very likely will) be hunted if their toggle is on.
2. Try to work out storylines between hunter, bounty, and client so everyone is invested in the story this could create.
3. Work amongst yourselves to rope people into bounty stories (see 1 & 2) to normalize bounties over the classic (and sometimes overused) revenge duel.
4. Be ready to do a whole lot more work than you might've expected to do in order to set this all up with the target.
5. Be aware that there's a lot of moving parts (people) involved and everyone needs to be working together in some way for it to work.

 

[Romano Shamalain]

I'd love to see the story behind the bounty. I.E. the thread set up with the reason given so the reader knows what may or may not be coming down the pipeline. Doesn't have to be a long thread at all (a few posts where someone posts they are setting a bounty). It would be odd for someone to just show up and say "Im collecting a bounty" when the readers don't have any background as to wtf is going on in a sense? Perhaps even linking the bounty set up in the attack? I think Im rambling and made no sense, I apologize.

 

[Heinrich Faust]

So I have been giving this a lot of thought, as I too would like to see the bounty board have some life breathed into it. I have a couple of ideas that might help with the situation.

First of all, I think that if there is some coordination between say, a bounty hunter faction and a criminal faction (the Bounty Hunters Guild and The Exchange, for example), then it may be easier to coordinate hunts. There could even be hunts that involve tracking down groups of individuals, like a group of pirates or something similar. I know that criminal characters need more activity as well, so perhaps some kind of coordination would help bring it back. Essentially, you could turn it into a sort of ongoing PvP type story between the two, and thus build faction stories while bringing activity to the bounty board. This could also be a solution to what Romano Shamalain mentioned. You could create ongoing stories that build rivalries and move a long term narrative forward.

The other idea is more about individual writers. I know that personally, I have a tendency to make more characters than I know what to do with (it's a real problem haha). I'm looking at my roster, and there's definitely some characters that would be perfect as bounty targets. I can't be the only one that is in this position. Perhaps if we have a way for people to list their characters as open to being a bounty target (aside from the toggle), it would be easier for people to connect. It could be through a site function, or through a faction. Perhaps there's an information broker that works with a lot of different people, and that character could be the centerpiece for the interactions.

Honestly, if I wasn't already busy with admin stuff in a major, I would totally help facilitate this. But alas, I simply don't have the time for it. So in the meantime, I'll send my ideas out into the ether, and maybe they'll help someone get the ball rolling

 

[Dantum Kryszar]

Some members of the Bounty Hunter's Guild are currently on a mission. After the mission is completed, I will be glad to take on others with fellow Guild members to bring back bounty hunting.