'Uber' RPing

[Taurenthefirst]

Originally posted by Karyuu
...other IC players immediately come down on him or her with (often but not always) snobby attitudes of \"What the bloody \'ell are you talking about?\" I think kindly  pointing out that OOC talk can be designated through the use of parentheses is the only real practical approach...

i think kindly is the key word here.  people are too often very harsh and un-understanding of noobs (does that make sense? maybe not-understanding is better)

and i agree, it should be fun for the majority of the people first and foremost.  however, right now there is not really much anything to do for fun in game right now for most people except rp... so basically fun and rp are the same thing right now for the majority of the people in my opinion.

[Seytra]

Originally posted by Ralas
I have a thought about the name thing.

It is, actually, somewhat realistic to see someone\'s name floating above their head, even if you\'ve never met them.  It is a substitute for a recognizeable facial feature.  That way If you see someone you\'ve met before, but whos name you don\'t know, you can ask something like, \"Excuse me, have we met somewhere before?\"  The player sees the name so that the character sees the face.  Now ideally the character should not know the name without being told, I do agree with this.  However, it is easy to forget, as I have done quite a few times, and should not be reprimanded too heavily.

This is exactly my interpretation of it. It is there to get around the limitations of the game. You cannot make even afraction of the number of differences that would be required to make everyone look sufficiently unique to be recognisable, let alone have the level of detail that would take in terms of graphics.
Therefore, it is something that has to be abstracted OOC-ly in order to provide means for IC communication. Thus, knowledge of the name is OOC, recognition of the person is IC.

Originally posted by Ralas
And you don\'t have to get in with the \"Uber\" RPers to have RP fun in this game.  Some of the most fun I\'ve had is simply playing the role of my character around others doing the same.  Merely conversing, usually.  And yes, someone walking up to your group and talking OOC can have a negative effect on the experience.

Once again, you express my thoughts perfectly. For me, people who are OOC are not there IC-ly at all. I may talk to them designatedly OOC, but I almost always give RP preference over OOC. Interacting IC-ly with someone who is undesignatedly OOC isn\'t fun, anyway, unless they are asking things that might be IC-ly if they were worded differently, like when asking for the sewers. Still, this is a means of interaction that I don\'t enjoy.

I, too, think that this \"IC at all costs\" is overdoing it, but I do play PS in order to roleplay. RP definitely has higher priority than OOc chatting, about any topic (except for debugging).
Yes, RP does make sense, no matter what the state of the game. If things are missing in the engine / content, just pretend they were there using the good old /me system, like in textual MUDs. Once the features are implemented, it\'s merely a matter of putting some effort into getting them to the level you RPd them so you don\'t need the /me ing in that case anymore. The nice side-effect of this is that you are a lot less likely to become unrealistic in what your char supposedly can do, since you have to make sure it would be doable.
I, too, think that PS is by far too combat-focused ATM, but there are signs of that changing.

Originally posted by Karyuu
There are times when I certainly agree. For example when a new player comes in who has no idea that conversations in /say are considered to be IC by default, and discusses OOC subjects, and other IC players immediately come down on him or her with (often but not always) snobby attitudes of \"What the bloody \'ell are you talking about?\" I think kindly pointing out that OOC talk can be designated through the use of parentheses is the only real practical approach. However if that new player is simply rude, has a stupidly chosen name (e.g., Greatest Ofall), or has done absolutely no reading of anything at all before downloading the client, I think others have a sort of right to pester him or her I know I certainly would, and have before.

Same here.

Originally posted by Ralas
This thread got too long for me to remember all of, even after having read it diligently.  sorry If I repeated anyone else\'s thoughs unecessarily.

Not unnecessarily, as I hadn\'t expressed them on this thread yet.

Originally posted by Taurenthefirst
however, right now there is not really much anything to do for fun in game right now for most people except rp... so basically fun and rp are the same thing right now for the majority of the people in my opinion.

