This rule is regularly not enforced to the point where queens feel confident in saying, over Queen Announcements, that an area should be held until the bodies go cold. The reason this rule is not enforced is because of the difficulty with which the meta-gaming can be determined, hence the current culture of the community has not compelled staff to condemn xenos for this behavior.
The Resolution:
The rule is too difficult to enforce and should thus be removed. Ideally xenos would not metagame this mechanic, however because this policy can not be applied consistently and uniformly due to a variety of circumstances including (but not limited to): strategic holding of locations, stalemates, happenstance (xenos just happen to be around but are unaware of a revivable body), etc, it is simply too difficult to gauge the intent of xenos when trying to assess this current rulebreak, and even if the more obvious examples of this illicit strategy being employed were curtailed, it would just lead to an illusion of intent.
Ex: “Let’s hold this position until we are pushed out because it is a forward location further from the hive.” Players will easily disguise their true intentions, and furthermore innocent intentions might be conflated with an intent to metagame.
Potential Solution to Metagaming: Mechanically modify the way death timers work, perhaps a body’s death timer is paused while there is a xenomorph within 15 tiles, or perhaps the death timer is done away with entirely in exchange for new death mechanics.
One thing is certain, this rule borders on unenforceable and is not in line with the current consistency of this server’s rules.
I personally don’t see anything wrong with Xenos guarding dead bodies. As long as they aren’t making active efforts to conceal them (like walling them up or pushing crates onto them).
Those marines had to die to get into that situation, and if a xeno wants to spend their time watching a dead body they are welcome to. Either the marines will come and fight the xeno which makes that area with the dead body a battle ground, or the marines don’t try to recover that body, and the xeno guarding it has contributed nothing to the hive for the 5 minutes of perma timer.
I’m sorry, but this has to be premium copium, man. Imagine this but in any of our (many) choke point slogs? Xenos can’t drag dead bodies but have to hold the choke also - are there just gonna be 15 bodies piling up behind the choke which, as soon as xenos pull back (due to an OB for example) can easily be retrieved with a full revive timer?
I wasn’t trying to offer a foolproof solution, the post is far more about the deficits of the rule in question. I just offered some under-cooked solutions to get people thinking about potential mechanical fixes to a rules-based problem. No need to be rude.
My biggest problem with that rule is that it just doesn’t make sense. Xenos are supposed to be intelligent. We can literally see marines recovering corpses and then reviving them. We know that killing medics is valuable due to the fact that they can revive people (as far as I’m aware that isn’t considered metagaming). Yet for some reason we are not allowed to put 2 and 2 together and conclude that we shouldn’t let them recover bodies. We have to play as if we are idiots. It’s just silly and makes no sense.
Oh and also the reasoning stated in the rule clarification is stupid. Guarding a body is NOT akin to walling it off at all, I don’t know how anyone could even think that to be honest. They don’t even fall under the same rule, the walling off dead bodies rule is under Exploits in the rule page, while the guarding dead bodies is a metagaming rule clarification.
Now it just falls on queen to say “Due to QM’s recent amendments to the Xeneva Convention, I am now legally obligated to state that henceforth I fully intend to gib every single tall we kill; you will let them recover NO bodies, I shall gib them ALL no mater HOW LONG it takes”.
Playing lawyer IC to circumvent a stupid OOC rule.
The rule always stuck me as the kind wherein everyone involved is going, “yeah this is technically a rule, but we’re only going to invoke it if you go out of your way to order aliens to defend a dead body or to metagrudge some random PFC”.
I’d say to let the rule slide since its a known in-universe mechanic. Same as how Marines know they have about 7.5 minutes till they die of a larva.
Fuckin’ hell, I’ll cross out the random suggestion at the end since that’s what’s getting so much focus. This isn’t about the random potential solution to metagaming, this is about the rule being unenforceable. I guess the suggestion is so bad to a lot of people that it’s overriding their ability to see the thesis of the post.
Heya! So seeing this post I was already kinda internally cringing since I was working on clarifications getting changed.
Your issue might have been addressed now that all clarifications have been merged into the Rules page.
