OCR or hostile faction to fugitives?

[King Pickle]

Banishment / being wanted.
How is that supposed to work?
I'm asking because the way it is handled seems to have changed over years and as a result, consequences are different between PC's.
I don't have a guard faction character and after speaking with couple of other players, none of us have any idea how this is supposed to operate.

Over the time I've had multiple characters banished or wanted from multiple domains.
Back in the old days, a DM would set your OCR to 100. Then if you waited that out, NPC's (maybe even PC's) would forget your face and you could interact again.
Now, apparently you just get set hostile to the local guard faction and it lasts forever. NPC's see through your disguise and PC's kind of too since you are *red*.

For example, I have a character who is banished from Dementlieu. Guards will murder him on sight. But at the same time, this character has a friend who is also banished from Dementlieu, but who has not been set hostile and can move around the city in disguise to interact with both NPCs & PCs.

Another example: A character of mine has a high OCR in Barovia, has not been been set hostile and most of the time it can move past guards unless I start a conversation with an NPC.
But at the same time, another character is wanted in Vallaki and as a result guards of Krezk are also automatically hostile to it.

Ironically a character with high charisma, influence, disguise & low OCR has no chance to get past NPCs, but a high OCR, low cha/inf/dis character can do it with ease.

So results of a banishment/wanted status are inconsistent between different characters and players.

Personally I enjoy the OCR approach more.
After all, there's a feat to make OCR go down faster but it seems kind of pointless investment now.
And I don't think being wanted in one town of Barovia should make the guards automatically hostile to you in all of them, as I recall occurrences where enemy of one Burgomaster was an ally of another.

[mooner]

i don't think this is necessarily a result of an intentional change of approach, it just comes down to circumstance.

when someone is bountied, it's usually done by players. they're not usually around the character in question when it happens and they cant jump to them as a DM would, so there's often no immediate consequence in regards to npcs.

regarding OCR - players cant do it, and DMs are probably too busy to go around manually adjusting the OCR of every single bountied character. i would assume it was possible years and years ago as there were less players, but that's an assumption - could be wrong.

the faction hostile mark often comes from a bountied character trying to enter areas that sometimes have a PC guard presence - e.g. the outskirts. if you're fleeing, it's usually the most you can do as you're often trying to run after the person as well as type. a personal dislike doesn't do anything for other guard pcs, etc, so it's really the only resort. this does bring some perhaps unintended consequences - such as being automatically hostile everywhere and even in different settlements.

that happens because every guard npc belongs to the vallaki garda faction (the ones in barovia, obviously) - even those at krezk outpost and even those at the VoB. you can make the argument that yeah, sometimes the settlements have conflicts but a situation like krofburg harbouring a known, wanted criminal from vallaki is something i've only seen done while a specific plot was occuring and seems the exception to the rule, rather than the norm. bounties posted from one settlement apply everywhere in barovia

i would assume manually adjusting OCR is out of the question. the workarounds would be dev fixes - either making it so faction hostile can be bypassed with influence checks or disguises, or by changing it so each settlement has its own guard faction. i presume both of these would involve some work. effectively you're making changes that make life easier for bountied characters, when really these characters should (in theory) have been given a chance to de-escalate or opt out of the bounty, e.g. by turning themselves in beforehand. so, frankly, i can't imagine they'd be much of a priority. not that i necessarily disagree with implementing either of these changes if somebody was willing to do so

[King Pickle]

That's not my experience at all. Like I said I've had this happen many times.
In the past when I was banished, I was walked out of the domain, my OCR was boosted or not.

Now the standard seems to be that you are set as faction enemy in the same situation.

The de-escalating theory is another matter all together and I'm not getting on that hill on this topic.

[mooner]

That's not my experience at all. Like I said I've had this happen many times.
In the past when I was banished, I was walked out of the domain, my OCR was boosted or not.

Now the standard seems to be that you are set as faction enemy in the same situation.

The de-escalating theory is another matter all together and I'm not getting on that hill on this topic.

banishments are a bit different - sure, if there is a dm available to boost your OCR then i dont see why not. otherwise there's not much alternative beside either hoping the player doesn't ignore npcs or marking them as hostile. i dont usually do it, but i suppose everyone has a different approach.

again, i suspect the situation has changed because there are more players, more banishments and bounties, and overall less DMs available per player. i don't see that changing anytime soon.

[FinalHeaven]

When I was leading the Red Vardo in Port-a-Lucine some years ago I was told to use the Faction Hostile tool only in extreme circumstances because of how it was set up.

I think broadly speaking a guard faction using it on people who are bountied or banished is totally fine but I don't think it should automatically pierce the disguise system. 

It sounds like it needs to be adjusted to take Disguise into account somehow, but if that's not feasible then some care should probably be taken.  Either way, hearing from a DM on when it is and isn't appropriate to use Faction Hostile would probably be a good thing.

As for OCR boosting my understanding is that's entirely controlled by DMs, so seeing some discrepancy in who gets hit by it and who doesn't isn't a huge surprise due to different people doing it.

[Day Old Bread]

Couldn't the bountied player make a general request in the general requests thread to have their OCR bumped in this instance? This would allow the DM team to also take off any faction hostility once it's been handled?

Guard factions should certainly be doing faction hostile, I think, for an immediate effect when DMs aren't available to adjust OCR. The banished/bountied characters player should then be speaking to the DM team to have the appropriate adjustments made so that they can reasonably attempt to defy the banishment/bounty.

I think it's a good work around at least