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General Discussion /
« on: June 15, 2005, 07:58:38 pm »
I\'ve got some thoughts and ovservations I\'ve gained from a Neverwinter Nights persistent world I play on that\'s particularly RP-heavy.
OOC information of any kind is to be separated from IC information. ((putting things in quotes)) or using tells, much like others have suggested here, is a perfectly appropriate way of doing this in regards to conversation, and it\'s in widespread use on Avlis. In fact, some of you might be flabbergasted at how freely ((ooc comments)) are interjected into conversation. Until you realize that our \"characters\" ignore the comments as if they never hear them, and they are almost always related in some way to the characters present and the situation at hand; we have an IRC chat room for off-topic stuff. You have to have a sense of humor about this, people.
The other important consideration there is how we keep OOC and IC conversation separate. People fek up. Everyone. Especially new people. Sometimes someone will fail to properly denote OOC conversation. The response to such a dialogue is NEVER EVER EVER RESPOND IN-CHARACTER. NEVER. You will either come across as dumb, not knowing that a comment was out of character, or as a jackass. But either way it shows that _you_ do not fully understand keeping OOC and IC separate. To your IC character, the comment never occured. For the deodorant example, the correct response would not be to be IC confused about what the player said, since it was clearly an OOC comment. The proper way to respond to it would have been an OOC tell or an ((OOC say)) that the previous comment was out-of-character, and that we would ignore it and move on. Things are clarified quickly and without frustration. _All_parties_involved_ need to follow the same guidelines about separation of IC and OOC.
As for names - right now it\'s probably not worth getting riled up about _how_ they are implemented until we have features that allow us to differentiate characters by other means. But I\'ll eat what I just said and comment anyway:
In NWN we still have floaty names, but they only appear when you mouse-over a character or press TAB (it shows every targetable thing when you do this, btw). The mechanics of the game also don\'t let you see anybody beyond a certain distance. I\'d suggest a similar system for PS, when you mouseover it shows the floaty or when you press and hold a button it shows the floaty of everyone within a certain range. And the floaties should always be the same size, rather than scaling with distance (as it was last time I played. That\'s real annoying.) It also helps that in NWN chat appears above a character\'s head as well as the chat window, it\'s much less confusing who said what, and doing so makes it easier to not have to keep track of who said what _by_name_. I doubt that exactly would work in PS, but there should be some kind of indication that \"this character has spoken\" like a little floating text bubble (just the bubble no text) that shows for a second. Something like that plus not constantly showing the name should provide just enough of a disjuction to make it easier to ignore the floaty name of someone you don\'t know.
I strongly discourage the implementation of hiding a character\'s speech in the chat window behind a fakey description. That would be more confusing than helpful. If someone abuses a floaty name, again, the response should be an ooc tell explaining what they did wrong and why, then IC pretend it didn\'t ocour and try again _the_right_way_.
If they CONTINUE to abuse floaties and OOC speech, that is a different story. First, there should be a policy about it, which I don\'t know if we have. Not guidelines. POLICY. And a way to report the offending player. A function to do that in-game is NOT necessary. That could get abused, or mistakenly used. Since it\'s an OOC concern, the methods should be separate from the game, like a special board account you can PM. And finally, we need people and methods for actually enforcing decisions made about infractions. Whether or not this game is mature enough to go there is up to the development team. I\'m not sure we can really afford to \"jail\" accounts for OOC infractions at this game\'s current state.
If any of you are interested, the world I\'m discussing is http://www.avlis.org. I\'m sure if anyone is interested in how exactly these concerns are dealt with in that community, there are people there who will be more than willing to discuss it with you ad nauseum. Not all the tools the DM\'s and team there have at their disposal are applicable to PS. But the system they have in place _works_. I\'m sure an interested PS member could learn a lot.
OOC information of any kind is to be separated from IC information. ((putting things in quotes)) or using tells, much like others have suggested here, is a perfectly appropriate way of doing this in regards to conversation, and it\'s in widespread use on Avlis. In fact, some of you might be flabbergasted at how freely ((ooc comments)) are interjected into conversation. Until you realize that our \"characters\" ignore the comments as if they never hear them, and they are almost always related in some way to the characters present and the situation at hand; we have an IRC chat room for off-topic stuff. You have to have a sense of humor about this, people.
The other important consideration there is how we keep OOC and IC conversation separate. People fek up. Everyone. Especially new people. Sometimes someone will fail to properly denote OOC conversation. The response to such a dialogue is NEVER EVER EVER RESPOND IN-CHARACTER. NEVER. You will either come across as dumb, not knowing that a comment was out of character, or as a jackass. But either way it shows that _you_ do not fully understand keeping OOC and IC separate. To your IC character, the comment never occured. For the deodorant example, the correct response would not be to be IC confused about what the player said, since it was clearly an OOC comment. The proper way to respond to it would have been an OOC tell or an ((OOC say)) that the previous comment was out-of-character, and that we would ignore it and move on. Things are clarified quickly and without frustration. _All_parties_involved_ need to follow the same guidelines about separation of IC and OOC.
As for names - right now it\'s probably not worth getting riled up about _how_ they are implemented until we have features that allow us to differentiate characters by other means. But I\'ll eat what I just said and comment anyway:
In NWN we still have floaty names, but they only appear when you mouse-over a character or press TAB (it shows every targetable thing when you do this, btw). The mechanics of the game also don\'t let you see anybody beyond a certain distance. I\'d suggest a similar system for PS, when you mouseover it shows the floaty or when you press and hold a button it shows the floaty of everyone within a certain range. And the floaties should always be the same size, rather than scaling with distance (as it was last time I played. That\'s real annoying.) It also helps that in NWN chat appears above a character\'s head as well as the chat window, it\'s much less confusing who said what, and doing so makes it easier to not have to keep track of who said what _by_name_. I doubt that exactly would work in PS, but there should be some kind of indication that \"this character has spoken\" like a little floating text bubble (just the bubble no text) that shows for a second. Something like that plus not constantly showing the name should provide just enough of a disjuction to make it easier to ignore the floaty name of someone you don\'t know.
I strongly discourage the implementation of hiding a character\'s speech in the chat window behind a fakey description. That would be more confusing than helpful. If someone abuses a floaty name, again, the response should be an ooc tell explaining what they did wrong and why, then IC pretend it didn\'t ocour and try again _the_right_way_.
If they CONTINUE to abuse floaties and OOC speech, that is a different story. First, there should be a policy about it, which I don\'t know if we have. Not guidelines. POLICY. And a way to report the offending player. A function to do that in-game is NOT necessary. That could get abused, or mistakenly used. Since it\'s an OOC concern, the methods should be separate from the game, like a special board account you can PM. And finally, we need people and methods for actually enforcing decisions made about infractions. Whether or not this game is mature enough to go there is up to the development team. I\'m not sure we can really afford to \"jail\" accounts for OOC infractions at this game\'s current state.
If any of you are interested, the world I\'m discussing is http://www.avlis.org. I\'m sure if anyone is interested in how exactly these concerns are dealt with in that community, there are people there who will be more than willing to discuss it with you ad nauseum. Not all the tools the DM\'s and team there have at their disposal are applicable to PS. But the system they have in place _works_. I\'m sure an interested PS member could learn a lot.