Well, PS is only about RP. As I always say: the rules and features are merely serving as framework to allow RPing to be done by people who are not experienced / disciplined enough to do freeform RP. Thus, things like advancing stats definitely take secondary priority, only done to fit what I am RPing.
Due to the limited set of working options in PS my char has some skills that don\'t fit my RP, but I don\'t use them IC. Likewise, my char has skills that aren\'t working yet, but I do use these IC.
It is still my strong opinion that people who do not want to roleplay have no place in PS.

[Induane]

That name thing bothers me a lot, and I don\'t quite agree with your \"solutions\" for it. There is no excuse, really, for anyone\'s character to know any stranger\'s name, unless he or she (the character) is truly telepathic, and the player behind the character roleplays a telepath the great majority of the time.

What about having the name be exchanged on a greeting.  If you want someone to be able to see your name then you can greet them. My greet shortcut is actually modified to be:

/say Greetings, I am Induane, and Einharjar in The Sentinels of the Ragnarok, it is a pleasure to meet you.
/me bows respectfully
/greet

If you are greeted by someone who has never greeted you before then a dialog can come up and say accept name yes or no.  If you click yes then their name can come up above their heads, otherwise no.  That way you can keep your name annonomous if you like.  In addition, you could even forget names, i.e. if you never contact them again with a tell message within say a week the name will dissappear.  Sending a certain number of tell messages to a person automatically could place them on your buddy list, which would be names you don\'t ever \"forget\".

Only mods would be able to see all names so that they can send tells to players as necessary.

[Monketh]

I myself did not RP when I came to Planeshift.  I always take this into consideration when speaking with someone who\'s new.  It should be considered that many of them have no clue what rp is.

[Ralas]

Originally posted by Induane

That name thing bothers me a lot, and I don\'t quite agree with your \"solutions\" for it. There is no excuse, really, for anyone\'s character to know any stranger\'s name, unless he or she (the character) is truly telepathic, and the player behind the character roleplays a telepath the great majority of the time.

What about having the name be exchanged on a greeting.  If you want someone to be able to see your name then you can greet them. My greet shortcut is actually modified to be:

/say Greetings, I am Induane, and Einharjar in The Sentinels of the Ragnarok, it is a pleasure to meet you.
/me bows respectfully
/greet

If you are greeted by someone who has never greeted you before then a dialog can come up and say accept name yes or no.  If you click yes then their name can come up above their heads, otherwise no.  That way you can keep your name annonomous if you like.  In addition, you could even forget names, i.e. if you never contact them again with a tell message within say a week the name will dissappear.  Sending a certain number of tell messages to a person automatically could place them on your buddy list, which would be names you don\'t ever \"forget\".

Only mods would be able to see all names so that they can send tells to players as necessary.

I like most of this idea.  The only problem is that for me, /tell is strictly an OOC thing.  So someone with whom my relationship is only IC, I would not /tell anything.  Sometimes you start to know the player behind the character, and this is when /tell is useful, but for RP, it\'s quite unrealistic.  Therefore, having it linked to whether you remember someone IC does not work for me.

[Karyuu]

I like the idea of characters introducing themselves to each other, but I think it\'ll be a while before such a thing might be implemented, and it still has problems. Right now we don\'t have enough GMs \"patrolling\" the streets to check on offensive behavior and/or names, so the players tend to do most of the work in reporting. At least that is how it appears to me. Once you make everyone anonymous, it will be nearly impossible to send a report on abusive behavior, OOC names, or spamming.

And on the topic of spamming/chat, how will the chat window process text if everyone\'s name is hidden from view? I\'m strictly against assigning random numbers to everyone, as that is a giant slap to RPers, so what would a decent solution be? :/

[hitancrias]

Reporting abuses might still be possible by targeted reports with a standard report commando which reports the name of the targeted character.

The problems with the chat processing are nastier I think. The chat window could just display the race and gender in stead of a name, but you\'ll still have confusion as more then one char with an identical race/gender combination participate in a conversation.
(Note that, in the end, a total amount of 23 race/gender combo\'s will limit this problem.) To distinguish between avatars of the same gender and race a speaking motion (or a simple dot above the head) can be implemented, so you can see who spoke last.

I also thought of using different colored question marks as name, to differentiate between two seemingly identical strangers. But I came to the conclusion that it won\'t work because it will lead to total chaos as soon as characters start moving around. Not to mention a limitted amount of usable colors.

