Originally posted by Eowyn
If so, how do you tell apart IC stuff from some random OOC chatter from another random player just around the corner? From experience?
As steuben has said, yes, IC is using normal chat, OOC is in brackets. Like this:
(I have lots of lag today.)
/me (is annoyed by the lag)
As for telling these apart: the only way to make sure that there won\'t ever be confusion is to consequently apply brackets. This is what I do. There are very rara circumstances where they are not required because the chat cannot be IC and no RPer could see it, like when you are talking to a GM in unreachable places. Still, I prefer to apply brackets even then.
You can with random chatter often, but nowhere near always, use experience to guess IC / OOC. Due to that problem, I tend to \"probe\" for RP before entering into meaningful RP with that person, or before applying non-trivial information from the chatter to my IC knowledge.
Unless that probing gives a clear indication of the other being RPer and IC, I assume they aren\'t and don\'t interact or react IC-ly with / to them (i.e., they don\'t exist in the game world).
Trivial things like greetings or questions about locations can usually be regarded as IC, since their OOC-ness won\'t be noticable. However, when the talk contains abbreviations (like \"u r cool\") or references to clearly OOC things like levels or other things outside the game world (bugs, computer trouble, etc.), it is obvious that the person is not IC and most likely doesn\'t even know about RP or the brackets which is a speciality of PS. The absence of a designated OOC channel is on purpose, because OOC isn\'t wanted in PS and thus anything like a OOC channel would be seen as an invitation or condoning of OOC.
As I said, it is dangerous to not consequently apply brackets or another OOC marker to OOC talk when others have reason to assume that you know about it and are an RPer. Likewise, it is just as dangerous to assume undesignated talk as being OOC unless it is clear not from the context, but from the way one speaks.
Context is unreliable, and the problems I had came from the fact that the context could have been both IC and OOC. In that case, I was IC while the other was undesignated OOC and the result was not pretty.
This is why it is so tremendously important to clearly and consequently designate all OOC chat so that everything undesignated can only be IC.
