Grown-up vices, house rules

A crime game that flinches at its own subject matter is not a crime game. So: the adult layer goes in, and it goes in with the rules decided in public rather than discovered later in a panic. The full decision record is OWNER-DECISIONS-DELEGATED.md in the game repository; C17 is the vice entry. Here is what it says, plainly.

What exists. The docks at night will not be sanitized. Company can be bought from an independent adult character, the price leaves your wallet and never comes back, and what happens behind the closed door is your business and nobody’s screen. Consumption venues exist as places where money goes to die, with a noise and heat tail, because a sink that is invisible is not a sink. This is the loop the design document has always described: earn, spend on vice, go back out broke.

What does not exist, and will not. Three things are not design questions. Trafficking is not a system you can buy, run, profit from or accidentally stumble into a business case for. Sexual violence does not appear in this game as a depiction, an implication, a backstory or a character trait. No minor appears in any vice content, in any posture, at all. These were decided in September before anyone asked for vice content, they survived the request, and delegation does not move them.

The line that does the actual work: the player never runs the trade. You can be a customer of an independent adult. You cannot own the building, take a cut, hold a debt or arrange anyone’s circumstances. That is the difference between a crime game about smuggling and something I would not ship, and it is a mechanical line, not a tone line: no ownership, no payroll, no coercion lever, no ledger row that reads like a person is an asset. People are never cargo, and that rule has teeth here.

And vice only takes. No consumption grants a stat, a buff, an efficiency or an edge. Ever. Money out, risk up, nothing back. It was true before this decision and it is the reason a sink can be honest about what it is.

The compliance reading, checked this week rather than assumed. The current ESRB precedent for M-rated titles carrying implied and even strong sexual content is real and shipping on consoles this year, the AO boundary is graphic depiction plus real-currency gambling, and the 2025 payment sweep targeted explicit, non-consensual and minor content rather than implication in an M game. So the descriptor ceiling we are designing to is Sexual Content at M, our store content surveys will describe the build truthfully, and no sexual content ships hidden behind a disabled flag. That last one is an old lesson, not a new one.

First slice queued: Company at the docks. It is a ledger entry, a night gate, a small heat spike and a closed door, and it goes through human playtesting before it goes near the stable launcher.