Maybe the system with the good old name tags we have now is not that bad after all...

[Induane]

actually hitancrias I think your additions are a good idea and could be implemented fairly easily.  It would be more confusing but I think better for RP overall, and thus better for the whole world.

[frostwolf10]

I have never met any uber-RPers as you call them, but I wonder just how far will they go to uphold IC. And everyone forgets things once in a while, like I only put one bracket at the end in OOC.

As for names, the Hydlaa Law Enforcement Agency could have an excuse, as they probably have a horde of records in their office somewhere, complete with personal info and a picture taken by a mage who discovered screenshot glyphs (that sounds weird...)
Regular folks could just us pronouns or try to avoid the name.

And for newbie RPing, maybe there should be something on the character creation screen which says \"Have You Read the RP Guide? You\'ll be Sorry if you don\'t.\" or something like that, which leads to a screen discussing the basics of roleplaying. And that could include the rules about names too. (who wants to be called looneytunes?)

[pincushionman]

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.

[winterk]

I met one uber RPGer. I was down in the sewer when this female cat player/character came up and make a comment about how she really got off to seeing a muscle bound man killing rats like that. She then asked if she could stand there for a bit to watch me. The whole time she was talking she kept purring and stuff. She even went through an entire dialogue where she was cleaning herself with her tongue...

[Karyuu]

Winterk, that is \"normal\" RP ;) If that was \"uber roleplay\" to you, then man do you need to explore more.

Pincushionman (I love that xD), I really enjoyed reading your post. Definitely agree about the name scaling, first off, it\'s an irritation. The chat bubble suggestion has been made before, and I was against it previously... but somehow it doesn\'t sound as bad anymore. Perhaps as you said if it is just the bubble, without text. And of decent size. (Another irritation is the current size of name displays - I doubt the font really needs to be that large, and so bold.)

I\'ll certainly need to explore the Avlis website as well :D

[Seytra]

I completely agree with Karyuu: it was normal RP all the way.

And I also agree to Pincusionman. As I said, I answer IC-ly to questions that could be IC, like when asked for the sewers. I answer OOC-ly to questions that contain OOC information.

[Hirogurth]

I have not run into as much of a problem with uber roleplaying because I am almost always IC on public chat except when I am talking to a n00b because he/she is a n00b and probably doesn't know any better

secondly I have run into a couple of other types of rolplay that I find slightly annoying one is "soapopera roleplaying" in which the roleplayer is being overly dramatic in a situation which any normal person of any time period would be bothered but only to an a certain extent I think you cross the line when you trash talk an entire race for one mugging and then go to war for it or drag out a "scene" past its worth

and the other is "ignorant roleplaying" in which people make something happen that according to the yliakum historys and other base information could never happen in the immediate future such as the dwarves and the Enki's going to war. According to the race discriptions that the Stonebreaker Dwarves may be disagreeable with races taller than them but they have a good relation ship with the Enki's who provide them with the meat that is the dwarves basic food item and as for the Hammerwielder Dwarves they have good relationships with all races because of their great ability as blacksmiths. Finally a war between the Enki's and the Dwarves would be econimically improbable because the dwarves get their food from the Enki's and the Enki's would in all probability since they provide the dwarves with their food in turn get their weapons from the dwares in exchange.

[Verrliit]

It is still my strong opinion that people who do not want to roleplay have no place in PS.

Actually, to be truthful, at least a few of those have become GMs...

And with sufficient imagination, a use can be found for any raw material.

Such people inspire me to make greater effort, as well as sparking my creativity in less nurturing roles.

Socially engineering a reasonable and productive role for this particular minority, and not just for selected individuals, will be an interesting challenge... 


I would like to thank Seytra, Karyuu, and others of you, who have posted in this thread.

Reading it has been rather a treat for me.

Last year, some of you opposed my viewpoints passionately.

That you have since adopted so many of my positions as your own, and show such understanding, tolerance and patience with those who disagree with you, well, it quite literally brings tears to my eyes.

You have made me very happy.

Thank you so much.

~Verrliit~