I'm going to join him.
That's gay dude.
Yeah, I wasn't gonna say anything, but it was rather disturbing.
Anyway, that's enough, people. It was meant to be a quick joke, not a derailment of Illysia's thread. Let's hope people have more creative contributions than Geoni's rather tired attempt at a rebuke. For my part:
Suggestion Type: Playing multiple characters
Common Problems:
- Difficulty in keeping IC information separate from OOC information. In other words, difficulty in not having all your characters immediately know or "find out" something that one character did.
- Lack of identity within the community.
- Mistrust of your characters because you of the first issue in this list.
- Not having enough time to put into each of your characters to keep them all valid members of the community.
- Sloppy characters due to not putting enough effort into any single one.
- Sloppy RP because you have other characters to fall back on if something goes wrong with this one.
Suggested Solutions:
- Obviously, simplest is to only have one character at a time. I know that seems like a dumb suggestion, but I find that a lot of the people who want to play half a dozen characters at once are actually the people who can't even RP one character well, let alone several. Take a long good think about whether you can really pull it off, or if you're just being selfish because you have a short attention span. (Yes, I consider attempting to participate in serious RP with people who have put a lot of effort into their characters when you haven't to be selfish. Kills the fun they deserve to have for taking the time to make it happen.)
- Make sure you only have one "main" character. That way people know where your loyalties lie, even if they know you play other characters as well. Also, lets you put more effort into that character and make sure you have at least one character who is actually decent.
- Don't join different organizations with each different character. People won't trust you, and no matter how great an RPer you are, there'll be a time when your loyalties are tested, and you'll be tempted to have one character "find out" something that's going on in an organization another character belongs to.
- Don't delude yourself into thinking that deceiving someone by playing a different character to find out something or to accomplish something you wouldn't be able to otherwise is anything but dishonest. You're not being a good RPer, you're being a jerk who's taking advantage of the fact that they have no reliable way of telling who you really are.
- Generally put quality above quantity. Don't create new characters if the ones you have are total crap. Obviously there can be some exceptions if you're creating a temporary character for a specific purpose, but even that's risky. Chances are, if the characters you have are crap, then any RP reason you have for creating another one is probably, to use a word from another generation, whack.